Die 1930er-Jahre gelten als das populistische Jahrzehnt Hollywoods. Regisseure wie Frank Capra, Leo McCarey und John Ford entwerfen in ihren Werken Szenarien geglückter oder gescheiterter politischer Repräsentation, in denen sich demokratische Ideale mit politischer Theologie und amerikanischem Exzeptionalismus verbinden. Die Szenographie dieser Filme hat sich tief in das kulturelle Gedächtnis der USA eingeschrieben und prägt die politische Inszenierung von Repräsentation bis heute. Johannes Pause liest die damals entstandene Bildsprache als eine Typologie populistischer Repräsentation neu und nutzt sie als Folie, um aktuelle politische Tendenzen zu analysieren.
Democracy, states Claude Lefort, is distinguished by a fundamental representation problem: unlike in the case of a monarchy, there is no longer any sovereign body through which the state is able to uniformly manifest itself. In Hollywood cinema, the "empty space" at the core of democracy thus disclosed is filled with mythical 'primal scene' that conceive of political representation – in the precise sense described by Thomas Hobbes – as a spontaneous theatrical performance: the persuasive power of a political speech fashions an individual, for as long as that person is performing, into the representative of all those present, with the latter becoming the audience and hence a representation of the people. This myth of a social order occurring at the moment of spontaneous performativity is also the identifying feature of filmic depictions of parliament, election rallies, and other political arenas, which Hollywood movies portray as places in which the shaping of democratic principles is a process being permanently re-enacted. Yet the films are characterized not by this legitimization of the democratic system alone, each of them also consistently pursuing an investigative act of enlightenment, revealing to us what is going on behind the scenes of the performance. By means of a comparative analysis of individual scenes from works by Frank Capra, Otto Preminger, John Frankenheimer, and George Clooney, the essay examines how the stage-like nature of political action takes on additional complexity through these explorations of the backstage. Similarly, the influence of filmic media on politics, as evidenced by the production of ever-new front- and side-stages (Meyrowitz), is an aspect being considered by these works in increasingly autoreflexive manner. Far from creating monodimensional ideologies, Hollywood thus seeks, through a highly differentiated approach, to get to grips with the mechanisms and aporias of modern-day politics, one which, in the actual essay itself, assumes the form of a filmic outline of the intellectual history of democratic representation.
»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. Tobias Nanz (Dr. phil.) ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter des ERC-Projekts »The Principle of Disruption« an der Technischen Universität Dresden. Johannes Pause (Dr. phil.) ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter des ERC-Projekts »The Principle of Disruption« an der Technischen Universität Dresden.
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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.
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. ; 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.
