Intertextuality and Constructive Non-identity: In Memoriam to Identity

Kathy Acker ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Don Quixote ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Community Solidarity ◽  
Textual Space ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
Compositional Practice ◽  
A Site ◽  
Topological Form

In Memoriam To Identity is apprehended in chapter four as an experiment with the récit form. Acker’s compositional practice in In Memoriam to Identity is distinguished from that at work in Don Quixote through the topological form of the text, which folds in intersecting narratives and creates a fluid textual space, rather than a space characterised by disjunction. These topological revolutions have a counterpart in the radical politics of the text. Returning to Denise Riley’s work, I argue that through intertextuality, In Memoriam To Identity offers a site for that which Riley understands as constructive non-identity. The political and social negation of the voices of the narratives is positioned in contrast to the fictional site that offers the voices of the text a site of existence. The text points to the tensions surrounding the avant-garde idea of the sublation of art and life. In its inclusive and reintegrative form, the experimental text is apprehended as a site for community, solidarity, and intimacy.

scholarly journals Radical Detours: A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew Raba
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Game Players

<p>In this project I read four Philip K. Dick novels against the writing of the Situationist International (SI). In doing so, I seek to disrupt two critical trends that arguably impede Dick criticism: the depoliticization of Dick and the lack of focus on his style. Through reading his work against the politics of the SI, Dick’s own radical politics can be defined and reaffirmed. I make the case that Dick is a writer predominantly concerned with politics and ideology over and above philosophy and ontology. Secondly, I argue that the political power of Dick’s work is inseparable from his avant-garde style; in particular, his frequent use of what the Situationists termed détournement. With revolutionary politics and avant-garde aesthetics in mind, I re-examine the canonical novels Martian Time-Slip and Ubik, and redeem two of Dick’s neglected novels, The Game-Players of Titan and Galactic Pot-Healer.</p>

Radical Detours: A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew Raba
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Game Players

<p>In this project I read four Philip K. Dick novels against the writing of the Situationist International (SI). In doing so, I seek to disrupt two critical trends that arguably impede Dick criticism: the depoliticization of Dick and the lack of focus on his style. Through reading his work against the politics of the SI, Dick’s own radical politics can be defined and reaffirmed. I make the case that Dick is a writer predominantly concerned with politics and ideology over and above philosophy and ontology. Secondly, I argue that the political power of Dick’s work is inseparable from his avant-garde style; in particular, his frequent use of what the Situationists termed détournement. With revolutionary politics and avant-garde aesthetics in mind, I re-examine the canonical novels Martian Time-Slip and Ubik, and redeem two of Dick’s neglected novels, The Game-Players of Titan and Galactic Pot-Healer.</p>

scholarly journals SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THEFIN DE SIECLE

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 697-709
Author(s):  
Jock Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Split Ends ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Long Course

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which thefin de sièclewas constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out ofavant gardefrom bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

The avant-garde’s visual arts in the context of Santayana’s idea of vital liberty

Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Universe

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.

scholarly journals Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Mourant
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
The Political ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Journal ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The Many

Katherine Mansfield’s contemporaries knew her primarily as a contributor to magazines and periodicals. In 1922, for instance, Wyndham Lewis described her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. This book provides the first in-depth study of Mansfield’s engagement in periodical culture, examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Reading these writings against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, Chris Mourant situates Mansfield’s work within networks of production and uncovers the many ways in which she engaged with the writings of others and responded to the political, aesthetic and social contexts of early twentieth-century periodical culture. By examining Mansfield’s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer working both within and against the London literary establishment, in particular, this book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and proto-postcolonial writer.

scholarly journals VIRTUAL TOUR ENVIRONMENT OF CUBA’S NATIONAL SCHOOL OF ART

2017 ◽  
Vol XLII-2/W5 ◽  
pp. 547-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Napolitano ◽  
I. P. Douglas ◽  
M. E. Garlock ◽  
B. Glisic
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Virtual Tour ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
National School ◽  
Imaging Camera ◽  
Pertinent Information ◽  
Information Image ◽  
A Site ◽  
Art Schools

Innovative technologies have enabled new opportunities for collecting, analyzing, and sharing information about cultural heritage sites. Through a combination of two of these technologies, spherical imaging and virtual tour environment, we preliminarily documented one of Cuba’s National Schools of Art, the National Ballet School.The Ballet School is one of the five National Art Schools built in Havana, Cuba after the revolution. Due to changes in the political climate, construction was halted on the schools before completion. The Ballet School in particular was partially completed but never used for the intended purpose. Over the years, the surrounding vegetation and environment have started to overtake the buildings; damages such as missing bricks, corroded rebar, and broken tie bars can be seen. We created a virtual tour through the Ballet School which highlights key satellite classrooms and the main domed performance spaces. Scenes of the virtual tour were captured utilizing the Ricoh Theta S spherical imaging camera and processed with Kolor Panotour virtual environment software. Different forms of data can be included in this environment in order to provide a user with pertinent information. Image galleries, hyperlinks to websites, videos, PDFs, and links to databases can be embedded within the scene and interacted with by a user. By including this information within the virtual tour, a user can better understand how the site was constructed as well as the existing types of damage. The results of this work are recommendations for how a site can be preliminarily documented and information can be initially organized and shared.

