The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Reviewer, 1983). 2. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Henry Holt, 1958). 3. Skousen, The Naked Communist, n.p. 4. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Capitalist (Salt Lake City: Reviewer, 1970). 5. For a definition of “post-Althusserian” political philosophy, see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 2000), 127–28. 1 / The Aesthetic Unconscious 1. For a brief overview of the debate and the argument that aesthetic ideology should not always be taken to be a negative category, see Martin Jay, “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology; or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?,” Cultural Critique 21 (Spring 1992). In fact, the start of my argument is Jay’s conclusion that the “wholesale critique of ‘aesthetic ideology’ . . . can thus be itself deemed ideological if it fails to register the divergent implications of the application of the aesthetic to politics. For ironically, when it does so, it falls prey to the same homogenizing, totalizing , covertly violent tendencies it too rapidly attributes to ‘the aesthetic’ itself.” See ibid., 56. In other words, I want to argue here that our task today is to deconstruct the concept of “aesthetic ideology” by highlighting the essentialist residues that still determine its common usage. This deconstruction, however, does not necessarily lead to the elimination of the concept itself. 2. For a famous discussion of these issues, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). 3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility ,” in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 122. 204 / notes 4. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 171. 5. Ibid., 173. 6. Ibid., 223. 7. See Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell , 2000). 8. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. 9. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 106. 10. de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 8. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 28. 15. Ibid., 93–94. 16. Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. James Swenson Christine Jones and Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002), 1. 17. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2009), 64. 18. Jacques Rancière, “What Aesthetics Can Mean?,” in From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 33. 19. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006), 13. 20. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 24. 21. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. 22. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 6. 23. Ibid., 23. 24. Ibid., 9. 25. Rancière, “What Aesthetics Can Mean?,” 17. 26. Ibid., 16–17. 27. Ibid., 19. 28. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 50. 29. Ibid. 30. Rancière, Disagreement, 68. 31. Ibid., 82. 32. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 21. 33. Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics,” in Think Again, ed. Peter Hallward (New York: Continuum, 2004), 219. 34. We could add a fourth political and aesthetic regime to Rancière’s list: postpolitics and antiaesthetics. The “postdemocracy” of postmodern identity politics is considered by Rancière to be the final elimination of politics in the form of the all-consuming ideology of “consensus.” This antipolitical fervor of the age of postmodernity corresponds to the theoretical enterprise of antiaesthetics, the contemporary attempt to liberate artistic practices from the “straightjacket” of speculative philosophy. 35. Rancière, Disagreement, 58. notes / 205 36. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 62. 37. Ibid., 26. Emphasis in original. 38. Rancière, Disagreement, 32. 39. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 115. 40. Ibid., 116. 41. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 24. 42. Ibid., 57–58. Emphasis in original. 43. Ibid., 57. 44. Ibid., 58. 45. Ibid., 59...