tailieunhanh - CA AMERICAN STIOB: Or,What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in theWest

It is not possible to produce an adequate aesthetic theory by considering aesthetic experiences and aesthetic objects as if they belonged to entirely independent domains. 7 This is true first of all because qualities such as beauty and ugliness inhere in aesthetic objects only to the extent that they stand in certain specific relations, both causal and intentional, to experiencing subjects (a thesis which does not amount to the claim that aesthetic qualities are `merely subjective'). Further, aesthetic experiences can be directed towards further experiences as their objects: our feelings themselves can be beautiful or ugly or (otherwise aesthetically relevant. | AMERICAN STIOB Or What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West DOMINIC BOYER Rice University ALEXEI YURCHAK University of California Berkeley To those of us weaned during the Cold War there are few certainties more bedrock than the antithetical character of liberalism and socialism. For some four decades liberal-capitalist regimes and state-socialist regimes marshaled enormous pedagogical and ideological resources to educate their citizens in this singular truth that legitimated the polarized geopolitics of the second half of the 20th century. The gist of this truth was that nothing could be farther from the constitutive liberal rights and freedoms of Western democracy than the tyranny and group think of communism or seen from the other side that nothing could be more opposite from the internationalist communitarian values of socialism than the predatory self-interestedness and class warfare of capitalism. It is no small testament to the success of this Cold War pedagogy that the certainty of antithesis has outlived by decades the geopolitics that inspired it. Even as the Cold War geopolitics crumbled in the years 1989 to 1991 a victorious liberalism spared no opportunity to remind the world of its fundamental oppositeness from communism s evil empire. Liberal historiography has subsequently memorialized 1989-91 as an end-of-history extinction event for socialism Fukuyama 1992 Kornai 1992 as vindication not only of the idea that the philosophical premises of liberalism amount to human nature but also of the idea that socialism s experiments to improve human sociality have been absolutely defunct and defrauded. Twenty CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 25 Issue 2 pp. 179-221. ISSN 0886-7356 online ISSN 1548-1360. 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 25 2 years later it is unsurprising to find socialism no longer treated as a viable