Group items tagged

What, given these circumstances, was a "high culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details

Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).

too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by "rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of "good" art.

In fact, it could be argued that queer theory's main project is not the interrogation of homosexuality, but the subverting and challenging of heterosexuality as 'natural' and 'unmarked'.

Queer theory's main project is exploring the contestations of the categorization of gender and sexuality. Theorists claim that identities are not fixed – they cannot be categorized and labeled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to categorize by one characteristic is wrong.

Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. However, it is in no position to imagine itself outside the circuit of problems energized by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations attract, queer allows those criticisms to shape its - for now unimaginable – future directions. "The term," writes Butler, "will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized."

A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. IT is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

The failure of the academic feminists to recognize differences as a crucial stregnth is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower.