Damit soli gezeigt werden, wie man von relativ allgemeinen und abstrakten Grundannahmen zu konkreten, empirisch iiberpriifbaren Hypothesen iiber klassische Themen gelangen kann. Ihnen allen sei herzlich ged Publisher Description Legitimitat und politische Macht sind klassische Themen der politischen Theorie und der politischen Soziologie. In der hier vorliegenden Untersuchung sollen zu- nachst drei unterschiedliche soziologische Ansatze zu diesen Themen dargestellt und iiberpriift werden. Allge- meine Theorienbildung und empirische Forschung konnten auf diese Weise wieder einander naher gebracht werden.
Ihre Fragen haben mich vor allem zu verstandlicher Darstellung ge- zwungen. Ihre kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den Pro- blemlosungen hat mir viele Anregungen gegeben. Ihnen allen sei herzlich gedankt. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and over 1,, in stock items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! Please view eBay estimated delivery times at the top of the listing. There was no need to hide the torturer or the torture chamber. On the contrary, the aim was to make everyone aware of the instruments of torture and the torment.
An ideal of the Inquisition was not to use the instruments but merely to show them to the witch or the heretic with the intent of making them confess. We know, however, that there was no inhibition on the part of the church to applying the instruments physically, to make the accused speak. Inhibition could signify doubt and doubt was contrary to Christian dogma. The images of scientific experiments do not show the men responsible for the arrangements. The new authority had no face and no ears. It is implicit, depersonalized, and anonymous. The cruel experiments are done in the name of science and its objects are depicted in complete spatial and temporal isolation.
Pain was immaterial, a mere side effect. Laboratory reports make it obvi- ous that it was not noticed even if animals such as rabbits shrieked in pain. The frog was considered an animal incapable of suffering Singer The silence of the frog precluded any emotions of inhibition. That the instruments were both shown to the dis- tanced viewers of science images and put to use in the laboratories reveals a combination of unperceived anxiety and unwavering belief in the legiti- macy of experimental practices. Laboratory reports often refer to experiments done on frogs in terms of a theatrical performance narrating event after event.
The choreography was a combination of scientific search and performance on the part of the animal whose body was prepared to form the center of all attention, exposed to the eyes of curious spectators. A cynical joke could often be heard until recently: Physiology is the science of the dead frog die Lehre von toten Frosch.
This joke offers a revealing displacement in accordance with the metonymi- cal operations that pertain to science images of the frog. Physiology is the discipline concerned with the chemical and physical functions of the living human body.
The joke substitutes the dead frog for the living human body. The secular imagery of the positive sciences, combined with elements of the iconic tradition of the martyr, the sacrificial lamb, or the torture victim, created the frog imagery. The frog was the frog but at the same time it was an emblem for the glorification of the sciences as a new religion. Frog iconography became the perfect medium for the abstraction and objectification of an originally religious dream.
A critical reading of the impact of the Christian iconic tradition of pain and sacrifice on the images of the biological sciences could shed new light on the consti- tution of the sciences in the nineteenth century. From early civilizations on, animals have served as sacred totems and as victims in ceremonial sacrifices. The fundamental idea of sacrificial substi- tution is built on animals and images of animals. We are familiar with rams and lambs, chickens, cocks and goats, or cattle as animals sacrificed in religious rituals. The frog had never been an animal apposite for sacrifice.
The frog had to wait for the beginning of the scientific age and the emer- gence of the modern laboratory before being chosen as sacrificial animal. Physiologists furnished the spaces of their laboratories in such a way that it became possible to sacrifice this animal under the disguise of the ratio- nality of scientific experiments. It is symptomatic of the transformation of ritual in the modern age that its crucial role in the creation of a self-image of the period of the positive sciences was un-ceremonial and its liminality went largely unnoticed.
No animal was sacrificed in the same way and in the same quantities for the sake of scientific knowledge as the frog was. That frogs had to be cut up and die in large numbers was considered an inevitable consequence of the defi nition of life by modern science.
