The postmodern scene - excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics

Arthur Kroker, David Cook

New World Perspectives

1986

322 páginas

10h 44m

ISBN-10: 092039342X

What is the postmodern scene? Baudrillard's vision of excremental culture par excellence or a final coming home to a mediascape which even as a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari), a 'negative space' (Krauss), a 'pure implosion' (Lyotard) or a 'symbolic experience' (Kristeva) is now first nature, and thus the terrain of a new political refusal?

The Postmodern Scene is a series of major theorisations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition. A variety of texts, ranging from Nietzsche's The Will to Power, Serres' Hermes, Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra, the visual art of Fischl, Hopper, Colville and Magritte and recent performance art are used as probes of the human fate in the contemporary century. Here, theoretical reflection is viewed as a privileged artistic act: simultaneously a critical encounter with the 'shock of the real', and a meditation in the form of a lament over the 'intimations of deprival' which speak to us now of postmodern culture, art, and philosophy in ruins.