Download or read book Aesthetics Alienation written by Gary Tedman and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete and original theory of aesthetics based on Marx and Althusser in the modernist Marxist anti-humanist tradition (Brecht, Althusser, Benjamin, Adorno). The main concepts that arise from this work are: the aesthetic level of practice, aesthetic state apparatuses, aesthetic interpellation, and pseudo dialectics, all of which are used to understand the role of aesthetic experience and its place in everyday life. - In the space long thought as necessary to fill spanning the gap between Marx and Freud, the author proposes that aesthetics can be located and defined in a concrete way. We are therefore looking at a domain involving and implicating feelings, affections, dispositions, sensibilities and sensuality, as well as their social role in art, tradition, ritual, and taboo. With the classic Marxist concepts of base and superstructure divided into levels, economic, ideological, and political, the aesthetic level of practice is the area that has traditionally been mostly either missing or mislocated and, especially perhaps, misrepresented for political reasons. The importance of this level is that it fuels and supports the media, or as Althusser described it the 'traffic' (or mediation) between base and superstructure, although for Althusser this was ideological traffic. Here, this is also defined as aesthetic. From this vantage point, we begin to be able to see aesthetic state apparatuses, analyse how they function, both in the past, historically (for example firstly in art history), and today, in the contemporary political context, to grasp the role that art and feelings, along with affective alienation, plays in our culture as a complete and, in fact, cyclical reciprocating system. ,

Download or read book Passions for Nature written by Rochelle Johnson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.

Download or read book Aesthetics of Alienation written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-16 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative work takes issue with the idea that Socialist Realism was mainly the creation of party leaders and was imposed from above on the literati who lived and worked under the Soviet regime. Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading expert on Soviet literature, argues instead--and offers persuasive evidence--that the aesthetic theories underpinning Socialist Realism arose among the writers themselves, born of their proponents' desire for power in the realm of literary policymaking. Accordingly, Dobrenko closely considers the evolution of these theories, deciphering the power relations and social conditions that helped to shape them. In chapters on Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, and Pereval, Dobrenko reexamines the theories generated by these major Marxist literary groupings of the early Soviet Union. He shows how each approached the problems of literature's response to the presumed social mandate of the young communist society, and how Socialist Realism emerged as a conglomerate of these earlier, revolutionary theories. With extensive and detailed reference to supporting testimony and documents, Dobrenko clearly demonstrates how Socialist Realism was created from within the revolutionary culture, and how this culture and its disciples fully participated in this creative process. His work represents a major breakthrough in our current understanding of the complex sources that contributed to early Soviet culture.

Download or read book Art Alienation and the Humanities written by Charles Reitz and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-02-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrates how Marcuse's theory sheds new light on current debates in both education and society involving issues of multiculturalism, postmodernism, civic education, the "culture wars," critical thinking, and critical literacy.

Download or read book The Fate of Art written by J. M. Bernstein and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers--Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno--and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics (its concepts of judgment, genius, and the sublime) to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies.

Download or read book Art Alienation and the Humanities written by Charles Reitz and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-02-03 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrates how Marcuse's theory sheds new light on current debates in both education and society involving issues of multiculturalism, postmodernism, civic education, the "culture wars," critical thinking, and critical literacy.

Download or read book Aesthetics Equals Politics written by Mark Foster Gage and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

Download or read book Alienation Effects written by Branislav Jakovljevic and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the interplay of artistic, political, and economic performance in the former Yugoslavia and reveals their inseparability

Download or read book Relational Aesthetics written by Nicolas Bourriaud and published by Les presses du réel. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art as a set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context: the manifesto that has renewed the approach of contemporary art since the 1990s. Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach towards contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists' works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting. The aim of his essay is to produce the tools to enable us to understand the evolution of today's art. We meet Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Louis Althusser, Rirkrit Tiravanija or Félix Guattari, along with most of today's practising creative personalities.

Download or read book Georg Simmel written by Georg Simmel and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is a first of its kind: an edited collection bringing the finest of Georg Simmel's writing on art and aesthetics together, and bringing many of these essays into English for the first time. Simmel is considered one of the founding fathers of modern sociology but he, like his contemporary Walter Benjamin, wrote about many aspects of life and culture. Simmel's intellectual contributions have long been recognized and he is a keystone in cultural theory of the early 20th century. The essays in this collection are gathered topically and show the wide range of Simmel's thinking even within the arts: aesthetics, landscape, theater, sculpture, literature, and more. Austin Harrington is the brilliant guide behind this substantial volume. He served as editor and translator and also wrote an introduction. Richly informative and thoroughly familiar with Simmel's life and work, Harrington's introduction will itself be an important contribution to the scholarship on Simmel"--

Download or read book The Dialectics of Art written by John Molyneux and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the question of &lquo;what is art?&rquo;, it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and commodification brought about by capitalism. The pieces and individuals Molyneux examines — from Michelangelo’s Slaves to Rembrandts Jewish Bride to the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock – are presented as embodying the social contradictions of their times, giving art an inherently political relevance. In its relationship of creative and dialectical tension to prevailing social relationships and norms, such art points beyond the existing order of things, hinting at a potential future society not based on alienated labour in which creative production becomes the property and practice of all.

Download or read book Alienation and Theatricality written by Phoebevon Held and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alienation (Vefremdung) is a concept inextricably linked with the name of twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht - with modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, as Phoebe von Held argues in this book, 'alienation' as a sociological and aesthetic notionavant la lettre had already surfaced in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot. This original study destabilizes the conventional understanding of alienation through a reading ofLe Paradoxe sur le comedien, Le Neveu de Rameau and other works by Diderot, opening up new ways of interpretation and aesthetic practices. If alienation constitutes a historical development for the Marxist Brecht, for Diderot it defines an existential condition. Brecht uses the alienation-effect to undermine a form of naturalism based on subjectivity, identification and illusion; Diderot, by contrast, plunges the spectator into identification and illusion, to produce an aesthetic of theatricality that is profoundly alienating and yet remains anchored in subjectivity.

Download or read book The Lonely City written by Olivia Laing and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. This roving cultural history of urban loneliness centers on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Laing travels deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists in a celebration of the state of loneliness.

Download or read book Anti Book written by Nicholas Thoburn and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

Download or read book Escaping Alienation written by Warren Frederick Morris and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2002 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying nearly exclusively on Hegel's ontological conception of the authentic self, the author seeks to explicate the causes of alienation and offer a method for overcoming it. Hegel's idea that human history is the quest through rational freedom towards spirit is advanced as the fundamental truth for overcoming alienation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Social Dissonance written by Mattin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social. Work in sound studies continues to seek out sound "itself"--but, today, when the aesthetic can claim no autonomy and the agency of both artist and audience is socially constituted, why not explore the social mediation already present within our experience of the sonorous? In this work, artist, musician, performer, and theorist Mattin sets out an understanding of alienation as a constitutive part of subjectivity and as an enabling condition for exploring social dissonance--the discrepancy between our individual narcissism and our social capacity. Mattin's theoretical investigation is intertwined with documentation of a concrete experiment in the form of an instructional score (performed at documenta 14, 2017, in Athens and Kassel) which explores these conceptual connotations in practice, as players use members of the audience as instruments, who then hear themselves and reflect on their own conception and self-presentation. Social Dissonance claims that, by amplifying alienation in performance and participation in order to understand how we are constructed through various forms of mediation, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social, and in doing so, discover for ourselves that social dissonance is the territory within which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit.

Download or read book Alienation Effects written by Branislav Jakovljevic and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s, Yugoslavia emerged as a dynamic environment for conceptual and performance art. At the same time, it pursued its own form of political economy of socialist self-management. Alienation Effects argues that a deep relationship existed between the democratization of the arts and industrial democracy, resulting in a culture difficult to classify. The book challenges the assumption that the art emerging in Eastern Europe before 1989 was either “official” or “dissident” art; and shows thatthe break up of Yugoslavia was not a result of “ancient hatreds” among its peoples but instead came from the distortion and defeat of the idea of self-management. The case studies include mass performances organized during state holidays; proto-performance art, such as the 1954 production of Waiting for Godot in a former concentration camp in Belgrade; student demonstrations in 1968; and body art pieces by Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and others. Alienation Effects sheds new light on the work of well-known artists and scholars, including early experimental poetry by Slavoj Žižek, as well as performance and conceptual artists that deserve wider, international attention.