Suchergebnisse

»Ereignisse« sind nicht in der Welt. Sie werden diskursiv formiert und medial verbreitet, sie versehen historisches Geschehen mit Sinn und geben der Zukunft eine Richtung. Ereignisse besitzen somit stets eine politische Dimension.Die Beiträge dieses Bandes sondieren die medialen Strategien, die ein Ereignis inszenieren und zugleich eine Interpretation des Geschehens vorbereiten. Sie loten die Grenzen zwischen Medien, Ereignis und Politik aus und fragen nach den Handlungsoptionen, die sich vor dem Hintergrund möglicher oder vergangener Ereignisse bieten.

During the Cold War numerous fictional scenarios featured War Rooms and bunkers as control rooms. In these places we witness how a head of government is negotiating with a political opponent in times of crises and deciding on war or peace. In this paper, I will discuss three literary and cinematic treatments that focus on crises situations that broach the issue of atomic war. I consider the War Room (and its environment) as an experimental laboratory. It tests the decision-making ability of any political leader and his skills to handle technical or human failures that threaten to cause a nuclear war. As I will argue, in fiction human control and sovereignty were replaced by computers that had taken command. This loss of human agency was caused by the medialisation and mechanisation of the nuclear weapons control. Drawing on these deliberations, this article aims to introduce a typology of disruption. Based on the analysis of Cold War fictional treatments, this typology identifies different ways of handling incidents caused by human or technical agents as well as different ways of solving (or failing to solve) a nuclear crisis. The paper concludes with an outlook on fictional scenarios that discuss current Situation Rooms at the time of "War on Terror".

The 'Red Phone', understood as a telephone connection between the Cremlin and the White House, never existed. In this paper I treat it as a hybrid object of knowledge, whose materiality is mixed with facts and fictions. When the fictitious object first appeared in literature and film it was still relatively amorphous and insignificant. Only due to an increased production of signs, symbolic attributions, narrative strategies and rhetorical figures was the notorious Cold War apparatus constituted. As a discursive object the 'Red Phone' in turn provides specific information on a form of knowledge characteristic of this period. The 'Red Phone' is closely connected to crisis situations that deal with apocalyptic scenarios. To better understand this hybrid object this paper will analyze the short story "Abraham '59 – A nuclear Fantasy" (Harvey Wheeler) and the novel Fail-Safe (Eugene Burdick/Harvey Wheeler) that both stage a telephone connection between Moscow and Washington, which aims at deescalating a crisis situation.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Filme WarGames (USA 1983), Krieg und Frieden (BRD 1982) und Der Dritte Weltkrieg (BRD 1998) als Dokumente aus der letzten Phase des Kalten Krieges. Die Filme behandeln Ausnahmesituationen, in denen jeweils die Grenzen souveräner Entscheidung in einer lebensbedrohlichen Krise verhandelt werden. Sie entwerfen eine mögliche Zukunft ebenso wie einen kontrafaktischen Verlauf der Geschichte. Ihre Dynamik beziehen die zwar fiktionalen, aber denkbaren Erzählungen aus der Spieltheorie, aus Simulationen und aus der Kraft der historischen Imagination.

Disruption is a phenomenon that has gained the attention of a broad and diverse range of academic disciplines. Building on this work we propose that disruptions are by no means solely destructive but rather have productive consequences. We aim to establish disruption as a starting point for the analysis of formulas of societal self-description. In this, epistemological and aesthetic aspects of disturbances will be focused since these moments of interruption or loss of order evoke efforts of theoretical or practical consolidation of the social sphere. After discussing the history of experimentalization of the life sciences, we point out how art can be understood as an experimental system that integrates and explores the function of disruption. Second, the relationship between factual and fictional knowledge and how both impact on society through the fabrication of different worlds are to be questioned. Finally, we will argue that art such as literature, film, modern theatre, or performances use disruptions as a tool, with which the perception of the past, present and future and of the society itself can be shaped. They achieve this by employing powerfully repercussive narratives that construct political and socio-cultural coherence through the symbolic re-integration of imaginary or real disruptive incidents.

The volume examines aesthetic disruptions within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content. Rather, it creates a space of perception and interaction using formal means, thus problematizing the self-evidence of hegemonic structures of communication.

The article is concerned with the current security policy paradigm of precaution, which tries to be prepared for a completely unknown ("unknown unknowns") situation of danger. Within this political security regime, imaginations, both of disruption and security, gain center stage: They enable – at least approximately – the preparative handling with a yet unknown or even unthinkable future catastrophe and simultaneously serve as media of societies self-description. To be able to grasp the political role of imagination analytically, after a short historical and theoretical introduction, the article presents a model that shows the transformation of diffuse anxiety into specific scenarios of fear infused with implications of values and actions to be the central function of collective imaginations of danger. Based on this, a typology of disruption is developed that distinguishes between predetermined disruption, adaptive disruption and overstressing disruption.