The Philistine Controversy

Conventionally, the Philistine is assumed to have no value for art and culture, but in this re-evaluation of its excluded identity, the authors address the philistine not as an empirical phenomenon, but as a relational category that operates between art and anti-art, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, arguing that the Philistine cuts to the core of the predicament of art in a divided culture. The authors develop what they call a counter-intuitive notion of the Philistine, claiming that what the Philistine tells us about cultural division and exclusion is more persuasive than the theories of the popular and the otherly-cultured in cultural studies and postmodernism. They contest that the counter-intuitive Philistine returns the cultural debate to the problems of the persistence of poser, privilege and symbolic violence.