Weaponised Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups and the ‘Limits of Control’ from Burroughs to Deleuze

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-584
Author(s):  
S. E. Gontarski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Surveillance Culture ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Commercial Media ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel (but independent) trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art.

Digging for Apples: Reappraising the Influence of Situationist Theory on Theatre Practice in the English Counterculture

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. D. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Panel Discussion ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Read Group ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Critical Model

This article is a development of a paper submitted to last year's ASTR conference at City University of New York as part of a panel discussion on the legacy of the 1960s. That paper was prepared to the conference brief that submissions should involve some reflexive investigation of research methods and scholarly practices. Reviewing existing material written on the causal links between Situationist theory and theatre practice in the 1960s counterculture in England, I began to question the “fit” between these two areas. A critical narrative concerning the development of a post-Brechtian theatrical style in the work of a generation of English political dramatists — such as Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths, and David Edgar — during the late 1960s and early 1970s has come to read Situationism as a dominant shaping force. On closer examination, however, this relationship is neither as clear nor as convincing as this now commonplace critical model would suggest. Additionally, neglected and underreported instances and examples — some of which are explored in this article — seem to tell contrasting, or more complex, stories about the forms and practices of English theatre in the counterculture. Investigation of some of these issues has led me to consider why it is that particular historical orthodoxies develop to account for movements and moments in cultural and performance history. What happens to make a small and, at the time, not widely published or read group of theorists such as the Situationists take on a retrospectively key position in scholarly accounts of cultural history? Thus, this article investigates the transmission of Situationist ideas in English theatre practice to conclude that there may be a broader, more idiosyncratic, history to read against dominant accounts of influence and causation.

Formative Influences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Christian Metz ◽  
The Way

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Effects of control strategy on the activation of unwanted intrusive thoughts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sicong Liu ◽  
Jonathan Folstein ◽  
Lawrence Gregory Appelbaum ◽  
Gershon Tenenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Control Strategies ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Intrusive Thoughts ◽  
Control Process ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Opposite Pattern ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
And Performance

Although the unwanted intrusive thoughts (UITs) exist widely in human beings and show similar characteristics between clinical and nonclinical forms, its control process remains unclear. Thoughts of choking under pressure, particularly among high-achieving athletes, represent a meaningful UIT type due to their psychological and performance-related impact. Taking a dynamic view of UIT control process, this study tested the effect of thought-control strategies among sub-elite to elite athletes, applied to individualized choking thoughts. Ninety athletes recollected recent athletic choking experiences prior to being randomized into one of three thought control interventions using strategies of either acceptance, passive monitoring (control), or suppression. To control for individual differences, athletes’ working memory capacity was measured and modeled as a covariate at baseline. The activation of choking thoughts during and after the intervention was gauged through multiple measurement approaches including conscious presence in mind, priming, and event-related potentials (P3b and N400 amplitudes). Results indicated that, relative to the control, suppression led to enhanced priming and reduced conscious presence of choking thoughts, whereas acceptance resulted in an opposite pattern of reduced priming and increased conscious presence of choking thoughts. In addition, thought-related stimuli elicited less negative-going N400 amplitudes and more positive-going P3b amplitudes than control stimuli. These findings advance understandings of the control mechanism underpinning UITs, and generate applied implications regarding UIT control in high-risk populations such as those with athletic expertise.

Making Ballet 3

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Story Line ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Ballet History ◽  
Choreographic Analysis

Making Ballet 3 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Western Symphony, produced by the New York City Ballet in 1954 with choreography by George Balanchine, music by Hershy Kay, scenery by John Boyt, and costumes by Karinska. It brings to light the multitude of intertextual allusions that occur throughout the ballet, playfully intermingling references of “America” with an entire lineage of nineteenth-century European classicism. Although Western Symphony has no story line, it crafts a deliberate message: a long, transatlantic genealogy of Western classicism that, in the twentieth century, has come to rest in America. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, this interchapter argues that Western Symphony incorporates parody to present a revisionist ballet history in which the high cultural lineages of Europe and America are intimately entwined. Ultimately, this message reinforced the Atlanticist politics of private and state anticommunist groups in the cultural Cold War, the historical setting for its production and performance.

The Constitutionality of Involuntary Civil Commitment of Opiate Addicts

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Commitment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Involuntary Treatment ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Narcotic Trafficking ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Opiate Addicts ◽  
The 1960S

This paper deals with the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts. Although the first laws permitting involuntary treatment of opiate addicts were enacted in the second half of the nineteenth century, addicts were not committed in large numbers until California and New York enacted new civil commitment legislation in the 1960s. Inevitably, the courts were called upon to decide if involuntary treatment was constitutional. Both the California and New York courts decided that it was. These decisions were heavily influenced by statements made by the United States Supreme Court in Robinson v. California. The Robinson case did not actually involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment; it involved the question of whether it was constitutional for a state to make addiction a crime. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declared (in a dictum) that a state might establish a program of compulsory treatment for opiate addicts either to discourage violation of its criminal laws against narcotic trafficking or to safeguard the general health or welfare of its inhabitants. Presumably because the Robinson case did not involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts, the Supreme Court did not go into that question as deeply as it might have. The California and New York courts, in turn, relied too much on this dictum and did not delve deeply into the question. The New York courts did a better job than the California courts, but their work too was not as good as it should have been.

Bill Dixon's Voice (Letter)

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-231
Author(s):  
ERIC PORTER
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
Wage Employment ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

AbstractIn November 1966 composer and improviser Bill Dixon recorded a seventeen-minute-long “voice letter” to jazz writer Frank Kofsky. This letter may be analyzed as a critical intervention by Dixon, an attempt to change the context of interpretation around improvised music. But the voice letter may also be heard and analyzed as a kind of performance. As Dixon speaks, one can hear the rumbling and roar of the city as well as the staccato sounds of car and truck horns unfolding in dynamic counterpoint to his words. In this essay, I put the voice letter into dialogue with Dixon's personal history, his writings and interview statements, and some of his contemporaneous musical and multi-generic projects, especially his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn. I show how the letter maps Dixon's and Dunn's positions within a geography of intellectual circles, experimental artistic communities, and low-wage employment networks. By extension, I examine how the voice letter, as critical intervention and performance, points us to a nuanced understanding of black experimental music of the 1960s as a socially inflected, self-conscious and, ultimately, serious engagement with various modes of artistic production and thought, carried out under conditions of both precarity and inspiration.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document