The Philistine ControversyVerso, 2002 M06 17 - 314 pages In this fascinating study, Dave Beech and John Roberts 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. The ‘counter-intuitive’ philistine, they contest, returns the cultural debate to the problems of the persistence of power, privilege and symbolic violence. Asserting that the relations between power and art have been untheorized in recent studies, Beech and Roberts find their critical resources in the least likely place: not in the ‘best of things’, but in that which has ‘no proper place’. The book also includes several in-depth responses to the Beech and Roberts thesis by leading scholars in the field of cultural theory, together with the authors’ replies to their critics. |
Contents
Spectres of the Aesthetic | 13 |
The Ecstasy of Philistinism | 48 |
A Response to the New Philistines | 73 |
Of Satiation Without Happiness | 103 |
An Ontology Genealogy and Defence | 125 |
Another Third Way? | 161 |
A Critical View | 175 |
Philistines and Art Vandals Get Upset | 201 |
When Art Works Crackle | 228 |
The Philistine and Cultural Studies | 255 |
The Philistine and the Logic of Negation | 272 |
Notes on Contributors | 300 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract Adorno aesthetic subject Aesthetic Theory aestheticism Aesthetics and Subjectivity alienation anti-art argue argument art and aesthetics art history art's autonomy articulation artistic atheism avant-garde Baumeister Beech and John Beech and Roberts Benjamin Bernstein Birth of Tragedy bourgeois Bowie claim Clement Greenberg cognitive conceptual art contemporary counter-intuitive conception Critical Theory cultural division cultural studies Dada Dave Beech debate defence Degenerate Art derogation dialectic discourse dominant Eagleton epistemological essay ethical experience film German Greenberg human Ibid idea ideology intellectual issue John Roberts judgement kitsch Left London Marx Marxist masochistic mass culture means modern art modernist modernist art modes of attention Nazi negation Nietzsche nihilism nihilistic notion object ontology philistine modes philosophical pleasures political popular culture position postmodernism practice produced proletariat question radical rationalization relations repressed Roberts's Romantic Romanticism Sadeian sense social Socrates Sokal Sokal Affair species-being Spectres taste theoretical tradition truth validity violation writing