Annual Mission for 2005-2006
(ratified by CAAS Participants September 2006):
During the 2005-6 academic year, CAAS will investigate the question “Periodizing the Contemporary: Challenges and Opportunities.”
At mid-twentieth century, a central question preoccupying literary and cultural criticism was "What is postmodernism?" For nearly twenty years, this question produced heated debate, but at the turn of the century--with the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of British colonialism, the rise of digital technologies, and the change in the nature of capitalist economies—the question of “postmodernism” became more and more academic in the mundane sense. At the same time, contemporary arts studies fractured into myriad subgroups and affiliations. A quick review of monographs and articles published in the most prominent journals of contemporary studies reveals this fracturing of interests: while study of the contemporary arts seems to be mushrooming into a majoritarian concern of the academy, publication about the contemporary arts is increasingly splintered into ever-more-focused academic specializations with their own journals, their own conferences, and their own aesthetic criteria and canons.
It is time for those in contemporary studies to ask global questions about what the field comprises in the twenty-first century. Some questions we need to ask include the following:
v What do we mean by “contemporary” in contemporary studies? What do we gain by periodizing the present in arts studies?
v How can one do a history of the present with any validity? Why is study of the present so appealing to academics across disciplines? What draws us to the contemporary as a subject?
v What arts are unique to the contemporary period, and why? What would an aesthetics of the contemporary—on a par with the aesthetics of modernism--look like?
v How do the aesthetics of contemporary arts in different disciplinary contexts overlap and correspond? (The relation between written and plastic arts and digital arts? rhetoric and art? Aesthetics and art?)
v What is the relation between art and the world in the twenty-first century?
v What is the relation between “the contemporary” and the modern, or the post-modern, or the pre-modern, as periodizing concepts? Are the older categories obsolete, and if so, why?
v Are older political and aesthetic categories of artistic production—e.g., “avant-garde”—relevant to the contemporary period, and if not, why?
v What unique (ideological, social, philosophical, aesthetic) paradigms construct the contemporary against those of previous periods?
v Do the splintered factions within contemporary arts studies have things in common? Is the fracturing of the contemporary field real, or an effect produced by market forces? What discourses overlap, perhaps in ways unknown to the different constituencies involved? Who is reinventing the wheel and why? In what ways is separation and specialization good, and in what ways does it prevent the contemporary from assuming a presence such as that now occupied by modernism?
v Is there any specialized training needed to teach the contemporary arts, in the way that specialized knowledge is needed to teach pre-twentieth-century periods? What constitutes disciplinary knowledge and expertise in the field of contemporary studies?
These questions need to be asked and debated, as we are increasingly asked to justify, or at least cogitate upon, why as humanities scholars we do what we do. In addition, the historical moment is right to reopen meta-critical questions of this type: with the “death of theory,” an opening has been created for a re-evaluation of all aspects of arts study. This, combined with the relative absence in journals and monographs of meta-critical perspectives on studying “the contemporary,” indicates that the time is ripe for such questions.
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