The Loss of Boredom and the End of the Human

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-303
Author(s):  
Charlie Gere
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Avant Garde

This paper looks at the role of boredom as central to the emergence of the human, and at its disappearance in our hypermediated culture. It does so through the works of Giorgio Agamben, in particular his discussions of the apparatus and of Stimmung, mood; his engagement with Heidegger's notion of boredom as Stimmung; and Agamben's radical reading of Aristotle's understanding of potentiality. Finally through a consideration of the relation between Agamben and John Cage and other avant-garde artists working with the idea of boredom, this paper examines the role of art in allowing boredom to reveal the fundamental inoperativity of the human, something that the culture of contemporary distraction and hypermediation disavows.

The Time of Indifference: Mandelstam's Age, Badiou's Event, and Agamben's Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
William Watkin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Time ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Alain Badiou

There has been little direct discussion between perhaps the two leading philosophers of our age: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Yet both men have written about the same poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Age’, around the topic of time. Significantly, Agamben's response, written after Badiou's, is a subtle and damning critique of Badiou's conceptualisation of time, in particular extended across the categories of the modern, the contemporary, and the now or the event – although it never actually mentions Badiou by name. In this paper the lens of the central role of indifference in the work of both is used to present alternating and competing views as to the nature of modern, contemporary, and ‘now’ time. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between Badiou's use of indifference as both quality-neutral and absolutely non-relational, and Agamben's application of the indifferent suspension of the temporal signature as such. The paper concludes that while Badiou uses temporal indifference to question and problematise the idea of modern time as ‘now’, through a theory of the event, Agamben appears to go further. Rather than analyse the nature of modern time, the contemporary and the now through his reading of Mandelstam, Agamben uses Mandelstam's poem to suspend the Western conception of time as a line composed of points in its entirety.

scholarly journals Fetishizing Captain America’s sidearm: iconography, exceptionality, and the politics of representing guns

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Posada
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Captain America ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Digital Discourse ◽  
Digital News ◽  
The Times

Abstract In 2007, Captain America, or Cap to his peers, died outside the courthouse where he would answer for leading a band of superheroes against the government’s Superhuman Registration Act in a plot line Fox and Friends took issue with, condemning Marvel Comics for killing Cap “while we’re at war,” referring to President George W. Bush’s war on terror. In 2008, former sidekick Bucky took up the Cap banner. Legacy characters are common in comics, but fans noted an unexpected addition to the costume: a handgun. Cap’s shield, a symbol of defense, now had an offensive accent. News media outlets lauded the new gun as a “sign of the times,” as Rolling Stone said, considering it a critique on the post-9/11 cultural landscape, but fan communities felt uneasy about the decision. The gun’s presence on Bucky Cap’s belt marks a continuous period of exceptionality, the kind Giorgio Agamben warns against in State of Exception. When Bucky’s predecessor would return to the role of Captain America, the sidearm would no longer remain, but the character would confront issues related to guns, and media and fans would once again respond. Even though Cap only encounters guns a few times during the 2010s, reception to these moments is more significant than that of characters who regularly use lethal weapons. Fetishistic emphasis on Captain America’s gun exposes the state of exception inherent in all superhero media, prompting a digital discourse across professional and amateur platforms on gun-related subjects. This project analyzes how superhero media portray gun use and the subsequent reception from both news media and digital fandom. A sampling of comics, television series, and films are textually analyzed, along with digital news media and online fan forums pertaining to those examples.

scholarly journals Notes on the nature of avant-garde and constructivism

2020 ◽  
pp. 106-119
Author(s):  
Vadim Markovich Rozin
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Analysis Methods ◽  
Figurative Art ◽  
The Family ◽  
Methods Of Reconstruction ◽  
Applied Arts

Based on the materials of the family of architects Zimonenko-Feierstein, this article examines the peculiarities of avant-garde and constructivism. Roman Feierstein and Lyubov Zimonenko graduated the Moscow University of Arctitecture and were taught by pedagogues – the representative of avant-garde and constructivism. To understand the nature of avant-garde and constructivism, the author characterizes the goals and tasks solved by these trends and concepts, as well as analyzes the works of Roman Feierstein and Lyubov Zimonenko. It is demonstrated that constructivists create artistic reality, juxtaposing and simultaneously combining various processes and contents, sending over consciousness of a spectator to a particular reality. This pattern is inherent not only to figurative art, but also literature. The article employs situational and comparative analysis, methods of reconstruction of the works of applied arts and generalization. As a result, the author was able to reveal certain peculiarities of avant-garde and constructivism as an approach and activity, as well as underline that avant-garde and constructivism as approaches also suggest conceptualism. The role of conceptualism consists in outlining and explaining of reality, created by an artist for their audience.

scholarly journals “Merde Alors!”

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-383
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Bernini
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Umberto Eco ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Deputy Prime Minister

AbstractIn recent history, Italy has repeatedly emerged as a successful laboratory for political experiments. After WWI, Fascism was invented there by Mussolini, and it quickly spread across Europe. In the 1990s, Berlusconi anticipated Trump's entrepreneurial populism. Today, there is a risk that Italy will once again perform the role of a political avant-garde: that it will export to Europe a sovereign populism of a new kind that is nonetheless in continuity with disquieting features of the worst past. The essay performs a close reading of the programmatic speech that Minister of Home Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Salvini delivered in July 2018 at the thirty-second annual gathering of the Lega party. Its aim is to detect the presence in it of the politics of abjection (Judith Butler), a “Fascist archetype” (Umberto Eco) that affects both racialized and non-heterosexual people.

