Cultures of Critique
Central to the Cultures of Critique research focus are genealogical perspectives on the disruptive conflicts of the present, including technological transformations, platform capitalism, migration, coloniality and decoloniality, gender, racism, climate change, and the Anthropocene condition. These thorny issues form the entangled objects of positive critique today, and critique’s meaning and scope must be readjusted to address them. As a research focus, Cultures of Critique assumes that the fundamental questions of contemporary societies are oriented around an overall structure of sociocultural, political, economic, ecological, and technical-media constellations, which in their interconnectedness can only be understood through a truly interdisciplinary cultural critique. At Leuphana University Lüneburg, this means combining perspectives from the social sciences and humanities, in which cultural studies, philosophy, the history of knowledge, cultural organization, migration research, and sociology play just as important a role as the visual arts, literature, media practices, and forms of social and political action. This focus also explores the theorization of critical-diagnostic work, the elaboration of different notions of critique and critical practices, their history, and the reflection and reformulation of the concept of critique itself.
This focus area thus productively revises the preconditions, functions, and claims of critique’s validity, and it aims to redefine the significance of critique in modern and contemporary culture. This is done programmatically through the DFG Research Training Group, Cultures of Critique, whose research agenda develops specific approaches to the problem of critique and inspires further research efforts. In this research area, students analyze critical practices, including their forms, media, and effects. What critique has constituted and constitutes in each case, and what it can be and intends to be, is only partially accessible through generalized systematic and theoretical reflection. Criticism can only be understood as a practice that is always already culturally situated, determined by forms and media of representation, which necessarily has to claim to be valid and binding in order to be effective. On the one hand, new technologies and distribution channels have given rise to a multitude of unexpected, objectionable practices whose criticality needs to be clarified on a case-by-case basis. On the other hand, postcolonial, decolonial, and transcultural perspectives have called into question fundamental assumptions about critique that are rooted in the Enlightenment. While an understanding of critique as a transformative, emancipatory, and intervening practice remains largely intact, these new phenomena increasingly raise questions about claims to validity, the situatedness of critique, and the subject of critique itself.
On this programmatic basis, this research focus intends to grasp anew the connection between critique and culture in the history of modernity up to the present, developing a new understanding of critique that is rooted in its cultural conditions and thus framing criticism as a new historical-hermeneutic task. In the first period of the study of culture (Kulturwissenschaften) at the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars considered how the critique of culture was replacing the critique of reason, namely as a transcendental determination of the "various basic forms of 'understanding' the world" (Cassirer). But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the critical task of the study of culture and society has changed significantly. Now—and not least because we find ourselves in a state of shock resulting from disruptive positivities that force us to think anew—the critical task of Kulturwissenschaften has fundamentally shifted in the direction of a positive critique and a different form of hermeneia. Consequently, critique appears in a new light as a caring problematization of prevailing conditions that can open up social potentialities and pluralize the possible, thereby claiming the sense of the “impossible” that is obscured by a more limited “possible.” In this sense, Cultures of Critique at the School of Culture and Society can be seen as both a model and a field of experimentation in which the question of critique—in the sense of critical studies—is further developed to uncover social potentialities and to promote multifaceted possibilities. This approach may also signal a key step in a far-reaching reactualization of cultural studies more broadly, a critically urgent task under our current Anthropocene conditions.
Artistic Life Practice as Intervention, Prof. Dr. Beate Söntgen, Institute of Philosophy und Art History, since 2022, Funded by the DFG as part of the CRC „Intervening Arts“
DFG-Training Group Cultures of Critique: Prof. Dr. Beate Söntgen, Prof. Dr. Erich Hörl, since 2016, Funded by the DFG
Modern Migrants: Paintings from Europe in US Museum Collections, Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother, Institute of Philosophy und Art History, since 2019, Förderung durch die VolkswagenStiftung im Rahmen einer Lichtenberg-Professur
Jameson 2.0 – Cognitive mapping in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, Prof. Dr. Susanne Leeb, Institute of Philosophy und Art History, sincet 2020, Förderung durch die DFG
Die Ausstellung Les Immatériaux: Interdisziplinarität, Epistemologie, kuratorische Subjekte, PD Dr. Andreas Broeckmann, Institut für Philosophie und Kunstwissenschaft, seit 2021, Förderung durch die DFG
Zukunftsdiskurse – Öffentlichkeit zwischen Fakt und Fiktion. Wissensproduktion in Wissenschaft, Literatur, Medien, Kunst, Prof. Dr. Sven Kramer, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft und Literarische Kulturen, 2021-2022, Förderung durch das MWK
Elemente einer kritischen Theorie medialer Teilhabe, Prof. Dr. Erich Hörl, Prof. Dr. Roberto Nigro, Institut für Kultur und Ästhetik digitaler Medien, Institut für Philosophie und Kunstwissenschaft 2018-2021, Förderung durch die DFG
Complexity or control? Paradigms for sustainable development, Prof. Dr. Erich Hörl et al., Institut für Kultur und Ästhetik digitaler Medien, 2015-2020, Förderung durch das Land Niedersachsen
PriMus – Promovieren im Museum, Prof. Dr. Beate Söntgen, Prof. Dr. Susanne Leeb, Institut für Philosophie und Kunstwissenschaft, 2017-2019, Förderung durch das BMBF
Urzeit und Umwelt. Inszenierungen des Prähistorischen in der Moderne, Prof. Dr. Christina Wessely, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft und Literarische Kulturen, 2017-2019, Förderung durch die DFG