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Cultures of Evidence. Reality in the Cultural Sciences
Academic year 2009 - 2010
Where questions of "evidence" are concerned, the cultural sciences always have displayed a great deal of skepticism. Scholars appear to have abandoned all claims of being able to present "the naked truth" or formulate principles on the reality of events, things and passions. It is now generally accepted that the impression of "immediacy" persists only so long as one has no knowledge of the conditions by which phenomena are produced, the social coding of one's own perception, and the medial and/or technological arrangement of things. Over the past two decades, such investigations have produced undeniably great achievements. Research into culture has thematized the pictorial worlds of knowledge-production, the cultural construction of gender difference, and other rhetorical arenas of evidence. Focusing on the mediations that permeate our understanding of the world, such studies have made visible the narrative structures underlying historiography, discovered the dramaturgic formulas of passion stored in cultural archives, and deciphered the technological encoding of images. Currently, however, we are witnessing the emergence of new questions since the emphasis on semiotics and linguistic foundation of knowledge neglected the resistance and relative autonomy of objects.
In the social studies of science, meanwhile it is currently assumed that while the hard sciences construct their objects, the scientist is not lord of the game; though he may create his objects, he remains captive to the object-world thus produced. While he uses media (diagrams, pictures, formulas, texts, etc.) to generate evidence, these media cannot be analyzed in isolation from the space of the laboratories and experimental situations.
The conjecture that the objects of science are at once constructed and existing-mediated and immediate, robust and fragile, artificial and "natural"-points to an interest shared by the social studies of science and other fields of cultural research. While not abandoning their skepticism towards concepts of evidence, these fields now appear to be focusing more on the particular logic of things, on the arenas of action in which they are embedded, and on the practical spaces in which formal, medial and discursive operations of perception are carried out. Hence research has now to address what happens in between words and things, discourses and objects. However the achievements of the "linguistic turn" and of constructivism should not be abandoned under the auspices of a naïve post-semiotic approach. Topics falling under the rubric of "cultures of evidence" include:
1. Artificial modes of evidence
- New directions in the phenomenology of perception
- Anthropological presuppositions in the cultural sciences
- Evidence in the age of digital sound and image editing
- Pictorial worlds of social knowledge, graphic representation, charts and statistics
- Authentification strategies in different media. The concept of intermedial transcription
- Pathos as a rhetorical strategy, stylistic figure, or expression of suffering
- The regulation of identification in visual, acoustic and textual media
- Evidence claims in philosophy and the arts
2. Evidence and Power
- The relations between philosophical, scientific and forensic forms of proof
- Evidence in legal decision processes (media, discourses, images)
- Generating evidence through social rituals
- Evidence of the clear demarcation of borders
- Evidence in political processes (perception, decision)
- The evidence of the sovereign
The IFK discourages proposals that are either exclusively theoretical or exclusively empirical in character. It supports projects that combine empirical investigation with thoughtful theoretical work. Research proposals that present a clearly formulated problem, demonstrate familiarity with the scholarly field(s), and develop an interdisciplinary methodological framework stand the best chance of approval by the International Advisory Board.
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