DOCSLIB.ORG

Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 4

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 4 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 1 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 2 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 3 Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 4 SEMIOTEXT(E) ACTIVE AGENTS SERIES Copyright © 2007 Gerald Raunig Originally published as: Kunst und Revolution. Künstlerischer Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert, Wien: Turia+Kant 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com Special thanks to Sarah Wang and Andrew Berardini. The Index was prepared by Andrew Lopez. Cover Photograph by Jürgen Schmidt Design by Hedi El Kholti ISBN-10: 1-58435-046-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-046-0 Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Printed in the United States of America Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 5 Art and Revolution Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century Gerald Raunig Translated by Aileen Derieg <e> Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 6 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 7 Contents 1. Introduction: The Concatenation of Art and Revolution 9 2. The Three Components of the Revolutionary Machine 25 3. Out of Sync: The Paris Commune as Revolutionary Machine 67 4. The Courbet Model: Sequential Concatenation: 97 Artist, Revolutionary, Artist 5. Spirit and Betrayal: German “Activism” in the 1910s 113 6. Disruptive Monsters: From Representing to Constructing Situations 131 7. “Art and Revolution,” 1968: 187 Viennese Actionism and the Negative Concatenation 8. The Transversal Concatenation of the PublixTheatreCaravan: 203 Temporary Overlaps of Art and Revolution 9. After 9/11: Postscript on an Immeasurable Border Space 237 Notes 267 Bibliography 299 Index 313 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 8 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 9 1. Introduction The Concatenation of Art and Revolution “…to say the revolution is itself utopia of immanence is not to say that it is a dream, something that is not realized or that is only real- ized by betraying itself. On the contrary, it is to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed.” — Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari1 “In this short article I could sketch only with a couple of strokes the peculiar zigzag line of the relationships between revolution and art that we have hitherto observed. It has not been broken off. It continues even further.” — Anatoly Lunacharsky 2 IN THE LONG ECHO of a revolution, Richard Wagner and Anatoly Lunacharsky each wrote their texts about the “zigzag line of the relationships between revolution and art.” In 1849, in the wake of the failed bourgeois revolution in Germany, Wagner sketched “Art and the Revolution,”3 and about seventy years later Lunacharsky— 9 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 10 influenced by the first experiences of post-revolutionary cultural policies following the successful October Revolution—published the two sections of his short article “Revolution and Art”4 as the powerful Commissar for Education and Enlightenment. The two titles evince a minimal and yet significant variation of the con- catenation of art and revolution reflecting the contrary ideological positions of the two authors. For Wagner revolution seems to fol- low art, for Lunacharsky art follows the revolution: on the one side there is the royal court conductor of Saxony and proponent of the gesamtkunstwerk Wagner, whose later nationalist, chauvinistic and anti-Semitic tirades were to make him a useful point of reference both aesthetically and politically for National-Socialist ideology; on the other Lunacharsky, member of the government for twelve years under Lenin and Stalin until 1929, decisive especially in the early years of the Proletkult for the development of cultural policies in the Soviet Union. The preconditions could hardly be more different, and yet the two texts converge in several paradigmatic aspects due to specific biographic as well as to structural similarities in the cultural- political strategies of the two very different authors. In the years around 1848, under the vague influence of the ideas of Proudhon, Feuerbach and Bakunin, Wagner included diffuse revolutionary tones beyond his tight, mostly musical theory radius of reflection. Lunacharsky’s attitude developed in attempting to bridge the gap between the utilization of art already brought up by Lenin on the one hand, and the radical left-wing experiments of the leftist Pro- letkult wing on the other, into a strangely conservative position, which blocked not only socialist innovation, but also placed itself vehemently before the cultural heritage of bourgeois society. Against this backdrop of the ambivalence, volatility and diffusiveness 10 / Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 11 of both positions, it is understandable that there is a certain degree of congruence in the two very different texts, especially where they are most relevant for our considerations