Discursive Constellation Research Articles

How Useful Is the Christian Theology of Religions? Critical Questions from a Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology Perspective

This contribution to the literature regarding the Christian theology of religions presents a critical view from the outside, a meta-reflection primarily from a religious studies perspective considering the conditions and contexts of academic theology on the one hand, and lived interreligious relationships on the other, which are all-too-easily ignored in works of the theology of religions. First, some newer approaches to the theology of religions will be mentioned before critical questions will be addressed from a religious studies perspective. These are observations in discourse theory, the sociology of religion, religious economics and spatial theory. This is followed by observations from the perspective of intercultural theology, which examine approaches to the theology of religions with regard to phenomena within the Pentecostal movement, discursive constellations in Muslim majority societies and cultural–religious aspects within Indian society. Finally, the “theology of interreligious relations” will be proposed as a corrective to the shortcomings of the ordinary theology of religions.

Overcoming vulnerability by editing the germline?

The concept of vulnerability has become widely acknowledged as a fundamental concept for medical ethics and research ethics, yet rarely considered with respect to ethical assessments of human germline genome editing. A first aim of this paper is to make vulnerability ethics considerations fruitful for issues related to these technical innovations. The possibility of altering the genome promises to overcome forms of vulnerability inherently connected to our existence as physical beings and would hence allow to increase the resilience of human nature or even to move evolution forward by equipping people with new character traits and enhanced capabilities. I suggest a more fine-grained distinction of various applications purposes than the dichotomy of therapeutic and enhancement. I support the rejection of most application purposes as ‘therapeutic’ and claim that framing them as ‘therapeutic’ in the context of the current discursive constellation runs the risk of accentuating existing vulnerabilities. With respect to intergenerational responsibilities, I reject the view that editing the germline necessarily leads to corrupt intergenerational relations based on which it must be categorically excluded. I conclude that it is nevertheless important to take a very close look at the challenges that arise, especially from a vulnerability perspective, before irreversible facts are created overhastily.

Media, Cultural Techniques, and the Law: The Other Cornelia Vismann

AbstractIn the Anglophone world of law, the German legal historian and legal theorist Cornelia Vismann (1961–2010) is best known as an acute interpreter of French high theory, especially of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. This type of reception is, I argue, somewhat distorted. For her English-speaking colleagues, French “poststructuralism” provides the interface that enables Vismann to enter into shared discursive constellations with her Anglo-American critical legal colleagues. But at the same time, such a reception also downplays the very specifically German soil from which her unique scholarship arose. This Article discusses Vismann’s German background as media theory, the discipline that she was mostly associated with by her compatriots. The Article then assesses what Vismann’s media-theoretical contributions potentially offer to the contemporary study of law. For this “other Vismann,” the media-theoretical study of law was, I suggest, a practically oriented critical discipline that focused on law’s “cultural techniques” and how they operated. I also briefly touch upon what is generally known as “German media theory” through key figures such as Friedrich A. Kittler and Bernhard Siegert.

The Virus as Remedy: COVID-19 and the End of the Populist Meta-Crisis

Abstract Understood not only as a challenge to democracy but as a crisis, populism has received widespread attention in both media and academic circles for the better part of the past decade. Yet the outbreak of COVID-19 and its escalation into a pandemic eclipsed the fear of rising populism within weeks: With lockdowns imposed and civil liberties suspended, it lost its menacing character and became a mere background nuisance. This, I argue in this article, is the consequence of a discursive constellation in which there is only room for one dominant crisis – a meta-crisis as I call it – at a time. Populism filled this meta-crisis role for a long while, but the COVID-19 shock redirected society’s attention to a more pervasive and immediate threat. While this does not spell the end of populism, it still marks a notable shift in the relative importance we attribute to it.

In the Conceptual Twilight Zone: Federation, Empire, and the Description of Large-Scale Orders

Both empire and federation are deeply contested concepts. The difficulties surrounding the competing notions of “empire” or “federation” can be rooted in their respective heuristic strengths and weaknesses, but also in their political uses. In analyzing these concepts, recent scholarship has mostly neglected the relationship between empire and federation. Should the two be used as compatible concepts, as complementary categories, or as fundamentally competing frameworks? What implications do these conceptual options have for the larger endeavor of a description of transnational politics? This article systematically addresses this tension through an argument on how intellectual and conceptual histories can contribute to approaching this complicated relationship. As the article argues, overlaps and hybridities between empire and federation can be grasped plausibly by analyzing these polities not only through their institutional features but also as discursive constellations. Through such a lens, it becomes clear why modern politics is populated by numerous political orders both federal and imperial.

Antigenderism and White Feminist Reconstructions in Germany

This article critically reflects on dominant scholarship on antigenderism in Germany. In its most common usage, antigenderism refers to an ideological and discursive constellation that is opposed to critical scholarship and activism around gender and sexism. I argue against common accounts, which suggest that the critical analysis of antigenderism can bottom out in claims about sexism and gender rather than race and racism. In so doing, I urge feminist scholars to resist the temptation to reassert the primacy of gender as a corrective to antigenderism. Instead, I highlight the need for an intersectional reading. The reason German antigenderists rhetorically target “gender ideology” rather than “antiracism,” I argue, is not that they care less about their racial privileges than their gender privileges but that, in a context of German “race” and colonial denial, the marginalization of antiracist claims is constitutive of the political status quo in a way that the marginalization of antisexism is not. Thus, an attack on “gender ideology” enables political groups across the spectrum to discredit antiracist claims without having to invoke the language of race and racism.

The Serbian Progressive Party's re-articulation of the Kosovo myth within the internal dialogue on Kosovo, 2017–2018

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the re-articulation of the Kosovo myth, specifically Serbia's claim to the territory of Kosovo, within the so-called internal dialogue on Kosovo initiated in 2017 by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. It asks what elements are re-articulated and through which practices, in an effort to institute a counter-hegemonic project of partitioning Northern Kosovo from the rest of the territory. This is mainly achieved through de-mythologizing, de-emotionalizing/rationalizing and economizing Serbia's approach to Kosovo. Within this counter-hegemonic project, Vučić is constituted as an empty signifier, incarnating a solution to the Kosovo-Serbia dispute, whatever content it might take on. Re-articulation of the Kosovo myth involves both transposing Serbia's claim to the territory from Southern and Central to Northern Kosovo, and dis-articulating the Kosovo discourse from the sedimented affects of love and pride that constitute it. The article offers a deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth, conceptualizing it as a discourse in poststructuralist terms and focusing on citationality and re-articulation of its elements in other discursive constellations. Such a reading has implications for re-thinking national myths as bounded narratives of the past, by examining how their elements can constitute even counter-hegemonic projects aimed at the future.

Trailblazing the gender revolution? Young people's understandings of gender diversity through generation and social change

ABSTRACT Against a backdrop of increasing cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female, young people have been positioned within the wider social imaginary as radical trailblazers for a new, progressive gender order. This paper provides original insights that empirically ground and interrogate such claims. Drawing on findings from focus group interviews held with 136 young people (aged 16–24) in the UK, the paper demonstrates how young people's understandings and narrations of gender diversity both support and contest linear progress narratives. We show how young people position their acceptance of gender diversity in contradistinction to older generations. However, this narrative of generational progress was undermined and complicated by tensions and ambiguities within young people's talk. Our findings suggest that, alongside being accepting of gender diversity, young people also experience confusion and misunderstanding which may mean that they are more comfortable with stable and binary forms of gender diversity. Moreover, some young people express ideological resistance to gender diversity, informed by wider debates around ‘identity politics’. Overall, we stress the importance of situating young people's gender talk amidst multiple discursive constellations through which increasingly politicised struggles around the meanings of ‘gender’ are currently playing out.

Strafrechtliche Theorie und Praxis um 1800 als eine Herausforderung für die ›Vernunft der Literatur‹?

