“There Is No Authority But Yourself ”: The Individual and the Collective in British Anarcho-Punk

Abstract:  The heartfelt conclusion to the fifth studio album by seminal British anarchist punk band Crass urges the listener to take up the challenge of personal freedom and responsibility. The exhaustion of vocalist Eve Libertine’s delivery serves to emphasis both the sincerity and desperation of the message. Taken in isolation, such a stark declaration of the “primacy of the individual” might suggest that the concern of anarchist punk began and ended with the agency of the single person. And yet, there can be little doubt that from its 1977 origins onwards, the self-declared role of anarcho-punk was to act as the catalyst for radical, collectivist opposition to the War State. Was there an unresolved tension between anarcho-punk’s concern to maximize the “rights of the individual,” free from societal interference, and its demand for mass mobilization against State power? Did this reveal a critical fault line in the movement’s anarchist manifesto? How could anarcho-punk’s celebration of individual liberty be reconciled with the movement’s “counter-cultural conformity,” as suggested by the critics? This article explores the relationship between the individual and the collective in the culture, politics, and practice of the British anarcho-punk movement, between 1977 and 1984.

A Sense of Place short link: http://wp.me/pISTJ-ht

Full Text: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0004.203

Cross, Rich. “‘There is No Authority but Yourself’: The Individual and the Collective in British Anarcho-Punk.” Music and Politics 4.2 (2010).

 

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Open Yale Courses

Overview: Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

• Registration is not required.
• No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.

The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.

Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

A Sense of Place Shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-gL

Full Course: http://oyc.yale.edu/courses

Open Yale Courses

Yale University

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Philosophical Outlooks Upon The Beautiful

Abstract: Constitutive interrogation of aesthetics is whether the beautiful stands for the universal object of aesthetics, in the way that the good stands for the universal object of ethics. The reason for this issue being raised to debate is that objections may arise upon the central position of the beautiful.

In the first place, we dare say art not always achieves the beautiful. There are artistic oeuvres that are not necessarily beautiful. The reply is generally that beauty asserts itself on another plan, as it pertains not to the field of the object, but to its representation.

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Full text: http://but.unitbv.ro/BU2010/Series%20VII/BULETIN%20VII%20PDF/PHILOSOPHY%20AND%20HISTORY/251%20Ratulea.pdf

Răţulea, GPhilosophical Outlooks Upon The Beautiful
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov • Vol. 3 (52) – 2010
Series VII: Social Sciences • Law

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STRANGER AT HOME: Poetic Sensibility Across Cultures and Languages

Excerpts:

Who gives the right to a foreign poet write in a non-native language? Knowledge of language is necessary, but not sufficient. This right is given by artist’s destiny. “Do not compare, the living is incomparable!” (Osip Mandelstam). Arthur Schopenhauer formulated a double-aspect theory to the understanding of reality, that of the world existing simultaneously but separately as will and representation. Real poets exercise the will, cultural bystanders – representation. People know and understand the world and reality by naming it; thus through language.

Literature in Diaspora, in intercultural space is creative work in solitude. Not poetry of solitude, but poetry in solitude. The condition of a writer in intercultural space is the condition of an artist who is alone with himself or herself and the literary language process is going mainly inside the artist. Such an artist has tempting opportunity to be a voyeur. There is something mysteriously wonderful of watching new life through the prism of alienation..

One of the major poets said, “A poet begins where a human being ends.” One of the important interpretations is that poetry uses a special, almost “nonhuman” language. Therefore, the process of merging, overlapping, overshadowing, intermingling, and entwining is characteristic for poetry. Living one’s life in a strange metaphorical sphere of poetry implies a certain degree of detachment, derangement, and alienation. A native or nonnative poet, who lives and therefore creates in a certain cultural space and time, is always, to a certain degree, an outsider, or at least, an extramural observer. “All poets are Yids!” (Jews, Zhidy in Russian) as Marina Tsvetaeva, a great Russian poet who was raised in the very center of the Russian intellectual elite, once said. What she meant is that poets, by definition, are more or less misfits or, at times, even outcasts in the mainstream of cultural establishment, where they live and create.

Full Text:

http://www.logosjournal.com/?q=print/66

Sense of Place Comments

STRANGER AT HOME: Poetic Sensibility Across Cultures and Languages

By: Andrey Gritsman

Logos a journal of modern society & culture. 2008; v. 7, Issue 2. ISSN 15430820.

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