The Elusive Anarchist Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Richard Porton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

This chapter explores the anarchist aesthetic. All of the leading anarchist figures joined forces with influential figures from the arts. And members of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' aesthetic avant-gardes often aligned themselves with anarchists. This alliance can be attributed to “the highly individualistic, anti-official, and artistically revolutionary nature of so much avant-garde art since the late eighteenth century.” Yet although there have often been ties between aesthetic radicals and the libertarian left, it is not likely that necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of “anarchist art” will ever be formulated. A monolithic anarchist aesthetic must be dismissed as elusive and dubiously essentialist: unlike the Marxist aesthetic, the anarchist conception of art is not “normative,” but “is presented in the form of a project which leaves the door wide open to the future.” Nevertheless, superficial hints of the desire to merge aesthetic provocation with political rebellion are evident in films that deal with the antics of so-called “bohemians”; bohemianism has often been associated with anarchism.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

Lyric Cousins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

Land and Territory

2020 ◽  
pp. 142-163
Author(s):  
Nicola Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Tropical Agriculture ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Tropical Fruits ◽  
Rare Element ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future

This chapter explains that the arrival of lithography in the 1820s made it possible to illustrate printed matter with beautiful scenic engravings. It analyses the evocations of distinctive natural phenomena that constituted a rare element of continuity between the creole patriotism of the late eighteenth century and the post-independence debates about the future. It also discusses how utility and utopianism were enfolded into investigations of the biblical and secular paradise of American nature. The chapter cites how Bello's famous Ode to Tropical Agriculture summoned its audience to live out the freedom won by independence through working the soil, exhorting them not to let the prodigious bounty of tropical fruits lure them into sterile idleness. It mentions that the Argentine anthem mapped out the battlegrounds where liberty had been won, and the Chilean anthem celebrated the clarity of the sky, the tranquillity of the sea, and the majesty of the mountains.

5. Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Waves ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Wave ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on the history of democratization since the late eighteenth century. It introduces the concepts of ‘waves’ (trends) and ‘conjunctures’ (briefer turmoils) and delineates the major developments in this respect. In this way, the major long-term and short-term factors leading to the emergence and breakdowns of democracies are also highlighted. The first long wave occurred during the period 1776–1914, followed by the first positive conjuncture in 1918–19, the second long wave (with some intermittent turbulences) in 1945–88, and the latest conjuncture in 1989–90. The chapter identifies the main ingredients to democratization throughout history, namely: republicanism, representation, and political equality. It concludes by considering some of the current perspectives and dangers for the future of democracy.

Trends in the Study of Medieval Hebrew Literature

AJS Review ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Dan Pagis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Medieval Hebrew

The vast body of premodern Hebrew literature is usually termed “medieval“—a somewhat misleading term, partly based on the assumption that in most countries the Jewish Middle Ages lasted until the Emancipation in the eighteenth century. However, as is well known, this literature was by no means monolithic. It comprised such disparate schools and styles as portions of the liturgy dating back to late Roman times, the Palestinian and Eastern piyyut (liturgical poetry) of the Byzantine and Moslem periods, the famed Hebrew-Spanish school and its ramifications or parallel schools in Provence, North Africa, Turkey, and the Yemen, other important centers like Germany and France, and an entire millennium of Hebrew poetry in Italy whose later stages coincided with, and were influenced by, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Israel Davidson's monumental bibliography, entitled in English Thesaurus of Hebrew Mediaeval Poetry, actually spans more than a millennium and a half, or, as its Hebrew title states, “from the canonization of the Bible to the beginning of the period of Enlightenment” (in the late eighteenth century). Alternative terms to “medieval” seem scarcely clearer; “postbiblical” tacitly and misleadingly excludes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while “premodern” includes the Bible.

Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the ‘Aesthetic Force’ of Music

2002 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Riley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Aesthetic

Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) exerted considerable influence on late eighteenth-century German musical writers. But for many modern commentators, it typifies the negative attitude to instrumental music characteristic of much Enlightenment rationalism. A reassessment of Sulzer, taking account of his philosophical background in Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten, shows that in fact he considered music the first of the fine arts. The arts have an ethical, civilizing role; but while most can affect only people who are already partly civilized, music possesses a special ‘aesthetic force’ which energizes the minds of cognitively passive people or ‘savages’.

4. Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Waves ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Wave ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on the history of democratization since the late eighteenth century. It introduces the concepts of ‘waves’ (trends) and ‘conjunctures’ (briefer turmoils) and delineates the major developments in this respect. In this way, the major long-term and short-term factors leading to the emergence and breakdowns of democracies are also highlighted. The first long wave occurred during the period 1776–1914, followed by the first positive conjuncture in 1918–19, the second long wave (with some intermittent turbulences) in 1945–88, and the latest conjuncture in 1989–90. The chapter identifies the main ingredients to democratization throughout history, namely: republicanism, representation, and political equality. It concludes by considering some of the current perspectives and dangers for the future of democracy.

Touching Books: Diderot, Novalis,and the Encyclopedia of the Future

2011 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Wellmon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future

This article considers the reinvention of the Enlightenment encyclopedic tradition in a late eighteenth-century Germany overwhelmed by the proliferation of print. In particular, it traces a shift in the very metaphors of encyclopedic knowledge from those of vision that characterized Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie to those of touch that characterized the German poet Novalis's Allgemeine Brouillon.

Liberty and Economics: A Reconsideration

1984 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. M. Goldsmith
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Of Economic Development ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
Liberal Position

The arguments presented by Fred M. Frohock and David J. Sylvan in ‘Liberty, Economics and Evidence’, Political Studies, 31 (1983), 541–55 need reconsideration. They attribute a theory of economic development to liberalism, but it is held by both liberal and other thinkers only after the late eighteenth century. This theory, that a certain level of economic development is a necessary prerequisite for freedom, is different from the widely-held anti-democratic view that political rights should only be granted to persons holding property. Again, the view that liberty and welfare can be traded-off seems not to be held by many of the ‘liberals' mentioned by the authors. Moreover, the contention that the ‘liberal position’ is empirically incorrect confuses two propositions: (1) that there are economic conditions which are necessary for the existence of freedom; (2) that there are economic conditions necessary and sufficient for freedom. The authors' recommendation of ‘holism’ should not be swallowed whole.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-88
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Separate Species ◽  
Biological Adaptation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sister Arts

Chapter 2 documents that, in contrast to more recent theories that have rendered adaptation a bad theoretical object, prior to the late eighteenth century, adaptation was theorized as a good theoretical object, fostering an innovative, progressive, national aesthetic culture and situating artists in a long lineage reaching back to classical Greece. Subsequently, late eighteenth-century Romantic theories of originality and theories of the arts as separate species militated against adaptation in the same way that theologies of original creation and scientific theories of separate species would militate against theories of biological adaptation in the late nineteenth century. Even so, some nineteenth-century theorists continued to valorize adaptation equivocally as a means of civilizing the lower classes and foreign cultures, even as its aesthetic deficiencies offended the higher ranked, fiercely nationalist arbiters of civilization and culture. Copyright laws, which did not apply when a work changed medium until the early twentieth century in Britain and other nations, intensified the opprobrium cast upon adaptation in a rhetoric of theft at home and piracy abroad. Even so, some critics maintained that adaptation is original when created by an original genius; others valorized intermedial adaptation in a pseudo-religious discourse of realization of the word made flesh; yet others pitted sister arts theories against theories of the arts as separate species that cannot mate to produce adaptation, although both militated against the reproductive, generative capacities of adaptation. These discourses were not limited to academics and reviewers, but extended to the adaptation industry.

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