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Showing posts with the label Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Kitsch, Normativity, and the Collapse of Culture

I intended to publish this a few weeks ago as a kind of year-end summary of some of the themes I drew out across reviews over the past twelve months or so. Time got away from me and I did not get around to it, so here it is. It comes in the form of a meta-commentary/review concerning two books published in the last few years. Both texts were attempts to resuscitate cultural theory. While that is hardly rare, they were unique for being a bit more inventive in their discussion of emergent forms and acknowledging how increasingly difficult it is to make the cultural premise appear sound. I am only highlighting a few of the themes they address and channelling them to extrapolate on the issues most relevant to the broader discussions on this site. Two recent books have attempted to salvage the notion of culture when confronted with the spectre that its material basis has clearly become unstuck. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism an...