An Undefined Something Else: Barthes, Culture, Neutral Life

Neil Badmington

doi:10.1177/0263276420910493

An Undefined Something Else: Barthes, Culture, Neutral Life

Theory Culture & Society ◽

10.1177/0263276420910493 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 37 (4) ◽

pp. 65-76

Author(s):

Neil Badmington

Keyword(s):

Cultural Analysis ◽

Roland Barthes ◽

Cultural Criticism ◽

Published Account

How might Roland Barthes’ posthumously published account of the Neutral invite us to rethink the very activity of cultural analysis? How did Barthes the cultural critic change when, towards the end of his career, he described and desired Neutral Life? Cultural criticism has often taken Barthes’ early semiological work as a guide, but this essay examines how we might need to reorient ourselves as critics, shift our stance, learn to look and live differently in the light of Barthes’ later focus on the Neutral.

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Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Weimar Criticism

Weimar Thought ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691135106.003.0011 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michael W. Jennings

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Weimar Republic ◽

Walter Benjamin ◽

Cultural Analysis ◽

Specific Form ◽

Cultural Criticism ◽

Siegfried Kracauer

This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.

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Mythologies, soixante ans après

Transilvania ◽

10.51391/trva.2021.04.02. ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 7-11

Author(s):

Serge Zenkine

Keyword(s):

Roland Barthes ◽

Cultural Criticism

The article identifies several problematic concepts characterizing the “myth” as it is interpreted in Roland Barthes’ “Mythologies”: the object, the image, the narrative, the action. All these concepts remain not defined in the book, and their further refinement, their adaptation to the modern cultural situation, more than half a century after the publication of the book, can serve the development of semiotics and of cultural criticism.

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