The scientific litera- ture offered pragmatic explanations. Also, it was an easy animal to deal with: While these pragmatic arguments prevailed, there is evidence that they were little more than rationalizations for laboratory practices, which necessitated the science image to actively negate traces of the human in the frog iconology. The scientific images served as a constitutive element in rationalizing the experiment in both meanings of the verb, they created a rational image in the sense of a Cartesian concept of nature and they also served as a means to cover non-rational motivations and darker affects and attach a pseudo- legitimacy to acts of sacrifice.
The scientific images of frogs made visible an uneasy relationship of a rational individual who deals with frogs in the name of science and the subconscious desire to shed this self. Scientific images of the frog, it can be argued, were the result of a projection by the rational experimenter and his artist of an inverted image of their self. A result was the immobility and sterility of the pictures of frogs and other animals under laboratory conditions.
Many scientific images display an impasse that results from invisible struggles between the universal ideal of ratio- nalization and pre-modern myths, between hermetic exclusion and popu- larization, between spaceless abstraction and the concreteness of material laboratories, between purity and the necessity of bodies as mediums that inevitably contaminate the abstractions free from moral considerations. It can be added that a good part of the science images of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the product of such an impasse.
Only a few of the images have a signature, which is always small and modestly placed not in the traditional place at the lower right side of a picture but almost invisibly hidden in or at the edge of the image. The wish to hide and van- ish from the surface of their own images could well suggest a bad artistic conscience. The art- ists were supported by theories of art and literature of the late nineteenth century.
Naturalism pursued the intention of removing the line that sepa- rated them from the sciences. They theorized about a structural homology between artistic and scientific experimentation as only different realiza- tions of the same human mind. For naturalists the relationship between artistic techniques and instruments and laboratory techniques and instru- ments went beyond a mere analogy.
Zola, referring to Claude Bernard, made it clear that the natural sciences provided the meta-discourse for the arts. In analogy, experiments carried out on the body of a frog would lead to linguistic and visual protocols of the world as it really is. Supported by naturalistic theories of art and literature, the correspond- ing dominant ideology of the scientists of the time led the anonymous art- ists to use their means in order to visually mimic a mechanical concept of life.
Artists who worked as illustrators acted in isolation from the world of the arts of their time and submitted their work to the ideology of mechani- cal objectivity. Given the power relationship between the sciences and the arts, they may have had no choice but to succumb to the domination of the sciences. In congruence with scientific theories of life, the iconographic tradition of the frog as a passive and motionless object of scientific observa- tion persisted for over a century. The relationship of science images to life was predicated on the death of the observed object.
The ensuing graphemes contained and also projected the object of experiments. Science images continued this heritage during a period when the arts experienced a revolution so that during the nineteenth century these artists worked in contradiction to images of life propagated in the arts. Impressionism, Expressionism, and Surrealism are labels refer- ring to a later period in which the visual representation of men and women, nature and animals underwent fundamental changes.
It was also the period when the new technologies of photography and film revolutionized ways of seeing and new knowledge about how bodies moved, and rendered visible a hitherto unknown reality. These innovations in the arts were inextrica- bly intertwined with new philosophical theories of space and time and, what is particularly important in our context, of the concepts of the body and of life and death. The poten- tially innovative power which the arts and literature after naturalism could have had on science images was lost.
The separation between scientist and object, self and other maintained by science images with such rigor, was out of sync with simultaneous developments in the arts. A separation of the science images from the arts, it can be argued, contributed to the mainte- nance of a mechanical image of the body. It would be an untenable exag- geration to argue that orthodoxy in the sciences was based on the power of images. Yet the consistency of canonical icons acted as a strong agent against change and in favor of a Cartesian image of the body at a time when it had already become outdated.
Science images did not passively represent scientific knowledge but cre- ated structures of seeing that organized entire perceptual fields. Memories of images of a magical animal that had been identified with terrifying imaginations and evil disfigurations fell prey to the cold arrange- ments of the dissecting tables, the glass and metal of the laboratories. The artists aimed at the highest degree of objectivity and their strabismus pre- vented them from realizing the foggy magic that enveloped the objects of their images.
This repression produced collective fallacies of vision. Into this void, perceptions of the body disappeared. The collective deceptio visus was neither an accident nor a simple mistake that could be rectified by diagnosis and correction. Collective scotomy was much more.
