Objectives
The interdisciplinary research project ‘Kulturen des Performativen' aims to investigate the relationship between performativity and textuality. With the middle ages, the early modern period and the twentieth century as its historical focal points, the project in particular inquires into the significance and functions performativity acquired during the major transformations in the history of the media.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
The research work of the individual projects in the Sonderforschungsbereich raises larger questions concerning the relationship of performativity with
a) media
b) perception
c) ritual
d) gender
e) knowledge and science. These issues are explored within interdisciplinary working groups, to which all the centre's members contribute.
The 'discovery' of performativity
Cultural studies - the humanities as well as the social sciences - are currently undergoing a shift of paradigm: from text based models of culture to models based on the notion of performance. Until the late 1980s culture was predominantly described in terms of a ‘text', which would be analysed for its inherent structures as well as for the meanings of its individual elements. While the reading of culture as a set of discursive formations contributed to the expansion of the field of cultural studies and opened new perspectives on hitherto neglected topics, it remained largely confined to a structuralist, and static, view of culture, looking at products rather than practices.
By focusing on the performativity of culture, however, culture can be perceived as a set of dynamic practices. Such a view foregrounds the processes of cultural construction rather than the effects, emphasising exchange, negotiations or transformations that do not merely represent, but constitute cultural events or social identities. Among the disciplines that have benefited from this change of perspective are theatre studies, discourse analysis, ethnology, sociology, philosophy of language, linguistics, literature and media studies, psychology and pedagogics. By using terms and concepts such as mis-en-scène, play, masquerade, spectacle, by privileging the materiality, mediality or the interactive dimension of cultural practices, critics in diverse fields today demonstrate how productive the notion of performativity can be.
Dynamic opposites: performativity and textuality
The interdisciplinary research project ‘Kulturen des Performativen' turns its attention from text to performance, without, however, assuming a rigid opposition between these two terms. Instead, the project focuses on the interactions, frictions, and oscillations between them, complementing and counterbalancing textual referentiality with a new accent on performativity.
Performativity - a new perspective
From a ‘performative' point of view, culture no longer appears defined by objects, monuments or works of art, but instead by the dynamic relations and processes that determine, produce and validate these objects. The body has become privileged as the site and medium of cultural practices. Teleological critique that focuses on the end and result of a process of cultural production has given way to the analysis of the duration and complexities of this process itself. While an object-centered view of culture grants central importance to the artist, the new paradigm is shifting the point of interest to the relation between the artist and her/his audience, regarding the audience itself as an active participant in cultural production.
The performative constitution of culture
Recent research in ethnology, theatre studies and philosophy, among other disciplines, has foregrounded the performative over the referential dimension in culture. While analysis of non-European cultures and European folk cultures has long had recourse to a ‘performance' model of explanation, critics are only currently beginning to apply the same approach to an inquiry into the constitution of European elite cultures. In the light of this development, scholarly positions with regard to identity formation, representation, the body, self-fashioning, notions of space and time, or cultural norms and values must be reviewed.
Performativity - a challenge to academic research
While the significance of performative processes in European culture has been the subject of numerous studies, no systematic discipline has evolved yet. The performative dimension of culture is a slippery phenomenon, challenging established methodologies, perpetually eluding those types of systematic analysis that are predicated on verifyability, repeatability and constancy. Thus, the emphasis placed on the performative construction of culture not only indicates a fundamentally altered sense of what ‘culture' is, but simultaneously requires a modification of the aims and methods of cultural critique.
New objects and new perspectives demand new research strategies. How to reconcile and adapt text-based methods of interpretation to performance-oriented inquiries remains one of the most challenging problems of the project. Our aim is not only to broaden and pluralise the readings of culture, but to fundamentally change the approaches and strategies deployed by a critique of culture. We also aim to contribute to a new conceptualisation of cultural studies that is based on the productive interplay between textuality and performativity.
Areas of research
We are investigating the relation between textuality and performativity by primarily looking at ‘threshold periods' in the history of communication, when the material and medial basis of cultural communication was subject to radical change. The first of these transformations of media culture, roughly spanning the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period, saw the introduction of script in the vernaculars - a development that reached a first peak in the 12th century -, the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and the rediscovery of classical authors. The second transformation set in with the ‘new media' at the end of the 19th century. With regard to the latter development, we are specifically investigating the effects these innovations had on ‘old' media such as the theatre, music, the visual arts and literature.
The first phase of transformation resulted in the gradual cultural dominance of texts over oral performances. Since the beginning of the 20th century, this process can be said to have gone into reverse: the emergence of the electronic media is undermining the hegemony of textuality, increasing and intensifying performativity in many areas of culture.
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