Representation of Women in History Essay

All through American history, ladies have been the foundation of the nation, working at dealing with their families, and the nation itself. The acknowledgment of this is appeared by the changed portrayals of America in a female setting. Regardless of whether as a rude youthful Native American princess who has wronged her British mother, or as Roman goddess Columbia in her long, streaming white robes.  â â â â â â â â â â The significant change in the manner America was spoken to pictorially was achieved by Phillis Wheatley in 1775, when she sent her sonnet to George Washington portraying America as a goddess called Columbia. The individuals at the time rushed to relate to this new understanding as they needed to remove themselves from the negative British portrayals of America as a Native American lady who was youthful and resisting of her parental figure. Additionally around then, settlers were considering America a position of self-information and investigation, making libraries and different spots of study, total with mock Roman design that upheld the sentiment of the â€Å"new Rome,† and they enjoyed the way that Columbia was appeared as a Roman goddess of sorts.  â â â â â â â â â â When taking a gander at the distinctions in the print by Edward Savage and the print dated 1866, there can be seen a change from Savage’s quiet looking goddess Columbia, and afterward the furnished battling ladies that are in the 1866 picture. The prior picture dated as 1796 shows Liberty wearing a wreath of blossoms around her, offering a cup to a hawk and encompassed by surging mists and indicating her forthright, away from any savagery. The last drawing from 1866 shows three ladies, two holding the banner shaft, and one with a blade despite everything battling, encompassed by individuals. This image comes toward the finish of the Revolution time, and delineates America’s battling soul which has risen up out of the fight.  â â â â â â â â â â When taking a gander at the case of the Eighteenth century book, Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, the impact of the Columbian perfect can be appeared by the book being of the enticement class, which was famous in that period. This sort of story contacted numerous in the country, as individuals related their agonizing over how they remained in the wake of conflicting with Britain to the enchantment of a youthful female who was brought the new land, and afterward fooled into getting pregnant, just to be left amazing her own. Many pondered would America endure that equivalent destiny as the lured young lady, or would the nation triumph as the new goddess, Columbia. It is nothing unexpected that during such a hazardous time in history that individuals were attracted to these enchantment type stories to the point of having confidence in their souls that Rowson’s work was true to life, which is wasn’t.  â â â â â â â â â â The ongoing 2005 picture of Sacajawea is another drawing on a brilliant dollar coin. She is appeared as thinking back, her hair stepped back, and having her child, Jean Baptiste lashed to her. This portrayal of her is hitting with her huge, dim eyes, and her actual Native American highlights which are extremely articulated and staggering. In prior portrayals of Native American ladies, the facial highlights are for the most part extremely near what the highlights of drawings of white ladies at that point. These previous pictures were nearer to the facial similarity of early pictures of Columbia.  â â â â â â â â â â The United States mint obviously made this coin to speak to the commemoration of the Lewis and Clark undertaking, dated 1804. The ongoing brilliant dollar was dated 2005, which implies that it was considered and dependent on a 2004 date, precisely 200 years separated. The coin is additionally intended to celebrate the Native American individuals themselves ever.  â â â â â â â â â â The portrayal of Columbia in American history can be viewed as the advancement of the nation itself. As society developed, and the impression of what it intended to be an American changed, the figures of ladies changed with it. The soul of Columbia is likened with the soul of our country, and the creativity used to show that soul in female structure is as yet being utilized today, spoke to by the Sacajawea coin, praising the network perfect of what is to be American.

Summary of the Sugar Revolution free essay sample

Rundown of the Sugar Revolution Sugar-Summary The French and English didn't sit by a let Spain colonize the whole Caribbean. They to settled in a portion of the Caribbean islands which they colonized themselves. They assaulted Spanish provinces just as Spanish boats, both legitimately and wrongfully. By the mid seventeenth century Spain had now become a debilitated pioneer ace. Sugar The English Sugar venture started in Barbados in the mid 1640s. The opposition from Virginia tobacco prompted the Caribbean grower changing their concentration to the creation of sugar. The popularity of sugar by the European nations likewise played a factor The Dutch were extremely instrumental in carrying the creation of sugar toward the West Indies. They provided the strategies, just as the work. Somewhere in the range of 1643 and 1660 Barbados was changed into a complete sugar manor economy.  ·Lands which had recently been in little beneficial units were presently bits of bigger manors. We will compose a custom paper test on Outline of the Sugar Revolution or on the other hand any comparative subject explicitly for you Don't WasteYour Time Recruit WRITER Just 13.90/page  ·The cost of land soar  ·Small ranchers were constrained bankrupt  ·Large estate proprietors were then ready to control the islands issues

Homework Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 4

Schoolwork - Essay Example (Lougheed 2005) This appears as though this could be the answer for some clinical issues as researcher can to some degree fix harmed cells, and despite the fact that this can spare the lives of many, the lives lost through fetus removal will never compensate for the ones spared. Until undifferentiated organisms can be gathered in a progressively moral way, they ought not be utilized for clinical headway. Numerous supporters of immature microorganism inquire about concur that the undeveloped cells acquired from premature births would be pulverized at any rate. Regardless of whether this is the situation or not, the guardians are deciding to permit the unborn hatchling to bite the dust. This implies the phones additionally incredible it isn't morally right to utilize them as they were picked to be left dead. Ideally this data is useful and instructive concerning what kinds of undifferentiated cells ought to be utilized and why foundational microorganism research can be untrustworthy. Until another way is found to gather undifferentiated cells, I and numerous others will remain

Book pseudo-philosophical Free Essays

The book of employment is to be sure a troublesome book (especially in light of the fact that it is organized like a sonnet, which I think made it all the all the more exhausting. ) But going past that, it makes them intrigue pseudo-philosophical conversations going on. Employment is a daring man, given the conditions and the general suspicions about the idea of the universe at that point (a universe where god once in a while makes his quality known through a tornado or whatever gadget). We will compose a custom paper test on Book pseudo-philosophical or then again any comparable subject just for you Request Now Occupation is acceptable and courageous, however I think there is an intrinsic presumptions in his contentions that cause them to fall flat (in my book): the suspicion of the legitimacy of the method of reasoning behind the principles under which God appears to work. Since Sin is additionally, at last, God’s innovation, I think a proper reaction to such a condition as Job’s would have been â€Å"Why would you say you are messing with us? † When Job at long last recognizes God’s equity, Job recovers his great life! (Somebody was simply being puerile and simply needed some thankfulness, all things considered. ) I don’t accept that there is an immediate connection between's acceptable activities and†¦ supernaturally offered grants. A touch of work and a touch of karma are the stuff to get a decent life. With respect to Genesis parts 1-11, I can't take these as a true record of verifiable occasions. While perusing, I continued getting an inclination, in the rear of my psyche, that there is something innately wrong in the method of reasoning and clarifications of the practices of the characters (God included). The story introduced in Genesis has the makings of a legend, and is in a similar level as that of other creationist accounts of different convictions. As Darwin says, the idea of God is very past the extent of my capacities. Beginning 1-11 is a â€Å"explanation† of the sources of the world, which I accept must be much more intricate than the parts relate (at any rate on a superficial level). It likewise â€Å"explains† the starting points great and malice in current humankind. Exhausting too. Basically in light of the fact that the story has been related on many occasions, and, justifiably, the sentences are organized as differently as conceivable from regular discourse, while as yet holding syntactic accuracy. Be that as it may, it is as yet ideal to get old (and present day) social and strict attitude. Step by step instructions to refer to Book pseudo-philosophical, Papers

Martin Luther King College Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Martin Luther King College - Essay Example remained by the means of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. A lot to the information on everybody, he conveyed what is viewed as perhaps the best addresses in American history. Lord himself appeared to detect the memorable significance existing apart from everything else as he opened his I Have a Dream discourse by calling the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the best exhibition for opportunity throughout the entire existence of our country. The milestone fight, which drew in excess of 200,000 individuals, reported a defining moment in the social equality development and set up for the development's two most significant administrative accomplishments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Microsoft Encarta 2005). It is intriguing to guess on what the course of American history may have been, if Martin Luther King, Jr. had not gone to Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. Be that as it may, he did go, and the America he had experienced childhood in was perpetually changed. The notable transport blacklist that started there in late 1955 brought him national acknowledgment and set off a time of direct-activity fight that for all time modified the status of dark Americans. Andrew Young once said that Rosa Parks push enormity after King. Rosa Parks is a main individual from the nearby office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who was well known for her refusal to give her transport seat to a white man. Absolutely she formed the setting wherein he developed as a national figure and moved him to interpret his hypothesis of peacefulness into training. Ruler had no expectation of starting a significant crusade in Montgomery, however Mrs. Parks' refusal to yield her trans port seat to a white man on December 1, 1955 constrained the principal genuine trial of King's readiness to experience giving up of one's own priorities for Negro opportunity. She has never asserted a lot of credit for what occurred in Montgomery, however Rosa Parks' activity was an impetus in King's ascent to unmistakable quality and the rise of the southern social liberties development that commanded American social history for 10 years (SCLC/NH, National Conventions, 1980). Neighborhood pioneers of the NAACP, particularly Edgar D. Nixon, perceived that the capture of the mainstream and exceptionally regarded Parks was the occasion that could revitalize neighborhood blacks to a transport fight. Nixonalsobelievedthat a citywide dissent ought to be driven by somebody who could bring together the network. In contrast to Nixon and different pioneers in Montgomery's dark network, the as of late showed up King had no adversaries. Besides, Nixon saw King's open talking endowments as extraordinary resources in the fight for dark social equality in Montgomery. Ruler was before long picked as leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the association that coordinated the transport blacklist. When the Supreme Court maintained the lower court choice in November 1956, King unmistakable quality raised him to become driving dark national figure. His diary of the transport blacklist, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), gave an astute record of that experience and further expanded King's national impact. Another significant commitment of King is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an association of dark houses of worship and priests that meant to challenge racial isolation. As SCLC's leader, King turned into the association's prevailing character and its essential scholarly

Arts Dissertation - Situationist Theory - Free Essay Example

When Situationism evolved from the Letterist movement, in the middle of the last century, it set itself up in opposition to two other two other politically motivated groups: Dadism and Surreallism. Situationism, however, was only incidentally political, and rather than subverting the art world, aimed only to redesign its context, including the attitudes of the public, so that art could become something anyone could do or enjoy- something integrated into everyday life. Historically, arts efforts to bring down capitalist structures from within have been very ill-fated, with artists finding themselves ignored, scorned, crushed or perhaps worse- accessories to political agendas. Artists and writers must work harder than ever to devise means of opposing or exposing capitalisms deceptions, but many commentators appear to have reached the conclusion that the battle is barely worth fighting. As we shall see, Jean Baudrillard argues that criticism of the status quo is no longer possible through art or literature and that the only efficient way of dissenting from capitalist society is to commit suicide, Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a perpetual surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contests anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the malediction consumed. Thus the avant-garde movements in Europe put the artist under pressure to exhibit a certain individuality, while also rather contradictorily- being a producer, and as prolific, political and reactionary a producer as possible, There is a lot of talk, not about reform or forcing the Enlightenment project to live up to its own ideals, but about wholesale negation, revolution, another new sensibility, now self- affirming or self-creating, rather than a universalist or rational self-legitimation. This in turn suggests a tremendously heightened role for the artist, the figure whose imagination supposedly creates or shapes the sensibilities of civilization. In a sense, the avant-garde has been socially commissioned to forecast the future, to scouting out new intellectual terrain, Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured Early attempts to overthrow Capitalism In many ways, Dada and Surrealism represent the most successful artistic rebellions against capitalist norms, as they have attacked the conventional assumption of meaning itself, and in doing so drew attention to the ridiculous fact that such an assumption existed at all, Dada has often been called nihilistic and its declared purpose was indeed to make clear to the public at large that all established values, moral or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great War Dada preached nonsense and anti-art with a vengeance It is as though the Artist jumped before she was pushed. With its effort to close the gap between producer and produced by making everything equally alien, Surrealism also sought to negate its creator, using, pure psychic automatism intended to express the true process of thought free from the exercise of reason and from any aesthetic or moral purpose . Habermas, too, asserts that Surrealism poses a threat to arts existential rights, but still fails in two ways, First, when the containers of an autonomously developed cultural sphere are shattered, the contents get dispersed. Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow. Habermas draws attention to the levelling affect of contemporary communication networks: networks which challenge the hierarchical assumptions of classical Marxism, and which have, in scale, surpassed what any postmodern commentator even in the 1980s- could have imagined. More so than ever, our media are democratic and interrelated, A rationalized everyday life, therefore, could hardly be saved from cultural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural sphere art and so providing access to just one of the specialized knowledge complexes. Any active dissent can be transformed into a commodity, a product to assist the perpetuation of capitalism. Catchy slogans devised by revolutionaries are used to sell mortgages, paintings that challenge conventional assumptions about beauty and form are written about in books to be sold, and bought by galleries where their beauty and form can be admired and valued- bought and sold. As the Anti-Naturals recently wrote, on the subject, It is the nature of the Spectacle to transform all experience into a consumer commodity. It is no surprise, then, that so much of modern capitalist production should be focused on the authenticity swindle. It is not merely that we are told that our authentic self is only a credit card order away. We must be told what and how to