here. Wagner wrote “Art and the Revolution” in 1849, the year of his exile in Zurich following the failure of the Dresden Revolt, in which he had played a certain role, not only as a writer.5 Starting from the “lament of our modern artists and their hatred for the revolution,” the essay was intended to provide “a brief survey of the outstanding moments of European art history,” and despite the defeat in Dresden Wagner still clung to ideas and the concept of the revolution. In 1848/49, however, a certain oscillation in his position was already noticeable: Wagner’s stance, which was even in revolutionary times clearly focused on the conditions of art production and on reforming the administration and financing of art, ranged from radical democ- ratic demands on the one hand to more moderate visions of restoration and reconciliation with the German princes on the other. According to Wagner, the “thousand-year long revolution of humanity,” which he said also crushed the Greek tragedy together with the Athenian state, had now, at the time of writing his essay on revolution, created a situation that first made the artwork of the future possible. According to Wagner, art was to be understood as “social product,” and more precisely as a “faithful mirror image” of the “dominant spirit of the public.” Accordingly, the dissolution of the Athenian state corresponds to the downfall of the “great gesamtkunstwerk of the tragedy.” An artwork, which would be able to encompass “the spirit of free humanity beyond all limitations of nationalities,” could not emerge from contemporary society and art as an “industrial institution.” The drama as perfect art work could only be reborn from revolution: “True art can only rise up from its state of civilized barbarism to its dignity on the shoulders of our The Concatenation of Art and Revolution / 11 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 12 great social movement.” Wagner’s attitude, swaying between cultural pessimism and revolutionary pathos, although not yet ultimately decided in its tendency toward totality and authoritarianism, already moved him to grand pronouncements in 1849. “Only the great revolution of humanity, the beginning of which once crushed the Greek tragedy, can attain for us this art work, because only the revolution can newly and more beautifully, nobly, generally give birth from its greatest depths to that, which it snatched from the conservative spirit of an earlier period of more beautiful—but lim- ited—education, and devoured.”6 Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote his article, “Revolution and Art,” in two steps, the first part in 1920 as a newspaper article, the second as an interview on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Octo- ber Revolution. This means that the text was produced in a period that was no longer permeated by the fresh energy of the Russian Revolution, but in which the terminology and programs of this initial phase continued to be characteristic. For Lunacharsky, in the conventional diction of the revolutionary context, bourgeois art is initially denigrated as formalistic, as having “advanced merely a whimsical and absurd eclecticism.” Revolution, on the other hand, “is bringing ideas of remarkable breadth and depth.” For this rea- son—and Lunacharsky is still writing futuristically here in 1920—the highest cultural politician of the Soviet Union antici- pates “a great deal from the influence of the Revolution on art, to put it simply: I expect art to be saved from the worst forms of decadence and from pure formalism.” Conversely, art is defined as a means of revolution, particularly because of its function in agi- tating the masses and as the appropriate form of the expression of revolutionary policies: “If revolution can give art its soul, then art can give revolution its mouthpiece.”7 12 / Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 13 Lunacharsky and Wagner thus begin their analyses from extremely different experiences, standpoints and even concepts of revolution, yet surprising points of congruence are recognizable. Most of all, there are two figures that they have in common, which not only come up in both texts, but generally represent dubious twins in the different conceptualizations of the relationship between art and revolution. For texts propagating the concept of “revolution” in their titles, the first figure consists unexpectedly profanely in the question of the function and financing of art, which characterizes both texts as belonging to the genre of art policies.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Series Editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University
    The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism David Roberts A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the publication of this volume. Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writ- ing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, David, 1937– The total work of art in European modernism / David Roberts. p. cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5023-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Aesthetics) 2.