Abstract The starting point for this article is the question of the extent to which knowledge generated and mediated by literature can supplement or modify the professional knowledge of criminal law and practice around 1800. In particular, the article looks at the genres of the criminal case study and crime story, which were popular in this period, as a field of experience for the literary-productive observation of crime and criminal law. It explores the discursive constellations for possible relations between the areas of knowledge produced by the ›professional reason of law‹ and the ›reason of literature‹. These relations are discussed with regard to (1) types of ›medial places‹ in which legal as well as literary texts on criminal matters were published, (2) the aforementioned literary genres and (3) the literary approach of so-called poetic lawyers (›lawyers as writers‹). These perspectives determine the final analyses of texts by August Gottlieb Meisner, Karl Friedrich Muchler and Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach.

Claiming citizenship rights through the body multiple

ABSTRACTWhat have affirmative action policies, categorization of care needs, plastic surgery, forensic identification of dead bodies and age assessments of refugees in common? They all determine recognition and access to resources and rights via the body. In the introduction to this special issue, the editors emphasize that the body only becomes distinct and significant when it is put in relation to historically and geographically differing norms and standards. This relational approach opens up the ‘black boxes’ of science, medicine, bureaucracy and eventually the body. Drawing on practice theory, critical citizenship studies and Science and Technology Studies, the authors discuss notions of social citizenship and the conceptualization of biological citizenship in medical anthropology. They think with the contributions of the special issue that analyse how medical practitioners, state and private institutions, as well as individuals enact certain bodies in specific material and discursive constellations. By taking neither citizenship nor the body for granted, the special issue shows how situationally-bound elements in relations, space and time, matter for a person’s access to rights and resources – and hence can draw attention to blind spots in particular categorization practices.

The new politics and geographies of scarcity

Scarcity is a dangerous idea and has long been a totalising discourse in resource politics and mainstream economics. A large body of work has critiqued the naturalisation of scarcity in discourses of environmental change, and has highlighted problems in how scarcity is conceptualised and the ways in which scarcities are socially and politically generated. Despite this, the ‘scarcity postulate’ – an assumed mismatch between infinitely expanding human desires and finite means to realise them – remains a powerful concept that continues to be deployed and re-deployed in a host of debates concerning environment and natural resources. From the ‘Limits to Growth’ debates that influenced environmental movements in the 1970s, discussions concerning the causes and consequences of the overlapping food, fuel and finance crises of the 2000s to debates concerning climate change, environmental security and militarisation in the Anthropocene, the discursive constellation of scarcity seems always at work. The focus of this special issue is the cross-scalar dynamics of what we identify as a ‘new politics of scarcity’. This new politics is associated with new framings, contestations and entanglements of scarcity that are associated with new configurations of actors, new political economic relations and new spatialities and geographies of resource control and violence. Building on the empirical cases developed in this special issue, we examine the dynamics and the ‘work’ of the new cross-scalar scarcity politics in sustaining elite and capitalist power through justifying resource acquisitions and enclosures, large-scale policy reforms in the name of ‘austerity’ and intensification of extraction whilst politically side-stepping more thorny politics of (re)distribution, mis-appropriation, dispossession and social justice. We conclude by looking at alternative framings and vernacular conceptions of sustainability that challenge dominant scarcity-driven policies and programmes that intensify local exclusions and inequalities.

Innerimperiale Kämpfe

Dennis Eversberg: A conflict within the empire. Three theses on the relation between authoritarian nationalism and the imperial mode of living. The article analyses the success of authoritarian nationalist party „Alternative für Deutschland“ (AfD). Firstly, it is argued that voting for the AfD was not a ‘displaced’ form of reaction to actual or feared experiences of economic disadvantage or relegation. In fact, the AfD’s voter voted for the party because they support its authoritarian nationalist ideas. Secondly, authoritarian nationalism’s character as a vertical class alliance between parts of the elites on the one and segments of the middle and lower classes on the other hand is highlighted – an alliance that wants to reverse the transformation from post-war organized capitalism to the contemporary flexible capitalist regime. Thirdly, it is argued that the current conflict between “progressive neoliberalism” (Fraser) and authoritarian nationalism takes place on the firm ground of a shared consensus about the imperial mode of living. It is a conflict about the modernization of this mode of living and about how to best defend it. A critique of the global injustices it causes and perpetuates, or credible demands for overcoming it, can only be articulated from a globally solidary position that rejects this bipolar discursive constellation altogether.

