Critique: The Stakes of Form

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-3-0358-0240-5
Verlag: Diaphanes Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Format (B × H): 119 mm x 190 mm, Gewicht: 330 g

Reihe: Critical stances

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Söntgen, Beate

Kuhn, Holger

Lochner, Oona

Khatib, Sami

Mehl, Isabel

Khatib, Sami R.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Medientheorie, Medienanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden

Inhaltsverzeichnis

7 - 34An Introduction to "The Stakes of Form" (Sami Khatib, Holger Kuhn, Oona Lochner, Isabel Mehl, Beate Söntgen)37 - 52How to Do Materialistic Dialectics with Words? Adorno and the Resistance of Presentation (Heiko Stubenrauch)53 - 68Expression and Suffering; Semblance and Mimesis (Notes on an Enigmatic Passage in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory) (Eva Geulen)69 - 92Marx, Real Abstraction, and the Question of Form (Sami Khatib)95 - 116Forms of Critique, Modes of Combat (Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele)117 - 138“To Arlene on Wings of Love”: Shared Forms of Life, Art, and Writing (Oona Lochner)139 - 172Decorating Charleston Farmhouse: Bloomsbury’s Experiments in Forms of Life, Work, and Art (Beate Söntgen)175 - 184Feedback Systems: Artwriting as Critique? (Isabel Mehl)185 - 196On Slowing Down and Not Being Shy. A Conversation (Chris Kraus, Isabel Mehl)197 - 212The Horse’s Eye (Lynne Tillman)213 - 224Editing as the Practice of Criticism (Masha Tupitsyn)225 - 238ECZEMA! (Maria Fusco)239 - 258Roland Barthes’ Critical Writing from the Materials of Cy Twombly—and the Criticism of Form in the Early Texts of Lukács and Benjamin (Thomas Glaser)261 - 296Gesture and Citability: Theater as Critical Praxis (Bettine Menke)297 - 324The Stakes of the Stage: Piscator’s Scenography as a Practice of Critique and Benjamin’s Discontent with the “Zeittheater” (Mimmi Woisnitza)325 - 342Why Streets Are No Longer Paved with Theater Gold: Critique and Stage Form(s) (Sebastian Kirsch)343 - 344List of Illustrations345 - 352Contributors

Über Autor(innen)

Khatib, Sami
Sami Khatib is professor of visual arts at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and member of the Mellon Foundation research group “Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South.”

Lochner, Oona
Oona Lochner is a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art and a PhD candidate in the research training group “Cultures of Critique,” both at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her PhD project focuses on forms of feminist art criticism since the 1960s, asking how writing about art can contribute to a negotiation of subjectivity. Together with Isabel Mehl, she founded the collaborative “From Where I Stand” which addresses the current conditions and possibilities of writing feminist art histories. She was an editor of Texte zur Kunst and writes about contemporary art.

Mehl, Isabel
Isabel Mehl is a writer and an art critic. Since 2016 she is part of the research training group “Cultures of Critique” and researches on the function of fiction for art criticism. Her texts have been published in frieze, Texte zur Kunst, and elsewhere. Dialogue is at the core of her work – collaborators include: art historian Oona Lochner, artist Grazyna Roguski and Susan Funk (as DJ DUO). In 2012 she co-founded the Feminist Working Collective (FAK) and co-edited their publication Body of Work. She is developing a radio play for WDR with opera singer Pauline Jacob and musician Georg Conrad; and plans an anthology on digiphrenia with critic Masha Tupitsyn.

Söntgen, Beate
Beate Söntgen ist Professorin für Kunstgeschichte an der Leuphana. Neben freier Mitarbeit im Feuilleton der FAZ, Mitwirkung an Ausstellungen, zuletzt als Ko-Kuratorin zu „Matisse. Figur Farbe Raum“ (K20, Düsseldorf). WS 2009/10: Flaubert-Gastprofessorin am Flaubert-Zentrum der LMU München/Venedig.

Kuhn, Holger
Holger Kuhn works as assistant professor (Juniorprofessor) for Historical Visual Culture and Art History at Bielefeld University. From 2016 to 2021 he was postdoctoral researcher at the DFG research training group “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His current research focuses on and visual culture, media theory, and the questions of financialization and environmentalization in contemporary art.