    [Show full text]
  • Libertarian Marxism Mao-Spontex Open Marxism Popular Assembly Sovereign Citizen Movement Spontaneism Sui Iuris
    Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis Brian Marks1 University of Arizona School of Geography and Development [email protected] Abstract Autonomist Marxism is a political tendency premised on the autonomy of the proletariat. Working class autonomy is manifested in the self-activity of the working class independent of formal organizations and representations, the multiplicity of forms that struggles take, and the role of class composition in shaping the overall balance of power in capitalist societies, not least in the relationship of class struggles to the character of capitalist crises. Class composition analysis is applied here to narrate the recent history of capitalism leading up to the current crisis, giving particular attention to China and the United States. A global wave of struggles in the mid-2000s was constituitive of the kinds of working class responses to the crisis that unfolded in 2008-10. The circulation of those struggles and resultant trends of recomposition and/or decomposition are argued to be important factors in the balance of political forces across the varied geography of the present crisis. The whirlwind of crises and the autonomist perspective The whirlwind of crises (Marks, 2010) that swept the world in 2008, financial panic upon food crisis upon energy shock upon inflationary spiral, receded temporarily only to surge forward again, leaving us in a turbulent world, full of possibility and peril. Is this the end of Neoliberalism or its retrenchment? A new 1 Published under the Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis 468 New Deal or a new Great Depression? The end of American hegemony or the rise of an “imperialism with Chinese characteristics?” Or all of those at once? This paper brings the political tendency known as autonomist Marxism (H.
    [Show full text]
  • Council Communism Or Councilism? - the Period of Transition a Book Review by Fredo Corvo
    Council communism or councilism? - The period of transition A book review by Fredo Corvo Book review of Philippe Bourrinet “The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900-68); ‘Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin!”, ‘All workers must think for themselves!’”, Leiden/Boston (Brill) ISBN 978-90-04-26977-4. This book in fact is based on a master thesis in French language, defended at the Sorbonne University Paris, 1988. Since then editions in several languages appeared, with or without permission of the author, or of the International Communist Current, who claims to be its ‘collective author’. Therefor it is unfortunately that this new edition by Brill doesn’t explain the differences with the master thesis. For readers that know the Porcupine Press English language edition, I found two additions. A fragment preceding chapter 1, on Religion, Capitalism and colonial Empire: From the ‘Golden Age’ to the Decline, gives a short overview of the history of the Netherlands before industrialization. A text added to chapter 11, International Council-Communists up to the 1970s adds interesting information of studies published since 1987, which can be found in the bibliography. On the other hand, some of the more recent works are missing here as well as in the 58 pages long section ‘Further reading’: for example, Gerber’s and Boekelman's biographies of Anton Pannekoek. No doubt this study is impressive for many reasons, of which its international scope and its internationalist approach are the most important. No coincidence the author identifies with the Communist left, consisting mainly of the German-Dutch left and the Italian left, having published several studies on the latter as well.
    [Show full text]
  • The New Age Under Orage
    THE NEW AGE UNDER ORAGE CHAPTERS IN ENGLISH CULTURAL HISTORY by WALLACE MARTIN MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS BARNES & NOBLE, INC., NEW YORK Frontispiece A. R. ORAGE © 1967 Wallace Martin All rights reserved MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS 316-324 Oxford Road, Manchester 13, England U.S.A. BARNES & NOBLE, INC. 105 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London This digital edition has been produced by the Modernist Journals Project with the permission of Wallace T. Martin, granted on 28 July 1999. Users may download and reproduce any of these pages, provided that proper credit is given the author and the Project. FOR MY PARENTS CONTENTS PART ONE. ORIGINS Page I. Introduction: The New Age and its Contemporaries 1 II. The Purchase of The New Age 17 III. Orage’s Editorial Methods 32 PART TWO. ‘THE NEW AGE’, 1908-1910: LITERARY REALISM AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IV. The ‘New Drama’ 61 V. The Realistic Novel 81 VI. The Rejection of Realism 108 PART THREE. 1911-1914: NEW DIRECTIONS VII. Contributors and Contents 120 VIII. The Cultural Awakening 128 IX. The Origins of Imagism 145 X. Other Movements 182 PART FOUR. 1915-1918: THE SEARCH FOR VALUES XI. Guild Socialism 193 XII. A Conservative Philosophy 212 XIII. Orage’s Literary Criticism 235 PART FIVE. 1919-1922: SOCIAL CREDIT AND MYSTICISM XIV. The Economic Crisis 266 XV. Orage’s Religious Quest 284 Appendix: Contributors to The New Age 295 Index 297 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A. R. Orage Frontispiece 1 * Tom Titt: Mr G. Bernard Shaw 25 2 * Tom Titt: Mr G.