It was the result of the desire not to see and to remain ignorant in the name of pure science. The inherent fallacies of perception remained hidden. Negativity and magic were and still are considered contrary to the frame of reference created by the rationality of modern science. To seize upon these qualities as a characteristics of science images is an attack on the integrity and self-understanding of the sciences. The unacknowledged relation to cave art and primitive art is but one of the non-rational elements in science images that need to be explored in more detail.
Revealing a gene- alogy of the bad image of the frog in its scientific images is the same as revealing a cultural strabismus. Its image was rendered transparent and fully intelligible. Any attempt to correct this image involves a discomforting operation. To associate the canonical icon of experimental research with negativity and the violence of sacrifice inevitably raises resistance because seeing and producing science images as images of reason is central to understanding the self in the age of science. A new type of science image, emerging at present, may lead to new ways of seeing. These new images that do not pretend to represent a visual reality demand a new attitude towards images that is beginning to have effects also on our understanding of science images based on the ideal of objectiv- ity.
A new and close relationship of science images and contemporary art could open a new chapter in the evolution of science images and, as a con- sequence, of our image of the sciences. Until the late eighteenth century this parody on the war of Troy in hexameter was believed to have been written by Homer. The Battle of Frogs and Mice can be found at http: Von J ohan H.
Kermit the frog from the Muppet show may be the best known version of contemporary frog imagery. Encyclopaedias and handbooks with frog illustrations were widely distrib- uted in Europe. The Atlas zur Methodik der physiologischen Experimente und Vivisectionen by Elie de Cyon had a considerable influence on several disciplines of experimental science and is remarkable for its uncom- promising plea for objectivity in the presentation of its materials and instruc- tions on how to perform experiments on animals.
A desirable distinction between frog and toad is beyond the scope of this essay. Husserl interpreted this split as the origin of the crisis of the sciences which, he argued, were completely dominated by the idea of rationality. Inevitably, this separation from the origin of all knowledge in the life world led to a change of meaning of the things themselves Sinnverwandlung der Dinge.
Perti- nent to the topic are also publications of the Berlin Helmholtz Center and, in particular, Bredekamp and Werner For an interpretation of its significance for the merger of two-dimensional representation see Lewis-Williams Derrida, in a reference to Jeremy Bentham elaborates on the specific char- acteristics associated with suffering and the claim that animals differ from humans insofar as they lack the faculty to suffer: The Birth of the Prison.
Glanadet or Perot are recurring names on the plates but often barely decipherable. For a few years now computer programs have been used for teaching univer- sity students. They demonstrate the dissection of a virtual frog whose body pieces are re-assembled at the end of the demonstration so that the reborn animal can jump in a virtual pond saying farewell with a single croak. Forgetting and neglect in the sciences are discussed in an insightful essay by Sacks Verlagsgruppe Weltbild GmbH, Augsburg. Original bis , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. University of Illinois Press.
Derrida, Jacques Mensch und Tier. Eine paradoxe Beziehung, Dresden: New York Review of Books: Kolmar, Gertrud Das lyrische Werk, Heidelberg: Lesson and Paul J. Ohio State University Press. Singer, Peter Praktische Ethik, Stuttgart: Catharines, Ontario, Canada Prof. Claudia Glunz, Thomas F. Schneider, Michael Fisher Titelbildnachweis: K 13 Kps. Jahrhundert Below the horsmen. Im Funkwagen durch Europa: Balkan, Ukraine, Stalin- grad. Feldpostbriefe des Gefreiten Wilhelm Moldenhauer — Jander 64 Karmasin, Faulstich Hgg. Krieg — Medien — Kultur. Ernst von Salomons autobiographische Romane als literarische Selbstgestaltungsstrategien im Kontext der historisch- politischen Semantik.
Bibliography of studies in lite- rature, linguistics, history, film, and the arts published in Krieg und Literatur im September zum ersten Tag eines Krieges wurde How September 11, was made the First Day of a War The essay is based on personal experiences of the events. It offers a reflection on attempts to giving them a meaning for both victims and perpetrators and expanding its significance, during the following years, for the imagination as well as the every-day life.
A link between imagined dangers and the new systems of security is suggested that is intermeshed with the maintenance of power structures.
