Project Details
Projekt
Insane rationalities: Media techniques and protest movements, 1967-1991
Applicant
Professor Dr. Volker Hess
Subject Area
History of Science
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419057548
This project focuses on the new social movements in the years between social change (1967/68) and the end of the post-war period (1989/91) in the Federal Republic of Germany. We will examine three fields (psychiatry criticism, women's movement, New Age) how the (in the broadest sense) therapeutic claim was founded, occurred and developed with the emergence of other rationalities. We do not consider this only as social and socio-historical phenomena, but as a lived way of new media technologies. The demand for authentic self-empowerment, self-determined subjectivity and spiritual self-realization was as much a guiding principle as it was an identity-building factor. These self-referential techniques formed important elements of the "psychoboom" that emerged in the 1970s: Anti-psychiatry was understood as a decisive turn away from the psychiatry of the time, radical feminism as the renunciation of patriarchal-restrictive structures, and the new spirituality of the New Age movement as an alternative concept to a restorative society frozen in traditional rituals. Psyche, self and gender form the three axes of our research project. Our aim is to uncover the multiplication and fragmentation of reality from the moment of displacement. By doing so, we consider this process as a decentering of contemporary rationality while simultaneously privileging subjective reason. We will investigate the material this process as a decentering of contemporary rationality while simultaneously privileging subjective reason. The material foundations of these "self" movements will be investigated: How did media techniques and communication tools enable authenticity and imagined community? By what means (leaflets, underground magazines, pirate prints and new AV media) did the Self come to itself, and how were these media made available, used and distributed? The aim of the project is to reconstruct the material conditions of dis-placed, insane rationality. The subproject thus introduces two arguments into the FOR: (1) Material history of anti-psychiatry, women's movement & esotericism/New Age. (2) Pluralization of truth and reality through media-technical reproduction techniques.
DFG Programme
Research Units
