In this chapter we approach something that appears, at first glance, in the form of an implacable opposition. The title should, perhaps, read:
‘Cultural Studies or Alain Badiou’. While cultural studies has been the most hospitable of disciplines, absorbing and assimilating no end of theo-retical ‘positions’ in its muscular advance towards an adequate critical rela-tionship with its world, there is the strong sense that, in the work of Alain Badiou at least, a limit has been reached. We will see below how hostile Badiou himself is to any rapprochement with a discipline he presumptively lumps together with the worst varieties of ‘multiculturalism’; and we will further specify good reasons why cultural studies as it is presently consti-tuted can have little immediate use for a philosophy, like Badiou’s, predi-cated on truth, subjectivity, universals and ‘pure art’. In the words of Badiou’s most gifted English mediator, Peter Hallward: ‘It is probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Badiou’s work is today almost literally unreadable according to the prevailing codes – both political and philo-sophical – of the Anglo-American academy’ (2003: xxiii). And if there is little chance that these two critical protocols might learn to read each other in a common project, then perhaps the force of this irreconcilability amounts to an injunction to decide, to decide in favour of decision, rather than cling to the dream of conciliation. Yet the question remains: is this antagonism the ‘right’ one for us to be deciding? And furthermore, is it reallythe antagonism it appears to be?1At the conclusion of this chapter we will ask these questions more insistently, and probe the possibility of a conjuncture between two such seemingly mutually exclusive critical positions.
Let us briefly summarise a few principles and premises that might be said to confer at least the semblance of unity on the proliferation of prac-tices going ahead in the name of cultural studies (though each of these tenets is arguable, even within ‘the discipline’):
1. Truth is a discursive construct always implicated in the operations of power and fundamentally unavailable for effective critical reclamation.
2. Any truck with the universal must be resisted. Only concrete particu-larities and their combinations can responsibly be treated.
3. Difference is good, ‘sameness’ is bad.
4. Multiculturalism is ‘a core value of the discipline’ (During 2005: 160).
5. Culturally, the impure is simply what is, and is, as such, good. Any attempt to ‘purify’ the impure (à la Mallarmé and Ezra Pound, who both offered to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’ with their forbidding works) is a totalitarian gesture.
6. Cultural studies ‘tends to regard all cultural practices and objects as value-equivalent’ (During 2005: 7).
Every one of these tenets is categorically opposed by the philosophy of Alain Badiou, who affirms a philosophy of truth, in the name of universal-ism, the immortal subject, an ethics of the Same, and the value of the purity of art. Clearly, this requires some explanation.
Badiou, who came to intellectual maturity under the auspices of Louis Althusser, proceeds from a basic conviction: that mathematics, particularly post-Cantorian set-theory, resolves one of philosophy’s most enduring problems – namely, the question of Being. ‘Ontology is nothing other than mathematics as such’ (Badiou 2004: 45). Mathematics thinks pure being, and does so perfectly adequately, in terms of its immanent multiplicity, its infinite extension from within. Passionately hostile to all philosophies of the ‘One’, Badiou embraces the ‘inconsistent multiple’ of mathematical infinity as the ultimate horizon of all thought and practice.
Truthis the name of philosophical responsibility before the universality of mathematical logic. One of Badiou’s more exasperated asides berates cultural relativism as a ‘barbaric’ retreat from this universality:
The extreme forms of this relativism . . . claim to relegate mathematics itself to an ‘Occidental’ setup, to which any number of obscuranitst or symbolically trivial apparatuses could be rendered equivalent, provided one is able to name the subset of humanity that supports this apparatus. (Badiou 2003: 6)
Badiou insists on mathematics as a universal condition of thought, against any attempt to relativise it. But truth itself is not mathematical – far from it. Mathematical ontology is descriptive; it enables us to think being, but in a more or less tautological way. Set-theory elucidates the infinitely mul-tiple constitution of any given situation, and insists on the gap between this raw multiplicity and the ‘count-for-one’ that represents it as a ‘state’ (for
instance, a political state consists of these elements: politicians, trades unions, capitalists, media institutions, and so forth; and not others that are none the less ‘inside’ it: illegal immigrants, homeless and mentally ill persons), but it does not explain how it is that anything could happen within a situation to change it. Set-theory and the ‘difference’ it underscores as constitutive and therefore banal cannot explain events; and for Badiou the realm of truth proper is reserved only for events.
