A new journal put together by some great folks here in Greensboro. Check it out at:
Backwards City
I am enjoying Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Only read the foreword yesterday by Jochen Schulte-Sasse:
The historical avant-garde as an assault on the autonomy of art.
True and false vs. right and wrong.
Adorno's critique of the culture industry as a "circle of manipulation and retroactive need."
However, the question is whether the attempt to dominate cultural life is successful?
"Poststructuralism excludes from the start the possibility that there might exist a material organization of social reality external to language and imprinted on our psyche (and physical being), written into our existence via the mechanisms of material as well as cultural reproduction."
In other words:
"Just as the play of signifiers contradicts and undermines any claim of possessing a well-defined, conceptually unequivocal, logocentric discourse, so material experience may contradict and undermine the prevalent ideology of a historical situtation."
So, "if material, unarticulated experiences exist, and if their effect is a psychic tension . . . then different degrees of verbal approximation and, thus, of conscious understanding are possible."
A poetics of unarticulated experience seems to depend on access to the public sphere of production.
"The ideological ruptures in every historical situtation enable us to develop alternatives of thought that do approximate an understanding of experience."
Both Adorno and Derrida's theories are limiting because "they take capitalist, bourgeois society to be closed, a monolith without ruptures that allow intervening practice."
Breton: "Experience has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge."
So to give "voice" to "experience" via ideological ruptures.
The poetics of experience as not mimetic/empirical.
Experience as a rupture.
Jochen: "it is not the opposition between cognition as copy and cognition as production that is at stake but the question regarding the preconditions of cognition that are embedded in social development."