by Malte Thießen
Semantics, social and temporal orders of and through diagnoses of the present
Final commentary on the workshop "Gegenwartsdiagnosen. Modelling society from an interdisciplinary perspective" in Oldenburg, 08-10 October 2015
Introduction
In my concluding commentary, I would like to "visualise" us in a sense, in both senses of the word. I am focussing on three points: Firstly, I am concerned with the connection between diagnoses of the present and social orders, secondly with diagnoses of the present as orders of time, and thirdly with semantics and a narratology of diagnoses of the present.
1. social orders
Let us begin with the first point, the connection between diagnoses of the present and social orders: So what is this "modelling of society" that our conference has in its title anyway? Thomas Etzemüller has traced this modelling using the example of racial anthropology. Its diagnosis of the present was therefore also - and not least - a bourgeois project or one of the "middle class". "Achievement must be worthwhile again" - Thilo Sarrazin recently used this simple formula to summarise the corresponding fears of decline and alienation, which find their projection surface in the visual translation of population statistics as an "urn" or "pyramid".
Diagnoses of the present obviously construct social norms, social milieus, social hierarchies and even social orders as a whole. Tobias Peter therefore pointed out at our conference that diagnoses of the present both open up and close off "spaces of sayability". Diagnoses of the present are thus always also an instrument of social exclusion, inclusion and not least: of social distinction.
This seems to me to be precisely the potential of our approach: that we examine diagnoses of the present as a source for contemporary notions of threat, security and order, as David Kuchenbuch suggested in his paper this morning.
Diagnoses of the present are thus made: they serve to mobilise, legitimise interventions or professionalise experts who assert themselves as diagnosticians and "social engineers" - in both senses of the word "assert".
However, this doing raises the question of who the doers actually are. At our conference, we spoke a lot about narratives, discourses, structures and practices, but little about specific actors. It seems to me that there is a lot of catching up to do here, so that we do not misunderstand the diagnoses of the present as actors themselves. That would then be the very "biologisation" of social processes that we were so keen to beat about the ears of all the experts at our conference.
2. temporal orders
We quickly move on from social orders to time orders. Diagnoses of the present attempt to organise not only the social, but also time. They open up spaces of sayability, but also spaces of time, with which threats are made plausible and interventions are legitimised. On the one hand, this plausibilisation and legitimisation through references to time seems to me to be an important result of our conference. On the other hand, I have gained the impression that we should take a closer look at these temporal references.
Let us first take a very brief look at the past: In her paper, Käte Meyer-Drawe showed that "diagnoses of time" construct "figures of farewell". Appeals for the present and future are derived from this construction of the past. We can understand such references to the past as historical politics or a culture of remembrance in order to track down specific contexts, motives and actors: What images of history are drawn by diagnoses of the present? What traditions do the actors inscribe themselves into with these images?
It seems even more important to me to analyse more precisely what we have been talking about constantly for three days: the present. For what exactly does the "present" that is diagnosed and problematised actually mean? Herbert Mehrtens noted in his paper that brain researchers estimate that the present is "about 2.7 seconds long". I find this remark as funny as it is important. After all, the specific time period of the present actually constructs very specific fields of intervention. So what, in the opinion of the actors, belongs to this present because it is supposed to increase the pressure to act? Or what do they prefer to exclude from the present because it reduces the persuasiveness of the diagnosis?
A brief look at the last dimension of time, the future: the fact that diagnoses of the present construct future plans and fuel fears of the future was a topic of many presentations. So we are not only dealing with diagnoses, but also with forecasts. At our conference, there was talk of "utopias" and "blueprints for the future" just as frequently as there was of course.
And yet this anticipation of the future seems to me to be something else than diagnoses of the present. I would therefore like to suggest that we take a closer look at the tense relationship between diagnosis and prognosis, because futures involve very specific styles of thinking or cultural techniques of modernity: Figures of "hygiene" and "prevention", of "prevention and "prevention" have already been mentioned in the last few days with reference to Ulrich Bröckling.
3 Semantics and narratives
The forecasts bring me to my third and final point, semantics: We have been presented with a wealth of images and concepts, symbols and narratives. The narrativity of diagnoses of the present is undoubtedly an important result of the conference. In this context, Ariane Leendertz even spoke of a "genre" that elevates diagnoses of the present to a specific narrative form.
I would like to take up these considerations and encourage you to take a closer look at the specific semantics and narratology of diagnoses of the present: What patterns of interpretation and techniques of representation do diagnoses use to gain plausibility and, above all, popularity? Is it, for example, the semantics of bacteriology that catches on particularly well in everyday life because sources of danger are to be "contained", because "risk groups" are to be identified or entire populations are to be "immunised"? Or is it analogies to physics and cybernetics, i.e. the "equilibrium" narratives, the pressure and force models, the "feedback effects" and "impulses", with which diagnoses of the present gain their persuasive power?
Such semantics could help us to determine the premises and motives, the actors and, above all, the addressees of diagnoses of the present. Our discussion on Thursday about the effectiveness of brain research imaging techniques is just one example of the fact that this addressee orientation is still by no means clear: So what characterises the "century of the brain": is it really the specialist journals - or is it the "Apotheken-Umschau", which we quoted a little mockingly on Thursday?
Conclusion: a plea for self-reflection
Summarising these three observations, the analysis of contemporary diagnoses can be seen as a stimulus for self-reflection.
At the opening of the conference, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger showed how humanities scholars and natural scientists use diagnoses of the present to delimit, explore and also "plough" their fields of action, to stay with the metaphor. I would like to understand these search movements of different disciplines as an invitation to all of us, as an invitation to self-reflection on our approaches to diagnoses of the present.
On the one hand, this applies to our own diagnoses of the present. We also received several examples of this in the form of presentations at our conference. If you want to be a little mean, you could use these presentations to trace the very processes that we have so often deconstructed: Our diagnoses of the present at this conference also construct crisis phenomena, in some cases even descent narratives, and thus point to a need for action or legitimise specific disciplines - preferably our own, of course, when in doubt.
On the other hand, even reflections on diagnoses of the present are always themselves diagnoses of the present. Niko Buschmann already pointed this out in his introductory lecture. However, I have the feeling that we have sometimes forgotten this point in the heat of the moment.
So this also seems to me to be an important result of our conference: That "diagnoses of the present" are a challenge to us all, that we should reflect on our premises and semantics, that we must ask ourselves which social designs and temporal orders we are actually constructing - also and especially with our deconstructions of the diagnoses.
Malte Thießen, Dr phil. habil., is Director of the LWL Institute for Westphalian Regional History in Münster.
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