- Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.
 |
| The cover design they didn't choose. |
I was surprised to come upon this here. I was searching in all my ARG-poached files for any reference to trans* and Badiou's book on Paul popped up. Go figure. In the text, Badiou is giving a snarky sort of litany of hyperbolic identitarian positions and asks who will "eulogize the cultural marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual?" and the collision of these varied terms is an index of the general scorn that Badiou has for what he calls identitarian or minoritarian logics. Below is reasonable chunk (I hope) of Badiou in which the reference to the transsexual appears, to help provide a sense of why the transsexual appears at all and what Badiou's point may be, and to what degree we can assume it to have any bearing on trans* persons as such.
For those not versed in or perhaps even familiar with Badiou this might be steep reading. Keep in mind that for Badiou universalism is not a bad thing and truth and 'truth procedures' are crucial. I'm not the best expositor of this stuff because I am not sure I follow once things get articulated as set theory. Still, in one example (that I might sort of get), that of "politics" being replaced by "management" (see below), part of the point is that politics maintains antagonism as politically constitutive (a point Badiou had made in the 70s but which is independently arrived at by Laclau and Mouffe later in a formulation that is more well known) whereas management elides antagonism, presenting it as something that can administered out of existence by better management. There is a similar elision at work when the terms sexuality, technology and culture replace those of love, science and art in Badiou's analysis. & Badiou's thoughts about love and its truths are related to Lacan's (lack of sexual relationship) if by no means equivalent. (Big topic, not going there.)
Also important to Badiou's philosophy are events and truths and subjects that they create. Being super schematic about all of that… An event is what can not be predicted based on how the situation or status quo is at any given moment (an event is then not a consequence of what there is, it is an interruption in that field). An event happens and it manifests or embodies a truth in one of the four 'conditions' [art, science, politics, love] and this truth creates subjects, in that subjects hold to the truth, live so as to sustain that truth, in the sense of remaining faithful to that truth - this is what Badiou calls fidelity to truth. To reneg on that, to lose faith in the truth found in some event is evil. (Yeah, no shit, he goes to that word! …which gives you another glimpse of what is so unusual about Badiou.) Anyway, here is the passage from Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism…
The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name "culture" comes to obliterate that of "art." The word "technology" obliterates the word "science." The word "management" obliterates the word "politics." The word "sexuality" obliterates "love." The "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system, which has the immense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the "art-science-politics-Iove" system, which identifies truth procedures typologically.
Now, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology, identitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nominal occlusion by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of art, putting the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the group, as the subjective or representative glue for the group's existence, a culture that addresses only itself and remains potentially nonuniversalizable. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive elements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong to the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the sort: only a homosexual can "understand" what a homosexual is, only an Arab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only truths (thought) allow man to be distinguished from the human animal that underlies him, it is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian pronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, culturalism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of scientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of // these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the complementary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and such a form of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity; or for the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established conceptions, such as that of strict conjugality, the confinement of women, and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes apparent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in the grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsibility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing.
The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogeneity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority of the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will defend the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist? Or eulogize the cultural marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual? Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce.
Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?
(Badiou, Saint Paul, 12-13)
 |
| These days, I restrict myself to lacy underthings - Alain Badiou |
I feel a certain use value in the critique of the "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system launched from the POV of "art-science-politics-Iove" but I am unsure precisely where Badiou stands on some of these. What I guess I am responsive to is in part to the aesthetics of the critique itself, the way that, by ref. to an event the universality of truth creates subjects to that truth (in one of those four areas, art - science, love, politics) a subjection that requires fidelity. So, while I respond to that critique, it also makes me a bit nervous in that "Honor" and "Duty" and all manner of other suspect master signifiers seem to lurk in the wings, waiting for the old narratives to take off running with this purportedly new rationale. After all, I respond to tear-jerkers just like the next moron, but so what?
