Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Critical Essays (1982)

Among the twelve scintillating essays by a German poet, translator, critic and playwright presented here are “The Industrialization of the Mind”, “Poetry and Politics”, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media”, “Toward a Theory of Treason”, “Tourists of the Revolution”, “A Critique of Political Ecology” and “Two Notes on the End of the World”.

Edited by Reinhold Grimm, Bruce Armstrong
Translated by Michael Roloff, Stuart Hood, Judith Ryan, David Fernbach and Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Foreword by John Simon
Introduction by Reinhold Grimm
Publisher Continuum, New York, 1982
German Library series
ISBN 0826402585, 9780826402585
250 pages

Review (Heinz D. Osterle, The German Quarterly, 1986, in German)
Review (Kathy Acker, Artforum, 1983, very low resolution)

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Martin Puchner: Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2005)

“Poetry of the Revolution tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from the Communist Manifesto to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto–what Marx called the ‘poetry’ of the revolution–was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires. When it intruded into the sphere of art, the manifesto created an art in its own image: shrill and aggressive, political and polemical. The result was “manifesto art”–combinations of manifesto and art that fundamentally transformed the artistic landscape of the twentieth century.

Central to modern politics and art, the manifesto also measures the geography of modernity. The translations, editions, and adaptations of such texts as the Communist Manifesto and the Futurist Manifesto registered and advanced the spread of revolutionary modernity and of avant-garde movements across Europe and to the Americas. The rapid diffusion of these manifestos was made “possible by networks–such as the successive socialist internationals and international avant-garde movements–that connected Santiago and Zurich, Moscow and New York, London and Mexico City. Poetry of the Revolution thus provides the point of departure for a truly global analysis of modernism and modernity.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2005
Translation/Transnation series
ISBN 1400844126, 9781400844128
336 pages
via delery

Reviews: Gregory Byala (Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature), Randy Martin (The Drama Review), Matthew Rebhorn (Modern Drama), Laura A. Winkiel (Modernism/Modernity), Gavin Grindon (Papers of Surrealism).

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See also the entry on Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki.

Ken Knabb (ed.): Situationist International Anthology (1981/2006)

“In 1957 a few experimental European groups stemming from the radical tradition of dadaism and surrealism, but seeking to avoid the cooption to which those movements succumbed, came together to form the Situationist International. The name came from their aim of liberating everyday life through the creation of open-ended, participatory “situations” (as opposed to fixed works of art) — an aim which naturally ran up against the whole range of material and mental obstacles produced by the present social order. Over the next decade the situationists developed an increasingly incisive critique of the global ‘spectacle-commodity system’ and of its bureaucratic leftist pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then — although the SI itself was dissolved in 1972 — situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents in dozens of countries all over the world.

The SI Anthology, generally recognized as the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English, presents a chronological survey of the group’s activities and development as reflected in articles from its French journal and in a variety of leaflets, pamphlets, filmscripts and internal documents, ranging from their early experiments in urban “psychogeography” and cultural subversion to their lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam war, the Prague Spring, the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” and other crises and upheavals of the sixties.

A greatly revised, and expanded edition, with over 100 pages of new material.”

First published in 1981
Translated by Ken Knabb
Publisher Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, CA, 2006
No copyright. Any of the texts in this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without mentioning the source.
ISBN 0939682044, 9780939682041
532 pages
via quackalist

Reviews: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996), Not Bored! (2007).

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