by Team
Workshop at the University of Oldenburg, 8-10 October 2015
Under the buzzwords "control society", "normalisation society", "creative society" or "contingency society" - to name but a few - a plethora of contemporary diagnoses are currently vying for interpretative power in the attention arena of "reflexive modernity" (Beck), which in turn represents such a diagnosis itself. By making paradigmatic statements about reality, diagnoses of the present not only recognise it as reality, but also as a specific reality. Authenticated by the scientific authority with which they are charged, as symbolic representations of the "social imaginary" (Castoriadis), they always help to shape social practice.
Diagnoses of the present can be understood as performative elements of practice in several respects, in that they a) (implicitly) guide practice, b) function as an appeal aimed at change or c) can themselves become effective as (elements or drafts of) practice - and thus become tangible as an organon of cultural self-transformation. For example, since the 1970s, social sensitisation to ecological issues has taken shape in transformation scenarios that project human coexistence in terms of economic and ecological "sustainability" (e.g. in alternative supply communities). In a similar vein, concepts are being established in developmental psychology, education and the health sciences under the guiding concept of "resilience", which are aimed at training the resilience of the individual in a "risk society" that is getting out of hand and reconfiguring it as a "prevention society". In contrast, talk of the "rule of the algorithm" conjures up the idea of complete predictability of human behaviour in a world seemingly controlled by machines, in which the contingency of social processes is absorbed by formalised procedures.
Under certain conditions, diagnoses of the present thus prove to be creative acts themselves, which point beyond the existing and are able to expand the boundaries of meaning of a culture. They can lead us to intervene in the reality that they simultaneously diagnose. These creative anticipations (of other social conditions, institutions, ways of life, etc.) are in turn influenced by the images produced and disseminated by the media in which people live. When analysing social self-designs, different media accordingly come into view: They range from sociological analyses that attempt to shed light on society as a whole, to detailed studies that deal with publicly discussed developments (such as juvenile delinquency, consumption, demographics, etc.), to enquiries that develop politically viable proposals for solutions, and statistics that claim to make hidden developments and conditions visible. In a similar way, the life sciences, cultural studies and psychology, for example, produce their own epistemological foundations for the perception of people and the conceptualisation of social action. The programme of these reflections can be found in the practices of social movements and takes on a sensual and sensuous form in images and cultural performances (of the body, sport, etc.). Similar developments can be observed in architecture, which attempts to redesign people's habitat and thus the social relationships of entire societies based on a diagnosis of its own present. In this sense, landscapes can be analysed as designed imaginations of society, sports games as performative representations of social order formation, identities as "designs" of cultural distinctions, crisis imaginations as performances of social self-descriptions or even prevention programmes as designs of socio-political contingency management.
The workshop is interested in how (social) reality is modelled in currently circulating diagnoses of the present. How do different academic disciplines describe the present? In what way (and media form) do these descriptions shape reality and its perception? What basic scientific assumptions and social concepts of order underlie the modelling? We are also interested in the interfaces between subject and general knowledge at which diagnoses of the present are negotiated: How do diagnoses of the present emerge in everyday practices, and to what extent do they simultaneously precede these practices in the sense of a "performative feedback loop" (Koschorke)? To what extent can practices be understood as orders of execution in which diagnoses of the present are (implicitly) inscribed? The aim of the workshop is to focus on the social imaginary contained in contemporary diagnostic modelling and the way in which it is produced, also in the sense that the usual opposition of fact and fiction is undermined:
- The aim is to ask which (epistemic, anthropological, social-theoretical, etc.) basic assumptions about reality and its shaping flow into the various diagnoses of the present, to what extent they solidify into socially conventionalised knowledge (or, conversely, knowledge dissolves in this process) and which (alternative) dimensions and possibilities of the social they render invisible in the process.
- In particular, the specific forms of production of and the respective handling of diagnoses of the present in the various academic disciplines will be analysed. At the centre are a) the methodological construction and the implicit empiricism of diagnoses of the present, b) the socio-material arrangements (laboratories, classrooms, conference halls, etc.) and techniques (algorithms, statistics, test procedures, etc.) of knowledge production and c) the positioning of observers in the scientific field, which in turn are tied back to the material conditions of this field.
- Against this background, the phenomenon of contemporary diagnostics and its conceptualisation (as models, diagnoses, analyses, etc.) will be reflected upon. The attempt to capture diagnostics of the present in an interdisciplinary way then proves itself to be a method of ascertaining the present in the sense of second-order observation.
Format and procedure
The workshop is designed to be interdisciplinary in order to be able to investigate the interactions, translations and migratory movements within and between different areas of social knowledge on the one hand, and to discuss the interweaving of modelling and practice of these collective self-designs from the respective specialist perspectives on the other. We will also ask why and under what conditions certain diagnoses of the present resonate in which subjects. In an exchange between the social sciences, humanities, cultural studies and natural sciences, the aim is not so much to discuss finished research results as innovative questions and research approaches in order to cut interdisciplinary paths into a field of research that has so far hardly been dealt with or only by individual subjects.
Speakers
Prof. Dr Elke Bippus (Zurich University of the Arts)
Prof. Dr Tilman Borsche (University of Hildesheim)
Prof. Dr Thomas Etzemüller (University of Oldenburg)
Prof. Dr Antonia Grunenberg (University of Oldenburg)
Prof. Dr Frank Hillebrandt (Open University Hagen)
Dr David Kuchenbuch (Justus Liebig University Giessen)
Dr Ariane Leendertz (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)
Prof. Dr Herbert Mehrtens (TU Braunschweig)
Prof. Dr Käte Meyer-Drawe (Ruhr University Bochum)
Dr Hanno Pahl (University of Lucerne)
Dr Tobias Peter (Albert Ludwig University Freiburg)
Prof. Dr Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPI for the History of Science Berlin)
With the kind support of
