Badiou Reframed

Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

Alex Ling

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Critique philosophique

He has been regarded with suspicion by some, as an anti-postmodernist who dared to write about unfashionable concepts such as truth and meaning. But in recent years, the philosopher Alain Badiou has risen in prominence, pioneering new ways to produce, conceptualise and discover art. Badiou Reframed is an original book about an original thinker which applies - for the first time - Badiou's philosophy to the visual arts. The six central concepts of this philosophy - 'being and appearing', 'event and subject' and 'truth and ethics' - are elucidated through detailed analysis of a range of visual artworks, including Marcel Duchamp's readymades, the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko, Banksy's contemporary street art, the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, Stephane Mallarme's visual poetry and Victor Fleming's classic film The Wizard of Oz. In focusing on Badiou's critical relationship with the visual arts, Alex Ling reinterprets and represents not only the man, but art itself.

PART ONE

Being and appearing

Chapter 1

Unframing, enframing, reframing

So far, we have focused almost exclusively on the ‘radical’ side of Badiou’s thought, the part comprising the event and everything that follows from its sudden irruption, and which is preoccupied with things like newness and sweeping change. Yet Badiou’s so-called ‘mature’ philosophy effectively kicks off long before the event arrives on the scene, with his celebrated (if initially perplexing) pronouncement in the opening pages of Being and Event that ‘mathematics is ontology’.¹

It really is difficult to overstate the importance of this inaugural assertion. Everything that follows from it – from the structure of situations and their states all the way to events and the subjects and truths they can engender – must be understood as the carefully drawn out consequences of this initial philosophical decision (we say ‘decision’ because the actual mathematical status of ontology is, as we will see, not something that can be known, but rather something that can only be decided upon). In fact, as we suggested at the very start of this book, such is the rigor with which Badiou constructs Being and Event that those who reject Badiou’s core philosophy arguably do so foremost because they reject his initial thesis on the equivalence of mathematics and ontology. For if this thesis is unfounded, so too is Badiou’s entire philosophy. Conversely, in accepting the equivalence of mathematics and ontology it is hard to avoid its manifold ramifications, meticulously laid out in Being and Event and the works that follow.

The one or the multiple?

Before we consider the meaning (much less the consequences) of Badiou’s equation of ontology with mathematics, we would do well to remind ourselves exactly what ontology is.

Plainly put, ontology designates the science of being qua being. This was Aristotle’s original definition in the Metaphysics, and Badiou employs it as such in his own writings. Yet ‘being’ is itself an elusive concept. The easiest way to come to grips with it is through a simple thought experiment. First, imagine an object, any object; a tree, another person, a wooden stool, a paper bag… Now imagine that we can strip away all of this object’s properties, everything that identifies the object as this object (and not another). All we can now say of the object is that it simply is. This indistinct remainder is none other than the object’s pure being. ‘Being qua being’ (meaning being itself or being as such) is then basically another way of saying pure being, or being that purely and simply is, divorced from all of its particular qualities and attributes. Moreover, given that everything that exists is, ontology would seem to equally designate the study of what is common to everything. In this precise sense – and this will become important later in the book – ontology is equally the discourse of universality.

It is also essential to recognize that when Badiou says that ontology literally is mathematics, this is in no way to suggest that being is itself mathematical or is composed of mathematical objects. To the contrary, what he means is that mathematics figures the scientific discourse on, or way of talking about, being. (Accordingly, to suggest that being is itself mathematical would be to illegitimately conflate ontology, which is simply the discourse on being, with the object of this discourse, namely, being itself.) Or more precisely, mathematics says everything that can be said about being; it is the only discourse up to the task of articulating being qua being. It is however, for reasons we will explore presently, only today – which is to say, after Georg Cantor’s invention of the mathematical field of set theory in the late nineteenth century (and its subsequent axiomatization by Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel in the early twentieth century) – that we can truly know this.

