Walter Benjamin: between academic fashion and the avant-garde

In the present context of the triumph of capitalism over real socialism, this article points out that, despite their ideological differences, both systems are bound to the same conception of history-as-progress. In contrast, it recalls Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, marked by the critique of progress in the name of a revolutionary time, which interrupts history's chronological continuum. Benjamin's perspective is used to study the conflict of temporalities among the Soviet artists in the two decades after the October Revolution: on the one hand, the anarchic, autonomous and critical time of interruption – which is the time of avant-gade –, on the other hand, the synchronization with the ideas of a progressive time as ordered by the Communist Patty; this is the time of vanguard, whose capitalist Counterpart is fashion.Nestes tempos de triunfo do capitalismo sobre o socialismo real, o presente artigo mostra que, apesar de suas diferences ideológicas, ambos os sistemas baseiamse numa concepcão da história como progresso. Contrastivamente, é lembrada a filosofia da história de Walter Benjamin, marcada pela crítica do progresso e a concepção de um tempo revolucionário, que interrompe o continuum histórico. A luz da teoria benjaminiana é estudado o conflito de concepções de tempo entre os artistas soviéticos das duas décadas posteriores à Revolução de Outubro de 1917: de um lado, o tempo da interrupção, anárquico, autônomo e crítico – que é o tempo da avat-garde –, do outro lado, a sincronização com una idéia de um tempo progressivo tal como foi decretado pelo Partido Comunista; este é o tempo das vanguardas, cuja contrapartida capitalista é a moda

'Non-violent Resistance is Forceful'

Joanna Kusiak: You’re a politically engaged philosopher. You’ve signed a letter of support for Occupy Wall Street and CUNY’s student protests, you talk about OWS during your philosophical seminar and at the same time you claim there is no political ontology. Why? Susan Buck-Morss: My prejudice against ontology comes from reading Adorno and his virulent criticism of existential ontology as he sees it so powerfully expressed in Heidegger, but then leading to such disastrous political consequenc..

The show must go on: making money glamorizing oppression

This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the glamorization of the courtesan image as proposed by Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge. The film sparked the appearance of high-street fashion inspired by the image of the 19th-century Parisian courtesan, which prompted the authors to examine how and why such images might appeal to female consumers. The critical analysis reaches beyond the images themselves to identify and discuss the modes of circulation of such images, and their function in achieving both the material ends of capitalism (ever-increasing consumption and production) and the promotion of one of the system’s core values (patriarchy). Moreover, the article hopes to illustrate the possibilities offered by integrating cultural and structural analyses of current social phenomena

‘Born to Shop’: Malls, Dream-Worlds and Capitalism

It has been twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a new generation, untouched by the previous communist regimes, has come to adulthood throughout the post-communist world. The Iulius Group’s logo – ‘Born to shop!’ – suggests that these are born shoppers: the capitalist babies of Central and Eastern Europe who are sustaining the largest growth in retail and shopping malls in Europe. With no living memory of shortages, queuing, or government restrictions, they know only the limit of their own – or their parents’ – pocket/credit. Their world could not be more different from the one that their parents and grandparents experienced: both the abundance of goods and services, as well as the opulent settings under which they are now sold, offer striking visual contrasts to the not-so-distant past. In addition, the very experience of consumption is directly connected to the way in which the current social fabric – and new social divisions within it – is interwoven with the physical and architectural changes taking place in the urban setting

Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form

Abstract Contemporary artworks in Northern Ireland are explored here as critical constellations, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, that engage the cultural processes of transition through their problematisation of it. It is argued that the artworks become sites in which the assumptions of transition are opened up for critical reflection, requesting attention to the foreclosing of the meanings of memory, of past-and-future, of community. A mode of critical questioning of the present renders the present problematic not in terms of exclusions nor with reference to a past that cannot or will not be erased, but in terms of the present’s inability to be conceived through a linear conception of time. That is, the past and its relation to both the present and to the future are set in oscillation as artworks explore the complex temporalities of a present self-consciously attempting to narrate itself away from the past. The artworks, ‘without the bigotry of conviction’ as Seamus Deane put it, suggest that the task of dealing with the past is flawed wherever the past is conceived as a history that can be rendered present to be judged by subjects who are thereby placed beyond it. That is the illusion of a present ‘no-time’ that dovetails with the desires of commercial enterprise and neo-liberal conceptions of freedom. If this suggests an unceasing restlessness, the consolation is that this questioning does take a form, not as judgement or political decision but as artworks which by definition, remain open to reinterpretation and new understandings. These issues are discussed with reference to the work of four artists in Northern Ireland: the paintings of Rita Duffy, the photography and installation work of Anthony Haughey, and the sculptural works of Philip Napier and Mike Hogg

Following the Money: The Wire and Distant American Studies

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show’s didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its “openly class-based” politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identity