'Modernism' tag archive

John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). 300pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 64259 131 6 This book is a significant contribution to the Marxist reflection on art. This is not a ‘Marxist history of art’, but a Marxist book about art, composed of various essays, some of a general theoretical character, and […]

‘There is no beginning and no end in music … Some people want it to end but it goes on’ Florian Schneider, 1975 Not long after the death of Florian Schneider was announced in May of this year, 1 I re-watched the 1979 film Radio On, directed by Chris Petit, and co-produced by Wim Wenders. […]

Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 288pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82236 245 6 hb., 978 0 8223 6260 9 pb. The title of Jaleh Mansoor’s Marshall Plan Modernism provides a number of clues about the author’s methodological ambitions. The juxtaposition […]

conference at Birkbeck College. He will be remembered by all who knew him for his amiability, his modesty, the ever renewed breadth of his interests, and above all, for his intellectual generosity. We will miss him. His publications include: 1978: Marxism and Education: A Study of Phenomenological and Marxist Approaches to Education (RKP) 1982: Education, […]

NEWS SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989) “,,:,.,.; ~ ,•. . “‘. “‘… . W ~~ ~:’~..’ .”‘~””:.’ < ~ ,.~ The last days and months of the 1980s were a time of astonishing social and political upheaval. In the midst of these events, news came from Paris, discreetly and quietly, of the death of Samuel Beckett. No […]

Boundaries Versus Binaries: Bakhtin in/against the History of Ideas Graham Pechey Who or what is Mikhail Bakhtin? The two monographs we have on him agree on an identity: Bakhtin is a philosopher. The compliment, however well meant, could be lethal. Bakhtin was born in Orel in 1895 and died near Moscow in 1975. This bald […]

From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic Pauline Johnson Contemporary feminist art theory and practIce has, by and large, turned away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from IHe towards a post-modern problematisation of the specIfIc category of the aesthetIc. The modernist assertion of the freedom of the […]

The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness: Lukacs, Marxism, the Novel, and Beyond Keith Ansell-Pearson Parmenides said, ‘one cannot think of what is not’; – we are at the other extreme, and say, ‘what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’ – Nietzsche (1) Introduction J. M. Bernstein has written a book that merits […]

English Conservatism and the Aesthetics of Architecture Michael Rustin Prologue Architecture seems a ‘natural’ subject for conservatives, and it is therefore fitting that it has become one of the maill t·:!rrains for the advocacy of the intellectual perspectives of the New Right. Particularly, that is, of the New Right in England, where organic and traditionalist […]

The rhythm of alterity Levinas and aestheticsgary peters The evocative remarks of Emmanuel Levinas on art and rhythm have received little attention. In opening the question of the aesthetic, indeed the questionable nature of the aesthetic for Levinas, the intention here is to redress the balance at a time when the ethical dimension of his […]

But if this position rightly demolishes the opposition between art and technological mediation enshrined in late modernist theory1 it nevertheless suffers from its own kind of blindness: the identification of technological mediation with the democratization of form. By subsuming art under technology, this kind of thinking renders the connection between form and ethics harmless or […]

, > ` ˆ V >  Ê * … ˆ  œ à œ « … Þ Ê £ ä { Ê ­ œ Û i “ L i À É i V i “ L i À Ê Ó ä ä ä ®ʻ‘But clearly something of socialism and modernism has died, in both […]

Niklas Luhmann, who died in 1998 (see Obituary in RP 94), is not widely discussed by social and cultural theorists outside Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia and Italy. Yet in Germany his influence rivals and even exceeds that of Habermas in certain reaches of social theory, extending also to philosophers and logicians. More surprisingly, perhaps, he […]

Obituary Richard Wollheim, 1923–2003 Richard Wollheim taught philosophy at University College London from 1949 to his retirement as Grote Professor of Mind and Logic in 1982. During 1982–85 he was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and then at the University of California at Berkeley from 1985 to 2003. As well as philosophical works and […]

Notes on nuance Rethinking a philosophy of modern music David cunningham this encounter can often seem to fit all too easily into a standard model of ʻOrientalistʼ practice – though this is hardly the whole story – such a model should not in itself be taken as an excuse for prejudging the role that a […]

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller Two readings of Kant and their political significance Jacques rancière I will here offer a few reflections on a paradoxical object that Jean-François Lyotard puts at the centre of aesthetic theory: the aesthetic of the sublime. Two closely interconnected questions will be raised: What makes this theoretical construction possible? […]

Nihilism and faith Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory Tony gorman In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical Theory, contra Habermas, [1] and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. [2] In these works, […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Notes on the photographic image Jacques rancière In the relation between art and image, photography has played a symptomatic and often paradoxical role. Baudelaire made of it the sinister instrument of the triumph of technical reproduction over artistic imagination. And yet we also know of the long struggle of photographers (pictorialistes) to affirm that photography […]

Obituary J.G. Ballard, 1930–2009 I always suspected that eternity would look like Milton Keynes. J.G. Bal ard (1993) With the recent outpouring of tributes to the late J.G. Ballard on the part of mainstream literary culture, it is easy to forget that he was in the 1970s the recipient of a reader’s report that read […]