Badiou and His Interlocutors by Alain Badiou;A.J. Bartlett;Justin Clemens;

Author:Alain Badiou;A.J. Bartlett;Justin Clemens;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350026643
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

The treatment of waste

Placing momentarily to one side this ‘idealization’ of cinema, it is necessary to emphasize another aspect of cinema’s impurity, namely, its non-artistic side, which relates to its peculiar status as a ‘place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT 111). In a nutshell, cinema figures for Badiou as an art that remains in an important sense ‘beneath’ art. Indeed, Badiou explicitly holds that ‘no film strictly speaking is controlled by artistic thinking from beginning to end. It always bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn from ambient imagery, from the detritus of other arts, and from conventions with a limited shelf life’ (IT 111). Or as he puts it elsewhere (in relation to Plato’s theory of Forms), ‘if cinema is… the chance visitation of the Idea, it is in the sense in which Plato has the old Parmenides demand of the young Socrates that he accept, together with the Good, the Just, the True, and the Beautiful, other equally abstract though less respectable ideas: the ideas of Hair, or of Mud’.18

What this of course means is that – at least in the case of cinema – non-art is immanent to art as a rule. Not only is every film, in the final analysis, a commodity circulating in a global market, which is produced by a certain number of labourers, and manufactured within a specific system of economic and ideological relations; moreover, the voracious relation of the camera to the real means that no film can truly shield itself from the stock images of the time. It is with this in mind that Badiou proclaims that ‘with only slight exaggeration cinema could be compared to the treatment of waste’ (CMA 226). Indeed, insofar as cinema figures as something of a grey area between art and non-art, Badiou contends that any properly artistic activity in cinema – that is, the effective passage of a cinema-Idea – can only be discerned as a ‘process of purification of its own immanent non-artistic character’ (IT 111). Which is to say that, for a film to be truly artistic, an (effectively interminable) process of purging must first take place. And yet, Badiou quickly concedes, such an absolutely purificatory process can of course never be actually achieved. At best, such a ‘pure’ cinematic ideal might only be approached asymptotically. ‘This impossibility’, Badiou declares, ‘is the real of cinema, which is a struggle with the infinite, a struggle to purify the infinite’ (CMA 227). To this effect Badiou concludes that ‘cinema’s artistic operations are incompletable purification operations, bearing on current non-artistic forms or indistinct imagery’ (IT 111).

Now, while it might seem that cinema’s necessary non-artistry forecloses from the start any possibility of its attaining true (or ‘pure’) artistic status, again, the paradox is that, according to Badiou, it is precisely in maintaining a degree of non-artistic content that cinema is guaranteed a certain artistic capacity. For as Badiou sees it, an absolute purification of cinema’s non-artistic content would actually work to suppress its artistic

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