{"id":8155,"date":"2011-09-16T12:36:17","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T17:36:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8155"},"modified":"2011-09-16T14:01:35","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T19:01:35","slug":"johnston-intervierw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/09\/16\/johnston-intervierw\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnston Intervierw regarding Badiou"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Role of Alain Badiou\u2019s Inaesththetics in Visual Culture: An Interview with Adrian Johnston<\/a> (circa 2010)<\/p>\n

Hilary Ellenshaw, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico<\/p>\n

One of the read threads throughout the span of Logics and Worlds is a sustained Plato-influenced polemic against a very dominant twentieth century tendency to always historicize, as exemplified by Frederic Jameson\u2019s injunction \u201cAlways historicize!\u201d (Jameson is very well known for his Marxist work particularly with regard to aesthetic issues, especially literature.) Badiou feels that to some extent this must be resisted. He thinks this has become an instinctive reaction, and whenever we are confronted with a form we want to describe it as peculiar to a given context that emerges out of a specific backdrop. Its validity and status is bound up with its place in time. To speak of these diagonal lines, which cut across vast swaths of history from the cave paintings up through to Picasso, is viewed as a heresy for a sensibility that is so attune to and so careful to always speak of history as a matter of particularization.<\/p>\n

There is a resistance to any kind of positing of anything universal, anything trans-temporal, anything that smacks of the old eternals that philosophy seems so preoccupied with. Badiou wants to plead on behalf of these things.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In politics he still speaks nowadays of what he first referred to in a short text on ideology\u2014from 1976 that has yet to be translated\u2014what he calls \u201ccommunist invariance.\u201d This would be history as the practice of true politics in his sense, a kind of radical emancipator and generally leftist sort of politics. There are certain lowest common denominators, from Spartacus and the slave revolt in the Ancient World, through the struggle of Chinese peasants under Mao\u2019s direction, and everything in between. This is also related to a cause dear to Badiou\u2019s heart, the struggles of the undocumented workers in France, les sans papiers,<\/em> of North African origin for recognition. Badiou says that these different movements, despite of all of their differences, and even though of course there is much that is contextually specific about each of these struggles, that one will find the same sorts of basic core concepts or causes motivating and justifying the rightness of these revolts. And he consistently does this with art and politics.<\/p>\n

He defines democratic materialism as the notion that there are only bodies and languages. You have incarnate individuals whose bodies are particular entities. Then these beings are fully ensconced within the linguistic life-worlds of particular communities. All that is left then is a relativism of different people with different language games, and what perspectives you have is relative to which of these worlds you inhabit.<\/p>\n

Badiou wants to claim that there is another kind of materialism, which adds a qualification to the axiom, or the core tenant, of democratic materialism. In addition to the bodies and languages, the materialist dialectic<\/span> states that there are truths that cannot be reduced to particular people, who are ensconced in particular social or cultural linguistic context, and to cut across these otherwise divided spheres that seem to present us with nothing but a fragmented multitude of partial perspectives. At the same time these truths are not transcending. Again they are not like Plato\u2019s metaphysical realism, in which pure forms or ideas exist in a timeless state of unchanging heaven of purely conceptual intelligible axis that we can only get a sideways glimpse of in this world.<\/p>\n

But rather his idea is that you have produced certain things out of particular times and places that can survive an indefinite number of de-contextualizations and re-contextualizations.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mathematics provides him with an easy and obvious set of examples. For instance for any given mathematical truth we can clearly identify the given time and place in which it arose. We can look back at ancient Greece for the genesis of the fundamental ingredients of arithmetic and geometry brought about by particular individuals living in that specific life-world. We can point to Kurt G\u00f6del in the twentieth century, with his famous incompleteness theorem. But for Badiou those mathematical truths are true and they have a historical genesis, they arise in a particular time and place; certain people with certain languages forge them and they cannot be reduced to that contextual point of origin. They thereafter achieve independence relative to their site of genesis<\/span>.\u00a0 And he wants to claim that this is something that is affirmed by materialist dialectics that democratic materialism denies. Democratic materialism compulsively historicizes and contextualizes, and denies that there is anything, which really does genuinely have that kind of trans-contextual, autonomous, and irreducible truth status to itself. And that is the fundamental thing he is after in Logics of Worlds<\/em>.<\/p>\n

… To bring it into context with art, part of what is involved in an artistic work that has a truth to it is that it is not in principle closed to anyone. It is not as though only if you are from that community, you are that kind of person with that sort of linguistic, cultural, social, etc. background can it speak to you.<\/p>\n

But for Badiou any truth, whether it is artistic, amorous, political or scientific, has something in it that is at least potentially, if not actually, universal.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It addresses anyone and everyone without discriminating amongst its addressees based upon their background or based upon particular characteristics or differences that mark them. There is that insistence on the universality of artistic truths as with all truths.<\/p>\n

Also it would not be to deny that given works of art emerge from particular times and places; specific people embedded in a particular cultural horizon fashion these works. If they really are artists worthy of being paid attention to philosophically in his view, they manage to produce something in a sensible medium that can survive being exported out of that particular context in which that artistic product was first produced, despite being something ensconced in a particular life-world. And that for him is very essential. He strongly opposed any kind of cultural relativist approach to artistic analysis. He acknowledged form as a twentieth-century concern, and even though there are certain concerns that emerge in a particular time and place, that does not mean that if we look back at formal features, or become preoccupied with the pre-twentieth century that it should just be denounced as anachronisms. He would hesitate to endorse that sort of caveat to qualifications.<\/p>\n

… If a piece of art worthy of the name bears within itself something (i.e., a truth) that can be exported beyond the culturally localized\/situated site of its production<\/span>, something that is (at least in principle) open to everyone and is able to address an incalculable multitude others situated in an indefinite plurality of different cultural life-worlds,<\/p>\n

then an authentic instance of art proper is, in fact, a\/non-cultural (insofar as it cuts across cultures, being de-contextualized out of the culture in which it was fashioned and re-contextualized in any number of cultures distinct from its culture of origin).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Role of Alain Badiou\u2019s Inaesththetics in Visual Culture: An Interview with Adrian Johnston (circa 2010) Hilary Ellenshaw, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico One of the read threads throughout the span of Logics and Worlds is a sustained Plato-influenced polemic against a very dominant twentieth century tendency to always historicize, … Continue reading “Johnston Intervierw regarding Badiou”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,103],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-8155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-universal","tag-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8155"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8157,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155\/revisions\/8157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}