There Is an Alternative: With Herbert Marcuse and Mark Fisher Towards a Political Aesthetics of Neoliberalism

Description

The book aims at interrogating the contemporary problematic of neoliberalism and its relationship to culture and ideology through the lens of a theoretical synthesis interweaving the emancipatory aesthetics of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson's pathbreaking analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, and the late Mark Fisher's work on "post-capitalist desire" and "acid communism." The main imperative is to formulate a possible (and, as it turns out, necessary) opening for aesthetic critique in the climate of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. This mode of aesthetic critique is then operationalized through an exemplary reading of the emancipatory poetics of Ben Lerner's 2014 novel "10:04." Acknowledgements Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Why Neoliberalism? 1.2 Why Marcuse? (Re-)Turning to Aesthetics 1.3 Why Ben Lerner? 2 Neoliberalism and One-Dimensional Society 2.1 Neoliberalism: Attempting to Grasp Contemporary Capitalism 2.1.1 A (Very) Brief History of Neoliberalism 2.1.2 How Ontological Is the “Ontological Phase”? 2.2 Capitalist Realism and Capitalism’s Real 2.2.1 Preliminaries on the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 2.2.2 Defining Capitalist Realism 2.2.3 Capitalist Realism and Ideology 2.2.4 Capitalist Realism and Emancipation 2.3 From Fisher to Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man as a Critique of Neoliberalism 2.4 Reiterating the Problem of Critique and Emancipation 3 One-Dimensional Society and Emancipatory Art 3.1 Adorno and the Idea of a Critical Aesthetics 3.1.1 Form and the Dialectics of Mimesis and Construction 3.1.2 What Art Can Do: Negativity and Emancipatory Potential 3.2 Art and Liberation in Marcuse’s Radical Aesthetics 3.2.1 Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism 3.2.2 A Brief Note in Defense of Marcuse 3.2.3 Marcuse’s Adorno 3.2.4 One-Dimensional Man and the Aesthetic Dimension 3.2.5 A Brief Note on the Critical Potential of Inwardness 3.2.6 Art, New Sensibility, and Liberation 3.3 Toward a Critical Aesthetics of Neoliberalism 3.3.1 Mark Fisher’s Aesthetic Turn 3.3.2 Unforgetting the ‘60s: “Acid Communism” and “Psychedelic Reason” 3.3.3 A Brief Note on the Question of Art and Its Relationship to Theory 4 Emancipatory Art and Neoliberalism in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 4.1 A Story About the World to Come 4.2 Irene: Performative Failures 4.2.1 “Liberal Communists” and Gestural Radicalism 4.2.2 Whole Foods and Exercises in Marxism 4.2.3 Broken Promises of Unconditional Community 4.2.4 Occupying Consciousness 4.2.5 Realizations of Capitalist Realism 4.3 Psychedelic Proprioceptions 4.3.1 The Urban Sublime 4.3.2 Donald Judd and the “Utopian Glimmer of Fiction” 4.3.3 Ketamine and the “Poet Nurse” 4.3.4 “Shorthand for What Our Language Couldn’t Represent” 4.4 Sandy: Crossing Brooklyn Bridge 4.5 Metafictionality and Aesthetic Experience 4.5.1 “The Golden Vanity” and Form 4.5.2 The Text as an “Object to be Experienced” 5 Conclusions 5.1 Summing Up 5.2 The Aesthetic Dimension: An Unfinished Project Bibliography