purchase. Since, in the midst of the Spectacle, all experience is real only when it can be consumed, it is natural to follow the guidance offered by the array of products engineered to address each particular need. In reality, it is quite easy to mass market to hundreds of millions of individuals, since each quest is identical in its basic features. Any words spoken against can be turned into rallying support. Art, like any powerful weapon, can always be turned against those who use it. Whatever doesnt kill power is killed by it. In this way the Dadaists watched their anti-art works being systematically categorised as works of art, and were forced to focus their whole project completely on the evasion of this recuperation. Five years of agitation against capital, war and morality, brought them to an impasse of suicide or silence. Everything the Dadaists made, said, wrote or performed seemed to be turned against its critical purpose and used against them- and they abandoned the project. Effectively, they went on strike. The Dadaists left a legacy in the form of recuperated, commodified art works, and in multiple imitations of their style and attitude. Their advocation of collage and photomontage is now everywhere in advertisements, their paradoxically anti-art art surely at the very heart of current post-modernist critical theory. They were correct in their belief that this capitalist appropriation was inevitable while they were merely producing, and not controlling the means of production, but in some ways, they did in fact constitute a challenge to bourgeois morality. Dadaism questioned the philosophical assumptions which justified smug bourgeois attitudes, and uncovered the hypocracy of World War 1s brutality legitimising propaganda. In the end they felt that their subversions of established values were merely contributing too much to the culture they had been trying to undermine. The Situationist Asger Jorn was emphatic about the failure of Marxist theory, to liberate of art from commodification , Instead of abolishing the private character of property, socialism does nothing but augment them as much as possible, rending humans themselves useless and socially non-existent. The goal of the development of artistic liberation is the liberation of human values by the transformation of human qualities into real values. Here begins the artistic revolution against socialist development, the artistic revolution that is tied to the communist project . . . Debord and the Situationist reaction to Capitalism Debords 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, represented an attempt to articulate as fully as possible the Situationist philosophy. The term spectacle refers to the colonization of everyday life by commodity in late capitalism, an extension of alienation experienced between production and consumption. The spectacles subjective, one-directional effect requires a kind of non-participation, eventually resulting in a breakdown of communication between people. Situationism distinguishes between classical and modern forms of capitalism. Where classical capitalism demanded that wasted time describes any time not spent at work, modern capitalism actually reverses that, using advertising and other spectacular means to declare that it is the time spent at work that is wasted, and work is justifiable only because it provides the monetary ability to consume. Marx wrote that, the worker feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home The Situationists describe the spectacular society as a place where, the spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere . As Debord himself explains, So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is guardian of that sleep . However, the spectacle was not unique to capitalist society; the Situationists worked on a theory of the concentrated spectacle that would incorporate individual influences on capitalist regimes. This was principally contrived as a rhetorical framework to include the cult of personality in the dictatorships of places such as Cuba, the Soviet Union and China. The Situationists argued that the same tricks that society used to sell fast cars and kitchen appliances were used to promote and deify figures such as Chairman Mao. In anarchic efforts to subvert the spiritual and fiscal poverty of urban life under the tyranny of the spectacle, the Situationists developed a revolutionary art, departed from artistic convention. In their article Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program, Debord and the Marxist theorist Pierre Canjuers, assert, At one pole, art is purely and simply recuperated by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity, an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (which makes it the most expensive and prestigious status symbol). But at the same time, this sphere reserved for free creative activity is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the question of communication are posed practically and in all their fullness. Here, in art, lies the basis of the antagonisms between partisans and adversaries of the officially dictated reasons for living. The established meaninglessness and separations give rise to the general crisis of traditional artistic means a crisis linked to the experience of alternative ways of living or the demand for such experience. Revolutionary artists are those who call for intervention; and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt or destroy it. Initially, the work the Situationist International produced was aimed at ridiculing formalist conceptions of the art object: Asger Jorn bought amateur paintings at flea markets and painted over them, subverting notions of authority and value. Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio invented a style of industrial painting where the canvas was over a hundred metres long, then cut strips off for potential buyers, thereby subverting traditional preconceptions of arts autonomy. In reality these processes were eventually absorbed by a capitalist art market bought, sold, exhibited, written about, and for the most part, politically neutered. In his 1974 book Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger points out that the avant-garde artists main goal is to shock the viewer, typically accustomed to organic or formalist works of art, in the hope that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the readers attention to the fact that the conduct of ones life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it He goes on to state that, Paradoxically, the avant-gardist intention to destroy art as an institution is thus realized in the work of art itself. The intention to revolutionize life by returning art to its praxis turns into a revolutionizing of art. This is the kind of logic that prompted the Situationists to agree to stop producing art in 1961, when they decided to cease considering themselves artists. Any remaining members unwilling to abandon traditional forms of art, including Jorn, Pinot-Gallizio, and Constant found themselves either being forced into ideological resignation or expulsion. It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather of refusing the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic and authentic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. Once and for all. . . . Our position is that of combatants between two worlds one that we dont acknowledge, the other that does not yet exist. In The Situationist City, Simon Sadler write that, in abandoning early Situationism, the Situationist International abandoned its imagining of utopia a devastating decision, surely unprecedented in the history of the avant-garde, and yet at the same time surely the situationists greatest contribution to that history: the recognition that in changing the world, avant-garde art cannot be a substitute for popular redistribution of power It seemed that the SI recognized that for any avant-garde to succeed, it would do best striving to produce artists, and not art. The Dadaists, too, were aware that both art and artist are part of the capitalist system, and consequently as guilty in their participation as any other commodity or worker. Marcuse and Adorno, in contrast, argued that the Dadaist project was misguided for its attacks on conventional art. They saw art as an autonomous entity, separate from capitalist interests, and something intrinsically apolitical that must be preserved rather than aggressively undermined. For Adorno, art bears an essential negativity derived from its peculiar Form; its rearrangements of reality are conducted according to a system quite alien to those of capitalism. This Form grants art a: refuge and a vantage point from which to denounce the reality established through domination. While Adorno and Marcuse criticised the anti-artists for attacking artistic Form, they agreed with the avant-gardists in their slightly utopic aspiration of abolishing the distinction that existed between art and the rest of reality. In fact, Marcuse wished to see a society organised around the aesthetic principles he believed resided only within art. Both argued that this integration could not be achieved if artists were allowed to participate. Art should be kept apolitical and protected, in a realm conducive to calm reflection that might remind us of the truth an authentic life can afford us after the revolution. So, although they expressed their rejection of this view in different ways, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists all aspired to a collapse of the distinction between art and the rest of life in present: everyday life. Instead of waiting for the revolution, all three argued that the integration of art and life was in fact necessary for the achievement of revolution, a revolution made possible only by a combined cultural, ideological and economic assault on capitalism. Asger Jorn, again, on the failure of the socialist revolution, The capitalist revolution was essentially a socialization of consumption. Capitalist industrialization brought humanity a socialization as profound as the socialization proposed by the socialists that of the means of production. The socialist revolution is the fulfillment of the capitalist revolution. The one element removed from the capitalist system is saving, because consumptions richness has already been eliminated by the capitalists themselves Real communism will be the leap into the domain of freedom and of value, of communication. Contrary to utilitarian value (normally known as material value), artistic value is the progressive value because, by a process of provocation, it is the valorization of humanity itself. Since Marx, economic politics has shown its impotence and its cowardice. A hyperpolitics will need to strive for the direct realization of humanity. Walter Benjamins authentic opposition: the Crisis of Reproduction Walter Benjamin is probably Adornos most established opponent, particularly since The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a work that concentrated upon defining the aura of traditional art preceding 1900, and assessed the decay of this aura under the impact of new media and cultural technologies. Benjamin argues that art has lost its authenticity because of mechanical mass reproduction in our capitalist-orientated culture industry. He is concerned about shifting attitudes to art, which came about as a consequence of the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction. Formerly unique objects, located in a particular space, lost their singularity as they became accessible to many people in diverse places. Lost too was the aura that was attached to a work of Art which was now open to many different readings and interpretations Unlike his Frankfurt School colleagues, however, and especially unlike Adorno, Benjamin argues, this loss of authenticity is actually a positive thing, because it democratizes and politicizes art. Benjamins claim that arts loss of authenticity might actually help free people, not enslave them in a capitalist culture industry starkly opposes Adornos ideas. In addition, each stage of reproduction of an original work of art also contributes to its loss of aura. According to Benjamin, then: culture has been transformed into an industry; thus art has become commodified; contemporary culture is the machinery by which oppressive ideologies are reproduced and disseminated; new media technologies such as phonographs, film and photography, serve to destroy arts aura and effectively demystify the process of creating art, making available radical new access and roles for art in mass culture; the spectator has become a collaborator and participant, who joins the author in determining the meaning of the production of the work of art. Art is successful only when it enables the critical contemplation of a viewer. Benjamin happily equates authenticity with authority- the authority of oppressive institutions such as the church or the state- and history. As Benjamin explains, the work of arts authenticity is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced Until the 20th century, artworks retained their aura, their authenticity precisely because of their inability to be mass-reproduced, whether religious artifacts or one-off paintings commissioned by individual wealthy patrons. This conception clearly presents aura and authenticity as profoundly undemocratic, as the means of artistic production remain in the control of the rich and powerful, then able use such art to maintain control over the masses. The introduction of mechanical means of reproduction of art, particularly photography and film, caused the very foundations of this setup to be radically altered. For the first time it was possible for anyone to acquire the means to take photographs of a work of art, or at purchase an image of the work. However hard cultural elites in the late 19th century had tried to protect the aura of art works, the social advance of the masses and the invention of media such as film, which depends upon distribution to the masses, had led to the inevitable decay of the aura in the 20th century. Benjamin marks the distinction between manual and machine reproduction of art, The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical, and, of course, not only technical reproducibility, he states, Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction Benjamin states two reasons this occurs. Firstly, machine reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction; secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. So mass-produced copies are able to engage with the wider world in a manner not possible for the original or one-off copies. Benjamin summarises his ideas concerning reproduction by asserting the technique detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. Many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. So to allow the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, is to reactivate the object reproduced, It is these processes that lead to the tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind In Benjamins conception, then, state and religious authorities have steadily lost the ability to control general access to such works of art, particularly since the 20th century began. This is most apparent in relation to the cinema, which destroyed the traces of aura with which art had been traditionally imbued; Benjamin cites arts historical value as a fundamental part of magical and religious rituals. In the process, capitalism strips art of its the idealistic, theological halo- to some extent a happy consequence and restorative, as it returns the art object to its non-utilitarian presence, its everyday reality. For Benjamin, an artworks aura refers to its uniqueness and the phenomena of distance, however close [an object] may be. He uses gives the example of distant mountains and a trees bough over head, both contain aura because they are images have not been effectively reproduced mechanically . Beyond the concepts of aura and authenticity, Benjamins concepts of reproduction and reversibility represent the core of his concerns about way in which arts role in society has been fundamentally altered in the 20th century. Benjamin proposes that the artworks aura of authenticity has withered away because of its reproduceability, and the process of reproduction brings art into closer proximity with a mass audience. However, paradoxically, as the authenticity erodes, the works essence becomes forefronted in the process, as it starts to become designed for reproducibility. As Benjamin describes it, for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for an authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice politics. Benjamins commentaries on the effects of reproduction inspired other writers, such as Lechte, it is the process of reproduction as such which is revolutionary: the fact, for instance, that the photographic negative enables a veritable multiplication of originals. With the photograph, therefore, the spectre of the simulacrum emerges, although Benjamin never names it as such. The photograph as simulacrum by-passes the simple difference between original and copy Barbara Krugers Situationism and the Irresistible Collage of Society Barbara Kruger addresses the negative aspects of capitalist society as an artist, writer, curator, lecturer and graphic designer. Her art is displayed both inside and outside museums and in a range of different forms. Occasionally her prints are framed and hung on the walls of museums and galleries in the traditional fashion, but Kruger is endlessly inventive, and often writes text to be printed or projected directly on the walls or floors of a museum. In Picturing Greatness, a photography exhibition curated by Kruger in 1987 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York, text was printed in large black type across a central partition. Kruger selected photographs for this exhibit from the museums collection, and according to the words on the partition, the photographs were mostly of mostly famous artists who happened to be predominantly white and male. The text on the partition claimed the works can show us how vocation is ambushed by clich and snapped into stereotype by the camera, and how photography freezes moments, creates prominence and makes history. Krugers work continually questions the definition of art, artists and the ways in which great art should be exhibited. In this work, Kruger challenges the overwhelming dominance of male artists and draws attention to the females apparent invisibility in western art history. Just like the Situationists under Guy Debord, she has altered the meaning of art by recontextualising it. Crucia lly, the visitor to Krugers exhibition does not need to be familiar with the original photographs before seeing the show- even the uneducated viewer could read Krugers text, look at the original images and come to their own conclusions about the meaning. Thus the work achieves a kind of unique political democracy. Kruger has a background as a graphic designer, and as such creates effective bold images which are in many ways visually indistinguishable from advertisements, but rather than trying to sell a product, appeal directly to our social conscience. The subject of her text is always I, me, we, or you, as though Kruger engages in conversation with the viewer. Her messages probe the assumptions of the capitalist status quo: You are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic, When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook and We have received orders not to move. Similarly, Constant, of the COBRA group, proposed a city as a kind of physical expression of his utopia of free play which, in parts, bears striking resemblance to representations of the Internet, in books such as Mapping Cyberspace (with wild lines pouring out of the metropolis perhaps representing bandwidth and site traffic). Made with perspex and bike parts, Constants models and his diagrams for New Babylon demonstrate his yearning for future as something mobile, organic, animated, and self-celebratory. For Constant the city was a sort of perpetual festival of leisure. With its intricately connected wires suspending clear circular layers, ramps and walkways, Constants New Babylon recalls some kind of tensile organism. As Constant describes it, The unfunctional character of this playground-like construction makes any logical division of the inner spaces senseless. We should rather think of a quite chaotic arrangement of small and bigger spaces that are constantly assembled and dissembles by means of standardized mobile construction elements like walls, floors and staircases. Thus the social space can be adapted to the ever-changing needs of an every changing population as it passes through the sector system. Analogues with the Internet are irresistable. Equally, he could have been referring in a general way to those unique social structures which have grown from the anti-globalisation movement structures which, although provisional, pragmatic and short term, are nevertheless ideologically committed to social change and serve as emblems of the ongoing struggle against capitalism, a battle fuelled entirely from reserves of creativity. Constants is city as collage, similar to that celebrated by the less politically motivated group, Archigram, in the UK (many of whose members now design massive architectural features for megaband stadium concerts). In this time of desperate connectivity and complicated layering of urban cultures, with invisible webs of communication engulfing us, the need to understand the city as a place beyond work and production seems more pressing than ever. The Situationist reaction to capitalism is also excellently expressed through anti capitalist collage: for example that of the General Lighting and Power group, whose slick mock-advertising images of soft focus female forms in leotards and computer graphics of office interiors and car accidents, wryly annotated with entertaining aphorisms such as: Aerobics is necessary: progress implies it (I see you baby, shaking that ass) and God is in the retailing Comparisons to Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are obvious. Charles Rice, too, has observed the oversized billboard signs now proliferating in major cities, arguing convincingly that they serve to perpetuate the distance between the real and the impossible,these spatial fantasies effectively deliver identification with the distant and the unattainable Many writers have noted the similarities between the Situationists idea of the derive (that is, the navigating of a city via means and routes other than those originally intended) and the experience of surfing the internet. Colin Fournier, architect and educator makes some potent observations on this area. It would seem that many of the characteristics of the internet reflect the S.I.s utopic city. The things considered prerequisite for their utopia: an ephemeral, negotiable type of city, where uses were determined by the population, surfing the web is like the idea of drifting or deriving, flaneur-like, through a city. The Situationist city and the web are uniquely flexible, anarchically dynamic: spacial relations secondary on any given route. The internet always seems to somehow recall the old Surrealist idea of using a map of one city to find ones way around another. Art as Capitalism: the Medias Re-appropriation of Images Increasingly, the media is becoming governed by imagery, and the average consumer is overwhelmed by visual information on a daily basis. Through sheer competition, the commercial sphere has been forced to use stranger, scarier, more extreme imagery to earn the attention of bewildered customers. Magazines such as Vogue have lured artists to their pages, where they are seen as innovative, visionary powers for re-inventing a complacent visual vocabulary. Thus, the traditional hierarchy of photography, in which the commercial and conceptual worlds were segregated, has been broken down into a fluid, integrated world- mutual respect has ensured that crossing the boundary either way no longer carries the taint or disrespect it once did. A new generation of artists have grown up with the rather cynical and postmodern idea that all things are commercially viable. Contemporary art school graduates are less likely to see their ventures into the commercial realm as contamination, and more as a necessary aspect of their endeavor. Commerce is incorporated into art at every level, from the means to the ends to the theme. That the common thread of art and fashion- the human body- has become such a commodity, seems like an obvious extension of this. Fashion spreads frequently borrow art photographers for their pages and mimic, in the case of Diesel and others, with considerable irony- the current art world trend towards narrative ambiguity and deliberately theatrical tableaux that recall theoretical artists like Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman. Russel Wong is one such new generation artist, his work strongly informed by todays cultural fascination with celebrity. Wong has become famous through striking portraits of personalities from sports to music and movies, famous for capturing moments of vulnerability, warmth and humor. A number of Wongs photos have been used on the covers of international magazines. My photos are never confrontational, he says, I want to bring something from the inside and not just show the pretty face, but I also want my subjects to look good. One of Wongs recent exhibitions, a series of prints, straddles the line between photography and fine art, and includes a commentary on celebrity that implicitly involves him with the commercial world. He has been painting, crayoning and etching on the photographs he works from, and uses this process to build a social commentary about the cult of celebrity. He explains, I wanted to look at how a stars identity is fabricatedEach image explores the relationship between the person, the entertainment industry and the public the cult of celebrity. Wongs print work is a little increasingly wry, showing a greater sense of self-criticality, possibly mocking phenomena of celebrity. In a work themed on the Chinese star Joan Chen, for example, Wong examines the manner in which publishers seem to critically view, censor or judge what is the right image before the consuming public encounters it as true. In this way, Chens picture is deemed too sexy, too demure and even too perfect, consciously pointing to the mechanics that operate within the celebrity media machine. Wong began taking photos of athletes as a teenager, having been a keen athlete himself and enjoyed taking photos of other athletes on the tracks. At only nineteen, he offered a photo of Sebastian Coe, to Nike, who, in an act of supreme arts/fashion crossover symbolism, paid him with a pair of shoes. The photo was published on the cover of the sports publication Track Field News, and Nike