To grasp what he means by an event, consider the ‘state’ of painterly practices in France around 1906–7. We could account for all the many schools and impulses within this field, and produce an exhaustive descrip-tion of its parts. An element named ‘Picasso’ (26 years old, Spaniard) would be enumerated within this manifold (‘wistful, etiolated nudes, circus folk, and beggars he had been painting up to 1905’ (Hughes 1980: 20)); but there would simply be no way of inferring from this the event of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, a painting which horrified even Picasso’s closest comrade Georges Braque ‘by its ugliness and intensity’. And yet, galvanised by that event and in solidarity with its immense implications, Braque would join Picasso and for the next several years enact something called Cubism. All of twentieth-century art took place within the after-math of this event, which was not reducible to its situation, and finally transformed it completely.
When Badiou says that events are irreducible to their situations, he means that although they can be seen to emerge from a situation (they are not miracles), they cannot be said to belong to it either. Their ‘evental site’
is near the void of any given situation, its interiorisation of the infinite, the gap between its official elements and its infinite distribution of parts, the counted and the uncounted – an ‘ugly’ mole in an amorous situation, for example, or the homeless in a political state. In the moment of their taking place, events cause their situations to bend and buckle. One glance at the beloved’s mole can suddenly transform the lover’s mind into a roiling chaos; an effective protest by the homeless might have sufficient power to force the entire political system into crisis. For Badiou, these events are the passages of truths. Truths have nothing to do with situations, sets, states of affairs (‘knowledge’ deals with these); they have to do only with the events that shatter situations. Truths are thus local and particular in origin, but they collapse all the existing hierarchical elements of their situations into a ‘generic multiple’, and thus attain the universal.
What happens . . . is precisely this: a fragment of multiplicity wrested from all inclusion. In a flash, this fragment (a certain modulation in a symphony by Haydn, a particular command in the Paris Commune, a specific anxiety
preceding a declaration of love, a unique intuition by Gauss or Galois) affirms its unfoundedness, its pure advent, which is intransitive to the place in which ‘it’ comes. (Badiou 2004: 101)
Truths are what Badiou calls ‘universal singularities’. They emerge singu-larly, completely by chance, out of determinate states of affairs, and cannot be predicted or categorised in advance. Because their status is so murky and undecidable (is Les Demoiselles really an event, or just ugly nonsense? have our demands to end the death penalty really been met, or is this a tempor-ary cynical capitulation?), they are always in danger of disappearing for ever, reabsorbed by the status quo. But their implications, once declared, are universal: this painting isn’t just a local resolution to specific procedural problems in representation, it fundamentally redirects the course of art itself; if we have succeeded in forcing this demand to end the death penalty here and now, then the death penalty is universally evil; and so on.
In order to become true, events must be named and sworn to by human agents, who, torn from their regular roles, now become what Badiou calls subjects of a truth. In their declarations of fidelity to events that most people have not even discerned, these subjects (the only genuine subjects) take leave of things as they are, of routines and opinions. Kitty Shcherbátsky in Anna Kareninaexperiences this break as profoundly as any: ‘On that day when . . . she had silently gone up and given herself to him – in her soul on that day and hour there was accomplished a total break with her entire former life, and there began a completely different, new life, totally unknown to her’ (Tolstoy 2003: 453). Subjects tread a dangerous path: a selfless dedication to the universal implications of something which only ‘happened’ because they have decided to declare it. In remaining faithful to the event, subjects become immortal: ‘to be the immortal that he is’, writes Badiou, is the highest task of ‘man’ (2001: 14; sic). For Badiou,
‘subjectivity’ and ‘immortality’ have nothing to do with the routine iden-tity of a ‘self ’ – they are inhuman processes of depersonalisation in the name of singular universals, or truths: scientific, political, amorous or artistic.
Take Badiou’s privileged example, St Paul. Although Saul (a Jew and Roman citizen) was for many years an ardent persecutor of Christians, he was struck one day on the road to Damascus by the realisation that he himself was a Christian. From that moment forward, he was no longer Saul, persecutor of Christians, but Paul, apostle of a Christ he had never met, declaring the truth of an event he never witnessed (the resurrection), a position that made life extremely hazardous for him as a human being, but which guaranteed his immortality as a subject. For Badiou, Paul is the
very type of the subject of a truth, the courageous ‘new figure of the mili-tant’. Paul’s Christian ‘I am’ is the subjective ‘I am’ as such: a perilous project of faith and consistency in the face of violent social opposition, sus-tained by conviction, hope and love, and by the co-workers whom his faith conscripted around him. And this subjectivation can happen to anyone and implies everyone. In Paul’s astonishing words, which resound in the present with such perdurable force, ‘there is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave or free man, man or woman, . . . for you are all one person in Jesus Christ’. The event of the resurrection (whether it happened or not; the point lies in Paul’s conviction that it did) laid bare the generic truth of its situation. All ‘cultural identities’ were as nothing when seen in the light of this truth: human beings are equal in the love of Christ. The lesson was clear:
‘Adapt yourself no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed’ (Romans 12.2).
Badiou’s presentation of truth, as a passionate subjective attachment to an accidental occurrence whose ramifications threaten the entire order of things, is to say the least eccentric. Hitherto, philosophy has approached truth either as transcendental, as positivistic, as consensual, or as a rhet-orical vestment of power, but never in such a perverse blend of absolutism and voluntarism as this. In essence, what it amounts to is an admission of politics into the highest philosophical values – truth can only be under-stood politically, and fundamentally there is no truth without the political praxis that brings it into being. Politics saturates all four of Badiou’s ‘truth precincts’ (love, art, science and politics proper), because the subjective conscription to a cause of any sort involves irreversible decisions, struggles for power and the formation of sects and cells (even if the membership is limited to one). If we are now to shift gears and begin to spell out some of the relations between Badiou’s militant philosophical Platonism and the ground-level practices of cultural studies, this question of politics seems a good place to start. After all, in a certain tradition of cultural studies, pol-itics is construed as foundationally as in Badiou’s project. The difference, of course, lies in the place of truth and the meaning of culture within either paradigm.
How are the concepts of politics and culture related to each other in cul-tural studies? Nick Couldry’s book Inside Culture has argued that culcul-tural studies is undergirded by a commitment to a ‘broad notion of citizenship’
and the quest for a ‘common culture’, which he defines as ‘the attempt to build a common space where cultural differences can be mutually negotiated, explored, reflected upon – a space of speaking and listening between “con-crete others” ’ (2000: 142). More recently, Simon During has tried to group the panoply of cultural studies trajectories under three modalities: ‘It takes
into account the perspective of the marginalized and oppressed; it nurtures cultural celebration and affirmation, and encourages fandom; and it aims to frame its analyses and critiques in relation to everyday life’ (2005: 214).
These two examples suggest powerful underlying frames of reference, drawn from cultural studies’ interdisciplinary origins in anthropology, ethnography, literary studies, sociology and political theory. The bedrock assumption is not hard to miss: ‘concrete’ and ‘marginalized others’ are to be
‘affirmed’ in their everyday cultural values, even if the structures governing everyday life have to be ‘critiqued’. This – what can only be described as a kind of radical liberalism – has obvious affinities with the mainstream project of multiculturalism, which During has declared to be ‘a core value of the dis-cipline’ (2005: 160). It is indeed, despite the complex theoretical contribu-tions to the discipline of intellectuals such as Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, difficult to dissociate ground-level cultural studies from an ongoing belief that ‘other’ cultures, as much as ‘our own’, constitute the primary frames in which the majority of people enact their political lives.
