Materialist Aesthetics Research Articles

Rameau´s Nephew as an Essay-Form

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse Diderot’s enigmatic dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew through a different ‘adornian’ lens. Against the canonical Hegelian reading of this dialogue as a symptom of the decadence of critical thinking in enlightenment philosophy, and the Frankfurt School emphasis on the systematic character of Enlightenment thought, I argue that the paradoxical and sometimes pessimistic nature of Rameau’s Nephew contains also some elements for an Enlightenment cure through its aesthetic form. By analysing the philosophical value of the pantomimes and musical performances by the character Rameau, I hope to unveil an aspect of the materialist aesthetics Diderot developed to oppose systematic thinking and the reification of thought at work in the Enlightenment movement of which he was a part.

Review: The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan

Review: The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan

"Vibrating through all its breadth": Musical Fiction and Materialist Aesthetics in the Strand Musical Magazine

The aims of the Strand Musical Magazine were largely practical in nature: articles and advertisements provided information about concerts, festivals, and other events on the Victorian music calendar. Yet, as this essay argues, it also (perhaps unwittingly) participated in key nineteenth-century aesthetic and scientific debates about music's ties to the human body. In several of the short stories published in the Strand Musical Magazine, characters cry, throb, convulse, quiver, and sweat while playing or hearing music. These corporeal events correspond with emerging acoustical and physiological science that understood music in terms of sound waves and bodily vibrations. The Strand Musical Magazine conceived of music not as an intangible, transcendent phenomenon but as a material force rooted in the science of sound.

The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan

The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan

Narrative and Affect in William Gillespie'sKeyhole FactoryandMorpheus: Biblionaut, or, Post-Digital Fiction for the Programming Era

Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie. Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics. My project was prompted by calls for more in-depth critical interpretations of works of electronic literature; an appreciation of how Gillespie problematises tropes of proximity and distance used to characterise modes of critical reading; and a desire to explain Gillespie's commitment to both conceptual, constraint-based writing practices (facilitated by computational media) and the intentional production of meaningful narrative affect. Ultimately, my analyses showcase Gillespie's countertextual achievement: assembling a network of texts, both electronic and analogue, that functions as a literary ecosystem resistant to the instrumentalism of the neoliberal publishing industry. Gillespie's Spineless Books provides an exemplary model of and working platform for collaborative, conceptual, and countertextual literary writing across media.

Earth Forces: Contemporary Land Arts, Technology and New Materialist Aesthetics

This article addresses recent art projects that are discussed under the notion of new materialist aesthetics. This term is used to elaborate connections between these projects and their methods and recent discussions of the nonhuman and posthuman philosophy. The article also elaborates some positions in technological or 'media art' practices that work on hardware and infrastructure but also on the geophysical underpinnings of media. It expands on more geocentric perspectives in art and aesthetics through connecting a range of such projects by a contemporary artists including Martin Howse, Jonathan Kemp, Ryan Jordan, Terike Haapoja, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier to the body of land art (as represented by Robert Smithson) and current new materialist discussions.

Getting the Joke in “Of Being Numerous”: George Oppen as Heir to Walt Whitman's Public Poetics