Bats in the Belfry: On the Relationship of Cybernetics and German Media Theory

Background When German media theory (GMT) took shape in the early 1980s it was influenced by cybernetic concepts; however, it eventually discovered the history of cybernetics as an object of research.Analysis The article follows the assumption that GMT’s double reference to cybernetics must be characterized as the result of both a shared epistemology and a specific discursive constellation. After contrasting McCulloch’s concept of a synthetic physiological a priori and Kittler’s concept of a technological a priori it examines how GMT adopted concepts from cybernetics, and how its members eventually became fascinated by the history of cybernetics.Conclusion and implications The article concludes that the double reference to cybernetics explains its special role in GMT, while raising problems for GMT’s current fascination with cybernetics.

Heart of Darkness. Über das katastrophische Imaginäre des Blackouts

The article is concerned with pop-cultural imaginations of wide-spread power failures and asks which political, ethical and aesthetic implications can be carved out from them. The imagination of the blackout, so the argument, can be read as a pop-cultural examination of the complexity of the high-tech world. The respective narrative actualizations of this paradigmatic disruptive incident of networked societies react to real events, historically varying discursive constellations and affective engagements with the future. With these qualities, the blackout can be regarded as a crucial element of societies sense of danger since the 1970s, and its analysis allows drawing conclusions about the prevalent orders of the visible, expressible and representable at a particular point in time.

Social classes, ideology, and national issue in the debate between the FAR and the PRT-ERP

The purpose of this paper is addressing the main argumentative cores in the debate between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR) and the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores-Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (PRT-ERP), two armed organizations in the 1970s. The discussion took place between April and November 1971 and its trigger was a report on the FAR published by the serial Cristianismo y Revolución. This document was followed by “Responde el ERP,” a brief replica prepared by political prisoners, and then the response by the FAR with its “Aportes al proceso de confrontación de posiciones y polémica pública que abordamos con el ERP.” In this paper, we address in detail the role assigned in the debate to social classes, to deepen its relation with other topics, such as the national issue and ideology. We are interested in studying the meaning of these categories from the viewpoint of historical players, to track which ideological and discursive constellation they are in.

Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity

David Trippett’s sprawling, occasionally puzzling, yet often captivating and fascinating attempt to provide fresh insights into Richard Wagner’s compositional practices and aesthetic productions, combines wide-ranging and detailed scholarly reconstructions of some of the cultural contexts or ‘discursive constellations’ that framed the production and reception of Wagner’s works in nineteenth century Germany, with an intensely detailed, sometimes speculative intellectual analysis of the ways in which such re-framings hint at hidden layers of meaning in the aesthetic works themselves, meanings that Wagner himself did not necessarily recognize or share. It is important to point out that, although Trippett’s work is clearly focused on the ways in which discursive framings created different, historically shifting meanings for Wagner’s music, he does not claim that the substance and meaning of the work can simply be reduced to such historical constructions. Although specific discursive webs tend to be self-reflexive in the assignation of meanings, they do not simply construct different realities in different worlds. In a passage somewhat enigmatic in its own right, Trippett claims that his analysis does not assume a ‘substantial’ identity in the Wagner melodies that the different discourses engaged, nor does he claim that the different discourses simply leave us with a series of incommensurable constructions. Instead he claims that what the discourses implicitly share, and what draws them together as articulations of a unifying theme that can be addressed as ‘Wagner’s Melodies’, is a common assumption about melodic form as the articulation of expressive agency. Whether this form is discursively defined as a ‘a music-theoretical category, a philosophical idea, an unwritable utterance, embodied sensuality’ or a ‘material emblem of sound waves’, it holds the individual discourses together and ‘sublates’ their differences as participants in a shared discourse about melody as the musical articulation of a universal dynamics of identity formation (11). The patterned sequence of tones in harmonic space and musical time, the emergence of individuated narrative (with the characteristics of sensual embodiment and historical particularity) from undifferentiated being, provides the common form which the various discursive frameworks tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to define, control and possess as an integral objective experiential reality. Wagner’s melodies sustain a recognizable Wagnerian form through their various historical appropriations and transformations.

A Genealogy of Public Housing Production: Practice, Knowledge and the Broadacre Housing Estate

The rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and its consequences for housing policy have long interested researchers. This study treats neoliberalism as a discursive practice that produces knowledge, including our knowledge of the past. Using a Foucauldian approach to the analysis of historical files housed in the archives of one Australian state, I examine the emergence of the “failed” broadacre public housing estate as an object of discourse. I argue that this object emerged as a localized effect of a reconfiguration in what Foucault refers to as the “discursive constellation” which placed neoliberalism at a higher level within that constellation. The effect was to change the conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge within lower discursive levels, and in the case of housing policy, it became difficult to know that broadacre development was anything other than a mistake and a failure. I argue that widespread acceptance of this view within the policy community today arises from a set of relations between knowledge and power predicated upon particular discursive rules and procedures of control. Recognition that our knowledge is conditional is the first step in a process of critique that can transform our responses to locational disadvantage, poverty and stigmatization.

I Problems; Blindness and Autobiography

The literary genre of autobiography dates back to the 18th century, when philosophy became a type of anthropology, archives and case histories strengthened the grasp of discourse over life, and modern authorship and hermeneutics led to new modes of reading and writing. Nietzsche and so-called French theory have put significant strain on this constellation in their shared critique of language, subjectivity and authorship – a critique that makes traditional autobiography all but impossible. Needless to say, this has stopped neither Nietzsche nor a number of postmodern theorists from writing their own autobiographical texts. Interestingly, blindness is a recurring figure in many of these texts; and in this article, I argue that this figure allows us to trace the generic upheaval generated by the problematization of the discursive constellation that fostered modern autobiographical writing. By means of a brief introduction into the history of optics and a close reading of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Cixous' 'Savoir,' I show that the malfunctioning eye is one of the figures employed to deinstitutionalize both the philosophical and the autobiographical tradition, allowing us to grasp what became of autobiography after philosophy pronounced the death of man, the subject, and the author.This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in May 2014 and published on 16 March 2015.

Ancient Esotericism, Problematic Assumptions, and Conceptual Trouble

The article critiques the idea that what scholars today call “Western esotericism” emerged only after the “Renaissance”. It argues that for an understanding of the complex dynamics that have shaped the construction of esoteric knowledge and counter-knowledge, the ancient world is crucial in two ways: First, ancient cultures provide a rich spectrum of polemical discourses of knowledge in philosophy and religion, most of them prefiguring the discursive constellations of subsequent centuries. Second, the ancient world is a huge imaginal space that has influenced identities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, including leading theorists of mysticism, secrecy, and esotericism

Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory

“Generation” is a twofold term. Understood as generational identity (generationality) the history of “generation” can be traced back to its foundational moment during the First World War. In its second meaning, as genealogy, the idea of generation is age-old. While sociological and historical research tends to focus on generationality, literary and cultural studies have recently reinvigorated the study of generation as genealogy. Both concepts are deeply enmeshed with literature and other representational media. Such entanglements point well beyond our field’s traditional practice of using the notion of generation as a means of writing literary history (from the “first-generation Romantics” to the “angry young men”). What is at stake, rather, is the development of comprehensive and conceptually rigorous approaches to the many-layered interrelationships between generation, memory, and literature. “Generation” deserves to be put on the agenda of a “new” literary history. This article therefore proposes an integrative literary- and memory-studies perspective on generation, combining classic and more recent theories of generation with historical case studies. It reconstructs three discursive constellations around “generation” that have shaped the past century (the First World War and the “lost generation,” the Holocaust and the “generation of postmemory,” and the nexus between immigration and generation) with a focus on the question of how literature and literary studies have intervened in these discourses. It does so in order to show the rich, and still largely untapped, potential of studying generationality and genealogy as part of literary history.