Not the Badiou Meme

Okay, some time ago Fort Kant initiated a ‘meme’ on Badiou’s fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. He takes his cue from the Vienna Circle’s voting on the truth or falsehood of certain propositions. The meme then passes from here to here.

Of course, I have no intention of doing the meme. I would just like to take up something from AvW’s response. Now, Alph. has yet to reach the propositions themselves, struck instead by certain rhetorical gestures -

..... And this immediately places Badiou in the corps of clerks labouring away at the maintenance of the Art Market, which is fuelled constantly, and desperately, by the seemingly gratuitous issue of such prescriptions, Art is This, Art is That. It IS this, really, if hiddenly, and ought then be rendered more obviously itself (but not too obviously. It mustn‘t become out and out criticism). The predicates are of no consequence whatsoever.

Alphonse is right. Before one sets about the content, what’s remarkable is the strident intoning of ‘Art is’. It seems to me that the chords struck by this intoning are like those of a manifesto. That is, Badiou’s ‘Theses’ = precisely the kind of statement one would expect to be made, pre-emptively, by a Movement in order to authorise and anticipate its own artistic practice.

A manifesto can indeed read like a theoretical statement, but it is theory of a peculiar kind. It does not try and distil, from the history of art (or from individual genres) an ‘essence’ or explain an evolution (cf Lukacs, Theory of the Novel). It is not arriving after the fact, but before it. This is surely a definitively Modernist gesture. Theory as ‘prolepsis’.

This kind of theory cannot be ‘disproved’ by drawing attention to some neglected pocket of art history, some genre that has escaped its criteria. Nor will it be disproved by subsequent artistic productions, since its only objective is to sanction or initiate artistic productions defined by fidelity to this very ‘theory.’

The reason I would call this a definitively Modernist gesture is that it involves a conscious jettisoning of tradition and traditional authority. The manifesto replaces tradition – as the taken-for-granted, unconscious inheritance – with a self-consciously chosen set of prescriptions and precepts. The manifesto claims to rest not on some unfathomable ground, but on a Thought that is wholly transparent to itself.

The manifesto erects its own foundations, but also places those foundations on display as part and parcel of the work. No dark earth remains concealed, no hidden source of authority (made more authoritative by its hiddenness), only the ‘outworks’ of purposive construction and the making of new constellations. The Futurist Manifesto, for example, if it is a theoretical statement, is also part of Futurism.

The manifesto both punctures a whole in established practices and, simultaneously, inaugurates something else. This ‘something else’ cannot be described by the established practices. This, at least, is the manifesto’s wager. The theory defined in the manifesto awaits the blessing of a posterity which it also hopes to create.

Heidegger is sometimes put on stage as Badiou’s great adversary. As usual with such defining oppositions, there is also striking symmetry. Art, for Heidegger, discloses something forgotten, actively forgotten by current forms of knowledge and thought; at the same time it discloses the poverty of those current forms, so that we are not then able to return to them. The deeply forgotten greets us as foreign but also makes strange the familiar. For Badiou, Art, equally, seems to disclose a Truth, a Truth which, once it has addressed us, demands our fidelity and forbids our return to what currently is. But it discloses a Truth which opens into the future, and a truth which is inseparable from the fidelity to it. Perhaps what separates the two – H & B - is only the sliver of a rhetoric of ‘depth’ and uncovering. (Badiou's Art as Heidegger's folded inside out).

If what I have said is true, that Badiou’s ‘Theses’ has the form of a manifesto, can we presume that this is deliberate, that Badiou is indeed striking a ‘first blow’, stating an ‘a-priori’? This seems to be the case. Or are we dealing with a kind of nostalgia for a Modernism, a Modernist gesture, no longer in fact possible?

Ps, while i work out the precise relation between CS and LS, I'm cross posting this at Ls - it won't happen again.