established a regular routine with the young man, regularly taking his work in exchange for shoes. Again, exemplifying the symbiotic relationship between art and capitalism, played out in the fashion world, Wong recounts, Soon I was running a shoe shop out of my dorm, Wong went on to develop a keen interest in portraiture, but has never explicitly acknowledged that even his sports photography was a form of portraiture: albeit a portrait of an archetype- or even a portrait of a brand. The move from portraits to celebrity portraits was a natural one, in Wongs case, a mere side effect of geography, in fact. The models started to bring their boyfriends. In those days it was the brat pack with people like Downey JrFrankly when youre living in L.A. and youre in this kind of business its bound to happen. Fashion as Capitalism: the Medias Re-appropriation of Gender In Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City, Cristy Turner suggests that the show may be really about four gay men. The show is set in the gay territory of fabulousness and that gay men hold all the cards both on and off screen- many of the shows writers are gay. The women in SATC are, on first glance, hardly a minority group. Yet, as Turner writes, Yet disidentification with mainstream ideals can also occur within the diegesis of a show; the women of Sex and the City could loosely be described as constituting one such minority group, as they consciously disidentify with bourgeois family values in favor of the dazzling, idealized notion of fabulousness embodied in their gay sidekicks. While certainly upholding and perpetuating many strongholds of normative US culturemoney, consumerism, heteronormativity, whitenessthe characters of Sex and the City also stray from certain conventions of femininity and tradition in favor of attaining this fabulous lifestyle and persona. The fabulous high campness that Turner describes hails from a tradition of black gay males that evolved as a defensive measure to create an impenetrable force-field of extravagant confection, both a protection and a distraction, it also served to underline the difference to the mainstream with an autonomic flourish that reclaims homosexual exclusion as a conscious choice of self-marginalisation. Yet the lifestyle and trappings of flamboyance require money, and capitalism will always ask subcultures to forfeit their marginalized chic, if they wish to survive in society. Hence underground culture is rapidly appropriated by dominant society as capitalism turns subculture into style. As Turner says, what began as a survival strategy for poor queer people of color eventually morphs into sly and discreet markers of fabulousness for the rich, white, heteronormative characters on Sex and the CityFabulousness exists merely as a free-floating marker of cultural capital, obscuring its subversive origins and capitalizing on a raced and classed cultural history without acknowledging the fierce politics behind it. Harzweski argues convincingly that sexuality has undergone increasing capitalization right across the board, and this is clearly reflected in the visual arts. She expands on the old discourse of female objectification, explaining how the culture of dating itself is an exacerbatory symptom of an increasingly commodified society. People of both genders have become a currency in a new society which pivots on the trading of love promises, where everything is accountable and where our commercial greed to earn more is mapped directly onto our biological desire to love and be loved. She cites a dating book which offers an up to 60 percent increase in the odds of marital likelihood, Featured guidelines specify that the shift from casual to monogamous dating should occur between the 1st and 4th month and that the 22nd month of dating marks a watershed moment as the statistical trend line for receiving a proposal begins to drop off. In late heterosexuality, capitalism levels heterosexualitys claim to naturalness in that successful heterosexuality is shown to be the product of labor or a resilient entrepreneurial esprit, Late heterosexuality, a term Harzweski coins, describes this particular social moment, where the desire to go get it has been transferred from entrepreneurial ambitions onto dating culture. Women today believe if they work hard enough, aim high enough, put enough effort in, believe in themselves enough, they are entitled to any man they want- or whichever men they want, however they want them. Laura Kipnis has called it labor-intensive intimacy the idea that if we work hard and network enough in our quest for a soul-mate, payoffs will inevitably yield, and the idea is also touted by a self-help lecture program that Charlotte and Carrie are seen to attend in Season 5 . Capitalising on Sexual Imagery: the Limits of Choice There is indeed much evidence that Sex and the City conflates sexual politics with modern business concepts and sales rhetoric. For example, Samantha asserts that the new dating field is all about multitasking and that the group ought to try to avoid falling into a one-man-at-a-time pattern. We are constantly reminded of the significance of Samanthas position as an efficient PR executive. She is clearly an expert at selling, and sells herself better than anything. Carrie, especially, appears stricken with a materialistic malaise, for example where she compares first dates to job interviews with cocktails in episode 69. She makes the point even more explicitly, in episode 75, as she types on her laptop, When it comes to finance and dating I couldnt help wonder why we keep investing. Carries capital is astonishing and apparently entirely expressed through an invented iconography of high-heeled shoes. There are occasional anxieties around the sheer amount of capital invested in clothes and shoes, after weathering all the ups and downs you could one day find yourself with nothing, and the time Carrie discovers that she cannot get a bank loan to buy her apartment and that she has, over the course of a decade, spent $40,000 on shoes. Theres your down payment, Miranda tells her. I will literally become the old woman who lived in her shoes, Carrie laments. Yet despite this Carrie remains constantly upbeat about her material situation: after all it is her job to wear style, to be style, and as long as there is consumerism she will be happy in her identity. The constant celebration of the material in Sex and the City is only hollow and exhausting if it is set against any anticipation of the women as three-dimensional characters. To the extent that show is a commentary, and surely this facet is emphatically underlined by Carries literal, post-modern commentaries of each episode, (including details of her friends lives she couldnt possibly really know)- the show is a commentary on the abstractions of modern living and modern loving. The message is that the privilege of capitalism is choice. We can choose which woman to be, which shoes we want, which words we write, which man we want to spend the night with. Every episode turns on an over-agonised choice around some consumable or other: most memorably in the case of the dress from the pages of Vogue, which The Russian buys for Carrie. Marxist academic Tim Fiskin has contrasted Carries function with that of Girls Aloud, the pop group chosen by the people and successful against the odds. Their appeal, for him, is their apparent stubborn refusal to choose, refusal to participate in the choices which will only fatten capitalist coffers and delay the revolution, Girls Aloud are unimpressed, which carries the pretty strong corollary that anything you do might fail to impress them (which would lead not to ridicule or punishment, of course, but simply more unfeeling boredom)their apathy is not in principle limited to any particular circumstances. In this sense, the Girls are the anti-Carrie Bradshaws. Carrie is obsessed with choosing, carefully organising her life so that no choice is completed. She inhabits the perfect late-capitalist world where the moment of choice is literally endless (that is, lasts forever). And note that this is not simply despite her choice being of no significance whatsoever, but precisely because of that: the more indiscernable the alternatives then the more the choice is a pure exercise of will; that is, the more it is, ideologically, a free choice. Girls Aloud have no truck with any of that. Their aporia is a quite different one, not an endless deferral but a tactical refusal (sometimes to not choose is not a choice , its something much better) According to Tim, the refusal to choose will bring about freedom- and Carries insistence on frolicking delightedly in her capitalist playground only reinforces the fact that she exists in a perpetual state of choice, with infinite options. The human moments in Sex and the City, undoubtedly the best moments, arise when choices are denied the characters. When Miranda has a baby, for example, or Samantha is diagnosed with cancer. In fact it is only