2020 5(112)/2020 quarterly 5/2020 5/2020 Special Issue National Centre for Culture Warsaw 2020 SCIENTIFIC BOARD: Maciej Ząbek– Chairperson, Elżbieta Banecka, Grzegorz Godlewski, Anna Gomóła, Konrad Klejsa, Leszek Korporowicz, Iwona Kurz, Ewa Rewers, Elżbieta Rybicka, Bożena Shallcross, Roch Sulima, Renata Tańczuk, Izolda Topp-Wójtowicz, Dariusz Wadowski, Krzysztof Wielecki, Rafał Wiśniewski EDITORIAL TEAM: Rafał Koschany– Editor-in-Chief Magdalena Woźniewska-Działak– Deputy Editor-in-Chief Maria Pietrusiewicz– Editorial Secretary Tomasz Majewski– Member of Editorial Team LAYOUT DESIGNER: Wojciech Pawliński ILLUSTRATOR: Agnieszka Prus TRANSLATION: Konrad Siekierski, Jakub Ozimek TRANSLATION OF ABSTRACTS AND KEYWORDS: Małgorzata Sobczak (p. 22, 32, 80, 95, 108, 121, 131, also 134, 135), Dagmara Sotowicz-Krauz (p. 52), Jacek Siminski (p. 67–68) PROOFREADER: Ralph Fitchett TECHNICAL EDITOR: Maryla Broda TYPESETTING: Marcin Szcześniak Polish Association of Cultural Studies Forum © Copyright by Narodowe Centrum Kultury ADDRESS: Kultura Współczesna Narodowe Centrum Kultury ul. Płocka 13 01-231 Warszawa e-mail: [email protected] www.kulturawspolczesna.pl ARCHIVES: sklep.nck.pl SUBSCRIPTION: [email protected] The National Centre for Culture is a public institution working to promote the development of culture in Poland. Publication fi nanced from the funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Rafał Koschany CONTEMPORARY CULTURE: AN ACADEMIC QUARTERLY AND A RESEARCH OBJECT — 7 Narratives in Cultural Studies Krzysztof Łukasiewicz ON THE ORIGINS OF POLISH CULTURAL STUDIES — 12 Ewa Kosowska E PUR SI MUOVE: ON NARRATIVES IN CULTURAL STUDIES — 23 Marta Kosińska IN-CULTURE DIAGNOSIS AND CULTURAL ‘FIELD’ STUDIES — 33 Piotr Filipkowski ORAL HISTORY – EVEN MORE VERNACULAR? — 53 Tomasz Kukołowicz, Rafał Wiśniewski EMPIRICAL RESEARCH FOR CULTURAL POLICY: A RETROSPECTIVE — 69 The Present and the Future of Culture Magdalena Matysek-Imielińska WEAVING AN OPEN WORLD / EXPERIENCING URBAN UTOPIAS THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR URBAN EXPERIMENTS IN THE SPIRIT OF TIM INGOLD — 84 Renata Tańczuk ON THE AUTONOMY OF THE SELF AND NATURE: SOME REMARKS ON OLD FEARS IN NEW TECHNOLOGICAL SCENERY — 96 Piotr Zawojski AGAINST (INTELLIGENT) MACHINES? ON ART IN THE TIMES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE — 109 Anna Nacher DIGITAL ARCHIVES / DATABASES: A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE IN ACTION — 122 Kultura Współczesna 5(112)/2020 doi.org/10.26112/kw.2020.112.01 Rafał Koschany Contemporary Culture An Academic Quarterly and a Research Object Introduction ultura Współczesna. Teorie – Interpretacje – Praktyka (Contemporary Culture: K Theories – Interpretations – Practice) is an academic quarterly jointly published by the Polish Cultural Studies Association and the National Centre for Culture. Appearing regularly since 1993, it quite recently celebrated its twenty-fi fth an- niversary with the 2018 one-hundredth issue, which provided an opportunity for narratives summarising not only the past and present of cultural studies in Poland but also the past and present form of the journal itself. From the beginning of its existence, the journal’s goal has been to analyse the most recent cultural processes and phenomena in their context – regional, national as well as universal, since reflection in cultural studies cannot be done well without knowledge of global cultural processes. Contemporary Culture has also tried to account for the methodological context of cultural research, mostly by way of – often transformative and critical – reception of the fi ndings of the humanities worldwide. The quarterly has been highly successful, on the one hand, in identifying the most interesting trends in global cultural and scientifi c thought. On the other hand, it often succeeded in setting new trends for the more intimate circle of its readers. Thus – from its inception until today – the journal has continued to be an important Polish platform for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, substantive (concerning all aspects of contemporary culture) as well as epistemological and methodological (associated with the presentation of emerging and evolving research approaches). Special attention is deserved in this regard by one of the most remarkable rela- tionships connected with these two levels on which the journal has been operat- ing. I mean by that, to put it most briefly, the various cross-disciplinary marriages of cultural studies. They are manifested in the institutional affi liations of both the authors of the journal and the readers who choose it, precisely due to their research, as well as non-research, interests. Of course, this tendency is not a ques- tion of hastily constructed interdisciplinarity but of fundamental