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Ich fand die Frage erstaunlich. Es war 9 Uhr Das ist ein Terroranschlag. Es hatte keinen konkreten Inhalt und bedeutete nicht, was wir heute mit dem Wort verbinden. Das alles waren lokale und zeitlich begrenzte Aktionen in der Vergangenheit, die ich damals mit dem Wort Terror verband. Keines dieser Ereignisse kam mir irgendwie nahe.
In den wenigen Jahren nach dem Was vor dem Die Bedrohung durch den Terrorismus und die korrespondierende Unsicherheit hat das Leben bis in die engsten Winkel erfasst.
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Millionen verbrachten viele Stunden vor Bildschirmen und verfolgten gebannt das Drama in Manhattan. Der Tag ist in ein Netz von Ereignissen eingebunden. Ich fuhr mit der Information aus dem Supermarkt nach Hause und berichtete meinem Sohn. Das war zweifellos ein dramatischer Anblick. Was wir heute mit diesen Stunden verbinden, sahen wir damals nicht. Aber eine Vorstellung, wovon wir gerade Augenzeugen waren, hatten wir nicht. Aber dass wir bald die Zeitrechnung in vor und nach dem Ein Aufschrei der Fassungslosigkeit und des Unglaubens begleitete den Zusammenbruch eines Turms, kurz nachdem ich mich unter die Zuschauer gestellt hatte.
Dies Unwirkliche empfand ich damals intensiv. Aber mein Inneres wehrte sich gegen dieses Bild, das mein Blick mir doch unzweideutig als wirklich zeigte. Es war deutlich, dass alle zustimmten. Zwar ist auch in ihm vom Krieg die Rede: Diese Gegner sind nur schwer zu einem Gegner zusammen- zufassen, und sie haben keine Kriegsziele. Das soll ein Krieg sein, wenn es nicht gelingt, ein strategisches Ziel zu erkennen? Der Angriff selbst war das Ziel.
Ihr sagten sie den Kampf an. Diese Bestimmungen trafen und treffen hier nicht zu. Aber der Ausruf beim Anblick des fallenden Turms und seine Wiederholung in der Zeit danach waren auch nicht metaphorisch, wie etwa im Krieg der Geschlechter, Krieg gegen den Hunger usw. Aber was, das war mir damals nicht klar und ist es heute nicht.
Eine neue Definition von Krieg, die nicht den Krieg gegen einen Staat, etwa den Irak meinte, war als Potential in dem Ausruf auf der Brooklyn Promenade bereits enthalten. Terrorismus ist eine Taktik. Aber, der Grund, warum wir ihn verlieren, liegt vor allem darin, dass wir das tun, was unsere Gegner von uns erwarten.
Was ist es dann? Es widerspricht der christlichen Ethik, aber die geschichtliche Erfahrung zeigt: Nicht das Opfer, sondern der Sieger kann Solidarisierung erwarten. Opfer erwecken Mitleid oder Verachtung. Das ist keine erstrebenswerte Lage. Diese Verkehrung inszenierte der September Sie leiden und sterben.
Aber dieser Tod ist keine Niederlage, sondern ein Triumph. Diese Frage wird in allen Glaubenssystemen gestellt, und die Antwort ist eindeutig: Der Anschlag hatte, so argumentiere ich, ein zweites Ziel: Er schuf ein Datum und einen Ort zur Identifikation. Es ist wichtig, das zu erkennen: Die Handlungen selbst waren kriminell: Flugzeuge waren gekapert und Geiseln genommen worden, das Fliegen und Steuern der Flugzeuge als Geschosse ein Verbrechen —, das alles war unzweideutig.
Aber wir verbinden heute mit diesen Taten etwas ganz anderes. Diese Wirklichkeit kommt in einem Bild vom Das mentale Bild vom September braucht die Anschaulichkeit und ist nur mit der Erinnerung an die sinnliche Wahrnehmung lebendig. Es ist kein Wider- spruch, wenn ich zugleich sage, dass der September durch kein Bild visualisiert werden kann. Auch wir wissen, wie viel Abstraktion in ihm wirkt, die sich einer Visualisierung entzieht. Aber ohne diese Abstraktionen kann der Aus meiner Vorlesung wurde an diesem Tag nichts.
