Zamyn's Analytical Circle aims to encourage critical reflection and alternative ways of understanding culture, cultural transformation and the intricate relation that exists between culture and corporations. By exploring established representations in an analytic way, the Analytical Circle works to deconstruct the cultural 'realities' that we take for granted.
Culture, often equated with essentialist notions of 'high' or 'popular' culture, is considered here as the system of values, symbols and everyday practices that underpin the socio-cultural fabric of the everyday in all its complexities. As the focus of the Analytical Circle, this is examined as a framework of meaning that mediates collective interpretations of the world as we know it, with an emphasis on cultural change as a process that we are often unaware of.
The Analytical Circle is committed to dialogue with disciplines and practices including anthropology, art and philosophy, opening up new perspectives on culture as a dynamic, evolving set of frameworks. The movement at play in cultural transformation can reveal new aspects of culture as such, and suggest pathways and directions for change.
This dialogue accords a privileged value to the contingent, peripheral details which may be passed over in other forms of cultural study. Following the psychoanalytical emphasis on details as clues, to more general processes, feeds back into those artistic practices that give careful consideration and elaboration to what may otherwise be ignored or dismissed as insignificant. Artists and writers are crucial here as they occupy a unique space outside of established systems, where their framework for 'doing' and thus 'being' is constantly shifting.
By analysing culture as perpetually in motion, the Analytical Circle seeks to maintain a discourse that is always open-ended. It adopts a rhizomatic approach to culture, drawing out threads for critical reflection and engagement. In Deleuze's description: 'A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles.'
The Circle is thus a unique part of Zamyn's activities. It will continually engage with other discourses and practices in its enquiry into culture and change.
Circle Members
John Akomfrah
Film director
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
Lisa Appignanesi
Writer
Lourdes Arizpe
Professor, National University of Mexico
Doreen Baingana
Writer continued
Benjamin R. Barber
Professor of Civil Society, University of Maryland
Ulrich Beck
Director, Institute of Sociology, University of Munich
Norman Bryson
Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego
John Forrester
Acting Head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
Anthony Giddens
Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics
Paul Gilroy
Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory, London School of Economics
Antony Gormley
Artist
Zaha Hadid
Architect
Mona Hatoum
Artist
David Held
Political Theorist
Anish Kapoor
Sculptor
William Kentridge
Artist and film-maker
Bruno Latour
Professor of Sociology, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, Paris
Darian Leader
Psychoanalyst
Daniel Libeskind
Architect
Rik Loose
Psychoanalyst
Henrietta Moore
Professor of Social Anthropology, London School of Economics
Shirin Neshat
Artist and film-maker
Susie Orbach
Psychoanalyst
Renata Salecl
Philosopher and sociologist
Yinka Shonibare
Artist
Abdul Karim Soroush
Academic lawyer and theologian
Adhaf Soueif
Novelist and academic
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Avalon Foundation, Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University
Elia Suleiman
Palestinian film-maker
Sherry Turkle
Professor in Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Theodore Zeldin
Fellow and Former Dean of St Anthony’s College, Oxford
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