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The Aesthetics Of Terrorism And The Temporalities Of Representation, Robert Appelbaum
The Aesthetics Of Terrorism And The Temporalities Of Representation, Robert Appelbaum
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Representations of terrorism, in fiction and non-fiction, summon their readers and viewers to examine terrorism in any of at least four modes of temporality: the past, the past perfect, the continuous present, and the simple present. This essay explains those modalities and shows how they work with reference to novels, a film documentary, and contemporary American television, including the documentary Black September and the series NCIS. The modalities are ideological as well as narratological functions and are sometimes employed to occlude the historical and pragmatic dimensions of terrorist violence. Terrorism is always already aesthetic and “hyperreal,” in Jean Baudrillard’s …
Isis And Futurist Terrorism Versus Cyberpunk, Thorsten Botz-Bornstei
Isis And Futurist Terrorism Versus Cyberpunk, Thorsten Botz-Bornstei
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The origin of science fiction is twentieth-century Futurism. For the largest part of the twentieth century, science fiction maintained an optimistic attitude towards the future. At the end of the 1970s, the modern, optimistic, and futurist vision of the future, typical for avant-garde movements of the 1930s, took a negative turn and became dark, pessimistic, and cynical, in a postmodern sense; it became what would be called, in a word, ‘cyberpunk.’ In this article, I want to show that the terrorist organization generally known as ISIS (Islamic State) intends, or rather intended, to go back to futurism and modernism by …
Letters On The Aesthetic Deformation Of Man, Katya Mandoki
Letters On The Aesthetic Deformation Of Man, Katya Mandoki
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Friedrich Schiller wrote Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man hoping to elevate human potential through the arts for the development of free citizens of the Republic, and also in reaction to the decline of the French Revolution into a Reign of Terror. Nowadays, with the prominent role social networks have acquired in human relations, aesthetics is an invaluable tool for capturing attention in marketing and political propaganda, no less than in recruitment and indoctrination by terrorist organizations. Adopting a pragmatics approach, we will examine Schiller’s relevance today regarding uses and abuses of aesthetics related to terrorism, focusing on the …
Terrorist Aesthetics As Ideal Types: From Spectacle To "Vicious Lottery", Marshall Battani, Michaelyn Mankel
Terrorist Aesthetics As Ideal Types: From Spectacle To "Vicious Lottery", Marshall Battani, Michaelyn Mankel
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This essay builds on Arnold Berleant’s concept of the negative sublime and his less-appreciated image of the vicious lottery to engage the ongoing discussion about the importance of aesthetic analysis for understanding terrorism. Sociological definitions of aesthetics and terrorism are presented as potential tools to aid in the analyses of terrorist aesthetics. Three aesthetic types of terrorism are developed in the tradition of Weberian sociological ideal typification. The article discusses the appropriateness and applicability of that typology for enriching our understanding of terrorism and counterterrorism.
Art, Terrorism And The Negative Sublime, Arnold Berleant
Art, Terrorism And The Negative Sublime, Arnold Berleant
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The range of the aesthetic has expanded to cover not only a wider range of objects and situations of daily life but also to encompass the negative. This includes terrorism, whose aesthetic impact is central to its use as a political tactic. The complex of positive and negative aesthetic values in terrorism are explored, introducing the concept of the sublime as a negative category to illuminate the analysis and the distinctive aesthetic of terrorism.
Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, And 9/11, Emmanouil Aretoulakis
Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, And 9/11, Emmanouil Aretoulakis
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
There have been numerous critical articles on what really happened on the otherwise beautiful morning of 11 September 2001. Beyond doubt, the bulk of the critical responses to the terrorist attacks focused on the ethical and humanitarian, or rather the unethical and inhumane implications of the atrocious act, leaving no room for any philosophical reflection on the potential assessment or reception of the event from the perspective of art and aesthetics. The few years that have gone by since 2001 have provided us with some a sense of emotional detachment from the horror of that day, a detachment that may …