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Artful Visions: Aesthetic Possibility and Social Transformation in Zizek, Hardt and Negri, Foucault, and the New Relational Art

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Abstract:
This dissertation brings together the work of a group of contemporary social theorists, art critics, and artists, including Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, critic Nicolas Bourriaud, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who explore the potential of the aesthetic to address the social and subjective fragmentation and the cultural nihilism of contemporary capitalist modernity. Placing their output within the tradition of the "philosophical discourse of modernity" as formalized by Jürgen Habermas, the dissertation investigates the ways in which these theorists and artists attempt to harness the aesthetic as a form of praxis and thus a force of social and subjective intervention and change. Charting the ways in which these thinkers propose to rewrite the contemporary symbolic order through aesthetic means, the dissertation reveals that while all wish to move beyond capitalism, they are fundamentally divided in their visions of a post-capitalist social system: Zizek, Hardt & Negri, and Rancière wish to maintain a Marxist vision of social antagonism and class struggle, while Bourriaud and Tiravanija advocate for a form of relationality which would repair the social bond broken in modernity. The dissertation demonstrates, however, that both sets of thinkers envison post-capitalist socialities and subjectivities that are modern, albeit radicalized or reconciled. Calling this vision into question, the dissertation suggests that a move beyond capitalism will require a move beyond modernity, particularly its structural formations of desire and radical contingency. It is here that the dissertation turns to the work of Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, which, in its willingness to think both ontology and epistemology beyond the limits of what is possible for modernity--particularly in its theorizations of the "end of man" and the "mode of being of language"--provides an inventive and thus powerful model for radical, postmodern social and subjective change. Reading Foucault's early theories of language and subjectivity in combination with the world-generating work of contemporary "relational" and digital artists, the dissertation argues that such an intersection might help bring about a new aesthetic theory, one that may lead us beyond not only capitalism but modernity itself.
Notes:
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)

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Citation

Oliver, Lisa Ann, "Artful Visions: Aesthetic Possibility and Social Transformation in Zizek, Hardt and Negri, Foucault, and the New Relational Art" (2011). History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0X34VQR

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