Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The study traces the imaginary of art and security in the works John Ruskin, Franz Kafka, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These writers share a concern with the relationship between art and security, which is intertwined with speculations about the role of bureaucracy. Ruskin, initially an art critic, became increasingly interested in cultural policy as his career progressed. His ideas on art and cultural policy were surprisingly attuned to the role of earth resources and their extraction and political uses. In particular, we examine Ruskin’s public lectures on cultural policy, where he considers the entanglements of art and security through a reflection on the geological, material, political, and artistic aspects of iron. Kafka’s reflections on art and security, on the other hand, revolve around modern urban problems of bureaucratic imagination and security, particularly in his short story “The Burrow.” We read this story as a literary endeavor to re-imagine the role of security and the environment in bureaucratic city planning. In Stanley Robinson’s works, we find speculative global environmental disaster bureaucracies that offer a way to understand the post-nation/urban politics of art, security, and the environment. The Science in the Capital trilogy, in particular, presents a refreshingly positive take on passionate bureaucracy, attempting to disentangle it from the nation-state focus, Kafkaesque individual crushing nightmares, and critiques of neoliberalism. However, it also brings us back to Weberian notions of rational bureaucracy, which now extend not only to individuals and populations but also to the earth system.