Understanding with Water: Hydro-art in Osieki (1973)

The paper is located at the intersection of the art history of the Polish neo-avant-garde and the environmental humanities informed by feminist new materialisms. It proposes an interpretation of performative works in which artists used aqueous matter as an object of interaction, a source of artistic transcription, and as an active participant in artistic scenarios. It concentrates on works that were realized during the open-air art meetings in socialist Poland and in particular at the Osieki meeting in 1973 with the title The Art of Water Surfaces [Plastyka obszarów wodnych]. Based on the analyzed works, it offers a speculative reflection on Hydroart, which is defined as region-specific development parallel to land art practices.

Modele publikacyjne w nauce o kulturze

Publication Models in the Science of Culture This article examines quantitatively the patterns of research phenomena being observed during last years in the field of cultural studies basing on the data acquired from Scopus – one of the biggest scientific bibliographic databases. The authors of the article were inspired to undertake such research from the recent amendment of Polish legislation called the Constitution for Science, which promotes inter-institutional and international research. Therefore, the results of the investigation were prepared for all countries publishing in Scopus indexed literature, but with particular emphasis on Polish participation. The conducted research allowed to identify the dominant publication languages in the studied field, the quantitative publication share of individual countries, the average number of authors per one publication from a given country, but also made it possible to identify countries willing to cooperate with each other, which was visualized on the so-called cooperation maps. In addition, Polish and global scientific productivity measured by the number of articles was embedded in the so-called Polish “ministerial list” of journals, which may give Polish scientists of the field of cultural studies hints on the choice of a journal dealing with relevant topics and being indexed in the Scopus database.

Kapuściński non-fiction jako biografia polityczna. Lewicowość Kapuścińskiego w kontekście paraliżu dyskursu o PRL-u

Kapuściński non-fiction as a political biography. The leftism of Kapuściński in the context of the discourse on Polish People’s Republic In the article, the author is surveying the scientific discourse on political threads embraced in the Kapuściński non-fiction biography written by Artur Domosławski. This discourse spectacularly reveals the wider problem with the discourse on the Polish People’s Republic. There will be indicated how presuppositions concerning Ryszard’s Kapuściński leftism (valorized the leftism positively or negatively) position the interpretation of the book Kapuściński non-fiction. Various typologies of the discourse on PRL will be enumerated and the problem of whether the biography written by Artur Domosławski eludes the classical narration on real socialism will be discussed.

Learning to Cooperate: Implications for Humanistic Management

The contemporary business education has been promoting competition to the detriment of cooperation. This is unfortunate, given the magnitude and complexity of the current crisis facing humanity: a situation which urgently requires cooperation. Based on an ethnographic study of IT management consultants, we propose a practice-based framework for education and training rooted in humanistic management principles to remedy this lack.

Zarządzanie posthumanistyczne

Posthumanistic management The article introduces the concept of posthumanistic management as a result of exploring the relationships between the Anthropocene, management and contemporary humanities. Posthumanistic management is a response to the pressing need of management reform in the context of a swirl of crises of what is called Generalized Anthropocene (and described as brutal adulthood of humanity), especially concerning the anthropogenic climate-ecological and derivative crises. The author argues that the culture of management (dominant activity of the modern world) based on greed is the reason to make management at least co-responsible for the crises of the Anthropocene next to the pathological actions and inactions of business and political actors and the dominant socio-economic system of capitalism itself. The text summarizes the attempts to humanize management (business ethics, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory, sustainable development, critical management studies, humanistic management) and makes an effort of posthumanistic correction of one of the dominant definitions of economic management. A posthumanistic correction of management is based on assigning agency and dignity to all, also non-human resources of management processes, and on transformation of the purpose of organizational practices from focused on particular goals of the organization towards the pursuit of the heterogeneous common good. The posthumanization of management implies, the author argues, pansolidarity, radical empathy, the fall of the mean-end dualism, redistansation and cyclization. The article ends by highliting some of the flaws of the introduced concept and some possible ways of overcoming them.

(Post)humanistyka antropocentrycznego exodusu – w stronę roślinnego socjetas

(Post)humanities of the Anthropocentric Exodus: Towards plant societas The main aim of this article is an attempt at mapping the preventive strategy in the epoch of climate and ecology crisis through the lens of (post)humanities. Drawing upon posthuman perspectives, as well as methodologies and research tools, I will try to grasp the complexity of reality through relational ontologies, which linked Anthropos with the plant kingdom. As Małgorzata Praczyk pointed out, posthumanism is still not so investigated in humanities (especially in the historic field), and even when it finally appears, ended up at counterproductive reductionism. Trying to avoid this impasse, the author of this text is using the method of morphing history which allows changing the perspectives from anthropocentric one to the plants, thus polyphonic assemblages (A. Tsing) enables to re(present) the other and multispecies agency. Finally, I will map the possible perspectives in an epoch of Anthropocene according to the statement: “the environmental crisis brings a crisis of imagination”(L. Buell). In that sense, rethinking humanities with indigenous knowledge(s) is strongly needed as well as “deep adaptation” (J. Bendell) in order to understand that “humans interact not only with each other, but in all times, places and context of ecosystems, and are affected by them” (R.C. Foltz).