changes in the 7 institutional and methodological footing of cultural studies, and the increasingly blurred lines between particular areas of social and human sciences. Contempo- rary culture – as a research object – required with increasing intensity a perspec- tive capable of grasping its complex ‘nature’. Contemporary Culture – as a medium presenting reflection on this topic – has been a witness to those changes and a sui generis experimental fi eld in the transformations undergone by the discipline: from its beginnings rooted in the conventional study of culture to the deeply transdisciplinary present. We are convinced that the sheer number of authors who have published their papers in the more than one hundred issues of our jour- nal has contributed, on the one hand, to the solidifi cation of Polish cultural stud- ies and, on the other hand, to their popularisation. Over the last few years, the themes of particular issues have been selected in open competitions. This guarantees that the editors (the competition winners) and the authors that they invite will speak/write about matters that they fi nd to be of most urgent importance to culture today. This special issue, however, fol- lowed a different path: the presented articles were selected by the Editorial Board among the journal’s best, most valuable, most read, and most quoted papers of the recent years. For almost three decades, Contemporary Culture has been a crucial medium familiarising the Polish reader with the key developments (ideas, books, artistic events) in the global humanities. Now – without giving up those founding ambitions – we would like to modify the direction of information flow and widen our readership. We sincerely hope that this English-language issue reaches read- ers beyond our culture and language area and also beyond the Polish institutional Koschany ł context of cultural studies. With this initiative, the quarterly has come full circle: from facilitating the Polish reception of the international context to presenting Rafa both the emerging and well-established achievement of Polish cultural studies to the international reader. This special issue is divided into two thematic sections. The fi rst one is devot- ed predominantly to methodology. It focuses on identifying the distinguishing features of cultural studies as an academic discipline. This is done in terms of historical reconstruction and recapitulation (texts by Krzysztof Łukasiewicz and Ewa Kosowska) but also synchronically, so to speak, in terms of reflection on to- day’s status of the fi eld and possible directions of its development. The papers chosen for this section clearly show that ‘theoretical’ cultural studies today de- mand an empirical component. One of the forms this tendency has taken on is ‘in-culture diagnosis’, postulated as a transdisciplinary research method subor- dinated to the researcher’s (self-)reflexivity (see Marta Kosińska’s article). A simi- lar feedback loop is also to be observed in Piotr Filipkowski’s text. Based on his own projects concerning the life histories of former concentration and forced labour camp prisoners, he reflects on the boundary conditions differentiating a ‘successful’ oral history research project from an ‘unsuccessful’ one. Another implementation of ‘the concept of pragmatic research’ (as proposed in their paper by Tomasz Kukołowicz and Rafał Wiśniewski) is closer to what might be termed ‘diagnosis of culture’. The authors concentrate on methodological considerations 8 about various relations between studies of cultural life and those devoted to cultural policy. The second section is more analytical in character, even though reflection on research and description methods is an indispensable element of each of the pre- sented texts. Above all, however, these contributions’ common trait is that they all treat the aspects of culture they discuss as objects in statu nascendi and, si- multaneously, oriented towards future and development. That is probably one of the reasons why the authors formulate reservations that need to be voiced within such discussions: the pace of changes, the elusiveness and fluidity of the studied ‘objects’, fears associated with particular paths of development, etc. And so, the classical cultural studies topic of the city is analysed here by Magdalena Matysek-Imielińska in reference to urban utopias and Tim Ingold’s theory. Re- nata Tańczuk poses questions about the status of new technological beings and tries to identify the everyday fears caused by emerging technologies, including fears for the loss of human autonomy. One of the elements of contemporary, or perhaps already future, culture is of course art. Its possible directions of develop- ment in the context of artifi cial intelligence are pondered by Piotr Zawojski. At the same time,