Through the concept of ldquo;social choreographyrdquo; Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history and critical theory together; he shows that ideology needs to be understood as something embodied and practiced; not just as an abstract form of consciousness. Linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movementmdash;such as walking; stumbling; and laughtermdash;to historical ideals of social order; he provides a powerful exposition of Marxist debates about the relation of ideology and aesthetics.Hewitt focuses on the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth and considers dancers and social theorists in Germany; Britain; France; and the United States. Analyzing the arguments of writers including Friedrich Schiller; Theodor Adorno; Hans Brandenburg; Ernst Bloch; and Siegfried Kracauer; he reveals in their thinking about the movement of bodies a shift from an understanding of play as the condition of human freedom to one prioritizing labor as either the realization or alienation of embodied human potential. Whether considering understandings of the Charleston; Isadora Duncan; Nijinsky; or the famous British chorus line the Tiller Girls; Hewitt foregrounds gender as he uses dance and everyday movement to rethink the relationship of aesthetics and social order.
#646816 in eBooks 2013-10-31 2013-10-31File Name: B00EFB45SS
Review
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Avant-Garde DeleuzeBy StreetlightReaderThis was a book I was suspicious of from the get-go. Deleuze and futurism? What in the world could they have to do with each other? Deleuze never openly wrote on the futurists; and his artistic and literary references - Antonin Artaud; Lewis Carroll; Herman Melvile; Francis Bacon; Franz Kafka; and D. H. Lawrence to name a few - certainly didnrsquo;t scream the name of a Futurist aesthetic. Yet such is the strength of Helen Palmerrsquo;s powerfully argued case that by the turn of this studyrsquo;s last page; a believer and a dunce Irsquo;ve been made to be. In truth through; Palmer doesnrsquo;t so much identify Deleuze as a futurist so much as she diagnoses what she refers to as a lsquo;futurist driversquo; that courses through his writings; one made especially manifest at the level of Deleuzersquo;s theories about; and practice of; linguistic exercise.Indeed; Deleuzersquo;s engagements with the question of language have often been a source of puzzlement - if not outright neglect - for commentators; who commonly declare Deleuze to have situated himself beyond the so-called lsquo;linguistic turnrsquo; more commonly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. No doubt this owes to the obscurity of Deleuzes pronouncements on language; which tend to trade at a level of elliptic abstractness that defies easy explication. Yet when shone through the lens of Palmers futurist prism; the colours and relief of the Deleuzian take on language come through in spectacular fashion; coalescing in the light of a movement whose concrete expression works to give body to aerialities of Deleuzes complex conceptual manoeuvres.In fact; half the fun of Palmers book comes from her detailing of futurism itself; with its fascinating blend of aesthetics; politics; and even geographical inflection; split as the movement was between its Italian and Russian roots. Her examination of the various futurist manifestos; together with their poetic innovations and stylistic idiosyncrasies; makes for a learning experience unto itself; bringing to the fore a period of intense creative ferment deserving of study in its own regard. And when placed alongside the work of Deleuze - with their shared concerns regarding questions of speed and temporality; space and materiality; metaphor and performativity - each serves to illuminate the other in a mutual glow well worth attending to.For all that; it is worth mentioning that this isnrsquo;t exactly an exhaustive study. While the poetic vicissitudes of Deleuze and the futurists are explored in magnificent depth; and while Palmer is at pains to point out the way in which Deleuzersquo;s reflections on language stand metonymically for his philosophical approach as a whole; other aspects of Deleuze work so central to his reflections on language - I have in mind specifically his notion of the lsquo;eventrsquo; - seem relatively underdeveloped. A reading of the Logic of Sense this is not. Still; if yoursquo;ve ever wanted to see Artaud and Khlebnikov; Carroll and Marinetti; along with all the other doyens of the modernist avant-garde spoken about in a key both philosophical and literary - and hell; you should want to see it - there are few better places to turn to than this excellent work.