Alain Badiou’s Handbook on Inaesthetics describes his ‘inaesthetic’ approach to art as “a relation of philosophy to art…[which] makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy….[Rather,] inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by some works of art.” In other words, artworks produce their own truths and philosophy’s task, when it attends to artworks, is to bring those truths to light. When discussing the power of cinema as an artform, Badiou argues that cinema’s “movement is the impure circulation that obtains within the totality that comprises the other artistic practices [e.g. poetry, painting, music]” (79). For Badiou, a modern, technically sophisticated artform such as cinema is an impure “plus-one” to all prior artforms insofar as it “operates on the other arts, using them as its starting point” (79). He concludes that “just as poetry is an arrest upon language, an effect of the coded artifice of linguistic manipulation, so the movements woven by the poetics of cinema are...false movements” (81). In the words of Pietro Bianchi and Bruno Besana, “Badiou believes that cinema, far from representing what is already (in the) visible, should empty out the particular concreteness of the represented image” (Badiou Dictionary, 55). We should not be dazzled by cinema’s movement but should seek the idea that is stabilized within its movements.

In light of Badiou’s remarks on cinema, this seminar explores the artistic and formal capacities of interactive media—video games, hypertext novels, alternative reality games, social media, virtual reality, table top roleplaying games, etc.—and other aleatory media objects in light of Badiou’s understanding of art as a condition of truths, inaesthetics versus aesthetics, and continuing developments in the techniques of artistic and mediatic forms since the advent of cinema. How can we think these new forms of 'impure' art with and through Badiou?

This panel invites topics such as:

(1) What is the relationship between interactive media forms and established artforms in Badiouian terms?

(2) Is it possible to produce an (in)aesthetics of interactive media, and if so, what would it look like?

(3) How might Badiouian concepts such as being, event, subject, world, etc. illuminate our understanding of interactive media objects?

(4) Can interactive media forms present ideas, in Badiou’s sense, such that they can serve as bases of truth procedures?

(5) What forms of interactivity (e.g. found poetry, erasure poetry, performance art, dance) present a world or give shape to an idea in Badiou's sense?

(6) What affordances does Badiou's thought provide us for thinking the concept of play or games in general?

(7) How do interactive media forms participate in literary practices? What ‘literary situations’ are they capable of presenting? What can/do interactive media forms think?