by Velten Schäfer
Notes on the workshop "Diagnoses of the present - modelling society from an interdisciplinary perspective"
What is the "present"? At least neuroscience has a clear answer to this question: a period of 2.7 seconds. It becomes more difficult when the question is directed at philosophy, history, social sciences or cultural studies. The present usually refers to an epoch or 'time' that society has recently entered and which is then often characterised by hyphenated constructions. Such "diagnoses of the present" - "risk" or "experience", "knowledge" and "control" or even "creative society", to name a few - are important for the sciences themselves: they make them socially relevant by picking up on, condensing and feeding back to the non-academic everyday mind tendencies. They ensure scientific dynamism as well as social change when they spark discussions and initiate practices. At the very least, however, they serve to provide work by creating the opportunity to write all the books again. For this reason alone, according to Käte Meyer-Drawe(Bochum), it is typical for them to "dramatise" change and "trivialise" what "endures". In this way, 'pathologies' can be identified and 'therapies' prescribed, even if no 'revolution' is taking place and no 'structural problem' exists. In this sense, Herbert Mehrtens (Braunschweig), contrary to many a diagnosis of the creative-impulsive working subject of postmodernism, held on to 'rationalisation' as the socially dominant dispositive to this day.
The workshop on the topic of "diagnosis of the present", to which Thomas Alkemeyer, Nikolaus Buschmann and Rea Kodalle (Oldenburg) from the "Wissenschaftliche Zentrum Genealogie der Gegenwart" (WiZeGG) invited participants between 8 and 11 October 2015, was less concerned with diagnosing itself than with diagnosing itself. An interdisciplinary look was taken at how time-diagnostic "modelling of society" affects it. Alkemeyer and Buschmann began by characterising diagnoses of the present as "performative elements (...) that simultaneously produce the reality they describe" and elaborated on three questions: Firstly, how is "social reality (...) accentuated, problematised and represented in current or past diagnoses of the present", what "basic assumptions" are involved, why do we "virtually absorb" some diagnoses but not others? Secondly, how exactly do diagnoses of the present "inscribe themselves into social contexts of experience" and help to shape them, what "practices, images and performances" are involved? Finally, which "dimensions and possibilities of the social" do contemporary diagnoses make visible, and which are de-thematised?
Cultural and scientific pathologies
The fact that an unconditional "recognising through", as "diagnosis" would literally be translated, is completely impossible is already made clear by the common use of the word: what disorder a doctor sees in this pain or that swelling and what he prescribes against it has changed drastically in a very short time. A diagnosis is therefore not a process in which an external observer questions an object that is substantially separate from him; rather, according to Meyer-Drawe in her theses on the "century of the brain" proclaimed by the neurosciences, diagnoses are characterised by "the diagnosticians and their epistemic origins". Even and especially when "scientific" diagnosticians in particular believe that their work is purely "evidence-based".
According to Meyer-Drawe, such attitudes are so alarming because there is currently a pull towards "scientific" social diagnostics: social deviance, 'school problems' and the like are being medicalised, and a "philosophical view of humanity" is being "abdicated". Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin) also stated that such an 'objectivist' understanding of natural science is "still prevalent in certain expert discourses". Against such discourses, which are based on the opposition of "culture" and "nature" that is constitutive of Western modernity but has long been questionable, more recent debates in the history and sociology of science are to be strongly opposed, which examine "precisely natural science and scientific knowledge of nature (...) as cultural phenomena in their historical conditionality" - which is notoriously considered obvious as long as older, 'refuted' findings are concerned, while current ones often seem to be able to evade such consideration.
Certainly, science always claims to proceed in a reflective manner and to subject its results to fixed verification procedures. However, the preconceptions of the diagnosticians are found more at the level of the questions. This was impressively demonstrated by Thomas Etzemüller (Munich) using the history of "racial anthropology" since the 19th century, which merged "nature" and "culture" in a very special way. What today is considered a bizarre pseudo-science, which 'rationalised' social order in a biologistic way in order to demand 'operations' on the 'body of the people', spoke with the authority of the catheder for a century. In doing so, the discipline was quite honest about the criteria of scientific rigour: extensive discussions were held about error rates, measuring instruments and other methodological problems. In addition to innovative and suggestive clarification techniques, it was precisely the problematisation of its own inadequacies that made up the evidence of this science. From the 1960s onwards, racial anthropology did not come to an end with a big bang, but by gently falling asleep. With the rise of sociology as the leading discipline in the humanities, its questions became obsolete in large parts of the scientific field, making the results all the more superfluous. Only against the background of widespread culturally pessimistic, anti-modern diagnoses of the times could racial anthropology ever 'make sense'. According to Etzemüller, the lack of a proper settlement with the discipline also means that elements of it - most prominently in the so-called Sarrazin debate - repeatedly "haunt the literature undead".
Realisation: crisis, pop and "remote morality"
But how do such diagnoses materialise in society? The lecture by Ariane Leendertz (Cologne), for example, shed light on this by analysing the intertwining of time diagnostics and knowledge production using a less distant example. She showed how talk of "complexity" became a leitmotif of American political and social science in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Initially, an interdisciplinary appropriation of mathematical knowledge in conjunction with the rise of computer technology seemed to renew the promise of the American tradition of "social engineering" that the complexity of the social, economic and political reality of a changing society could be analysed "in its entirety". However, these expectations then "overlapped" in the transition to the 1970s "with the impression that crisis phenomena, problems and conflicts in American society were not only not coming to an end, but seemed to be intensifying." Thus, at the end of this new modelling of the social on the basis of the diagnosis of complexity, there was a renunciation of therapy and a belief in 'self-healing': the social technology of the "Great Society" capitulated; the neoliberal discourse of state retreat and trust in 'market forces' was based on the supposed "ungovernability".