Another point of ambivalence for me concerns Badiou's thoughts on love. Apparently there is a new book on love out now by Badiou (In Praise of Love), though I've not seen it or read anything about it so far. Again to shoot from the hip; Badiou's language seems to shut things down to the terms of the extant sex/gender regime in what I have read, and he does not seem to be thinking about those who do not fit within it - and yet, the arguments that he makes about love as an event that creates of two people - the lovers - subjects of this shared event, does not seem to be predicated upon sexuality as such and thus, perhaps not to be limited to any M/F predictability. So these various terms like fidelity and truth, and the narrative that is implied in his discussion chimes uncomfortably close to the find your soulmate and never let go dicta that underpins so much of the popular ideology of love. But what if I think sexuality is important too? Can there be no truth of sexuality? Seemingly not for Badiou, events just don't come from there. Yet another wrinkle is added when one tries to factor in that the vast majority of the times when two people both get all gooey for one another and declare that they are in love, that this is probably not "love" as Badiou conceives it.
Here though is a passage from Žižek's book Violence,
Alain Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds - monde atone - which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality. // A basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally. Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: “the modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world…is really nothing but a generalized desire for atony.” Badiou’s excellent example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality as promoted by gender studies with its obsessive rejection of binary logic: the world is a nuanced world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation, in the strong Nietzschean sense of the term.(34-35)
I'd be curious to read Badiou on Gender Studies, not sure where that is to be found though - the quote that Žižek embeds is from the French version what in English is Logics of Worlds, so perhaps it is found there. What strikes me as a bit weird in this account of atony is that Slavoj tells us that the effort is to get rid of S1s - master signifiers - and yet he writes "the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally" which, to my mind, nominates COMPLEXITY to the status of S1 - even a more aggressive S1 in that - like the Borg perhaps - it attacks and assimilates all other rivals to itself. But might we not also observe that the assertion of complexity might be understood as pushing the Symbolic in relation to the Imaginary? A strategy that might be thought of as contributing to the loosening of Imaginary fixations.
None of which is to say that I also do not see a point to his criticism, just that it has these contrary associations as well. I am thus asserting the complexity of the potential meanings of complexity to Žižek (who is surely still reading).
I bet Žižek likes this notion of atony as well as it echoes his analysis of the rhetoric around wars - where they have profit incentive they are insistently make-or-break, into the breach, combattings of the "obvious" evil etc, but where no profit motive, complexity rules and it is impossible to ascribe clear blame to anyone, the conflict is intractable, time to step back, queue the sociologist-historian, etc. Thus complexity acts as an apology for inaction - there is something to that, and I largely buy his earlier analysis… just not sure that I can sign off yet on atony as discussed here (though it further contextualizes Badiou I guess).
Žižek's evocation of the binary is also a bit off-putting, but is anyone seriously reading him for gender politics? The question I can't answer is whether Badiou's thinking about such matters is any different or an sort of "improvement".
To the extent that Badiou's rephrased critique of the "it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" idea is generalized to all similar identitarian claims, I am intrigued by the charge of barbarism (and how he seems to liken this to essentialism via the brute animality of humans). But, I am uncertain how Badiou gets from there to being in a position, it seems, to blame this logic for the proliferation of all manner of things which it appears he dislikes, things like "Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas" (recall that the transsexual above is 'media friendly' and 'homeopathic', the latter term surely fitting in to a sequence with emollient herbal teas for Badiou). So, given that I think that homeopathy is ridiculous (I do actually) am I to see the transexual, who is media-friendly (really?) and culturally marginal, as also being ridiculous (guilt by association?). Or to cut to the quick, is identifying oneself as a "transsexual" (or a "manager" or "straight") in and of itself enough to sustain the charge of barbarism that he formulates?
& can we really let that "media-friendly" pass without further question? With the terms manager and terrorist (with which transsexual would seem to be substitutable) what would being media-friendly mean? Certainly the media has been thriving on terrorism and transsexuality and in a vastly different way on managers/management - but even with those terms - it seems to me that they are, what they are, in ways that exceed what the media is "friendly" towards and about. Is the media-friendly transsexual the one parodied on Jerry Springer and the one troped as psychotic killer and the one marked prostitute and etc… If so, then it seems ludicrous to name this construct a product of an indentitarian or minoritarian logic as there seems to be nothing behind this "identity" or "minority" at all but refusal, a various phrased but quite insistent "That's not me".
& throughout, are we implicitly limiting to trans women in this discussion? I ask as the discussion of the media invisibility of trans men is not uncommon and I am having trouble thinking any similar set of delimited connotations for trans man (has there ever been a trans man prostitute story for example?). For terrorist and for manager we have a bewildering variety of associations, the difference being that for terrorist the "positive" connotations are few and far between and the term acts as a flashpoint for negative affective connotations. By contrast manager is rather neutral, or simply open to positive and negative connotations. Transsexual has by contrast has been heavily overdetermined by the few possible articulations (stereotypes might be a better term) above and few others as all (already well-critiqued by folks like Julia Serrano), with actual trans people being pushed or pulled or crammed into one or another of these few narratives.
Anyway, all of this to gesture at how fraught it is to conjoin "media-friendly" with "transexual" as Badiou does.
Maybe something can be extracted from the passages on politics to help think about this…
"In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators."
…which echoes a statement that will come later
"The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogeneity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring."
…this feels to me like the real teeth of this critique. That is, if we had good reason to doubt or dispute that "identitarian protest" was in a relationship of "reciprocal maintenance and mirroring" with the "abstract homogeneity of capital" then this critique would have no bite to it. But do we doubt this? Do I, I suppose I ought to ask.
I recall a discussion a decade or more ago with this poet who was insistent that every artistic form had already been politically neutralized. I asked about graffiti. He acted like I was an idiot and told me exasperatedly that there had been graffiti shows in NYC galleries since the 80s at least, ergo, graffiti had absolutely no status outside of the commodity. The "one drop rule" just flitted through my head, but that's a pretty fraught analogy to work from, even if it works. I'm uneasy with the idea that the potential for politics to emerge from within any group thought to have an "identity," if that identity has, at any time, anywhere, been positioned as a social category to be administered by the economy in some fashion, is thereby liquidated. Certainly I am not trying to uphold barbarism in the form of an "it's a My Identity®™ sort of knowledge (so I just have it) and you are not of my identity (so you never can know it)" but I worry that assuming that because there is a socially mediated niche seemingly already present and something appears to fit there, that whoever that "something" is has become tainted through and through. Does the existence of one "uncle Tom" politically neutralize all African Americans? I don't see how that can be right.
Another Badiou wrinkle to keep floating nearby is that for him, until one has been subjected to a truth, one is not a subject at all. Badiou is unconcerned with "identities" as generally conceived and does not extend subjecthood on the basis of membership in a group such as women or african americans, dead white guys or male lesbians, etc.
That is, there are probably some who identify strongly with being a manager - but does that have anything like the same range of effects and consequences that being identified as man or woman, straight or queer, muslim or buddhist, etc has for a person? Context is crucial here, no? I frankly find it hard to imagine a symbolic economy wherein the designation transsexual gains or loses in currency or legitimacy in a reciprocal relation with a term like manager - the two seem to operate in radically different zones of social meaning. Admittedly Badiou is probably using these somewhat synecdochally to refer to any and every such term one could produce and thus - by implication the system of differentially constructed identity terms. (This would connect to his claim that in the situation as such, all we have are bodies and languages - until a truth appears that is. See here for more).
Recall though that after his list of compound identities he writes "Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce."
There is a bunch of stuff in this that needs unpacking. Let's start with his recognition that there is/are something called "communitarian identities", temporally marked as "recent" and also as "typical" (though what register that term relates to I am not sure) (are "atypical communitarian identities" not subject to Badiou's critique?). So he seems to acknowledge that communities do confer, in some cases, "identities" upon their members. Is that already a problem? That is, is the identitarian or minortarian logic already at work here in Badiou's POV? I'm not sure really, though surely this is an important question. It seems that these problematic logics are operant at least by the point at which such "identities" have been converted into "advertising selling points and salable images".
 |
| Hi, I'm a spokes corpse! |
Here we might think about the way that The Gap used images of Kerouac to sell khaki pants or chinos or whatever they're called. Beatnik as spokes-corpse. Surely the beats have long since been turned into "advertising selling points and salable images" and I am not likely to argue for their relevance to the poetic or literary moment (though I hear that Sha-Na-Na are doing a reunion tour) but I'd also dispute that because something called beat has entered into economic circulation that who the beats were and what their work might persist in provoking in new readers is somehow foreclosed by that fact.
Is the economic dimension of this the top level of description? That is, when one of these figures "draws on the resources of the other" do we mean that they others are all literally "speculating on the financial markets" and this, their participation in the market, is what taints each and sets up the "relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring"? What about groups that don't speculate on the market? Or for whom such interaction with the market is not shared by all - surely even amongst managers there are many who do not invest in the market. Or, from a different direction we might ask if it makes any sense descriptively to discuss "transsexual market investors" as a group?
 |
| I have no published position on Homeopathy |
What does it mean that "communitarian identities" have been used as "advertising selling points and salable images" and that "the most insular or most violent groups" are good at "speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce" - how is the latter a "counterpart" to the former? The answer would have to be for Badiou that they are exhibiting these suspect logics that he's been complaining about. But do they? Let's say that I am a terrorist and I am also great at speculating on the derivatives market and I have a great business plan where I draw my resources from gun running, drug and sex trafficking and this all funnels into and is exponentialized by my market speculation and thus do I plan and fund terror worldwide. How does that sit next to, as the demonstration of the same "logic" the situation of a transsexual, who is media-friendly, culturally marginal and "into" homeopathy? Ok, let's pretend that Chaz Bono is way into homeopathy. Let's also call him culturally marginal just to keep the game going. If we could maintain this thought experiment without it collapsing into stupidity would we see this purportedly identical logic at work in both cases? What sort of perspective would I have to occupy to see the investment savvy capitalist-terrorist and Chaz as equivalent operators or a cultural logic? What makes Chaz media-friendly is his parents and his transition, child of celebs + sex change is like a tabloid wet dream and 'media-friendly' surely encompasses such dreams regardless of whether they aid or victimize their subjects. So, while I would not wish to deny any agency to Chaz Bono and submit him entirely to the enjoyment of the media apparatus - the balance seems to be with the demand of that media apparatus. But in the terrorist example the terrorist as agent is all slickly capitalistic and knows how to work the system, but it does not appear that the terrorist is worked by that system in anything like the same fashion. If these are counterparts, how much weight do we put on counter, do we read "counterpart" as denoting an inversion or reversal? That seems possible if I use my close-reading glasses (which make it impossible to see as far as my toes) but really? Does it really seem that the same logic is in effect in these two scenarios? To me, it does not.
Badiou's discourse here about these identitarian or minoritarian logics doesn't feel to me like it has that solid a grasp upon the ways that identities are adopted, imposed, implied, revoked and many other such "identity processes" of the social take place. I'm unconvinced that such processes can be adequately conceptualized as all exhibiting an identical logic. The terms in question also seem to operate at different levels, mobilizing different potentials of investment and investment that is coded at times, coded along the lines of earlier identifications - as male or female, by race, etc - even as these things may work to inhibit or facilitate certain outcomes. How much more likely circa 1950 in the USA was it for a man than for a woman to attain to the position of "manager" in a business? More perhaps than ended up in that year becoming "firemen" probably, but being identified as woman for the social realm surely impacted what professions one might attain in that time, arguably making this imposed identity more fundamentally determinative than others like 'manager' or 'patriot' or 'vegetarian'.
Perhaps if one drastically limited the terms to - for example - the designations available on any given US census, then we could begin with the pretense that these categories, all imposed by the same authority, operating on the same plane of reference, might be susceptible to reciprocal mirroring that Badiou discusses. But I am not sure that even in a setting where such is facilitated, like this one, that it can be unproblematically understood that way (which is not to exclude any understanding deriving from such a move, just to add a bracket for further consideration, a step back from the dogmatism of Badiou's presentations).
The idea that, should any term of identification enter into circulation within the economy, that the "identity" so referred to by the term is now reduced to a commodity-cog of said economy without remainder, strikes me as false. Which is not to argue that when a term of identification enters the economy that there are not many effects - surely there are, only that they cannot be adequately thought along the lines of a 'one drop rule'.
So, while I continue to find Badiou intriguing and provocative, here at least, little of what he is saying convinces me. My answer to my opening questions about the transsexual in Badiou's text is that - in principle - nearly any other identity term might have been chosen by him. So his use of "transsexual" feels largely spontaneous to me and given my thoughts above, largely irrelevant to whether anyone does or does not find transsexual a useful, necessary, problematic or irrelevant term for self-identification.
Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence; Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment
lay it on me/us