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This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment.

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic 'extra-territorial' identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at one point referred to the 'peripheral' sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the 'navigational hesitation' underpinning identity and its many trajectories.

AbstractComing from the premise that in order to capture the social in action, we have to be able to re‐construct or re‐assemble reality through parallel histories, I propose to re‐examine the notion of modern subjective culture by focusing on a historically specific interaction of human and non‐human actors. The main vehicle of comparison utilized for this purpose is the cultural history of psychoanalysis and contemporary furniture design.Specifically, the bent‐wood furniture and its emblematic example, the Thonet chair, are used to recover a cultural history of design through bending. By cross‐referencing such design practice with the contemporaneous to it moment of psychoanalysis, I propose that the cultural logic of the fin de siècle, viewed through this particular configuration of the human and material cultures, rests on the practice of plasticity; a conditions which, since then, has become an indispensable component of modern individuality and its numerous identity "construction‐projects".

"The eleven essays in this volume explore the surprising resilience of productive instabilities enclosed in historical asymmetries, cultural paradoxes, and misplaced topographies. The recent history of Central Europe - a history that vividly blurs the line between imagination and reality - is a particularly vibrant case study of such dynamics, the same dynamics that lie at the heart of modern perception. It investigates how varied and opposing tendencies co-exist and are transposed from one cultural and temporal register to another; how they emerge and are maintained in constantly renewed, productive tensions - what we call 'inhabited ruins.' Along the way the reader will encounter music from the Terezin concentration camp as a reversed Potemkin village, the BMW as an itinerant lieu de memoire, Mies van der Rohe's architecture as spaces belonging nowhere, anxious geographies, extra-territorial sounds, misremembered avant-gardes, and post-apocalyptic identities that fell out of time"--