An Inhuman Fiction of Forces
Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ is a strange story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which a young man who inherits an in-credible fortune decides to spend it, not on buying art but on fashioning a landscape. Poe also imagines the Earth seen from space as itself a complete work of art. He anticipates the real ends of modernism. Is not the totality of all our endeavors, all our so-cial relations, tending towards the making over of the planet as a total work of art? This theme of a secular, aesthetic destiny has its roots in Romanticism, but lately it has lost its more optimistic cast. What if the work of art into which the word turns excluded the presence of its own makers? What if its creation de-stroys the biological possibility of human life on the planet?
Source: Punctum Books
Author: McKenzie Wark
Institution: The New School
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410045085