Disruption in the Arts: Textual, Visual, and Performative Strategies for Analyzing Societal Self-Descriptions (Culture & Conflict Book 11)

Supported by the ERC The volume examines from a comparative perspective the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content, but rather from creating a space of perception and interaction using formal means: a space that makes hegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizing their self-evidence. The contributions conceptualize historical and contemporary politics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies, which are concerned not just with the ‘narcissistic’ exhibition of art as art, but also with the creation of a new common horizon of experience. They combine the analysis of paradigmatic works, procedures and actions with reference to theoretical debates in the fields of literature, media and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essay-collection shows how textual, visual, auditive or performative strategies disclose their own ways of functioning, intervene in automated processes of reception and thus work on stimulating a sense of political possibilities. The editors acknowledge support from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP 7/ 2007–2013), ERC grant agreement no. 312454.

Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities.

Editors:
Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Editorial Board:
Arjun Appadurai, New York University,
Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg,
Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich,
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam,
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University,
Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen,
Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College,
Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra,
Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna,
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University,
Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania,
Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin,
Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong

Table of contents 5 Disruption in the Arts: Prologue 9 I. Conceptual Approaches 19 Aesthetic experiments: On the Event-Like Character and the Function of Disruptions in the Arts 19 Scandalous Expectations: Second Order Scandals in Modern Society 43 Ekstasis and Paradoxa. The Miracle as Disruption 53 Imagined Scenarios of Disruption. A Concept 79 II. Media 101 Disruptive Storytelling. Notes on E.T.A. Hoffmann 101 Perturbing the Reader: The Riddle-character of Art and the Dialectical Impact of Contemporary Literature (Adorno, Goetz, Kracht) 121 Expansions of the Instant: Disruptions of Time in Contemporary German Literature 133 III. Body 205 Interferences: Posthuman Perspectives on Early Electronic Music 205 The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Trouble Every Day 227 “They Starve to death, but who dares ask why?”: Steve McQueen’s Film Hunger 247 Writing Aphasia: Intermedial Observation of Disrupted Language in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur 263 IV. Power 291 The Red Telephone: A Hybrid Object of the Cold War 291 Christoph Schlingensief’s Image Disruption Machine 307 Citizen n-1: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour as a Reparative Reading of a Paranoid World 331 V. Archive 353 Notes on Secondary Drama 353 Disturbance in the Intermediate: Secondary Drama as a Parasite 355 Signal-to-Noise Ratio 363 Disrupted Arts and Marginalized Humans: A Commentary on Friedrich Kittler’s “Signal-to-Noise Ratio” 379 Contributors 385 Index of Subjects 389 Index of Persons 395