What_is_Cultural_Production?

= **What is “Cultural Production”?** = = = Mark Auslander As an emergent zone of theory and practice, “cultural production” has its intellectual roots in late 20th century arguments and developments across the interpretive social sciences, critical humanities, visual arts and performing arts. The concept emerged in reaction against orthodox structuralist and “cultural reproduction” approaches that emphasized the automatic transmission of cultural form across the generations, as overdetermined either by deep structures of human thought or by the overarching frameworks of economy and society. Cultural Production theorists, coalescing around Pierre Bourdieu (and heavily inspired by Michel Foucault and feminist praxis) rejected both claims for the pure autonomy of “culture” or culture’s subordinate, superstructural status. Instead, they insisted that fields of literature and art and the fields of culture making more broadly are all "fields of forces" and "fields of struggle." In Bourdieu’s terms, cultural production develops out of tensions between structure and human agency, out of ongoing struggles over “symbolic capital” and unstable definitions of social reality. Integrative historical, social and cultural analysis must thus pay particular attention to processes of labor and the active (and contested) making of meaning at all levels of the social formation.

The 1993 publication of //The Field of Cultural Productio//n (Bourdieu and Jackson) roughly coincided with comparable positions being articulated by contemporary visual and performance artists, emphasizing the contingent nature of struggles over the measures of human accomplishment and the problems of how human domination and subordination were to be defined. These cultural producers, artists, and theorists stressed the generative value of dialectical relationships between theory and practice, between cultural critique and cultural making, and between distanced contemplation and hands-on engagement.

Cultural Production is emphatically not a discipline, nor likely to become one. It is however a dynamic and fluid field of integrative conversation, bridging diverse disciplines and modes of creative practice. At Brandeis, it has drawn especially on faculty in Anthropology, Art History, Education, English and literary studies, Jewish studies, Music, Philosophy, Sociology, Theater Arts, and visual studio arts, with exciting contributions from many other scholars, artists and programs in the region. Our students and faculty have been oriented towards problems in pubic scholarship, as we seek to make critical academic discourse accessible and relevant to our neighbors in historically underserved communities. We have been especially engaged with re-theorizing museum spaces and contemporary art venues, and have found a natural affinity with the Rose Art Museum, our own most important site of collaborative “cultural production.” Museums for many of us are critical living laboratories for exploring the dynamics of culture and power, for the experimental catalyzing of a new, in Calvino’s terms, “pedagogy of the imagination.”

Our students come to us with diverse backgrounds, often with particular strengths in visual and performing arts, curatorial practice, community advocacy and activism, new media technologies, and literary and cultural theory. Mentored by faculty across campus, they create unexpected art installations, museum exhibitions, multimedia sites, and performance works that speak to a great range of disciplines and intellectual traditions. In these respects, we hope to stimulate the university community’s broader journey of mutual discovery, as we all chart unexpected territories of learning, critical reflection and the making of cultural form in the 21st century.