This project continues the work that up to now has been entiteld: "Re/Presentations of Gender - Narrative and Performative discourses in contemporary erotic and aesthetic cultures". The new title expresses the shrinking importance of narrativity in favour of an orientation towards aesthetics, media, and empiricism. The subproject 1 (Gert Mattenklott) investigates in further research on Jan Fabre but transfers its interest to the new research focus I about power, embodiment, and the subject. Whilst during the last period the subproject 3 (Volker Woltersdorff) has laid the theoretical basics for the analysis of subcultural aesthetics, it now explores one particular subculture (sadomasochism) and its aesthetic and performative production under the aspects of power, gender, and violence. The restriction to discursive documents is now extended to bodily and material practices. That allows approaching the so called "pathic" aspect of performativity otherwise hardly accessible. The subproject 3 forms part of the research focus I.
The entire project enacts a broader notion of literature as including other media like it has been developed in recent philology. Therefore it keeps to its focus on other figurative arts, media, and performances. Just as in the last research period, the main questions stay the same: Which new performative aspects have been set free by the critical interventions into the symbolic and discursive order of the sex gender matrix? Which strategies characterise different discourses of gender, identity politics, and aesthetics? What role does the use of specific media play in this context? What is new, is the interest for spatial and temporal paradigms, the conditions of interactive signification and the characteristics of aesthetic performances as symbolic acts in subculture.
Subproject 1 (Gert Mattenklott): Jan Fabre
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Subproject 3 (Volker Woltersdorff): Performing Sadomasochism in Art, Subculture and on the Internet
The subproject points at raising and discussing several controversial hypotheses that go as follows: The field of power in modern societies is thoroughly marked by sadomasochistic dynamics. There is con-tinuity between sadomasochistic subculture and the performativity of power in all day life. These very dynamics can be considered in all day life as a subtext put under taboo whilst pushed in the very centre of SM subculture and of the art work that is in-spired by it. That implies a significant shift. Libidinous impacts and mechanisms of the per-formance of power are not only exposed but also modified by a special framing that guarantees pleasure for all participants – and be it merely the pleasure of pain and fear... While con-tradiction and ambivalence otherwise bother and therefore are repressed, in sadomasochistic settings they acquire a special appeal and are to be confronted with high intensity.
The possibility to deal with contradictions and borderlines in a playful and fictitious way brings subcultural sadomasochistic practices into a close context with aesthetic practices. The subproject aims to analyse this specific quality of the performance of power in sadomasochistic subculture, in its virtual counterpart on the Internet and in its artistic adaptations. Its main interest lies in understanding and criticising the performativity of power, violence, gender, community, and the subject. Therefore the conference tries to describe »SM« as a ludic state of emergency where subject positions become precarious and where a multiplicity of borderlines is transgressed, suspended and reinstated. The conference finally asks whether »SM« can be considered as a specific mode of cognition that allows insights in the specific libidinal economy by which all participants are involved in the reproduction of dominant positions. That implies the fascination by violence and authority, the pleasure in transgression and in the politically incorrect. They are no exclusive particularities of the sadomasochistic subculture but determine the collective imaginary of a society.
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