Ecology and Science Fiction. Managing Imagination in the Age of the Anthropocene

When formulating proecological strategies, social imagination is devoted relatively little attention. Contribution of the humanities to the management in the age of the Anthropocene is most often perceived as explaining threats that we and the future human and non-human beings will have to face as a result of irresponsible environmental policies. Hence, the presumed task of the humanities (and social science) consists primarily in analyzing and presenting the causes and the processes which culminated in the climate crisis and the decline of biodiversity. However, such an approach does not allow this knowledge to be actively engaged in constructing alternative, proecological attitudes. Consequently, I argue in this paper that in order for the state of affairs to change one requires not only new scientific tools (methodology, language), but also new sensitivity and aesthetics. The author argues that the challenges of the current times, resulting from environmental change, destruction of habitats and ecological disasters, direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever more tangibly towards the fantastic: horror, science fiction, or fantasy. However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene – culminating in the inevitable disaster – science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. It is therefore suggested that there is much need for a science fiction aesthetic and narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).

Sztuka wobec antropocenu – wybrane strategie artystyczne

Art and the Anthropocene – Selected Artistic Strategies The article presents an analysis of the artistic projects of three graphic artists who for nearly a decade have been trying to illustrate the causes and effects of the Anthropocene in various ways. Each of the authors in question uses a separate language of forms and different artistic tools, but their common goal is to establish, as Angelos Koutsourakis excellently put it, “dialectical representation of the Anthropocene” based on “self-reflexive representational tropes”. This self-reflexivity is not about constantly reminding that what is in front of the viewer’s eyes and what he/she experiences when entering the space of the installation is an artistic construction, but to sensitize him/her to the fact that what he/she looks at and participates in – both through form and the content – is a way of representing the causes that produce specific effects and the effects behind which specific processes lie. In the case of Sean Caulfield, it is about making the viewer aware of the cumulative effect of individual actions, which, when depicted in the form of a gradually destroyed installation, direct attention to individual acts causing global changes. On the other hand, Angela Snieder sensitizes the viewer to the influence that the historical conditions shaping the production processes influenced the way people perceive nature. The artist uses the visual attractiveness of the dioramas to blur the border between what is natural and what is industrial, ultimately confronting the viewer with the artificiality of the created reality. While Ellen Karin Maehlum raises the problem of connection between histories often treated separately: human and natural. The organisms shown by her are creations in which natural factors and those resulting from human influence on the environment combine with each other. Recognizing this fact allows us to consider natural and human history as interconnected vessels and realms that interact with each other. The article analyzes the strategies used by these artists to establish an engaging dialogue between them and the viewers, which may result in awakening the viewers’ awareness of the complex causes and effects of the Anthropocene.

Scenariusz błądzenia. O peryferiach i praktykowaniu eklektyzmu. Aleksander Woźny, Scenariusze kultury w mediach i medycynie narracyjnej, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław 2020, ss. 219

A Scenario of Meandering. On Peripheries and Practicing Eclectism. Aleksander Woźny, Scenariusze kultury w mediach i medycynie narracyjnej, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław 2020, ss. 219. The paper reflects on an academic practice of applying interdisciplinary and progressive humanistic discourse to the analysis that is only marking its critical and revisory character. The example considered in detail is Aleksander Woźny’s book Scenariusze kultury w mediach i medycynie narracyjnej [Culture Scenarios in Media and Narrative Medicine]. The tendency to overtheorize about general cultural mechanism of explaining experience (i.e. culture scenario), appearing in the book, as well as the tendency to instrumentally use the idea to advocate peripheries in the humanities, are being recognized and commented on. The review also pays a close attention to narrative medicine and its application in Woźny’s analysis in order to indicate some discursive appropriations.

Will the Future Be Aquatic? Underwater Cartography, Verticality and Leonardo’s Submarine by Hito Steyerl

This text explores the uses of water metaphors in the discourse of digital media on the example of Leonardo’s Submarine, a three-channel AI-generated video work by the artist and writer Hito Steyerl, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as its subsequent installation in a purposefully built virtual reality underwater gallery in winter 2020/2021. The two venues for staging the work are discussed in the context of Steyerl’s writings on the change of the European geographical imagination from the Renaissance up to the present day and the role played in this change by digital technologies. Steyerl’s ideas about the shift from the horizontal to vertical perspective and the present condition of groundlessness are “submerged” in a watery context of the ocean to test how verticality and groundlessness behave in an underwater environment. Drawing on selected concepts developed in the field of blue humanities, this text seeks to investigate Steyerl’s practice as an artist and new media theorist to show how it employs water metaphors to challenge rather than perpetuate our habitual thinking about the ocean and the media used to represent it.