    [Show full text]
  • Beyond the Black Box: the Lettrist Cinema of Disjunction
    Beyond the Black Box: The Lettrist Cinema of Disjunction ANDREW V. UROSKIE I was not, in my youth, particularly affected by cine - ma’s “Europeans” . perhaps because I, early on, developed an aversion to Surrealism—finding it an altogether inadequate (highly symbolic) envision - ment of dreaming. What did rivet my attention (and must be particularly distinguished) was Jean- Isidore Isou’s Treatise : as a creative polemic it has no peer in the history of cinema. —Stan Brakhage 1 As Caroline Jones has demonstrated, midcentury aesthetics was dominated by a rhetoric of isolated and purified opticality. 2 But another aesthetics, one dramatically opposed to it, was in motion at the time. Operating at a subterranean level, it began, as early as 1951, to articulate a vision of intermedia assemblage. Rather than cohering into the synaesthetic unity of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk , works in this vein sought to juxtapose multiple registers of sensory experience—the spatial and the temporal, the textual and the imagistic—into pieces that were intentionally disjunc - tive and lacking in unity. Within them, we can already observe questions that would come to haunt the topos of avant-garde film and performance in the coming decades: questions regarding the nature and specificity of cinema, its place within artistic modernism and mass culture, the institutions through which it is presented, and the possible modes of its spectatorial engagement. Crucially associated with 1. “Inspirations,” in The Essential Brakhage , ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: McPherson & Co., 2001), pp. 208 –9. Mentioned briefly across his various writings, Isou’s Treatise was the subject of a 1993 letter from Brakhage to Frédérique Devaux on the occasion of her research for Traité de bave et d’eternite de Isidore Isou (Paris: Editions Yellow Now, 1994).
    [Show full text]
  • Letterism 1947-2014 Vol. 1
    The Future is Unwritten: Letterism 1947-2014 Vol. 1 Catalog 17 Division Leap 6635 N. Baltimore Ave. Ste. 111 Portland, OR 97203 www.divisionleap.com [email protected] 503 206 7291 “Radically anticipating Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and their Letterism is a movement whose influence is as widespread as it is unacknowledged. From punk to concrete poetry to experimental film, from the development of youth culture to the student uprisings of 1968 and epigones in the 1960s new left, Isou the formation of the Situationist International, most postwar avant-garde movements owe a debt to it’s rev- produced an analysis of youth as olutionary theories, yet it remains largely overlooked in studies of the period (some notable exceptions are listed in the bibliography that follows the text). an inevitably revolutionary social sector - revolutionary on its own This catalog contains over one hundred items devoted to Letterism and Inismo. To the best of our knowl- edge it is the first devoted to either of these movements in the US. It contains a number of publications terms, which meant that the terms which have little or no institutional representation on these shores, and represents a valuable opportunity for of revolution had to be seen in a future research. new way.” A number of the items in this catalog were collected by the anarchist scholar Pietro Ferrua, who was closely associated with members of both Letterism and Inismo and who has written a great deal about both move- ments. Ferrua organized the first international conference on Letterism here in Portland in 1979 [see #62].
    [Show full text]
  • Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Edited by Tom Mcdonough G D   S I
    G D S I OCTOBER BOOKS Rosalind E. Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Mignon Nixon, editors Broodthaers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp Aberrations, by Jurgis Baltrusˇaitis Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, by Denis Hollier Painting as Model, by Yve-Alain Bois The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk The Woman in Question, edited by Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, by Jonathan Crary The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will, by Joel Fineman Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, by Nagisa Oshima The Optical Unconscious, by Rosalind E. Krauss Gesture and Speech, by André Leroi-Gourhan Compulsive Beauty, by Hal Foster Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, by Robert Morris Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, by Joan Copjec Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, by Kristin Ross Kant after Duchamp, by Thierry de Duve The Duchamp Effect, edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, by Hal Foster October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996, edited by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, by David Joselit Caravaggio’s Secrets, by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875, by Carol Armstrong Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, by Benjamin H.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art Henry Van De Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept
    THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE TOTAL WORK OF ART Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept Carsten Ruhl, Chris Dähne, Rixt Hoekstra (Eds.) INTRODUCTION 7 THE SYMBOLIC DIMENSION BETWEEN Carsten Ruhl, Rixt Hoekstra, Chris Dähne NATURE AND ARTIFACT 117 The Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm FROM TOTAL DESIGN TO TOTAL THEORY 12 Carlotta Torricelli Carsten Ruhl THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF THE TOTAL WORK OF ART 128 EDUCATING THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK 24 From Hegel to Wagner and Beyond Henry van de Velde and Art School Reform Wolfram Bergande in Germany, 1900–14 Katherine Kuenzli INSULAR UTOPIAS? 146 Henry van de Velde, Peter Zumthor, and the Gesamtkunstwerk A COLLISION OF WORLDS 41 Ole W. Fischer Art and Commerce in the Age of Henry van de Velde THE NOTION OF THE TOTAL WORK OF ART AND John V. Maciuika ITALIAN BUILDING CUltURE AFTER WORLD WAR II 164 Silvia Malcovati EXISTENZMINIMUM AS GESAMTKUNSTWERK 63 Robin Schuldenfrei CAN THE IMMIGRANT SPEAK? 179 Autonomy and Participation in IBA 1984/87 PANS, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE 79 Esra Akcan Theo van Doesburg and the Question of the “Aesthetic Unity of All the Arts” THE CRITICAL ARABESQUE 195 Matthias Noell On Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990) Regine Prange GESAMTKUNSTWERK AND GENDER 94 From Domesticity to Branding and Back Again AcUTE AESTHETICS 217 Kathleen James-Chakraborty Anke Finger EXPRESSING POLITICS IN URBAN PLANNING 105 ARCHITECTURES TO BE INHALED 227 Two Projects by Herman Sörgel for Munich Constructing the Ephemeral between the Monarchy and Republic Ákos Moravánszky Rainer Schützeichel THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK IN THE AGE OF TERROR 244 Esther da Costa Meyer Hegel’s philosophy, notably The Phenomenology of Spirit, his Lectures on Aesthetics, THE CREATIVE held in Berlin in the 1820s, and the later Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, casts a long shadow on the philosophies of art that followed—a shadow that is high con- trast, especially in the nineteenth century.
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistic Scepticism in Mauthner's Philosophy
    LiberaPisano Misunderstanding Metaphors: Linguistic ScepticisminMauthner’s Philosophy Nous sommes tous dans un désert. Personne ne comprend personne. Gustave Flaubert¹ This essayisanoverview of Fritz Mauthner’slinguistic scepticism, which, in my view, represents apowerful hermeneutic category of philosophical doubts about the com- municative,epistemological, and ontological value of language. In order to shed light on the main features of Mauthner’sthought, Idrawattention to his long-stand- ing dialogue with both the sceptical tradition and philosophyoflanguage. This con- tribution has nine short sections: the first has an introductory function and illus- tratesseveral aspectsoflinguistic scepticism in the history of philosophy; the second offers acontextualisation of Mauthner’sphilosophyoflanguage; the remain- der present abroad examination of the main features of Mauthner’sthought as fol- lows: the impossibility of knowledge that stems from aradicalisationofempiricism; the coincidencebetween wordand thought,thinkingand speaking;the notion of use, the relevanceoflinguistic habits,and the utopia of communication; the decep- tive metaphors at the root of an epoché of meaning;the new task of philosophyasan exercise of liberation against the limits of language; the controversial relationship between Judaism and scepticism; and the mystical silence as an extreme conse- quence of his thought.² Mauthnerturns scepticism into aform of life and philosophy into acritique of language, and he inauguratesanew approach that is traceable in manyGerman—Jewish
    [Show full text]
  • The Letterists
    The Letterists The Letterism, founded in 1946 by Gabriel Pomerand (1925-1972) and Isidore Isou (1925-2007), uses letters as “sounds” and then as “images.” Poetry turns into music and writing becomes painting. The letterists extend these changing relationships to film, culture and society. In 1952 the movement divides because of diverging objectives: living art or the art of living. Jean-Louis Brau, Guy Debord and Gil Wolman founded the Letterist International to “transcend art”. Marc’O set up the group “Ex- ternalists” to encourage the uprising of youth. The Isouists asserted that their only doctrine came from a single creator. Letterists, for a long time, would remain “badly known or known to be bad”. gation d’un nom et d’un messie and at- tempted alliances such as Réflexions sur André Breton; group lectures on youth up- rising, which Isou would develop in Traité d’économie nucléaire; lectures by Pomer- and on prostitution, pederasty, rain and fine weather, that he published and had him sent to jail, such as his book Lettres ouvertes à un mythe. Le cri et son arch- ange, which Isou wanted to appropriate, led Pomerand to break with him. Isou pub- lished Isou ou la Mécanique des femmes, which brought him legal troubles, like those of Pomerand. 1949 and the beginning of 1950 marked a move to the production of films and paint- From poetic letterism to political letterists: 1946-1952 ings. The documentary filmed about Saint The letter as sound 1946 / 1949 Germain des Près, on which Jacques Barat- Letterism takes its name from the letter that some young people, of the inter-war gen- ier worked with Pomerand starting in 1947, eration, wanted to use in ways other than words, which they believed had been killed by was finished in 1949.
