Bruno Latour (1947-present)

Answering charges of radical relativism

Latour litanies (5, 6, 7, 11, 19, 21)

Realpolitik to Dingpolitik (4)

"assembly of relevant parties" (5)

Two meanings of the word "representation" (6)

Leviathan frontispiece and Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government (6-7)

Sloterdijk's Pneumantc Parliament and Colin Powell's U.N. PowerPoint

Dissembling not assembling

"Has the time not come to bring the res back to the res publica? This is why we have tried to build the provisional and fragile assembly of our show on as many fault lines from as many tectonic plates as possible." (13)

We assemble not "because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern" (13)

"hybrid forums and agoras" (13)

Columbia crash

Iconoclash

Representative bodies - "Scientific laboratories, technical institutions, marketplaces, churces and emples, financial trading rooms, Internet forums, ecological disputes" (21)

"politics as a problem of collecting" (25)

 

Benedict Anderson (1936-present)

1. war between revolutionary Marxist regimes

Nationalism's features: (5)

a) objective modernity

b) formal universality

c) political power despite philosophical poverty

How it is imagined: (7)

a) limited

b) sovereign

c) community

2. The tomb of the "Unknown Soldier" (9-10)

cultural systems that the nation replaces: religious community and dynastic realm

change in the apprehension of time

3. nationalism and "print-capitalism"

role of the novel and the newspaper

4. metropolitans vs. creoles (61)

the idea of a "periphery of vision"

nationalism in the New World not the Old and not a product of the Enlightenment or Liberalism

5. a golden age of "vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians, philologists, and litterateurs" (71)

Germany, Finland, Hungary, Greece

importance of composers (75)

"new glory" in vernacular languages (80)

6. unification and universalism of empire - "official nationalism"

doubly "universal-imperial" and "particular-national" (85)

"Russification" (87) applies to Russia, Hungary, England, and Japan

incompatibility of nation and empire (93)

7. postcolonial nationalism in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia

8. counterarguing equation of nationalism and racism - the importance of language but not necessarily the determinance of language

Racism is about ideologies of class rather than nation (149)

"tropical Gothic in colonial racism"

9. nationalism as a "two-headed Janus" (159) combining San Martín and Garibaldi with Uvarov and Macaulay

about "leaderships, not people" (161)

10. census, map, museum - role of educational institutions

logo-ization of map (175) and museum (184)

The Man Without a Country

 

Michael Taussig (1940-present)

Images of "The Liberator"

1. The spirit queen: Commodity fetishism

10. The idea of the relic - saint imagery

"does this state-making-thing really exist outside of its representation?" (106)

11. "frenzy for duplication and display" (108)

"state-inspired vast vomiting of His image akin to the destruction entailed in sacrifice" (111)

"controlled frenzy of kitsch" (112)

"the political unconscious can muster towards both child and adult" (113)

13.

description of the Liberator's "glorious second burial" (134)

circulation and transformation (138) IMTFI

state decising "how much of this stuff to print and circulate and what shape, color, size and pictures it should have" (143)

combining "secrecy with the sacred" (144)

15.

marble that is "lustrous and smooth" "impenetrable" "heavy" and "expensive" (165)

"form hidden in the marble"/"creates the mould from the idea"/"highlights by antithesis the sublime transcendence of the idea the substance restrains and figures"/"a site for philosophical meditation, where force and image lock together" (166)

"spirit posession shares these properties of the status" (166)

 

Randy Martin "Artistic Citizenship"

answering "to the muse, not to the state" (1) (Book titles include The Subsidized Muse, Bureaucratizing the Muse, Federalizing the Muse, and Public Money and the Muse.)

public and private are "the vehicle, the route, and the destination" (1)

public art as "a type of art" and "a form of representation" (3)

absorption of the art into the university (5-10)

civic education and "cultural ambivalence" (11)

Legal standing of images as speech (14)

"an invitation to view the work where the artist forms a partnership with the public" (15)

"private realm of aesthetic creativity and public realm of exhibit" (16)

 

Richard Schechner "A Polity of Its Own Called Art?"

"ordinary citizenship" as "tough enough," and "artistic citizenship" as a possible "burden" or "hot air" (33)

etymology of citizenship in "to rouse or move" (33)

Stockhausen's comment about 9/11 as "the greatest work of art imaginable" (35)

Holding "dual or even multiple citizenships" (39)

NEA Four and Critical Art Ensemble, Meyerhold, Brecht and Benjamin (40)

 

Controversy about "Cowboy Poetry" at the Western Folklife Center