| abstract
| - While cultural work as a corollary of mind and the cultural production of knowledge occupy a more lateral and ambivalent space ruled by the motors of global economic life, many observers emphasise the “totalising” hegemony of economic thought and capitalist social relations (e.g. in Banks 2007). A challenging issue is whether cultural work in the age of information, corporate knowledge work, and the ruling rationalities of a global market culture will be able to obtain a foothold in a knowledge space different from the one it finds itself embedded in in the present activities of the capitalist cultural industries. While knowledge work remains a slippery concept, there is little consensus as to its definition due to the term’s vagueness regarding the nature and processes of work itself and management in general, which different authors have criticised (Collins 1998; Despres and Hiltrop 1995; Drucker 1991; Liu 2004). In order to more thoroughly question the present status of “cultural work” and to explore possibilities for more knowledge-oriented cultural work practices and alternative knowledge spaces, the term “cultural knowledge work” (CKW) has been created to emphasise the link between cultural work and the creation of knowledge. In relying further on Banks’ definition of cultural work as an “act of labour within the industrialised process of cultural production” (2007:3), the thesis relocates Banks’ theoretical understanding of the politics of this work—how it is “constructed, managed and performed” (Ibid.)—in a discussion of the role and significance of knowledge, but also “knowledge work” as an integral part of the establishment of humanities- and arts-based civic dialogues. The construction of democratic and educational humanities- and arts-based “third” spaces of knowledge amidst the globally-functioning knowledge economies, the study suggests, depends on the successful spatialisation of knowledge corresponding to what is “really going on” in thought and practice, and that the recognition of the consequences of this practice (Lash 1999, no pagination) is centrally important. Hence, the issue to address is the construction of genuine “third” or interstitial spaces including the veracious civic deliberations and socio-cultural practices needed to sustain them, and this must be seen as deeply encoded in the socio-epistemological-political responsibility of cultural work. In other words and based on Heinz von Foerster’s aphorism that “reality equals community” (1973; 1998), these issues are part of a larger moral-ecological-political perspective embedding cultural work and knowledge in a framework of implicit collectively shared social imaginations about science and technology, wider cultural perceptions and sincere civic concerns, and diverging views of what “is really going on”, as outlined before. If civil societies need not only to be informed, but also mobilised with regard to ecologically, economically and socially sustainable action, as Klaus Wiegandt in the foreword to Josef H. Reichholf’s work The Demise of Diversity (2009:xii) claims, moral and pragmatic questions—which the proposed socio-epistemological-political scope of cultural work and learning entails—should be addressed.
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