The rise of pop and rock culture is also based on contemporary diagnoses of a uniformed-repressive, conformist mass culture that were widespread in the 1960s and 1970s. Frank Hillebrandt (Hagen) showed how this diagnosis was translated into practices of a "popularisation of creativity and innovation", which, according to Boltanski and Chiapello, led to the "project-based polis" and the "new spirit of capitalism", using the "pop festival" format that emerged as a result. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the pop festival should be understood as a "powerful zone of intensity of contemporary society" and, according to Foucault, as an "unprecedented event with a consequential character" that practically reconfigured the bodies, things, discourses and symbols of everyday culture. Rock and pop thus led firstly to a "revaluation of ordinary life" and secondly to a broad popularisation of 'creative' attitudes of self-transformation, which solidify as constitutive "characteristics of contemporary society". Perhaps it is precisely the rock and pop practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in their emphatically physical and sensual realisation of a certain critique of the times, that are a very instructive example of the performative, socially formative potential of diagnoses of the present.
In his theses on the "genealogy of glocalism", David Kuchenbuch (Giessen) dealt with another descendant of the end of the modernist belief in progress during the 1970s - the "knowledge-based, sustainable lifestyle" of "conscientious consumption" that began between the Club of Rome report on the "Limits to Growth" and One World Shops, but has since also become a means of distinguishing an educated middle class. Kuchenbuch explains the unlikely emergence of this practice/discourse formation with the confluence of a whole series of elements: A "pronounced data collection activity" of the UN that began after 1945 had grown into a "global comparative communication" and had entered into an interplay during the 1970s in the context of the oil crisis with contemporary diagnoses of "population explosion" and "excessive demands on spaceship Earth". Popularised by "life-world-oriented didactics" aimed at a "reassessment of the potential impact of individual action" - vivid comparative maps, graphs and tables on resource consumption, simulation and role-playing games - this knowledge turned individual consumption and self-restraint into a daily trade-off with individualised responsibility for the world. According to Kuchenbuch, this "remote morality", with its "glocalistic behavioural doctrine of self-questioning" in once politicised milieus, diminished resistance to "subjectivation imperatives", which were soon "brought to individuals from a completely different direction (neoliberal discourses on flexibility, EVS)". The world therapy of 'correct consumption' placed the "individual (...) directly in relation to the planet and to humanity" and thus nolens volens ratified the "credo" of "global capitalism": There is "no such thing as society". More concretely, it can be added that these discourses and practices of responsible consumption after 1990 are mixed with motives of health self-optimisation. This is illustrated by recent veganism, which in just a decade and a half has risen from a feature of marginalised political subcultures to a self-education technique suitable for television.
Viewpoints: between pessimism and utopia
On the basis of such "real stories", the workshop showed how certain realities emerge in the interplay between academic and popular knowledge production and that dealing with "diagnostics of the present" promises to advance a "genealogy of the present" in this respect. In addition, the discussions in The Smart House Oldenburg also confirmed what Alkemeyer and Buschmann had already formulated at the beginning: Namely, that "even the observation of diagnoses of the present always already adopts a present-diagnostic standpoint".
This was not only demonstrated by the theses on "Pathologies and therapies in contemporary educational discourse" presented by Tobias Peter (Freiburg): his examination of the impact of contemporary diagnoses of the "knowledge society", "globalisation" and "diversity" in the contested educational discourse led to the diagnosis of an economisation that "minimises the scope for collective political empowerment". Antonia Grunenberg's (Berlin/Oldenburg) lecture on "Some Practices and Discourses of the Digital Revolution" had contemporary diagnostic traits, as she saw a radical new elitism on the rise, based on old ideas of a "totally autonomous subject", in confrontation with manifesto-like texts from Silicon Valley. In a similar vein, Elke Bippus (Zurich), following the artist Andrea Fraser, diagnosed "regressive tendencies in the entire field of art", which went hand in hand with a revival of the concept of generally human, innate, unmediated "affects". This discourse, which corresponds to ideas of genius art, is also based on a non-social and non-historical subject, on 'man himself'. Bippus made it clear that a 'praxeological' sociology, which deals a lot with pre-linguistic knowledge and affects, must be careful not to lose sight of the effect character of affect.
It was not only the latter contributions that made it clear that the contemporary diagnostic standpoint from which the workshop predominantly spoke was a fundamentally pessimistic one - the lifeworld origins of which can perhaps be seen in a frequently perceived defeat of socio-critical science. With reference to the initial question of how the diagnosis of time has a performative effect, it might be worth considering whether such narratives of decline around the constantly reconstructed enforcement of the market-compliant subject do not have a cementing effect for their part - and whether, as Tilman Borsche (Hildesheim) formulated in his theses on the "orientation function of scientific knowledge", "ideology and utopia are no longer needed as moments of a dialectic of social imagination" in order "to understand our social present and to be able to shape our social future".
Velten Schäfer, Dr phil., teaches sport sociology and lives as a journalist in Berlin.
Contact: