Daniel Herwitz

The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption

Preface and Acknowledgments1. The Candle in the Wind2. There Is Only One Star Icon (Except in a Warhol Picture)3. Therefore Not All Idols Are American4. A Star Is Born5. The Film Aura: An Intermediate Case6. Stargazing and Spying7. Teleaesthetics8. Diana Haunted and Hunted on TV9. Star Aura in Consumer Society (and Other Fatalities)NotesIndex

Heritage, culture, and politics in the postcolony

PrefaceAcknowledgments1. The Heritage of Heritage2. Recovering and Inventing the Past: M. F. Husains Live Action Heritage3. Sustaining Heritage Off the Road to Kruger Park4. Monument5. Renaissance and Pandemic6. Tocqueville on the Bridge to NowhereEpilogueNotesIndex

Monument, ruin, and redress in South African heritage

Apartheid ended in 1991, but its monuments were still standing. And so the question for the new government, brought to power in the first democratic elections in South African history (1994), was: What to do with them? Around these monuments had been generated powerful communalizing energies for the National Party, itself a cruel phoenix arisen from the ruination of the Afrikaner peoples in the Boer War; their devaluing of African culture had been a central symbol for the apartheid state. In response the moment of political transition to democracy was scripted as a de-monumentalizing one. This essay narrates the transitional moment and through a reading of the South African Constitutional Court considers whether the chief instances of this de-monumentalizing language were not in fact monumentalizing by other means. The question has no easy answer but is rather a window into the cultural politics of the transition.

Reclaiming the Past and Early Modern Indian Art

The first of the two concepts I have found crucial in understanding modern art outside the Euro-American ambit is that of shape. This is a philosophical concept. Shape is a particular kind of social formation whose terms derive from Hegel. An art historical shape, a social manifestation, relates art production and reception to social aspiration. A Hegelian shape is a way of positing the world, of claiming knowledge of it in relation to the self, from the position of an active subject constituted by desire. The subject’s desire in the plural, as a group with shared aspirations, a social formation or type, is to realise itself, which in the Hegelian system means to know and express itself. Expression and self-knowledge are two sides of the same coin. Human activity is meant to produce a world in which the human actor can come to expression of the self rooted in an ever-more comprehensive knowledge of itself, other, and world. Within every historical shape, the function of art, along with religion and philosophy, is to aim for fullness of expression, that is, for the inhabitance of a world in which one recognises oneself. Each shape, up until the last, has posited the world in a fundamentally incomplete way that inherently alienates certain aspects of it, which remain inaccessible to human interests. The function of art is to seek reconciliation with these alienated aspects of life. Art seeks wholeness of human constitution. It is motivated by the desire for a world wholly expressive of the human self, without remainder. There is a significant insight in the Hegelian picture about the way history is shaped before it comes to finality, within those shapes that are incomplete and are, finally, superseded. Hegel grasps that a world posited within a shape at once generates expression and condemns it to failure. For art, having set out like the other forms of absolute spirit, religion, and philosophy, to bring into reconciliation those aspects of the world that are alienated from a shape, cannot succeed in doing this. Art’s project of reconciliation fails as a direct consequence of the way in which

Postmodernists of the south: An essay in philosophical journalism

What is at stake in producing philosophical thinking in the southern hemisphere—specifically in South Africa—which would critically address the whirl of representations and events of contemporary life? Since some of these events appear to totter on the brink of the term ‘postmodern’, an exploration of the relevance of that concept—better, that family of related concepts—to the South African scene must be part of the task. Postmodernism must be contextualised to its northern clime as well as subjected to argumentative scrutiny in order for any appropriation of it to happen. Since appropriation often involves conceptual recasting, at stake in bringing of postmodern theory to the south is the question of expanding that family of concepts from their first world cocoon to a variety of global sites elsewhere, and doing so in a way that tracks global similarities, differences and enmeshments. This essay seeks to explore the issues surrounding the bringing of postmodern theory to the south. South African contempo...

Francis fukuyama and the end of history

Francis Fukuyama has argued that history has come to an end. His argument is a philosophical reading of history which derives philosophical implications from empirical views about human economy, society, recent history and the human conditions for self-realization and flourishing. It is this movement between empirical description and philosophical conceptualization that my paper explores, a movement which is both fascinating and problematical. The paper does not seek to “refute” Fukuyama, whose ideas have great currency with significant reason and assumes that there is something significant about the idea of the end of history. It is rather concerned to insert a certain skepticism about the dialectic between empirical description (of the historian, the economist, the student of human nature) and philosophical conceptualization (in the manner of Hegel). What the paper comes down against is the assurance that a philosophical structure can be assigned to history. The paper is part of a larger project about philosophical constructions of finality (the end of art, the end of society, the end of history, the end of reality) where similar conclusions are drawn. These are drawn in order to suggest that much of the modern/postmodern debate operates within an Hegelian framework that entitles a philosophical reading of human affairs with respect to their finality, a finality which is supposed to be happening now.

Three Essays on Style

What is baroque? style and medium in the motion pictures the ideological antecedents of the Rolls-Royce radiator Erwin Panofsky - a curriculum vitae, William S. Heckscher.