The Production of History and a History of Production - Anthony Iles (original) (raw)
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Abstract History was an important notion in constructing an industrial capitalist society in the nineteenth century. This article deals with the manifest use of history at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897. At this exhibition, history was ubiquitous and was most fully expressed in the model of medieval and Renaissance Stockholm called “Old Stockholm.” The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century exhibitions in general has been thoroughly studied in the field of humanities. However, the specific use of history and space has not attracted much interest. This analysis of the model of Old Stockholm is of the first archaeological study of remains of the great exhibitions ever to have been done. Even though the “Old Stockholm” pavilion was exceedingly popular in the summer of 1897, only very scarce documentation has survived. An archaeological excavation of parts of the temporary historical models, such as the “Hospital of the Holy Spirit,” showed convincing evidence of the hegemonic position which the use of history enjoyed at the exhibition and in the nineteenth century. Keywords Use of history. Nineteenth-century exhibitions . Reconstructions . Hegemony
Production studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry of film and television "production cultures," going beyond traditional examinations of authorship and industry structure. Studying production as culture involves gathering empirical data about the lived realities of people involved in media production - about collaboration and conflicts, routines and rituals, lay theories and performative actions. This volume broadens the scope of production studies by analyzing geographic and historical alternatives to contemporary Hollywood. At the same time, it invites disciplines such as ethnography, aesthetics, or sociology of art to reconsider established concepts of film and media studies like creative agency, genesis of a film work, or transnational production.
This chapter aims to offer a model with which to compare the historical character of the various nationalized cinemas of East-Central Europe. The example of Barrandov Studios in the Czech capital of Prague provides my case study. The chapter pays particular attention to the manner in which day-to-day creative activities were managed within a system that designated the state the sole official producer, and to organizational solutions that were introduced in an effort to strike a balance between centralized control and creative freedom. I also focus on the ways in which such a mode of production operated within the historical realities of this production community, and on how its activities responded to institutional interests. I begin by sketching what I call the “state-socialist mode of film production”--which comprises management hierarchies, the division of labor, and work practices--through the example of Czechoslovak cinema from 1945 to 1990, and the systemic variations that it exhibited to other film industries in the region. There follows a description of “dramaturgy”: a system of screenplay development and creative supervision that was typical of both the Czech and East German production systems, and which serves to highlight the revisionist dimensions of my model. A further three sections reveal some important aspects of the “production culture,” which is to say a set of lived realities as they were experienced by workers throughout the professional hierarchy. The combination of these two approaches--one organizational in perspective (top-down), the other cultural (bottom-up)--enables us to read official production documents against the grain and to show that they offer limited accounts of what actually took place. Consequently, this chapter is able to shed new light on how production communities “internalized and acted upon” regulatory environments and institutional interests.
Archeological Papers of The American Anthropological Association, 2007
The different ways that the authors of the chapters in this volume have reconsidered production serve as examples of the application of theories of production and practice to specific bodies of archaeological data. Two themes that inform many of the chapters are considered in greater depth in this commentary. The first is the question of scale and the social subject. It is argued that the authors have attempted, within the limits of their data, to demonstrate what may be learned through consideration of particular social subjects in particular social settings, paying close attention to how what is produced, where, and by whom create possibilities for social identity. The second theme is the role of ideology and the construction of moral frameworks of value. All the chapters emphasize ideological or symbolic aspects of production that allow the authors to consider the relationship between production and social difference. It is concluded that approaching production as socially embedded action should spark new ideas or directions for research on the part of authors and readers alike.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2013
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Art history cold cases: artists’ labour in the factory
Artnode, 2017
This paper calls into question the context in which artistic production related to industrial history may enter art official narratives. Drawing on the examples of the Voltron sculpture series by David Smith (1962); Yvonne Rainer's performance Carriage Discreteness (1966) and Stuart Brisley's work at the Hille Fellowship Poly Wheel factory (1970), I will propose that observing the production of artworks within industrial environments implies a twofold commitment for art history. On the one hand, investigating artworks relying on industrial materials and production modes calls for the analysis of the " concrete and direct evidence " that materials provide (Didi-Huberman, 2015; Domínguez Rubio, 2012). On the other, they invite consideration of informal archives and " suspect evidence " related to the tacit knowledge of production, subjective self-documentation and oral history (Rosnow and Fine, 1976). Seen from this perspective, artists' production in the context of industrial culture and workers' practices of self-managed time both contribute another point of view on how the inscription within the realm of high and low culture is done in art history. At a time when contemporary artistic and curatorial practices show a renewed interest in " outsiders' " artefacts, the different work models and modes adopted by the proposed case studies enable a reading of potential art historical narratives through the lens of working-class studies and the contemporary material turn.
Patterns of Production: Cultural Studies after Hegemony
T HE CONCEPT of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, drawing together as it did the analysis of the cultural and ideological formations of the Thatcherite or New Right project with the problematic of the popular and governance through the articulation of consent. 1 For Laclau and Mouffe , hegemony was a perspective with which to engage with the realities of a world where the frames of classical Marxism -class, capital, revolution -had become inadequate to the task of understanding the radical openness of the social and the rise of new, non-class-based actors and social movements. In Laclau and Mouffe's (2001: 161-71) argument, there is some suggestion that the concept of hegemony and the formations that it shed light upon were related to changes in processes of commodification but, as has often been noted, it was a severing of the analysis of hegemonic positions (of the right or left) from an apparently deterministic routing through the economic that was the distinctive feature of this approach. It was to be 'democracy' and the 'logic of equivalence' that became the 'new' and 'fundamental' 'mode of institution of the social' (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 155) in a fashion that, as Osborne (1991: 211) notes, reinterpreted class struggle as an instance of an expanded and open field of struggle for democratic articulation. This manoeuvre, associated as it was with certain post-structuralist positions, was what marked the newness of the post-Marxist project, but it is on the same axis that its frameworks today feel lacking in purchase, since -as research on fields such as cultural economy, information and communication technologies, and globalization attests -it is clear that neither culture nor politics can be understood without an intimate attention to the way capitalist dynamics and imperatives infuse the social (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 189).
Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures
2013
Production studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry of film and television "production cultures," going beyond traditional examinations of authorship and industry structure. Studying production as culture involves gathering empirical data about the lived realities of people involved in media production - about collaboration and conflicts, routines and rituals, lay theories and performative actions. This volume broadens the scope of production studies by analyzing geographic and historical alternatives to contemporary Hollywood. At the same time, it invites disciplines such as ethnography, aesthetics, or sociology of art to reconsider established concepts of film and media studies like creative agency, genesis of a film work, or transnational production.