The World around Us

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-60
Author(s):  
M.I. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
September 11 ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Singular Individual ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 2 sets the compass through a work that seems to have little to say about sampling. 4’33” (four thirty-three) by John Cage is based on no (performed) sounds, no flashy pyrotechnics in its execution, nor reverence for the notion of music as a singular, individual creative act, or performance. The chapter considers Cage’s evocation of “silence” as the sampled material that is at stake in this iconic piece. I consider how silence, and silencing work in the context of censorship and social control given that the timeframe for the inception of 4’33” resonates with post-World War II, mid-twentieth-century United States during the Cold War. Engaging with this work can also tell us something about the role of censorship in public arts life half a century later, in the US shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. As I argue, when regarded as a material of music, and thereby as a source from which to “sample” silence, 4’33”offers both a sonic and “sound-less” baseline for the four case studies to follow. “Silence” as rendered in Cage’s work, its wider connotations and evocation of the sensation of sound-filled stillness also serve as a signal for instances of domination, of how oppression can take place quietly, without fanfare. Considering silence as a geocultural, socio-musicological matter allows us a moment to retune our ears and minds by encountering the broader (in)audible domains through, and from which sampling practices take place.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Emma Cole
Keyword(s):  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Heiner Müller

This introduction makes the case for postdramatic classical receptions to be included within reception studies scholarship. It contextualizes the overall study by providing an overview of the role of the classics within the development of postdramatic theatre and by charting the history of postdramatic classical receptions. The chapter offers an alternative to the standard teleological approach of documenting the history of postdramatic theatre, and instead suggests that the form arose from a diverse range of international theatrical experiments led by highly influential avant-garde practitioners, which gained enough notoriety and exposure to influence a range of other theatre makers. It examines Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Schechner, Tadashi Suzuki, and Heiner Müller, alongside a range of broader contextual environments, to argue that an interest in the classical underpinned the development of postdramatic theatre.

John Cage (1921–1990)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Future ◽  
Musical Sounds

A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use of a naive modification of the latter’s twelve-tone system. By the late 1930s Cage had begun to pursue his own compositional interests, embarking on a career as a musical innovator who, for fifty years, would send ‘shock waves’ throughout the music world. In ‘The Future of Music Credo’, a manifesto written in 1940, Cage declared that in the future the distinction between ‘noise’ and so-called ‘musical sounds’ would no longer exist.

Readymades

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Child
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jasper Johns ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Bicycle Wheel

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.

scholarly journals Forming the Legal Avant-Garde: A Theory of Art/Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211987183
Author(s):  
Lucy Finchett-Maddock
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Legal Aesthetics

This piece seeks to account for an increased interest in the intersection of art and law within legal thinking, activism and artistic practice, arguing there to exist the phenomena and movement of ‘art/law’. Art/law is the coming together of theory and practice in legal and political aesthetics, understood as a practice, (im)materially performed. It is seen as a natural consequence of thinking law and resistance in terms of space and time, accounting for a turn towards the visual, the practical and the role of affect, within ways of knowing. Art/law is a symptom of the end of art and end of law, synchronically rendered. Divisions between legal and aesthetic form have been well rehearsed within legal aesthetics scholarship, from law and literature, to critical legal studies’ work with images, text and performativity, and now law’s Anthropocene. Art/law as a practice, however, is argued as an emergent onto-epistemic-ethics of necessity, a movement of seeing, being and knowing in response to the advancement of spectacle. It is the simultaneous reunion of law, art and resistance as one, breaking down the institutional artifice of art worlds and law worlds, offering a form of ‘resistant (in)formalism’, that accounts for matter and change and asserts convergence as a medium. It is an inclusion of the uncertain and the disordered, that is an opening for the audience. This resistant (in)formalism describes the role of form, audience and practice within property, legal and aesthetic establishment, offering a countering of separatism at the end of art and the end of law, through a praxeology of art/law in seeing, thinking and action.

Athena’s Way: The Jurisprudence of the Oresteia

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-276
Author(s):  
Desmond Manderson
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Legal Reason ◽  
Legal Decisions ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Legitimacy ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
New Interpretation

This article offers a substantial new interpretation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, one of the most important literary texts to deal with the question of the rule of law, and one of Western jurisprudence’s founding documents. Perhaps in part because of it has fallen under the shadow of Antigone, the play has tended to suffer from a reductionist reading in which legal reason triumphs over the passions. The present article rereads the text drawing on recent scholarship on Aeschylus’ work. It argues that the central figure of the Furies has been misunderstood: they are not simply expressions of violence and passion; on the contrary, they are the most legalistic of all the figures in the play. The model of judgment introduced by Athena in the resolution of Oresteia does not pit law against emotion, or feud against process, but judgment against law. The trilogy begins by presenting the uncertainty of language as law’s curse, and the certain application of the law its cure; it concludes by radically reframing the question. Now the illusory certainty of law is the curse – and the uncertainty of language its cure. Athena’s way positions legal judgment as something more than the mere following of rules. The article then goes on to show that this approach not only casts a new light on orthodox jurisprudence. It is of profound relevance to the work of Giorgio Agamben and the theory of sovereignty he has famously expounded in Homo Sacer. What ultimately separates Athena’s rule of law from mere decisionism or Agamben’s executive and unlimited sovereignty are the external constraints to which she purposely submits herself. Athena demonstrates a vision of judgment as a participatory and transformative process. Above all, she insists on the essential role of public legal argument and public accountability in a discourse of legal legitimacy, which is not simply limited to judges or particular legal decisions. On the contrary, Athena connects the rule of law to a continuing discussion of legal values and judgments which is never finally settled, and in which all of us, as citizens of Athens, are participants.

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