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A masterful study of the hidden roots of contemporary culture and should b read by anyone interested in how and why our intellectual landscape has changed quite dramatically since the Victorian era.
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Page i Anarchy & Culture Page ii A volume in the series Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture Edited by David Gross and William M. Johnston Page iii Anarchy & Culture The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism David Weir University of Massachusetts Press Amherst Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 88591 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 88591 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. Copyright © 1997 by David Weir All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 9650314 ISBN 1558490833 (cloth); 0841 (pbk.) Designed by Dennis Anderson Set in New Baskerville Printed and bound by BraunBrumfield, Inc. Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Weir, David, 1947 Apr. 20– Anarchy and culture : the aesthetic politics of modernism / David Weir. p. cm.—(Critical perspectives on modern culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1558490833 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 1558490841 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Politics and literature. 2. Literature, Modern—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature) 4. Anarchism. 5. Literature and society. I. Title. II. Series. PN51.W345 1997 809'.933358—dc21 9650314 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available. Page v Alles funktioniert, nur der Mensch selber nicht mehr. —Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit In memory of David Geoffrey Weir (1973–1991) Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Definitions The Ideologies of Anarchism 11 2 Reactions Anarchism as Cultural Threat 42 3 Responses Culture in the Anarchist Camp 87 4 Affinities Anarchism and Cultural Promotion 116 5 Aesthetics From Politics to Culture 158 6 Artists Anarchism and Cultural Production 201 Afterword 259 Notes 269 Index 297 Page ix Acknowledgments This book is mainly the product of my own autonomous impulses. Had I subjected those impulses more to the mutualist considerations of my academic comrades a better book might have been the result. Those comrades and colleagues who have tried to direct my egoistic endeavors toward more meaningful social and scholarly contexts include Dore Ashton, Peter Buckley, James Rubin, Maren Stange, and Brian Swann at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. I must also thank my students, whose ability to somehow extract a portion of their integral education out of me is truly remarkable. To Sven Zbinden, Brian Booth, Goon Koch, and Elizabeth Murray I say: "You've had the course, now read the book." If they do, they should be grateful, as I am, for the labor of Liselot Van der Heijden, Fernanda Perrone, Betty Waterhouse, and Pam Wilkinson, who assured that my own ideas and those suggested by the Colorado Kopfarbeiter David Gross would take material form. The final synthesis of material and intellectual culture was overseen by Clark Dougan (better known as the Dialectical Anarchist of Amherst), to whom I am most gratefu