Alain Badiou

b.1937 Morocco

Student of Althusser

Event - an unpredictable interruption in one's life that produces a change of discourse, a new relation to desire, a very new ethos or "way of being."

Generic Processes - Four types; Science, politics, love & art.

Universality of art - Art must be "an impersonal production of truth that is addressed to everyone."

Anti-philosophers, who stress the discontinuation between truth and knowledge.

Philosophy tuned to the singularity of what happens... one that addresses the present and not the future.

Inaesthetics -

"one of the conditions of philosophy and like all such conditions, articulates the singular directly with the universal...

Against any form of art as cultural therapy, as particularist, as identitarian or communiatrian, as "imperial" or re-presentative, Badiou affirms the production of contemporary works of art, universally addressed, as so many exceptional attempts "to form the formless" or "to purify the impure."

The sole task of an exclusively affirmative art is the effort to render visible all that which, from the perspective of the establishment, is invisible or non existent.

Theodor W. Adorno

Culture industry - Popular Culture and the entire sphere of popular media and culture that produces commodities of mass consumption. Its exchange value is its only use value.

The autonomy of art - With the fusion of economic and political power of late capitalism, art is alienated, presented as a mere commodity.

Relational Aesthetics

20 years hmmph click here

Ferdinand De Saussure

1857 - 1913

Structural linguistics / structuralism - relationships between words because its strategy for examining language and meaning centres on investigating structures within a system. "the life of signs within society"

Semiotics - The science of signs; the study of language as a system of signification rather than the study of the history of language.

Langue - Language as a structured system operating at a particular time and place.

Parole - (speech) particular instances of speech within a system.

Without langue, parole would be impossible.

Synchronic - At the same time. Synchrony - the study of language at a particular moment in time.

Diachronic - through time. Diachrony - Study of language over time.

Words do not have an inherent significance because meaning resides in relationships of difference and similarity within a larger linguistic system.

Sign - A word or some other form. "acoustic image"

A sign comprises of an acoustic image ie.

the signifier - the letters d-o-g either spoken or written

the signified - the object or concept associated with the acoustic image.

Sign is determined by its place within the larger network of interrelationships.

STRUCTURALIST APPROACH refers to the relationship of individual parts to the larger whole within which significance is determined.

Relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary(having only relative application), the sign is fundamentally relational.

Meaning is founded on binary oppositions ie light and dark, meaning is predicated on difference. "the idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.

Rene Magritte, The Betrayal of Images (This is not a pipe)

Frederich Nietzsche

The source of life - primordial, creative energy beyond rationality and beyond moral categorisation as good or evil.

Dionysian (blissful ecstacy) - Art is an alternative to the draining life force of western civilisation. It represents "the highest taste and the truly metaphysical activity of this life.

Dionysian Vs. Apollonian(the voice of order, sober rationality)

Inversion of Kantian aesthetis, that Kant only considers the spectator "which gives pleasure without interest".

Aesthetic experience is not what occurs in an isolated, priviliged sphere of existence, it is the very foundation of life.

Aesthetic relation - the gulf that separates subject and object, appearance and truth. Apollonian and Dionysian.

Continual rebirths.

The D motives of artist as opposed to spectator "true artist". Nihilistic "playing with seriousness" D Vs. A

Redefines art as a drive, force, rhythm.

No simple binary opposition of appearance or truth. Truth appears through the rhythm of intuition, language, music and image.

"art is worth more than truth"

Shaped discourse of modernism and post modernism.

Reception of artwork irreducible to formalist-linguistic concepts and the mere appreciation of beauty.

aisthesis - Viewers sensuous apprehension of an artwork.

Tragic Culture - Within the sphere of tragedy, art exists within the A and D.It can live resolutely in wholeness and fullness because the "tragic man of such a culture" is not afraid to desire a new art.

Art must first pass through the suffering of life before it can attain its ultimate goal.

Karl Marx

Marxism is based on a critique of industrial capitalism. Marx's goal was to have a socialist, classless state. Marx argues that capitalists recover profit at the expense of the proletariat. The bourgeouis,a third class who provide services, ie. doctors or teachers usually fit into the capitalist group.

Base & Superstructure

Base - Society's economic mode of production.

Superstructure - The base determines this; political, social, religious, moral, scientific and other cultural productions.

Autonomous - Self government in a country, acting independently or having freedom to do so, acting according to moral duty rather than to ones desires.

Alienation - Labour alienated from its own efforts. Workers are alienated from themselves in a capitalist system because workers become commodities when selling alienated labour in the workplace.

Dialectic - Every economic order grows to a state of maximum efficiency while at the same time developing internal contradictions or weaknesses that contribute to its decay.

Historical Materialism - Change as a result of actions of mankind rather than the hand of God.give me Sartre :)

Ideology - A fake consciousness that distorts social and material reality functioning to keep their place within the capitalist system.

Ontology - The philosophical study of nature, being or reality. A major part of metaphysics, deals eith what entities exist and how they can be grouped, related within a hierarchy and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

Commodity Fetishism - Only a social relation between products. The absent exchange of social relations between persons as opposed to things.

Dissertation Preperation

John Cage : Every Day is a Good Day.

"I use chance operations instead of operating according to my likes and dislikes"

John Cage 1978

Hitler doesn't approve.

Tracey Emin : Love is what you want.

At the Southbank Centre, in the Hayward Gallery lies a retrospective of Tracey Emin.

Room 1 containing Blankets and Knowing my enemy, a 'Neon' room 2, room 2 'Films", room 3 'Family and Friends', 'Early work", 'Menphis' and 'Trauma, room 4 'drawings' and 'paintings', room 5 'white light', 'sculpture', 'sculpture terraces'.

www.loveiswhatyouwant.com

The Guardian newspaper review

The Independant - Her life in art