In the summer of 1960, George Oppen (1908-84) remarked in a letter to his friend William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), People who are afraid to talk won't produce much poetry. Tho Whitman has been no use to me (Selected Letters 38-39). His comment recalls something Whitman (1819-92) said in a letter to one of his friends, William Sloane Kennedy (1850-1929), in 1887: It is of no importance whether I had read [Ralph Waldo] Emerson [1803-82] before starting L. of G. [Leaves of Grass (1855)] or not. The fact happens to be positively that I had (Correspondence IV 69). Taken in isolation, both statements are misleading (if not outright lies), though the date and context of Oppen's letter leaves open the possibility that he was referring to his early career, prior to his long hiatus from poetry, which began in 1935. When Oppen returned to writing poems in 1958, he soon found a use for Whitman. One of the first poems Oppen wrote upon returning, I Sing, published in the January 1960 issue of Poetry, portrays Whitman as a kind of poetic foil for Oppen's more sober regard for working-class Americans. The book in which this poem was collected, The Materials (1962), reveals a sophisticated engagement with Whitman, stressing Whitman's materialist aesthetics and linguistic theories. Oppen's response intensified in his best-known and most widely celebrated work, Being (the title poem of Of Being Numerous [1968]), which responds directly to Song of Myself (1855). Here, Oppen portrays a Civil War-era Whitman and concludes by using Whitman's words-a letter he wrote to his mother in 1864-and manipulating them with a deceptively simple yet telling formal gesture. While other modernist poets' reactions to Whitman have received greater focus, only Oppen devoted his best-known and most ambitious work to the task of responding to and revising Whitman's conception of a public poetry for Americans. In these poems and in his interviews, notes, and letters, Oppen relates himself to the Whitmanic vision in a more thorough and telling manner than his better-known modernist peers, many of whom issued more brazen public statements on Whitman but showed little of Oppen's nuance in interpreting and revising Whitman's reception.Oppen's engagement with Whitman is rich and broadly significant for American poetics, but there has been little critical commentary on his response. Outside of a handful of brief references in a few essays and early reviews, only two critics have approached their relationship. Peter O'Leary (b. 1968) analyzes some details of Oppen's response in Being Numerous, and Zack Finch (birth date unknown) compares how the two poets portray the human body and interpret the importance of physical contact.1 The paucity of commentary on what seems an obvious subject, especially given Oppen's increasing acclaim and critical stature, can be partially explained by Oppen's early reception, which focused on his relationships to Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who helped launch his career by writing the preface to Oppen's first book, Discrete Series (1934);2 to Louis Zukofsky (1904-78), a onetime mentor with whom Oppen later experienced an acrimonious split; and to William Carlos Williams, whose minimalist style and emphasis on direct perception of the outside world made him a natural touchstone for early readers. Even after Oppen portrayed Whitman and used his letter to conclude Being Numerous, few seemed to grasp Whitman's importance to Oppen's poetry. While in their visual appearance on the page, Oppen's poems look more like Williams's, Oppen himself realized that, in attempting a populist poetics and in developing his ideas regarding individual ethics and poetic responsibility, he would need to come to terms with his more loquacious poetic ancestor. Using Whitman variously as foil, icon, compatriot, and source text, Oppen developed some of Whitman's most important themes into perhaps the most distinctive and persuasive statement on the problem of a public poetics in the United States since Whitman's own Song of Myself. …

John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality

Materialist and historicist approaches to Keats have given us a Keats who thumbs his nose at conventional aesthetics, and the class assumptions buried within aesthetics. Christopher Ricks showed us how attuned Keats was to adolescent embarrassment, and how those nuances challenged an aesthetics that wanted nothing to do with embarrassment. Marjorie Levinson then demonstrated Keats’s efforts to parade his middle-classness with an ‘aggressively and absolutely superficial’ verbal materiality, one that ‘deconstructs humanistic seriousness altogether’. More recently, Christopher Rovee situates Keats within a contemporary debate about museums and waste that manifests ‘the predicament of art in capitalist modernity’, where wasting time is a luxury. Together, these approaches question the relation of surface to depth, while rereading Keats’s surfaces as forms of depth that question conventional depth even as they equate that depth to ideology. These versions of materiality also share an interest in materialist determinism: Keats’s social class matters for it shapes his ideology. The bases for such determinism are 1) the idea that materialism trumps idealism and 2) the idea that materialism trumps idealism because it conditions idealism and aesthetics. I seek instead a materialist possibility and a materialist aesthetics that embraces possibility, and in so doing, I am reminded of the Romantic desire to see into the life of things. The goal of this essay is to begin to reorient our accounts of Romantic materiality and aesthetics toward possibility, not determinism. I begin by thinking about how materialist determinism works in Romantic criticism. I then turn to Keats and Romantic theories of matter to suggest ways in which materiality need not be endorsed at the expense of ideality, especially since as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us, ‘the concrete is (as Hegel points out) the most abstract concept we have’. I conclude by thinking about how theories of Romantic matter might reopen questions of the aesthetic so that it cannot be automatically subsumed by ideology.

