The Postmodern Scene
Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics

Arthur Kroker and David Cook

What is the postmodern scene? Baudrillard's vision of excremental culture par excellence or a final coming home to a mediascape which even as a "body without organs" (Deleuze and Guattari), a "negative space" (Krauss), a "pure implosion" (Lyotard) or "a symbolic experience" (Kristeva) is now first nature and thus the terrain of a new political refusal?

The Postmodern Scene is a series of major theorizations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition. A variety of texts, ranging from Nietzsche's The Will to Power, Serres' Hermes, Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra, the visual art of Fischl, Hopper, Colville, and Magritte and recent performance art are used as probes of the human fate in the contemporary century. Here' a theoretical reflection is viewed as a privileged artistic act: simultaneously a critical encounter with the "shock of the real" and a meditation in the form of a lament over the "intimations of deprival" which speak to us now of postmodern culture, art, and philosophy in ruins.

The 2nd edition includes a new introduction, The Postmodern Mood. The Postmodern Scene addresses key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the world of postmodernism. Drawing on the notions of textuality, the theories of Derrida and others, Kroker and Cook break exciting new ground by pushing the realm of theory in the direction of the visual arts.

The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics by Arthur Kroker and David Cook ©1986, 1988, New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series Montreal: New World Perspectives, ISBN 0-920393-44-6 Published simultaneously in the USA by St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-31263-229-0