Carrie, the lynchpin of the series, who is never denied choices, whose aporia remains infinite, and who must remain a dehumanized logo, a letter or symbol, for the abstract messages of the show. Late heterosexuality is the selected heterosexuality, as opposed to the heterosexuality by default as feminist writers have characterised femininity. It is a desire for men that arises from an initial desire to choose. Harzweski calls it post compulsory sexuality , and, in her terms, it always involves a humiliating displacement of the male romantic lead. In the same way that Alfie calls his girl friends It, the female characters in Sex and the City barely seem to remember their lovers names, replacing them with impersonal classifications, Big, The Russian. It is almost as though the boundaries between man and accessory are no longer relevant. Males and products are interchangeable in Sex and the City: a shoe often appears to be as good as sex, a vibrator often better. For example, when Smith Jerrods genitals are represented by a vodka bottle in a billboard advert he becomes a minor celebrity as the Absolut Hunk. While he struggles with his new identity as commodity, Samantha strives to keep him anonymous for her anxiously anonymous sex games. After learning his name, she swiftly changes it back, as Harzweski writes, merging the girlfriend role she resists with a more familiar and powerful position as public relations manager (Lights, Camera, Relationship, episode 79) Carries relationships with men take second place to her wardrobe, obviously, yet since her desires seem to be an extreme shorthand for female narcissism, she must be presented as traditionally feminine around men. Carries ultimate desire is to be owned by the Russian; she revels in his attentions, his cooking, and most of all the way he can literally make her dreams come true (buying that dress for her, right out of the pages of Vogue). But while she frets to her friends that he is too good to be true, her real complaint is that he is crossing a line of imagined desire. If he is able to make her dreams come true, and in this very literal sense (she is a literal girl, and her dreams illustrate the pages of fashion magazines) then she will run out of dreams as soon as the magazine is finished. It is imperative that her desires remain slightly elusive, or that any man smart enough to recognize them from the pages of the magazines they are written in, must at least pretend he hasnt notic ed and play along for her sake. She is forced to continue deferring her choices indefinitely for her capitalist paradise to be sustained. Carrie loves the Russian, however, because he is tuned into her materialism and represents a very real extension of it. Barishnikov of course- carefully cast as he represents asexual elegance and performance rather than humanity, reality. Carries extraordinarily dandyish image casts her as a female flaneur of some sort. Her lover is Big, clearly an abbreviation for Big Apple, almost- and characterized as a symbol of classic New York. His rival Aiden is a country lover and opposite, but the men are virtually emasculated and obscured by the emphasis on their styles. Capitalisms Postmodern Apologists If Sex and the City is a postmodern production, we are left wondering whether postmodern approaches to art production can ever really challenge the capitalist status quo. As already seen in Baudrillard, postmodern writers have reacted to contemporary arts efforts to disrupt capitalism in different ways. Jurgen Habermas, the Marxist theorist, perceived postmodernism as reactionary because of the way it promoted industrial modernization on one hand, while criticising the art that emerged alongside. Habermas seemed open to the possibility that art might have a positive influence on social change, believing that modernism still has theoretical value. Habermas views modernism as something in a constant state of change, something that enjoyed the avant-garde as a force working continually against tradition, Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative. Lyotard, too, saw the anarchic potential in postmodern paradigms, because they enabled a critique of meta-narratives, i.e. philosophies and ideas that had been taken as truths. He saw these meta-narratives, such as the Enlightenment and even modernism as representations of dominant modes of thinking that, since late capitalism and postmodernism, could be called into question. Lyotard, like all the voices of postmodernism, questioned our assumptions about origination, authority, expression and universalism. Images which appeared to present an illusion of reality were disdained, since they fallaciously aimed to present an incorrect notion, that is, the impression that reality could be presented in art. Although his experience of the student riots of 1968 in Paris gave made him doubtful about whether social change was still possible, he did hope that postmodernism harboured potential to counter the capitalist regime, We can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be the witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. Meanwhile, Barthes viewed representative, deceptive pieces of mimetic art as text, and found liberation in the opportunity for engagement, even discourse, with art objects that had been opened up by postmodern theory. As he writes, the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia; before Historythe Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate. An explosion of experiment expressionist works and collage in the first half of the twentieth century had serious implications for art theory. The absence of an artist as the authorial presence, and as a person with a high level of training in a particular area allowed for a levelling of any perceived hierarchies between viewer and artist. It suddenly became possible for viewers to engage with the work without being intimidated or alienated by it; to contribute, affirm and create it, and to participate in the determination of meaning. Jean Baudrillard, by contrast, remained dubious about the merits of contemporary art, seeing the late capitalist trends towards mass reproduction as a damaging to the integrity of culture. The 1960s, in Baudrillards view, entailed a crisis of representational art due to commodity cultures reliance on reproductive methods. Baudrillards understanding of the post-modern centres on this notion of reproduction and the crisis, deriving from late capitalism, was symptomatic of an increasingly weak connection to reality- authenticity. In the place of Real ideas and objects, substituting originals, was a preference for a certain kind of simulation- a copies which had lost their originals altogether. Baudrillard labelled the new societical dominance of simulation hyperreal, a state where the copy is taken to be more real than the original. Conclusions: Arts Impossible Struggle for Authenticity Conceptual Artists have always tried to undermine capitalism. More so than ever before, artists in the late 1960s and early 70s saw their role as social mouthpiece, giving voice to ideas that attacked the limitations imposed by the economic autocracy of late capitalism. It was of course an impossible role to fulfil without contradiction. Artists aimed to overcome one set of limits- the social and political constrictions capitalism suggested, but at the same time their work had limits of its own. Art works had their own restrictions, assumptions, and biases, based on gender, class, and race. The art world was still laden with assumptions and unwritten rules about the kinds of ideas that were valid or appropriate for conceptual art, and most artists still had a vested interest in maintaining a sense of other worldly transcendence, maintaining a distance between the art object and the viewer. This is very clear from the writings of Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth- both of whom were writers as well as conceptual artists. Concept is so important to artists like these that it becomes the only aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. Conceptual artists were interested in studying the growth of simulacra as a means of critique on the growth of commodity culture. Conceptual art favoured ideas to objects, however, adhering to ideas reflected more a modernist attitudes of universalism, the humanist renaissance man ideal, that opposed the post-modern insistence that viewers ought to participate in art making. In actual fact, conceptual art suffered from airs of elitism- generally considered to be too narrow or beyond the intellectual range of the public. Conceptual art echoed modernism in many ways, then: it specified artistic criteria that, while obfuscated and draconian, were in reality extremely subjective. Its assertion that the work should be mentally stimulating recalled modernist ideas of transcendence far more than any real moralistic protest against the pressures presented by the capitalist society. It seems that even the most influential and persuasive