The Philistine Controversy Book

Conventionally, the philistine is assumed to have no value for art and culture. But in this fascinating re-evaluation of its excluded identity, Dave Beech and John Roberts address the philistine not as an empirical phenomenon but as a relational category that operates between art and anti-art, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, arguing that the philistine cuts to the very core of the predicament of art in a divided culture. In this they develop what they call a 'counter-intuitive' notion of the philistine, claiming that what the philistine tells us about cultural division and exclusion is more persuasive than the theories of the popular and the 'otherly-cultured' in cultural studies and postmodernism. The 'counter-intuitive' philistine, they contest, returns the cultural debate to the problems of the persistence of power, privilege and symbolic violence. Asserting that the relations between power and art have been undertheorized in recent studies, Beech and Roberts find their critical resources in the least likely place: not in the 'best of things,' but in that which has 'no proper place.'Read More