Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989–) [English, Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, advertising, bourgeoisie, city, commodification, critical theory, cultural criticism, fashion, flaneur, history, literary criticism, literature, paris, photography, poetry
“Walter Benjamin‘s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.
Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.
The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ‘ur-form’ of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.
Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of ‘dialectics at a standstill’. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.”
Publisher MIT Press, 1989
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Series
ISBN 0262022680
493 pages
Reviews: Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New German Critique, 1990), Robert Tobin (Phil and Lit, 1991), James L. Gussen (Germanic Review, 1992), Erika Berroth (J Germanic Linguistics, 1994), Beste Alpay (Montréal Review, 2011).
Publisher (EN)
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (English, 22 MB, updated on 2019-12-3)
Dialectica de la mirada: Walter Benjamin y el proyecto de los Pasajes (Spanish, trans. Nora Rabotnikof, 1995, updated on 2013-5-2)
Joan Retallack: The Poethical Wager (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, life, music, poethics, poetry
In these highly inventive essays, Joan Retallack, acclaimed poet and essayist, conveys her unique post-utopian vision as she explores the relationship between art and life in today’s chaotic world. In the tradition of the essay as complex humanist exploration, she engages ideas from across history: Aristotle’s definition of happiness, Epicurus’s swerve into unpredictable possibility, Montaigne’s essays as an instrument of self-invention, John Cage’s redefinition of Silence. Within her unifying rubric of poethics, Retallack gives the reader plenty of surprises with a wonderful range of examples, situations, and texts through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from Gertrude Stein’s favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental feminine, a John Cage performance—all serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a “complex realism.”
Publisher University of California Press, 2003
ISBN 0520218418, 9780520218413
279 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-4-3)
View online (HTML, added on 2014-4-3)
Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, 1-27 (1977-1993)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · activism, art, education, feminism, film, literature, poetry, politics, theatre, women
Classic feminist art magazine from the 1970s through the 1990. Collectively produced issues featured a wide variety of artists’ work, essays, prose and poetry.
The founding members of the Heresies Collective included Patsy Beckert, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Elizabeth Hess, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Mary Miss, Marty Pottenger, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Snyder, May Stevens, Michelle Stuart, Susana Torre, Elizabeth Weatherford, and Sally Webster.
Publisher Heresies Collective, New York
ISSN 0146-3411
via Heresies PDF Archive
The Heretics, trailer of documentary film by Joan Braderman, 10 min, 2009
View article index
Heresies 1: Feminism, Art and Politics (Jan 1977)
Heresies 2: Patterns of Communication and Space Among Women (May 1977)
Heresies 3: Lesbian Art and Artists (Fall 1977)
Heresies 4: Women’s Traditional Arts – The Politics of Aesthetics (1978)
Heresies 5: The Great Goddess (1978)
Heresies 6: On Women and Violence (Summer 1978)
Heresies 7: Women Working Together (Spring 1979)
Heresies 8: Third World Women (1979)
Heresies 9: Organized Women Divided (1980)
Heresies 10: Women and Music (1980)
Heresies 11: Making Room – Women and Architecture (1981)
Heresies 12: Sex Issue (1981)
Heresies 13: Earthkeeping / Earthshaking: Feminism & Ecology (1981)
Heresies 14: The Women’s Pages (1982)
Heresies 15: Racism is the Issue (1982)
Heresies 16: Film / Video / Media (1983)
Heresies 17: Acting Up!: Women in Theater and Performance (1984)
Heresies 18: Mothers, Mags, and Movie Stars – Feminism and Class (1985)
Heresies 19: Satire (1985)
Heresies 20: Heresies (1985)
Heresies 21: Food is a Feminist Issue (1987)
Heresies 22: Art in Unestablished Channels (1987)
Heresies 23: Coming of Age (1988)
Heresies 24: 12 Years (Anniversary Issue) (1989)
Heresies 25: The Art of Education (1990)
Heresies 26: A Journal of Feminist Post-Totalitarian Criticism (1992)
Heresies 27: LATINA – A Journal of Ideas (1993)
Download all 27 issues (ZIP’d PDFs)
See also the exhibition catalogue En Foco / Heresies Collective, New York: The New Museum, 1983, 48 pp (added on 2018-12-30).
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