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

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

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 USS Enterprise, 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.

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 called Banner Art and the artist is John Banks, a fireman in the Las Vegas Brigade. The reflexive wit that distinguishes Banner Art is 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-

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 revealed ARTwas 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 the knowledge 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

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 selfreflexive 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 selfgratifying 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 about art 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 their social 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 and Banner Art specifically. 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

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 to Banner 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 preordained 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 in from 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 situate Banner Art and Imperial Beach within the general purview of the San Diego military base.

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 USS Abraham 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 like Banner Art might seem to blur the boundaries between 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's John 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

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 like Lords of Dogtown and ultimately Banner Art through 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 in Lords 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 of Lords 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-rise development 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 Art is 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

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 active player 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 like Banner 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 like Banner Art within 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 of Banner 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 is generated 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 Art can only be 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 structuralistpoststructuralist 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 classicalpsychoanalytical 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 postmodern enthusiasts 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's Handbook 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 expressionart that 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' is neither 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 selfascribes 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. For Banner Art this 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 like Banner Art is 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 Badiou recognizes 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 which jouissance 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 of jouissance, 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 Art becomes a totemic code for the subject-object encounter and the aggregating discourses and language wars that comprise contemporary culture. Seen in this way, Banner Art is 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 of Banner 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 the artwork, 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 like Lords 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 Art exists 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 Art is 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 the Banner Art poles. 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's motifs 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 of Vieja 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 like Banner Art and commercially garnered texts like Lords 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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