Jason Miller

A poem encrypts, though not predictably, the effects it may have when at some future moment, in another context, it happens to be read and inscribed in a new situation, in ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx. In Wallace Stevens's ‘The Man on the Dump’ (1942), we are told: ‘The dump is full/Of images’. The poem's movement is itself a complex temporal to and fro that aims to repudiate and even annihilate these images. This renunciation leaves the man on the dump ‘The Latest Freed Man’, as the title of another Stevens poem puts it. Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, he has his back toward history and has rejected its images in ‘disgust’ in order to face toward a future that will, he hopes, be purified of ideology. Yet Stevens knows that more such images will come and will need in their turn to be rejected and junked, in an endless task of purification. In a now impossibly outdated way, Stevens nevertheless wanted the poet – that is, himself, the man on the dump – to be the begetter of a new ideology, or a new fiction that would, in a powerful speech act, replace all those outworn images on the dump. In the context of potentially catastrophic climate change (as the result of something like a global auto-immune disorder), the second part of the essay complements this commentary on the poem with a free reading; a performative reading, reading as work or as oeuvre that does something with words, for which Jacques Derrida calls. This reading sees Stevens's text as somehow the proleptic foretelling of a present situation. Such future chiming is also, it is argued, a sign to sign relation, an anticipatory allegory or prophecy, or, perhaps, a miniature apocalypse in the etymological sense of an enigmatic unveiling of what has not yet happened

In this article, I raise a simple but surprisingly vexing question: What makes heavy metal heavy? We commonly describe music as “heavy,” whether as criticism or praise. But what does “heavy” mean? How is it applied as an aesthetic term? Drawing on sociological and musicological studies of heavy metal, as well as recent work on the aesthetics of rock music, I discuss the relevant musical properties of heaviness. The modest aim of this article, however, is to show the difficulty, if not impossibility, of this seemingly straightforward task. I first address the difficulties of identifying the defining features, or “Gestalt,” of heavy metal that would allow us to treat heaviness as a genre concept. Next, I discuss both the merits and the limits of analyzing heaviness in terms of an aesthetics of “noise” in rock music developed in recent philosophy of music. In the remaining sections, I consider other nonaesthetic features relevant to aesthetic judgments of heaviness and show that the term ‘heavy’ is conceptually inarticulable, if not irreducible. This, I conclude, has partly to do with the radically different, sometimes incompatible, musical properties present in the perception of musical heaviness.

In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attention to the increasingly central role of art in debates and struggles over cultural identity in the public sphere. Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that artistic representation enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Just as Hegel asks us to acknowledge how different historical and cultural contexts produce radically different experiences of art, identity-based art calls on its audiences to situate themselves in relation to perspectives and experiences potentially quite remote—or even inaccessible—from their own. Miller offers a timely response to questions such as: How does contemporary art’s politics of perception contest liberal notions of deliberative politics? How does the cultural identity of the artist relate to the representations of cultural identity in their work? How do we understand and evaluate identity-based art aesthetically? Discussing a wide range of works of art and popular culture—from Antigone to Do the Right Thing and The Wire—this book develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the representation of cultural identity that affirms art’s capacity to effect social change.

The photograph of Ai Weiwei’s middle finger set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square has become an icon of politically subversive art. But can we see beyond the middle finger? Here I argue that current theories of political aesthetics operate on an oversimplified dichotomy between two competing paradigms of political art, and that this threatens a more nuanced engagement with contemporary artistic practices. In the first part, I re-examine both the antagonistic relation between art and politics exemplified in Plato's verdict against poetry as a socially corrosive form of imitation as well as the instrumental relation of art and politics developed in Friedrich Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education as a means of social and political reform. Then, drawing on recent work by the controversial Chinese artist, I argue for a model of political art that can account for the more complex interrelation of criticism and cultural affirmation evident in a growing body of politically-oriented art.

Shortly after John Andrew Rice, the eccentric classics professor and fire-brand advocate of progressive education, was dismissed from Rollins College for, among other things, teaching his students to “do as they please,”1 he drafted a sort of pedagogical manifesto announcing a new, and fundamentally new kind of, liberal arts school. The “Preliminary Announcement of Black Mountain College” describes this radical educational paradigm in largely contrarian terms, as the antithesis to traditional higher learning. This new college would be one without exams, without grades and required courses, and without typical hierarchy of academic administration. Beyond this negative agenda, however, Rice makes one positive...