Published 9 June 2004
Located within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, the research institute for the analysis of contemporary culture, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) is one of the three local institutes. The institute brings together scholars active in literature, philosophy, visual culture, religious studies, film and media studies, argumentation theory and science dynamics. Specialists in their respective fields, they share a commitment to working within an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates in the society at large and with cultural institutions outside of the narrow confines of the academic world. Within the institute they have joined forces to provide a stimulating environment for scholars, professionals, and graduate students both from the Netherlands and abroad. The institute supervises internally and externally funded PhD projects, offers regular seminars and hosts yearly workshops or international conferences. It publishes a monthly Newsletter and maintains a Website which carries reports on ongoing research on all levels, prepublications of given lectures, job openings, etc.
ASCA offers internationally recognized PhD degrees, awarded by the University of Amsterdam. The ASCA curriculum is designed to provide a high-level training for future scholars who have both a broad vision of cultural phenomena and a specialised knowledge of underlying philosophical issues. ASCA trains future scholars to develop a socially informed understanding of cultural phenomena, stimulating them to integrate such theoretical knowledge with a keen expertise in detailed analysis or "close reading".
Anachronisms: The Study of Contemporary Culture
Following Kant, Max Weber and the Frankfurt School, contemporary culture—or « modernity »—is commonly defined as the ensemble of processes that have cast a lasting doubt on the ability of traditional doctrines and organizations to provide a fundamental and comprehensive meaning of life and society. The world views that once pretended to hold together the Beautiful, the True and the Good are seen as no longer legitimate. Modernity thus signals the end of a number of traditional unitary conceptions concerning the divine and the cosmological, the self and others, but, more radically, also the end of unity itself. A single perspective from which the fractured dimensions of objective, social and individual reality might be viewed is no longer seen as a viable option for theories that seek to escape unwarranted metaphysical, substantialist or totalizing assumptions. And yet, while the body of religious, philosophical, literary and artistic texts and representations which were once privileged within the authoritative institutions of culture, such as church, state, family, academy, press may have lost their normative force and signifying power, the process of modernization has proven highly ambivalent. Other institutions and alternative discourses have emerged and become contenders for new forms of legitimation, cultural hegemony. Paradoxically, these new institutions and discourses continue to draw on structures—conceptual and visual, social and psychological—that modern history was supposed to have differentiated, secularized, and deconstructed once and for all. Cultural memory continues to inform the present, even in its most unprecedented and iconoclastic innovations.
It follows that the historical-social developments which occupy the heart of the institute’s research cannot be regarded as an exclusively modern—modernist or postmodern—phenomenon. While most contemporary manifestations of culture are unique and singular, they receive their specificity not as a consequence of a one-directional, mono-causal, evolutionary or revolutionary process. The situation confronting modern citizens has always already been a possibility within history. This truism tends to be overlooked by teleological or organic models of development, or when supposedly radical breaks and epistemic discontinuities are being posited in an all too eagerly fashion. More often than not, we are dealing instead with a special kind of diachronicity which escapes conceptual and ontological oppositions, such as implicit/explicit, surface/depth, absence/presence, identity and difference. Rather, the situation in which contemporary cultural phenomena present themselves obeys a logic which is based, among other things, on mimesis qua iterability, that is to say, on changing kinds of repetition. This alternative logic is non-synchronic and heterotopic, but also forms the basis of what is sometimes also called 'tacit knowledge', a form of knowledge production along the lines of the practical and the familiar, observable in everyday life, but all too often overlooked in scholarly research preoccupied with high culture, deep structures, and their functional equivalents. In philosophy, theology, anthropology as well as in the study of literature and visual culture, it has become imperative to look, not only at the erosion of former canons of cultural learning, but also and, perhaps, first of all, at the ways in which these canons have always already undermined and transformed themselves, in their encounter with oppositional movements as well as in response to their own internal contradictions.
