Disturbios culturales

Beyond its use in journalism and as a key methodology for Social Sciences, the ‘interview’ as such implies an encounter between two people, emphasising, precisely, what happens ‘in between them’. The term ‘interview’ is indeed related to the French entrevoir, which means be at a short distance, to encounter someone in a physical sense. The interviews collected in this volume keep that character of encounter, yet, more importantly, embody the open and multiple character of a conversation, the contingency of oral language (despite being edited for the collection) and the speculative tone that characterises a conversation over a written text.
The collection brings together a number of authors, academics and thinkers who are reformulating the notion of ‘culture’ in a variety of fields. In spite of the various approaches from which they work, all interviewees propose a notion of culture that is not organised around normative standards, but rather emphasises themes just as creativity, invention and difference; the volume is therefore not restricted to themes traditionally associated with cultural and artistic production, but also reflects on issues such as the emerging capitalism in China, the relationship between art and biological material, the affective turn on politics and others. Overall, the book proposes a notion of culture that emphasises transformation rather than an idea of ‘a culture’ linked to ‘belonging’ or ‘filiation’. Clearly, though, the aim of the book is not to provide a new definition of the term: quite the contrary, it proposes that the complexity and potentiality of this notion today resides in this multiplicity of approaches that generate their own ways of being ‘culture’.