Art and/or Revolution: The Matter of Painting in Postwar Japan

Japanese art critics of the 1950s perceived the locus of a new materialist aesthetics in the new trends of informal abstraction emanating from the United States and France. This revealed a stark contrast with the idea of individual freedom that informed North-American discourse on Abstract Expressionism. Focusing on the writings of Miyakawa Atsushi, Haryū Ichirō, and Segi Shinichi, this article explores the political significance of the question of matter in Japanese postwar art criticism and indicates its importance for the subsequent development of avant-garde art in 1960s Japan.

Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796, John Barrell, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000

AbstractThis review essay has two divisions. In its first division it sets out a brief overview of recent Marxist research in the field of ‘Romanticism’, identifying two major lines of inquiry. On the one hand, the attempt to expand our sense of what might constitute a ruthless critique of social relations; on the other, an attempt to develop a materialist account of aesthetic disengagement. This first division concludes with an extended summary of John Barrell’s account of the treason trials of the middle 1790s, as set out in his bookImagining the King’s Death. It argues that Barrell’s book is the most significant recent work belonging to the second line of inquiry. In its second division the review responds to Barrell’s concluding discussion, in which the aesthetic consequences of the treason trials are established by means of a close reading of some of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The division finishes with some more general remarks on the subject of a materialist aesthetics of disengagement.

“A Squeeze of the Invisible Hand: Materialist Aesthetics and Capitalism in Moby-Dick”

“A Squeeze of the Invisible Hand: Materialist Aesthetics and Capitalism in Moby-Dick”

A Calligraphy of Time: Allegory (Dis)orders in the Materialist Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man

This piece thematizes the material activity – accidentality – of time and its recursive flight from aesthetic categorization: how time brings order and disorder to, allegorically bifurcates, the scene of meaning-productive reading. ‘In what ways does ‘material’ inscription efface ‘artistic’ metaphors, their function and place in philosophy?’ A response to that issue, explored below, is: chrono-calligraphical.

Concrete abstractions — a Della Volpean perspective on studio practice as research

The Ph.D. in Studio Practice at the University of Leeds was set up on broadly Della Volpean lines. The programme is intended to embody and enable the dialectical interrelation of practical theory and theoretical practice so as to recognize the concrete materiality of studio practice as research, rather than envisaging studio work existing with an (often) under-theorized theory of theory ‘bolted on’ as cognitive support or intellectual crutch. The aim was to create an experimental space for high-level studio research, where the research-as-artwork would be recognized as cognitively equivalent, if methodologically and generically distinct, from research in other doctoral areas where the textual is the norm. This is not of course to preclude that a studio practice might indeed be primarily ‘textual’, but merely to emphasize the dialectics at play. In this conception, the work of the Italian philosopher Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968) has served as a very useful methodological mentor. Della Volpe's work, mostly untranslated into English, encompassed three interrelating fields: moral philosophy, philosophical logic, and materialist aesthetics. The author takes the interrelations amongst these apparently discrete areas as paradigmatic of a method of conceiving studio work as material practice, on a par with, if distinct from, other epistemological areas such as the sciences.

‘O, are you not being Phil?’: notes towards a materialist aesthetics of neo-symbolist performance

This article is a playwright's reflection on his continuing evolution into becoming a performer in his own anti-illusionist theatre. His search is for an anti-ideological aesthetic rooted in the kind of direct associative experience that is accessed by performance. The article outlines the impact on his own thinking of, for example, meme theory (Susan Blackmore) and Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of Mind. ‘I continue to experiment towards a materialist performance that reveals otherwise invisible ideological processes without plunging into irrationalism.’

