Red, Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics

This paper tries to show that black nationalist movements have been pervasively influential on the music and visual culture of the world. In particular, it focuses on the Marcus Garvey movement and some of its religious expressions or extensions - Rastafarianism and the Nation of Gods and Earths - and on reggae and hip hop music. This is also an illustration of a wider conceptual point: that political ideologies are not only constellations of texts and doctrines but multi-media aesthetic environments. Race itself is articulated in aesthetic categories, not only in terms of body appearance and color, but in cultural productions such as music and visual arts, while questions about what art is, or what are the data of aesthetics, cannot be answered in isolation from racial or other social/economic/political categories

Berleant\u27s Opening

Throughout modernity, aesthetics had been marked by a significant narrowing of its subject matter, the early peak of this trend being Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness and modernist formalism based on distance. Arnold Berleant’s mission in aesthetics has been to re-open its domain towards all elements of every-day life, including consumer products, political systems, and the environment. By defining the aesthetic field as an environment of continuity between the self and the non-self, Berleant has managed to transform the Kantian subject-object relation into one of unity. However, the paper argues that such an environmental aesthetics requires a basically realist or materialist ontology of perceiving bodies in a physical environment that seems incompatible with the sort of ontology Berleant deploys. Thus, in Berleant’s perspective, a sensory or aesthetic field and a material, partly-external environment seem to be two ways of articulating the same space. But this elides or collapses a series of key distinctions. The paper argues that the status of “woods” or “mountains” as objects outside our sensorium, objects not constituted by interpretation, is ultimately needed for a fully responsive and responsible environmental ethics and aesthetics. Nevertheless, despite this difficulty, Berleant’s opening in aesthetics is extremely salubrious

The Shape of the World: What if Aesthetic Properties Were Real?

Perhaps we should entertain the idea that aesthetic properties are no less (but no more) objective than properties like weight or shape. Indeed, the weight and shape of something are themselves aesthetic properties of that thing. And we might speculate or (what the heck) assert that aesthetic properties are no more (but no less) socially constructed than size or material composition, for example. Indeed the size and material composition of something are aesthetic properties of it. We might, that is, live in an aesthetic universe, live embedded in an aesthetic reality. Then, for example, to give a full description of any thing or phenomenon, we would have to resort to aesthetic categories: perhaps there is no natural science, for example, without aesthetics, and vice versa. On a good day, the universe might really, actually, truly be beautifu

Los Beatles frente a los Stones: la última palabra

Se reproduce a continuación un capítulo del libro The Rolling Stones and the philosophy, publicado recientemente en lengua inglesa, en el que más de veinte pensadores reflexionan sobre el significado cultural, social y político de su música. Publicado en la colección Popular Culture and Philosophy, se trata de plantear interrogantes profundos a partir de manifestaciones culturales cotidianas y acercar la especulación filosófica al hombre de la calle

Rocking and Reasoning: Randall Auxier’s Sharp Reflections on Rock Music, Philosophy and Life

Preview: /Review of Randall Auxier’s, Metaphysical Graffiti: Deep Cuts in the Philosophy of Rock (Chicago: Open Court, 2017), 396 pages.

The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren

The Practical Anarchist brings to light the work of Josiah Warren, eccentric American genius. Devoting his life to showing the practicality of an astonishing ideal, Warren devoted equal industry to the question of how to make a pair of shoes and how to remake the social world into an individualist paradise. This will be the first chance for many readers to encounter Warren’s writings, and in many cases their first publication since their original appearance in obscure, self-published periodicals, including The Peaceful Revolutionist (1833), the first American anarchist periodical. Moreover, they often appeared in a bizarre experimental typography. This volume presents, out of the welter of bewildering writings left by Warren, a reading text designed for today’ readers and students. It seeks to convey the practical value of many of Warren’s ideas, their continuing relevance

What the Drug Culture Meant

For American kids in the 1970s, the term "drugs" referred to more than chemical compounds or plant extracts, more than a disease or a relief. Drugs, particularly marijuana and psychedelics, had cultural and counter-cultural meaning; they were, for us, symbols of the fact that we were different sorts of people than our parents and principals and political leaders: more open-minded, as it were, and more adventurous. Drugs were aesthetic (they affected our music and design arts and our heads fundamentally) and they were political, signaling anti-authoritarianism or an entire rejection of "the establishment." The term 'drug culture' is a sensible representation of the scope of the symbolic and economic activity; the drug culture was our native land. It was a resistant ethos, with rituals and sacred texts (by Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, and Carlos Castaneda, for example), an underground world featuring, let's say, a third of the American population. We staked way too much of our lives and identities on substance abuse, I admit, gave drugs a symbolic weight that they cannot and really should not bear. But the power of the drug culture was in large measure derived from the sheer fact of illegality. In being part of it, each of us was a criminal, and we were all criminals together. That what we were doing was illegal is part of what made it seem, for a time, like a form of resistance