Thematic and Systematic Orientation: Culture & Analysis
The focus of the institute is therefore not only on contemporary culture, but also on historical phenomena analysed and interpreted from a contemporary theoretical viewpoint, that is to say, in their relevance for the present. Its object of inquiry is culture in its presently widely accepted sense: comprising individuals and institutions, practices and discourses, texts and images, whose logic of symbolic production we are only slowly beginning to recognize, thanks to the methodologies of critical theory and system theory, hermeneutics and discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and anthropology, structuralism and post-structuralism, semiotics and analytical philosophy.
While definitions and interpretations of the concept of “culture” (and of “analysis”) abound, this term is broadly and formally defined in the context of the research institute. Culture is in principle understood as encompassing any symbolic production and organisation of words and gestures, images and sounds. None of these, it is further assumed, can stand on their own and none can claim any ontological, epistemological, or axiological primacy per se. Needless to say, culture thus understood is in demand of philosophical interpretation of its implications, the conditions of its possibility, the limits of its intelligibility, its ethico-political reverberations.
Yet, the hospitable denominator “culture” also captures all of these modes of philosophical reflection, not only the theoretical assessment of the aforementioned singularities of culture taken in these wide—and formal—sense of the word, but also the reflection on this reflection, the effects that this reflection of the second order produces in the reflected. Seen from this perspective, even the grandest of theories or narratives of culture would, in the final analysis, also be a series of words and gestures, images and sounds. Culture, then, ought to be studied on more than one level of abstraction at once.
The concept and practice of cultural analysis should not simply be taken literally—or analytically—as meaning the “taking apart” of culture. Rather, cultural analysts, it would seem, interpret the way in which cultures take things, people, and themselves “apart.” Culture is seen as a polemical and divisive concept at least as much as a quest for communality and the provisional stabilization of shared ideas, values, and goods. Whether high, low, or mass culture, culture would thus almost seem a conflict of worlds, just as much as it conjures up the ideal of a certain universality.
The general programs and special projects of the institute are guided by this systematic questioning and consist in as many attempts to analyze cultural phenomena and their conceptual underpinnings with an equally important emphasis on textual and historical detail as well as on implied normativity. As such, the programs bring different theoretical approaches to bear on the study of cultural utterances and symbolic actions by which human beings live individual and collective identities, share a common fate and communicate—or fail to communicate—with others. It unpacks the conceptual implications of (the study of) systems of belief and of value, but also of works of arts (literature, the visual arts, film, and music), all of which are also investigated from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.
In order to better structure this immense variety and to conduct its research projects effectively, the instititute is divided into six programs. Each program is identified by a central issue or a cluster of common themes and consists of several different projects.
It is within this institutional framework that the research institute will coordinate and direct all systematic and analytical research in the study of contemporary culture in the Faculty of Humanities. Different intersections between the programs will be possible and necessary, albeit in a way and temperament that will steer clear from all facile eclecticism. To that extent several significant special projects have been selected for the first planning period 2005-2008 that can be expected to set the tone for future adjustments of the larger program as a whole. Some of them will consist in the exploration of concrete themes and topics. Others will confront the task of reformulating the systematic aims of the program in a sustained dialogue with leading concepts and methodologies, for example those that have come to dominate so-called Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, system-theory, the theory of rational choice, etc., all of which are relatively unexplored in the study of culture in the humanities. Given the context and intellectual background of the institute, these matters will be addressed not only in a systematic or meta-theoretical way, but first of all in a manner that is problem oriented and thematically focused. Much can be expected from the revaluation of the tradition, topics, and methods of cultural criticism in light of contemporary developments in analytic philosophy and system-theory. This systematic reorientation will also enable a rereading and reappropriation of the major texts of the canon of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. While these matters are currently being explored in joint seminars and permanent intellectual exchanges (not in the least in discussion with the several Spinoza Visiting Professors who have visited or will be visiting the faculty in recent and coming years (Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, Hilary Putnam, and Judith Butler), they will also find attention in concrete future projects. This is also the domain in which intensive forms of cooperation are developed between the Institute for Cultural Analysis and the Institute for Language, Logic and Computation (ILLC).
Source: ASCA
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