Architecture, Art & Culture - Ambra Verlag

Cultural Studies | 15
René Stettler (Eds.)
The Politics of Knowledge Work
in the Post-Industrial Culture
Understanding the Dissemination
of Knowledge of the Sciences,
Humanities, and the Arts
Pages Approx. 240
Ills. 63
Format 13 × 19 cm
Binding Softcover
Price Approx. € 42.79 | $ 59.95 | £ 35.99
ISBN 978-3-99043-546-5, English
Available September 2013
Available in the US October 2013
An outline of an epistemology for cultural work
chapter i
course about private and public virtue” (Ibid.). If we assume that cultural
work might be on the verge of a new period of intellectual and educational
accomplishment, a number of issues such as human excellence
and a new ecological-cosmopolitical understanding (Sloterdijk 2010:37)
of what we do and how we act pose fundamental challenges for the
post-industrial cultural workplace. In order to create an awareness of the
consequences of our behaviour, as well as to contribute to more sustainable
foundations for a global society and culture, 20 the particular challenge
lies in developing a new compass that could help us to shift values,
“reprogram” our destructive pursuits, and rethink accumulated habits and
collective aspirations, as Reto Ringger suggests (2009:20). 21 However, the
underlying question regarding the future of social, economic and ethical
practices is whether the imperatives of globalised consumer culture
and the forces of commodification and marketization—to which the production
and dissemination of knowledge are vulnerable—have rendered
the world incontestable. 22 Different authors have problematised these
issues from social, economic, political and ecological perspectives (for
example, Altvater 2007; Capra 2002; Castells 2000; Gibbons et al. 1994;
Horkheimer and Adorno 1947). While some have suggested “remoralising”
social, economic and educational practices in the “search for place”
(Banks 2007:145), others have called for future paths towards a renewed
ethic of civic virtue.
20 I do not attempt to provide much elaboration on the term culture, which, especially in recent
years, has undergone yet more transformations of meaning. I use the term in a broader sense to
refer to ways of life, the arts, the media, political, educational and religious culture, and attitudes
to globalization. For the purpose of this book, I suggest that culture, as it is expressed in the arts,
literature, film, and different practices of mediation and representation, draws from and participates
in the construction of culture as a system of human values, beliefs and behaviours.
21 Ringger is a Swiss pioneer of the concept of sustainability investments.
22 Banks notes: “Yet, even now, ongoing transformations in the structure of capitalism appear to
provide cultural industries with the opportunity to obtain even greater shares of wealth, power, and
control (...) [T]he social and economic impacts of globalization now appear to have exacerbated the
scale and scope of the cultural ‘standardization, commercialization, and rigidification’ that Adorno
(...) first identified in the high-modern period” (2007:25). In an essay published after his death,
Adorno in fact reiterated that the “entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive
naked onto cultural forms” (1981; 1991:99), thus anticipating the commercial control of all kinds of
social practices that we can observe today.
The Fragmentation of the Humanities and Arts
Introduction
Since World War II research and education have focused overwhelmingly
on science and technology, which has resulted in the marginalization
of the humanities with negative repercussions for both knowledge
and the human community. While the humanities appear to play an ambi-
Fig. 1.1
valent role in modern culture, their intellectual values are at the same time
formed by the social context in which they evolve and are practised, and,
according to Gibbons et al., thus become entangled in markets in a “more
diffuse sense” (1994:91). Formally and academically, the humanities represent
our usual human activities as well as the meaning and values that we
construct in different ways by looking at the world and thinking about life.
Yet, the work of the humanities and the knowledge which they involve are
not one particular thing. Their outcomes and the many forms of knowledge
that they provide are all around us and present in our daily lives. They are
the newspaper we read, the news we watch on television, or the exhibition
we visit in the local art museum. Whether we watch an episode of
Star Trek, read Stefan Zweig’s biography of Marie Antoinette, listen to the
Ritual Orchestra and Chants of the Khampagar Buddhist Monastery, or visit
San Francisco’s Exploratorium, these activities are all part of the humanities.
The humanities are always a manner of commitment that embraces human
knowledge with a central concern for human beings and our self-conscious
awareness of how we know, what we know and how we act. In short, the
Cultural work and knowledge are central
topics of this book
In-depth inquiries into the practices, nature
and theory of postindustrial cultural work
and the humanities
Epistemological, ecological, ethical and
political dimensions of cultural work
2 3
The book conducts in-depth inquiries into
the practices, nature and theory of postindustrial
cultural work and the humanities –
and arts – based civic dialogues which cultural
work promotes. The aim of the book is
to outline an epistemology for cultural work
as well as to reflect upon the prospects for
educational cultural work practices.
A major focus of the book is on the epistemological,
ecological, ethical and political
dimensions of cultural work. This includes
the prospects for a new form of communal
workspace for knowledge and cultural
learning. Cultural work and knowledge are
the central topics of this book.