Tagungsankündigung:

Laugh-Communities. Cultural Staging and Social Effects of Laughter in the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Period.

International Conference at the Humboldt University Berlin, April 3-5, 2003

Outline

While research on comical texts traditionally enquired after the "nature"of laughter/"the comic"(H. Bergson), recent approaches have emphasized the instrumental and functional character of laughter, its social contexts and historically variant semiotic references. Viewing the comic ontologically, most of the definitions agreed in the understanding of it as a "clash of different notions of reality, which through their mutual misunderstanding may cause laughter and derision"(H. Blumenberg). But if we assume the existence of historically different cultures of laughter, their anthropological conditions and their different forms of social communication become more relevant. In contrast to the high variance in the meaning of "laughing", "laughter" more precisely is about the process and dynamic of a loud, bodily determined laugh of a group of people. The collective noun, laughter, denotes the laugh recognized as a group phenomenon, which is performed within a determined event-centered social interaction, whose participants also can be described as a "laugh-community”. This laugh-community is necessarily determined both historically and socially, because the participants, in the first place, must be present and, secondly, they can only laugh about something, if they bring with them the same expectations from their concrete social and cultural background. The term laugh-community (analog to "discourse community") allows us to better locate historically and to better understand laughter in its social function.

The conference focuses on forms of laughter production (staging) as a medium for the constitution of communities and their corresponding outsiders in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. In each community, next to institutions and rational agreements, appear coded communications systems which can be actualized through performance in order to determine social positions. Particularly in medieval and early modern societies, in which such positions are often allotted through honor, laughter acquires a central meaning to mark belonging and exclusion. This aspect of inclusion and exclusion mechanisms enacted through laughter will be one of the central issues of the conference, taking into consideration the different lifestyles and social groups in the given epochs. The use of the laugh to mark participation or exclusion is especially evident in the cases of social conflict, if, for example in different medieval customs of rebuke, a person is mocked by a group of young men. The laugh appears here as a medium among others, often violent, to punish deviant behavior. Such deviant behavior can also be confirmed by laughter, if we recall the provocation of jesters or court fools. Carriers of power are provoked by laughter; it can also be used as a means of power through which enemies are made ridiculous.

But laugh-communities are not only constituted by the borderline between the laughers and the laughed-at. Some laugh-communities in their communal laugh strengthen the affiliation of their members rather than mark the outsider: "to laugh with” ranks higher than "to be laughed-at". The humanist laugh-community, as it presents itself in the Facetiae, is outlined much more clearly by means of its witty members than through an amorphus mass of indocti, at whose expense the joke often plays. The examples of laughing young men in mock rituals and humanists telling themselves facetiae outline the differences in social milieus and places, age and education, and "lifestyles". Family and neighbors, town and city, university and parliament, church and lay, guild and dishonoured groups are social systems, which are only macroscopically recognizable as constructions of their own. Yet historical individuals are integrated into more than one of these systems. The sense of belonging to a community and acting in a communal frame arise often enough ad hoc in certain situations on the basis of concrete action patterns. Occasions, forms and places of laughter, but also attempts to control the situative laughter (by legal rules) are the intended fields of analysis, in which the performative aspect of laughter as social action appear.

Until now the social function and forms of laughing and "to be laughed-at” have been hardly researched. It is true that since Freud's joke studies laughing is considered as a "social process", but questions which inquire into the actual potential of laughter performances to effect and change reality and the conditions for the creation and development of historically and socially specific laugh-communities have long been neglected. Therefore, it appears to us interesting and important to enlarge our own horizons and to profit from the interdisciplinary cooperation with specialists in medieval and early modern research to further develop our existing knowledge, regarding the following questions: To what extent is laughter a catalyst of social action generating group and institutional formation? What are the cultural forms of laughter production and staging?


Participants

Prof. Dr. Gerd Althoff, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Prof. Dr. Klaus Grubmüller, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Dr. Katja Gvozdeva, Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Dr. Maria Javor-Briski, Universität Ljubljana

Dr. Malcolm Jones, University of Sheffield

Prof. Dr. Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, Universität Zürich

Prof. Dr. Jelle Koopmans, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Prof. Dr. Helga Kotthoff, Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg

PD Dr. Wolfgang Maaz, Freie Universität Berlin

Prof. Dr. Jan-Dirk Müller, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Prof. Dr. Stephen C. Nichols, Johns-Hopkins University, Baltimore

Prof. Dr. Herman Pleij, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Prof. Dr. Werner Röcke, Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Dr. Jens Roselt, Freie Universität Berlin

PD Dr. Thomas Scharff, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Scholz, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Teuber, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Dr. Hans Rudolf Velten, Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Dr. Frank Wittchow, Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Prof. Dr. Gerhart Wolf, Universität Bayreuth






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