The pre-eminence in cultural studies of categories such as the everyday, the ordinary (Williams 1997) and the popular points to the discipline’s celebration of the political valency and wealth of existing human cultural practices: their diversity and tenacity, their traditions, both inherited and invented, their active and passive moments. At present, of course, this field is riven by clear political inequalities; and in Henry Giroux’s words,
‘culture as a terrain of struggle shapes our sense of political agency and mediates the relation between materially based protests and structures of power and the contexts of daily struggles’ (2000: 139). However, the
‘common culture’ putatively lying within reach of these ‘struggles’, a global citizenship which much cultural studies would like to see consol-idated by a web of mutual respect and ‘listening’, is perhaps a specious fetish, constructed by Western liberals and a few of their Third World cohorts to palliate the existential and historical burden of guilt. Such at least is the thrust of Badiou’s critique of what he calls ‘culturalism’, a ten-dency of which institutional ‘cultural studies’ is symptomatic:
The objective (or historical) foundation of contemporary ethics is cultural-ism, in truth a tourist’s fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs. . . .
Against these trifling descriptions (of a reality that is both obvious and inconsistent in itself), genuine thought should affirm the following princi-ple: since differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant. . . .
Only a truth is, as such, indifferent to differences. This is something we have always known, even if sophists of every age have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a truth is the same for all. . . .
It is only through a genuine perversion, for which we will pay a terrible historical price, that we have sought to elaborate an ‘ethics’ on the basis of cultural relativism. (2001: 27–9)
No one is arguing that cultural studies is reducible to ‘cultural relativism’ – the study of difference in and between cultures does not reduce to rela-tivism. Badiou’s critique here is absolute, however: cultural differences are simply the way things are. They are thus politically meaningless and phil-osophically devoid of interest. There can be no ‘critique’, in the strong Kantian sense of the word, of those differences whose oft-proclaimed
‘ordinariness’ suggests as much. The ‘obvious and inconsistent’ terrain of culture is precisely what truths ‘depose’ and render insignificant; cultural studies must therefore, logically, be untrue.
Badiou’s ‘return to truth’ strikes right to the core of cultural studies as it is most often practised, since the discipline’s claims for political relevance are so often pinned to the democratic vista of a realised ‘space’ of cultural
‘negotiation’ and ‘recognition’. Couldry sees the political promise of cul-tural studies as a progressive pedagogical enlightenment: ‘This means as many people as possible getting critical skills, demystifying the processes of representation through examining how meanings are produced, and becom-ing aware of the underlybecom-ing politics of representation. . . . openbecom-ing up our experiences of living inside contemporary mediated, commodified cultures to reflection and dialogue’ (2000: 42). This sounds admirable as far as it goes, but alas it goes nowhere. Reflexive immanence is arguably the very name of the system we inhabit: its modus operandi, nowhere hidden, is reflected back at us before we have a chance to refract it inwardly. Dialogue itself is a vacuous category, outside of a context defined by antagonistic aims. In the absence of any ‘truth procedure’ (in Badiou’s sense), ‘people’ are simply unable to transform the open secret of ‘critical’ knowledge into anything more than cynical reason. The awareness that what is being done to me (my culture) is a fraud, and my acceptance of that as inevitable, has even become pleasurable, and is meant to be so. Ours are cultures that ceaselessly ‘study’
themselves, and publicly proclaim their relativity and absence of truth.
What is a discipline devoted to the critical study of such ‘obviousness’ sup-posed to do? For all its oppositional rhetoric, how critical is cultural studies?
Simon During has written that, ‘from within cultural studies, the discip-line’s rise is consistently narrated in terms of its struggle against elitism, Eurocentrism and cultural conservatism; yet from the outside it often looks
like a beneficiary of the new market-orientated political economy and econ-omistic models of university governance’ (During 2005: 11). Cultural studies has, here and there, even become a way of intervening in the man-agement of culture. This position, espoused by Tony Bennett, has the critical advantage of clarifying the ‘programmatic, institutional and gov-ernmental calculations in which cultural practices are inscribed’ (1992: 28), and urges a realpolitik view of culture, whose ultimate goal is ‘a politics
like a beneficiary of the new market-orientated political economy and econ-omistic models of university governance’ (During 2005: 11). Cultural studies has, here and there, even become a way of intervening in the man-agement of culture. This position, espoused by Tony Bennett, has the critical advantage of clarifying the ‘programmatic, institutional and gov-ernmental calculations in which cultural practices are inscribed’ (1992: 28), and urges a realpolitik view of culture, whose ultimate goal is ‘a politics