movements in art history have struggled in vain to sustain an anti-capitalist position, but this may be less to do with unconviction or insincerity and more to do with the pervasion of capitalism- and the highly appealing idealism of the vision that opposes it. Bibliography Art Strike Handbook, p. 38 as referenced on https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/artstrik.htm Atkin, Douglas, The Culting Of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers London: Portfolio (2004) Barthes, Roland From Work To Text (1971) online here https://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Barthes-FromWorktoText.html Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in ed. Hannah Arendt, Illuminations Glasgow: Fontana (1973). Borden, Iain Sandy McCreery (Eds) New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City (2001) Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde UK: Morgan Morgan (1981) Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle UK: Zone Books (1995) Debord and Canjuers, Preliminaries: Towards Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program online here https://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/prelim.htm Fiskin, T. Shoulda Known, Shoulda Cared,in https://huh.34sp.com/wrong/2005/01/01/the-erotics-of-apathy/#comments Habermas, Jurgen in Holub, Robert. Jrgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere, London: Routledge, (1991) p. 134 Harzewski, S. The Limits of Defamiliarization: Sex and the City as Late Heterosexuality from https://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/hbo/harzewski_01.htm Hebdidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style London: Methuen (1979) https://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj84/molyneux.htm https://www.midaddle.com/interstitial.aspx Hussey, Andrew. The Game of War London: Jonathan Cape (2001) Jappe, A. Guy Debord US: University of California Press (1999) Jorn, Asger The End of The Economy and The Realisation of Art -originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste No.4 (June 1960) Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Pantheon, 2003 Knabb, Ken (ed) Situationist International Anthology Bureau of Public Secrets, US: Berkeley (1981) Kolesnikov-Jessop, A take on the cult of celebrity from the International Herald Tribune, Jan 6th 2005 https://iht.com/articles/2005/01/05/features/wong.html Kristeva, Zoe Artistic Rebellion: The Modern Dynamic in The Philosopher, Volume LXXXIV No. 1 Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity London; New York: Routledge (1998) Sol LeWitt, Sol. Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum (June, 1967) online https://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Stu/kswenson/lewitt.htm Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism Berkeley: University of California Press (1984) Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism? In Waugh, Patricia Postmodernism: A Reader UK: Edward Arnold (1992) Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension London: Macmillan (1979) Marshall, D. Celebrity and power; fame in a contemporary culture Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press (1997) McCracken, Grant, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press (1990) MacInnis and Mello, The Concept of Hope and Its Relevance to Consumer Behavior (2001) p.67 Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge (1992) Rice, Charles, New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City US: John Riley Sons (2001) Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City US: Mit Press (1998) Sex and the City. Created by Darren Star. HBO. 19982004. The Origin Of Dadaism https://www.public.iastate.edu/~volkerh/99R/online/DADA1.htm Turner, C. Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City in https://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/hbo/turner_01.htm Vaneigem, Raoul The Revolution of Everyday Life US: Rebel Press (2001) Wells, Liz. Thinking About Photography, in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. Liz Wells, London; New York: Routledge (1997)

How to Write a Newsletter in Less Than an Hour

When I was first hired at Lucidpress, I was asked to handle nearly all of our content writing, including the monthly email newsletter. It was a terrifying prospect. Most marketers know that email is a specialized skillset, and it's easy to screw something up. But not only have we avoided major newsletter snafus, I've been able to cut down my time creating a newsletter from one workday... to one hour. That's a time savings of about 800%, and the newsletters look (and read) better than ever. Related: How to make a newsletter in 9 steps So, how did I streamline my process? I'll boil it down to 3 easy steps, which you can follow for newsletters, blog posts, email campaigns and similar content. 1. Do your homework I hate starting newsletters from scratch, so I always do research beforehand. If you're at a larger company, attend important meetings and take notes a few weeks before you start writing. If you're running a one-man shop, make notes throughout the month. You'll want to record things like: Improvements or updates to your product Business initiatives, like a push for more customer feedback Random thoughts and ideas like "Are there any upcoming holidays we can capitalize on?" or "Should we start a referral marketing program?" Always write down a point-of-contact's name next to your notes so you know who to seek out for more details. As for the third point, you may not use all the random ideas that pop up, but before long, you'll have a working list of future email campaigns to test. 2. Clarify your goals Develop a clear goal, and make sure it's displayed front-and-center in your newsletter. You might be trying to: Publicize new features or offerings Increase traffic to a store or website Boost sales with a newsletter discount or promotion Capture customer feedback on your product Get subscribers to tell their friends about you Remind customers what your product does Make an emotional connection with your audience In all likelihood, you're trying to do several of these at once. Pick the most important one, and make sure it's represented at the very start of your newsletter. It should also be presented (in a compelling way) in your subject line. The other major points will fall into place and can often be accomplished without text (think strategically placed links, images and calls-to-action). 3. Make it pretty (and repeatable) Now that you have notes and a clear goal, you can easily write the text of your newsletter. The most important step here is to format your text for maximum readability. You'll also want a nice-looking layout that communicates your company's professionalism. Here are my tips for making it happen in under an hour: Distribution Ask yourself where your audience is, then decide on your method of distribution. You can go old-school with a printed newsletter or distribute your content digitally; the latter is more common nowadays. Lucidpress's company newsletter templates allow you to quickly build a professional-looking newsletter, then print or share with a URL. All of our templates can be customized to make school newsletter templates, Christmas newsletter templates and more. You can push out the link via social media or a website, but remember that you'll still want to use a dedicated email service to email it. That way, you don't have to handle subscribes/unsubscribes, CAN-SPAM compliance, and other time-sucking aspects of email management. I've had good experiences with MailChimp and Hubspot, but there are many others to choose from. Here's how a Lucidpress newsletter looks when you embed it in MailChimp. Pretty snazzy, right? We generate the code for you—just copy and paste it in. If you'd rather build a newsletter with HTML than embed a Lucidpress newsletter, pick an email service that offers prebuilt layouts. If you can't do that, enlist the help of a professional web developer to create a few plug-and-play templates. Text formatting Lead with items that have the broadest appeal to your audience. Keep it short, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. My newsletters rarely exceed 400 words and are usually closer to 200. This email from MURAL is a great example of how to use text sparingly to get your point across. The copy is brief and easy to read, while the images are carefully positioned to support the text. It all adds up to a highly consumable newsletter. Design Break up the text with relevant images, buttons and links. Use enough negative space to let all of your design elements breathe. This example from Litographs shows how striking a clean, roomy design can be. And that's all, folks: how to write a newsletter in less time than ever before. We'd love to hear your own tips for maximizing effectiveness in marketing—just leave them in the comments. Ready to make your own newsletter? These free newsletter templates are a great starting point.