WOMEN HOLLERING TRANSFRONTERIZA FEMINISMS

The publication of texts by Chicana feminists in the 1980s offered an alternative mapping of feminist literary cartographies and subject positions. This article examines the work of contemporary Chicana writer, Sandra Cisneros, whose literary text enacts a practice of Chicana feminism that engages with a transnational, transfronteriza practice of feminismo popular, which literally translates as ‘popular feminism’. This type of border feminism articulates a feminist materialist aesthetics that enables us to re-examine an emergent formation of feminism on the border, a formation characterized by specific types of movements of Mexican women across geopolitical boundaries and borders. The complex movements of this transnational Chicana feminism are announced in the story ‘Woman Hollering Creek’, which complicates the binarisms of the metropolitan opposed to the rural, the core and periphery, and militates against a reductionist opposition of First World versus Third World. I argue that armed with a transfrontera feminism, the protagonist Cleofilas and her peers can resist the power of a transnational media. This story changes the subject of dominant, patriarchal discourse and lets readers imagine how Chicana transfrontera feminism and Mexican feminismo popular can converge in other spaces and under other circumstances to produce socially nuanced global Chicana Mexicana coalitions.

Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies.

Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies.

Literature and Art as Ideological Form

N TWO PREVIOUS theoretical essays I have endeavored to situate the concept of aesthetic at the center of an attempt to conceive the theory of art more concretely on the basis of reflection theory than has hitherto been the case.1 The essays seek to define aesthetic as unified process which includes the producer, the art product, and the recipient; to work out the dialectical, that is, the processive, dynamic character of artistic production and reception as well as the specific form of cognition articulated in this process. The basic question of the theory of aesthetic is: what kind of knowledge, or cognition does art mediate? It is question concerned with the cognitive (in the widest sense) function of art, but which does not thereby mean that the theory of art should be simply identified with the theory of aesthetic or that art should be reduced to knowledge or even scientific knowledge. The theory of aesthetic explores specific aspect of materialist aesthetics. Its questions are developed within the framework of the subsuming question of the function and significance of art, its place in the social and historical process. Its starting point is the fact that certain knowledge, certain contents of certain view of the world, certain attitudes, values, and norms-whatever they are, however right or wrong-are articulated in and mediated by art. What then is the nature of this mediated by art? What are the criteria of its truth and untruth? Under what conditions and in what form is this formulated and mediated? How are we to understand the relation to reality, the quality and scope, the genesis and function of this cognition? What does it actually mean when we speak of art as a form of social consciousness, as ideology or ideological form? This epistemological dimension of the theory of art reveals itself,

Sense of Beauty and Beauty

The debate on the problems in aesthetics now is focused on the most basic question, the question of whether beauty is subjective or objective. More than a year of debate has shown that idealism still has great influence. The reason for this is that, on the one hand, idealist aesthetics offers explanations, which although fictitious, are capable of misleading people; and on the other hand, mechanical materialist aesthetics provides only mechanical and vulgar explanations of the problems in aesthetics, and it leaves loopholes in its attacks on idealist aesthetics.

The Basic Difference Between Materialist and Idealist Aesthetics

The study of aesthetics and the theories of literature and art is directly related to the creation and criticism of literature and art and is indirectly related to the aesthetic education of the people's spirit and the beautification of their life. Undoubtedly, this is an important component of cultural science. However, there is no denying that this is also a weak link in our research work. And it is precisely because of the weakness of this link that we have failed to do a good job in promoting the development of literature and art and instead have allowed reactionary idealism room to function and counterrevolutionary elements opportunity to take advantage of. This was why the Hu Feng counterrevolutionary clique's sabotage activities were mainly conducted through the clique's so-called literary and artistic work. Despite the fact that the reactionary essence of Hu Feng's theory of literature and art has been exposed from all sides, there is still the need for a serious and thorough criticism of the aest...