Overview

By what aesthetic practice might post-politics be disrupted? Now is a moment that many believe has become post-racial, post- national, post-queer, and post-feminist. This belief is reaffirmed by recent events in the politics of diminished expectations, especially in the United States.What Lies Between illustrates how today's discourse repeats the post-politics of an earlier time. In the aftermath of World War II, both Communism and Fascism were no longer considered acceptable, political extremes appeared exhausted, and consensus appeared dominant. Then, unlike today, this consensus met a formal challenge, a disruption in the shape of a generative and negativist aesthetic figure--the void.What Lies Between explores fiction, film, and theory from this period that disrupted consensual and technocratic rhetorics with formal experimentation. It seeks to develop an aesthetic rebellion that is still relevant, and indeed vital, in the positivist present.

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9781322339009

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Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Matt Tierney puts insistent and subtle pressure on this ancient cosmological and philosophical chestnut by recasting nothing as void. And, as one might expect, what comes out of the void is far from nothing. Situated initially in the literary, critical and filmic practices of figures as diverse as Richard Wright, Jonas Mekas and Paul Goodman, void is shown to generate a medium of aesthetic politics that, in the end, Tierney wants to call Melvillean. As the reference to Melville might suggest, this resourceful and principled meditation on the void and its textual iterations blankness, darkness, negativity, the silhouette is a bold disruption of the dispersed field of American literary and cultural studies, one that moves to gather the void into a point: it offers us a way to keep the future open and avoid succumbing to the deadlock of a presumed post-political era of contemporary America, a national project indefinitely suspended between utopia and nostalgia. Dissatisfied with merely pointing, Tierney concludes by teasing out of a work like Kara Walker s Subtlety the nothing that connects us to potentia, power and possibility. Now that s something.--John Mowitt, Leadership Chair in the Critical Humanities at the University of Leeds

Author Information

Matt Tierney has taught cultural criticism and theory at Amherst College, Brown University, MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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