On Badiou

In his respose on Badiou, Kemal has focused on the first part of Badiou’s essay. What I would like to do is mostly focus on the other parts of his essay.

The essay starts with the argument of Badiou, cinema is an ontological art, and passes to the notion that cinema is a “mass art”. Than he defines and explains the words art and the mass, reaches the point that the notion of mass art is in a way paradoxical. This is the point that he goes true to the ontological art via five examples.

Till that point I would like to discuss some points starting with the notion of “genetic popular”. Badiou states that millions of people goes to the cinema, and cinema has a wisdom that subtracts humanity from its differences. What he mean by that is more or less cinema has same representative value for different cultures and ethnic groups. More controversially he states that this claim is true not only for comic or burlesque genre, but for other as well.

Than what is in my mind in this point is if it was the same thousands of years ago. What I mean is it is not the same thing for the tribes and metropolitans to watch a movie like Office Space. The point seems to me like the globalization and post industrial societies, in which all different societies seems like a bit different from a common culture of all societies. And I believe this notion of generic humanity was not as true as today in the time of Chaplin. The example he gives, Chaplin, is not the same with the example of lets say Hababam Sınıfı. The second is neither funny or popular in other countries. Therefore the notion of generic humanity is not that strong even for cinema.

Than Badiou passes to the notion of “mass” and states that it is a category of communism however art is more aristocratic rooted. Therefore the syntagm “mass art” is has a paradoxical relation in itself because of the two words.

Later on he states that all the art works of twentieth century is avant-garde. It this point I have a critic especially on music. I believe after the use of mp3, there is no difference between the popularity of music and cinema. Millions of people listens to Michael Jackson even the Eskimos. He is missing a point in this point, while putting cinema as only mass art. Therefore later connections which sees cinema as only mass art is not that reliable in my point of view. It is mass culture that makes art mass and especially music is in it as cinema, as a part of generic humanity.

And than the essay passes to “five different ways of entering into the problem : to think cinema as mass art”. First one is on image; that is to say cinema is the final mastery of the metaphysical cycle of identification, because identification occurs with semblance whose height is cinema. In this first attempt, the problem is in seeing cinema as the height of the visual offered by the semblance. When I think of the video and the highly developing new technologies, I can not be sure about correctness of this assumption. Second attempt is “on time”, which means cinema is a mass art because it transforms time into perception. It is the most powerful becoming visible of time. Third attempt is, the series of arts, in the mean of cinema takes parts of other arts, that are at generic humanity. This part is important for Badiou’s article, however it didn’t convince me at all. Cinema takes sometimes more from music, but less from theater or vice versa. I am not sure it is that easy to reach the conclusion that Badiou did. Fourth way is impurity. This part mostly based on the property of cinema that it is in the border of being art and non-art. And cinema reaches purity through impurity. However my question is what about pop art? Anyway this is the most convincing part of this series of ways in my point of view. And the final attempt is ethical figures. Cinema is an art of the great figures of humanity. It is where this figures and the most classic struggles are still on scene, like good and evil. However this part seems to me a sub-cathegory of the one before, impurity. Because, this heroic nature is the reason of banality of the cinema, that makes it non-art and sometimes more art.

Final words for me is, the essay of Badiou is contraversial but clever as his other essays. There are a lot of point that I would like to discuss widely, but after finishing the text, I had an essay in my mind that I can refer time to time.

Ozan Kamiloğlu