Marcela Knapp

The Creation of the Social: Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy

Springer eBooks, 2020

This chapter focuses on Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. The play initiated the genre of documentary t... more This chapter focuses on Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. The play initiated the genre of documentary theater and disrupted the notion of the distinction between fiction and reality. By claiming to bring reality on stage, the play proclaimed a new approach to social reality, in which the past is inherently part of the present. The aesthetics of immediacy proposed by documentary theater created a new political imaginary, in which everything is political. It reorganized the relation between the individual and society. The individual is re-conceptualized as a political being. The controversy about the new aesthetics displays the emergence of a new political identity culminating in the student protests of the late 1960s, and initiates the founding of West Germany’s “myth of origin” in the Holocaust. A transformation of the social and political imaginary, this case study suggests, is dependent on a form-language, which organizes a society’s relation with social reality.

Confirming a Secular World Order: Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence

Springer eBooks, 2020

Cultural Controversies in the West German Public Sphere: Aesthetic Fiction and the Creation of Social Identities

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more

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Wie Fiktionalität das soziale Imaginäre (re)organisiert

Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, Nov 1, 2019

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag gehe ich der Frage nach, wie fiktionale Kunst auf das soziale I... more Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag gehe ich der Frage nach, wie fiktionale Kunst auf das soziale Imaginäre einwirkt und es verändert. Am Beispiel der öffentlichen Rezeption von Rolf Hochhuths Theaterstück Der Stellvertreter (1963) zeige ich, wie sich soziale Identität aus dem Ästhetischen speist. Hochhuths Stellvertreter markiert den Beginn der westdeutschen Auseinandersetzung mit der Frage nach Schuld am Holocaust und bildet einen kulturellen Ausgangspunkt für die 68er-Bewegung. Indem das dokumentarische Theater eine neue Form der Individualität, des Denkens und des Fühlens hervorbringt, reorganisiert es soziale Wirklichkeit und greift durch ästhetische Formgebung aktiv in das soziale Imaginäre ein. Werke fiktionaler Kunst spielen bei der Hervorbringung bzw. Schöpfung sozialer Identität eine besondere Rolle, denn Kunst ist laut Wolfgang Iser dem Prinzip des Ästhetischen unterworfen. Das Prinzip des Ästhetischen ist formgebend und spricht somit das Sein der Psyche an-hier folge ich dem Sozialphilosophen Cornelius Castoriadis. Am Beispiel von Hochhuths Stellvertreter möchte ich darlegen, wie es der Kunst gelingt, ein neues Wahrnehmungsmuster zu etablieren, das durch die öffentliche Debatte zu einer neuen "Sensorialitätsordnung" (Rancière) führt. Diese neue Ordnung transformiert den Begriff des Politischen, der als primäre soziale imaginäre Bedeutung (Castoriadis) zu den gesellschaftskonstitutiven Begriffen westlicher Demokratien gehört.

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Cultural Controversies in the West German Public Sphere

Springer eBooks, 2020

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more

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A Moving World: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Few fictional works of art have left such a lasting impact on the conceptual framework of Western... more Few fictional works of art have left such a lasting impact on the conceptual framework of Western societies as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The term "Big Brother" is included in the German Duden as well as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Both dictionaries are authoritative works of reference in their respective languages. The OED gives the following definition of the term Big Brother: [After the name given to the head of state in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.] Usu. with capital initials. A political or administrative authority, esp. the State, exercising strict supervision of and total control over people's lives; (hence) the agencies, institutions, etc., used by such an authority to monitor and control people's behaviour. 1

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The Social Visibility of Corporeality: The Rebel Youth Films in the Fifties

This chapter deals with the rebel youth films that stand at the very beginning of the development... more This chapter deals with the rebel youth films that stand at the very beginning of the development of a youth and teenager identity and the youth rebellion about to transform West Germany’s social order. This chapter analyzes the discourse about the rebel youth films The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, and Rock Around the Clock. They paradigmatically stand for the genre and together caused a public discourse. Through an aesthetics of physical presence and sensual corporeality, the films develop a new narrative of youth in which actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and Rock ’n Roll created a new space of experience. This chapter is concerned with a mediatized reality, in which fiction and reality can no longer be distinguished. Youth becomes the placeholder for the arrival of modernity in West Germany and is represented by style, appearance, performance, and corporeality. The films mark the birth of youth as a new social identity.