    [Show full text]
  • Sretenovic Dejan Red Horizon
    Dejan Sretenović RED HORIZON EDITION Red Publications Dejan Sretenović RED HORIZON AVANT-GARDE AND REVOLUTION IN YUGOSLAVIA 1919–1932 kuda.org NOVI SAD, 2020 The Social Revolution in Yugoslavia is the only thing that can bring about the catharsis of our people and of all the immorality of our political liberation. Oh, sacred struggle between the left and the right, on This Day and on the Day of Judgment, I stand on the far left, the very far left. Be‑ cause, only a terrible cry against Nonsense can accelerate the whisper of a new Sense. It was with this paragraph that August Cesarec ended his manifesto ‘Two Orientations’, published in the second issue of the “bimonthly for all cultural problems” Plamen (Zagreb, 1919; 15 issues in total), which he co‑edited with Miroslav Krleža. With a strong dose of revolutionary euphoria and ex‑ pressionistic messianic pathos, the manifesto demonstrated the ideational and political platform of the magazine, founded by the two avant‑garde writers from Zagreb, activists of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia, after the October Revolution and the First World War. It was the struggle between the two orientations, the world social revolution led by Bolshevik Russia on the one hand, and the world of bourgeois counter‑revolution led by the Entente Forces on the other, that was for Cesarec pivot‑ al in determining the future of Europe and mankind, and therefore also of the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Cro‑ ats and Slovenes (Kingdom of SCS), which had allied itself with the counter‑revolutionary bloc.
    [Show full text]
  • The Influence of Ludwig Feuerbach's Philosophy
    1 THE INFLUENCE OF LUDWIG FEUERBACH’S PHILOSOPHY UPON THE LIBRETTO OF RICHARD WAGNER’S MUSIC-DRAMA ‘PARSIFAL’ By Paul Heise Research Consultant – The Richard Wagner Society of Florida [email protected] Home Tel: 727-343-0365 Home Add: 2001 55TH St. South Gulfport, FL 33707 ELABORATION OF A TALK PRESENTED TO THE BOSTON WAGNER SOCIETY ON 5/30/07, AT THE WELLESLEY FREE LIBRARY While it is well known that the atheist German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s influence upon Richard Wagner’s libretto for his music-drama The Ring of The Nibelung is great, it is usually assumed that Feuerbach’s influence upon Wagner’s writings and operas dropped off radically after his 1854 conversion to the pessimist philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. For this reason the librettos of Wagner’s other mature music- dramas completed after 1854, namely, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal, are widely regarded as expressions of Wagner’s post-1854 Schopenhauerian phase. It is therefore quite surprising to find in key passages from the libretto of Wagner’s last work for the theater, Parsifal, a remarkable dependence on Feuerbachian concepts. This paper will examine that influence closely. A familiarity with the libretto of Parsifal is assumed. This paper has retained all the extracts from Feuerbach’s and Wagner’s writings (and recorded remarks) discussed in my original talk of 5/30/07. However, a number of key extracts which had to be dropped from the talk due to time constraints have been restored, and other extracts added, both to fill in logical gaps in the talk, and also to address certain questions posed by audience members after the talk.
    [Show full text]