Paper short abstract:

The presentation will investigate processes in the field of culture, main cultural agents and their practices in Slovenia, and with a comparative scanning of the situations and transformations in the region. The topic will be presented in the perspective of general global and particularly European processes, in the view to determine apprehension of culture (“cultural turn”) in European societies.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will investigate processes in the field of culture in Slovenia, and with a comparative scanning of the situations and transformations in three neighbouring states - Italy, Austria and Croatia. The topic will be presented in the perspective of general global and particularly European processes, in the view to analyse the chances they have under their present cultural policies. The cultural sphere, as it was constituted in the early modern Europe, is presently undergoing dramatic transformations under the impact of contradictory processes. Both its internal articulations and the ways how cultural practices connect with other social practices are rapidly changing within the global social restructuring. If, in the early modern Europe, the emergence of "culture" was a non-capitalist condition of the triumph of capitalist economy - its present "dissolution" may well indicate the irruption of cultural practices into the heart of capitalist economy as a condition of its next cyclical transformation. What may seem as a mere extension of market economy towards the domains that have traditionally been withdrawn from it, may well be their affirmation as the key factor of the new capitalist economy. What seem to be mere conflicts over the distribution of profits (intellectual property rights, cultural entrepreneurship…) may well be aspects of a major global struggle over the most propulsive resources of production. Under these particular tensions and conflicts, a new geopolitical map of the world is being created.