The Politics of Apolitical Culture

Over the last twenty years the work of Antonio Gramsci has provided the basis for some important theoretical developments in the field of international studies, and a significant body of literature now exists that has been broadly inspired by his investigations.

 For researchers of international political economy, Gramscian-influenced theory has been used to explain the formation and effects of social relations beyond the national level, such that the focus has been on how ideas, their solidification into norms, and their relation to material forces have operated with a transnational scope.

 Critiques of orthodox interpretations of power and vulgar notions of hegemony as political—military dominance have pointed out how state-civil society relations involve a far more complex coalition of forces than previously presented.

 Stephen Gill has noted that [t]he movement towards the extension of Gramscian ideas has [led to research] on the internationalisation of state and civil society, the international aspects of social hegemony and supremacy, and the transnational class and bloc formations and economic forces, the role of organic intellectuals and of international organisations and other issues which help to define the nature of global politics in the twentieth century.

https://www.academia.edu/1880657/The_Politics_of_Apolitical_Culture_The_Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom_the_CIA_and_Postwar_American_Hegemony

Governing by design

Foucault developed his conception of governmentality through studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, where states and nongovern-mental institutions aggregated data to constitute knowledge frameworks and expertise profiles capable of managing populations by regulating their demo-graphics, health, housing, environmental conditions, employment, social lives, and culture. This “administration of life” constituted a biopolitics that the so-ciologist Mitchell Dean has described as being “aimed at enhancing the lives of a population through the application of a norm.”

 For Foucault, Dean, and others the goal of governmentality, and the raison d’être of the modern state, is to provide security to the processes of life—to tame risk, be it through social insurance schemes, food regulation, or housing norms.Governmentality works less by the application of raw state power than through a multiplicity of heterogeneous public and private agencies, standards, forms of knowledge, effects, outcomes, and consequences that Dean has de-scribed as “mobile, changing, and contingent assemblages” continually “con-structed, assembled, contested, and transformed.”

 It operates not in the reg-ister of high culture, politics, and history, but rather in what the anthropologist Paul Rabinow, writing about French planning practices, has characterized as “a middle ground where social technicians were articulating a normative, or mid-dling modernism . . . pragmatic technicians seeking to find scientific and practical solutions to public problems in times of crisis.
https://www.academia.edu/14619946/Governing_by_Design_Architecture_Economy_and_Politics_in_the_Twentieth_Century

Crisis and Innovation in Modern Greece

Lefteris Theodosis

PROSPECTS OF SURVIVAL:
CONSTANTINOS DOXIADIS AND THE MINISTRY OF RECONSTRUCTION (1945-1951)

ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the Second World War Greece was shattered and politically divided between the leftist resistance groups and the political elites of the Centre-Right, effectively backed up by the British and American allies. While most of the European countries were licking the wounds, the political and social chasm in Greece deepened. The “hidden war” compounded the devastated rural areas intensifying the migration of its population that flocked to the cities in search of a shelter and a job.  Moreover, Greek economy was in imminent danger of collapse: hyperinflation rendered the drachmae a useless currency, infrastructure and approximately three-fourths of the merchant fleet tonnage were destroyed, and Nazi looting had seized the Greek treasury. Paradoxically, after the liberation there was little hope for recovering. Being a matter of survival, the first postwar years became one of the most critical periods in the Modern Greek history.  Against this background, Constantinos A. Doxiadis undertook the efforts for the Reconstruction of the country. Initially as Undersecretary and Director-General of the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction (1945-48), and subsequently as General Director and Coordinator of the Greek Recovery Program (1948-51), Doxiadis reinvented and orchestrated the administrations that devised the economic policies for the reconstruction of the settlements of Greece, effectively collaborating with foreign agencies and the Marshall Plan aid representatives.  This paper will examine the manifold interventions promoted by the Ministry of Reconstruction as an integrated program of economic recovery and regional planning. The Ministry’s programmatic actions comprised the restoration of damaged buildings, the construction of new settlements, and the provision of building materials and technical assistance as aided self-help programs that actively engaged the future inhabitants in the reconstruction process. Beyond any doubt, international and local politics highly conditioned the Reconstruction and the postwar development of Greece that defied every planning effort and eventually, against all odds, took off in the 1960s. Interestingly, Doxiadis’ initiatives set guidelines for the modernization of the country, while his discourse evinced the unification of Europe and emphasized the stance of Greece in the geopolitical Cold War game.

Victory over Chaos? Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Ekistics 1945-1975
http://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/396119/TLT1de1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture

The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.

"Although the attack on modern art was one of the most dominant cultural trends of the late forties, ultimately it was the exact opposite tendency that came to dominate public discussions of American art. At some point, in spite of the fierce opposition, the redfinition of the field of representation had to be accepted and even celebrated as the inheretently American tendency of art history. Although scholars disagree about the exact moment of the victory of modern art in America, it is clear that by the second half of the fifties (especially after McCarthy's demise) it was no longer acceptable in mainstream discussions to equate modern art with communism."
https://is.gd/sVNBoO

Mike Featherstone - Consumer Culture and Postmodernism - The Aestheticization of Everyday Life

If we examine definitions of postmodernism we find an emphasis upon the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life, the collapse of the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture, a general stylistic promiscuity and playful mixing of codes. These general features of postmodern theories which stress the equalization and levelling out of symbolic hierarchies, antifoundationalism and a general impulse towards cultural declassification, can also be related to what are held to be the characteristic postmodern experiences. Here one can build upon the use of the term modernité by Baudelaire to point to the new experience of modernity, the shocks, jolts, and vivid presentness captured by the break with traditional forms of sociation which the modern cities such as Paris seemed to bring forth from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In a similar way one might also be able to speak of the experience of postmodernité and draw upon perceived shifts in cultural experiences and modes of signification. Here we find an emphasis upon the aestheticization of everyday life and the transformation of reality into images in the work of Baudrillard (1983a). Jameson (1984a) too emphasizes the loss of a sense of history and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents in which there is the experience of multiphrenic intensities. A similar aestheticization of experience and breaking down of the ordered chain of signifiers can be detected in the writings of their followers where one finds an emphasis upon ‘the liquefaction of signs and commodities’, ‘the effacement of the boundary between the real and the image’, ‘floating signifiers’, ‘hyperreality’, ‘depthless culture’, ‘bewildering immersion’, ‘sensory overload’ and ‘affect-charge intensities’ (Kroker and Cook, 1987; Crary, 1984).

https://is.gd/LxnKsO

RISE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE AND THE PROCESS OF GLOBALIZATION

For most of its history, Western art was seen as an instrument for reaching

different inartistic purposes. It was generally expected that experiencing the beautiful has to facilitate the maintenance of political power or the spreading of various religious views.
This means, in one hand, that aesthetic values have been residing, in some sense, in the background of cultural history, but also that art, just because of its function, held an important place in the life of every society.
However, in its quest for independence, art managed to move off the everyday life in such measure that it has even become hostile to it, beside the fact that art was
always, as Stendhal laconically put it, only “for a happy few”.
However, during the recent years, the aesthetic “empty space”, which has been

created by weakening of the social call of art, began to be filled with aesthetic artifacts and aesthetic experiences, which in the meanwhile even took the leading role in delivering the aesthetic pleasure.
As the “aesthetic imperative” started to attack aesthetic and cultural elitism on every margin, everything and not just the aesthetic has been subdued to the radical

changes of enormous speed. Even the innovations that today seem exciting and disturbing will eventually become the backgrounds of our lives (Postrel, 2004:189). In that sense, we could say that the very nature of the world became aesthetic in itself.

http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/content/pdf/participant-papers/2011-08-loam/Rise-of-the-aesthetic-experience-and-the-process-of-globalization-Aleksandar.pdf

Exploring the Modern:Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called Postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the "new expressionism"; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming  new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture...The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?
It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of Postmodernism - - as it will be outlined in the following pages -- initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the highmodernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck," as Robert Venturi puts it) 1 are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighborhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.

http://flawedart.net/courses/articles/Jameson_Postmodernism__cultural_logic_late_capitalism.pdf

ΤΟ ΠΡΟΣΦΑΤΟ ΜΕΛΛΟΝ Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο

Αξίζει να θυμηθούμε στο σημείο αυτό τον Κριστιάν Ζερβός (Christian Zervos), τον ελληνικής καταγωγής τεχνοκριτικό και διορατικό πάτρωνα του ευρωπαϊκού μοντερνισμού και των εκπροσώπων του, όπως ο Πάμπλο Πικάσο. Κατά τη δε- καετία του 1930, ο Ζερβός επιχείρησε να θεμελιώσει το αφήγημα περί μιας πο- λιτισμικά συνεχούς και πνευματικά πεφωτισμένης Ελλάδος, μέσα από κείμενά του όπου υποστήριζε πως «ένα κυκλαδικό ειδώλιο, ένα αγγείο ή ένα ορειχάλ- κινο τέχνεργο της γεωμετρικής περιόδου, ένα γλυπτό ή ένας αμφορέας της αρ- χαϊκής περιόδου […] περιέχουν εγγενώς τα ουσιώδη στοιχεία της τεχνοτροπίας του Παρθενώνα».

https://nefeli.fairead.net/files/NEFELI/authors/plantzos-dimitris/pagesFrom-plantzos-prosfatoMellon.pdf

Crisis and innovation

This paper will examine the manifold interventions promoted by the Ministry of Reconstruction as an integrated program of economic recovery and regional planning. The Ministry’s programmatic actions comprised the restoration of damaged buildings, the construction of new settlements, and the provision of building materials and technical assistance as aided self-help programs that actively engaged the future inhabitants in the reconstruction process.

Beyond any doubt, international and local politics highly conditioned the Reconstruction and the postwar development of Greece that defied every planning effort and eventually, against all odds, took off in the 1960s. Interestingly, Doxiadis’ initiatives set guidelines for the modernization of the country, while his discourse evinced the unification of Europe and emphasized the stance of Greece in the geopolitical Cold War game.

https://funnelme.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/prospects-of-survival/

http://www.princeton.edu/~hellenic/GradStudentConf12/