scholarly journals Grażyna Bacewicz – The Polish Sappho

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Gąsiorowska
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Women Composers ◽  
The Political ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
New Type ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Artistic Career

Abstract The paper is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s (1909–1969) musical output and artistic career, presented against the background of events in her personal life, and of major events in Polish and European history in the first seven decades of the 20th century. Bacewicz was called ‘the Polish Sappho’ already in the years between World Wars I and II, when there were very few women-composers capable of creating works comparable to the most eminent achievements of male composers. Her path to success in composition and as a concert soloist leads from lessons with her father, the Lithuanian Vincas Bacevičius, to studies at the Łódź and Warsaw Conservatories (violin with Józef Jarzębski, composition with Kazimierz Sikorski), and later with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de la Musique, as well as violin lessons with André Tourret. Her oeuvre has for many years been linked with neoclassicism, and folkloric inspirations are evident in many of her works. Her crowning achievement in the neoclassical style is the Concerto for String Orchestra of 1948, while influences from folklore can distinctly be heard in many concert pieces and small forms. The breakthrough came around 1958, under the influence of avant-garde trends present in West European music, which came to be adapted in Poland thanks to the political transformations and the rejection of socialist realism. In such pieces as Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion of 1958, Bacewicz transforms her previously fundamental musical components (melody, rhythm, harmony) into a qualitatively new type of sound structures, mainly focused on the coloristic aspects. Grażyna Bacewicz also applied the twelve-note technique, albeit to a limited extent, as in String Quartet No. 6 (1960). Her last work was the unfinished ballet Desire to a libretto by Mieczysław Bibrowski after Pablo Picasso’s play Le désir attrapé par la queue.

scholarly journals Distributing productive play: a materialist analysis of Steam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Interaction Design ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sales Promotions ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
New Space ◽  
A Site

Valve Corporation’s digital game distribution platform, Steam, is the largest distributor of games on personal computers, analyzed here as a site where control over the production, design and use of digital games is established. Steam creates and exercises processes and techniques such as monopolization and enclosure over creative products, online labour, and exchange among game designers. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework places communication at the centre of the political economy, here of digital commodities distributed and produced by online platforms like Steam. James Gibson’s affordance theory allows the market Steam’s owners create for its users to be cast in terms of visuality and interaction design. These theories are largely neglected in the existing literature in game studies, platform studies, and political economy, but they allow intervention in an ongoing debate concerning the ontological status of work and play as distinct, separate human activities by offering a specific focus on the political economy of visual or algorithmic communication. Three case studies then analyze Steam as a site where the slippage between game-play and work is constant and deepening. The first isolates three sales promotions on Steam as forms of work disguised as online shopping. The second is a discourse analysis of a crisis within the community of mod creators for the game Skyrim, triggered by changes implemented on Steam. The third case study critiques Valve Corporation’s positioning of Steam as a new space to extract value from play by demonstrating historical continuity with consumer monopolies. A concluding discussion argues Steam is a platform that evolves to meet distinct crises and problems in the production and circulation of its digital commodities as contradictions arise. Ultimately, Steam shows how the cycle of capital accumulation encourages monopolization and centralization.

Looping Sensations

Ricanness ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 135-168
Author(s):  
Sandra Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
The Political ◽  
Video Screen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Injury ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Narrow Space

This chapter shares the archive of the late queer Rican avant-garde multimedia artist Ryan Rivera by examining his experimental videos. Less than a minute each, these abstract videos draw the spectator’s attention to the psychical states of self-injury and suffering. Through close-ups, looping, a manipulation of real time, and overexposure, Rivera pushes the spectator to endure a series of grotesque actions; he repeatedly bangs his head, places his fist down his throat, holds his breath, retches, and punches and slaps his face. The author explicates the political and aesthetic consequences of waiting in the seat of sensation with and for a bodiless Rican subject who compels us to wait in dissonance through the exploitation of the senses. As a way to engender a type of queer calling, the author urges the reader to sit with the artist as he beats his head against the never-quite-postcolonial, creating new forms of Brown and Rican intimacy. The author reformulates the Cartesian split by showcasing the narrow space of a video screen in which the artist bangs his queer postcolonial head against the fast-paced heteronormative world.

Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Rajbir Singh Judge
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

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