Interspaces. Cultural journalism and the transformation of the aesthetic world- perception

Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activ... more Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activity that introduces the recipient as an agent into the production of the artwork. Reception is an act of completion, without which the art remains fragmentary. My own considerations are nourished by these thoughts. In order to find out more about the meaning and role of art in society, we have to look at those practices that engage art with society; it means detecting those points of intersection that intertwine artistic fiction and the constitution of social meaning. I claim that these interspaces between artistic text and social meaning are the discursive laboratories that make operative the specificities of artistic fiction. Conversely, they bring to light the particular role artistic production takes within society. Interspaces are those spaces where art participates in politics, which, in Jacques Rancière's words, is the "partition of the visible and the sayable", an "intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world" 2 , which he elsewhere terms a "regime of meaning" 3. It is in the interspaces that art develops the power to shape a society's 'social imaginary significations' 4. Due to the participatory nature of reception the resulting interpretations are not stable. With reference to Wolfgang Iser, I will therefore conceptualize the act of reception as a performance. Each interpretation of the same artwork results in a different staging of the 1 These thoughts are developed both in Wolfgang Iser. (1970). Die Appellstruktur der Texte.

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Theoretical Considerations

Springer eBooks, 2020

Interspaces. Cultural journalism and the transformation of the aesthetic world- perception

Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, Dec 28, 2015

Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activ... more Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activity that introduces the recipient as an agent into the production of the artwork. Reception is an act of completion, without which the art remains fragmentary. My own considerations are nourished by these thoughts. In order to find out more about the meaning and role of art in society, we have to look at those practices that engage art with society; it means detecting those points of intersection that intertwine artistic fiction and the constitution of social meaning. I claim that these interspaces between artistic text and social meaning are the discursive laboratories that make operative the specificities of artistic fiction. Conversely, they bring to light the particular role artistic production takes within society. Interspaces are those spaces where art participates in politics, which, in Jacques Rancière's words, is the "partition of the visible and the sayable", an "intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world" 2 , which he elsewhere terms a "regime of meaning" 3. It is in the interspaces that art develops the power to shape a society's 'social imaginary significations' 4. Due to the participatory nature of reception the resulting interpretations are not stable. With reference to Wolfgang Iser, I will therefore conceptualize the act of reception as a performance. Each interpretation of the same artwork results in a different staging of the 1 These thoughts are developed both in Wolfgang Iser. (1970). Die Appellstruktur der Texte.

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Interespacios. El periodismo cultural y la transformación de la percepción estética mundial

REGAC, 2019

Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activ... more Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activity that introduces the recipient as an agent into the production of the artwork. Reception is an act of completion, without which the art remains fragmentary. My own considerations are nourished by these thoughts. In order to find out more about the meaning and role of art in society, we have to look at those practices that engage art with society; it means detecting those points of intersection that intertwine artistic fiction and the constitution of social meaning. I claim that these interspaces between artistic text and social meaning are the discursive laboratories that make operative the specificities of artistic fiction. Conversely, they bring to light the particular role artistic production takes within society. Interspaces are those spaces where art participates in politics, which, in Jacques Rancière's words, is the "partition of the visible and the sayable", an "intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world" 2 , which he elsewhere terms a "regime of meaning" 3. It is in the interspaces that art develops the power to shape a society's 'social imaginary significations' 4. Due to the participatory nature of reception the resulting interpretations are not stable. With reference to Wolfgang Iser, I will therefore conceptualize the act of reception as a performance. Each interpretation of the same artwork results in a different staging of the 1 These thoughts are developed both in Wolfgang Iser. (1970). Die Appellstruktur der Texte.

