The Aesthetics Of Anarchy

"In this meticulously-researched, in-depth examination of anarchism and modernism, Gurianova provides a new and compelling interpretation of the early Russian avant-garde. Her study has major implications for our understanding of some of the twentieth century’s most important modernists and is an important contribution to the history and theory of radical political thought."— Allan Antliff, author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde. “Gurianova is the first scholar to study the early Russian avant-garde not as a precursor to the Constructivism of the 1920s, but as a distinctive movement in its own right. In this important book, she identifies an “aesthetics of anarchy” that characterized the movement’s politics and poetics—a concept with provocative implications for our understanding of the relationship between word and image. This is a work of original and compelling scholarship that will profoundly alter our understanding of the Russian avant-garde.”— Nancy Perloff, Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), curator of the exhibit Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde (1910-1917).

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

A masterful study of the hidden roots of contemporary culture and should b read by anyone interested in how and why our intellectual landscape has changed quite dramatically since the Victorian era.

The acclaimed Italian philosopher interrogates the concept of creation in art, religion, and economics in this collection of five essays. Creation and the giving of orders are closely entwined in Western culture, where God commands the world into existence and later issues the injunctions known as the Ten Commandments. The arche, or origin, is always also a command, and a beginning is always the first principle that governs and decrees. This is as true for theology, where God not only creates the world but governs and continues to govern through continuous creation, as it is for the philosophical and political tradition according to which beginning and creation, command and will, together form a strategic apparatus without which our society would fall apart. The five essays collected here aim to deactivate this apparatus through a patient archaeological inquiry into the concepts of work, creation, and command. Giorgio Agamben explores every nuance of the arche in search of an an-archic exit strategy. By the book’s final chapter, anarchy appears as the secret center of power, brought to light so as to make possible a philosophical thought that might overthrow both the principle and its command.

This book explores pirate culture as radical social organization: a salty picture of anarchic pirate life, liberated, pleasurable and violent!Rebelling against hierarchical society and choosing the Jolly Roger, pirates entered the political spheres of anarchist organization and festival, with death and violence ever-present. Pirates created an upside-down world full of heroics as well as the deep horrors of life outside authority.Examining piracy as limited social rebellion,The Devil's Anarchy travels from the Hollywood pirate-as-hero to the stories of two great Dutch pirates: Claes Compaen, who terrorized the seas from 1623 to 1627, and Jan Erasmus Reyning, who ruled the seas a half-century later.This unique focus on the politics of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, featuring the first english translations of key Dutch texts, makes this a hugely entertaining book that provides insight into the real lives of these legendary bandits of the seas.

This volume, in honour of John Kay Clegg, consists of papers by rock art researchers from around the world on topics such as aesthetics, the application of statistical analyses, frontier conflict and layered symbolic meanings, the deliberate use of optical illusion, and the contemporary significance of ancient and street art.

"Playfully exploring the intimate relationships between physical media and everyday life: Ford's investigations into, and reflections on, existential nature and the use of conventional materials and modes of presentation reveal ... nuanced contradictions as well as a fascination with process and the filling-in of time. While mostly a creator of laboured drawings, well-considered objects and videos, Ford also provides us with scenarios that have us pondering over the mundane and/or acting out the absurd as he invites us to look deeper into his works and what is taking place around us."--Back cover.