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Lecture slides for MA Contemporary Art Theory and for MFA Visual Culture students at Edinburgh College of Art. http://www.eca.ac.uk/pdf/getCourse.php?id=88
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Cultural Turns
This lecture will introduce two key methodological
issues key to this module:
1) Metahistory
2) The Cultural Turn
Metahistories
1. METAHISTORY
Hayden White - Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Europe
(1973).
o Literary readings of historical texts / History writing is a form of
literature.
o The historiography of every
period is defined by a trope specific to its time and place.
Roland Barthes ‘The Discourse of History“ (1967)
Barthes applying concepts of structural linguistics to
historical narrative:
“Does the narration of past events, which, in our
culture from the time of the Greeks onwards, has
generally been subject to the sanction of historical
'science', bound to the unbending standard of the
'real', and justified by the principles of 'rational'
exposition - does this form of narration really differ, in
some specific trait, in some indubitably distinctive
feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the
epic, the novel, and the drama? And if this trait or
feature exists, then in what level of the historical
statement must it be placed?”
In this sense, he has much in common with Hayden
White who also saw History primarily as a form of
narrative discourse.
Michel de Certeau The Writing of History (1975)
Freudian reading of History writing in relation to the
Uncanny –
o In western histories the past explains the present.
o In psychoanalysis, the past haunts the patient, its is a
phantom in the present.
o Hence, the past is read as an unstable or impossible
reflection of death which de Certeau describes ambiguously as a “strange familiarity” or “familiar
strangeness”.
o Rather than manage events, Certeau argues that
historiography should speak with the dead by adopting a psychoanalytic approach.
o de Certeau argues that written history’s manageable
past is at the cost of a massive exclusion of popular and
oral forms of culture that did not fit the rationalist framework.
David Wojnarowicz
Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-79)
Dominick LaCapra
Examines the writing of post-traumatic histories.
o How do we write about the
Holocaust?
o How does memory effect our
recollection of such traumatic
events in history?
Against-Metahistory
Many historians, such as Richard Evans, dislike the disregard of how
historical facts limit what the
historian might wish to say about the
past.
Metahistorians use narratives to
assess other narratives. How can
we tell which story is worth
following?
Is there, as Richard Evans
suggests, a link between
postmodernist theory and Holocaust
denial?
Microhistoriography:
Examines historical events from the
perspective of the microcosmic, from the
vantage of the ‘common’ people: the
disenfranchized, oppressed, poor, non-
conformist, or otherwise forgotten, as
opposed to that of the power structure.
e.g.s of People’s Histories:
• A History of Racism, 800BC-Today
• Radical Puppetry - 17th-today.
• Revolutionary Song in France, 1789-1989
• The Radical History of Aussie Rules
Football
• Skinhead Culture, 1960-Today
• Italians in Northern Ireland Casalattico is home to many
Italians in N.Ireland
People’s Histories
• In de Certeau’s psychoanalytic terms, People’s
History is the return of the repressed. Can be
written by amateur historians or gathered as oral /
folk histories from the ‘people’ themselves.
• Often local histories, or micro-histories emerge
from communities themselves and are vanity or
community published. (This can be good and
bad).
• Are potentially limitless - leads to proliferation of
histories, debates and alternative voices.
• Archival aspect is useful for alternative visual
and oral forms of education and education
through material culture and museums.
Co-Op
The co-operative movement that flourishes
all over the world today was started in 1844
with a shop in Rochdale by 28 men, known
as the Rochdale Pioneers.
Football
Football became a professional game in the
1880s with players being paid a wage.
Attempts were soon made to form a union
and in 1907 the Players Union was formed.
The People's Palace is Glasgow's
social history museum and a
chance to see the story of the
people and city of Glasgow from
1750 to the present.
Jeremy Deller
Ruth Ewan
Rory MacBeth
Aleksandra Mir
Beauty Free, Cold War Hot Stuff and Real Real Estate Flowers (2005)
Khalil Rabah, The Palestinian Museum
of Natural History and Humankind,
2005.
Multimedia installation. 9th Istanbull
Biennial
Michael Blum, A Tribute to Safiye Behar, 2005.
Installation: mixed media. 9th Istanbull Biennial
2. THE CULTURAL TURN: THEORIES AND METHODS
[known often within art and design as the ‘linguistic turn’]
o The hypothesis that culture powerfully shapes human
histories (cultural determinism).
o The idea that key aspects of life can best be understood
by exploring the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of a culture (e.g. its music, language, visual art, etc.)
o The idea that scholars and practitioners of all disciplines
should examine the cultural implications (the meaning) and
assumptions of their practice.
USA - SYMBOLIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Clifford Geertz Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
"The concept of culture I espouse… is
essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with
Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun, I take culture to be those
webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore
not an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after…”p4-5.
France - Michel Foucault
Enormous influence on Cultural Studies and historians interested
in exploring cultural histories.
Key texts are:
• Madness and Civilization (1961)
• Discpline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison (1975)
• The History of Sexuality (1984)
UK (Birmingham School)
CULTURAL STUDIES
Raymond Williams, “Moving from High Culture to Ordinary
Culture” in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions, 1958
“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society
has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings.
[…]
The questions I ask about our culture are questions about
deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society
and in every mind.”
Cultural Turn –
Science and Technologies
Ways of representing and
researching that emphasise the
determining role of culture in any
given situation or discipline.
Cultural determinism replaces
biological determinism?
Discursive Psychology
contends that, instead of looking at inherent or invariant
human reactions, scholars
should probe how different
cultures generate quite different
psychological reactions.
History of Medicine / History of Emotion
Which of the following are medical conditions; which are ‘emotions’?
• Grief
• Anorexia
• Nostalgia
• Boredom
Bas Jan Ader
I’M TOO SAD TO TELL YOU, 1971 16mm film, 16mm film transferred onto
DVD, silent 3 min, 21 sec
Edition of 3
http://www.basjanader.com/
Laurie Anderson
Institutional Dream Series NYC 1971
Komar and Melamid
Moscow in Mickey's Eyes (1998)
Rod Dickinson
The Milgram Re-enactment
‘Soft Data’?
(Critique of ‘Discursive Science’)
Many cultural-turn partisans have committed a
number of blunders that have called their
approach into question. Some have, quite
simply, pressed the cultural case too hard,
ignoring evidence of constant or "natural"
features in the human experience.
This approach also undermines the claims of
current medicine and science to objectivity.
Despite this, many social scientists would still
view such cultural data as soft.
Cultural Turn –
Politics and Economics
Ways of representing and
researching that emphasise the
determining role of culture in any
given situation or discipline.
Cultural determinism replaces
economic determinism?
Recommended