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Wild Inside: Uncanny Encounters in European Traveller Fantasies of Africa

Confirming a Secular World Order: Ingmar Bergman's The Silence

Theoretical Considerations

A Moving World: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

In 1983 a specific paradigmatic way of reading Orwell’s novel develops, which closely associates ... more In 1983 a specific paradigmatic way of reading Orwell’s novel develops, which closely associates the novel with the threat of technological data surveillance. While the novel was traditionally interpreted allegorically, this new paradigm re-conceived the novel as a dystopian vision of West Germany’s future. The novel’s impact for an emerging movement against data surveillance becomes explainable against the backdrop of the communication patterns of the peace movement of the early 1980s. The paradigm of interpretation developed by the movement against data surveillance drew from the dystopian communication cultivated by the peace movement as a means of mobilization. It gave expression to a world experience of political activism. The novel’s form-language created a chain of equivalence (Laclau/Mouffe) between the peace and data surveillance movement. Identity between the movements emerged through the dystopian pattern of communication. The dystopian paradigm actualized this pattern an...

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The Reality of Nineteen Eighty-Four. How Fiction Becomes Social

The Social Visibility of Corporeality: The Rebel Youth Films in the Fifties

This chapter deals with the rebel youth films that stand at the very beginning of the development... more This chapter deals with the rebel youth films that stand at the very beginning of the development of a youth and teenager identity and the youth rebellion about to transform West Germany’s social order. This chapter analyzes the discourse about the rebel youth films The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, and Rock Around the Clock. They paradigmatically stand for the genre and together caused a public discourse. Through an aesthetics of physical presence and sensual corporeality, the films develop a new narrative of youth in which actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and Rock ’n Roll created a new space of experience. This chapter is concerned with a mediatized reality, in which fiction and reality can no longer be distinguished. Youth becomes the placeholder for the arrival of modernity in West Germany and is represented by style, appearance, performance, and corporeality. The films mark the birth of youth as a new social identity.

Fiction Between Representation and Quotation: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Garbage, the City and Death

This chapter scrutinizes the development of the three debates dealing with Fassbinder’s play and ... more This chapter scrutinizes the development of the three debates dealing with Fassbinder’s play and depicts the world-creating (poietic) power of fiction. In 1976 a means of meaningfully deciphering the play still had to be developed. The play fell prey to what may be called, loosely following the Adorno dictum, the paradigm of the “prohibition of the image.” The situation differed in 1985 due to the emergence of a postmodern paradigm of interpretation.

The Creation of the Social: Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy

This chapter focuses on Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. The play initiated the genre of documentary t... more This chapter focuses on Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. The play initiated the genre of documentary theater and disrupted the notion of the distinction between fiction and reality. By claiming to bring reality on stage, the play proclaimed a new approach to social reality, in which the past is inherently part of the present. The aesthetics of immediacy proposed by documentary theater created a new political imaginary, in which everything is political. It reorganized the relation between the individual and society. The individual is re-conceptualized as a political being. The controversy about the new aesthetics displays the emergence of a new political identity culminating in the student protests of the late 1960s, and initiates the founding of West Germany’s “myth of origin” in the Holocaust. A transformation of the social and political imaginary, this case study suggests, is dependent on a form-language, which organizes a society’s relation with social reality.

Cultural Journalism and the Transformation of Aesthetic World-Perception

The social institution of fiction takes a special place in the social order of many contemporary ... more The social institution of fiction takes a special place in the social order of many contemporary societies. It discloses itself as fictional, it cuts the referential function of language and claims that what it represents does not exist. It is thus contrary to the social need to strive for facticity and stability – for the closure of meaning which tolerates only a single truth. As a social phenomenon, it thus disrupts the principles of the constitution of the social which permanently seeks to minimize the openness of meaning. But as an institutionalized phenomenon, fiction is deeply ingrained in the constitution of (Western) societies and therefore the question may be asked: How does artistic fiction become productive in an environment that insists on its own facticity?

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