Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture
A series edited by Saul Ostrow
Now Available
Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context
Essays by Stephen Melville. Edited and Introduced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism
Essays by Thomas McEvilley. Commentary by G.Roger Denson
Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication
Essays by Marshall McLuhan. Edited and with a Commentary by Michel A.Moos
Literature, Media, Information Systems
Essays by Friedrich A.Kittler. Edited and Introduced by John Johnston
England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste
Essays by John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Adrian Stokes. Commentary by David Carrier
The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste
Essays by Arthur C.DantoSelected and with a Critical Introduction by Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn
Beauty Is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design
Edited and Introduced by Richard Roth and Susan King Roth
Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic
Edited and Introduced by Adam Krims. Commentary by Henry Klumpenhouwer
Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page
Essays by Douglas Dunn, Marjorie Gamso, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kenneth King, Yvonne Meier, Sarah SkaggsText and Commentary by Elena Alexander. Foreword by Jill Johnston
Difference/lndifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel
Duchamp and John Cage
Introduction and Text by Moira Roth. Commentary by Jonathan D.Katz
Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory
Essays by Nicholas Zurbrugg. Commentary by Warren Burt
When Down Is Up: The Desublimating Impulse
Essays by John Miller. Edited and with a Commentary by G.Roger Denson
Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation
Essays by Stan Allen. Postscript by Diana Agrest
Looking In: The Art of Viewing
Essays and Afterword by Mieke Bal. Edited and with an Introduction by Norman Bryson
This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.
critical vices
the myths of postmodern theory commentary
nicholas zurbrugg essays
warren burt
Copyright 2000 OPA
(Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.
Published by license under the G+B Arts International imprint,
part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Zurbrugg, Nicholas
Critical vices : the myths of postmodern theory.
(Critical voices in art, theory and cultureISSN 1025-9325)
l. Postmodernism
I. Title II. Burt, Warren
700.4113
ISBN 0-203-98533-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 90-5701-062-3 (Print Edition)
introduction to the series
CRITICAL VOICES IN ART, THEORY AND Culture is a response to the changing perspectives that have resulted from the continuing application of structural and poststructural methodologies and interpretations to the cultural sphere. From the ongoing processes of deconstruction and reorganization of the traditional canon, new forms of speculative, intellectual inquiry and academic practices have emerged that are premised on the realization that insights into differing aspects of the disciplines that make up this realm are best provided by an interdisciplinary approach that follows a discursive, rather than a dialectic, model.
In recognition of these changes, and of the view that the histories and practices that form our present circumstances are in turn transformed by the social, economic, and political requirements of our lives, this series will publish not only those authors who already are prominent in their fieldor those who are now emergingbut also those writers who had previously been acknowledged, then passed over, only now to become relevant once more. This multigenerational approach will give many writers an opportunity to analyze and reevaluate the position of those thinkers who have influenced their own practices, or to present responses to the themes and writings that are significant to their own research.
In emphasizing dialogue, self-reflective critiques, and exegesis, the Critical Voices series not only acknowledges the deterritorialized nature of our present intellectual environment, but also extends the challenge to the traditional supremacy of the authorial voice by literally relocating it within a discursive network. This approach to text breaks with the current practice of speaking of multiplicity, while continuing to construct a singularly linear vision of discourse that retains the characteristics of dialectics. In an age when subjects are conceived of as acting upon one another, each within the context of its own history and without contradiction, the ideal of a totalizing system does not seem to suffice. I have come to realize that the near collapse of the endeavor to produce homogeneous terms, practices, and historiesonce thought to be an essential aspect of defining the practices of art, theory, and culturereopened each of these subjects to new interpretations and methods.
My intent as editor of Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture is to make available to our readers heterogeneous texts that provide a view that looks ahead to new and differing approaches, and back toward those views that make the dialogues and debates developing within the areas of cultural studies, art history, and critical theory possible and necessary. In this manner we hope to contribute to the expanding map not only of the borderlands of modernism, but also of those newly opened territories now identified with postmodernism.
Saul Ostrow
acknowledgments
I would like to offer particular thanks to Elinor Shaffer, John OBrien, Ken Ruthven, Sydney Lvy, Michel Pierssens, Paul Foss, Ross Harley, John Caughie, John H.Astington, Mike Gane, Douglas Kellner, Stuart Koop, Ric Allsopp and Claire MacDonald, whose generosity and enthusiasm first helped these essays into print; to J.G.Ballard who endorsed this publication; to my editors Saul Ostrow, Liza Rudneva and Brian Bendlin who prepared the present volume, and to Warren Burt, for his visionary final essay.
This book is dedicated to all those artists, writers, critics, theorists and friends whose writings and conversation provoked its pages in the first place, and to everyone who shared Paris Street oysters, passion fruit, and another bottle of wine, back at Drake Street, Brisbane, as these essays slowly began to enter subtropical orbit.
Nicholas Zurbrugg