Content
Editorial
Editorial / Bröckling, Ulrich [Autor:in] … – 2014
Bröckling, Ulrich; Dries, Christian; Leanza, Matthias; Schlechtriemen, Tobias
Pages: 4-10
Scientific article
Error and irritation: towards a minor sociology of crisis with Luhmann and Foucault
Folkers, Andreas; Lim, Il-Tschung
Abstract:
Crisis frequently figures as a moment of truth in social science literature. In this paper we set out to challenge this long-standing understanding of the crisis and its connection to truth in both critical as well as positivistic accounts in the social sciences. By engaging with Michel Foucault’s understanding of error and Niklas Luhmann’s concept of irritation, we argue for an alternative or ‘minor’ sociology of crisis. Error and irritation are critical micro-events that disrupt social order and change the mode of perceiving the social. Yet, we want to challenge the idea that this disruptive power elucidates underlying structures of the social. We argue rather that error and irritation are critical moments for the production of truth and can thus become constitutive moments of the social retroactively. By placing erroneous and irritating micro-events at the center of Luhmann’s systems theory and Foucault’s analytics of power, these theories appear as analytical approaches that maintain a reflexive and affirmative relationship to the susceptibility of the social.
Pages: 48-69
Scientific article
The dark is more than the absence of light: on the obstinacy of the abnormal
Adamowsky, Natascha
Abstract:
This article deals with theoretical concepts that focus on the aesthetic and medial obstinacy of abnormal objects and phenomena and search for descriptions of a more complex and sophisticated relation between “the order and its Other” beyond traditional binary thought patterns. Starting point is the observation of the cultural diversity of aesthetic appearances, semantics and media processes concerning anomalies. This diversity gives reason to believe that the abnormal can not only be described as a result of normalizing power that has left its indelible mark on modernity. Moreover, there is the unsuspended cultural endeavour to measure, catch, communicate or exceed experiences of abnormality and thereby to satisfy human boundaries aesthetically. Against the backdrop of these observations, the article assumes that through this endeavour obstinacy articulates itself, presenting abnormality as an independent historical as well as epistemological potential taking shape aesthetically and medially in different ways. The idea is that the abnormal as the zone of the other maintains a very special relationship with the media as well as with the aesthetic order.
Pages: 70-83
Scientific article
Love and crime
Giesen, Bernhard; Gerster, Marco; Meyer, Kim-Claude
Abstract:
A cultural sociology of the extraordinary assumes that ambivalences, disturbances, paradoxes and exceptions are not critical risks for social order. Instead, they are its indispensable elements and drive the process of social communication. Love and crime are antagonistic notions of the extraordinary. From a Durkheimian perspective emotions are an important layer of social order – a layer that can function properly only if its social origin remains hidden. Although emotions are still frequently conceived of as a crisis or challenge to rational order, they, in fact, reinforce its foundations for these cannot be generated by rational order itself. Love and crime in particular mark different possibilities of emotional reference to the modern world. Both seem to occur suddenly and unpredictably and seek to overcome opaqueness. Narration, symbolization and visualization – e.g. through the medium of film – are some ways of representing the extraordinary.
Pages: 84-102
Scientific article
"Zusammenhanglose Bevölkerungshaufen, aller inneren Gliederung bar" : the crowd as the other of order in sociological discourse
Lüdemann, Susanne
Abstract:
This article deals with the conceptual history of the “crowd” (Masse) in modernity, especially in French crowd psychology and in early German sociology. It shows that, ever since the French Revolution, the “crowd” has been conceptualized as the ‘Other’ of the social order, whether this ‘Other’ has been considered to be threatening, a danger to society, or, on the contrary, the revolutionary source of social change. Between the concepts of “class” on the one hand and “the people” on the other, the concept of the “crowd” became a sort of placeholder or signifier of any social formation that doesn’t fit into the social order, of any collective phenomenon that couldn’t be classified within the framework of sociological categories. It therefore also functioned as the reentry of that which was excluded into the very social order from which it was excluded. Whether it was defined as the absence of agency, as instinctual force, or as the bare product of social dissociation, the “crowd” has always raised the issue of the ‘social bond’ itself and of its dependence on (social and conceptual) disbandment, disorder, and dissemination.
Pages: 103-117
Scientific article
"A measure of disorder" – entropy as metaphor for the other of order
Feustel, Robert
Abstract:
Entropy has been used as measure of disorder in several ways. Originally based on physics, the term has extended its meaning, and since the late 19th century describes the upcoming end of the world, the heat death, the unstoppable increase of disorder within closed systems (e. g., the world or the universe). Understood in this way, entropy has been a shifting concept which has partly adopted the role of apocalyptic narratives. The paper follows this concept from its origin in thermodynamics (Clausius) into cybernetic theory (Wiener, von Foerster) and beyond. It emphasizes the dissimilar understandings and misunderstandings of a physical notion including its surrounding philosophical discussions. During this journey, different and sometimes opposed concepts of entropy appear: First it is part of the second law of thermodynamics measuring molecule disorder; then it makes a shift into information theory and emerges as measure of noise, of misleading and chaotic non-information. Depending upon the precise definition of information, it then pops up as “hell for cyberneticists” or – on the contrary – as the basis of any kind of progression and innovation. Finally, the paper indicates that the issue of entropy remains an unclear and a heterogeneous notion which plays a major role in theorizing (and measuring) the other side of order. However, because of the concept’s ambiguity, it is inappropriate to translate entropy into the social sciences and hence as a justification of pessimistic prospects.
Pages: 118-139
Scientific article
The problem of order and the specter of chaos
Seyfert, Robert
Abstract:
Social theory seems predominantly occupied with the question of how and why social order exists. Often, this question presupposes an improbability of order and a primordiality of chaos. Systems Theory is a paradigmatic case, and provides a particularly clear articulation of this presupposition of disorder and chaos. This is demonstrable in Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann’s appropriation of Hobbes, which – mistakenly, as I will argue – attributes pride of place to the concepts of fear, war and chaos in Hobbes’ theory. I turn to Henri Bergson’s early criticism of the underlying logic behind the ‘problem of order’ to explain the assumptions behind and limitations to the presuppositions of Systems Theory. Finally, by comparing Émile Durkheim’s analysis of Darwin’s theory of evolution to Parsons’ reading of Darwin, I show why the ‘problem of order’ need not be the fundamental question for social theory. I will conclude this discussion by arguing that social theory would be well advised to move beyond the problem of order that proceeds from the implicit assumption of a primordial disorder.
Pages: 140-157
Scientific article
Hagen Schölzel: Guerillakommunikation : Genealogie einer politischen Konfliktform; [Rezension] / Garnier, Adele [Autor:in] – 2014
Garnier, Adele
Pages: 177-181