Peter Osborne

Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well.

This essay considers the proposal of a new cultural-theoretical problematic of ‘culture as resource’ from three points of view: (1) its ‘metacultural’ structure, (2) Adornos account of the relationship between culture and administration, and (3) the relationship between pragmatism and Cultural Studies. ‘Culture as resource’, it suggests, aspires to the status of a new cultural-theoretical paradigm that might transform Cultural Studies into Cultural Policy Studies, in much the same way that, on Mulherns account in Culture/Metaculture, Cultural Studies critically succeeded Kulturkritik. As such, it represents the political revenge of pragmatism on Cultural Studies for the untheorized presumption of its immediate practicality. With the refunctioning of transnational frameworks as the means for a newfound orientation to policy studies, it is argued, it is time for Cultural Studies to reconsider the presuppositions about use on which it politics has historically been grounded. It is time, in fact, for a Pragmatist Dispute in Cultural Theory.

Problematizing disciplinarity, transdisciplinary problematics

This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to the incorporation of the 19th- and 20th-century German and French philosophical traditions into the anglophone humanities, under the name of ‘theory’. It identifies two distinct – dialectical and anti-dialectical, or dialectical and transversal – transdisciplinary trajectories. It locates the various contributions to the special issue of which it is the introduction within this conceptual field, drawing attention to the distinct contribution of the French debates about structuralism and its aftermath – those by Serres, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Latour, in particular. It concludes with an appendix on Foucault’s place within current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines.

Gillian Rose and Marxism

Returning today to the topic of “Gillian Rose and Marxism,” which I first broached thirty-three years ago now, back in 1982, cannot but provoke a certain salutary temporal and existential disorientation.1 This is, first, because enough has changed world-historically—that is to say, geopolitically—in those thirty-three years to make “the project of a critical Marxism” (Roses phrase from Hegel Contra Sociology)2 somewhat quixotic, in a way I will explain later; and second, because I have come to see Roses identification with that project, such as it was, to be, retrospectively illuminated, something of a passing placeholder or a mask within her…

Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-layered Temporal Dialectic

This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book, Marx’s Temporalities, with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities (Ernst Bloch) and temporal layers (Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck). Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s dependence upon received versions of these concepts, untransformed, reproduces theoretical problems implicit within them, which have been intensified by recent developments within global capital. The application of these concepts to an understanding of the historical present, understood as a situation of globally disjunctive contemporaneity, is seen to be, in part, vitiated by their embeddedness within an increasingly exhausted past.

The Kabakov Effect: ‘Moscow Conceptualism’ in the History of Contemporary Art

Peter Osborne tracks the trajectory of ‘Moscow Conceptualism’ against contemporary art’s historical contradictions.

Ou est l'oeuvre d’art? l’art, l’architecture et l’espace de l’oeuvre post-conceptuelle

La question de la mediation dans l’art contemporain constitue la question des formes de mediation qui composent l’art post-conceptuel. C’est dans la relation a l’architecture que se mediatise la spatialisation de l’œuvre post-conceptuelle. Cela implique une multiplicite de formes de materialisation. Le reseau de relations entre differentes sortes de materialisations constitue ainsi l’espace propre de chaque œuvre.