NYU lag in der Sperrzone, die von der Bald kamen Anrufe aus Deutschland: Nein, mir selbst war gar nichts passiert. Aber das war, wie sich bald zeigte, eine unzutreffende Antwort. Eine innere Unruhe hatte mich erfasst. Depression hatte uns erfasst, und bald wurde deutlich, dass wir, ohne direkte Opfer geworden zu sein, traumatisiert waren.
Das folgte aus dem Zusammenwirken von Nachrichten der Medien und direktem Erleben. Es geschah in den folgenden Tagen und Wochen nichts, kein weiterer Anschlag. Das sind viele Tote. Ich denke, dass diese Wirkung in der kollektiven Psyche die wichtigste Wirkung des Anschlags war. Am Tag des Anschlags hatte ich einen Versuch unternommen. Wer drinnen war, war der Gefahr und dem Leiden ausgesetzt. Bald richtete sich der Lehrbetrieb wieder ein.
Da gibt es ein Loblied zu singen: Wichtiger aber war das Signal: Ihr seid nicht allein. Bald setzte das New Yorker Leben wieder ein. Der Kommerz von NYC setzte sich in einer Weise fort, dass der Terroranschlag eingebaut werden konnte, so dass nach einer kurzen Unterbrechung alles weiterzugehen schien wie vor dem Anschlag. Sie enthielt 38 Seiten mit Berichten und Fotos vom In den Formulierungen der Anzeigen zeigte sich eine allgemeine Sprachregelung, die in den Medien, der Werbung und in der Politik wirkte und einige Wochen anhielt.
Es wurde in der Folgezeit mehr Geld gemacht als zuvor. Was die Verachtung und die Aggression der Fundamentalisten erregte und weiterhin erregt, ging nach einer kurzen Phase der Irritation ungebrochen weiter. In diesem Sinn kann von einem Sieg der Angreifer nicht die Rede sein.
Aber das ist nur die halbe Geschichte. Was geschah in den Seminaren? Das Thema musste angesprochen werden, aber es musste so behandelt werden, dass die eigenen Verletzungen nicht thematisiert wurden. Distanz zur Emotion war gefragt. Das ist ein neuer Terroranschlag. Es war jedes Mal ein Irrtum. Aber die Angst war real.
Warum nutzten die Terroristen diese Lage eigentlich nicht aus? Warum haben diese Nachfolgeschlachten nicht stattgefunden? Dieser Krieg ist bis heute ausgeblieben. Bemerkenswert ist, dass diese Frage selten gestellt wird und der Erstaunlich ist, dass der Er wirkt in der vorgestellten Wirklichkeit wie der erste Tag einer neuen Welt im Zeichen des Terrorismus. Aber bei genauerer Betrachtung besteht die eindeutige Verbindung nur in unserer imaginierten Welt. Niemand wagt, sich zu widersetzen. Wenige Worte wurden dabei gewechselt. Die Scheidung von vorher und nachher wurde jedem bewusst und viele machten danach eigene Erfahrungen mit der Macht der Polizei, die durch die Erinnerung an den Der Gegensatz ist nicht, wie immer wieder behauptet wird, der zwischen Freiheit und Sicherheit, sondern noch immer der zwischen Freiheit und Macht.
Merkur , August , Was Terroristen wol- len. Die Ursachen der Gewalt und wie wir sie Between Imitation and Simulation. Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images. Bernd Huppauf 1 Introduction What do we see when we look at a fuzzy image? Searching for the clear image somehow concealed within a fuzzy image equals denial and is the same as not seeing at all. Fuzziness ignores the common conception of the image and transcends the world of visual representation. It loosens the bond between a picture and the thing represented.
It is a visual mode for the simulation of the possible that is not only conceivable but retains rudimentary elements of the logic of the real. At the same time, it safeguards the image against being merely arbitrary and a pure construction by maintaining a degree of similarity. The fuzzy image hovers on the dividing line between representation and the dissolution of mimetic correspondence with the signified. It creates indeterminacy and ambiguity comparable to the relationship of images, masks, idols and sculptures to reality in pre-modern and primitive cultures.
They do not represent, yet would be misinterpreted as mere fantasy. It appeals to the imagination to complete images, which are, by nature, incomplete and it prevents this process from ever being completed. Breaking the bond with the referent while simultaneously maintaining rudimentary similarities with it requires a great deal of attention of the part of the spectator.
