Online research in philosophy

“Else-where” is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production from 2002 through 2011. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the real Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the “Real-Irreal” or “Else-where”). While architecture nominally addresses an environmental ethos, it also famously negotiates its own representational values by way of its putative autonomy (autonomy as self-interest, versus selflessness); its main repression in this regard is “landscape,” figure of the Other and figure of the Real. Engaging forms of spectrality, and not necessarily speculative intelligence per se, architecture is also “conscious” of its own complicity in capitalist orders, a complicity that in part underwrites its avant-garde forms of agitation since the onset of modern architecture. As a result, and over the course of the twentieth century, architectural vanguards have successively been depleted such that they return only as reified half-measures in the late-modern production of difference. As such, the essay “Actually Existing Ground” (2008) examines the failed promise of Landscape Urbanism. Since the 1960s, as with the allied arts, architecture has evacuated many of the utopian gestures given to modernism and embraced a form of ultra-contingency in a direct alliance with the post-modern and post-Marxist concession to markets and to cultural production as principal means of establishing formal hegemony. This recourse or surrender to the economic-determinist ethos of post-modernity, regardless of attempts to problematize it and/or critique it through types of what Manfredo Tafuri has called “operative criticism” (works of architecture as criticism), has, arguably, all but failed, and with the suggestive return circa 2011 of new forms of resistance an exit from the accommodating spirit of the times is indicative of the expectation of strenuous, yet highly formal and non-discursive operations within artistic and architectural production. The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines, inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art, to develop a nuanced critique of an emergent formal regard in the arts that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself – or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”.

If we want to be autonomous, what do we want? The author shows that contemporary value-neutral and metaphysically economical conceptions of autonomy, such as that of Harry Frankfurt, face a serious problem. Drawing on Plato, Augustine, and Kant, this book provides a sketch of how "ancient" and "modern" can be reconciled to solve it. But at what expense? It turns out that the dominant modern ideal of autonomy cannot do without a costly metaphysics if it is to be coherent.

This paper examines the assumptions underpinning one of the constitutive elements of the modern concept of art: the idea of aesthetic autonomy. I argue that the orientation of recent art practice towards what has come to be termed ‘site-specificity’ is best understood as a progressive relinquishment of the principle of aesthetic autonomy. I develop this position through a close analysis of the work of Miwon Kwon. The paper is intended as a case-study that investigates the problematic relation between historical and philosophical enquiry. CiteULike     Connotea     Del.icio.us     What's this?

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion in ideas and theories on art. Art itself has never been more popular, but much recent thinking remains inaccessible and difficult to use. This book assesses the work of leading thinkers (including artists) who are having a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art. Each entry, written by a leading international expert, presents a concise, critical appraisal of a thinker and their contribution to thought about art and its place in the wider cultural context. A guide to the key thinkers who shape today's world of art, this book is a vital reference for anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, its history, theory, philosophy and practice.

language-theoretic attempt to ground a post-liberal theory of democracy on Kant's intuitions concerning subjective autonomy is flawed because it leaves unexamined the internally contradictory experiential content of the Cartesian subject's experience of self. This case is made through reference to aspects of Habermas’ reconstructions of Kant and Mead; iek's criticisms of Kant, Heidegger and Habermas; and Honneth's idea that autonomy, for the post-Cartesian self, involves the ability of the subject to come to terms with the experience of negativity. The article concludes by arguing that a post-liberal account of democracy needs to leave behind the Kantian notion of autonomous subjectivity and base itself on a fundamentally different, post-individualist understanding of the self. Key Words: autonomy • critical theory • democratic theory • Jürgen Habermas • Axel Honneth • subjectivity • Slavojiek.

In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben makes a few but poignant references to Plato’s understanding of art. Because art’s impact was powerful, Plato deemed art dangerous and subordinated it to politics. In contrast, Agamben argues, modern art enjoys the privilege of formal autonomy at the cost of losing political significance. This essay develops the Platonic dimension in Agamben’s thought: whereas Platonic censorship recognizes art’s power by way of prohibition, the modern culturalist tolerance of art is symptomatic of art’s reduction into commodity and of the public indifference toward it.

The thesis examines Charles Taylor's theory of agency and the moral sources that he believes inform our modern notion of the self. Taylor's concept of the strong evaluator is outlined and brought to bear on post-structuralist and postmodernist literary-theoretical positions that attempt to reconcile amoral positions and nonagency with multicultural political demands and the demands of what Taylor calls a "culture of authenticity". In order to do full justice to a theory of art that would incorporate Taylor's concept of agency, however, it becomes necessary to critique the philosopher's account of art, which he derives from widely held doctrines of Romanticism and aesthetic autonomy found in the Western tradition. The concept of a pragmatist approach to art serves as the main argument against Taylor's views, which exclude certain agents and their social experiences. Those agents who do not subscribe to Romantic and high Modernist ideas about art's function can often be said to adopt a pragmatic critique, which takes into account the uses of art in defining modern identities, and exposes the social privilege that has typically accompanied the autonomy that art has been awarded.

This book offers an historical and critical guide to the concepts of the post-modern and the post-industrial. It brings admirable clarity and thoroughness to a discussion of the many different uses made of the term post-modern across a number of different disciplines (including literature, architecture, art history, philosophy, anthropology and geography). It also analyses the concept of the post-industrial society to which the concept of the post-modern has often been related. Dr Rose discusses the work of many theorists in the area, including Hassan, Lyotard, Jameson and the architectural historian Charles Jencks, and also looks at analyses and uses of the concepts of the post-modern and post-industrial by Frampton, Portoghesi, Peter Fuller and others.

The identification of a post-modern art requires the determination of its implicit patterns of signification, as is the case with the modern art’s patterns of signification. In fact, the mere formal and stylistic analyses are not able to distinguish the post-modern art from the modern art. Actually, the specificity of minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture is founded on a phenomenological interpretation of subjective aesthetic experience (the reciprocal glance between who regards and what is regarded) and on a phenomenological interpretation of significance. In other words, this phenomenological interpretation gives a positive content to the concept of post-modern art.