MC: CANCELLED: Bernhard Giesen: Heroes, Perpetrators, Cultural Trauma and the Issue of Intransparency: CANCELLED

This event has been cancelled.

In contrast to the conventional cultural analysis whose endeavor is to discover some hidden structures behind the surface of behavior, the following remarks will present a cultural paradigm that does not reveal valid, though hidden, cultural orders but, instead, presupposes the intransparency of the situation in which acting occurs. It is not intransparency that has to be replaced by enlightenment and a transparent cultural order but the intransparency of the environment of acting is the starting point. It is not the mostly assumed transparency but instead the intransparency and the readiness of actors to take this intransparency and at the end the inseparable social phenomena for regular and normal that provides the basis of social order. We do not act out of the urge for dissimulation and enlightenment; we do not act for enlightenment but for accepting secrets that we will never unveil: Vagueness and indeterminacy will never be replaced by clear definitions. Thinkers of indeterminacy are thinkers as diverse as Carl Schmitt and ethnomethodologists like Harold Garfinkel.

The assumption of a common culture provides a grammar of correct and understandable acting. This holds true in particular when it comes to decide about questions of inclusion and exclusion, for instance when membership is questioned in heroification, perpetratorship or cultural trauma issues. These liminal figures are at the center of the talk.  The hero transcends the boundary separating the mundane and the divine. He acts beyond rational calculations and dares to do the unprecedented while the perpetrator is seduced by earthly considerations and falls prey of it.

// Prof. Dr. Bernhard Giesen (Universität Konstanz)