40,006 research outputs found
Heideggerian Marxism
An extended review of the English collection of Marcuse's essays and interviews on Heidegger that addresses the philosophical basis of a synthesis of Marx and Heidegger
Situating Martin Heideggerâs claim to a âproductive dialogueâ with Marxism
This critical review aims to more fully situate the claim Martin Heidegger makes in âLetter on Humanismâ that a âproductive dialogueâ between his work and that of Karl Marx is possible. The prompt for this is Paul Laurence Hemmingâs recently published Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (2013) which omits to fully account for the historical situation which motivated Heideggerâs seemingly positive endorsement of Marxism. This piece will show that there were significant external factors which influenced Heideggerâs claim and that, when seen within his broader corpus, these particular comments in âLetter on Humanismâ are evidently disingenuous, given that his general opinion of Marxism can only be described as vitriolic. Any attempt to explore how such a âproductive dialogueâ could be construed must fully contextualise Heideggerâs claim for it. This piece will aim to do that, and more broadly explore Heideggerâs general opinion of Marxism
Eco-aesthetic dimensions: Herbert Marcuse, ecollogy and art
In his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse argued that a concern for aesthetics is justified when political change is unlikely. But the relation between aesthetics and politics is oblique: âArt cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness ⊠of the men and women who could change the world.â (p. 33). Marcuse also linked his critique of capitalism to environmentalism in the early 1970s: âthe violation of the Earth is a vital aspect of the counterrevolution.â (Ecology and Revolution, in The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers 3, 2005, p. 173). This article revisits Marcuseâs ideas on aesthetics and ecology, and reviews two recent art projects which engage their audiences in ecological issues: The Jetty Project (2014) by Wolfgang Weilederâwhich used recycled material and community participation to construct a temporary monument within a wider conservation project on the Tyne, N-E Englandâand Fracking Futures by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen)âwhich turned the interior of the gallery at FACT, Liverpool, into what appeared to be a fracking site. The aim is not to evaluate the projects, nor to test the efficacy of Marcuseâs ideas, more to ask again whether art has a role in a shift of attitude which might contribute to dealing with the political and economic causes of climate change
Cultural consumption and the myth of âlife-styleâ
The concept of âlife-styleâ seems to have been thoroughly naturalised, both academically and in common parlance.There is little critical interrogation of what âlife-styleâ involves, beyond its connection to cultural and aesthetic aspects of consumption. What are the implications of accepting this culturalised description of consumption and its shorthand designation, âlifestyleâ? This polemical paper interrogates both the linguistic and conceptual challenges associated with the term, and argues that it acts to efface and erase important social differences of wealth, opportunity, class, gender and ethnicity, as well as obscuring global and historical inequalities
Taking great pains: critical theory, affective pedagogies and radical democracy
The consolidation of neoliberal capitalism over the past decade has been intense, as has the articulation of critical and creative responses to it. One of the most remarkable is the turn towards forms of political resistance that seek liberation from the logics of state and capital while â or through â simultaneously creating alternative, radically democratic modes of existence. Many of these draw on anarchistic and autonomist traditions of critical theory which assert the possibility of prefiguring alternative political projects as well as critiquing existing ones, thus appearing to transcend what Herbert Marcuse described as a âvicious circleâ of liberation (1964, 1967). We have thus seen a proliferation of work on problems of prefigurative politics, autonomy, co-operation and self-valorisation; significantly, there is renewed attention to pedagogy in critical theory and as a political practice. However, there is still little attention to the affective and social labour that this type of prefigurative theory and practice requires, or to the systemic critique of the conditions of possibility for it to constitute a challenge to neoliberalism. My concern is that these lacunae can lead to misinterpretations of the meaning of radical democracy and of its possibilities and limitations as a challenge to the logics of neoliberal capitalism and other forms of dehumanising power. In this paper, I draw on work with British-based cultural workers who are active in radical-democratic projects to illustrate how bringing practical work into conversation with critical theories of political subjectivity, on the one hand, and theories of affective pedagogy and politics, on the other, can contribute to strengthening both theories and practices of radical democracy
On the attenuation coefficient of monomode periodic waveguides
It is widely accepted that, on ensemble average, the transmission T of guided
modes decays exponentially with the waveguide length L due to small
imperfections, leading to the important figure of merit defined as the
attenuation-rate coefficient alpha = -/L. In this letter, we evidence
that the exponential-damping law is not valid in general for periodic monomode
waveguides, especially as the group velocity decreases. This result that
contradicts common beliefs and experimental practices aiming at measuring alpha
is supported by a theoretical study of light transport in the limit of very
small imperfections, and by numerical results obtained for two waveguide
geometries that offer contrasted damping behaviours
Spartan Daily, March 13, 1972
Volume 59, Issue 80https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5593/thumbnail.jp
- âŠ