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Transcript of Art and Power-OCT 10
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Art and Power
Imperial Beach, Alain Badiou and the Public-Popular Aesthetic
Professor Jeff Lewis (RMIT University)
RMIT University
http://jeffreylewis.webs.com/
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between art and power within a particular aesthetic,
spatial and historical context. In order to problematise 'art' as a form of cultural and political
coding, the paper focuses on a specific public artwork that is located in the US border town
of Imperial Beach, The paper focuses on the ongoing problematics of art and its cultural
valence, re-engaging with debates on the conditions of power and politics through the wake
of the postmodern vortex. In particular, the paper draws on recent writings by Alain Badiou'
and his attempts to stablize these debates through an account of 'inaesthetics', and the
reconciliation of truth, immanence and universality of meaning. The paper concludes by
suggesting an alternative theoretical framework for the reading of art generally and the
specific artwork under examination.
Keywords
public art
globalization
Alain Badiou
psychoanalysis
urban renewal
power
The Peripatetic Consort
As you walk south along Imperial Beach toward the Mexican border, a small mystery reveals
itself. Out of the sea mists, rising over the sand at the end of Imperial Beach Boulevard, there
is a sentinel of three red, tubular poles. Above the sea-wall at about the same height as the
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palm trees, the poles curve and twist into a complex of curves which stretch, like distended
fingers, toward the Imperial Beach pier and the Pacific Ocean. On closer inspection, it
becomes clear that each of the tubular lines is subtly distinct, with its own discernible
compass and topography leading to a distant point on the western horizon.
For most of the beach-goers this red triumvirate seems barely worth a glance. Perhaps, for the
gaggle of sunbathers and sea-scamps who hang about the lee of the Imperial Beach pier, the
mystery may be already evident or entirely inconsequential: the poles' call for attention may
simply have been lost within the cacophony of our media-dense, urban landscapes. As a
visitor to Imperial Beach, however, I found the aporia utterly irresistible, as though knowing
the secret of the poles might admit me to the greater episteme of California and even America
itself. There is, of course, little excuse for such brazen naivet, except inasmuch as my
fascination expressed a deeper sense of disjunction that derived from the great and spectral
presence America has always exercised over my thinking and understanding of the world.
Like the three-headed hydra, the poles loomed above the beach-scape of California, as though
guarding that secret America which had always so deftly resisted my consummate knowing.
Given this hiatus and the sense of insecurity which often accompanies ignorance, my
first speculation identified the poles with the town's safety infrastructure. Specifically, the
poles seemed to indicate some zone of demarcation, protecting swimmers especially from the
hazardous incursion of fishing boats and surfboard riders. Along with a raft of civil
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ordinances, police officials and lifeguards, the poles may have been part of the state's
authority system, a mechanism for ordering the beach-goers, beach culture and the locally
constituted economy of pleasure.
As I thought this possibility through, however, I realised that such a function would
have been entirely redundant. The American disposition to social and cosmological ordering
had blessed this little town with an authoritarian community surveillance and civic police
system which deterred any kind of transgressive practiceanything that might disrupt the
peace, order or safety of the beachfront. Coming from the somewhat more relaxed beach
culture of Australia, I was overwhelmed by the lifeguard militia, water sheriffs, red flags,
whistles and constant constraints on the dangers that might issue from free bodily expression
and pleasure. In such a scrupulously controlled social regimen, a red pole warning system
would be entirely redundant. Thus, abandoning the notion that the poles were safety markers,
I then fixed on the idea that they were transmitters in America's military communications
infrastructure. The town's proximity to the San Diego fleet and the Mexican border suggested
that Imperial was not simply a Californian beach backwater, but was actually an integral part
of the nation's global military matrix. The ceaseless parade of naval helicopters that fly over
the town, circling the coast and the Tijuana Valley, not only threaten smugglers and illegal
immigrants, but reassure the Imperial Beach citizenry that they are safe within the cradle of
the American economic and military power network. It is, after all, the San Diego naval base
which produces and repairs significant proportions of the US maritime armada, facilitating its
domination across the western hemisphere. The symbolic apex of this power, the USSEnterprise, is now moored in the San Diego city harbour, a monument to American victory in
the Pacific War and convolution of the glory which frames the region's tourism economy.
In this same context, the red poles and their twisted tubular logic may have
constituted a cryptic but similarly forceful component of the nation's military topology.
However, when I put this possibility to a local surfer, he replied that he thought the poles
were the remnants of a film set: 'They went up at about the same time they were making
Lords of Dogtown here. I don't think anyone bothered to take them down againbut no-one
really knows.' So, then, the third possibility was that the poles were Hollywood relics and
part of California's propagated symbological landscape. In this sense, the poles were
implicated in another dimension of the US pleasure economy and its global cultural
hegemony. In any case, it had become increasingly apparent that the poles were not innocent,
and hence my quest became engaged in a broader interrogation of cultural meaning, ethics
and transnational geo-politics. Like Thomas Pynchon's Oedipa Maas, I devoted myself to the
objet du desir, walking around the structures, photographing them from various angles,
tracing their lines on a map and surveying their form. When finally the truth revealed itself, I
realised (also like Oedipa) that I had been as much duped in the imagining of this vision, as I
had been entranced by its chimeric and unexcogitable mystery.
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Indeed, what I was to discover was that I had been the vector for the very knowledge I
had been pursuing. Travelling on a bus toward the Mexican border, I found myself gazing
across the streetscape at the intersection with Imperial Beach Boulevard. When the bus stops,
my gaze is drawn inexorably toward the ocean and the red poles. At this moment, I am sitting
higher than the surrounding traffic and pedestrians on the sidewalk; it is the first time I have
seen the poles from this precise angle, vantage and distance. Instead of seeing the squiggling
cipher and its infernal lacuna, the parallax of red lines falls into a comprehensible shape, a
message. Against the perfect blue of the ocean and the soft washed sky, a word is written
purposefully, precisely, and in capital letters: ART.
ART
As though on the elemental origin of human time, the word ART is written. Thus, while art is
a vaguely articulated taxonomy of human coding, ART is inscribed as the reflexive banner
toward and from which all human expression derives. From the first inscription, ART
dissolves the boundaries of subject and object, line and space, meaning and medium: ART is
the end and the beginning point of human knowledge. In terms proposed by ART, Martin
Heidegger conceives of knowledge which animates
... a questioning along a pathway which is first traced out by the crossing to the other
beginning, into which Western thinking is now entering. This crossing brings the pathway
into the openness of history and establishes the crossing as perhaps a very long sojourn, in
the enactment of which the other beginning of thinking always remains only an intimation,though already decisive. (Heidegger, 1959: 3)
The task, then, is to travel the pathways through contending directions and crossings that
situate ART within the banner of our beingthat volition of knowing that is both incarnate
and paradoxically extemporal (Heidegger, 2002; see also Foti, 1998).
As I gazed across at the specific artwork in Imperial Beach, this task revealed itself in
the canny little code which was both the moment revealed and the universal volition of
knowing. ART, in this context, is Heidegger's crossing place whereby the pathways of artist,
art object and viewer converge. That is, while we might imagine a distinction between the art
viewer and the art object, ART deftly inverts the taxonomy, reminding us that all codes are
contingent and that every expression is an unstable pact of trust and play (Wittgenstein,
1965). In the specific incarnation at the centre of this paper, the sculpture is calledBanner Art
and the artist is John Banks, a fireman in the Las Vegas Brigade. The reflexive wit that
distinguishesBanner Artis set within the dynamic of a social episteme that is formed around
community interaction, urban renewal and public space (see Epting, 2001). Using the
compendium of knowledge and strategies we call 'culture', the subject-viewer must move
through space, language and learning until the message is revealed: that s/he is the subject-
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object of the art experience and that all human knowledge ultimately must be marshaled
through the power of ART.
In many respects, the moment of revelation is precisely the mystical epiphany of
being about which Heidegger speaks. From that moment, I may have contented myself with
the conceptionor conceptual ontologyby which art and its mystical codes excites our
aesthetic and cognitive sensibilities; I might have been satisfied with ART and its
convergence of universal and particulate imaginaries, the convergence of the infinite and the
material moment. Sadly, however, there was something profoundly unsatisfying about the
revelation and the presence of the work within the cultural grid of Imperial Beach, CA.
Something in the mystery, the nagging lacuna, persisted through the image and its startlingly
disarming denouement.
My own transverse of knowledge, elicited through a cognate academic framing,
considered the language-aesthetic game and its context in terms of broader plays of power.
Across the code and its pre-determined narrative pathways, there was, in fact, a sense of
continuing duplicity, a sense in which the knowledge revealedARTwas overflowing the
boundaries of its own conceptual and normative integrity. Indeed, the prescription of the
aesthetic and epistemological pathways revealed itself as a crafty expedition to a 'truth' that
transcended the specific conditions of its revelation beyond the capacity and agency of the
viewer-victim. In this sense, the pathways were constructed as a more or less infallible grid
upon which the viewer was placed and by which his or her freedom was denied. The
language-aesthetic game, that is, was also a power game by which the pathway and theknowledge were pre-ordained. This second revelation fostered a further response, a
resistance, which reclaimed my own sense of agency within the cultural landscape of
Imperial Beach. My moment of resistance, however, returned me to the ongoing problematics
of power and its coding within a truth-based knowledge system, a problematics which
continues to plague disciplines like cultural studies, philosophy and aesthetics, and their
capacity to offer strong conclusions about the nature and orientation of power across these
cultural landscapes.
Power (+ART)
Of course, the problem of truth and coding has for some time frustrated the scholarly and
public aspirations of humanities and creative disciplines. Focusing on the ways in which
social groups construct and apprehend meaning, particularly through the social ordering of
power, humanities and creative disciplines have been consistently accused of theoretical and
political irrelevance (Lewis, 2002, 435-48) At the harder edge of political and social science,
various critics have identified the creative and cultural disciplines with a monolithic
flaccidity which valorizes a 'postmodern' moral and political relativisma creative
slippageover the harsh truth of historical hierarchy and modes of social violence. Jane
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Bennett (2001), for example, argues that disciplines like cultural studies and art theory are
compromised by their resistance to a strong and grounded critical theory; according to
Bennett, these forms of cultural analysis are predisposed to a 'weak theory' that invokes all
manner of conceptual distension in order to avoid substantive truth claims.
Cultural theories, in this sense, are bound to the solipsistic relativism and self-
reflexive immanence of their focus: that is, to the codings of art and related expressive
modes. The immanent or 'cultural' meaning of an artwork cannot be liberated from a self-
gratifying aesthetic nor the ever-multiplying legitimacy of counter-claims, no matter how
nefarious, reactionary or insubstantial. In this sense, neither art nor its cultural-analytical
framing can say anything substantial about power, ideology, morality or truth. And though
many cultural scholars would reject this characterization, it is clear that their disciplines'
approach to truth, coding and power remains a central problem and the source of perpetual
theoretical revisionism (Hall and Birchall, 2006; Gibson, 2007; Rojek, 2007; Lewis, 2008).
Alain Badiou (2001, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2006), who has been recently conscripted
into these theoretical debates within the cultural disciplines, argues that the cultural coding of
art bears no significant relationship to philosophy: art is a conjuration of creative and
aesthetic strategies, while philosophy is designed to pursue and illuminate truth. To this end,
Badiou (2005a, 2005b) applies his philosophical method to illuminate the truth aboutart and
the ways in which philosophy has conceptualized art. For Badiou, these conceptualizations
form a basis for better understanding of art within a contemporary context. In the shadow of
the 'postmodern turn' and the imperative for current cultural disciplines to (re-)confirm theirsocial and academic cogency, we might usefully look to Badiou's rendering of art as a form
of cultural philosophy that may advance our own understanding of art generally andBanner
Artspecifically. This framework may provide a basis for the reconciliation of the artwork and
the conditions of poweror cultural politicsthrough which the meanings of the artwork are
generated.
Badiou argues that there are three schemata by which art is framed in modes of
cultural and philosophical analysis; these schemata are formed around a more generalized
account of the ways in which 'philosophy' engages with 'art'. According to Badiou (2005a),
each of these three historical schemata has its own modern iteration: didactic (-Marxism),
romantic (-German hermeneutics)and classical (-psychoanalysis). In the didactic schema,
the 'truth' of art lies in its public presence and effects: that is, its power is largely external to
the artwork itself as it is generated through its engagement with audiences as an assemblage
of social agents. According to Badiou, this means that 'the absolute of art is thus controlled
by the public effects of semblance, effects that are the truth regulated by an extrinsic truth'
(2005a: 3). Badiou places the Platonic anxiety about the power of poetics to disrupt public
order alongside the (neo-) Marxist paradigm which views art (the superstructure) as a
dangerous supplement to the dialectical force of the economic base. Thus, while writers like
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Georg Lukacs extol Soviet Realism, Brecht and others created an artistry that was designed to
counter the force of bourgeois ideology. This counter ideology informs the Althusserian
precepts which ultimately seep from a Marxist conception into a more romantically disposed
proposition of the opposition between social truth and imagination. Ideology, in this sense,
fills the void between a subject's conception of their life conditions and how things really are.
Applying these ideas toBanner Art, we may feel somewhat dejected by the vacuity of
the scriptural message, as well as the general indifference displayed by locals and town
visitors to the work's dynamism and playful aesthetic. From those commentators who are
concerned about serious matters of power and ideology, the work, as a feature on the
postmodern symbolic landscape of California, merely confirms the pseudo-individualism that
capitalism engenders;Banner Art's subject positioning simply traps the viewer into a game of
submission. The 'sweet spot', as some locals call the point of perspectival revelation, is pre-
ordained by the artist, the town engineers and the San Diego public art board. There is
nothing free-form, emancipatory or expressive about the social servitude of a viewer: the
aesthetic framing of the space simply replicates social conditioning and conformity. In the
end, the viewer is left stranded, holding nothing but the disappointment of another false
visionART as art vacated of meaning.
Moreover, the artwork, which is part of a more generalized urban redevelopment plan
for Imperial Beach, is an emissary of broader global trends which deliberately obfuscate
historically deemed spatial and economic differentiations that drive the capitalist project.
While the non-sanctioned public art like graffiti may approach the issues of urbanism infrom an entirely different political and cultural perspective, authorized public art like Banner
Art become aligned with the public aspirations of their community planners and benefactors.
As a new globalist discourse, therefore, urban renewal tends to parenthesize or even shift the
sriuous social questions of alienation, unemployment, poverty, diaspora, community violence
and American political hegemony into a more sanguine cultural spacea form of
embourgoisement (Hurst, 2007) that standardizes cultural expression into a more comfortable
social vision and economy of pleasure.
In this broader context, the banner ART ideology is propagated through the Imperial
Beach vista which is constituted around urban renewal and the global momentum of the
economy of pleasure. As we noted, however, this imaginary of pleasure is itself supported,
framed and surrounded by an equally potent and omnipotent economy of violence. The red
poles, which point across the shore to the Imperial Beach pier, may not be directly linked to a
militarized communications system, but they are nevertheless implicated within the
imaginary of 'America', the American cultural empire and its vast power.
Elaborating Badiou's didactic schema, therefore, we might situateBanner Artand Imperial
Beach within the general purview of the San Diego military base.
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This base, along with its network of interconnected communicational satellites, not
only enforces the militarized demarcation zones of nation (America-Mexico, citizen-alien), it
is also the platform for America's defensive and offensive security strategies in the western
hemisphere. Following Paul Virilio's (1994, 2002) arguments about the radical enhancement
of ballistic power through the deployment of ocular-computer technological systems, we can
see that the intense military bombardment of Iraq was 'directed' from the 'distance-proximity'
and security of the California coast (see Roseman, 2003; Lewis, 2005). Even more telling,
perhaps, the San Diego based USSAbraham Lincoln was the site upon which George W.
Bush declared 'an end to major combat operations' in Iraq (May 2, 2003). The Bush PR team
re-configured the military vessel as a Hollywood war ship with the Commander-in-Chief
performing a starring role. Wearing an aircraft military flak-jacket and stepping from the
cockpit of a S3B Viking fighter plane, the President announced to the world media that the
war in Iraq was effectively over and the US had been victorious in this important battlefront
in the war on terror. Pyrrhic as it was to prove, the victory speech was crowned in symbolic
paraphernalia, prompting CNN to note that the military 'tailhook' landing 'marked the first
time a sitting president has arrived on the deck of an aircraft carrier by plane' (rather than
helicopter). However, while the landing, the suit and the setting were designed to give an
impression that the 'mission accomplished' speech was delivered in the midst of Middle East
hostilities, it actually was presented only 39 miles off the San Diego coast where the aircraft
carrier was anchored (Waldman, 2004; Lewis 2005).
In a similar way, cultural products likeBanner Artmight seem to blur the boundariesbetween art and the artifice of propaganda. For the didactic schema, that is, particular
artworks or the broad category of art might simply contribute to an ideological system that
ultimately becomes normalized as social knowledge and truth. Within the critical studies
incarnation of the didactic schema, critics like Henry Giroux and Douglas Kellner point to the
popular media and its contribution to the ideological imaginary of America. Thus, televisual
works such as Mark Tinker'sJohn from Cincinnati (2007) and Catherine Hardwicke's skater
movie,Lords of Dogtown (2005) fortify American power through a narrative rendering of the
Imperial Beach pier in the social pursuit of pleasure and power.
Set in the 1970s,Lords of Dogtown, specifically, iconicizes the Imperial Beach pier
through its convocation of bodily ecstasy and bodily danger. The film is a biographical
narrative describing the social rise of the Z-Boys, a group of underprivileged skateboarders
from Venice Beach. Because the Venice Beach pier had been substantially re-modeled and
re=furbished, the film was largely shot around Imperial Beach pier, which provided a more
authentic rendering of the 1970s. Thus, in the imagining of the film, Imperial Beach becomes
part of a dual fantasy which is not simply about the revolutionizing of skating and the social
progress of the Z-Boys, but about urban renewal and the re-imagining of the community and
community space. In both community dialogue and the film, the pier becomes part of the
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imagined future, the bridge to a better life and infinite pleasurethe symbolic heart of the
American dream, America and the economy of pleasure. Against these pleasures are the
dangers associated with the brute territorialism surrounding the pier, community
fragmentation, and ethno-class violence. These dangers, however, are mobilized in artworks
likeLords of Dogtown and ultimatelyBanner Artthrough their dialogue with bodily pleasure;
it is precisely this dialogue in contention that further substantiates the ideological volition of
renewal, social progress and American self-conceptionthe American dream. In this way,
the familiar rags-to-riches motif deployed inLords of Dogtown becomes etched into the
Imperial Beach pier and the homology of its social imaginary.
Thus, the diverse communities of Imperial Beach are re-configured into a consensus
aesthetic notionally called 'the community' or 'the public'; the old territories thus become
securitized and renewed as 'public space', The filming ofLords of Dogtown in Imperial
Beach, as substitute for Venice Beach, might be understood in terms of Lacan's
misrecognition: the space is conceived by community leaders and art critics, thereby, as a
social laurel, an expression of homologous public pride and achievement
Imperial Beachis a far different place than it was in the 1970s, residents say.
Neighborhoods have been cleaned up. Redevelopment projects are underway. Property
values have increased. And the city, unlike other coastal beach towns, has retained its
small-town feel Imperial Beach was chosen for the film's opening beach scenes because
it is close to Hollywood and the Venice Beach pier could easily be created here. Not
much has changed along the Imperial Beach shore since the 1970s, when high-risedevelopment was banned. (Zuniga, 2004)
In Badiou's didactic schema, such pronouncements confirm an ideological account of art that
is critiqued through a dialectical, counter-ideology. Critics like Theodor Adorno, thereby,
famously seek to correct the public misapprehension of themselves and the popular 'artwork'
which is generally a product within the a deplorable culture industry and system of social
control (Adorno, 1941, 1975).Banner Artis merely an ensign to this broader social system
and its deep roots in melodramatic narratives and the instrumental control of social agents
and their capacity for aesthetic knowledge and independent thought..
This counter ideology framework remains influential, particularly for critics like
Douglas Kellner and others who are suspicious of populism in various forms of media and
commercial art. Adorno's privileging of 'high art' as the sublime aesthetic, however, also
introduces us to the second of Alain Badiou's schema, romanticism. According to Badiou,
romantic models of art and its understanding are characterized by its claim that art alone is
able to generate an original and ultimate truth: as the antecedent of religion, 'it is art itself that
educates, because it teaches of the power of infinity held within the tormented cohesion of a
form. Art delivers us from the subjective barrenness of a concept. Art is the absolute of the
subjectits incarnation' (2005a: 3). Maintaining a view consistent throughout his later
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writings, Badiou largely dismisses romanticism, including the hermeneutic phenomenology
he identifies in the writings of Martin Heidegger for whom 'the poet, in the flesh of language,
maintains the effaced guarding of the Open' (2005a: 6). This form of romanticism, as the
finite holding up of the infinite beyond, is barely registered by Badiou's account since its
claims to a unique truth inevitably separate it from itself and from the conditions through
which its immanent truth may be marshaled. In particular, Badiou expresses his concerns
about an absolute subjectivity and the transcendent promise (a return to the gods), which can
never be fulfilled.
Thus, while neo-Marxist and critical didacticism locate the power of art in conditions
and effects that are extrinsic to the symbolic form, romanticism imbues art with a unique and
immanent power which draws largely upon the relationship between the subject and the
ontological self (the gods). Even so, romanticism's most recent incarnation as
'postmodernism' claims that the personalas individual expressivitycan ultimately
reproduce its transformative power into some form of more generalized social effect. Out of
the writings of Andreas Huyessen, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, a flurry of
postmodern politics was generated. This new politics claimed that a postmodern aesthetic
was intrinsically liberatory as it reversed the authority and hierarchal expressive order that
characterized modernism. Releasing the gridlock of the modern subject perspective, the
postmodern aesthetic experience propitiated through art insists on a creative fluidity and open
relationship between subject and objectincluding of course the art object. The order of the
aesthetic and epistemic relationships perpetually shifts as the viewer becomes an activeplayer in an ever-expanding language game. Heidegger's crossings and pathways, thereby,
become re-invigorated through the release of the subject into the conditions of contingency,
perpetual mobility and expressivity commended by the new mysticism of poststructuralism
and even more nefarious descendent, postmodernism (Guattari, 1992). The authority of truth
is thereby returned to the subject, since the meaning of the artwork, when finally it appears, is
translucent, playful and infinitely open: it is, after all, ART.
Indeed, the motif of language games, theorized initially by Ludwig Wittgenstein and
elaborated through Lyotard's postmodern condition, has become something of an orthodoxy
in various forms of publicly funded urban art (see Lyotard, 1994). The viewer is an agent of
shared, democratic, community space, in which the banner of art becomes the public property
of an egalitarian vision. Sitting within the leisure-scape of the beach, an artwork likeBanner
Art, specifcally, analogizes the pleasure and play of the carnival and the carnivalesque (see
Lemeck, 1998). The city, in this sense, is re-calibrated as a zone of desire: a diverse, dynamic
and freshly cosmopolitanized matrix of symbolic games. The city gates are open: new
perspectives, people and adventures are endorsed in the civil processes and their
representative public art. Thus, while the postmodern movements of the 1980s and 1990s
may have rejected the connotation of ontological or transcendent truth, they are nevertheless
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responsible for the ascent of an invigorated expressive aesthetic and cultural ethics. The
caprice and energy of the city is articulated through works likeBanner Artwithin the
democratic culture and the ideals intrinsic to an economy of pleasure (see, Doss and Doss,
1995; Blake, 2007).
According to the San Diego Tribune's review ofBanner Art, the work articulates a
clear lineage between the Imperial Beach community and the sense of a public identity
through which the state's art sponsorship program operates. This continuity is evidenced in
the community's proactive engagement in the urban re-development project of which public
art is a critical feature (see Miles, 1997, 2004). From his perspective, the artist, John Banks,
declared that'It's another study of sculptural space using a word as the subject matter I
had the design, and I think the people that chose it thought it would fit into the environment
perfectly' (cited in Ziga, 2006). Other public artworks, including a collection of translucent
surfboard-like arches called Surfhenge and a sculpture of three dolphins in a wave, have been
installed around the Imperial Beach pier. According to the Imperial Beach representative on
the San Diego Port District Art Board: 'People identify with art in the community I think
people are going to come to see it. It's going to be a lot of fun' (Allan Tait, cited in Ziga,
2006).
Aristotle, Art and the Oracle
In many respects, this form of postmodern celebrationism lies well beyond the purview of
Heideggerian hermeneutic romanticism, at least inasmuch as the folk culture it exalts isgenerated by cultural populism and an economy of pleasure. Like Adorno, Heidegger is
deeply suspicious of a notion of freedom that constituted around consumer choice and the
edifice of American individualism. Even so, the conflux of postmodern styles and the public
art ethos is critically engendered through the context of the Imperial Beach vista and its
engagement with the global momentum of urban renewal. The postmodern or popular
incarnation of cultural analysis simply extended the radical phenomenology that Heidegger
advocates to all codings across all cultural taxonomies: the shift from high art to public,
popular and mediated 'art' merely recognizes the arbitrariness of god in the mystical force of
the absolute subject.
Certainly, this is how Badiou would understand the expansive and unfettered nature
of 'the open' and transcendent force of a mystical truth that inevitably issues from romantic
conceptions of art and other modes of aesthetic coding. In fact, Badiou's dissatisfaction with
the romantic schema does not lead us back to a didactic conception that situates art within a
framework of political economy or grounded political critique; rather, Badiou considers a
third schema which is generated through Aristotelian classicism and the broader lineage that
leads ultimately to psychoanalytic theory. Unlike Plato, Aristotle relieves art of the burden of
truth or even a deceptive truth, arguing that 'poetics' generates its aesthetic and bodily effects
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through 'semblance' or imitation rather than through a collusion of facts. In this sense,
Aristotle concerns himself with the capacity of the artwork to be 'liked' by its audience. This
liking has nothing to do with being 'truthful' but relates rather to its arrangement of truth
elements which constitute its resemblance to the world-as-lived. In the phrasing of more
recent cultural theory, the force and believability of an artwork is a contingency, therefore, of
its truth within the imaginary of the subject. This is not the imaginary of a constituted
political ideology; it is rather the assemblage of culturally constructed co-ordinates that
express themselves through art. In Aristotelian terms, the process of managing these elevated
emotions and imaginings is part of the therapeutic or 'cathartic' function of the work of the
artistssomething at which Sophocles excels over other tragedians (see Poetics,52a22-26).
For Badiou the modern extension of classicism is largely borne through
psychoanalytic theory: 'In Freud and Lacan, art is conceived as what makes it so that the
object of desire, which is beyond symbolization, can subtractively emerge at the very peak of
an act of symbolization' (2005a: 7). The very act of symbolization, that is, facilitates the
blockage of symbolization through the interposition of the re-emergent real. For this reason,
the artwork necessarily draws the attention of the viewer as s/he encounters the object of
desire (and loss) in the appearance of the symbolic artwork: 'This is why the effect of art
remains imaginary' (2005a: 7). Badiou readily concedes that this form of epistemological
framing of art relegates its function to the (free) service of psychoanalysis, occluding a
political or even ethical function that is not set within the framework of personal therapy and
its implications for a more generalized social illumination. In this way,Banner Artcan onlybe inderstood in terms of its psycho-social value whereby the viewer's engagement (liking) of
the artwork presupposes its effectiveness as art and therapyparticularly as liking revolves
around its power to evince and stimulate the psycho-emotional gratification associated with
catharsis.
Badiou's own journey through Marxism to psychoanalysis is evident in his
philosophical rendering, most particularly as he attempts to move beyond the structuralist-
poststructuralist political blockage. In his analysis of these schemata, Badiou identifies a
condition of 'saturation' which, in his view, limits their effectiveness as modes of aesthetic
analysis. To this end, Badiou offers a fourth schema, which distinguishes art from philosophy
while recognizing the particular capacity of an artwork to generate its own 'unique' conditions
of (immediate or imagined) truth. Specifically, Badiou seeks to expand upon the classical-
psychoanalytical schema and its account of art as 'the constraint that a truth exercises within
the domain of the imaginary in the guise of verisimilitude' (2005a: 9). Badiou's reading of
'inaesthetics' represents an attempt to reconcile theoretically the seemingly incompatible
condition of the distinctive artwork as both unique and contextual. Thus, Badiou argues that
art should be conceived as a ' truth procedure' which is formed paradoxically through the
defining characteristics of immanence and singularity. According to Badiou, this immanence
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refers to the fact that 'Art is rigorously coextensive with the truths that it generates', while its
singularity suggests, 'These truths are given nowhere else than in art' (2005a: 9). This is not to
claim, however, that art might itself generate absolute (and hence universal) truth as per a
romantic idealization of the enjoinment of creative expression and subjectivity. In the
romantic schema of art 'truth is an infinite multiplicity Or, to be more conceptual: The
infinity of a truth is the property whereby it subtracts itself from its pure and simple identity
with the established forms of knowledge' (2005a: 10). Badiou goes on to argue that this is
precisely the weakness of the romantic conception of art; the artwork is finite, according to
Badiou, on at least three counts
First of all, it exposes itself as finite objectivity in space and/or in time. Second, it is
always regulated by a Greek principle of completion: It moves within the fulfillment of its
own limits. It signals its display of all the perfection of which it is capable. Finally, and
most importantly, it sets itself up as an inquiry into the question of its own finality. It is the
persuasive procedure of its own finitude. This is, after all, why the artwork is irreplaceable
in all of its points (another trait that distinguishes it from the generic infinite of the true)
I would even happily argue that the work of art is in fact the only finite thing that
existsthat art creates finitude. (2005a: 10-11)
In this vein, Badiou rejects Deleuze's conceptions of expressivity and Guattari's adapted
notion of pathways which fortify a romantic ontology of the infinite. While many postmodernenthusiasts have claimed exemption from the modernist and romantic lineage, Badiou
recognizes a clear link between a mystical politics of subject liberation through 'expressivity'
and earliey romanticism's espousal of transcendent aesthetics (see also Badiou, 2000).
Thus, while Heidegger and Deleuze-Guattari may speak expansively of the mobility
of expressivity and pathways, Badiou restricts art to the composite elements of its formation
and completion: an artwork is necessarily itself, its semblance and extrapolation of the
continuities of life within the framed borders of its narrative and imagistic effects. As with
his other key writings on history (2005b) and ethics (2001), Badiou'sHandbook of
Inaesthetics proposes that 'truth' exists but it can only be illuminated through the conjuration
of a truth procedure, which is directly associated with what Badiou calls 'the event': 'a truth is
an artistic configuration initiated by an event (an event is a group of works, a singular
multiple of works) and unfolded through chance in the form of the works that serve as the
subject points' (2005a: 12). Badiou's broader theoretical writings argue that the event is
distinguished by its originality and transformative power. Occurring across four domains of
human experience (art, history, politics and love), the event constitutes a radical and
seemingly random rupture of the repetitive and rhythmic momentum of phenomenal
conditions: this break inevitably disrupts the symbolic order and hermeneutic grid upon
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which human meanings are constructed. The force and originality of the event seems,
thereby, to confound the formulations of human knowledge, creating a 'truth' that is acutely
and irrevocably novel. In the realm of art this means that a given artwork is the local subject
point of a differentiated art procedure constituted through an event as artistic rupture.
Badiou is confident that he has not retreated into a romantic or mystical account of
history and cultural transformation. He is equally confident that he has resolved the question
of artistic immanence and singularity, even though he is unsure of the consequences of his
proposition. Yet, it is only possible to understand Badiou's claims when we accept that 'art' is
itself a distinctive category of human coding and expression a claim that the advanced
cultural disciplines have long since abandoned. The avant garde has disappeared, Badiou
pronounces, because it could no longer sustain its interrogation of a taxonomic system of
expressionartthat it sought to destroy by the very act of interrogation. Through its
fatuous convergence of anti-classicism, revolutionary didacticism and romantic conceptions
of artistic re-birth, the avant garde exhausted itself and its 'synthetic' schema. However, while
Badiou rejects the notion of art or an artwork as absolute in the romantic sense, it appears to
be the resistant purity of art and its evental aleatory which distinguishes it as an expressive
category over all other expressive codes. In this sense, it is not that the avant garde
disappeared so much as it morphed and hybridized with other expressive codes, particularly
in terms of the electrical and digital media. This, however, is not a question that Badiou is
prepared to address beyond his insistence that some form of alchemic truth procedure enables
the emergence of a work's immanent and singular facticity, and that this 'knowledge' isneither the endowment of a truth effect back to the world: nor does it re-present the truths of
the world that already exist.
While maintaining his resistance to the Deleuzian line, Badiou's miraculous truth
procedure draws upon, as it seeks to resolve, the dual lineage of romanticism and a Lacanian
poststructuralist psychoanalysis. His romanticism, in particular, resonates with the American
New Criticism of the 1950s whereby Cleanth Brooks famously proclaimed that 'every new
poem is a new word'. This immanent singularity is presented, however, as the predicate of a
psychoanalytic paradigm by which the miracle is uniquely inscribed by the artwork's deeply
personalized truth. But it is the artwork and only the artwork which is capable of this
miraculous conjunction within its evental topography: the category self-regulates and self-
ascribes as it is only the artwork within this evental 'condition' that is capable of the miracle.
Badiou concludes that our social salvation is a contingency of culture, as it is isolated and
rendered through the co-ordinates of the art eventart as oracle.
In the end, we are left with an expressive category which presumes itself and which
retroactively demonstrates its radical capacities through its own truth procedures. The power
of art resides, therefore, in the capacity of an artwork to break the grid; all other expressive or
mediated codes are largely irrelevant to Badiou's schema since they can never claim this
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miraculous or irruptive power. Indeed, it is not a matter of self-ascription or self-assertion
which enables the code to claim its artistic integrity: it is rather the radical expression of
desire and its aleatory effect. In the end, Badiou's fourth schema returns the artwork to itself
and its own borders, at least until it congregates with other artworks around the
transformative accidents of history; these accidents or events are the constituent fabric of the
truth that only philosophy, in the end, can illuminate.
ForBanner Artthis simply means that, if it exists as art at all, then it has no
substantive truth claims; the text of the artwork is contained within its own self-referencing
borders. Similarly, the subject is valid only inasmuch as s/he is engaged in the aesthetic game
and the act of desiring which underscores the narrative-aesthetic encounter. Whatever
pleasures the text may elicit, the subject remains moored within the framing of the moment
and the immanent lexicon of desire. There is nothing else that counts. The politics of poesy
are constrained within an aesthetic framework which may resemble, but never replace, the
actual conditions of life.
Desire, Art and the Economy of Pleasure
Not surprisingly, Badiou enters the perpetual revisionism of cultural philosophy through his
contentions with Heidegger and Deleuze, and his convictions around truth and immanence.
For some scholars, like Julian Murphet (2006), Badiou's return to truth and disavowal of
cultural relativism represents an heretical, even treacherous, challenge to the productive
assumptions of cultural analysis and its primary project. Others, such as Colin Wright (2008),rejoice in Badiou's reappraisal of the possibilities of culture and cultural transformations that
are not bound to a critical tradition that has proved largely irrelevant to substantial social and
political reform. From this latter perspective, Badiou advances a psychoanalytic framework
that recognizes the significance of human desire within agency and the formative power of
culture and aesthetics.
What is clear, however, is that Badiou's self-proclaiming break with Deleuzian
cultural politics might seem to leave the peripatetic art viewer in a condition of abject
confusion. In Badiou's schema the viewer of works likeBanner Artis left stranded within the
deceptive play of desire, power and meaning; like Janus, the viewer looks from the
playfulness of the cipher to the public setting and the accretions of power that situate the
artwork and its own prescriptive subject positioning. Indeed, for Badiou, there can no
pathway to emancipation that is bound to the authority of the state and its brutal economies of
violence.
Equally, however, Badiou is contemptuous of the idea that emancipation might issue
through play, desire or an economy of pleasure, which are themselves merely manifestations
of capitalist and democratic delusions. While he rejects the artifice of party-based democracy,
Badiou is equally critical of the libertarianism espoused by Deleuze and Michel Foucault
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We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or
of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics without party, and yet at the same time
without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the
vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag
is only the double or the shadow of the red flag (2006: 321).
Badiou rejects both the party-based democratic system and the alternative anti-capitalist
libertarianisms which remain fixed in a dualist political schema. For Badiou, the 'anti-' prefix
merely confirms the might of the system and a disposition which restores itself in a
teleological constraint on human possibility. Even if the opponents of capitalism and its
tendril democracies strike a victory, there is only another system to fill the void or restore the
wound. For Badiou, this cycle of power and systemic shift is not broken by a fatuous
libertarianism and the Deleuzian release of desire, which Badiou caricatures in the following
termsUnforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift, my son, and you will make the
Revolution (2004: 76).
Thus, while his writings on art leave the subject suspended between a miraculous
truth procedure and the deceptive play of desire, his political philosophy denies the subject
sufficient agency to resist the state and its artifice of democracy. Even so, and as Saul
Newman (2007) points out, despite these protestations, Badiou's own intrigue with the
Lacanian framework draws him toward the possibilities of desire and its anarchic disposition.
Badiou, that is, pursues the possibilities of knowledge into Lacanian conceptions of desire
which at some point he also finds himself resisting. Part of the problem is that Badiourecognizes the potency of desire as a social volition, but he ultimately despairs of its capacity
for genuine human reformation. In either case, Badiou seems to forestall the complex and
multitudinous nature of Lacanian desire, particularly in terms of its coded excess and the
ways in whichjouissance is implicated in the convocation of pleasure and displeasure. As it
has been broadly understood, Lacan explains desire in terms of the loss of completeness and
a subject's entry into the symbolic order: in the pursuit of pleasure, particularly through the
blissful excess ofjouissance, the subject necessarily generates conditions of displeasure that
are deeply rooted in the state of loss (see Lacan, 1977; Lewis, 2008: 137-50).
While numerous theorists have adapted Lacan's theory of desire for a more general
cultural critique (see esp. Zizek, 2006), we can see that the pursuit of pleasure is also
profoundly implicated in the social exercise of power and economy. In particular, the
mechanisms for the pursuit of pleasure have contributed to the historical organization of
social groups and its expression in hierarchy, politics and politically generated violencethat
is, in the social formation of pleasure and displeasure. The evolution of a contemporary
mediasphere and economy of pleasure is thereby set within these processes of 'loss' and the
transfer of somatic and symbolic conditions of displeasure to others (see Lewis, 2005, 2008,
Lewis and Lewis, 2009; Lewis, forthcoming).
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Artworks, like other coded texts, need to be understood in terms of these conditions of
desire and the transection of pleasure and displeasure. Within a globalizing economy of
pleasure,Banner Artbecomes a totemic code for the subject-object encounter and the
aggregating discourses and language wars that comprise contemporary culture. Seen in this
way,Banner Artis never complete, as Badiou suggests it might be. Rather, the artwork is a
transitional and often agonistic communion of desires and an imaginary of pleasure which is
always implicated in its countervailing conditions of displeasure. The pathways and grids
about which Heidegger and Deleuze-Guattari speak are not set within an integrated,
homologous and bordered knowledge system, but are the overlapping pathways of multiple
knowledge constructs. The aesthetic experience, thereby, is a convocation of desires and
codes which create a semblance of being that synthesizes itself through the crossing places of
pleasure and displeasure.
In our reading ofBanner Art, therefore, there can be no deferral of alternative
knowledge systems and their ideological drivers: the text and its pleasure games cannot be
isolated from the political conditions of its spatial, psycho-cultural and cultural locale. The
public artwork is not a parallel lineage, but a crossing place in which the imaginary of civic
renewal and economy of pleasure are profoundly bound to the matrix of the broader banner
of America and its ferocious project of acquisitive pleasure and transferal of displeasure.
Using the mechanisms of hierarchy, power and violence, the banner America operates within
and through the pleasure of the text and its game of urban renewal. Thus, the Gulf War and
the bestial malice of America's industrial militarism are inscribed in the sensibilities of theartwork, as much as they are inscribed in flight path of naval helicopters that hourly circle the
skies above Imperial Beach. The play-games and pleasures that rise from the California
beachscape and the fantasy of leisure-resistance texts likeLords of Dogtown are shaped
within the force of an American military imaginary and its astonishing capacity for global
self-assertion. This disposition of violence and displeasure, however, does not constitute the
'real'Banner Art, but is co-extensive to the pleasure and deadly delights that rise in the triple
hydra of the artwork's meaning.
Ladies of Dogtown: Conclusion
Understood in these terms,Banner Artexists at the crossing place between pleasure and
displeasure, between the aesthetics of somatic bliss and the gradients of various forms of
socially constituted exclusion and violence. Quite clearly, the artwork is located within the
elongated hub of the Californian beach culture and its expressivities of bodily display, sexual
performativity, fantasy and the ongoing parade of urban-spatial renewal. Against this
disposition of pleasure, however, Imperial Beach is also articulated through the imaginary of
an absolute state power represented in the nearby San Diego naval base and the town's
proximity to the US-Mexican border. In this light,Banner Artis a beacon and gateway that
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draws from itself the hideous truth of human demarcation. Pointing from the ex-temporality
of its claim to ART, the red poles also point to the misery of innumerable human groups who
are not embraced beneath the banner America, at least inasmuch as they are not the true
citizens of the code.
These groups include the multitude of Mexicans who are born outside the borders and
who seek nevertheless to embrace the banner as guest workers, and legal or illegal
immigrants. One of these guest workers is a young, female surfer, Miranda, whom I met on
the beach just below theBanner Artpoles. Miranda is conspicuous in Imperial Beach because
of her body art. She has two distinctly ethno-national symbols tattooed on her body: the first
is a cluster of Mexican sculls inscribed across her shoulders and back; the second features
two frontier-style six-guns tattooed in her groin, the barrels pointing toward her pudenda. The
guns are a distinctive tribute to Old California (Vieja California) when the territory was part
of Spanish Mexico. Miranda travels each day across the border from Tijuana to her cleaning
job at the Imperial Beach naval base. She earns around eight dollars an hour, which she says
is better than unemployment or the sex work she might be doing in her home town in
Mexico. When I asked her about the tattoos, she replied with a constrained but determined
intensity, slowly tapping the guns with her forefingers'I am not White, not Black. I am not
Hispanic and I am not Latino. I am Mexican. Get it? I am fucking Mexican!'
Miranda's body art presents itself in dialogue with the red poles, specifically as both
are forms of public art and both demand the subject-viewer to become engaged in a game of
de-coding that is mobilized through the crossing place of pleasure and displeasure. Miranda'smotifs elicit a form of desiring that is destabilized through an imaginary of intimacy, danger
and violence that is both intensely erotic and profoundly political. As they draw the viewer
toward the vortex of pleasure, the gun barrels are tilted back toward the red poles, reminding
us of the terror of America's expropriation ofVieja California and the ongoing force of
national and imperial hegemony.
Like many other non-authorized modes of public art, Miranda's inscriptions enter the
hegemony through a self-consciously defined pathway of resistance. This resistance marshals
a mode of power that is denied to publicly funded and sanctioned works likeBanner Artand
commercially garnered texts likeLords of Dogtown. Even so, on the warm Californian beach,
the viewer might gaze from Miranda's tattoos toward the aporetic red poles and their
background of translucent blue. In that intoxicating afternoon light, the beach-goer may or
may not seek an explanation for this tubular lacuna. But in either case, the cipher of this ART
remains set within specific conditions of volition, code and knowledge. The art and power
that preside over the pleasure zones of the Californian beach are not accidental but are set
within the complex of language games that are seething with menace as much as somatic
bliss. They are, that is, set within the power of art, and the art of power.
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