A philosophical memoir: notes on Bhaskar, realism and cultural theory
Abstract
In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic (1993) played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘aesthete’ drew extensively on Bhaskar's notion of absence (in this instance of cultural skill and sensitivity) as a real absence. This in turn, allowed us to bring Bhaskar's realism and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into alignment, where the philistine plays a similar, if undeveloped and untheorized role. Overall, the article marks a recognition of the continuing possibilities of Dialectic for a theory of negation in contemporary art and cultural theory.Citation
Roberts, J. (2016) 'A philosophical memoir: notes on Bhaskar, realism and cultural theory', Journal of Critical Realism, 15(2) pp. 175-186 doi:10.1080/14767430.2016.1149771Publisher
Taylor and FrancisJournal
Journal of Critical RealismAdditional Links
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14767430.2016.1149771Type
Journal articleLanguage
enISSN
1476-7430Sponsors
University of Wolverhamptonae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1080/14767430.2016.1149771
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