It draws the gaze into a sphere of undecidability that leads to disorientation, rattling it through insecurity, captivating and enthralling it. The dispersed gaze der zerstreute Blick that Simmel, Benjamin and other theoreticians of modernity considered symptomatic for the present is ill-equipped for the fuzzy image and will not find access to it. It requires a wandering view that is also searching and, furthermore, language.
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What is intimated in the fuzziness of a picture is fugitive and can be fixed only through narrative and interpretive language. More than the sharp image, the fuzzy image is empty without the absconding content being translated into linguistic structures. Image 1 Jorma Puranan: Shadows, Reflections and all that sort of things 17, It involuntarily searches for a clarity that makes it possible to identify recognizable shapes on the surface of the picture as elements in a visual order and through their correspondence with reality outside the image.
In European cultural history the sharp image is the norm and its lack is commonly considered a deficiency and an absence of an essential quality. I would like to raise the question of whether an image that lacks this supposedly indispensable quality can be perceived and interpreted differently, not in terms of negativity and absence, but as an expansion of the familiar store of images. Can and should the fuzzy image be understood as a dilatation of the imaged world that challenges conventional concepts of the image rather than an object of deficiency that raises regret and refusal?
Is it possible to define a logic of imaging 1 Wittgenstein: Philosophische Untersuchungen, Werkausgabe Band 1, Frankfurt: The relationship between sharpness and i unsharpness is an asymmetrical one. Sharpness exists as a singular only, whereas unsharpness exists as a multitude, has degrees and shades. It exists in different varieties that can be labelled the obscure, the vague, the complex and the ambiguous polyvalent. I will deal with it as a noun that denotes a category and not as an adjective attributed to a noun and qualifying it.
This requires reference to two basic concepts of image theory, namely imitation mimesis and fantasy simulation or construction. The first has a long history as a normative term with even canonical power. It has lost this position in public discourse, yet is not obsolete and cannot be abandoned. The latter is modern and places emphasis on the connotative character of images and with it, the arbitrariness or its play with simulation.
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It can be made instrumental in an attempt to develop an intrinsic logic of fuzziness. The photo, Roland Barthes argues, is the absolute opposite of the general. It is unique and repetitive of that which existed once, and only once, in the world of events. The photo is, he argues, a mechanical repetition of something that cannot be repeated in the world of experience. The photo never transcends the specific moment in favour of the general. It reduces the body to a mere physical individual.
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It is the absolute particularity and domination of the accidental and, therefore, it is stupid. This can only be argued on the basis of sharp images. Barthes, and most other theorists of the photographic image, fail to consider fuzzy images. Fuzziness challenges common characterizations in particular semiotic theories of the image. It addresses the imagination, stimulating it to leave behind the particular and reflect on the general. Photography of fuzziness does not reproduce the world in terms of representing the unique moment, and a fuzzy photo can be interpreted as a sign only with great difficulty.
Its reference is one of vague similarity and undetermined analogies, dissolving the sign in an obscure gliding pane. By opening the image, fuzziness offers the perception of the general in the specific. It invests the image with the dimension of the general resulting from a degree of abstraction.
Visuelle Entdeckungen durch die Kunst, in: Bild und Auge, Stuttgart , S. He comments on a blurred photo of a giraffe and asks rhetorically whether the haziness may not give a specific quality of African mystery to this picture. The first monograph on the issue is Wolfgang Ullrich: By using the adjectives fuzzy, blurred, hazy and the nouns, fuzziness and haziness, the linguistic opposition is lost. It is often overemphasized and it can only to a limited degree be associated with Saussure and Wittgenstein.
It was Baudrillard who made simulation and simulacrum popular for the current debate on images. Simulacres et simulations, Paris He does not refer to the hypocrisis of simulation. New York , p. Unsharpness can only be comprehended though a logic of difference. Only if we stop identifying the fuzzy image with a failed sharp image and stop reducing blurred contours to concealed sharp ones, will we be able see the fuzzy image as genuinely different to sharp images, or to other blurred or hazy ones.