Mathematics to one side, in Being and Event Badiou holds that being itself, being qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity. By which he means that once an object is divested of (or subtracted from) everything that goes into making it a ‘unique’ thing – once we isolate it from its context and strip away all of its qualitative determinations – what remains is essentially a multiple of multiples. There is no intrinsic determination to this multiple multiplicity; it is not a multiple of ‘this’ or of ‘that’, rather, it is purely – or it purely is – multiple. This pure multiple remainder, Badiou claims, is precisely the being of the object, the elementary ‘there is’ underlying everything that ‘is there’. Crucially, there is no ‘atomic’ halting point to this infinite decomposition; what we arrive at is not the ‘One’ (that is, some form of primordial unity, an indivisible base from which everything sallies forth), but rather the void, nothingness itself – the in-finite dissemination of multiple multiplicity.

Now, if the idea that in journeying to the heart of ‘what is’ we do not eventually stumble across some elementary unit – a kind of irreducible ‘atom of being’ – but rather only infinite multiple multiplicity seems somewhat counterintuitive, well, that’s because it is. Indeed, Badiou begins Being and Event by literally turning the history of ontology – which, from Parmenides on, holds that what is is one and what is there (or is presented) is multiple – on its head.

Taking as his point of departure Plato’s famous theses on the one and the multiple in the Parmenides, Badiou begins by isolating a crucial variation in Plato’s terminology – specifically, between two ‘kinds’ of multiplicity, πληθος (plethos) and πολλα (polla) – to argue that Plato’s true position is not, as it is generally understood, that ‘if the one is not, nothing is’, but rather that ‘if the one is not, (the) nothing is’.² The logic here is subtle but no less devastating. At base it means that, if there is no ultimate consistency or unity to being (‘if the one is not…’), then being must in fact in-consist (‘…the nothing is’). This simple but counter-intuitive reversal is really the key to Badiou’s ‘subtractive’ ontology: that which is one (or is ‘consistent’) is not, strictly speaking, what is. Rather, what is per se is multiple (devoid of any instance of the one, radically withdrawn from all possible unification). Which is finally to say that being, when thought in its very being (that is, as being qua being), is nothing other than inconsistent multiplicity, and that ontology, which is the discourse on being, must accordingly be the science of the pure multiple.

So Badiou launches his philosophical project by arguing against the one in favour of the multiple which is radically ‘without-one’ (recruiting Plato to his cause along the way). Yet he cannot escape the fact that ‘oneness’ exists, that even things that are multiple are nevertheless presented to us as unified. For unity is something that is repeatedly testified to by our everyday experiences; simply, each and every object we experience is, in an immediate sense, discrete and coherent, that is to say, unified (when was the last time you experienced the ‘multiple-without-one’?!). Intuitively, this means that even though, technically speaking, the one is not, there is nevertheless an ‘effect’ of oneness, a ‘one-effect’ whereby inconsistency is somehow rendered consistent. This unification or ‘one-ification’ of pure multiplicity is precisely the presentation of multiplicity as such. Or again, while pure multiplicity is itself inconsistent, it is nonetheless presented as unified. Badiou calls such unified presentation a situation. One of the most plastic and immediately useful terms in Badiou’s philosophical lexicon, a situation is thus any presented multiplicity whatsoever: the desk at which I am currently sitting, the city of Bremen, several sunflowers in a vase, a gathering of sea urchins off the Florida coast, the ruins of ancient Greece, an art exhibition, Brazil, a political demonstration, Picasso’s Guernica, the discourse of ontology itself…

Now the operation by which pure multiplicity actually becomes ‘one-ified’ (i.e. is presented or ‘situated’) is itself termed the ‘count-as-one’ or simply the count, for the rather straightforward reason that it ‘counts’ certain elements (multiples) as belonging to the situation (while at the same time ‘discounting’ others). The count is thus the operation that structures the situation – indeed, it literally is the structure of the situation – and is to this effect indistinguishable from the situation itself. The crucial ontological distinction is then found at the level of the situation’s being: the pure being of the situation – the ‘before of the count’ (or what precedes structuration) – necessarily remains beyond the situation itself, inasmuch as its being is uncounted (or ‘inconsistent’) multiplicity.

The paradox here is fundamental: as all knowledge is necessarily ‘situated’, the in-consistent being which underlies all consistency is itself radically unknowable. Thus any consideration of what precedes the situation is itself hopelessly compromised by virtue of its very situatedness. Inconsistency is therefore what Lacan would call the ‘real’ of presentation, namely, the point at which knowledge butts against its own limit. Which is why Badiou’s initial embrace of the multiple (and concurrent assertion that ‘the one is not’) is moreover a pure decision, insofar as the actual status of pure multiplicity is itself properly undecidable. Furthermore, this is one of the main reasons why Badiou’s ontology should be understood as being essentially subtractive: in the face of a classical metaphysics defined by ‘the enframing of being by the one’,³ Badiou decides that ontology can be nothing other than the theory of in-different, in-consistent multiplicity, radically subtracted from the power of the one. (We will return to this ‘subtractive’ point momentarily.)

And so, with a simple yet powerful philosophical gesture, Badiou unframes being and returns it to its originary abstraction.

The void and the state

While these difficult and demanding meditations on the one and the multiple may leave you fighting a strong urge to pour yourself a stiff drink, we need to exercise just a little more fortitude as there are two very important consequences of this ontological abstraction that must be highlighted before we can move on. The first is the problem of the void, while the second is its ostensible ‘solution’ in the form of the state.

As we have seen, it follows from the fact that the situation and the count are one and the same thing that the inconsistent substructure of a situation is itself fundamentally ungraspable. However, the simple fact that the count is itself an operation tells us that there must be something on which this operation operates (as we can hardly have an operation without there being something operated-upon!). Thus the count, by its very nature, retroactively posits a corollary ‘to-be-counted’, a ‘before-of-thecount’ that can be said to ‘in-consist’ in the situation.

Now, given the seemingly self-contradictory fact that, whilst everything is counted, the count itself necessarily posits a kind of ‘phantom remainder’ (namely, the initial multiple qua inconsistent being of the situation), we can only conclude that while the pure multiple is excluded from the situation – from presentation itself – it must at the same time be included in the presentation ‘in-itself’. Excluded from presentation itself, included in presentation in-itself, the pure multiple must really be nothing in the situation. Yet as Badiou points out, being-nothing is not at all the same thing as non-being. In fact, this ‘nothing’ subsists within the situation in two immediate guises: in the very operation of the count (which, in its ‘pure transparency’, remains itself uncounted); and in the pure multiple upon which the count operates (which, as we have seen, differs in itself from its situated, or consistent, result). The pure multiple thus ‘in-consists’ within the situation in the form of the void – as the void in situ – and as such figures the precise point at which the situation is ‘sutured’ to its inconsistent being.

Two immediate and important theses follow from this proposition: first, that, according to the situation, the void is the proper name of being; and second, that everything that is is woven from the void.

Yet even while existence owes all that it is to the void, the latter nonetheless presents a real danger to the situation, inasmuch as its very in-consistency inevitably threatens the fabric of structured presentation. For were the situation to actually encounter its void – were it to paradoxically present its inherent inconsistency – this would necessarily undermine its own consistency and thereby spell the ‘ruin of the one’. Accordingly, so as to avoid such a catastrophe, every situation as a matter of course subjects itself to a structural re-count, a ‘count of the count’ whereby the initial count is itself counted (for, as we saw above, what escapes the operation of the count is precisely the count itself).This essential reframing of the situation establishes a kind of metastructure ensuring that everything in the situation is present and accounted for.

It is this double structuration by which the structure of a situation is itself ‘counted as one’ – thereby ensuring that there is both presentation and representation (or, if you prefer, ‘enframing’ and ‘reframing’) – that Badiou calls, for its ‘metaphorical affinity with politics’,⁴ the state of the situation (or simply the ‘state’). Furthermore, it is in this precise sense that Badiou can say that in our world ‘what counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted’.⁵

These three successional acts of framing – the unframing of the one (inconsistent or pure multiplicity), the enframing of being (situation), and the reframing of the situation (state) – are the grounds on which Badiou constructs his entire philosophical edifice.

The art of subtraction

While it is not especially hard to see the enormously productive role of Badiou’s ontology – its vast edifice being entirely built, as we have seen, out of operations that are essentially performed on nothing (i.e. the void) – we need to keep in mind how its basic gesture is in fact subtractive. Indeed, as indicated above, Badiou’s ontology is first and foremost a ‘subtractive ontology’. We can understand this in a number of ways.

First, it is subtractive in that it in no way purports to convey being as presence. Being (qua being) is most assuredly not what is presented to us.To the contrary, being – pure being – is that which defies any and every form of presentation (or representation, for that matter). Radically...