Only if we see a fuzzy image for what it is will we be able to realize how such images participate in the social praxis of creating visual memory. Looking for the sharp image hidden in the failed fuzzy image prevents the viewer from understanding a simulation of reality that does not create identity, but visual difference instead. Taking an attitude to fuzzy images that is free from the standard demand of clarity and distinctiveness is a prerequisite for their own unique contribution to an imagined world to become visible itself.
They require an aesthetic of their own. Absolute sharpness is an abstract ideal and all images are constituted by a certain degree of visual indeterminacy. Indeterminacy and vagueness, I want to argue, are features not only of the imagination, but also of imaging, and we are familiar with them without taking notice in every picture. There are no dividing lines that do not also create spaces of meeting and expanses for exchange. Yet the difference between sharp and fuzzy images is not fluid, and demonstrably fuzzy images must be understood in terms of a specific genre. Sharpness, while never free from indeterminacy, can be defined as an ideal, unsharpness cannot.
It is a category that denotes a class of images ranging in types and degrees of indeterminacy and vagueness. They contradict common and seemingly self-evident expectations, but cannot be appropriately comprehended as negativity and lack, or refusal either. Vague contains the Latin word vagus, i.
This unsettled wandering of the eye through the haze of the image produces indeterminacy. Yet the hazy image requires its own way of concentration and penetration that is different from dis-engaged jumping, leaping and zapping. It requires a distinct way of seeing. A theory of unsharpness has to confront the problem of an intrinsic contradiction that cannot be resolved.
How could unsharpness as a term for vagueness, ambiguity, obscurity, or indistinctness be subjected to a process of theorizing that by definition requires consistency and precise definitions of concepts without the danger of making it disappear altogether? Vagueness, ambiguity, obscurity, or indistinctness - all dimensions of unsharpness - are negative characterizations of an argument, a treatise or an image. They are deficient, lead to miscomprehension and consequently inappropriate action.
Pragmatism of the everyday, therefore, asks for an end of unsharpness through clarification, sharpness and distinctness. However, in the arts, literature and a minority philosophical discourse the unsharp has existed in a different understanding that, in contrast to common language, associates it with productivity. It was a rare exception when Friedrich Schlegel named fuzziness incomprehensibility and tried, thereby, to strip it of its pejorative image and elevate it to a higher ideal in the arts, literature and life This radical move was not followed. What Kant called the productive imagination is a rehabilitation of the vague and obscure, in contrast to the ideal of philosophical clarity.
Only in this sense, and not as a defect, imperfection or absence, will it be treated in this essay. The unsharp and its appeal to the imagination is neither accounted for by realist theories of representation nor by theories of cultural construction. Fuzzy images make futile an attempt to draw a dividing line between the image as a document and a construction. If we insist on drawing a dividing line, fuzziness of imagery as well as fuzzy images fall victim to an opposition and are either bad and need to be eliminated or improved , or useless images that we can do without.
I want to argue that the category of fuzziness dissolves this binary opposition. It makes it necessary to maintain both dimensions of the image simultaneously. Fuzzy images maintain a relationship between image and the imaged, insinuating its presence. Yet, at the same time, they deny this presence and explode the connection. The vagueness, ambiguity, obscurity, or complexity of a fuzzy image appeal to the imagination in an intensified manner, so that any attempt to perceive and comprehend it within the structure of a logic of representation is misguided from the start.
A distinction needs to be made between the deliberate production of fuzzy images and unintended fuzziness. The results are similar and, from the perspective of the viewer, even identical. Yet in terms of an aesthetic of production and image theory, the difference is significant. If a photo can be understood as a sign of intention, namely, that someone has the intention to produce and send a message,6 only the intentional, but not the accidental fuzziness of the photo can be part of the image.
It is the strongest form of cancelling the agreement between the image and what it is supposed to represent. Yet, it is precisely this type of failure and lack that endows the photo with a rare degree of authenticity. Von ihm — nicht oder doch nicht nur von den einzelnen Parlamentariern: Sie erwarten vor allem: Diese Gesetzgebung versuchte, die Wahlkosten zu kontrollieren und der Macht des Geldes entgegenzutreten, indem sie den Kandidaten verpflichtete anzugeben, was ihn die Wahl gekostet hatte: So etwa sah die alte Parteiorganisation aus, halb Honoratiorenwirtschaft, halb bereits Angestellten- und Unternehmerbetrieb.
Das Resultat war eine Zentralisation der ganzen Gewalt in der Hand der wenigen und letztlich der einen Person, die an der Spitze der Partei stand. Denn in der liberalen Partei war das ganze System aufgekommen in Verbindung mit dem Emporsteigen Gladstones zur Macht. Stehen wir sachlich auf dem Boden Gladstones?
Diese Maschinerie bedarf eines erheblichen Personenapparates. Es sind immerhin wohl Personen in England, die direkt von der Politik der Parteien leben. Was war nun der Effekt des ganzen Systems? Die Parteiorganisation war ganz locker. Das dauerte bis Was ist der Boss? Hat er es so weit gebracht, so tritt er mit den Nachbarbosses in Verbindung, erregt durch Eifer, Geschicklichkeit und vor allen Dingen: Diskretion die Aufmerksamkeit derjenigen, die es in der Karriere schon weiter gebracht haben, und steigt nun auf.
Die liegt zentralisiert in seiner Hand. Er beschafft sehr wesentlich die Mittel. Wie kommt er zu ihnen? Dann durch Bestechungs- und Trinkgelder. Sonst erwachsen ihm unweigerlich Unannehmlichkeiten. Aber damit allein ist das erforderliche Betriebskapital noch nicht beschafft. Er arbeitet im Dunklen, das ist sein Gegensatz zum englischen leader. Er ist nicht selten ein ziemlich schlecht erzogener Mann.
Er pflegt aber in seinem Privatleben einwandfrei und korrekt zu leben. Amerika kann nicht mehr nur durch Dilettanten regiert werden. Von amerikanischen Arbeitern bekam man noch vor 15 Jahren Der Zustand wird nicht mehr ertragen. In Deutschland waren die entscheidenden Bedingungen des politischen Betriebes bisher im wesentlichen folgende. Gesetzt den Fall, man wollte hineingehen, — was konnte man dort tun?
Wenn eine Kanzleistelle frei wurde, konnte man dem betreffenden Verwaltungschef sagen: Und das geschah gern. Dazu trat — und dies zweite Moment bedingte das erste —: Wir waren darin die ersten der Welt. Im bayerischen Landtag ist es gewesen, wo im vorigen Jahre, als die Parlamentarisierung zur Diskussion stand, gesagt wurde: Die beiden wichtigsten dieser Parteien: Was wurde dabei aus den deutschen Berufspolitikern? Diesen Weg der Entwicklung zur Honoratiorenzunft sind alle unsere Parteien gegangen. Nach seinem Tode hatte das ein Ende, und die Beamtenherrschaft begann. Im Parlament herrschte der gleiche Geist.
Jede Rede, die gehalten wird im Plenum des Reichstages, ist vorher durchrezensiert in der Partei. Nur wer als Redner bestellt ist, kann zu Wort kommen. Jetzt ist infolge des gewaltigen Zusammenbruchs, den man Revolution zu nennen pflegt, vielleicht eine Umwandlung im Gange. Vielleicht — nicht sicher. Aber beides waren schnell aufsteigende Blasen, die rasch wieder verschwanden. Die vorhandenen Apparate schichteten sich um, arbeiteten aber weiter.
Aber es gibt nur die Wahl: Journalistik oder Parteibeamtenstellung als die typischen direkten Wege, oder eine der Interessenvertretungen: Leidenschaft im Sinn von Sachlichkeit: Denn das Problem ist eben: Und doch kann die Hingabe an sie, wenn sie nicht ein frivoles intellektuelles Spiel, sondern menschlich echtes Handeln sein soll, nur aus Leidenschaft geboren und gespeist werden. Eitelkeit ist eine sehr verbreitete Eigenschaft, und vielleicht ist niemand ganz frei davon.
Und in akademischen und Gelehrtenkreisen ist sie eine Art von Berufskrankheit. Ganz anders beim Politiker. Er arbeitet mit dem Streben nach Macht als unvermeidlichem Mittel. Unsachlichkeit und — oft, aber nicht immer, damit identisch — Verantwortungslosigkeit. Denn obwohl, oder vielmehr: Aber deshalb darf dieser Sinn: