(Extra)Ordinary Presence: Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires [1. Aufl.] 9783839427217

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Markus Gottwald, Kay Kirchmann, Heike Paul (eds.) (Extra)Ordinary Presence

Presence and Tacit Knwoledge | Volume 3

For Christoph Schumann, in memoriam

Markus Gottwald, Kay Kirchmann, Heike Paul (eds.)

(Extra)Ordinary Presence Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires

Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstuetzung der DFG.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Angela Nentwig Proofread by Sebastian Schneider Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2721-3 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2721-7

Contents (Extra)Ordinary Presence Social Configurations and Cultural Reper toires Heike Paul | 7

I. W hiteness and the R ules of R edemption : O rdinary and T ranscendent P resences Caucasia’s Capital The Ordinary Presence of Whiteness Willie James Jennings | 17

Christian New Birth as an Experience of Presence An Introduction to Its Theological Structure Stephen James Hamilton | 29

Preachers’ Daughters Discourses of Presence and the Sensation of ‘Purity’ Monika Sauter | 51

II. A b -U se , P aranoia , D ecay : T he (E xtra )O rdinary P resence of the P ast Heidegger Ab-Used Thinking (Extra)Ordinary Presences between Place and Planet Florian Tatschner  | 71

Persisting Presence The JFK Assassination as Mediated Event Carolin Lano | 99

“Still Standing Like Timeless Islands” The Presence of Postindustrial Spaces in The Ruins of Detroit (2010) Susann Köhler | 121

III. T he C ultural S pecificit y of P resence : R ituals , S ymbols , and I magined C ommunities The Presence of Sacralization The Configuration of Presence in Vladimir Sorokin’s Kremlin Made of Sugar Alexander Engel | 137

The Macrocontext of (Extra)Ordinary Presence A Methodological Challenge Markus Gottwald | 157

Tea Flows A Praxeological Perspective on Ritual Kristin Surak | 181

Afterword Bodily Presence and Absence Bernhard Waldenfels | 195

List of Contributors  | 203

(Extra)Ordinary Presence Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires Heike Paul

I ntroduction I. “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died.” Thus opens Emily Dickinson’s poem no. 465, one of many in her oeuvre to center on death as perhaps the ultimate experience of presence turning into absence (and vice versa). The poem superbly captures the tension between ordinary and extraordinary presence in this one single line: it undercuts the pathos and somberness of conventional religious deathbed poetry by interjecting a fly, i.e. an ordinary, contingent presence, into the speaker’s death scene. The solemnity of this extraordinary moment – “The Eyes around – had wrung them dry – / And Breaths were gathering firm / For that last Onset” – is interrupted by this fly in an almost macabre way; as the poem ends “I could not see to see,” we may assume that death has come right after the fly has “interposed” itself at the deathbed and has shielded the dying woman from the “light.” “With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz,” the fly itself may be read as symbolizing the briefness and transitoriness of life (Dickinson c.1862/1985: 851). In many ways, Emily Dickinson is a poet of (extra)ordinary presence who time and again torques a Puritan belief system (and thus the absolute presence of God) around everyday matters and quotidian observations. Dickinson interweaves social configurations and cultural repertoires of presence in an aesthetic practice whose deceptive simplicity taps into romantic symbolic codes and proto-modernist concerns with self-reflexivity at the same time. In doing so, she anticipates several dimensions of more recent debates on presence that are at the center of this volume: the oscillation between extraordinary and ordinary presence in conceptualizations of religious, civil religious, and aesthetic experience; the modes of representation of presence in literature, poetry, and popular culture; the cultural practices that produce both (ordinary) orientation and (extraordinary) spectacle, and the adjustments in

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theoretical and philosophical debates in light of this kind of scaling of presence. The latter may take on different forms: the extraordinary can be considered an explication or an amplification of the ordinary, but it can also figure as an (adversarial) opposition to the ordinary. Taking its cue from contemporary Western debates on presence in the social sciences and the humanities, this volume focuses on ‘presence’ both as everyday experience and as an experience of intense moments. It raises questions about diverse social configurations of presence as well as about the specific cultural repertoires which encode, articulate, and shape discourses of presence – implicitly and explicitly. Recent debates about ‘presence’ are themselves symptomatic of a specific social configuration and cultural repertoire: Firstly, they seem to respond to the highly differentiated and culturally plural contemporary world society of media-driven interconnectivity and space-time-compression. A perceived ‘loss’ of actual presence, secondly, is often seen as propelling discussions of presence as an epistemological category. The contemporary discourse on ‘presence’ acknowledges an epistemic repertoire focusing on materiality, aspects of somatically mediated practices, the immediacy of emotions, pathos, affect, excess, and ecstasy as well as the ritualized and atmospheric character of the private and the public, respectively, in their functions for various social fields such as the arts, religion, and politics. This collection brings together different disciplinary perspectives on phenomena of presence and their discursive negotiations and manifestations in social and/or cultural practices, artifacts, and narratives, past and present. It accounts for both ordinary and extraordinary experiences of presence in their local, cultural, and social contexts. Therefore, it takes as a premise that phenomena of presence are connected to particular forms of knowledge – especially tacit knowledge, which (pre-)determines experiences of individual and collective presence and becomes tangible in moments of presence or presentification.

II. Can there be ordinary presence without extraordinary presence (and vice versa)? And how are the two related in the social, cultural, and political spheres? Is ordinary presence the tacit dimension of the extraordinary? Or rather its opposite? Both, we argue. The former is evident, for instance, in the symbolizations, configurations, and practices of (extra)ordinary presence of collective identities on which nation-states and democracies are predicated and which mark “nation-time” as both circular and teleological (Anderson 1991: 24): the imagined community of the nation is a “sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time” (ibid. 26) and is thereby

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presentified in a meaningful synchronicity that produces the modern nation as a coherent entity. In celebrations of national holidays, memorial events, and collective civil religious rituals – both ordinary and extraordinary presences – imagined communities evoke a sense of a shared history and a common future/telos. Donald Pease has – with a nod to Jacqueline Rose’s work on “states of fantasy” (cf. Rose 1995) in psychoanalysis – coined the term “state fantasy” to suggest a tacit dimension of collective identity work in the nation that often operates subliminally and “which cannot be named” (Pease 2009: 17), while manifesting itself as an extraordinary presence in particular moments of crisis to respond to uncertainty and change (cf. ibid. 4-5) and to enable recalibrations in the “political unconscious” (cf. Jameson 1981) that smooth over contradictions in the social fabric and the cultural imaginary of a community/nation/state. Several contributions in this volume engage with state fantasies of various kinds that imply differing degrees of consensus and contentiousness. In the realm of the social and the political, modern democracy has been addressed as necessarily resting on both ordinary and extraordinary presence. Hans Vorländer has noted the ordinary and implicit dimension of democracy in discourses of legitimacy as a fundamental and counter-intuitive paradox, as it renders the transparent premises of a democratic order as somehow transcendent and unavailable (‘unverfügbar;’ cf. Vorländer 2013: 13). From another angle, Judith Butler, a theorist of (extra)ordinary presence in many ways, has recently reiterated how the ordinary presence of democracy is posited on and is interdependent with its extraordinary presences, i.e. the gatherings, protests, and demonstrations that draw upon the “right to appear” and to occupy public spaces in protest to political and economic infringement: “‘the people’ are not just produced by their vocalized claims, but also by the conditions of possibility of their appearance, and so within the visual field, and by their actions, and so as part of embodied performance” (Butler 2015: 19). The politics of assembly thus make present abstract claims of political participation and representation. This presentification only works, Vorländer and Butler seem to suggest, because of an implicit understanding of the meaning of democracy and of the inalienable rights to gather and to speak. In fact, from the Occupy Movement in the US to the protests that are now commonly referred to as the Arab Spring, Butler reads public gatherings as concrete embodiments of such abstract claims. More recently, the protests following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States are another case in point. The ordinary presence of people on the street turns into an extraordinary articulation of resistance that, in turn, rests on implicit dimensions of what it means to be a citizen and to ‘appear.’ In a similar vein, Christoph Schumann and Dimitris Soudias have only begun to unfold a new political theory of space that accounts for the effects and transformations of the public co-presence of people protesting in the streets of Cairo in 2011 (cf. Schumann/Soudias 2013).

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With a view to possibly antithetical constellations of ordinary and extraordinary presence, such gatherings can also be read as contending with the ordinary presences and forces of late capitalism, structural racism, and political oppression in people’s lives and as explicating their destructive powers. In that sense, the assembly of protesters may (re)present and embody the workings of a political system, yet, on another level, also draw attention to and explicate its shortcomings. With regard to another protest movement, the current Black Lives Matter, it is the ordinary presence of “premature black death” (Gilmore 2007: 28) in the black diaspora and in much of the Western world that is marked as a matter that should not be accepted as ordinary but should rather be of extraordinary concern.1 The hegemonic discourse of anti-Blackness and white supremacy (i.e. hegemonic whiteness, as addressed in Willie James Jennings’s contribution to this volume) has recently been analyzed as being widely considered as normative (or, at least, normal) by Christina Sharpe. Somewhat contrary to Butler’s discourse of performative empowerment, Sharpe’s Afropessimist perspective reads the democratic foundations of the West as too deeply flawed to serve as a ground for (black) empowerment. Rather, she calls upon her readers to be “in the wake,” i.e. to be present (cf. Sharpe 2016). Sharpe plays upon the ambiguity of the concept of the ‘wake’ (referencing both the wake of a ship, i.e. the slave ship or the refugee boat, and the wake held for the dead) and manages to intricately weave these different registers and evocations into a kind of cross-mapping of a history of slavery and black death and a contemporary scene still characterized by an apparent acceptance of premature black death in America (and elsewhere). In sum, the scaling of presence and the discussion of (extra)ordinary presence enables us to re-engage with what counts as ordinary (or normal) and what constitutes an extraordinary manifestation of presence in times of perpetual, ever-extending “states of exception” often orchestrated as the “new normal” (Dick Cheney quoted and critically discussed in Masco 2014).2 The dramatization of some presences on the one hand and the normalization of other presences on the other can clearly serve different social, cultural, and political functions, a tension which is also addressed in various contributions to this volume.

1 | “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (ibid.). 2 | Giorgio Agamben’s phrase of the “state of exception” (cf. Agamben 2005) has had a broad reception in cultural studies and the social sciences. It can clearly be seen as related to discussions of extraordinary presence, especially with regard to state control and the legal underpinnings of security issues as well as the politics of representation of these issues in global post-9/11 popular culture.

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III. Grouped into three sections, the essays in this volume provide theoretical reflections as well as case studies on the phenomenon of (extra)ordinary presence within a broad disciplinary scope including American studies, theology, media studies, comparative literature, sociology, and philosophy. Section I, “Whiteness and the Rules of Redemption: Ordinary and Transcendent Presence,” includes the essays by Willie Jennings, Stephen Hamilton, and Monika Sauter. In his essay on whiteness and aesthetics, titled “Caucasia’s Capital: The Ordinary Presence of Whiteness,” Willie Jennings takes issue with normative frameworks of beauty and uncovers their often tacit investment in racial norms. The recent return to beauty in philosophy and theology as well as literary and visual culture studies has, according to him, yet to give an adequate account of the wider horizon of the racial aesthetic energized by the performances of whiteness. Drawing on examples from popular culture and public debates, Jennings points out how discourses of whiteness are, in fact, foundational for Western standards of beauty, whose tacitness and ‘invisibility’ make them appear self-evident (to white people, at least), whereas they present an “aesthetic disciplinary” and a technology of othering for people of color. From the perspective of the latter, he calls for a pedagogy of unthinking this ordinary, yet normative presence of a white aesthetic regime. Stephen Hamilton’s essay draws on a religious discourse of presence and explores its theological structure in the conversion experience as extraordinary presence. In his broader argument, he connects the concept of a “new birth” in the works of the late 17th-century German theologian Philipp Jacob Spener with contemporary discourses of the religious right in the United States and the spiritual autobiographies some of its ‘converts’ have written, among them Brian “Head” Welch, founding member of the nu-metal band Korn. Hamilton argues that the connecting link between both Spener and Welch, separated as they are by 300 years, is the concept of the “Born-Again Christian” as a particular theology, i.e. formula, of conversion and presence. Monika Sauter, who is also interested in the pop-cultural aspects of religious presence, analyzes the television show Preachers’ Daughters and its focus on a religious public feeling that negotiates the seeming tension between claims of a divine (i.e., absolute) presence in the lives of those very same preachers’ daughters and their contingent social and cultural contexts as perpetually ‘tempted’ adolescent girls in contemporary America. It is their struggle for ‘purity’ (read: chastity) that the series stages in a manner that, on the one hand, evokes therapeutic discourses of self-improvement and, on the other, invites a more voyeuristic access to the girls’ frequent ‘failures’ and their exposed bodies. Thus, the affective economy of the series allows for its audience’s libidinal investment in chastity (pleasing God and sanctioning his

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overarching presence) while at the same time making room for the enjoyment of supposedly also pleasurable transgressions. Section II, titled “Ab-Use, Paranoia, Decay: The (Extra)Ordinary Presence of the Past,” gathers the essays by Florian Tatschner, Carolin Lano, and Susann Köhler. In “Heidegger Ab-Used,” Florian Tatschner engages in a creative sabotage of Martin Heidegger’s later writings, and especially his idea of Besinnung, to think “(Extra-)Ordinary Presences between Place and Planet.” He performs this ab-use in three steps. Tatschner first reads Heidegger’s notion of a struggle between world and earth with Mignolo’s border gnosis to develop a dynamic concept of presencing beyond a static logocentrism. Secondly, Heidegger’s critique of the aesthetic through his sense of “attunement” is supplemented with what Shotwell calls “sensuous knowledge” (2011: 53) to unfold an embodied mode of approaching phenomena. Lastly, by drawing on Lyotard’s distinction of discourse/figure the concepts developed in this way are connected to Heidegger’s (un-)homeliness and poetic dwelling in/through literature and beyond by way of his reading of Antigone. Carolin Lano’s essay looks at the “persisting presence” of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 in American culture and analyzes discourses of the archive (and reliability), witnessing, and conspiracy as elements in the reiteration of the shooting as a mediated event. Rather than a sense of closure, these re-entries time and again produce an ambivalence and a continual deferral of meaning in the very process of guiding their audience through the evidential process that claims to point toward the actual ‘truth.’ Taking as her key source the famous Zapruder film as well as its complex history of reception allows her to demonstrate this media-induced self-reflexive absence of closure and the kind of lingering presence it involves. Urban ruins in postindustrial photography are at the center of Susann Köhler’s essay, a meditation on presence, aesthetic experience, and urban materiality. The photobook The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre ‘presentifies’ and documents a particular urban history of decline while orchestrating and engaging with affective responses to that loss to which the presence of the ruin attests. The urban ruin thus can be seen as an ordinary presence of destruction (in the lived reality of the city population) that is turned into a (possibly controversial) sublime and beautiful presence through the medium of photography. Whereas the images attest to the decay of postindustrial Detroit, the human suffering remains absent or is at best implicit in these renderings. Thus, it remains debatable whether the photographs provide a vehicle of social and cultural critique or whether the overt aestheticization of their visual language actually has the opposite effect. Section III, “The Cultural Specificity of Presence: Rituals, Symbols, and Imagined Communities,” includes contributions by Alexander Engel, Kristin Surak, and Markus Gottwald. Alexander Engel looks at Vladimir Sorokin’s

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novel Kremlin Made of Sugar (2008) in order to discuss and expose an aesthetics of presence in contemporary Russian political culture – Vladimir Putin’s civil religious self-sacralization – that is feeding on Russian Orthodox traditions. In a science-fiction scenario set in the not-too-distant future of 2028, Sorokin’s novel exposes, satirizes, and critiques a cult of leadership and leader worship that instrumentalizes a religious iconicity while also being steeped in notions of material consumption. It is the sugar-made Kremlin that becomes a central symbol for the materiality of an Ersatz-presence and the apparent immateriality of power and total control. Few practices are simultaneously as exotic and representative, esoteric and quotidian, instrumental and sensual, political and cultural as the Japanese tea ceremony. In her observation and analysis of tea rituals, Kristin Surak studies culturally specific practices and rituals that are based on and, in turn, affirm constructions of Japaneseness. As her ethnographic research as an observing participant shows, the tea gathering as a full four-hour social affair is a highly and tightly scripted ritual whose rules extend to actions, gestures, conversations, and all bodily movements. Depending on the actual context, however, the ritual appears to be ordinary or extraordinary – in a traditional context, it may seem a daily routine, in a non-traditional, urban context it conjures up nostalgic notions of traditional Japanese culture. And yet, in both instances, the (extra) ordinary performances of the ritual couple the “tea flow” with the concomitant, intensive experience of cultural specificity, as the tea ceremony serves as a site and instrument for evoking Japaneseness. Markus Gottwald analyzes the apparent difference between a sociology of the micro level, more recently informed by the practice turn, and a perspective attuned to the macro level. Drawing on Goffman and Joachim Renn’s pragmatist theory of differentiation, he uses the concept of presence in order to mediate between these apparently different epistemological approaches and thus seeks to figure out a “technique of presentification” which may allow for a reconstruction of macro-dynamics as the absent present of micro-level practices. The volume concludes with an afterword by Bernhard Waldenfels, who comments on individual contributions to this volume while also identifying larger patterns of the discussion of presence as they relate to experience and to bodily presence and absence, both temporal and spatial. From the perspective of a phenomenologist, Waldenfels opts out of simplistic dichotomous models that pit presence, i.e. the phenomenology of experience, against meaning, i.e. the semiotics of the sign. Instead, he perceives the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa, thus seeing them as mutually constitutive of each other rather than figuring as binary opposites. This brings us back full circle to Emily Dickinson’s poetic oeuvre, with a sample from which I began this introduction. In her poems, Dickinson often

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treats death not as a terrible calamity or as an extraordinary absence, but as an ordinary, familiar presence, as a close friend, trustworthy confidante, and permanent companion. It is in the spirit of this symbolic repertoire that we dedicate this volume to the memory of our late colleague Christoph Schumann (1969-2013), Professor of Politics and Society in the Middle East at the FriedrichAlexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2009. This project began with his presence in our midst and now concludes with his presence in our minds. We miss him.

W orks C ited Agamben, Giorgio (2005): State of Exception, Trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: Chicago UP. Anderson, Benedict (1991): Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2015): Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge: Harvard UP. Dickinson, Emily (c.1862/1985): “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” in: Gilbert, Sandra M./ Gubar, Susan (eds.): The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, New York: Norton, p. 851. Gilmore, Ruthie (2007): Golden Gulag. Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley: U of California P. Jameson, Fredric (1981): The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell UP. Masco, Joseph (2014): The Theater of Operations. National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Durham: Duke UP. Pease, Donald (2009): The New American Exceptionalism, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Rose, Jacqueline (1995): States of Fantasy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schumann, Christoph/Soudias (2013): “Präsenz und Raum in der Arabischen Revolte. Ägypten im Jahr 2011,” in: Ernst, Christoph/Paul, Heike (eds.), Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 297-315. Sharpe, Christina (2016): In the Wake. On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke UP. Shotwell, Alexis (2011): Knowing Otherwise. Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Vorländer, Hans (2013): “Demokratie und Transzendenz. Politische Ordnungen zwischen Autonomiebehauptung und Unverfügbarkeitspraktiken,” in: Hans Vorländer (ed.), Demokratie und Transzendenz. Zur Begründung politischer Ordnungen, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 11-37.

I. Whiteness and the Rules of Redemption: Ordinary and Transcendent Presences

Caucasia’s Capital The Ordinary Presence of Whiteness Willie James Jennings

I am interested in the presence of whiteness in the western world, especially on the American social and intellectual landscapes. I do not mean the presence of white people. I mean the form of presence whiteness constitutes in its conjuring power. That form of presence carries an ever expanding white aesthetic regime that teaches us how to see and narrate the true, the good, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the noble around white bodies. Elsewhere, I have reflected on that white aesthetic regime and the racializing pedagogy that emerges from it. That pedagogy continues to discipline fantasies of becoming (becoming human, mature, cultured, civilized, authoritative, and so forth) (cf. Jennings 2015). It is this educative reality of whiteness within its aesthetic disciplinary that gives witness to the density of coloniality’s on-going effects. In this essay I will consider the tacit dimension of whiteness; that is, the way whiteness constitutes a presence that fills the modern body. Indeed the modern body would be impossible to grasp without the ordinary presence of whiteness. Whiteness in this regard is a founding form of modern capital. Capital here is both spatial – productive of centralized body and place – and fiduciary – productive of trust and economic facilitation. This essay considers the capital that is whiteness in relation to one of its crucial sites of biopower, beauty, and beautification. The recent return to beauty in philosophical, literary, and visual culture as well as in theological studies has yet to give an adequate account of the wider horizon of the racial aesthetic energized by the performances of whiteness. At one level this blindness to the racial aesthetic is due to the unease bordering on distain of the processes of beautification by those who do philosophical aesthetics, which may, as Arthur Danto suggests, reach back to the philosophical distinction between reality and appearance, a distinction laden with the Platonic preference for the Real (cf. Danto 2000: 71-72). Thus many philosophers would not have imagined the practice of aesthetics as in cosmetology a worthy site for serious contemplation (cf. ibid. 72). At another level, however, this blindness is driven by the role that

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Enlightenment philosophers played in being facilitators and accomplices in the formation of whiteness and the racial aesthetic itself (cf. Eze 1997). Western Christian thought has generally followed the sensibilities of philosophers in relation to aesthetics. Moreover Christian thought has not only followed the direction of philosophical aesthetics in relation to racial being and racial attribution, but was also the central progenitor of the logic of racial attribution. These developments have yet to receive the attention they deserve within any comprehensive analysis of the historical deployment of the ideas of truth, goodness, beauty, and intelligence in modernity. While “whiteness studies” is growing in strength in the academy, its presence in the study of aesthetics within philosophy or theology is still embryonic. Centrally, this essay will reflect on the complexities of aesthetic life for people of color living in what I am calling Caucasia’s capital, in which whiteness constitutes presence and makes bodies present but also makes bodies absent and engenders a sense of loss, deficit, and defect. What whiteness constantly enacts is a complex performance of agency, especially for people of color, through which self-mastery becomes a profound vacillation between what Houston Baker Jr. once called the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery. I will add to this famous Baker couplet another aspect of that selfmastery that I call the failure of form and the mastery of failure. Baker’s original couplet suggested a mode of resistance through which African diaspora peoples learned and manipulated given form, whether we envision form as ways of speaking, writing, comportment, or thinking that would allow the “crafting [of] a voice out of tight places” (Baker 1987: 33). That mastery of form often found its most enlivening use in counter-hegemonic actions that challenged the colonial control, organization, and facilitation of bodies, land, and animals. This use of form was an intervention, a disruption in the smooth flow of white racial mastery. This was mastery’s deformation (cf. ibid. 36). Baker’s account of these matters focused on the arts (especially music and literature) as the sites for these heroic executions. This is exactly right, because it is indeed the artistic site that exposes the imperial position of whiteness in western fantasy work. It will also be the goal of this essay to examine the complexity of agency for African diaspora people affected by the racial aesthetic. What I hope comes into view is the deeper sense of a productive melancholic that attends the performance of that agency. ‘Melancholic’ in this sense functions like the blues as a way of making pain and contradiction useful but not purposeful. The blues as musical form has always carried this epistemic density, but it has also served historically as a template for a variety of other musical forms as they carried forward its harmonic, lyrical, and melodic architectures (cf. Tracy 2001: 59-140; Lewis 2008: 29-50). Blues agency is burdened agency as black peoples came to understand what it meant to inhabit modern bodies – that is, racialized bodies. By blues agency I am not suggesting a romanticized or essentialized “blues

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essence” for black diaspora peoples (cf. Ramsey 2003: 44-75). Blues agency here is a modality of reflexivity characterized by its mobility, flexibility, and adaptability that can weave continuity of life across injury, insult, racist microaggression, and violence. Equally important, blues agency is a site of redemptive fantasy work that delivers subjectivity into new psychic spaces inside of old spaces. Here we must hold together the work of racial fantasy that is emancipatory dreaming and imagining with the hegemonic operations of whiteness without collapsing them into each other. Racial fantasy is not the same as racializing fantasy, yet black diaspora people have to deal with both. Racializing fantasy is fantasy captured in the normalizing gaze of whiteness and leads inextricably toward white veneration. Racial fantasy in contradistinction plays in whiteness, as one plays with objects that can harm but turns them toward producing life and pleasure. So I am concerned then with the possibilities of agency in full view of whiteness. Black diaspora peoples have learned to live within this full view.

S uggesting a F ull V ie w Lupita Nyong’o became a household name in 2014. She is the Kenyan actor who won an American academy award for her searing depiction of Patsey, a female slave, in the movie rendition of Solomon Northup’s classic text, Twelve Years a Slave (which is also a text of great literary beauty and stunning insight in and of itself). Her accomplishment came at the familiar nexus for such achievement for black actors: when black artists perform blackness and thereby confirm their approved forms of humanity. We yet wait for the true artistic breakthrough when black actors are awarded this highest honor for acting the human just as white actors. At the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Award banquet, Lupita Nyong’o told a story that many people of dark skin in this world would have anticipated she could and would tell. She told the story of her awakening to racial trauma (cf. “Lupita Nyong’o’s Moving Essence Black Women in Hollywood Speech”). She prefaced her story by reading a letter she had received from a little darkskinned girl who told Nyong’o how proud she was on her accomplishment of achieving recognition and fame, and that she too (this little dark-skinned girl) hopes now for a better future for dark-skinned girls. This little girl was in the process of buying skin-lightening cream in order to transform her body when Nyong’o’s image appeared and, as she said, “saved her.” Nyong’o then told the story that many of her listeners I am sure knew was coming. It was of the time when she too, like the little dark-skinned girl, wished desperately to be lightskinned. She prayed and bargained with God, the good and merciful God (as

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she called God) that she would be a better person morally if this God would alter her physically, thereby making her a better person in the flesh. The camera scanning the audience of listeners showed well-known African and African American celebrities, some with eyes closed, some looking directly at her, others with head bowed or nodding, all seemingly possessed of the intimate knowledge of this Morrisonesque Bluest-Eye story being told by Nyong’o. Indeed, this was shared knowledge that was not rooted in shared dark skin but a shared reality of presence. The image to which Nyong’o (like the little dark-skinned girl) has to reconcile was no specific image. Whiteness at that moment was powerfully present even as Nyong’o spoke of her own black body. Whiteness is both a way of seeing and a way of being seen and in this moment its dual modality intertwined in the logic of her speech. This familiar story of black flesh she resolved in characteristic fashion by telling of how she learned that beauty is fleeting, and that we should make ourselves beautiful inside. Applause followed. Lupita Nyong’o’s speech was in fact about self-making through a powerful act of self-narration against the backdrop of the fetishizing of her image. Her success should be read inside the spectral calculus that often accompanies the stardom of dark bodies. On the one hand, Nyong’o – like many others – has been read inside exoticism, through which black women’s bodies appear as embodiments of stunningly overwhelming beauty that reaches past civilization and rationality and into the primal eroticism of the earth creature. In this regard, her beauty becomes captivating to such an extent that the specifics of her life – her real history, education, experiences, philosophy of life and so forth – are inconsequential for grasping her personhood. On the other hand, Nyong’o is being read inside the logics of social uplift and achievement that render her simply another Americanized citizen who has overcome the racial barriers to success, both external and internal. Her dark body suggests its inconsequentiality even as its signifying power makes such an American reading fully an illusion. To what extent Lupita Nyong’o is actively manipulating this spectral calculus would be an interesting question that we could not answer at this point. Yet what is crucial for our analysis is the ways in which she exposes blues agency in her rhetorical improvisation.

The B lues in B e aut y Her improvisation helps us see what many people of color can sense all around them, knowing that they must actively enact fantasies of agency against the racial given of whiteness. This enacting of racial fantasy is what I wish to register as a wider reality of beautification. This is a much broader use of the idea of beautification than cosmetological practices, although it certainly includes

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such practices. This broader idea of beautification connects bodies and space, land and animals, mobility and habitation in complex love work that allows us to claim ourselves in self-presentation and self-giving (cf. Povinelli 2006: 175236). Such an idea encompasses cosmetological, theatrical, rhetorical, somatic, and spiritual practices. It also includes architectural practice as well as the body’s relation to and manipulation of inanimate objects. How does one enact a redemptive aesthetic inside the operations of white aesthetic hegemony? This is a question acutely felt by people of color living against the backdrop of the ubiquitous white body that covers western mediascapes (cf. Appadurai 1996: 27-47). Anne Anlin Cheng in her reflection on the racial performance of Josephine Baker identified Baker as someone gesturing toward such an aesthetic, although neither Cheng nor Baker would probably give it the kind of theological weight I am conceptualizing here. Baker’s art and life however does suggest an effort in subjectivity that exists outside what Cheng terms “the burdens of racial legibility and epidermal inscription” (Cheng 2011: Kindle: Location 240 of 3861 [6%]). Cheng’s brilliant meditation on Baker highlights the conundrums of racial visibility bequeathed to us by the colonial racial matrix. Visibility has been collapsed into a readability that haunts racialized subjects. Josephine Baker’s art seemed to play in, with, and against that readability and thereby drew attention to the surface as the site of a theatrical racial interiority that was never an essence. This is what Cheng calls the dream of a second skin (cf. ibid., Kindle: Location 956 of 3861 [25%]). I would like to extend this metaphor of a second skin to capture what is at play in a redemptive aesthetic exercised in processes of beautification engaged in and through blues agency. Such work negotiates the condition constituted by whiteness by manipulating a stereotypical racial interiority at the surface. Yet this negotiation is not the real handling of something that is false or the authentic playing with illusion. It is as Cheng suggests, “a complicated and unceasing negotiation between the two” (ibid., Kindle: Location 1932 of 3861 [50%]).1 This is in effect the spectacular work of performing the mystery of the visible through which objectification becomes a means of concealment, protest, and self-making. Yet the effects of objectification are never perfectly contained or resisted; they seep through in the processes of beautification, making the work of subjectivity torturous pleasure and pleasurably torturous – that is, bluesy. Additionally, processes of beautification are implicated in processes of governmentality and imperialist western economic practices. 1 | Cheng is referring specifically to Baker, but she draws wider implications soon after this point where she states, “[h]ow racialized skin responds to relentless corporealization and objectification may take unexpected forms. The desire to remake oneself as object can be shared by those we think would be most allergic to such transformation” (ibid.).

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Mimi Thi Nguyen notes the ways beauty work is imbricated in nationbuilding and war-making in an essay that reflects on the efforts of the NGO (non-governmental organization) Beauty without Borders in building the Kabul Beauty School in Kabul, Afghanistan (cf. Nguyen 2011). This humanitarian work at one level was intended to empower Afghan women by creating space for them to reclaim their bodies, through processes of beautification. Cosmetological practices were interlocked with American statecraft and capitalism as a way to give Afghan women voice and self-determination within a context of relentless sexual violence and tyranny. The Kabul Beauty School gave sight to the private spaces where Afghan women could literally and metaphorically unveil themselves and claim their agency in the work of makeup and makeovers. Nguyen is not questioning the agential possibilities of such processes of beautification. She draws attention, however, to the biopower at work in this emancipatory operation. Thus at another level, these processes of beautification are held inside processes of formation – national, economic, and racial – and, most importantly for our analysis, inside whiteness, again as both a way of seeing and a way of being seen. This humanitarian effort framed “a potential liberal feminist subject who seeks to esteem herself in collaboration with development regimes that represent women in the global South as needing modernization” (Nguyen 2011: 374). That potential liberal feminist subject is not only one that exists against the ubiquitous backdrop of whiteness but one energized by images of white bodies performing the good, the true, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the modern. Projects of governmentality are executed in and through whiteness as a production plant or plantation of signifiers. Thus processes of beautification exist within the long centuries of colonialism and imperial control in which the organization of morality, beauty, and the social order are made the quotidian work of colonized subjects. As Nguyen notes: Through instruction on the proper care of the self, this makeover imperative produces normative notions about what counts as healthy versus pathological bodies, converting social and moral statements into truth statements about the self – for instance, that your beauty choices necessarily reveal something about your character or competency – validated then by the signs of parascientific expertise. (ibid. 375)

Nguyen’s comments on the complexities of beauty work for Afghan women help frame the historical dilemma of self-reflexivity for people of color. That self-reflexivity is always crowded. Cheng is surely correct when she argues that cultural theorists and others attuned to the aesthetic struggle today have “few tools and little language for addressing … [what she calls] … visual pleasure in the contaminated zones: those uneasy places of visual exchange where pleasure, law, and resistance converge” (Cheng 2011: Kindle: Location 1958 of

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3861 ([51%]). However, Cheng underestimates the permeability, multiplicity, and fragmentation of the visual. The work of making visible is always on the one hand a shared work and on the other hand work that is always being intercepted, anticipated, and redirected in whiteness. This is due in part to the historical modes of creation that merged with whiteness. They were the modes of becoming, universalizing, and managing.

M odes of W hiteness I have articulated these modes extensively in another place, but it is important to review briefly their contours (cf. Jennings 2015; Nguyen 2011). These three mutual interlocking modes co-opted by whiteness constituted a selfcolluding racial anthropology that produced nonwhite raced subjects while simultaneously making white subjects who are also rendered invisible through its operation. The mode of becoming was transformed through the historic work of assimilation of European immigrants in America who were able to shed themselves of the density of their ethnic past and perform a cleansing whiteness. This trajectory of assimilation has been flexible enough to capture those immigrants who followed the archetypical work of the European and made possible for them an abiding mimeticism that extends far beyond the possibilities of looking white, that is, passing as white. This mimetic reality enables minority immigrants to gesture whiteness that pivots on stripping away a determinative ethnic past. Their ethnicity becomes a past, an inconsequential appendage to their American existence. This stripping away was coordinated with the work of self-development and training in and toward civilized existence. Self-development collaborated with the development of land and the domestication of space in America and other colonial sites (cf. Jennings 2010; Roediger 2005). This meant that civilized bodies were coordinated with the spaces of civilization, and both mutually enforced the transformation of each. The mode of universalizing grew out of the manipulation of a Christian matrix through which the European took over the vicarious position of the scriptural people, the Jews, as the exemplars of the human in its full anthropological range. This allowed the European to speak not only of the human didactically but also for the human imperially. Whiteness became the signified and the signifier of human essence and existence (cf. Carter 2007; Fredriksen 2008: 260-89; Goldstein 2006). This performance of the universal was not simply conceptual but also material as Europeans enclosed multiple peoples of the world in an evaluative universe that sought to school them in a shared sense of the value of objects, both natural and manufactured. Through this mode objects and peoples came to inhabit various scales that moved from beautiful to ugly, perfect to imperfect, elegant to grotesque, and so

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forth. Europeans were not the progenitors of practices of evaluation especially on their colonial sites. Rather this new evaluative universe had – and has – three abiding characteristics: (a) its global or colonizing effect that allows it to incorporate and manipulate existing evaluative systems; (b) its ability to conceal the speaking white subject; and (c) its ability to produce native subjects who know themselves and gauge themselves through this new evaluative universe (cf. Nguyen 2011: 376).2 The managerial mode grew out of a distorted sense of ownership and a diseased reality of fraternity and manifest destiny through which white men imagined themselves as bequeathed by God with stewardship of the planet and the peoples of the world. Such imagining was also a constitutive element in becoming and being recognized as a man, as one ready to handle the affairs of men and take the world stage as a global leader (cf. Nelson 1998; Lake/Reynolds 2008). This managerial mode was fundamentally a kind of secular gendered asceticism through which peoples (men and women) could show mastery of themselves and control over nonwhite bodies through claiming institutional identities. Institution building (e.g., hacienda, plantation, company, church, school, etc.) emerged as crucial sites for forming the distinction between white and nonwhite people in the performance of duties associated with the maintenance and promotion of the aims and interests of the institution. Thus racial formation and institutionalization have always worked together in this mode.

The F ailure of F orm and the M astery of F ailure These modes expose a more complex picture for self-reflexivity than is currently at play in much cultural theory or critical race theory concerned with aesthetics. This tangled picture does not negate the crucial interventions being done through processes of beautification, but only sharpens the work of blues agency as people of color have sought to make themselves visible. That tangled picture requires analyses that grasp the ordinary presence of whiteness in the ways it has constituted and continues to constitute the aesthetic forest that multiple peoples must move through, groping for light and life. Whiteness in this regard will always constitute for people of color a failure of form. The failure in this sense is not the failure of anti-racialist aesthetic practice, nor is it the failure of art, or media, or artistic practice. The failure of form in this 2  |  Nguyen notes that “the ultimate aim of colonial mimicry, […] as Parama Roy observes, ‘is not simply to constitute natives as objects to be studied; it must also produce natives as self-reflective subjects, who know themselves as others (the colonizers) know them’” (376).

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regard is the relentless return of aesthetic form to gesture whiteness as both the definitive source of pleasure and knowledge. Both pleasure and knowledge in this regard are matters of circulation through which white bodies remain the critical sites of intersection of the production and consumption of goods and services and fantasy. This failure of form means that artistic work and performance, aesthetic practice, and processes of beautification do not simply exist in contaminated zones as Cheng suggests, but are caught irreversibly in a racial drift toward whiteness through which any anti-racist, anti-white supremacist artistic work may be drawn into new possibilities for signifying whiteness, either by packaging the ethnic progenitors of that art and the art itself in commodity and cultural form, or by drawing art and progenitor into an imagined community that shares in the production and consumption of goods and fantasy and thereby shares in both knowledge and pleasure. This failure of form is not immutable or eternal. It has however been with us since the dawning of the colonial modern and the modern body formed in the crucible of stolen land and altered spaces, and enslaved bodies. Processes of beautification have challenged and continue to challenge that failure of form not by its denial, but by its mastery. This mastery of failure is a contingent, always vulnerable work of blues agency that recognizes that self-reflexivity is always a crowded activity filled with welcome and unwelcome guests speaking at us in the mirror, haunting us even as we imagine with and against the imagistic machine that greets us through ubiquitous media. How does one imagine self with and against the tide of whiteness? This is a question that touches on desire and pleasure, but also on the daily rituals and routines through which black people gauge their appearance, measure their effect, and daily launch their improvisational performances into their social worlds. There is a haunting scene from the 2009 movie Precious based on the novel Push by Sapphire. This scene finds Precious, an African American woman (the main character) preparing for the day after dressing herself and gauging her appearance in the mirror. The camera moves from the image of Precious looking at herself to the image of herself that she sees reflected back through the mirror. To the viewer’s surprise the image is of a young white woman looking back at Precious. I am not suggesting an overdetermination of white image, fantasy, and dream for people of color by invoking this scene from the movie. Rather I call on it as a metaphor for grasping the contours of this work of mastering failure. The situation in which people of color must do their love work requires an improvisational dexterity and an artistic nimbleness that allows for the cultivation of nothing less than an evangelistic posture toward the social world. Writer Marita Golden in her powerful memoir, Don’t Play in the Sun:

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One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex, offers us insight into this evangelistic posture within her own sense of blues agency: Writing is one of the most rebellious, incendiary acts that an individual can perform … It did not always seem inevitable that I should write … For if I wrote, and wrote with steely determination and imagination, I would have to write my way out of the hold of the racist and colorist assumptions about brown to black Black women that I’d inherited … I would have to write myself into being visible to a world dedicated to turning me into a phantom … I write to be heard. And I write to be loved. I write seeking congregants who will attend the church of my specific beliefs, adherents to my assertion of reality, converts to my vision. (Golden 2004: 184-85)

Golden’s comments point to what is needed for strengthening the processes of beautification. What is needed is conversion for all those comfortably at home in whiteness. Processes of beautification enter more deeply into the zone of a redemptive aesthetic once they are shared across racial, gendered, and cultural lines of difference. That sharing would entail not only a recognition of the presence conjured by whiteness, a presence that constantly establishes a normalizing aesthetic power, but also a kind of renunciation and turning away from that power in its exploitive modes of production and consumption. The turning away requires a turning toward relationships and friendships that imagine possibilities of life together that continuously engage in aesthetic play with, in, and against whiteness. Such play is finally the most challenging and costly aspect of the mastery of failure, because the white aesthetic regime is not imagined as a problem by a significant number of people in the world. Indeed, some have taken as their task its defense and further dissemination without ever recognizing its existence (cf. Nehamas 2000; Jusdanis 2005).3 Whiteness is a tacit power because it is productive of life, albeit false life. It is parasite on bare life and the creative energies of human existence. Most importantly, it is advantageous to groups of people in the world for whom images of the true, the good, the beautiful, the intelligent, the noble, and the powerful flow around their white or white-like bodies without having to touch them directly. This means that like theological conversion, this conversion with its renunciation and turning away from whiteness will not be for everyone but only for those seeking to live a better life in Caucasia’s capital.

3 | Alexander Nehamas’ article is a review of On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry, Air Guitar by Dave Hickey, and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty by Dave Hickey.

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W orks C ited Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Baker, Jr., Houston A. (1987): Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Carter, Julian B. (2007): The Heart of Whiteness. Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940, Durham: Duke UP. Cheng, Anne Anlin (2011): Second Skin. Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, New York: Oxford UP. Danto, Arthur (2000): “Beauty and Beautification,” in: Peg Zeglin Brand (ed.), Beauty Matters, Bloomington: Indiana UP, pp. 71-72. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (ed.) (1997): Race and the Enlightenment. A Reader, Cambridge: Blackwell. Fredriksen, Paula (2008): Augustine and the Jews. A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, New York: Doubleday. Golden, Marita (2004): Don’t Play in the Sun. One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex, New York: Anchor. Goldstein, Eric L. (2006): The Price of Whiteness. Jews, Race, and American Identity, Princeton: Princeton UP. Jennings, Willie James (2010): The Christian Imagination. Theology and the Origins of Race, New Haven: Yale UP. —, (2015): “The Aesthetic Struggle and Ecclesial Vision,” in: Dale P. Andrews/ Robert London Smith Jr. (eds.), Black Practical Theology, Waco: Baylor UP, pp. 163-185. Jusdanis, Gregory (2005): “Two Cheers for Aesthetic Autonomy,” in: Cultural Critique 61, pp. 22-54. Lake, Marilyn/Reynolds, Henry (2008): Drawing the Global Colour Line. White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lewis, George E. (2008): A Power Stronger Than Itself. The AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago: U of Chicago P. “Lupita Nyong’o’s Moving Essence Black Women in Hollywood Speech,” essence.com: http://www.essence.com/2014/02/28/lupita-nyongos-bw ih-acceptance-speech/ (last accessed October 12 2016). Nehamas, Alexander (2000): “The Return of the Beautiful. Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty,” in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58.4, pp. 393-403. Nelson, Dana D. (1998): National Manhood. Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, Durham: Duke UP. Nguyen, Mimi Thi (2011): “The Biopower of Beauty. Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror,” in: Signs 36.2, pp. 359-83.

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Northup, Solomon (1996): Twelve Years a Slave, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2006): The Empire of Love. Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality, Durham: Duke UP. Ramsey, Jr., Guthrie P. (2003): Race Music. Black Cultures from Bebop to HipHop, Berkeley: U of California P. Roediger, David R. (2005): Working Toward Whiteness. How America’s Immigrants Became White, New York: Basic. Sapphire (1996): Push, New York: Knopf. Tracy, Steven C. (2001): Langston Hughes and the Blues, Urbana: U of Illinois P.

Christian New Birth as an Experience of Presence An Introduction to Its Theological Structure Stephen James Hamilton

I ntroduction A general picture of what most North Americans associate with the term “born-again Christianity” can be found in Charles Colson’s 1976 two-millioncopy bestselling autobiography, Born Again. Here, Colson tells the story of how he, a former political aide and personal confidante of president Richard Nixon, found himself in a spiritual crisis after the infamous Watergate scandal which eventually unseated Nixon and landed Colson in jail. These upheavals led Colson to begin having deeper thoughts about the purpose of his life and of Christianity in particular, which were only intensified when a friend and recent convert to evangelical Christianity began telling Colson regularly about his conversion experience and giving him Christian literature to read. Colson writes that he finally experienced a conversion on a Friday morning, sitting in front of the sea, with the words: “Lord Jesus. I accept You. Please come into my life. I commit it to You.” He then describes what happened next: With these few words that morning, while the briny sea churned, came a sureness of mind that matched the depth of feeling in my heart. There came something more: strength and serenity, a wonderful new assurance of life, a fresh perception of myself and the world around me. In the process, I felt old fears, tensions and animosities draining away. I was coming alive to things I’d never seen before; as if God was filling the barren void I’d known for so many months, filing it to its brim with a whole new kind of awareness. (Colson 2008: 142-143)

This moment of conversion, as narrated by its recipient, would certainly appear to qualify as an experience of an “extraordinary presence,” to use the language of this volume. However, it is also an experience which can be classified within

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a general tradition of Christian conversion which is influential, prevalent, and culturally widespread – in other words, quite “ordinary.” According to the language of those who count themselves within this tradition, such as Colson, new birth is a spiritually necessary presence-experience which frequently (though not always) begins during a memorable conversion event and is followed by the conviction that one is now a different person, embraced by the presence of a God with whom the born-again Christian has a “personal relationship.” Thus Colson’s narrative, despite the exceptional nature of its biographical particulars, is perceived by many of its readers with a sense of deep familiarity. The question posed by this present article is the following: What does it mean to understand this phenomenon theologically?1 Those who are familiar with Puritan conversion narratives will immediately recognize a strong resemblance to countless other autobiographical passages, and philosophers of religion will perhaps recall case studies from William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (cf. James 2004). Moreover, psychologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars will all find Colson’s aspects of this passage interesting from their own academic perspectives. Within mainstream theological scholarship, however, conversion experiences such as Colson’s are a topic which, despite its cultural importance, has been largely neglected. While one reason for this disregard may be cultural bias – evangelical Christianity’s bold religious fervor and often arch-conservative politics would appear to clash with the general disposition of academia – it is far more likely due to the apparently subjective nature of being “born again”: it is a phenomenon which appears to have its locus in the private confines of the individual, as a form of immediate presence, which in turn would appear to at least partially shield it from scholarly scrutiny. Theology, however, is essential to understanding the phenomenon of Christian new birth as a whole, because when evangelical Christians reflect on what it means to be “born again,” they are neither solely thinking of an abstract, external doctrine to which they adhere, nor of a private “religious” experience separable from theological interpretation: instead, it is the result of the creative reciprocity between one’s (often implicit) theological convictions, on the one hand, and one’s experiences on the other. Consequently, a theological analysis is necessary to provide an exploration of the theological structure and implications of the language of those who believe themselves to have had this experience. It is thus this article’s thesis that narratives such as Colson’s possess a fundamental theological grammar – a “theo-logic,” so to speak – which is based on a particular understanding of Christian new birth: namely, that being “born again” is a three-fold event of personal transformation, the 1 | For a more detailed analysis of the question, cf. Hamilton 2017.

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experience of God’s presence, and a fundamental change in status before God which is acknowledged in the local religious community. After beginning with a short biblical, historical, and cultural sketch of the Christian doctrine of new birth, or regeneration, this article will provide an overview of the particular theological grammar of being “born again.” Special focus will be given to the theology of Philipp Jacob Spener, whose three-fold definition of the doctrine of regeneration provides a helpful general paradigm for understanding what, theologically, evangelical Christians such as Colson mean when they claim to be “born again.” However, despite a basic consistency in theological structure which spans a variety of evangelical traditions, there are also significant theological disagreements among “born-again” Christians concerning the exact nature of their conversion – for instance the role of one’s free will – which will be briefly discussed at the end of this essay.

A B iblical , H istorical , and C ultur al O vervie w of “B orn A gain ” C hristianit y The Doctrine of Regeneration in the New Testament and Early Christianity The concept of Christian new birth – or, in more traditional theological language: regeneration (and ensuing sanctification)2 – is found sporadically in the Bible, most famously in the third chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”3 – which the highly influential 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, better known as the King James Bible, renders as “born again.” In addition to this passage, many parallel concepts, such as “born of God” 2 | While the term “regeneration” typically refers to an event of conversion, “sanctification” signifies the process of spiritual development afterwards, which is viewed as lasting one’s entire lifetime. 3 | Cf. John 3:1-6: “Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ 3 Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ 4 Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ 5 Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.’” All biblical citations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation of the Bible.

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(cf. John 1:12-13, James 1:18, 1 John 3:9, 5:4), “children of God” (cf. John 1:12, Gal. 3:26, Rom. 8:17-19, 1 John 3), “new being” (cf. Eph. 4:22-24, Col. 3:10), and “new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17) appear scattered throughout the New Testament. While interpretations of these verses are predictably manifold, there is a basic theological thread which spans all traditions, cultures, and epochs: that being a Christian makes one different – new – and that this newness cannot be attributable to one’s own efforts, but instead to a miraculous work of God. While many contemporary Protestant Christians associate these biblical passages with conversion, it is crucial to understand that the conception of new birth as a personal conversion experience is, historically speaking, the minority position. Prior to the historical rise of Protestantism, regeneration had been virtually entirely linked to the sacrament of baptism, which was understood as having the ability to wash away sins.4 As a result, the category “new birth” was in itself not of fundamental theological importance, but was instead considered within the context of baptismal theology. And there is good reason for this association: in his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus tells him that he must be “born of water and spirit” (3:5); and another biblical reference to new birth, Titus 3:5, refers to the “washing of rebirth.”5 Early Christian sources generally interpreted these references to water not as metaphors for a spiritual experience, but instead literally, as clear references to the ritual of baptism.6 Thus one does not find entire chapters or meditations – not to speak of entire books – dedicated to being “born again” in ancient and medieval theological

4 | Cf. Peter Toon’s chapter on “Patristic and Medieval Interpretations”: “In examining how the doctrine of inward regeneration was interpreted in the period from the second to the fifteenth centuries, we must be mentally prepared to encounter an approach and context very different from contemporary Western Protestantism. In particular, we have to be prepared for the fact that virtually all discussion of the new birth is in the context of the rite of baptism” (Toon 1987: 71-72). The Theologische Realenzyklopäde comes to the same conclusion: “Im Anschluß an die Deutung der Taufe als Wiedergeburt nach Joh 3,3.5 und Tit 3,5 wurde in der Alten Kirche und im Mittelalter – abgesehen von einzelnen mystischen Tendenzen – ein sakramentales Verständnis der Wiedergeburt maßgeblich” (Nüssel 2004: 14). 5 | “He saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal [dia loutrou paliggenesias kai anakainōseōs] by the Holy Spirit.” The NRSV, though translating loutrou as “water,” notes in a footnote that the more literal meaning of the Greek is “washing.” The King James version also uses “washing” as the translation. 6 | A wide selection of early commentaries on John 3:1-5, which includes John Chrysostom, Athananius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine, among many others, can be found in Elowsky 2007: 107-114. For Titus 3:5, see Gorday 2000: 304-305.

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sources; what one does find, however, are frequent meditations on baptism, in which the concept of new birth finds its role. Take for example Augustine’s Confessions, whose famous eighth chapter describing his conversion has served as an inspiration to many modern evangelical conversion narratives (cf. Watkins 1972: 56-61, 136). Yet in this book, the concept “new birth” does not appear until the ninth chapter, when he comments on his friend Alypius “joining me in being reborn in [God]” [renasci in te mecum] in baptism (cf. Augustine 1998: 179-80 [Section 9.6.14]). Interestingly, Augustine does not elaborate any further on this moment of “being reborn”: he simply assumes that he was born again in his baptism. Thus for Augustine, as well as for many other Christians outside of the evangelical tradition, “conversion” as an experience and new birth as a theological doctrine are clearly differentiated. Indeed, many theological traditions retain this interpretation today. The Catholic Catechism, for instance, associates being born again with baptism and not with a later conversion experience,7 and many Protestant theologians, particularly from the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, also share similar interpretations. Among these traditions, subjective experience plays a less significant theological role: whether the recipient feels anything during baptism is clearly beside the point; instead, attention is given to the sacrament itself, particularly to its meaning within the wider church community.

Modern Evangelical Christianity The object of this investigation, however, is a view of regeneration which deliberately undercuts the traditional logic of sacramental presence in, and which – certainly not coincidentally – developed contemporaneously with the conception of the modern, autonomous individual, to which Charles Taylor has recently referred as “the buffered self” (cf. Taylor 2007: 37-42).8 It was the Anabaptist movement which first radically separated the concept of new birth from the sacrament of baptism, locating regeneration instead in the subjective change of the individual and, consequently, viewing baptism primarily in terms

7 | Cf. Catholic Church 1997: 1265 (Section II.1.7): “Baptism not only purifies from all sins, but also makes the neophyte ‘a new creature,’ an adopted son of God, who has become a ‘partaker of the divine nature,’ member of Christ and co-heir with him, and a temple of the Holy Spirit.” 8 | It has become increasingly difficult, indeed counterintuitive, for modern Christians to conceive of spiritual rebirth as somehow contingent upon an external ritual – not to mention one that is frequently administered to infants.

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of its symbolic meaning and communal function.9 Baptism in this tradition has been generally conceived as an external affirmation of a prior internal event, the dawning of faith, and has its value in reference to this event. German Pietism and Anglo-American Puritanism in the 17th century, while not going as far as to reject infant baptism, still retained this theological uncoupling of the doctrine of regeneration from the sacrament of baptism, which had previously been assumed to be the locus of Christian new birth throughout the majority of Christian history, in favor of an understanding of the event of being born again as primarily an inward experience of the soul. Theologically, this disassociation represents a critical fork in the road, as now the attention of the Christian is no longer primarily directed towards an outward event (i.e. baptism), but instead the self, hence its description becomes largely a phenomenological undertaking: one’s behaviors, dispositions, thoughts, feelings, as well as mystical encounters with the divine. It is this phenomenological understanding of new birth that informs the theologies – both implicit and explicit – of countless evangelical Christians such as Colson.10 From the perspective of North American cultural history, the golden era of “born-again” Christianity was probably in the 1970s and ‘80s, when, largely due to Billy Graham’s highly publicized and sometimes even televised evangelistic “crusades” (which had already been going on for over two decades), the term “born again” began to sink into mainstream American culture’s vocabulary. It was the year 1976 that Newsweek magazine declared to be the “year of the evangelical,” based on the influence of Graham along with then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, whose reference to himself as “born again” had apparently caught a large contingent of the American press off guard (cf. Marty 1989). It is worth noting that at this time the term had fewer political connotations than it would soon receive: Graham was a conservative, 9 | The term “Anabaptist” refers not to a single tradition but instead to a host of different Christian groups in the 16th century who rejected infant baptism in favor of “believers’ baptism,” i.e. the delaying of the sacrament until after a confession of faith. The term “Anabaptist” was originally an epithet, since theologically there can only be one possible baptism (cf. Williams 1962; Estep 1996). 10 | The term “evangelicalism” is a notoriously broad concept which has taken on different meanings in its history. Perhaps one of the clearest and most well-known definitions of what the term implies today (and began to imply 300 years ago) is found in Bebbington: “There have been four qualities,” he writes, “that have been special marks of Evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Together they form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism” (Bebbington 1993: 2-3).

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but he shied away from political controversy and developed close friendships with American presidents from both parties (cf. Aikman 2007, esp. chapters 8-10); moreover, Carter was a Democrat, and often quite left-leaning in many of his views. By the 1980s, however, the term had, at least for many in that cultural context, devolved into the description of a political interest group (the so-called Religious Right, whose political views often directly contradicted those of Carter), and was connected to such controversial figures as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tim LaHaye, among others. This development led one theologian, Eric Gritsch, to coin the term “born-againism” in the early 1980s to describe what he called a “movement” marked by “patriotism, manifest destiny, Anglo-Saxon selfconfidence, the common folks’ social and economic aspirations, and whatever the American dream and the Constitution promised” (Gritsch 1982: 103). Even at the time he wrote it, Gritsch’s statement was problematic, and it has become even more so today, in that it ignores the diversity of opinion, theology, and (perhaps most importantly) ethnicity among those Americans who identify themselves as “born again.”11 Still, Gritsch’s characterization is representative of the images countless North Americans, among others, associate with the term (pleading televangelists, aggressive cultural and political conservatism, civil-religious kitsch), which has led many individuals to claim that they are “Christians, but not ‘born again’ Christians” – a statement as theologically nonsensical as it is culturally intelligible, given that according to the New Testament and classical Christian doctrine, all Christians are to be seen as regenerated.

C hristian N e w B irth as an E xperience of P resence : P hilipp J acob S pener and the Threefold D ivision of W iedergeburt However, to truly understand the logic of modern “born-againism” it is necessary to go beyond such recent developments and focus on the general conception of regeneration – that of a personal experience of presence – which can be traced 11 | According to the extensive 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life, 30% of the white population are affiliated with evangelical or “born again” churches, as well as 15% of African Americans, 16% of Latinos, 17% of Asian Americans, and 34% of those under the category “Other/Mixed Race” (cf. Lugo et al. 2008: 40). It is important to note that these data do not account for those African Americans who consider themselves to be born again and belong to what the Pew Forum classifies as “Historically Black Churches,” of whom 67% described themselves as “a ‘born again’ or evangelical Christian” (cf. ibid. 14, 101-107, 153).

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to beginnings of the modern period. Although theologians of this experiential tradition have often disagreed in terms of how exactly the presence of new birth is experienced and described, the argument of this article is that there is widespread agreement as to the basic theological structure of the experience, which can be summarized in three points: firstly, it is the experience of radical change in one’s own personal nature, which the convert could not have brought about by him- or herself; secondly, the born-again believer experiences the immediate, mystical, and ultimately indescribable presence of God; and finally, not only is being “born again” an experience of presence, but also a change of one’s status before God, which results in a fundamental normative change in identity: before, one was not (in the fullest sense of the word) a Christian, while afterwards, one is. This three-fold structure – new birth as personal metamorphosis, as an experience of the transcendent, and as the bestowal of a new divine status – can be said to make up the theological structure of this modern evangelical Protestant understanding of what it means to be “born again.” This three-fold structural division of Christian new birth is not my own insight but is borrowed from Philipp Jacob Spener’s massive tome Der hochwichtige Articul von der Wiedergeburt – roughly translated, “The Extremely Important Doctrine of the New Birth” – published in the early 18th century and based on a series of 66 sermons delivered to his congregation in Berlin from 1691 to 1694.12 Here, Spener divides the doctrine of new birth into three parts: the creation of a “new person” [neuer mensch]; the “igniting” or “sparking” [entzündung] of faith; and justification [rechtfertigung], which includes “adoption” as a child of God [annahme an kindes statt] (cf. Spener 1715: 150ff.; Spener 1982: 445; Spener 1999: 305). Important to note is that these three elements do not represent a chronological sequence, but according to Spener all happen instantaneously; however, all three of these elements – the new being, faith, and justification/adoption – do represent three different events, albeit on three different planes. It is important to note that in drawing this division Spener was not trying to be theologically innovative: instead, he claims to have been merely summarizing and systematizing how people at his time had already been reflecting on their own experience (cf. Spener 1715: 150-51). As a pastor, he was concerned that pious Christians in Germany properly understood what it means to be born again and not draw any false conclusions – for instance, that 12 | All English translations of Spener, unless otherwise noted, are the author’s own. Although Wiedergeburt has not been translated into English, and it is doubtful that the book, at nearly 1,300 pages, ever will be in its entirety, the first 10 sermons have been rendered into more modern German by Hans-Georg Feller (cf. Spener 1963). In addition to updating the German, Feller also provides a helpful short historical introduction to the text.

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they were born again simply because they had been baptized as infants – and was therefore moved to make explicit a theology of regeneration which had already been accepted by many others on a tacit level.

Regeneration as the Transformation into a New Self According to Spener, to have been truly born again is to have gone through an essential inward change, and those who have not first experienced it cannot begin to truly live a faithful life because they are bound to their “old selves” (cf. the 6th chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans). They must first be transformed into a “new being” (neuer mensch is Spener’s preferred term), which is the aspect of new birth most often thought of as “conversion,” in that it describes the experience of a radical change in one’s own inward disposition. Drawing from the language of the Bible, Spener describes this as a “new heart and new spirit” (Spener 1715: 213; cf. 145, 212, 283) which transforms the individual into a “new creation” (ibid. 142). Importantly, this change is one that the individual cannot bring about by him- or herself: I can work to change my habits and even certain dispositions, but I cannot fundamentally change my “heart,” hence this radical transformation must ultimately be attributed to a work of God. This is why, comments Spener, the New Testament uses the metaphor of new birth: “the word Wiedergeburt reminds us that the individual does not do anything in this process [der mensch in derselben nichts thue],” just as in the case of a real birth (ibid. 7; italics reflect bold print in the original text). According to Spener, this “new nature” bestowed by God transforms one’s own reason and will, which leads the reborn believer to feel drawn toward doing the good in way that he or she previously was not (cf. Spener 1715: 152; Spener 1999: 336). Spener describes this as an experience of presence: They feel an inner drive [trieb] towards the Word or prayer, and when they follow this same thing they sense [empfinden] from it a new light, strength, solace, peace and joy, as well as the power of the Kingdom of God which exists within them. (Spener 1715: 765)

Though Spener prefers language of presence and inwardness, he makes clear that this change in inward disposition leads to a seamless relation between internal experience and external behavior, meaning that the new birth is not merely an esoteric feeling but will inevitably lead to “uncountable fruits of good works” (ibid. 886). Moreover, it is also important to note that this description is not of a momentarily intense conversion experience but instead of an abiding state which is always present – hence the “extraordinary” change effected through Wiedergeburt is to become “ordinary,” which for Spener is far more significant than identifying a particular conversion moment – in traditional

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theological vocabulary, the process of sanctification – i.e., the state of already being “born again.”13

Regeneration as the Presence of God Yet according to Spener the experience of presence which takes place when one is “born again” is more than the experience of a change in one’s personal orientation. It is also the direct experience of the presence of God. Thus a second type of presence-experience occurs, which is more difficult to articulate because it is a presence that is mystical, its object being neither material nor subjective but instead a higher spiritual reality. After one is born again, God is no longer merely a postulate whose existence, perhaps along with other doctrines, is to be affirmed. Nor does one merely infer God’s presence from the internal changes he or she has experienced: God now dwells inside the soul, writes Spener, like a tenant in a building (cf. Spener 1715: 887ff.).14 Following Reformation tradition, he calls this experience of God’s indwelling “faith,” with Wiedergeburt being the moment in which one’s faith is “ignited” [entzündet], in which there appears a “little spark” [ füncklein]. “As soon as the spark [ funcke] of faith enters the soul,” he writes, “this is the beginning of a spiritual life” (Spener 1982: 445). By using the metaphor of the spark, Spener makes clear that for him, the concept “faith” does not describe a general psychological capacity - i.e. the propensity to “believe in” something – but instead marks the collapse of the boundary between the subjective human consciousness and the transcendent God. Moreover, the metaphor draws attention to the fact that for Spener, just like the change from an old to a new being, the mystical presence of Holy Spirit is not primarily conceived as transpiring in “moments of intensity” (to borrow a phrase from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht),15 but instead as steady, abiding presence which is intended to grow with time, just as a spark turns into a flame. For Spener, as for many others, the use of metaphor is crucial for communicating a mystical presence which cannot be encapsulated by human 13 | However, unlike the majority of theologians in this tradition, Spener prefers the term Erneuerung or renovatio to Heiligung or sanctificatio. 14 | In the German Spener is able to use a play on words: Wohnung means “abode” (in modern German, it primarily means “apartment”), while God’s act of “indwelling” the soul is Einwohnung. 15 | Gumbrecht sees the aesthetic experience as consisting of such moments. “There is nothing edifying in such moments,” he writes, “no message, nothing that we could really learn from them – and this is why I like to refer to them as ‘moments of intensity.’ For what we feel is probably not more than a specifically high level in the functioning of some of our general cognitive, emotional, and perhaps even physical faculties” (Gumbrecht 2007: 98).

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language. Like many others in the Pietist and Puritan traditions, Spener uses the biblical metaphor of light to describe the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, who causes the regenerate soul, including the intellect, to be “illuminated,” i.e. able to see spiritual truths which were previously veiled.16 Drawing on 2 Corinthians, 4:617 Spener writes that God has given us a bright glow [schein] in our hearts (this is the light of the Spirit, with which the Apostles were directly [unmittelbar] enlightened), so that (through us) the illumination [erleuchtung] of the knowledge of God’s lucidity [klarheit] in Jesus Christ’s countenance would arise. (Spener 1715: 168)

It is the same “inner light” (ibid.) that inspired the original Apostles which shines in the heart of every believer. God’s presence in the born again Christian is therefore not like God’s general presence in nature, writes Spener, as if the presence of the Holy Spirit were merely perceived in the sense of someone feeling the sun’s warmth without seeing standing in its light: “on the contrary, in this union [vereinigung] and indwelling [einwohnung] is the essence of God himself” (ibid.). According to Spener, this experience “vastly transcends our reason” – hence the necessity of “illumination” – and is a union comparable to the mystery of how the soul and body are united despite each clearly retaining its own, separate essence. Spener is thus forced to resort to this set of metaphors and analogies because, ultimately, he has no other choice since what he is describing is a mystery and “we have to let it remain a mystery” (ibid. 884). This language of illumination also appears in Colson’s narrative, as seen in his references to “sureness of mind,” a “fresh perception” and “a whole new kind of awareness.” It allowed Colson to see when those around him were in need of spiritual help, to see truths in the Bible he previously had not, and to generally discern the proper path for his life. He did not view these new insights as merely the result of his own learning or newly developed habits, but instead as only made possible through the presence of God’s Holy Spirit – and thus a truly mystical experience, insofar as the presence he encountered had no physical or mental correlate. However, this mystical experience is different from many others in that it is not ecstatic: there are no external visions or voices, no out-of-body experiences, but instead events which take place within in the subjective, “buffered” self. Unlike the Apostle Paul’s conversion on the 16 | Spener continues: “Through the word, God awakens the faith in the soul thus: He lets his divine light shine into the understanding, so that one exhibits [erzeiget] God’s grace in Christ Jesus and sees [erkennet] all his good works [wohlthaten]…,” filling the Christian with “heartfelt trust” (Spener 1715: 167). 17 | “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

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Road to Damascus, in which he encountered an external audible voice and a blinding light (cf. Acts 9:3-9; 22:6-16). Spener’s conception, as well as Colson’s experience, of this confrontation with the transcendent transpires primarily within the confines of the “heart.”

Regeneration a Normative Change in Status The third event in new birth, according to Spener, is a normative change in one’s status before God,18 which is not a subjective experience at all. Instead, it is a doctrinal proposition, based on scripture, which promises that the sinful human being has been reconciled and declared righteous before God, and is now one of God’s children (which includes being saved from hell). The classic term used by Reformation theology to describe this event of being declared righteous (or “imputed righteousness,” cf. Spener 1715: 178) is forensic justification, and that of becoming a child of God adoption. That such justification and adoption is possible is, according to the theology of this tradition, ultimately the result of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which enables God, in the words of Spener, to “become our friend again” (ibid. 175). Thus this third element of new birth is not an experience of presence, like the first two, but is a doctrine to be believed. This leads to the most significant tension in the evangelical Protestant understanding of new birth: namely, that it describes both a subjective experience as well as a non-experiential doctrinal belief. The fact that this belief is doctrine and not an experience, however, does not entail that it is accepted arbitrarily, since according to Spener (as well as Pietism in general) the truth of God’s promise of justification and adoption is confirmed through inner experience – here, the change in one’s heart and the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.

The Importance of Community Furthermore, this change in status, though ultimately transcendent, is made present through its embodiment in a community of others who share it. It is this kind of community to which Spener refers with his well-known concepts of collegia pietatis, “schools of piety,” and ecclesiola in ecclesia, literally “little church within the church”: a close-knit, core-community of born-again believers who support each other in spiritual edification and ultimately, according to Spener,

18 | “We have seen that the term ‘born again’ [wiedergebohren werden] means becoming a different person [anderer mensch]…; yet this happens not only through the bestowal of a new nature, in which one is thereupon a different person than one was before, but also in that one becomes so before God” (Spener 1715: 184).

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hold the larger church institution together.19 It is an idea which led to the flourishing of Continental Pietism and Anglo-American Puritanism during the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as intense ecumenical communication between various churches and cultures which developed into what Susan Durden O’Brien has referred to as a “transatlantic evangelical consciousness” that came to fruition during the awakening movements of the 18th century (cf. O’Brien 1986). This particular form of “born again” community endures in contemporary evangelical “Bible studies” and “cell groups,” as well as countless Christian groups on high school and college campuses, all of which draw together participants from various denominational backgrounds under the assumption that one’s identity as a born-again Christian – which assumes a “personal relationship with Jesus” – is far more important than any other theological or confessional boundaries. Colson provides a particular cultural contextualization on this theological conviction when he portrays this community as transcending even the deep divisions of American politics, contrasting the support he received from other Christians with the abandonment of his own political party after he had become converted. “Some of my erstwhile colleagues in the Nixon administration […] had grown more distant as the accusations increased,” he writes. “Yet in the days that followed, men whom I hardly knew did not hesitate to ally themselves with me” (Colson 2008: 148). This included Democratic senator Harold Hughes, an outspoken critic of the Republican Nixon administration, who despite political differences reached out to Colson in support, even going as far to suggest a prayer meeting together with the president in the White House (which Nixon subsequently declined) (cf. ibid. 160-73). “Chuck, you have accepted Jesus and He has forgiven you,” Hughes told Colson: “I love you now as my brother in Christ, I will stand with you, defend you anywhere and trust you with anything I have” (ibid. 164). Hughes, along with a group of other politicians, became “brothers” to Colson while he endured his tribulations. Colson’s political example is just one among countless others, found in similar conversion narratives, of a community of faith that transcends boundaries previously viewed as insurmountable, exemplifying the fact that this change of status, though not an experience of presence in itself, is not seen as merely abstract but as initiating one into a community of “brothers” and “sisters.”

19 | In Spener’s context, this was the Lutheran Church in Germany (or, more accurately, the different Lutheran Landeskirchen found in the various independent German states). Most modern evangelicals, particularly in North America, place far less of an emphasis on the importance of the institutional church.

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N e w B irth Today Colson is separated from Spener by not only nearly 300 years, but also by significant differences in theological tradition: as a modern American evangelical, Colson’s views on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the structure of the Church all diverge sharply from Spener’s Lutheran Pietism. Moreover, unlike Colson and many of Spener’s own 17th-century peers, Spener shows significantly less interest in autobiographical conversion narratives. Still, Colson’s autobiography exemplifies the three-fold theological structure of Christian new birth, as outlined by Spener: the convert often speaks of the old self, possessing vices previously seen as insurmountable, being conquered through a miraculous change of heart; in addition to this is a general, constant feeling of peace and the certainty of God’s presence; and finally, the promise that one is now “redeemed,” “justified,” or “saved,” and is a child of God, both in the present life and afterwards – an affirmation, rooted in the New Testament, which is confirmed and strengthened by the conversion experience and subsequently cultivated in a tight-knit community of religious believers. It is a pattern which spans a wide cultural and theological landscape, working as a kind of tacit theological knowledge which appears to be shared by countless evangelical Christians’ perceptions of their experience of God, from classic and frequently celebrated conversion narratives such as John Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed”20 and John Newton’s autobiographical hymn “Amazing Grace” (cf. Noll 2003: 195-198) to countless contemporary evangelical “testi­ monies” of being changed. This structure is seen, for instance, in the recent spiritual autobiography of Brian “Head” Welch, the former guitarist of the successful hard rock band Korn, whose conversion “saved me from myself,” as the title of his book proclaims, which included being saved from his debilitating drug addiction. “I was feeling God touch me inside every day,” Welch writes: “I wasn’t sad at all. I just felt total peace. I had done drugs every day for almost two years, and now here I was, clean for a couple weeks. I couldn’t believe it” (Welch 2007: 136). Welch feels the presence of God and experiences a radical change which he cannot explain. And like Colson, he was guided after his conversion by close Christian friends who assisted him in learning and understanding the Christian life. Or consider the story of Jim Dycus, reported in the magazine Pentecostal Evangel 20 | According to Wesley, this took place during a public reading of Luther’s Preface to Romans: “About a quarter before nine, while [the speaker] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death” (passage from Wesley’s journal entry from May 24, 1738, cited in Noll 2003: 97).

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– a publication whose American Pentecostal theology differs drastically from the Lutheran Spener in many aspects – who before converting to Pentecostal Christianity was a drug-addicted pimp and robber: “Dycus felt like a new man that January day in 1972. ‘I met Jesus Christ, the only One who had the power to set me free from all my bondages and declare me not guilty,’ he says. He has never used illegal drugs again” (Kennedy 2005). In these three sentences, situated in a larger conversion narrative (or “personal testimony” in popular evangelical parlance), all three elements of Spener’s three-fold theology of regeneration are mentioned: there is the mystical language of “meeting” Jesus; the radical change in personality (which included an abrupt end to his drug abuse); and finally, in addition to his supernatural encounter with God and change in behavior, Dycus sees himself as “declare[d]” no longer “guilty” after this moment – a clear reference to the classic Protestant doctrine of forensic justification.

Theological V ariations New Birth as “Decision for Christ” vs. Classical Puritan Conversion Despite this basic agreement in structure, however, this tension between theological conviction and one’s own experiences leads to deep theological differences among those who take this view of being born again. Take for example Colson’s statement that he made a “decision” to become a Christian, that he “accepted” Jesus and “invited” him to come into his life: although Colson’s conversion narrative appears very similar to the literary genre of the Puritan conversion narrative (cf. Caldwell 1985; Hindmarsh 2007; Watkins 1972; Morgan 1963), theologically his belief that his conversion was predicated on intellectual assent is antithetical to Puritan theology. In the theology of the Puritan conversion narrative, grounded in the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination, one does not make a decision to accept God, because it is not one’s own decision to make. Instead, one becomes converted in God’s time, which is the result of a series of preparatory steps (which later came to be called “morphology of conversion”)21 which involve a lengthy period of deeply personal, emotional struggle, in which those who are not yet regenerated undertake the fruitless enterprise of attempting to fulfill God’s law by their own efforts, after which they experience the inevitable despair (or “humiliation”) which arises from realizing that they by themselves are utterly helpless in attaining spiritual salvation. Puritan scholar Mark Valeri comments on this process: 21 | This phrase was coined by Edmund S. Morgan in his book Visible Saints (cf. Morgan 1963).

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Stephen James Hamilton According to the typical scenario, converts initially underwent a period of legal humiliation in several stages. First, they learned of the evil of disobedience to God, then felt remorse for their sin. They next came to hate their sin and to attempt repentance under their natural faculties and powers (although the Holy Spirit, operating through the Word of God, provoked their consciences). Yet while this preparatory work of repentance or humiliation was crucial in producing a change of heart, it was ultimately unsuccessful. Sinners would therefore fall into despair over their inability to repent. (Valeri 1999: 11)

It was only after such “humiliation,” according to traditional Puritan thought, that new birth was able to take place – but even after this process, the individual has to wait. This is all part of God’s plan of “effectual calling,” in which those who have been predestined to salvation are, “in His appointed and accepted time, enlighten[ed in] their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God” (Westminster Confession X.1). Thus the moment of regeneration is, according to classic Calvinist theology, radically passive: there is no movement of the rational will towards “acceptance,” as later theologies have posited, but instead a patient waiting on the work of a sovereign God by a penitent sinner whose legal humiliation can only prepare the way for, but not cause, new birth.22 Colson’s language of “decision,” however, is completely foreign to the classic Puritan conversion narrative – yet it is theologically central to his own. “I knew the time had come for me,” he writes: “I could not sidestep the central question […] placed before me” (Colson 2008: 142). Here, the transformation of new birth, although enacted by God, is predicated on the free will of the recipient: God waits, so to speak, for the subject to respond to this “central question,” and Colson sees his own autobiographical narrative as a powerful tool to help others make their own decision for Christianity.23 Whereas a primary theological function of the classical Puritan narratives was to demonstrate that God has 22 | See Westminster Confession X.2: “This effectual call is of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, who is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it.” 23 | Colson shares a letter he received shortly after his conversion story had become public, from a sergeant in the US Air Force, Nathaniel Green, who wrote that Colson’s story “has helped me more than anything in my entire life” (Colson 2008: 187). Colson comments: “I didn’t care who saw me in my office as the tears streamed town my cheeks while I read and reread Sergeant Green’s letter. He said it all. For eleven years of my life I’d driven with every ounce of energy in my body to do the things in government that I believed might make people’s lives better. But in all that time, I could not point to one single person, not one life, that had actually changed for the better. In fact, nothing I could reflect back on could compare to the feeling of joy I felt at the thought of one man reunited with his family on Christmas Day” (ibid. 188).

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regenerated the sinner against his or her own will, the main purpose of many contemporary conversion narratives is to attempt to convince listener or reader to use his or her free will to make a decision for Christianity – a view which is antithetical to the classical Puritan theology of Predestination.24 Thus this contrast in narrative function, though often subtle, is a contrast in theology, revealing a significant theological difference between many contemporary evangelicals and their Puritan predecessors (as well as reflecting the heavy influence of psychotherapeutic, “self-help” thinking on modern North American evangelicalism).25

Other Significant Theological Differences It would be a mistake to assume that the Puritan theology of regeneration was “then” and Colson’s (implicit) theology represents “now”: contemporary Christianity, particularly in North America, is a tapestry of theological traditions which have continuously clashed, absorbed, and synthesized with one another. This has led to a host of different theological considerations which inevitably affect one’s theology of what it means to be born again. For instance: can the grace of new birth be lost? Some, including Spener, have believed the answer to be obviously yes, for the “flame” of regeneration can dwindle and die out if one does not cultivate it; while others have claimed that someone who has apparently fallen away is either, a) not completely fallen, or b) was never truly born again in the first place. In contemporary North American evangelicalism, this question continues to be hotly debated. Also, what is the relation of new birth to baptism? For Colson, as for most modern evangelicals, the sacrament of baptism is an afterthought: while important, its relation to the doctrine of regeneration is mainly symbolic, and is completely separate from one’s conversion experience. Thus biblical language of “water” and “washing” is generally viewed as a metaphor for the mystical experience of conversion.

24 | From the latter perspective, although the convert has often undergone deep hardship, this is primarily the result of his or her own bad choices (for instance, substance addiction), and such hardships are certainly not seen as theologically necessary in the path to new birth; indeed, a main purpose of the narrative is to help others avoid such mistakes. 25 | The influence of psychotherapy on contemporary evangelicalism has recently been explored by psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann in her study of American Vineyard congregations, When God Talk Back (2012). Luhrmann writes: “The evangelical Christianity that emerged out of the 1960s is fundamentally psychotherapeutic. God is about relationship, not explanation, and the goal of the relationship is to convince congregants that their lives have a purpose and that they are loved” (ibid. 296).

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Spener, however, refuses to jettison the centrality of baptism to the doctrine of regeneration.26 Furthermore, how important is the exact moment of new birth? Does one need to remember it, narrativize it, and continuously re-present it? Some Christians, such as Spener, see little purpose in dwelling on the past; instead, essential is that I know that I am born again now, which most theologians refer to as “sanctification.” It is important to note that for Spener, the metaphors of fire and light primarily describe this continuous, abiding state and not an intense conversion experience which takes place during the moment of conversion and then later subsides. And as his metaphor of the “spark” implies, intensity need not be a distinguishing characteristic of the moment of rebirth, as a spark is something small, perhaps even unnoticeable, which will later develop into a flame. While this is a theological standpoint often overshadowed by the dramatic conversion narratives and references to dates and times in which one “got saved,” it would be false to assume that it is no longer influential.

C onclusion These are just some theological controversies among many others which can be found in the tradition of “born-again” Christianity, despite the general agreement on the three-fold nature of regeneration. Yet how can one explain both the consistencies spanning cultures and generations, on the one hand, and the radical theological plurality on the other? The answer can be found in the fact that the concept of new birth in evangelical Christianity, as has been here shown, refers not only to a subjective presence experience but also to an abstract doctrinal belief: to the transcendent act of being “justified” by God and becoming officially a Christian, in addition to the experience of both a personal transformation and the intimate presence of God in one’s life. As a result, all discourse on Christian new birth will inevitably be both dogmatic and phenomenological – a complex mix of one’s own personal experiences and doctrinal statements about God’s nature and one’s transcendent status. This is particularly the case, for example, with descriptions of the experience of God’s mystical presence, which often make use of metaphors taken from the Bible such as light, water, or love: such language is inevitably both descriptive 26 | Spener attempts to find middle ground by claiming that infants who are baptized are truly “born again” [wiedergebohren], receiving the “spark” of faith. When a pastor visibly baptizes an infant, he writes, “at the same moment the Holy Spirit is also poured out as invisible and divine water.” However, according to Spener, most lose this original baptismal new birth – and hence must be born again again, this time through conversion (cf. Spener 1715: 81).

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and theological.27 Even the term “born again” is both a normative theological doctrine and a descriptive metaphor used to describe one’s subjective state. When evangelical Christians speak of being “born again,” they are describing not merely an experience of presence, or an interpretation of this experience, or a theological doctrine, but a complex interaction of all these things, tied together by an underlying theological grammar. Yet while the basic structure of this grammar has remained remarkably constant among different traditions and contexts, the various theologies and narratives of Christian new birth reveal significant theological differences. This can ultimately be viewed as a creative reciprocity between one’s (often tacit) convictions and that which he or she experiences as a religious believer – which in the case of being “born again” includes forms of presence both “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” Thus a basic conclusion to be drawn is that understanding the theology behind the conversion experiences of evangelical Christians is essential for understanding the phenomenon itself, no matter from which academic perspective this is undertaken. As the psychological anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann points out, “God-concepts and spirit-concepts are not neutral;” instead, “they have great power for those for whom they are real” (Luhrmann 2012: 266). Narratives such as Colson’s are saturated with theological assumptions, allusions, and imagery, and to ignore or misunderstand this “theo-logic” is to misinterpret that which propels both the narrative as well as the human being behind it.

W orks C ited Aikman, David (2007): Billy Graham. His Life and Influence, Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Augustine (1998): Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, New York: Vintage. Bebbington, D. W. (1993): Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, London: Routledge. Caldwell, Patricia (1985): The Puritan Conversion Narrative. The Beginnings of American Expression, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Catholic Church (1997): Catechism of the Catholic Church, rev. ed., New York: Doubleday, vatican.va: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX. HTM (last accessed Oct. 04 2016). Colson, Charles (2008): Born Again, Grand Rapids: Chosen Books. 27 | The use of the metaphor of water is particularly theologically significant, given that it can also be associated with baptism. However, following their interpretations of the “water” and “washing” of John 3:5 and Titus 3:5, respectively, as not referring the sacrament of baptism but instead the experience of conversion, many contemporary evangelical Christians are much less likely to make this connection.

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Elowsky, Joel C. (ed.) (2007): Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, vol. 4a (New Testament): John 1-10, general ed. Thomas C. Oden, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Estep, William (1996): The Anabaptist Story. An Introduction to SixteenthCentury Anabaptism, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Gorday, Peter J. (ed.) (2000): Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, vol. 9 (New Testament): Colossians, 1-2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, general ed. Thomas C. Oden, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Gritsch, Eric W. (1982): Born-Againism, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2007): Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford UP. Hamilton, Stephen James (2017): „Born Again.“ A Portrait and Analysis of the Doctrine of Regeneration within Evangelical Protestantism, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce (2007): The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford UP. James, William (2004): The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, introd. and notes Wayne Proudfoot, New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. Kennedy, John W. (2005): “Transformed. Jim Dycus’ New Lease on Life,” in: Pentecostal Evangel April 10, pe.ag.org: http://www.pe.ag.org/Articles_2005/4744_jimdycus.cfm (last accessed Oct. 04 2016). Lugo, Luis, et al. (2008): U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Washington: Pew Research Center, pewforum.org: http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/05/ report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf (last accessed Oct. 04 2016). Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2012): When God Talks Back. Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, New York: Vintage. Marty, Martin (1989): “The Years of the Evangelicals,” in: The Christian Century February 15, pp. 171-174. Morgan, Edmund (1963): Visible Saints, New York: New York UP. Noll, Mark A. (2003): The Rise of Evangelicalism. The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, Downers Grove: IVP Academic. Nüssel, Friederike (2004): “Wiedergeburt” (III), in: Horst Robert Balz/Gerhard Krause/Gerhard Müller (eds.), Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 36, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 14-20. O’Brien, Susan Durden (1986): “A Transatlantic Community of Saints. The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735-1755,” in: The American Historical Review 91.4, pp. 811-32. Spener, Philipp Jacob (1715): Der hochwichtige Articul von der Wiedergeburt, Frankfurt a. M.: Johann David Zunner. —, (1963): Von der Wiedergeburt, ed. Hans-Georg Feller, Stuttgart: J.F. Steinkopf.

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—, (1982 [1689]): Kurtze Catechismus-Predigten, in: Erich Beyreuther (ed.), Philipp Jacob Spener. Schriften, vol. II.2, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. —, (1999 [1700]): Theologische Bedencken, Theil I, in: Erich Beyreuther (ed.), Philipp Jacob Spener. Schriften, vol. XI.1, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Taylor, Charles (2007): A Secular Age, Cambridge: Belknap. Toon, Peter (1987): Born Again. A Biblical and Theological Study of Regeneration, Grand Rapids: Baker House. Valeri, Mark (1999): “Preface,” in: Jonathan Edwards: Works, vol. 17, Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733, ed. Mark Valeri, New Haven: Yale UP, pp. 3-44. Watkins, Owen C. (1972): The Puritan Experience. Studies in Spiritual Autobiography, New York: Schocken. Welch, Brian (2007): Save Me From Myself, New York: Harper Collins. Williams, George H. (1962): The Radical Reformation, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. The Westminster Confession (1647): 2nd ed., London: Evan Tyler, ccel.org: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.xvii.ii.html (last accessed Oct. 04 2016).

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Preachers’ Daughters Discourses of Presence and the Sensation of ‘Purity’ Monika Sauter

Since the sex drive is so powerful in all of us, particularly between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, it is often a parent’s greatest worry. Several times after performing weddings, I have heard the mothers of the brides say, “Thank God they are married; now I can relax!” It is obvious what they were afraid of – that their daughters might succumb to sexual temptation and either ruin their lives or start their marriage off with much harmful and unneeded baggage. (LaHaye/LaHaye 1993: 19)

In the 1993 advice book Against the Tide: Raising Sexually Pure Kids in an “Anything-Goes” World, Beverly and Tim LaHaye lament an alleged culture of sexual permissiveness in the US and offer correctives to the “universal concern parents have for their children’s well-being” from an evangelical perspective (1993: 19).1 Similar unease about young women’s sexuality also informs the ‘reality’ TV series Preachers’ Daughters (Lifetime), which is bluntly advertised as “a behind-the-altar look at what happens at home after the sermon” (Lifetime).2 In the following, I will discuss the first season of the show with regard to its discursive articulations of and references to (divine) ‘presence’ and demonstrate how they are entangled with the show’s construction of racialized femininity.3 I will specifically discuss how the series articulates an ‘ordinary presence’ of 1 | The LaHayes are widely known from a number of contexts. Tim was a member of the original board of the Moral Majority as well as the co-author of the popular Left Behind series. With Beverly he is best-selling author of The Act of Marriage (1998). Beverly is founder of Concerned Women for America (1978-), a conservative women’s organization dedicated to ‘pro-family’ lobbying. 2 | Preachers’ Daughters’ first season aired on Lifetime in 2013. The show has continued with a second season in 2014 and a third in 2015. 3 | It is also a construction of ‘hyper-masculine’ fatherhood. For a sociological per­ spective on US-American evangelical fatherhood see W. Bradford Wilcox (2004).

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the divine through its depiction of the everyday life of its protagonists as well as an ‘extraordinary presence’ through its staging of a ‘purity’ ring ceremony. Preachers’ Daughters is located somewhat curiously in (evangelical) discourses of teenage sexuality. On the one hand, it evidently portrays evangelical culture through its references to the necessity of being born-again, biblical authority, and religiously motivated ‘purity’ rituals; on the other hand, it relies on ‘reality’ TV conventions to negotiate gender within the dogma of ‘sex sells,’ an obvious sensationalism, and a partly exoticizing depiction (‘othering’) of evangelicalism as an allegedly concrete culture of US-American social conservatism.4 Yet, such seemingly opposing logics are suspended by a religious public feeling which negotiates gendered notions of coming of age as well as more particular cultural practices such as sexual abstinence through the stereotype of the ‘preacher’s daughter.’ It constructs a notion of ‘pure’ (white) femininity according to the norms of hegemonic evangelical family and gender ideology and presents an emotional and ideological coherence that resonates beyond a distinctly evangelical audience. I borrow the term ‘public feeling’ from the works of Ann Cvet­kovitch and Lauren Berlant, among others, to designate how privatized, intimately felt feelings and emotions are culturally and historically constructed as well as evoked in what is commonly understood as the public sphere (cf. Cvetkovitch 2012; Berlant 1997, 2008); this public feeling framework points to the conjunction of “how it feels” as well as how feelings are “produced by social forces” (Cvetkovitch 2012: 14). This thought notably harks back to the aforementioned cultural polysemy of Preachers’ Daughters: On the one hand, the series proclaims the importance of divine presence and (religious) intimacy in daily family life; on the other hand, these discursive articulations of heightened moments of experience and their intertwined feelings about ‘proper’ femininity are constructed in the voyeuristic and sensationalist format of ‘reality’ TV. Since the 1990s, discourses and feelings about sexual abstinence before marriage have again come to national prominence in the US.5 There have 4 | This article is part of a larger project on constructions of femininity in evangelical popular culture. Even though Preachers’ Daughters, arguably, is not a straightforward evangelical self-representation, I use the example to point to the ways in which (evangelical) popular culture simultaneously needs to be understood as a (selffashioning) subculture, (political) counterculture, and “corresponding culture” (Yochim 2010: 4). The project’s focus on various, complex processes of intracultural differentiation aims to designate how evangelical popular culture is culturally, medially, and ideologically “in constant conversation (or correspondence)” (ibid.) with nominally secular US culture. 5 | There have been numerous demands for abstinence throughout US-American history. Widely known examples are the temperance movement and Prohibition (1920-

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been vigorous political debates at the local level about sex education in school curricula and advocacy for the advantages of sexual abstinence for teenagers in the guise of a medical health discourse. Furthermore, until 2010, federal governments – both under the George W. Bush and the Bill Clinton admini­ strations – politically and financially supported so-called ‘abstinence-only’ programs in public schools.6 In popular entertainment culture, there have been teenage stars such as Britney Spears, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber who – if only at some point in their careers – publicly endorsed sexual abstinence before marriage. Since 2005, the vampire romance Twilight, whose subtext of sexual abstinence is embedded in a narrative about supernatural and superior love, has resonated with readers worldwide.7 Christine Seifert, however, discerns an ambivalence when she calls the books “abstinence porn” and maintains that “Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot” (2008: n.pag.). The recent talk of sexual abstinence has been culturally and historically contextualized as a reaction against the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s. Historian Janice Irvine shows that mainly conservative evangelicals and Catholics advanced these discussions, and rhetorically as well as emotionally shaped contemporary US-American “ways of talking” (2002: 10) about sexuality (cf. ibid. 3-12). She further argues that “issues related to sexuality have been at the center of political battles. Opposition to sex education was a bridge issue between the Old Right and the new Right” (ibid. 7). In Against the Tide, the LaHayes delineate this historical context as follows: “For about the last ninety years there has been a cultural war going on in this country between the entertainment industry and the church. Sexual permissiveness has been at the core of that cultural war” (1993: 15). Refuting such ‘culture war’ rhetoric, sociologist Christine J. Gardner’s study on evangelical abstinence campaigns reveals how “[e]vangelicals are using sex to ‘sell’ abstinence, shifting from a negative focus on ‘just say no’ to sex before marriage to a positive focus on ‘just say yes’ to great sex within marriage” (2011: 13). To this end, evangelical popular culture targets an audience with a diverse assortment including for instance fairy tales like Jenny Bishop’s The Princess and the Kiss (1999) as well as advice literature such as Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye (2004). Evangelical organizations, most famously True Love Waits (est. 1993), market ‘purity rings’ 1933) as well as forms of fasting and sexual abstinence from Puritan fast days to moral reform campaigns in the 19th century. Marie R. Griffith addresses such practices as part of “Christianity’s powerful role in the shaping of American bodies and varied forms of embodiment” (2004: xi). 6 | Discussions of these political and medical discourses can be found in Fields (2008), Gardner (2011), Greslé-Favier (2009), and Luker (2006). 7 | For a discussion of the abstinence discourse in Twilight see Ann Bliss (2010).

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as well as teaching material, and promote sexual abstinence at events where teenagers can swear ‘purity vows’ in an atmosphere that is reminiscent of rock concerts (cf. Gardner 2011: 1-10, 46).8 There have also been widely discussed ‘purity balls’ for fathers and their daughters where young girls are encouraged to commit themselves to remain sexually abstinent before marriage.9 Fathers and daughters, faith and ‘purity’ are also the case in point in Preachers’ Daughters. Aesthetically, the show follows the conventions of ‘reality’ TV; it uses “personal history as spectacle” and professes “to portray the real lives of ordinary people rather than scripted performance” (Godderis/Sears 2011: 182). As regards content, the show claims to depict the daily lives of three evangelical families and specifically spotlights the relationship between parents – mainly represented by the father/preacher figure – and their teenage daughters.10 The projected conflict arises from different views on the ‘proper’ behavior for young women: While the parents expect their daughters to be role models in church as well as to participate in family prayer and Bible study, the seeming­ ly rebellious daughters are interested in experiences beyond the religious and domestic realm. Preachers’ Daughters portrays an ordinary presence of the divine in the lives of the Koloffs, the Perrys, and the Colemans only to then depict how their teenage daughters seemingly disturb family norms. However, the show restores the intimacy of the familial-religious realm with the enactment of extraordinary moments of presence. As my analysis will show, these discursive articulations of presence not only construct the necessity of a ‘pure’ lifestyle for young women but are furthermore informed by stereotypical, implicit understandings about race that imagine ‘pure’ femininity as white.

8 | In the self-image of Christian ‘purity’ rhetoric, a ‘pure’ lifestyle has a number of connotations: “This purity goes beyond sexual purity. While physical purity is very important, God also wants us to pursue purity and blamelessness in our motives, our minds, and our emotions” (Harris 1997: 22). 9 | Lisa and Randy Wilson from Generations of Light in Colorado have invented the first ‘Purity Balls,’ which have come to national prominence through extended media exposure. See, for instance, the 2008 photo coverage in The New York Times (“A Purity Ball,” n.pag.). 10 | In the case of Kolby Koloff there is also a preacher mother. Whereas Kolby’s mother – a blunt sex preacher – serves as an educator, her father – the former wrestler Nikita, who has shared his conversion narrative in Wrestling with God – adopts the role of Kolby’s bodily protector, which is why I still argue that the main desire of the series revolves around the father/daughter couple.

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P resence , G ender , and S acred I ntimacy Preachers’ Daughters anticipates the central conflict between fathers and daughters in its promotional video: It stages a prayer scene in which the show’s protagonists kneel in front of their beds. The TV screen is split into two parts and each father’s bed meets his respective daughter’s in the middle of the frame. As a result, they appear to form a single marital bed. In the course of the prayer of the three father-daughter ‘couples,’ 16-year-old Kolby says: “Help me in my struggle to stay pure.” Her wish to remain ‘pure’ establishes the need for a divine as well as fatherly presence in a teenage girl’s life, and in a sensationalistic and voyeuristic manner intertwines a religious ritual – pointing to a believer’s assurance of a divine presence – with young women’s sexuality, gender, transgression, and (familial) intimacy.11 In order to critically discuss such interconnections between presence and the construction of femininity and intimacy, I am concerned with the discursive articulations and the formal-aesthetic enactment of presence in the ‘reality’ TV format of Preachers’ Daughters. The relevance of phenomena of presence has been debated in a variety of disciplines and discourses. For instance, considerations about the aesthetic of the sublime and of epiphany, notions of excess, and reflections on experiences of transcendence in nature, literature, and religious formations all indicate modes of intensive experience that seemingly go beyond meaningful understandings of such phenomena. These intensities are often described in economies and expressions of presence, such as the topos of unspeakability, seemingly inadequate attempts to explicate the experience in analytical and rational discourses as well as the reference to their immediacy and sudden eruption.12 In Preachers’ Daughters, certain scenes and cultural patterns – often portraying sentiments of faith and/or love – suggest and enact culturally specific moments of presence. Moreover, the protagonists’ religiously based self-image indicates the presence of the divine. In the introduction to Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, religious studies scholar Elizabeth Castelli writes 11 | The incestuous discourse apparent in the scene will be discussed in more detail in the analysis below. Please also note that the scene is misleading regarding the overall aesthetic of the series’ individual episodes. The video is a glossy advertising production, whereas the individual episodes follow the conventions of ‘reality’ TV shows such as Teen Mom. 12 | See, for instance, Gumbrecht and his conception of aesthetics as “moments of intensity” (2004: 96f.; emphasis in orig.) An understanding of religious experience as presence has been developed in Protestant discourse at least since the 18th century: See Schleiermacher ([1799] 2002), Otto (1918), Tillich (1961). For a religious studies perspective on such discourses, see Nehring (2013).

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about the processes of interchange between religious discourses and gender: “As soon as the divine is analogized to the human realm, gender emerges as a problem of both difference and power. Once that analogy has been mobilized, the two realms seem to oscillate endlessly back and forth, each reflecting and reinscribing the other’s claims” (2001: 4). Discourses of (divine) presence in Preachers’ Daughters draw attention to, but also obscure, “the complicated role that religion has played in identity formations, social relations, and power structures” (ibid. 5) – and I argue not only in regard to the show’s exaggerated constructions of gender but also to intersected categories of difference such as race and age. The prayer scene outlined above, for instance, codes the relationship between teenage women and fathers as one of romantic intimacy, and thus – besides its incestuous evocation of marital intimacy – entangles the notion of a divine presence with feelings of love. At the end of the trailer, Olivia, Taylor, and Kolby seemingly contravene the rules of behavior articulated in the prayer scene and sneak out of their bedrooms for a night out. Their departure is staged as a quasiironic violation of rigid family rules. Yet, the show’s evocative imagery, which highlights the young women’s sexuality, seemingly affirms the sentiment of the prayer, which identifies them in need “to stay pure.” Furthermore, it expresses the racialized logics of ‘chaste’ and ‘transgressing’ daughterhood, as the African American Taylor is the first to ‘undress’ and escape through her bedroom window. In this manner, the juxtaposition of the sexualized visual level with verbal expressions of strict family rules and “the struggle to stay pure” clearly indicates the voyeuristic, sensationalistic, as well as teasing allure of the show – for Preachers’ Daughters only on the surface negotiates ‘pure’ femininity at the nexus of religion and (familial) intimacy. The genre of ‘reality’ TV as an “enactment of privacy” (Bleicher 2012: 16; my transl.) already complicates the seemingly clear distinctions between the private, intimate, religious, and the public as well as the ‘real’ and its TV mediation. Observing how the genre of ‘reality’ TV blurs the lines between television’s “promise of information with its penchant for entertainment” (2005: 94), Misha Kavka argues: Offering a kind of ‘best of the worst’ showcase of television as apparatus, ‘reality’ TV programmes produce a sense of ‘reality’ as an effect of seemingly direct transmission: They are thus sites of ‘constructed unmediation’, where the technology involved in both production and post-production shapes a final product that comes across as unmediated, or real (ibid.; emphasis in orig.).

What is more, she suggests that performances of love in ‘reality’ TV are “curiously appropriate, for the confirmation of both – the ‘reality’ of the televisual world and the ‘reality’ of being in love – comes down to a matter of feeling” (ibid. 93).

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A number of scholars have attested to the importance of feelings and discourses of intimacy, especially in regard to their reciprocity with the allegedly clear binary oppositions private/public and personal/political.13 In Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life, Sally Gallagher writes: “Although a family’s experience may feel private, the organization of employment, education, and government all affect and are affected by what we do and think about in this private sphere” (2003: 4). Lisa Kintz accounts for the special role of religious conservative women in the “construction of feelings of sacred intimacy” (1997: 17) and argues that such feelings, which she sees effective in emotionalized politics about abortion, LGBT rights, and sex education, resonate via a “pedagogy of familiarity” (ibid. 19) that is evoked “through affect, through the strong emotions and feelings that are experienced as enigmatic and inarticulable” (ibid. 17f.). Lauren Berlant conceptualizes contemporary US-American public spheres as intimate spaces: “What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” (2008: viii; emphasis in orig.). Analyzing the affect and emotional knowledge evoked in contemporary US-American national culture, she demonstrates how feelings about “pornography, abortion, sexuality, and reproduction; marriage, personal morality, and family values” become politically hegemonic in a “world of public intimacy” (1997: 1).14 My use of religious public feeling seeks to designate how Preachers’ Daughters negotiates a sensationalistic anxiety about gender relations and young women’s sexuality with its constructions of sacred intimacy. First, I argue that Preachers’ Daughters’ enactment of struggling ‘pure’ femininity becomes culturally meaningful at the nexus of evangelical cultural practices and familiarized as well as romanticized “public intimacy.” Second, I maintain that established repertoires of public intimacy – such as the performances of love in the mode of ‘reality’ TV – make plausible discursive articulations of divine presence, which in turn add intensity to such feelings and elevate them in the logics of a religious discourse formation. With respect to Preachers’ Daughters’ negotiation of gender, these discursive articulations of (divine) presence evoke 13 | Moreover, as the historical sketch at the beginning of this article indicates, discourses on sexual chastity point beyond questions of personal resolutions in the contemporary US. As Gardner notes for a religious context: “For evangelicals, sexual abstinence is about more than just sex; it has political, as well as moral and religious, implications” (2011: 3). 14 | Drawing on Ann Cvetkovitch, I use “affect in a generic sense, rather than in the more specific Deleuzian sense, as a category that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways […]” (2012: 4; emphasis in orig.).

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and ‘authenticate’ – to use Alexis Shotwell’s term – an “affective and emotional understanding” of US-American (evangelical) teenage femininity (2011: xi).15

“G od has not called us to an uncle an life :” The P resentification of (W hite) ‘V irginit y ’ In a conversation with her friend Frankie, 18-year-old Olivia explicitly refers to the presence of the divine: “When we are worshipping, if you… sometimes like if you just put your hands out like you’re receiving a gift or something. Like God’s presence totally comes over you. Yeah. I think it would be awesome if you could, like, experience that” (S1E04 “Turning Water to Wine”). Notably, her comment is embedded in the informal forwardness of youth language. Moreover, the audience can only ‘hear’ her whispered remarks with the help of subtitles. This ‘reality’ TV convention has two functions: It aesthetically implements the ‘authenticity’ of the scene and affirms Olivia’s assurance about the presence of the divine in the prayer situation. Beyond such specific references to godly presence, Preachers’ Daughters audio-visualizes a spatially coded realm of experience that indicates an all-encompassing presence of the divine in the daily life of the Perrys, the Colemans, and the Koloffs. First and most prominently, each episode is framed by specific Bible verses that address the corresponding plotlines of the families. Their visual insertion is emphasized acoustically with distant bell-ringing as well as sounds that are reminiscent of wind, an aesthetic strategy which creates a somewhat distant and quasi-transcendent atmosphere. The very first verse used in Preachers’ Daughters reads: “God has not called us to an unclean life but to one of purity. Thessalonians 4:3-7” (S1E01 “Daddy’s Little Angels”). This Bible passage sets and unfolds the overarching theme of the show, and opens up a biblical frame of reference that is obviously intended to legitimize the focus on ‘purity.’ Furthermore, the verses’ decontextualization from their respective Bible passages functions as a prompt to translate their biblical relevance into the everyday life of the families. Simultaneously, the repeated insertion of Bible verses functions as an enactment of the ordinary presence of divine guidance. Secondly, each family setting is (re-)introduced during individual episodes by establishing shots that stage the respective daughter in front of her home church before the show continues its ‘reality’ TV sequences “behind the 15 | Shotwell employs the notion of “implicit understanding” (xi) to give prominence to tacit modes of knowing in all social experience (ix-x). In this conceptualization, “affective and emotional understanding” is closely attached to “practical, skill-based knowledge; somatic or bodily knowing; [and] potentially propositional but currently implicit knowledge” (xi).

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pulpit.” This collapse of the separation of religious and domestic spaces is further maintained by the fact that the TV show’s prying look into the families’ lives often focuses on devotional time. These spatial constructions demonstrate that the families’ talk of the importance of faith governs everyday events and thus construct the notion that God’s presence is an exclusive part of family life. Such entanglements of piety and domesticity hark back to the ideology of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood,’ which historian Barbara Welter has identified as prevalent for the 19th century. Welter describes the ideological investment of the religious construction of femininity: “One reason religion was valued was that it did not take a woman away from her ‘proper sphere,’ her home” (1966: 153). In a quasi-modernized version of this thinking, the show’s spatial logics and their gendered ascriptions suggest that Kolby, Olivia, and Taylor can only experience (divine) presence in the confines of the private home and church space. Yet, the show focuses on how the experiences of Olivia, Taylor and Kolby as teenage women cannot be reconciled with such narrow confines. The first episode, “Daddy’s Little Angel,” sets the tone in this regard. We observe Kolby and her father over dinner while she announces somewhat queryingly: “I think 16 is the appropriate age for dating.” Olivia confesses to her parents that she is not sure who the father of her baby child is: “There is something I need to tell you guys. […] You not gonna like it.” Taylor laments her father’s strict rules in a conversation with her sister. Imagining what she would do if she were not a preacher’s daughter she says: “I mean I did one time think about being a porn star.” Her exposure is further exploited in the show. After Taylor introduces herself in the style of a ‘reality’ TV confessional for the first time, a seemingly ‘self-recorded’ video is edited into the show, in which she says: Everybody expects that I’m this girl who is always in her bible but I am not like this. I like boys and I like being around them and they like being around me. The reason why my alter ego is kind of why I wanna be a porn star is because it’s all the attention and it feels like you are free. You are really free. And I wanna be free. I’m tired of being in this little safe sheltered life. (S1E01)

Her remarks are emphasized visually by the insertion of ‘self-made’ pictures, some of which show her in openly sexualized poses. Embedding such seemingly lifelike dialogues as well as practices in the opening scenes of the show, “Daddy’s Little Angel” sets the scene for rebellious teenage femininity in a dialectic between ‘purity’ and ‘hypersexuality’ as a quasi-normal disturbance in the lives of the three families. However, the confessionals show precisely the close connection between intimately coded ‘reality’ TV and evangelical practices. Religious studies scholar Kathryn Lofton writes in Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon about the mode of exposure: “Exposure is therefore a necessary

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component of the make-over process. Such disclosing testimony defines talk show television [and ‘reality’ TV, MS] and is, as many observers have argued a variety of “evangelical disclosure” (2011: 89). In Preachers’ Daughters such (evangelical) disclosure is confirmed through the staging, i.e. the voyeuristic practices, of self-fashioning confession, overheard dialogue, and the insertion of visual ‘amateur’ material. Taylor’s seemingly sensational disclosure in this manner, on a visual level, clearly turns from the shallow teasing quality of the promotional to a sensationalism about racist stereotypes that is connected to watching the show. The representation of Taylor is paradigmatic for Preachers’ Daughters sensationalist anxiety about young women’s sexuality and its interconnected constructions of racial otherness. For a start, her parents’ reactions are portrayed as moments of emotional consternation. Whereas her mother asks Taylor “what’s this about some porno,” the audience witnesses preacher Coleman in a personal moment of prayer: “Please Lord, don’t ever let my daughter become a porn star.” Taylor’s representation as transgressing and rebellious is thus affirmed. Along these lines, she oversteps her parent’s rules of behavior throughout the whole season. In the first episode she is seen kissing a boy at the poolside in a bathing suit that her sister would call “something a stripper would wear” (S1E01 “Daddy’s Little Angels”); in “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” (S1E02), she sneaks out and meets her girlfriends only to go to a private hotel room party with boys; in “Dancing with the Devil” (S1E05), she participates in a photo shoot for her friend’s CD cover. The show’s recurring obsession with her impulsive comments about pornography in particular and her interest in boys in general, imagines Taylor as sexually excessive. In her seminal work Ain’t I a Woman, critic bell hooks stresses that this oversexualization and stereotyping of African-American femininity has a long history and has, in fact, been effective since slavery: [...] [A] devaluation of black womanhood […] permeated the psyches of all Americans and shaped the social statues of all black women once slavery ended. One has only to look at American television twenty-four hours a day for an entire week to learn the way in which black women are perceived in American society – the predominant image is that of the “fallen” woman, the whore, the slut, the prostitute. (1981: 52)

Preachers’ Daughters’ representation of Taylor reproduces and affirms such racist stereotypes in the portrayal of sensationalist, religiously motivated chastity. This is even more obvious in relation to the depiction of the two other young women. Kolby’s plotline mainly revolves around her wish to start dating. She gets to know Micah, a pastor’s son. On the first date already they share a kiss. However, she doubts her own maturity for dating as she ponders her parent’s

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marital struggles. In one of the most shock-seeking scenes, she breaks into tears after she learns that her married sister has had sex with her husband before their wedding day. As a result of her reaction and her concern about whether she should have a boyfriend, Kolby embodies a quasi-‘authentic’ version of ‘pure’ religious femininity and represents a “troubling idealization of white women’s virginity” (Fields 2008: 6). The link between whiteness and ‘pure’ femininity is further emphasized in that Olivia, single parent of a little baby girl, takes on the role of ‘virgin mother.’ While she time and again doubts her renewed decision to live a life without partying and alcohol, her ‘transgressions’ throughout the show always involve her sisters and in this manner are bound by family norms. She and her sisters participate, for instance, in a photo shoot for a Christian clothing line without prior permission of their father. In “Saints vs. Sinners” (S1E06), her transgression firmly puts her in mainstream US-American culture as she decides to take her baby trick-or-treating on Halloween, a holiday that her parents oppose for its ‘un-Christian’ origins. Despite the fact that Olivia already had sex, she represents what is called “second virginity” (Gardner 2011: 32). Gardner describes the effectiveness of such examples in the ‘purity’ movement as “embodied argument in support of abstinence” (ibid. 57). Thus, even though Taylor, Kolby, and Olivia seemingly all struggle with their strict parents, they embody three possible roles for women that, furthermore, implicitly link whiteness to ‘virginity’ and motherhood, and blackness to ‘hypersexuality.’ This construction is made possible by a racialized ‘common sense’16 and an emotional understanding of femininity which allow for the ideological correspondence of evangelical and sensationalist notions of young womanhood. The (spatial) transgression of ordinary presence of the divine and its implicit racial construction is disciplined by extraordinary moments of presence. In “Naughty and Nice” (S1E07), Taylor is expected to repeat the church’s “Purity and Passion class.” The study group is concluded with a festive father and daughter dance as well as a ring ceremony to (re-)pledge ‘purity vows.’ Only moments before Taylor is supposed to publicly renew her promise of ‘virginity,’ she again voices her doubts in a ‘reality’ TV confessional. Describing the moment as an intensive experience, she says: “My heart is beating really fast, and I am thinking oh my God I do not wanna do this […]. Standing in front of all of these people, from the church and everywhere else, my Dad is looking at me dead in my eyes, my Mom is looking at me and I don’t know if I can do 16 | Shotwell maintains that ‘common sense’ “[i]n sometimes benign and sometimes troubling ways […] goes without saying or is contingently unspeakable” (2011: xii). In reference to Gramsci, she uses the term to designate a shared understanding that functions unquestioned and unmarked, despite of, for instance, complex processes of racialization and gendering (cf. ibid. 29f.).

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it.” After her disclosure, the following Bible verse is shown: “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. Corinthians 14:33.” Back in the mode of the TV confessional, Taylor decides: “Ultimately this is my commitment between me and God, so I’m gonna make the commitment that I know I can keep. I’m willing to commit to not having sexual intercourse.” The viewer then witnesses this resolution in the moment of the actual ring ceremony. In an evangelical context, the importance of a personal experience of the divine is stressed by the necessity of conversion, a moment that is shared and discursified as a personal experience of godly presence.17 Literary critic Wayne Booth describes typical Protestant conversions as “dramatic, sudden, shattering, moving from depravity to a sudden inflowing of grace” (1995: 390) and thus invokes attributes of presence. Taylor’s ‘struggle with purity’ and the presentification of ‘virginity’ follow the same pattern, and thus intimately connect her reconciliation with faith to the prerequisite of young women’s ‘purity.’ In this way, the show imagines sexually abstinent femininity as the result of a theological certainty of a personal relationship with God, i.e. the extraordinary presence of the divine.18 Portrayed as the decisive moment in the conflict between Taylor and her father, the sequence, furthermore, shows a quasi-triangulation of authority: Taylor’s rebellion is suspended in her personal commitment “between me and God.” The biblical frame of reference, Corinthians 14:33, seemingly no longer functions as a contradiction but instructs her acceptance of sexual chastity. Yet, Preacher Coleman introduces the evening in their church with the following words: “It is a wonderful event and it is to honor our daughters. And it’s for us fathers to make a commitment to our daughters and our daughters to make a commitment to the Lord” (S1E07 “Naughty and Nice”). His words frame the event as a special celebration and rhetorically enclose daughters between their fathers and “the Lord.” Taylor’s appropriation of ‘purity’ is thus exposed as a tripling of authority through the God/priest/father-figure. This becomes especially accentuated during the moment of the ring exchange in the ceremony, which in ‘purity movement’ rhetoric has been dubbed a “wedding with a twist.”19 Taylor repeats after her father: “Today I commit myself to the 17 | According to D.W. Bebbington, the main characteristics of evangelicalism are an emphasis on the need of conversion – “conversionism,” the emphasis on the bible as God’s inerrant word – “biblicism,” a focus on Jesus Christ as the personal savior – “crucicentrism,” as well as witnessing – “activism” (1989: 3), which describes the idea that every believer has to share his personal faith to others in order to proselytize. 18 | Klaus Lösch and Heike Paul focus on the “all-American conversion narrative” as a cultural pattern (2013: 173) and understand it as a culturally specific discursive articulation of ‘presence’ that has been remarkably powerful in US- American culture and history (cf. ibid. 173-77). 19 | See the documentary Daddy I Do (2010).

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Lord until the day that I marry. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” Then, she and the other participants receive a ring by their fathers. The choreography of the ring ceremony obviously draws on contemporary US-American wedding culture and re-enacts wedding rituals. In an article on presence, tacit knowledge, and Otherness, Klaus Lösch and Heike Paul argue that the dramaturgy of weddings can be considered as an attempt to perpetuate the experience of love as presence in a socially intelligible ritual (cf. 2013: 169). Following this line of thought, the ritual of Taylor’s ‘purity vow’ evokes the otherwise inexpressible experience of divine love and performs it as fatherly devotion. The ceremony consequently is portrayed as the reconciliation between Taylor and her family. In ‘purity movement’-rhetoric this sentiment is understood as a necessarily preceding experience to the delayed gratification of elevated devotion in the context of Christian marriage. Joshua Harris, for instance, – Christian bestselling author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye – titles his second chapter “The Joy of Intimacy Is the Reward of Commitment” (2004: 25). In the logic of the show, Taylor’s ‘purity’ vow as an enactment of (divine) presence functions as a reconciliation with living a ‘faithful’ life, as a marker of ‘proper’ maturity as well as a restoration of familial affection. Along these lines, Preachers’ Daughters’ enactment of daughterly rebellion and family affection translate the Bible verse “God has not called us to an unclean life but to one of purity. Thessalonians 4:3-7” (S1E01 “Daddy’s Little Angels”) into the repertoire of (sacred) intimacy. Despite such an evangelical understanding of (familial) intimacy, the notion of ‘marrying’ daughters off to God and their fathers clearly has incestuous overtones. Heather Hendershot identifies a strong Oedipal dimension in conservative Christian abstinence media in general: [...] Christian media have ways of making [abstinence discourses] seem rather unpleasant, even infusing [...] [them] with Oedipal overtones. Magazines, videos, and advice books urge sexually aroused teens to stymie sexual feelings by picturing the faces of all their relatives, as well as Jesus. Although the intention may be simply to make kids feel guilty, there is also a creepy Oedipal dimension to picturing your mother’s or father’s face whenever you are sexually aroused. Boys and girls are encouraged to imagine dates as siblings and to “date” their parents. (2004: 95)

The enactment of marital intimacy in the promotional video, the ritual of Taylor’s ‘purity’ ceremony in the figuration of quasi-marital intimacy as well as countless other scenes that depict the interactions between fathers and daughters without doubt portray the life of the three families as almost

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exclusively oriented around the relationship God/father and daughter.20 Yet, in terms of the show’s construction of (visual) pleasure, i.e. the voyeurism directed at the daughters, such Oedipal or Electra desire is clearly inverted. Hence, Taylor’s ‘purity’ ceremony is neither a testimony to familial care nor a displacement of sexual desire from daughter to father, but a sexualization of the figuration God/father and daughter, which establishes patriarchal authority as well as the need to stay ‘pure.’ Due to the obsessive focus on sexuality, the show might also easily be dismissed as a distinct othering and exoticising of evangelical culture and its normative constructions of gender. Such an easy dismissal, however, ignores the sensationalistic desire of the show as ‘reality’ TV as well as the implicit logic of Preachers’ Daughters to construct sexual abstinence as the only and right choice for young women. Preachers’ Daughter is clear about the significance of (sacred) intimacy for Olivia, Kolby, and Taylor. This becomes most obvious in the first season’s second to last episode (S1E09 “Hallelujah”), in which Olivia makes public her decision to live a faithful life via the ritual of baptism. As the last instance of presence in the first season of the show, her baptism has a cathartic function. It ends the first season in regard to its narrative and performative depiction of the necessity of ‘purity’ as the godly mode of teenage femininity and ‘authenticates’ this understanding by enacting the ritual as a moment of accentuated experience of worship. Along these lines, Preachers’ Daughters enacts sexual abstinence and ‘pure’ femininity as the only way to achieve sacred and familial intimacy. The alleged maturity to choose entangles the process of coming of age with ‘faithful,’ ‘pure’ femininity. Thus, at the end of season one, Taylor is allowed to go on a date, Olivia gets baptized, and Kolby’s parents share a first family meal after years of marital separation. Yet, the ending of the first season carries forward the continuing and disciplining presence of the fathers: the last minutes of the season show them while they are preaching. Preachers’ Daughters’ presentifications of the divine codify ‘pure’ femininity as a religious experience and thus obscure their underlying ideologies of family, gender, and race.

20 | This almost obsessive focus as well as its generational logic is further emphasized by the conspicuous absence of motherly authority and male siblings. Of course, mothers are present in Preachers’ Daughters and to a certain degree they also have a say – most obviously in the case of Kolby’s mother. However, I read Kolby’s preacher mother as an attempt to ‘authenticate’ the three family structures and as such as a distraction from the obvious focus on the incestuous dimension of the father/daughter ‘couple.’

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‘R e alit y ’ T V and R eligious P ublic F eeling Taylor’s performance of ‘pure’ daughterhood, moreover, paradigmatically points to various intricacies of the private and the public in the show’s “enactment of privacy” (Bleicher 2012: 16; my transl.). On an intradiegetic level, her sister, mother, and father as well as the wider church community attend the ritual and thus attest to what Taylor describes as a personal commitment to “the Lord.” Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor argues: “The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission” (2003: 25). Her statement is helpful in two regards. First, by displaying how the church audience witnesses Taylor, the scene paradigmatically demonstrates a shared certainty of God’s presence in everyone’s lives.21 What is more, the participation of the congregation functions as a means to produce a normative performance of femininity. Understanding the ceremony as a reproduction of ‘knowing what is feminine,’ the scene codifies and establishes ‘pure’ teenage femininity (as well as ‘loving fatherhood’) as the communal expectation. Second, on an extradiegetic level, the ‘reality’ show shares the portrayed certainty about the presence of the divine and the interconnected constructions of femininity with the television viewers. Describing the seeming paradox of the constructedness of ‘reality’ TV, Kavka argues: “To accept both – that viewers know that it is set-up and yet the level of actuality in these shows is important – would be to understand that the appeal of ‘reality’ TV lies precisely in its performance of ‘reality’ in a way that matters” (2005: 94; emphasis in orig.). With regard to Preachers’ Daughters’ evocations of public feelings, therefore, the question does not concern the obvious constructedness of the show. Regardless of whether the TV audience understands the ‘reality’ of the show as constructed, Preachers’ Daughters evokes and ‘authenticates’ sentiments about (familial) love and faith as ‘real.’ In this manner, Taylor’s ‘purity’ ritual evokes a religious public feeling as a possible closure for Preachers’ Daughters’ excessive concerns about sexualized femininity for Taylor’s family as well as for the viewers. Nonetheless, further ‘transgressions’ of Olivia, Taylor, and Kolby inform the rest of the first season, for its allegedly ‘never-ending’ serialized aesthetic can only be upheld by the recurrence and repetition of generational conflict. The first season of Preachers’ Daughters ends with the teaser “To Be Continued” (S1E09 “Hallelujah”). This visual announcement aesthetically corresponds with the insertion of the biblical verses and in this way establishes an intimate link between biblical 21 | This thought, for instance, harks back to the notion that Puritan conversion narratives had to be told in front of the congregation in order to prove one’s spiritual experience (cf. Caldwell 1985).

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legitimacy as guidance for young women’s ‘purity’ and the conventions of the serial format. While the show vouches for the accuracy of this portrayal through its promise of ‘authenticity,’ it expresses a seemingly justified and possibly ‘never-ending’ public sensationalism about racialized young femininity as a religious public feeling. Preachers’ Daughters’ enactment of presence, i.e. the sequencing of ordinary (divine) presence, the disruption by rebellious daughters, and its restoration through moments of extraordinary presence stages the necessity for sexual chastity for young (evangelical) women. In its voyeuristic negotiation of the private in the public format of ‘reality’ TV as well as in its depiction of the relationship between religious fathers and their seemingly estranged daughters, the show evokes the sensation of ‘purity’ as a religious public feeling. It is affirmed, ‘authenticated,’ and naturalized via its construction of black womanhood vis-à-vis sacred intimacy and taps into implicit stereotypes about race and gender that imagine ‘pure’ femininity as white. Along these lines, Preachers’ Daughters’ portrayal of the sensation of ‘purity’ is endowed with cultural meanings that point to widespread anxieties about young women’s sexuality which matter both in the evangelical discourse formation and in the sensationalist format of ‘reality’ TV.

W orks C ited Bebbington, D.W. (1989): Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, London: Unwin Hyman. Berlant, Lauren (1997): The Queen of America Goes to Washington. Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham: Duke UP. —. (2008): The Female Complaint. The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham: Duke UP. Bishop, Jenny (1999): The Princess and the Kiss. A Story of God’s Gift of Purity, illustr. Preston McDaniels, Anderson: Warner. Bleicher, Joan Kristin (2012): “Inszenierte Wirklichkeit. Formen der Hybridisierung von Dokumentation und Fiktion im Reality-TV,” in: Frank Brinkmann (ed.), Scripts, Fiktionen, Konstruktionen. Theologische, kirchliche und popkulturelle Anmerkungen zu Reality-TV und gefühlsechtem Leben, Jena: Reskeia, pp. 13-22. Bliss, Ann V. (2010): “Abstinence, American Style,” in: Amy M. Clarke/Marijane Osborn (eds.), The Twilight Mystique. Critical Essays on the Novels and Films, Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 107-120. Booth, Wayne C. (1995): “The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Conversion Nar­ ratives,” in: Martin E. Marty/R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalism Comprehended, Chicago: Chicago UP, pp. 367-395.

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Caldwell, Patricia (1985): The Puritan Conversion Narrative. The Beginning of American Expression, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Castelli, Elizabeth A. (2001): “Women, Gender, Religion. Troubling Categories and Transforming Knowledge,” in: Elizabeth A. Castelli (ed.), Women, Gender, Religion. A Reader, New York: Palgrave, pp. 3-28. Cvetkovich, Ann (2012): Depression. A Public Feeling, Durham: Duke UP. Daddy I Do (2010): USA, dir. Cassie Jaye. Ernst, Christoph/Paul, Heike (eds.) (2013): Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, Bielefeldt: transcript. Fields, Jessica (2008): Risky Lessons. Sex Education and Social Inequality, New Brunswick: Rutgers. Gallagher, Sally K. (2003): Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life, New Brunswick: Rutgers. Gardner, Christine J. (2011): Making Chastity Sexy. The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns, Berkeley: U of California P. Godderis, Rebecca/Sears, Camilla A. (2011): “Roar Like a Tiger on TV?,” in: Feminist Media Studies 11.2, pp. 181-195. Greslé-Favier, Claire (2009): ‘Raising Sexually Pure Kids.’ Sexual Abstinence, Conservative Christians, and American Politics, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Griffith, Mary R. (2004): Born Again Bodies. Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, Berkeley: U of California P. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): The Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford UP. Harris, Joshua (2004): I Kissed Dating Goodbye. A New Attitude toward Romance and Relationships, Colorado Springs: Multnomah. Hendershot, Heather (2004): Shaking the World for Jesus. Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, Chicago: U of Chicago P. hooks, bell (1981): Ain’t I a Woman. Black Women and Feminism, London: Pluto Press. Irvine, Janice M. (2002): Talk about Sex. The Battles over Sex Education in the United States, Berkeley: U of California P. Kavka, Misha (2005): “Love ‘n the Real; or, How I Learned to Love ‘Reality’ TV,” in: Geoff King (ed.), The Spectacle of the Real. From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 93-104. Kintz, Linda (1997): Between Jesus and the Market. The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America, Durham: Duke UP. LaHaye, Beverly/LaHaye, Tim (1993): Against the Tide. How to Raise Sexually Pure Kids in an “Anything-Goes” World, Colorado Springs: Multnomah. —. (1998): The Act of Marriage. The Beauty of Sexual Love, Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

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Lofton, Kathryn (2011): Oprah. The Gospel of an Icon, Berkeley: U of California P. Lösch, Klaus/Paul, Heike (2013): “Präsenz, implizites Wissen und Fremdheit aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” in: Ernst/Paul, Präsenz und implizites Wissen, pp. 151-183. Luker, Kristin (2006): When Sex Goes to School. Warring Views on Sex and Sex Education since the Sixties, New York: Norton. Nehring, Andreas (2013): “Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Religionswissenschaftliche Perspektiven,” in: Ernst/Paul, Präsenz und implizites Wissen, pp. 341-372. Otto, Rudolf (1918): Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. Breslau: Trewendt (2. ed.). Preachers’ Daughters (2013-): USA, prod. Adam Freeman et al. “A Purity Ball,” The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/ slideshow/2008/05/19/us/0519-PURITY_index.html (last accessed April 30 2014). These intensities are often described in economies and expressions of presence, such as the topos of unspeakability and the inadequacy of attempts to explicate the experience in analytical and rational discourses as well as the reference to their immediacy and sudden eruption.12 Schleiermacher, Friedrich David ([1799] 2002): Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten und ihren Verächtern, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck. (8. ed.) Seifert, Christine (2008): “Bite Me! (Or Don’t),” Bitch Magazine: http:// bitchmagazine.org/article/bite-me-or-dont (last accessed Jan. 6 2016). Shotwell, Alexis (2011): Knowing Otherwise. Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Taylor, Diane (2003): The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham: Duke UP. Tillich, Paul (1961): Wesen und Wandel des Glaubens. Frankfurt: Ullstein. Welter, Barbara (1966): “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in: American Quarterly 18.2, pp. 151-174. Wilcox, Bradford W. (2004): Soft Patriarchs, New Men. How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, Chicago: Chicago UP. Yochim, Emily C. (2010): Skate Life. Re-Imagining White Masculinity, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.

II. Ab-Use, Paranoia, Decay: The (Extra)Ordinary Presence of the Past

Heidegger Ab-Used Thinking (Extra)Ordinary Presences between Place and Planet Florian Tatschner

I ntroduction The very mention of the name Martin Heidegger is anathema to many working in the fields of cultural and literary studies. The reasons for a cautious treatment of his work are without a doubt valid. They usually pertain to his relationship with National Socialism and how it may or may not be connected to his thought. The recent publication of his infamous Black Notebooks renders this connection even more problematic (cf. Trawny 2014: 119). The fundamental question, therefore, arises of how to deal with Heidegger’s philosophy today. While many scholars certainly still consider the critical analysis of his oeuvre a worthwhile endeavor, most would probably regard an integration of his ideas into the current endeavors of cultural and literary studies as – to put it euphemistically – a highly questionable ambition. Nonetheless, the (ad-)venture of integrating Heidegger into new, broader perspectives is bolstered – maybe for some surprisingly so – by postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha. The epigraph of his seminal The Location of Culture reads as follows: “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing” (2004: 1; original emphasis). It is taken from Heidegger’s article “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and testifies to the influence of the German philosopher on Bhabha’s thought. In fact, such central terms as “location” and “dwelling” are also borrowed from Heidegger – borrowed, however, with a twist: “[b]y taking terms from Heidegger and putting them to new uses, he mimics Heidegger without being quite the same” (Riquelme 1998: 552), unhinges the terminology “from its apparent moorings” (ibid. 543), and, thereby, alludes to possibilities in Heidegger’s thought yet undeveloped by himself; possibilities that point toward a radical reconceptualization of how one “is” within an ever-increasingly globalizing world. In what follows, I will build on Bhabha’s approach. Instead of reproducing either end of the usual diametrical opposition

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of sympathetic apology and utter condemnation, I am going to try to engage with Heidegger’s work in another way, namely by way of what Gayatri Spivak has recently called “‘ab-use’/‘use from below’” (2012: 11): a creative sabotage which teases out of Western thought forgotten or sidelined potentials instead of rejecting it altogether. That is to say, I will show Heidegger to argue things he most probably did not have in mind, but that can still be inferred from his writings: particularly through engaging with his playful way of dealing with (the German) language, I am going to argue that, via Heidegger’s philosophy, it becomes possible to outline a certain mode of being between the local and the global that remains open for the (extra-)ordinary presences of the other(s) in works of literature and beyond. I will perform this ab-use of Heidegger in three interrelated steps. In the first section, I am going to critique Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s interpretation of Heidegger’s struggle of world and earth as a form of “oscillation:” reading Heidegger instead with Walter Mignolo’s border gnosis, I will address some central pitfalls to be avoided with regard to my notion of presencing. Taking into account Heidegger’s critique of the Western aesthetic tradition, in section two, I will tease out the potential of the philosopher’s particular understanding of attunement, namely by reading it with what Alexis Shotwell calls “sensuous knowledge.” I am going to tie this attuned sensuousness – as an embodied, localized mode of engaging with phenomena – to Heidegger’s Besinnung (mindfulness) in the sense of Be-Sinnung (the addition of senses), so as to describe it as a mode of sense-sensitizing that is relevant for thinking presence within culturally plural societies (cf. Mignolo 2012: xi). Lastly, in section three, I will interweave the different strands of my argument: drawing on JeanFrançois Lyotard’s dyad of discourse and figure, I will link the notion of attuned sensuousness with Heidegger’s concepts of human (un-)homeliness and poetic dwelling in/through literature and beyond by way of his reading of Antigone. Before I begin, I would also like to point out that although my argument is situated in the context of American cultural and literary studies, I hope it will also provide sufficient angles for further interdisciplinary exchange.

O scill ation and C ounterturning With Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, published in 2004, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht established himself as a major advocate of a return to a notion of “presence” in current academic discourse. In a sweeping critique of modern Western thought, he identifies Descartes’s separation between res cogitans and res extensa as the climax of an intellectual development that resulted in the apotheosis of the mind as the only valid instrument of producing knowledge (cf. 33). Gumbrecht argues that, because of the ensuing split

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between subject and object, the humanities have forgotten affective matters of presence with an impact on bodies; that is, the relevance of spatio-sensual modes of relating to literary texts. More recently, Gumbrecht has connected his idea of presence to the German term Stimmung, meaning mood, tuning, or attunement. He argues that what he terms “‘[r]eading for Stimmung’ always means paying attention to the textual dimension of the forms that envelop us and our bodies as a physical reality” (2012: 5). For him, this can give rise to pre-reflective moments of encounter with a pure presence that “exclusively appeal[s] to the senses” (2004: xv), and, thus, points toward qualities of literature irreducible to the confines of Western metaphysics. Therefore, Gumbrecht’s epistemological quest is bound to a rejection of the hermeneutic paradigm or what he calls the “institutionally uncontested central position in the humanities of interpretation” (ibid. 21). He believes that this entails the sidelining of materiality as a mere obstacle to be overcome “in order to identify a meaning (i.e. something spiritual) that is supposed to lie behind or beneath it” (ibid. 25). This means that, in Gumbrecht’s work, meaning forms the antithesis of presence – the two concepts are regarded as diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Still, Gumbrecht regards presence and meaning as equally important for approaching worldly phenomena. Due to their supposed incommensurability, he thinks their relationship as “an oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects” (ibid. 107) – and it is from here that a critique of his thought will pave the way for a return to Heidegger’s philosophy. The metaphor of an oscillation between two static poles, no matter how irregular the movement between them is imagined, betrays Gumbrecht’s indebtedness to a form of thinking he initially sets out to overcome: as oscillation, the dynamics between presence and meaning remains controlled by the schematic binarism of a Cartesian coordinate system. Hence, the strategy of establishing presence next to meaning mirrors the Romantic effort of elevating sensuality to an equally important status as reason. In fact, one of the most important Romantic thinkers, Friedrich Schlegel, even goes beyond Gumbrecht’s notion of oscillation by regarding presence and meaning as always already reciprocally permeating, inseparable, and, to some extent, indistinguishable. In his Athenäum journal fragments, Schlegel describes presence as withdrawing ad infinitum (cf. 2005: 172): foreshadowing Heidegger’s philosophy, he regards it as ever self-concealing, subject to “eternal striving” and “constant longing” (Beiser 2003: 128). Gumbrecht, however, by not challenging the dichotomy of presence and meaning itself, reproduces the subject/object-paradigm upon which the division of sensuality and rationality is founded. He, ultimately, falls short of his own goals, and his call for an epistemological shift turns out to be more anachronistic and less profound than he would like to think.

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This binary reasoning revives issues that Gumbrecht’s declared archenemies – cultural studies and (feminist) deconstruction – have been criticizing since the 1960s. Reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s notorious polemic against the “School of Resentment” (1994: 7), Gumbrecht’s own dismissal of these approaches goes hand in hand with a disregard for their core issues of gender, race, and class. Drawing attention to the significance of corporeality as something supposedly radically new exposes his reluctance to take into account existing work in gender and queer studies. Reaffirming Western phallogocentrism, Gumbrecht’s fantasy of a presence free from semiotic taint entails fetishizing the passive female body – as his lustful comments on young beautiful women standing next to him at the copying machine reveal (cf. 2004: 97). He again strips the body of its epistemological potential by reducing it to an object for aesthetic contemplation. Although Gumbrecht critiques the scrutiny of interpretation, he does not notice this penetrating quality in his male gaze; a lewd stare that does not constitute a mutual spatio-sensual encounter, but only a unidirectional gaze of exploitative objectification. Gumbrecht’s engagement with (foreign) cultures also indicates a lingering Cartesianism in his work. He argues that “the recourse to pre- or nonmetaphysical cultures and discourses of the past” (ibid. 78) is a useful way of thinking about matters of presence. For him, medieval and pre-Socratic cultures had an affinity for presence while he considers modern culture as mostly meaning-oriented. According to his Eurocentric logic, today there either are no more “presence-cultures” or they must be considered anachronistic curiosities. Thus, the modern culture he imagines is certainly not the pluralistic society of the contemporary US, where several groups – such as Native Americans – still do value spatio-sensual modes of engaging the world; which does not expose them as less modern, but only confirms that non-European modes of knowing occupy a subaltern position in Western epistemology, and none at all in Gumbrecht’s work. The fact that his epistemological quest entails reaffirming the insular perspective of the academic ivory tower also reveals that his modifications are a lot less drastic than he believes. Gumbrecht writes that a remote position ensures “the possibility of thinking what cannot be thought in our everyday worlds” (ibid. 127). Although defined as corporeal, he insists that presencephenomena are “feelings of intensity that we cannot find in the historically and culturally specific everyday worlds that we inhabit” (ibid. 99). Hence, he contradicts himself again by integrating Cartesianism on yet another level. His ignorance of what happens outside the ivory tower seems rather elitist and hypocritical and testifies to an epistemological superiority complex. Gumbrecht’s work takes on a rather esoteric character, as his epiphanies of pristine presence are reserved for a priestly class or caste of academic acolytes.

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What this suggests is that playing off presence against meaning in such a binary manner results in a return to some of Western thought’s central pitfalls. It is certainly worthwhile to draw attention to the significance of corporeal aspects and sensual perception – also in the context of literature. However, opposing them to hermeneutics reproduces Cartesian reasoning. Gumbrecht’s concept of pure presence only works if opposed to a narrow understanding of interpretation. He misses that the radical challenge, which the acknowledgment of presence and Stimmung in literary texts poses, is to think the possibility of revising the meaning of meaning as something not exclusively metaphysical (cf. Hajduk 2012: 143f.). In other words, the challenge lies in thinking the ambiguity of “sense” as (meta-)physical, and regarding presence and meaning as always already inextricably interwoven. Here, I can now transition to Heidegger’s philosophy. It is going to function as a pathway, first, for developing a more nuanced take on the relationship between meaning and presence, and, eventually, for outlining a sense-sensitized mode of existence between the local and the global. Gumbrecht develops his conceptualization of oscillation by failing to grasp the scope of the dynamics between what Heidegger in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” respectively refers to as “world” and “earth.” Heidegger himself, rather abstractly, describes world as self-opening openness and earth as self-secluding shelter upon which the world rests: World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. Yet the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there. (2011d: 111)

Gumbrecht reads this in analogy to the relationship of presence and meaning: colored by his contention that materiality and hermeneutics oppose each other, he holds that earth designates “things appearing in their primordial material qualities” (2004: 74) and “seen independently of their cultural situations,” whereas world signifies discursive “configurations of things in the context of specific cultural situations” (ibid. 76). Although Gumbrecht grants that the two are inseparable, he erroneously conceives of this inseparability as an agonistic being-together of opponents in divergence (cf. ibid.). Heidegger himself does describe the struggle between world and earth as a “rift,” too, albeit a rather peculiar one: “Strife is not a rift [Riss], as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other [...]. This rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings what opposes measure and boundary into its common outline (2011d: 121; my emphases). When considering that what

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the translation here casts as “opponents” reads “die Gegenwendigen” (2003b: 51) in the original German, literally meaning “the counterturning ones,” then Heidegger’s rift takes on a decidedly different character. It does not emphasize a diverging movement, but portrays a dynamics of pushing up against or even into each other that cannot be neatly broken apart. Consequently, if one wishes to read meaning and presence in analogy to world and earth, then meaning and presence cannot be separated: as counterturning, the one always in-volves and, at the same time, withdraws from the other. This inseparability then also affects the relationship between interpretation and reading for Stimmung. Gumbrecht can argue for mood-sensitive readings to be practiced in addition to hermeneutics only based on the misled separation of materiality and meaning (cf. 2012: 5f.). Heidegger’s idea of interpretation differs from Gumbrecht’s “identification and/or attribution of meaning” (2004: 1). Based on the embrace of world and earth, interpretation for Heidegger entails and even calls for Stimmung: there is no affect which is not also meaningful, just as there is no meaning that is not also affecting – there is always the circular motion of counterturning. His hermeneutics, by neither breaking the movement apart into distinct poles nor fixing them in a stalemate between asemiotic presence and semiotic meaning, remains open for this dynamic: “Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect. To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought” (2011d: 90). According to Heidegger, there is no separation of interpretation and reading for Stimmung, but always the round dance of the hermeneutic circle between world and earth. Nonetheless, one needs to stress that while world and earth are reciprocally entangled, this does not mean that they dissolve into a synthesis of systemic harmony; they can rather be conceived as a mode of what Mignolo calls border gnosis – a way of approaching phenomena characterized by “delinking from hegemonic epistemology (‘absolute knowledge’) and the monoculture of the mind in its Western diversity” (2012: xvii). Though never free from world entirely, as counterturning, earth continually wrests itself from the grasp of world and withdraws from its ordering principles: the hermeneutic roundabout does not mend but mirrors and takes place in the strife of world and earth as rift. Heidegger plays on the different shades of meaning of the word Grundriss, implying “basic design, an outline sketch” (2011d: 121), but also “fundamental fissure.” For him, interpretation simultaneously in-volves meaning as well as its presencing excess; it requires a dynamic simultaneity of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Moving in this tearing circle, hermeneutics means residing somewhere in-between without completely entering into either territory and, thus, outlines a thinking from dichotomies: as an (extra-)ordinary space of (dis-) entangling meaning and presence, the rift unfolds a “dichotomous locus of enunciation;” a place at an “intersection between incommensurable (from the

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perspective of modernity) forms of knowledge” (Mignolo 2012: 85) – a place where sensuality and rationality uneasily commingle. This border gnosis of world and earth has far-reaching implications with regard to the supremacy of Western reason that Gumbrecht does not follow through. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics’ onto-theological ordering principles is echoed by Mignolo’s call for epistemic disobedience and urge to “delink from territorial and imperial epistemology grounded on theological (Renaissance) and egological (Enlightenment) politics of knowledge” (2011: n.pag.). The two thinkers stress the necessity of developing a willingness to question established disciplinary frameworks, but by translating counterturning into oscillation, Gumbrecht reintegrates spatio-sensuality into the Cartesian grid he seeks to dismantle: a distinction of presence and meaning as amplitudinal opposites only works in a calculative Western thinking that annexes both into the territory of the ratio’s system. Gumbrecht is not willing to go further. His epistemological endeavor serves the veiled agenda of bolstering Western academia’s crumbling hegemony and securing his privileged position therein as a white male scholar. He is unwilling to acknowledge that to think spatio-sensuality as a way to circumvent Cartesianism, one has to tear down the phallic tower it erected. As a form of border thinking, Heidegger’s notion of counterturning between world and earth neither allows for objectifying aesthetic attitudes, nor for the exclusion of non-Eurocentric perspectives, nor for the restriction of presence to a select few initiates. Gumbrecht’s vouching for the epistemological relevance of the corporeal from a Eurocentric viewpoint is prone to reproduce a phallocentric matrix: it might elevate the sensual to the same level as rationality, but only as something that does not question the legitimacy of established concepts of reason, which can, thus, remain in-/different toward/ from the sensual; but conceived as counterturning, sensuality and rationality are always co-dependently intertwined in circular motion. Considering the crude subjectivism in his work, Gumbrecht’s assertion that his “objective is to follow configurations of atmosphere and mood in order to encounter otherness in intense and intimate ways” (2012: 12f.) creates the impression of phallic exoticism. Instead, counterturning dynamics initiates a process of un-settlement where the other presences in withdrawal, thus underlines its concerns, and shows that otherness is ever at work in the self. When Gumbrecht argues that reading for Stimmung “means discovering sources of energy in artifacts and giving oneself over to them affectively and bodily – yielding to them and gesturing toward them” (ibid. 18) –, he thinks of removed objects for allegedly unmotivated aesthetic pleasure. Counterturning hermeneutics, by contrast, refers to communal everyday modes of being-in-the-world which harbor a political potential. Ultimately, while imagining presence and meaning

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as oscillation risks taking recourse to previous mistakes, thinking them as counterturning opens Western epistemology to new possibilities.

A t tunement and S ense -S ensitivit y In line with my argument, Alexis Shotwell also points out that sensuality should not be opposed to rationality: if one “synchronizes reason with passion, each of those categories hardens into conventional hierarchies of knowledge;” instead, she suggests, one should “look for an account of sensuousness that would assert a synchronicity without thereby positing irreducible distinctions and separability” (2011: 63). Therefore, building on the motion of counterturning as border gnosis, I will now revisit the term Stimmung with Heidegger’s understanding of attunement in relation to Shotwell’s concept of sensuous knowledge. At first, one needs to stress that Stimmung is, of course, not a novel term. In the German context, it has been linked to the attempt to recover sensuality by establishing aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the Western tradition since the 1750s. While the reflection on mood had meanwhile lost in importance – particularly during the second half of the twentieth century –, scholars have more recently rediscovered its potential, to which also Gumbrecht’s efforts testify (cf. Hajduk 2011: 89). It is ironic, though, that the very subjectivism characterizing his work is what had caused the earlier rejection of mood-based analyses in literary studies: similar to Hegel’s aesthetics, Gumbrecht promotes and thus reaffirms rather than challenges an individualization of mood and aesthetic experience, again subsumes the senses under the ratio’s systemic limitations, and, thus, re-perpetuates the pitfalls of the occidental tradition. The term Stimmung, however, need not be read that way. Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics paves the way for incorporating an idea of Stimmung as attunement into my argument. He assails the metaphysical subjectivism inherent in modern Western understandings of art as follows: Almost from the time when specialized thinking about art and the artist began, this thought was called aesthetic. Aesthetics takes the work of art as an object, the object of aisthēsis, of sensuous apprehension in the wide sense. Today we call this apprehension lived experience. [...] Everything is an experience. Yet perhaps lived experience is the element in which art dies. (2011d: 133; original emphasis)

Heidegger argues that establishing sensuous perception or lived experience next to a conceptual experience of the world replicates subject/object-logic insofar as it conceives of sensual forms of approaching the world as analogous to the instrumentalist modalities of the ratio. For him, this entails the

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decontextualization of art as ready-to-hand objects for a supposedly immediate and engrossed experience beyond the everyday in an objectifying gesture that strips artworks of their transformative force: the “triumph of the aesthetic view of art” is again synonymous with “the imperialism of reason” (Young 2001: 14) that subjects the world to its systemic grid. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s critical stance toward the aesthetic must not be mistaken for an entire rejection of sensual perception and corporeality. As Mignolo’s, and also Gumbrecht’s, his thought is concerned with a dehierarchization of art and philosophy or of sensuality and rationality, but Heidegger is more akin to Mignolo than to Gumbrecht when it comes to the modality of this renegotiation: rather than as adversarial equality, he envisions a more radical mode of thinking that insists on entangled reciprocity (cf. Bass 2006: 86). Heidegger holds that it is neither possible nor desirable to merely aspire to go beyond aesthetics: his understanding of art does not constitute an “anti-aesthetics” in the form of a “merely oppositional movement [that] remains trapped in the logic of what it opposes” (Thomson 2011: 41). Heidegger believes that overcoming a Cartesian axiomatic will not be achieved by an inversion that replaces an illusion of a pure supra-sensual meaning with a fantasy of an untainted sensual presence, as this strategy remains complicit with a Hegelian form of metaphysics (cf. 2009: 74ff.). Insisting on counterturning, he argues that an effective challenge requires “Verwindung” (ibid. 75) – literally a twisting or distorting. Iain Thomson summarizes this thus: “the best way to get beyond aesthetic experience is to transcend it from within” (2011: 56; original emphasis) or, in the terms of my argument: recovering the epistemological capacity of sensuality calls for creative sabotage. Heidegger writes that the Verwindung of metaphysics must go hand in hand with a becoming-other of thinking itself. This requires what he calls Besinnung, which he defines as the courage to regard the truth of one’s own premises and the space of one’s goals as the most questionable (cf. 2003c: 75). The word Sinn – as its English counterpart “sense” – can indicate both meaning and the physical senses. Due to this equivocality, Megan Altman asserts, Besinnung functions “as a mode of receptivity to changing manifestations of meaning” (2011: 230) that is not restricted to reason’s rules, but exhibits a “non-discursive” (ibid. 231) quality: mirroring Waldenfels’s logic of pathos and response, it remains open “for human being to ‘receive’ and ‘respond’ – to co-respond” (ibid. 235) – instead of subjecting the world under the ratio. Therefore, when the English translation renders the term Besinnung as “mindfulness,” it onesidedly unwinds the doubleness of sense contained in Heidegger’s term and annuls its radical character. Literally, Besinnung indicates the supplementation of meaning by physical senses. This can be made explicit by adding a dash signifying an entangling tension of sense between cognition and sensuality. Be-Sinnung, thus, relates to what Shotwell calls “the realm of sensuous

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knowledge” (2011: 57): a type of knowing where meaning is “not reducible to rational or logical form,” but that – similar to the thinking Heidegger envisions – “communicates truths through taking us from our constraint” through the “contradiction and subversion of dominant consciousness” (ibid. 54). Regarding Be-Sinnung as sensuous knowledge helps specify the role of sensual perception and corporeality in Heidegger’s philosophy. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger writes: “Perhaps, however, what we call feeling or mood, here and in similar instances, is more reasonable [vernünftiger] – that is, more intelligently perceptive [vernehmender] – because more open to Being than all that reason which, having meanwhile become ratio, was misinterpreted as being rational” (2011d: 95; original emphasis). When he describes mood as more perceptive and simultaneously stresses that reason in Western thought always implies ratio, he is not inverting the hierarchical dichotomy between sensuality and rationality; he rather provides another allusion to an irrational thinking where feeling and reason do not form an opposition, but are ever entangled (cf. Han 1996: 35; Ferreira 2002: 147), and which is clearly related to the counterturning border gnosis between world and earth. Mood, read as attunement, designates “the whole range of disclosive affectivity” (Storolow 2013: 8; original emphasis): it is neither rational, nor sensual, and yet both at once. Heidegger clarifies that “[p]hilosophy in each case happens in a fundamental attunement [Grundstimmung; literally: basic mood]. Conceptual philosophical comprehension is grounded in our being gripped, and this is grounded in a fundamental attunement” (1995: 7; original emphasis). Hence, he restates that the grasp of world is founded on a simultaneous beinggripped by earth that withdraws from conceptual recognition, but still affects through the senses as attuned mood: sensuality and/or corporeality retain the otherness of an irreducible telluric force by way of which mood or feeling attain a disrupting pathos that transgresses individualist subjectivity (cf. Waldenfels 2010: 13f., 325; Barison 2011: 152). While Stimmung does not reverse the hierarchy of the rational and the sensual, it still draws attention to the epistemological relevance of corporeality: it calls for Be-Sinnung. Thus, Robert Storolow observes, “without explicitly naming the lived body, Heidegger has placed it, along with affectivity, at the heart of Dasein’s disclosedness” (2013: 9). Correlated to Dasein, mood also entails the renegotiation of the significance of localized substantial spatiality. Hubert Dreyfus elaborates: “affectedness implies a disclosive submission to the world” (1991: 173) that, contrary to Cartesianism, acknowledges that human existence is not external toward, but always inherent in a (life-)world as embodied “way of being-in-the-world” (ibid. 172). The relation of affect and space becomes more evident when Heidegger synonymously refers to attunement as Befindlichkeit. With this term – meaning “emotional state” and literally “how-one-finds-oneself-ness” – he outlines a location in space or situatedness that is linked to sensuality and feeling: an

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emotionally-atmospheric situation between pathos and response (cf. Ferreira 2002: 141f.; Waldenfels 2010: 323). Thereby, Heidegger describes what Ursula Heise has called a “‘sense of place’” (2008: 13) – but with a decisive twist. One has to keep in mind that he does not shed the ambivalent (meta-)physical tension of sense between meaning and sensation. With Befindlichkeit, he points out the necessity of taking into account the affectation through a sense of place. As the implications of this are of central importance to the further course of my argument, they will be clarified throughout the following pages. To do so, one first needs to render more explicit the connection between attunement and sensuous knowledge. Surprisingly, the tertium comparationis of this link is Friedrich Schiller’s concept of the play drive. Heidegger relates this aporetic dynamic – Schiller himself describes it in his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man as a mediating free mood between thinking and feeling (cf. Letter XIV) – to his more radical idea of attunement as Befindlichkeit, where rationality and sensuality are inherently intertwined (cf. Miroković 2011: 102f.). Shotwell, analogously, builds on the same imbrication of feeling and thinking in the playful aesthetic condition to emphasize “the embodied situation we find ourselves in which situates us in time and matter” (2011: 59; my emphasis), and which is always co-constitutive of human existence although it has been gendered into passivity. What becomes evident is that both thinkers follow a similar ab-usive course of going beyond Schiller: they insist on the reciprocal entanglement of the rational and the sensual expressed in the doubleness of sense. Heidegger’s call for sense-sensitized attunement echoes Shotwell’s search “for an account of sensuousness that would assert a synchronicity without thereby positing irreducible distinctions and separability” (2011: 63). Both Befindlichkeit and sensuous knowledge point toward a sidelined epistemological potential by propagating a creatively sabotaged notion of Western aesthetics. Attunement and sensuous knowledge involve the attempt to free sensual perception from the individualist-subjectivist limitations it has attained in the ratio to then recast sensuality as an innately grounded and communal affair. With Befindlichkeit, Heidegger does not refer to an exclusively private mental or emotional condition: “The world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in is beingwith others” (Dreyfus 1991: 149; original emphases). Furthermore, through the relation to earth’s concealing impetus, attunement literally incorporates a sense of otherness into the self. Mood unfolds as corporeal and situated beingwith others that entails the possibility of mutual affectation between pathos and response where the earthen vessel of the body draws attention to a need for renegotiating the static limits of self and other (cf. Waldenfels 2000: 275, 284f.). Shotwell’s sensuous knowledge is in complete agreement with this observation, as for her, sensuality constitutes “an expression of relationality [that] situates one in relation to others” (2011: 68) and, as such, “marks a material social relation” that opens up the potential for “non-alienated species-

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being” (ibid. 69) as a “non-reductive bodily experience” (ibid. 125). Attunement and sensuous knowledge similarly oust the distanced and isolated mode of aesthetic contemplation in order to clear the way for an everyday spatio-social embodiment of “aesthetic engagement” (Magrini 2012: 510). While Heidegger’s Verwindung of the ratio supplements reason with attunement, Shotwell’s critique induces the non-masculinist and non-racialist excess of sensuous knowledge that harbors a (socio-politically) transformative potential with regard to encounters with otherness. Both Heidegger and Shotwell move beyond the static limitations of Cartesianism by thinking the body as residing within a dynamic (meta-)physical duplicity of sense. Shotwell’s non-binary synchronicity and Heidegger’s counterturning are geared toward a deconstruction of fixed borders between mind and body. Both thinkers regard the corporeal as an always already communal and transformative “taking-place of sense” (Nancy 2008: 119): for Heidegger and Shotwell, the body constitutes a nodal point between self and other. Jean-Luc Nancy asserts that “[b]odies don’t take place in discourse or in matter. They don’t inhabit ‘mind’ or ‘body.’ They take place at the limit, qua limit: limit – external border, the fracture and intersection of anything foreign in a continuum of sense, a continuum of matter” (2008: 17; original emphases); or, in the terminology of my argument, as node between self and other, corporeality is also related to the counterturning border gnosis between world and earth: bodies are always already bordering entities. They have the potential to retain a sense of sensual perception not bound by the subject/object-paradigm’s world by doubly binding mind and body as attuned to and grounded upon earth: “it makes no sense to talk about body and thought apart from each other, as if each could somehow subsist on its own,” Nancy continues: “they are only their touching each other, the touch of their breaking down, and into, each other” (ibid. 37). It is within this reciprocal embrace that rationality and sensuality together form what Mignolo calls dichotomous loci of enunciation instead of promoting “the universal ground of the [occidental] ‘human’ mind” (2012: 190) which regards every other entity as res extensa. Put differently, the touching body of border gnosis performs a taking place of sense where the other always already presences from inside the self. Mignolo’s notion of decolonial aesthetics – connoting “practices that challenge and subvert the hegemony of modern/ colonial aestheSis” (Mignolo/Vázquez 2013: n.pag.) – is linked to the call for a becoming-other of Western knowledge that is related both to Heidegger’s Verwindung and Shotwell’s sensuous knowledge. Mignolo’s exasperation concerning the subjectivist “transmogrification of ‘art’ as skill into ‘art’ as norm, as good taste and beauty” which “enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aestheSis, of sensing and perceiving” (ibid.) makes this unmistakably clear. For

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him, all this robs the aesthetic of epistemological potentials beyond detached and individualized experiences. Heidegger establishes a similar connection regarding the hermeneutic circle, writing that “to continue on it is the feast of thought” and adds: “assuming that thinking is a craft” (2011d: 90). That is, for him, thought, as attuned mode of being-in-the-world (with others), takes on the character of art as a skillful and poietic “bringing forth that causes beings in the first place to come forward and be present in assuming an outward aspect” (ibid. 119; my emphasis) and entails a sense of community. Likewise – bridging her Marxian approach with Heidegger’s ontology –, Shotwell develops her notion of “sensuous knowledge as craft” (2011: 148) that harbors a politically transformative momentum. Echoing Heidegger’s terms, she envisions an explicitly corporeal “form of understanding bodied forth through aesthetic experience” (ibid. 49; my emphasis) which “subverts our perception and understanding of reality as it appears to us” (ibid. 53). Together, in their respective revisions of sensual modes of perception, Shotwell, Heidegger, and Mignolo delineate an epistemological potential that allows for linking the political kinetics of sensuous knowledge with the ontological poetics of Stimmung and the decolonial aesthetics of sense-sensitivity. This ab-usive combination brings forth what Shotwell herself refers to as a “knowing otherwise” (ibid. 61): a disavowed sensuously attuned knowledge that designates a sense of place in the form of an always already bordering locus of enunciation between world and earth, constantly undermining the systemico-discursive global designs of rational metaphysics.

D welling and L iter ature With regard to my overall argument, two important questions have yet to be addressed: Firstly, how does a sense of place fit into the broader perspective of culturally plural societies? It needs to be shown that the focus on the local does not necessarily entail the kind of parochialism that American studies has been trying to overcome. Instead, I argue that through (sense-)sensitivity for voices from el otro lado [“the other side”] one can avoid complicity with the reach of globalizing neoliberalism and infuse critical theory with a sense of planet – a global thinking beyond the limitations of Western ordering principles. Secondly, how does sensuous attunement, with its strong focus on corporeality, relate to works of literature? I will use Lyotard’s concepts of discourse and figure to outline a non-instrumentalist notion of language that avoids the objectifying tendencies characteristic of Gumbrecht’s reading for Stimmung: by taking into account the subversive force of figural excess in concomitance with discursivity, I am going to show how the (politically) transformative potential of sensuous knowledge also pertains to the reading of literary texts.

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Heidegger, in an essay whose title “… Poetically Man Dwells …” (cf. 2001a) he borrowed from a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, provides a useful hint for answering these two questions and exposes them as thoroughly interwoven. The three terms comprising the title can function as the roadmap for what follows. Though “man” – which reads “human” (Mensch) in the original German and thus does not include the gender bias of the translation – at first glance might seem disconnected from the discussion above, Heidegger’s particular notion thereof can help guard my argument against premature accusations of provincial nostalgia or stasis supposedly contained in the idea of dwelling. “Man” will thus form the point of departure. In a second step, I will then outline “dwelling” as a dynamic concept suitable to explain how attunement relates to both sense of place and planet. While turning to the “poetic” aspect last may again appear as a deferral of the issue of language, I am going to illustrate eventually how the preceding steps (of the counterturning hermeneutic circle) have always already resided in the midst of this very question. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger arrives at his specific concept of the human via an analysis of Parmenides and his interpretation of the choral ode in Sophocles’s Antigone, whose first lines read as follows: “Many are the wonders, none / is more wonderful than what is man” (1991: 174). Heidegger translates deinon – which David Grene here renders “wonder” – as “das Unheimliche,” meaning “the uncanny” or, literally: “the unhomely.” In English-speaking literary studies, this German term is usually connected to Sigmund Freud’s essay with the same title. There, the psychoanalyst retraces the etymology of heimlich – which can mean both “secretive” and “homely” – to show that unheimlich does not simply form its antonym. He argues that “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich” (1955: 226). This short recourse proves helpful and needs to be kept in mind, for Heidegger’s understanding of the unhomely bears strong resemblance to Freud’s insistence on its semantic ambivalence, as Derrida also repeatedly stresses (cf. 1987: 191; 2006: 218f.). Still, in his reading of Antigone, Heidegger apparently moves into another direction when he writes that “[t]he Greek word deinon has that uncanny ambiguity with which the saying of the Greeks traverses [durchmißt] the opposed [gegenwendigen; in my argument cast as counterturning] con-frontations [Aus-einander-setzungen] of Being” (2000: 159). That is, he first distinguishes between two alwayscoinciding meanings of the uncanny or unhomely. The connection to my argument becomes clear when noting that Heidegger reads the uncanny’s doubleness of sense as inherently connected to the status of what he calls earth. On the one hand, Heidegger relates deinon to technē, meaning “craft” (and, as such, also art) to point out the first modality of humans’ stance toward their surroundings. The choral ode calls “man” the one “who wears away / the Earth,

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oldest of Gods” and whose “contrivances / make him master of beasts of the field and those that move in the mountains” (Sophocles 1991: 174). In using technical skills, human beings learned to model their surroundings and shape their existence on earth – or to construct a world – according to the conditions of their environment. In this sense of deinon, “man” is the “one who needs to use violence – and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violencedoing” (Heidegger 2000: 160). Thus, humans appear as uncanny insofar as they intervene into the concealment of earth; but, as long as it remains in the motion of counterturning, Heidegger does not judge this as negative per se. Nonetheless, he identifies it as the impetus of what would later turn into rational metaphysics, where technical skillfulness results in the misled “presumption and arrogance that we are not actually of this earth” (Davis 2009: 179) and have the power to reduce it to the status of a ready-to-hand object. This becomes also evident in the subjugation of other cultures under the hegemony of what Mignolo calls the modern/colonial world system with its extension of Western knowledge into global designs (cf. 2012: 17). Through the sole focus on technē as “the violence-doing of knowing” (Heidegger 2000: 176) without any sense of place, the grasp of occidental reason’s world assumes that it can control earth and, because of this domination, is at home in it. Heidegger reverses this logic. He argues that humans’ misuse of unheimliche technical skills results in homelessness. On the other hand, however, Heidegger connects deinon to dike – usually translated as “justice,” but here implying more than a moral-judicative concept, namely the “overwhelming sway” (ibid. 159) of earth’s concealment that runs counter to technical modification. In Sophocles’s tragedy, “man” has to yield to this telluric force, at the latest when faced with mortality: “He has a way against everything, / and he faces nothing that is to come / without contrivance. / Only against death / can he call on no means of escape” (1991: 174). This expresses nothing less than humans’ irreducible connection to earth’s withdrawal from world as a fact of finite corporeal existence, as often described in Western mythology; but Heidegger derives from this a second meaning of “man’s” unhomeliness that can be explicated by focusing, once more, on the body: as attuned sensuous bodies bound to the ungraspable force of earth, humans never exist as stable subjects, but remain within an (extra-) ordinary relation of “excess” (Shotwell 2011: 148) toward the ordering principles of their technically constructed world; a bond that permanently dis-closes them as “radically other-than-[themselves]” (ibid. 136). Thereby, the withdrawal that characterizes embodied selves at the same time uncovers “man’s” belonging to earth as that which always transcends the localized confines of world, but also that which first provides the locales or places for constructing such a world. Thus, regarding humans as always already under the impact of dike and its earthen excess, “Heidegger exposes the groundlessness of the security or what

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he might term the ‘tranquilized self-assurance’ (beruhigter Vertrautheit) [this is a quotation from Sein und Zeit] of being-at-home-in-the-world” (O’Donoghue 2011: 129). Residing in the unheimlich, overwhelming sway of earth, mortal corporeal “man” is never entirely at home in the designs of world, but remains foreign: “The unhomely does not allow us to be at home” (Heidegger 2000: 161). However, such individual analyses of the different layers of uncanniness in Heidegger’s work only constitute a preliminary step. This becomes obvious in the following remark: “The deinotaton of the deinon, the uncanniest of the uncanny [das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen], lies in the oppositional [gegenwendigen, that is counterturning] relation of dike and techne” (ibid. 173). The translation here again is misleading, for Heidegger reads both terms as inseparably enmeshed in a reciprocal relationship and as mutually constitutive. The technical modification of earth in line with the projections of world, through which humanity seeks to establish a home for itself, coincides with earth’s uncanny overwhelming sway that annuls the sense of complete being-homely and continuously testifies to humans’ unhomeliness on earth and in themselves (cf. O’Donoghue 2011: 153f.; Davis 2009: 180): a sense of unhomeliness remains involved in the home, just as a sense of homeliness remains involved in the unhomely. That is, contouring Freud’s uncanny, Heidegger’s reading of Antigone casts “man’s” existence – counterturning between technē and dike – as (un-)homely. With this in mind, I can now move on and outline the relevance of the concept of dwelling for my argument. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger writes: “To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell” (2011b: 245). What does this imply? At the risk of redundancy, responding to this question requires an ab-usive and at first glance maybe circumstantial, or better, circumventional explanation. For Heidegger, dwelling is simply the term that designates the mode of human existence as re-siding in counterturning (un-)homeliness just described. However, one must not confuse this with what he calls homelessness. Homelessness is the result of Western metaphysics’ one-sided focus on the technical modification of earth in which earth’s force is – in a first step – disavowed so as to enable the treatment of earth as nothing more than a material object to be mastered. Never being able to completely unwind itself from earth’s concealing force, as that is what enables a world’s construction in the first place, the ratio – in a second step – then displaces this earthen force onto itself, ascribing it to technē instead, and thereby constructs the notion of static homeliness and its worldwide(ning) extension. This quasi-apotheosis of technical reasoning results in the global designs of the modern/colonial world system’s most recent manifestation, namely globalizing neoliberalism. Spivak writes: “The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one

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lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality” (2012: 338). Such an objectifying treatment of earth equals existential homelessness. In contrast, Heidegger describes dwelling as technically “sparing” (2011b: 246) earth by care-fully exposing oneself to its overwhelming sway. “This ‘sparing’ comes to outline the new style of thinking [...] which Heidegger calls Besinnung” (Ziarek 2013: 142; original emphasis). As such, it forms a characteristic of a sensuously attuned existence with a sense of place – a mode of being situated in the counterturning of world and earth. This is no lack: sparing is something “positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own essence [Wesen]” (Heidegger 2011b: 246; original emphasis) instead of trying to subdue and master it. However, this is not to say that dwelling merely results in an isolated and insular rural existence, for, grounded on earthen concealment, humans are always already embedded in broader existential spatiality as well (cf. Gorgone 2011: 129). Ab-using Heise’s second term, this means that, precisely since earth grants a sense of place (namely one of ungraspable withdrawal into the unhomely), it also paradoxically – and simultaneously – opens the possibility (appropriated by the ratio and twisted into exploitation) for a sense of planet beyond objectification. Here is Spivak again: “The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, indeed we are it” (2012: 338); outlining “a position that has this particular (non)relationship to the global” (ibid.), dwelling means to exist sensuously attuned in the (un-)homely simultaneity of place and planet. When Spivak here writes of “alterity,” she does not mean discursive constructivism, but rather a radical otherness to which dwelling is always related. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger anticipates Bhabha’s assertion that “[t]he unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow” (2004: 13) when he designates “the silent call of the earth” (2011d: 101) as that other which “once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder” (ibid. 94). Instead of violent appropriation, this indicates a responsive attitude toward the other. Robert Mugerauer pinpoints this quality in Heidegger’s dwelling by describing it as being “open to the excess of the given over our finite reception, which amounts to a call for our response” (2009: 90). That is, this altered relationship toward spatiality entails a different – responsive – mode of engaging with other humans as also grounded upon and exhibiting earth’s sway; a form of relationality which brings forth the inextricability of ownness and otherness (cf. Guzzoni 2009: 121; Gorgone 2011: 130). Through the call of earthen otherness, the self senses an earthed-ness within upon which it rests but can never fully grasp, thus negating any clear separation of self and other. It turns out that the earthen otherness of the other is that upon which the self rests, too: there is always something else inside. Hence, the other figures not as merely other – that is, entirely withdrawn –, but as another self that, due to its very withdrawal from a self’s fixating grasp – but its still

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affecting difference or pathos – voices its own claims and concerns. The other denies a self’s attitude of indifference toward an other: just as the self is always other to itself, the other also always appears as another self. Thus, it is possible to characterize dwelling as constituting a peculiar border phenomenon (cf. Waldenfels 1997: 66): counterturning between world and earth, it also resides within the (un-)homely entanglement of self and other. Heidegger himself evokes the notion of such a “between” (2001b: 218), which helps to connect his ideas further to border gnosis. Keeping in mind the overlaps of counterturning and Mignolo’s thought established above, it comes as no surprise when Ben Vedder explicitly states that “dwelling is a kind of being at home within borders” (1999: 746). In fact, Mignolo implies such a connection, too, when he describes border gnosis as “dwelling in the borders” (2012: xv). It has become clear that “within borders” or “in the borders” neither suggests a completely static place nor a complete lack of place: contrary to a solely technical occupation of space, dwelling retains an ever-dynamic character without shedding its sense of place (cf. Guzzoni 2009: 122). As implied above, the (un-)homely “between” needs to be thought as a co-constitution of stasis and dynamics inherent in the counterturning of world and earth. As such, it circumscribes what Mignolo calls dichotomous loci of enunciation, that – formulating a similar paradox – he conceives as “grounded on the movable grounds of border gnosis” (2012: 163). The relation between grounded and movable grounds echoes the concurrence of world’s uncanny technical knowing and earth’s overwhelming sway. This synchronicity marks an ongoing performative process where “ground” (counter)turns into “unground” and “grounded” (counter)turns into “grounding:” adhering to subalternized knowledge(s), (un-)homely “loci of enunciation are not given but enacted” (ibid. 115). Casting this in Heideggerian terms, Mugerauer states that “mortals are guests within the fragility of locality,” which – contrary to fixating metaphysics – calls for repeated and continuous embodied (re-)enactments, namely through “acting with local knowledge” (2009: 93). Hence, rather than taking the unhomely homeliness of dwelling to be strictly utopian or antilocative (cf. Riquelme 1998: 553), reading it as a form of border gnosis renders the (un-)homely double bind of world and earth as bringing forth “a complex home, without guarantees” (Shotwell 2011: 151) on ever newly performed and movable (a-)topoi. Heidegger’s term for this enactment is the verb bauen – “to build.” Asserting that “to build is really to dwell” (2011b: 244), he suggests that “building” is not to be understood only in the instrumentalist sense of erecting static structures (although this also belongs to bauen), but rather as a released creative “posture toward things and others” (Dungey 2007: 240; original emphasis) which “accepts fully the contingency and conditionality of whatever there is” (Edwards 1997: 191) by “cooperating with the earth” and “letting

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things be” (ibid. 176; original emphasis). Acknowledging the irreducible link to earth, building defies the ratio’s violent epistemology and, instead, literally exhibits epistemological humility (derived from humus, meaning earth or soil). Building names the responsive modality of corporeal mortal dwelling as a technically sparing form of relating to things and human beings with a sense of place and planet. Contrary to binary logic, sensuously attuned bauen works in a counterturning “happening of presencing-absenscing” (Dungey 2007: 245). While technē signifies a unidirectional mode of world-disclosure, building figures as an enactive – that is, an actively performative – mode of bringing forth between concealment and unconcealment that Heidegger derives from the Greek poiēsis. As such, bauen, to him, is essentially Dichtung or, in other words, in the form of building, dwelling is inherently poetic. Here, my argument reaches the last term of this section’s roadmap: I can now turn to the link between sensuous attunement and language in literary texts. Heidegger thinks literature from his notion of Dichtung and thus not merely as a specific form of discourse. Contrary to what the translation may suggest, this does not mean that he believes art to be only lyric poetry (cf. Hermann 1985: 50). Though often writing about poems, Heidegger explains that Dichtung is not restricted to this, but – as poiēsis – constitutes the modality of art in general. This is to say that Heidegger does not subscribe to established typologies of literature because, in his view, such categorization is the result of a metaphysical conception of language. Timothy Clark explains that, for Heidegger, “[l]anguage is not just a system of signs whose code supposedly resides ‘in’ the minds of its users;” it per-forms an “environment, [namely] one which opens and maintains the shared horizon within which understanding is possible” (2002: 73). When Heidegger writes that “[p]oetic creation [dichten], which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (2001b: 213) and “[p]oetry [Dichtung] is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (ibid. 216), then he does not refer to a mere construction of texts in an instrumentalist manner; he outlines a “care-ful tending of and attending to things” (Fell 1986: 59) which “complies with, or defers to – and so lets things lie forth in their own configuration or conformation, that is, in their own proper, fitting, or appropriate place” (ibid. 43). As such, this mode of dis-closure brings forth a form of sensual unconcealment in the unfolding locus of the (literary) work of art that defies a Cartesian split of sensuality/ rationality and a sole focus on discursive signification by taking into account the excess of sensuous attunement (cf. Guzzoni 2009: 149; Sonderegger 2013: 95): in the counterturning of world and earth, Heidegger thinks poetic language as entangled between the sensual and the rational. From this perspective, it is possible to think literature and the corporeality of Shotwell’s sensuous knowledge as not mutually exclusive, or, more precisely (and radically), it becomes impossible to think them as separate. Linking the

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body and literature appears fundamentally implausible when the epistemological position from which the link is attested remains in a subject/object logic that starts its reasoning from the separation of body and mind; but from loci of enunciation enactively opened up in the border gnosis of world and earth, such foundation is denied: Dichtung – as “non-foundational thinking” (Clark 2002: 53; original emphasis) – is always (un-)grounded, and a position which separates embodiment and signification is, strictly speaking, impossible. Closely related to Shotwell’s Marxian approach to sensuousness, Dichtung entails “a transformation of thought from the ground up, from its non-ground (Abgrund) held open by the poietic momentum of language” (Ziarek 2013: 144; original emphasis) which brings forth different notions of discourse and the corporeal: a body cannot be seen as mere substance or matter, just as literary discourse cannot be seen as pure signification; both always already coincide in dynamic fashion. Nancy writes that “[b]odies don’t take place in discourse or in matter. They don’t inhabit ‘mind’ or ‘body.’ They take place at the limit, qua limit” (2008: 17); hence, “they are only their touching each other, the touch of their breaking down, and into, each other” (ibid. 37; original emphases). That is, as poiēsis, literature forms an attuned mode of knowing that in-volves a bodily dimension. Lyotard’s concept of figurality sheds more light on this aspect of Heidegger’s Dichtung. Contrary to the discursive systematicity of an instrumentalist linguistic conception of language, poetic discourse’s opening of an existential space cannot be thought from a calculable, objective notion of spatiality such as that of mathematics (cf. Mitchell 2010: 13). In Discourse, Figure, Lyotard holds that language unfolds, or dis-closes, “a thick space where the game of concealing/revealing can be played out” (2011: 74) by the simultaneous workings of figurality and discursivity. The hints toward Heidegger’s terminology contained in this assertion become even more explicit in a paragraph where Lyotard explicitly emphasizes the aspect of corporeality in language’s active spacing. Since the passage also ties together several strands of my argument, it will be quoted in full: This action [of spacing] places the elements of discourse in perspective, ordering them in a deep expanse where they play the role no longer of carriers of signification, but of thing-signs that show us one face while withholding the others, and that we will need to circumvent in order to understand. This suggests that the poet (the everyday speaker when she or he invents expressions, turns of phrases, metaphors) introduces into discourse properties that derive from the sensory. To which this new suggestion must be added: not only does this discourse become opaque, difficult to fathom, perilous like a world, but it acts upon our bodies! The key property of arbitrariness, which radically distinguishes language from all sign-systems, is precisely what the figure subverts in discourse. Through the figure words begin to induce in our bodies (as would colors) such

Heidegger Ab-Used and such a hint of attitude, posture, or rhythm: yet further proof that discursive space is dealt with as plastic space, and words as sensory things. (ibid. 283; my emphases)

What the figure induces here when Lyotard writes of rhythm, posture, and attitude is nothing less than what Heidegger calls the counterturning of world and earth, which, through sensuous attunement, renders possible a different mode of relating to phenomena and humans. That is to say, as earthen excess, “the figural is exactly that which comes as Unheimlich into language” (Ionescu 2014: 49); it brings forth in discourse a form of radical otherness that – the withdrawal from discourse’s fixation (not)withstanding – presences through bodily affectation. In grazing, and not only re-cognizing, the figure, “[w]e are touching on a certain interruption of sense, and this interruption of sense has to do with the body, it is body. And it’s no accident that the body has to do with sense, in the other sense of sense, sense in the sense of sensing, in the sense of touching” (Nancy 2008: 125). By way of the doubleness of sense, Dichtung circumscribes a (meta-)physical locality amidst worldly discourse and earthen figure. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger refers to this locality with a(n) (in)famous expression: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (2011c: 147). Just as the concepts it is linked to – home and dwelling –, this notion of a house has been criticized as problematically nostalgic. In one such critique, Thomä finds two supposed issues with this idea: stasis and interiority. Firstly, although acknowledging a dynamics in Heidegger’s thought on language, Thomä holds that the aspect of motion stands in stark contrast to the static construct of the house as something stationary (cf. 2013b: 300). Instead of pursuing the insight that the house’s stasis should not be seen as blindly opposed to motion, he concludes that it simply remains unclear how movement is supposed to be thought in relation to the house (cf. ibid.). Secondly, and similarly, Thomä criticizes the inclosing character of the house. Despite noting Heidegger’s renegotiation of inside, outside, and openness, he insists that the house’s diagnosed interiority entails specific constellations of things (cf. ibid. 302), resulting in a new categorical grid. A response to Thomä’s critique will serve to tie the different strands of my argument further together. The first point of critique can easily be refuted: Heidegger’s language-house of Being simply is not brought forth as a static structure based on the causeand-effect-logic that Thomä implies. He correctly notes that Heidegger thinks the spacing of the house as encompassing a “Bezirk” (cf. ibid. 301). Usually translated as “precinct,” Bezirk says more; it also comprises the meaning “circle.” Heidegger’s rendering of a Greek temple in “The Origin of the Work of Art” shows that he takes this into consideration. There, he thinks the temple from its root templum – that in German can also be translated as Bezirk – as “temple-work” (2011d: 107): an example of the strife between world and earth,

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and hence, always in the motion of counterturning and never merely static. Heidegger adds: “The same holds for the linguistic work [Sprachwerk]” (ibid.). One could say that as Bezirk, the house figures as ongoing Ent-Stehung (literally un-standing) that further characterizes dwelling as a form of wandering instead of fixed categorical stability (cf. Guzzoni 2009: 122). The precinct of language continuously (r-)evolves as a hermeneutic circling (Kreisgang) of world and earth, where humans ever dwell in dynamic circumvention. One possible rejection of Thomä’s second critique with regard to the house’s apparently interiorizing tendency is directly bound to this understanding of Bezirk. Heidegger explains: “Man does not dwell in that he merely establishes his stay on the earth beneath the sky, by raising growing things and simultaneously raising buildings. Man is capable of such building only if he already builds in the sense of the poetic taking of measure” (2001b: 225; my emphasis). This measuring is not a method of calculative reasoning that tries to map out a technically fixed categorical territory. Heidegger clarifies that poetically “‘[f]ixed’ means outlined, admitted into the boundary (peras), brought into the outline” (2011d: 137; original emphasis). That is, poetic measuring – sensuously attuned – points toward the Grundriss between world and earth: a rift or “tear, integral to language” (Lyotard 2011: 8) which – by way of tearing strife – outlines a(n) (extra-)ordinary locus where discursive meaning and figural presence are ever embracing. Thus (dis-)entangling, the house does not adhere to simple inside/ outside logic; it never appears “as anterior or posterior, exterior or interior to the signifying order – but at the limit” (Nancy 2008: 25); always responding to earth’s figural pathos that disrupts the discursive grasp of world (and vice versa), the house is ever “touching upon sense” (ibid. 17; original emphases). The Bezirk circumscribes dichotomous loci of enunciation neither inside nor outside, but both at once.

C onclusion To wrap up my argument, one can say that, sensuously attuned to earthen figurality, and hence, not reducible to an instrumentalist conceptualization of language, Heidegger’s house of Being poetically [dichterisch] unfolds a “[d] iscourse that is somehow beyond control” (Bhabha 2004: 18; original emphasis): it outlines a locale which calls for its ongoing (re-)enactment, and thus ever remains an “‘unhomely’ house” (ibid.). (A-)topos – emplaced and at the same time exceeding this emplacement (cf. Waldenfels/Gehring/Fischer 2001: 445) – in the counterturning border gnosis of world and earth, the Bezirk per-forms a sense of place and planet where a dynamic (border) dwelling becomes possible. Through the (meta-)physical doubleness of sense, this relates to what Spivak calls “planetary poiesis” (2012: 346; original emphasis): in contrast to the global

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designs of a modern/colonial world system, human beings in the Bezirk figure as “planetary accidents rather than global agents” whereby “alterity remains underived from [them]” (ibid. 339). Consequently, grazing literature as Dichtung has the potential to bring forth an “indefinite radical alterity of the other space of a planet to deflect the rational imperative of capitalist globalization” (ibid. 348). Thinking presence within increasingly culturally plural societies demands nothing less. Through ab-using Heidegger’s thought, I offer a fruitful way of thinking (extra-)ordinary presences beyond idealist logocentric stasis. Rather than exploiting the notion of presence, once again, for bolstering the relevance of Western(ized) academics’ distanced ivory-tower-position, attuned poetic dwelling calls for more fundamental challenges to the established Cartesian logic of occidental epistemology. I showed that truly acknowledging the claims and concerns of the other(s) requires an openness for an existential modality that simultaneously interweaves local particularity with global planetarity where presence ever figures as dynamic presencing; it calls for a mode of being that is always willing to readjust again within every new singular encounter with beings or things, and, thereby – that is, through these encounters – notices its envelopment in a planetary habitat. Through sensuous attunement, as Heidegger writes, [e]ven when we relate ourselves to those things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things themselves. We do not represent distant things merely in our mind [...] so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things. (2011b: 251)

The collective sentience of poetic sensuous dwelling touches upon and binds one to the realities of culturally plural configurations of world through an irreducible connectedness to earth which “persists through [durchsteht] the distance to that locale” (ibid. 251); even if – to once again invoke Nancy – “[t] his touch is infinitely indirect, deferred – machines, vehicles, photocopies, eyes, still other hands are all interposed – [...] it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact, everywhere interrupted and pursued” (2008: 51). Rather than returning to the world-dividing closure of ivory insularity, poetic dwelling outlines a wandering along the figural lines of the counterturning border gnosis between sense of place and planet where the other presences.

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W orks C ited Altman, Megan (2011): “Heidegger and Aristotle on Contemplating Contemplation,” in: Espinet, Schreiben Dichten Denken, pp. 227-40. Barison, Marcello (2011): “Seynsgeschichte und Erdgeschichte,” in: Espinet, Schreiben Dichten Denken, pp. 145-59. Bass, Alan (2006): Interpretation and Difference. The Strangeness of Care, Stanford: Stanford UP. Beiser, Frederick C. (2003): The Romantic Imperative. The Concept of Early German Romanticism, Cambridge: Harvard UP. Bhabha, Homi K. (2004): The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. Bloom, Harold (1994): The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Clark, Timothy (2002): Martin Heidegger, New York: Routledge. Davis, Steven (2009): “The Path of a Thinking, Poeticizing Building. The Strange Uncanniness of Human Being on Earth,” in: McWhorter/Stenstad, Heidegger and the Earth, pp. 169-85. Derrida, Jacques (1987): The Post Card (From Socrates to Freud and Beyond), transl. Alan Bass, Chicago: U of Chicago P. —, (2006): Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, transl. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge. Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991): Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge: MIT P. Dungey, Nicholas (2007): “The Ethics and Politics of Dwelling,” in: Polity 39.2, pp. 234-58. Edwards, James C. (1997): The Plain Sense of Things, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Espinet, David (ed.) (2011): Schreiben Dichten Denken. Zu Heideggers Sprachbegriff, Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Fell, Joseph P. (1986): “The Crisis of Reason. A Reading of Heidegger’s Zur Seinsfrage,” in: Heidegger Studies 2, pp. 41-65. Ferreira, Boris (2002): Stimmung bei Heidegger. Das Phänomen der Stimmung im Kontext von Heideggers Existenzialanalyse des Daseins, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Freud, Sigmund (1955): “The Uncanny,” transl. James Strachey, in: James Strachey et al. (eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917-1919), London: The Hogart P, pp. 217-52. Gorgone, Sandro (2011): “Entwurzelung und Verwüstung. Heidegger und die Dichtung der Heimat,” in: Espinet, Schreiben Dichten Denken, pp. 127-44. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford UP.

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—, (2012): Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. On a Hidden Potential of Literature, transl. Erik Butler, Stanford: Stanford UP. Guzzoni, Ute (2009): Der andere Heidegger. Überlegungen zu seinem späteren Denken, Freiburg: Karl Alber. Hajduk, Stefan (2011): “Vom Reden über Stimmungen. Ihre Geschichte in der Literaturwissenschaft, ihre Aktuelle Erforschung und ihre Medialität,” in: KulturPoetik 11.1, pp. 76-96. —, (2012): “Stimmungsorientiertes Lesen und seine verdeckte Theorie,” in: KulturPoetik 12.1, pp. 142-46. Han, Byung-Chul (1996): Heideggers Herz. Zum Begriff der Stimmung bei Martin Heidegger, München: Wilhelm Fink. Heidegger, Martin (1995): The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude, transl. William McNeill/Nicholas Walker, Bloomington: Indiana UP. —, (2000): Introduction to Metaphysics, transl. Gregory Fried/Richard Polt, New Haven: Yale UP. —, (2001a): Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper Perennial. —, (2001b): “… Poetically Man Dwells …,” in: Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 209-27. —, (2003a): Holzwege, Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. —, (2003b): “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks,” in: Heidegger, Holzwege, pp. 1-74. —, (2003c): “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in: Heidegger, Holzwege, pp. 75-113. —, (2009): Vorträge und Aufsätze, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. —, (2011a): Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge. —, (2011b): “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in: Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 243-55. —, (2011c): “Letter on Humanism,” in: Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 147-81. —, (2011d): “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in: Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 89-139. Heise, Ursula K. (2008): Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Oxford: Oxford UP. Hermann, Friedrich Wilhelm von (1985): “Kunst und Technik,” in: Heidegger Studies 1, pp. 25-62. Ionescu, Vlad (2014): “The Spectrum of the Figural. Aesthetics in the Eyes of Jean-François Lyotard,” in: Art History Supplement 4.1, pp. 46-73. Lyotard, Jean-François (2011): Discourse, Figure, transl. Antony Hudek/Mary Lydon, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Magrini, J.M. (2012): “Worlds Apart in the Curriculum. Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Literature,” in: Educational Philosophy and Theory 44.5, pp. 500-21.

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McWhorter, Ladelle/Stenstad, Gail (eds.) (2009): Heidegger and the Earth. Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Toronto: U of Toronto P. Mignolo, Walter D. (2011): “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing. On (De) Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience,” Transversal: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0112/mignolo/en (last accessed Nov. 28 2014). —, (2012): Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton UP. Mignolo, Walter D./Vázquez, Rolando (2013): “Decolonial AestheSis. Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” SocialText: http://socialtextjournal.org/ periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings (last accessed Nov. 11 2014). Miroković, Nikola (2011): “Ästhetischer Zustand als Grundstimmung. Eine Fußnote zu Heideggers Schiller-Seminar (1936),” in: Espinet, Schreiben Dichten Denken, pp. 99-112. Mitchell, Andrew, J. (2010): Heidegger among the Sculptors. Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford: Stanford UP. Mugerauer, Robert (2009): “Call of the Earth. Endowment and (Delayed) Response,” in: McWhorter/Stenstad, Heidegger and the Earth, pp. 70-99. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008): Corpus, transl. Richard A. Rand, New York: Fordham UP. O’Donoghue, Brendan (2011): A Poetics of Homecoming. Heidegger, Homelessness and the Homecoming Venture, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Riquelme, J.P. (1998): “Location and Home in Beckett, Bhabha, Fanon, and Heidegger,” in: The Centennial Review 52.3, pp. 541-68. Schiller, Friedrich: Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook: http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/ mod/schiller-education.asp (last accessed Feb. 15 2016). Schlegel, Friedrich (2005): “Athenäums”-Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen, Stuttgart: Reclam. Shotwell, Alexis (2011): Knowing Otherwise. Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Sonderegger, Ruth M. (2013): “Stichwort. Welt – Ihre Erschlossenheit und ihr Entzug,” in: Thomä, Heidegger Handbuch, pp. 92-8. Sophocles (1991): Antigone, transl. David Grene, in: David Grene/Richmond Lattimore (eds.), Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Chicago: U of Chicago P, pp. 159-212. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2012): An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge: Harvard UP. Storolow, Robert D. (2013): “Heidegger, Mood and the Lived Body. The Ontical and the Ontological,” in: Janus Head 13.2, pp. 5-11.

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Thomä, Dieter (ed.) (2013a): Heidegger Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung, Stuttgart: Metzler. —, (2013b): “Sprache: Von der ‘Bewandnisganzheit’ zum ‘Haus des Seins,’” in: Thomä, Heidegger Handbuch, pp. 295-304. Thomson, Iain D. (2011): Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Trawny, Peter (2014): Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Vedder, Ben (1999): “The Notion of Dwelling in Heidegger,” in: Marco M. Olivetti (ed.), Archivio di Filosofia. Incarnazione, Padova: Cedam, pp. 73746. Waldenfels, Bernhard (1997): Topografie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 1, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —, (2000): Das Leibliche Selbst. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —, (2010): Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Waldenfels, Bernhard/Gehring, Petra/Fischer, Matthias (2001): “Gespräch mit Bernhard Waldenfels: ‘… jeder philosophische Satz ist eigentlich in Unordnung, Bewegung,’” in: Matthias Fischer et al. (eds.), Vernunft im Zeichen des Fremden. Zur Philosophie von Bernhard Waldenfels, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 408-59. Young, Julian (2001): Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ziarek, Krzysztof (2013): Language after Heidegger, Bloomington: Indiana UP.

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Persisting Presence The JFK Assassination as Mediated Event Carolin Lano

After the decades-long unquestioned hegemonic position of hermeneutics in the humanities, the debates on presence have been understood as the advent of a paradigm shift (cf. Gumbrecht 2004; Mersch 2002a, 2002b) – at least by their supporters. But theories of presence can also be seen as a symptom of a revitalized desire for immediateness, emergence and materiality. In recent debates presence is generally linked with spatial, corporal, and temporal instantaneousness that defies meaning production. In the most extreme case, the line of demarcation is drawn between the ‘real’ on the one side and the self-reference of symbolic systems on the other. For Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht we face a permanent oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects, and “there is no way of making them compatible or of bringing them together in one ‘well-balanced’ phenomenal structure” (Gumbrecht 2004: 105). He states that the inability of hermeneutics to adequately address phenomena of presence has led to their marginalization in the humanities. But in aesthetic experience we can encounter exemplary instances of presence (cf. ibid. 106ff.) that may be instructive for a radical re-thinking. While theorists like Gumbrecht are emphasizing the positive or at least compensatory characteristics of phenomena of presence, the following text will focus on the impact of an event that has often been described as a traumatic experience especially for the USAmerican public: the assassination of US President Kennedy. This event seems to be subject to endless interpretations and re-interpretations. The article will focus on the relation between ‘presence’ and ‘evidence’ in the case of Kennedy’s assassination. The notion of evidence is probably one of the most instructive examples illustrating the concurrence of presence and hermeneutics beyond the field of aesthetics. The main thesis is that the ongoing re-interpretations of the assassination and the cultural impact of its prolonged investigation is to a considerable degree an effect of its mediation, which engenders the persisting presence of the event through the production of evidence.

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The Q uestion of E vidence and C onspir acy Thinking After nearly 1000 books, half a dozen journals, two official inquiries, several million pages of declassified documents, dozens of TV documentaries and hundreds of Websites, is there anything left to say about the assassination of President John F Kennedy? Hell, yes. (cf. blurb for Ramsay 2013)

On November 22, 2013 the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas had its 50th anniversary. Like on all previous anniversaries, countless speculations about the real circumstances of his death were rehashed. The circumstances of JFK’s death have been periodically reexamined and reinterpreted, with authors trying to answer questions such as ‘What happened?’ and ‘Who was involved?’ The anniversary marked an enormous increase in publications on the case. It seems that the American public was still captivated by the event that took place in November 1963. Obviously the intensified awareness of the general public provided a favorable economic opportunity for publishing companies to boost their sales. Indeed, a large majority of Americans still believes there was a conspiracy behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination, with everyone from the Mafia, the Texas oil industry, and Cuban exile groups to the CIA and then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson being accused of involvement. Some of the latest theories promise to finally unravel the cold case and convincingly prove, once and for all, ‘who really pulled the trigger.’ Conspiracy theorists undertake ever new attempts to assign meaning to the assassination, each of them offering information allegedly never considered before. In recent years the research on conspiracy theories has increasingly flourished after the subject had been deemed unworthy of attention for a long period of time. According to Dieter Groh, an anthropologically engrained need for orientation in the world is the reason for the enduring continuance of conspiracy thinking over hundreds of years (cf. Groh 1992: 284). Some psychologists argue likewise unhistorically by explaining the success of conspiracy theories with a pathological state of mind of their believers. In this perspective, conspiracy theorists try to compensate unmanageable disruptions of world views and social orders that cannot be channeled otherwise (for an overview, cf. Swami/Coles 2010). But those anthropological and psychological approaches cannot explain why in certain societies and eras conspiracy theories become more popular than in others. The historical and sociocultural background indeed seems to play a vital role. Accordingly one has to consider that throughout history different types and characteristic forms of conspiracy theories have arisen. Ralf Klausnitzer for example argues that conspiracy thinking has undergone significant modifications in Europe since

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the 18th century. He argues that the basic principles of the history of ideas of that period heavily influenced the conspiracy theorists’ view on historical development and their way of reasoning (cf. Klausnitzer 2007: 5ff./98). One example is the idea of the European Enlightenment that all events can be seen as an effect of intentional actions of individuals. This belief derived from the secularization of a structural pattern of the history of salvation, suggesting that history is no longer driven by god’s will but is still governed by a secret plan rather than by randomness (cf. ibid. 20f.). Thus conspiracy theories rely at least on a minimum of plausibility, which they foster by tapping into certain master narratives in order to evoke claims of validity. The notion of a connection between historical and socio-cultural backgrounds and the flourishing of conspiracy theories has resulted in research on US-specific forms of conspiracy thinking at least since the seminal study by Richard Hofstadter about the “paranoid style” in American politics (cf. Hofstadter 1965). According to Robert Alan Goldberg, conspiracy theories form “an American tradition” (Goldberg 2001: 2), Kathryn S. Olmsted states that conspiracy thinking is “endemic to American democracy” (Olmsted 2009: 234), and Gordon B. Arnold claims that since “the early 1990s, conspiracy theory thinking had become an element of mainstream American thought” (Arnold 2008: 141). Researcher Michael Butter however comes to a somewhat different conclusion (cf. Butter 2014); he restricts the greatest influence of these ideas to a period from the early days of British colonization to the mid-20th century, and states that conspiracy thinking lost its powerful status in the mainstream of American society since the second half of the 20th century (cf. Butter 2014: 269). From his point of view, critical debates on conspiracy theories in the mass media and scientific communities led to their increasing marginalization. The case of JFK however seems to contradict this assessment. Speculations about who really killed Kennedy were indeed very popular in the years and decades following the 1960s (cf. Olmsted 2009: 138ff.) and were widely circulated by the mass media, so conspiracy thinking was indeed far from being restricted to the margins of society. We shall return to this below. The influence of media in general is commonly discussed in recent studies on conspiracy theories. Many researchers agree that the Internet – or rather its semantic reification, the Web 2.0 – has significantly changed conspiracy thinking, since it offers new structures of communication and opportunities for sharing information. Accordingly a new public sphere is established, which Jodi Dean describes as ‘cyberia’: The pleasures of the wired world are pleasures of knowing, of no longer being duped by the system. In cyberia, action – like the action of the conspiracy theorist – is reconfigured as watching, surveilling, exposing, interpreting, linking, knowing. And its reconfiguration is driven by suspicion. (Dean 2002: 103)

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The Web is considered to be one of the most decisive factors fuelling the growth of conspiracy beliefs. But as we are about to see – apart from the social structure imposed by the Web that we are not going to examine here – new media technologies have always stimulated new efforts at interpretation. According to Mark Fenster, conspiracy theories tend to make use of “an excessively integrative interpretative practice that moves beyond the norms of inference” (Fenster 2008: 95). As such they seem to benefit from new technological possibilities as the necessary framework for a continual interpretative search for truth. Information on the John F. Kennedy assassination has been publicized through a whole range of divergent media like photographs and film that seem to provide a clear perspective on all relevant details of the crime. Yet the opposite is the case: it is especially a home movie of the assassination, known as the Zapruder film, that has time and again ignited discussions about the death of John F. Kennedy. The film has been considered to be a prime historical source, for it was the only film document to record the whole assassination in sequence. Abraham Zapruder, a local Dallas businessman, shot the silent color motion picture with his Bell & Howell home-movie camera. The remainder of this article will concentrate on some details of the film’s reception history in order to show that the lasting impact of the assassination is to a considerable degree an effect of its divergent medial adaptations and interpretations. The Zapruder film’s reception may show that against the often-claimed opposition between presence and hermeneutics, both are involved in generating and deconstructing evidence. Obviously images play a significant role in the production of evidence, for they seem to provide immediate access to the event in opposition to unreliable verbal testimony. This corresponds with the conceptualization of presence in terms of indeterminacy and in opposition to propositional meaning. In recent debates on presence, the linguistic turn has been strongly rejected for its perceived imposition of language as a general model of meaning production and its claim that every artifact can be seen as text. This critique of the linguistic turn is also connected with a renunciation of semiotics, as far as a sign is understood linguistically to be a conventionalized carrier of meaning. This is why theorists of presence draw on certain aspects of the iconic or pictorial turn in regard to the status of the image as something exceeding this notion of a sign (cf. Wirth 2007: 95). According to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the materiality of communication determines in each case the specific, idiosyncratic way in which a medium produces presence (cf. Gumbrecht 2004: 8), and Dieter Mersch states that the materiality of the image is prior to any meaning production, though generally concealed by the form (cf. Mersch 2010: 25; 2004: 78). Obviously the image has a privileged status with respect to the display of presence.

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The specific quality of the image is often seen in its auto-performative, deictic character. In its supposed immediacy it seems to give insights without discursive mediation. By producing this kind of immediate evidence, it is argued, a certain ‘fact’ can be revealed not by predication but by performance; the classical rhetorical figure of evidentia is used in this sense to provide seemingly non-discursive, ‘obvious’ insight through the use of figurative language (cf. Kemman 1996: 34). Because in English ‘evidence’ is also used to refer to proof in a court of law, I will try to distinguish between both meanings, because this distinction will be crucial for my argument. In order to understand the influence the images of the Zapruder film had and still have on the public and judicial assessments of the JFK assassination, one has to consider first of all the contextualization of the assassination and its framing as an event.

C onte x t : the F r aming of an E vent As mentioned above, the assassination of Kennedy seems to mark a break in American history. It is often portrayed as a turning point and the end of an era that was characterized by hopes and promises linked to Kennedy’s presidency. Beyond an accurate consideration of historical facts, for many Americans Kennedy was a charismatic leader that stood up against the so-called militaryindustrial complex (cf. Olmsted 2009: 133f.). Not least because of Kennedy’s symbolic significance as a figure of hope with powerful political enemies, his death was a shocking moment and traumatic experience which has triggered an unending quest for meaning until this day. Through its unexpected, shocking, and disruptive quality, the event appears to have a kind of extraordinary presence which has resulted in a need for interpretation and integration into retrospectively established contexts. As Reinhart Koselleck points out, this is typical for the temporality of events in modern history: “Every event produces more and at the same time less than is contained in its pre-given elements: hence its always surprising novelty” (Koselleck 2004: 110). In this respect the event is always characterized by a tension between presence and meaning, and the incommensurability of the event can only be retrospectively compensated by its conceptualization and narration. The term ‘event’ however has multiple meanings and implications which need to be carefully distinguished. As a concept, it has provoked a bundle of historiographical questions, and has been examined with the help of different methodological approaches and from different theoretical perspectives. In the ontological sense, the historical event has attributions such as being located in the past, being the result of human actions, and having a fundamentally

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foreign quality. Epistemologically, it is often characterized by its irretrievable singularity and its unexpected outcome (cf. Hölscher 2002: 72). In everyday speech the term may refer to sports events and to natural catastrophes, to coronations and other ceremonial acts as well as to terrorist attacks and sudden upheavals. Obviously we can differentiate here between events with a more ritual character and events with a particular singularity.1 Historian Hayden White critically noted that in the historiographical discourse “events seem to tell themselves” (White 1990: 2), while they were in fact explained through representation. The growing awareness of the generative power of language can be seen as a reaction to the linguistic turn in the academic discipline of history, which resulted in an increased interest on the part of historians regarding the media-specific properties and conditions of their instruments and sources. The John F. Kennedy assassination serves White as an example of the resistance of a modern event towards its objective account for two reasons: “one is that the number of details identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite; and the other is that the context of any singular event is infinitely extensive, or at least is not objectively determinable” (White 1999: 71). On the one hand, the meaning of a historical event relies on a structuring context or on a narrative frame; on the other hand, the historical event provides an indubitable point of reference for these constructions. Irrespective of the constructivist position of theorists like White, there is a consensus among researchers in the science of history that the critical comparison of divergent sources is a valid method to decide the factuality of events. That said, the historical event can become subject to many conflicting narrations and conceptions of history; the reconstructions of historical events in popular culture may thus constitute a distinct object of historical research. In each case, the medial and the archival conditions as well as their interrelations – e.g. concerning their modes of access – play an important role in the historical study of events. In fact, it was the written record that for a long time had been the predominant historical source. But in recent years, the question of other media has increasingly been raised by historians. Filmic or photographic images are often put in contrast to linguistic sources. Peter Burke states that “[i]mages are mute witnesses and it is difficult to translate their testimony into words” (Burke

1 | The former are mainly treated by Dayan and Katz in their study about media events in which they emphasize the social dimension of community-shaping rituals (cf. Dayan/ Katz 1994).

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2001: 14). The work of the historian thus is further complicated by the need for a translation between different sign and media systems.2 Notwithstanding these scientific discussions and difficulties, the Zapruder film has often been regarded as an ‘eyewitness account’ of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. As a technical recording, it seemed to be superior to the potentially distorted and unreliable memories of human witnesses. For that matter the discrepancy between the quality and the significance of its content has obviously made the Zapruder film particularly compelling. It seems to have been made with no regard to artistic considerations and contains a number of deficiencies: the images are blurred, badly focused, and ill-composed.3 According to Stella Bruzzi, the images give the impression of the absence of a “conscious creator of the images” (Bruzzi 2005: 422), which enhances their authenticity. Not least because of this strikingly authentic impression, the Zapruder film was considered to be one of the most important pieces of evidence during the official investigation of the assassination by the Warren Commission (the committee examining the murder of the President), whose report, published in 1964, included many Zapruder frames. Even though it could not clarify exactly when and how many shots had been fired, the Zapruder film also became the basis for different reconstructions of the shooting. It was assumed that despite its lack of a soundtrack the film provides an extraordinarily precise timeline for examining what happened due to its 486 frames recording the event at precisely 18.3 frames per second. The central role of the film for the forensic investigation at the time created a kind of fetishistic fascination that carried far beyond the historical moment. According to Richard Trask, “Zapruder’s viewfinder perspective has virtually replaced all other visual perspectives and realities of the event” (Trask 2005: 14), and the Norwegian media studies scholar Øyvind Vågnes uses the term “Zaprudered” in order to describe the film’s impact on the cultural memory (cf. Vågnes 2011: 9ff.). The Zapruder film and its reception history obviously contributed largely to the popular framing of the event. Furthermore, in the case of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, singular and ritual aspects of the event equally take effect: the memorization of the single event is highly influenced by the iterative commemoration on each anniversary, leading to new speculations and requests for further investigation that are often sparked off by a reassessment of the Zapruder footage. This public remembrance has the character of a traumatic actualization rather than of a 2 | The special nature of images as object and source of historiographical work has been recently reflected by the historian Gerhard Paul in his conception of a ‘visual history’ (cf. Paul 2006). 3 | According to Rolf F. Nohr such deficiencies are invoking a promise of authenticity through a monumentalization of the ephemeral (cf. Nohr 2014).

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simple recollection of the event. Trauma has a specific temporality: rather than to overcome the painful past, the past is permanently actualized. The event therefore seems to resist its narrative completion (cf. Caruth 1995; Eggers 2001). Today, the fact that the film is accessible in countless versions on YouTube makes it difficult to keep in mind that viewing the film in its proper form, as a motion picture, for a long time had been restricted to certain groups of people, like federal agents, experts, and jury members. For this very reason, the fascination for the Zapruder film has not diminished but grown throughout the history of its reception.

R ecep tion of the Z apruder F ilm : I s S eeing B elie ving ? The film was hardly developed when Zapruder sold it to Time Life. The first isolated frames of the assassination scene were published on November 29, 1963 in Life magazine. They were rendered in black and white, and the most shocking but allegedly also most enlightening of all images, frame 313, which shows the fatal head shot, was omitted. In November 1966 Life magazine then reacted to the growing dissatisfaction of the public concerning the findings of the Warren Commission. The issue contains an interview with eyewitness Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting in the presidential limousine on the day of the assassination and was also struck by a bullet. Despite the account of such a prominent witness, Life leaves no doubt that [o]f all the witnesses to the tragedy, the only unimpeachable one is the 8-mm movie camera of Abraham Zapruder, which recorded the assassination in sequence. […] by studying individual frames one can see what happened every instant and measure precisely the intervals between events. (Anon. 1966: 41)

This corresponds to the prevalent approach to the film in the first decades after its publication. Quite from the beginning, it was treated like a series of photographs, which allowed examining single frames in greater detail. Even Connally refreshes his memory by studying isolated frames, and he comes to the conclusion that the pictures show that the single bullet theory – one bullet striking him as well as President Kennedy – had to be wrong and consequently that the person accused of the assassination – Lee Harvey Oswald – had probably not acted alone. The case of Connally’s revised eyewitness account reveals the unreliability of many witness statements provided after the famous Zapruder film frames were released: It can hardly be ruled out that the memories of the witnesses may have been influenced by the images of the assassination.

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In the very same year, American lawyer Mark Lane first published his book Rush to Judgment, in which he criticizes various inaccuracies of the Warren Commission’s investigation. He emphasizes that “the United States Government retains photographic evidence which may be determinative of Oswald’s innocence or guilt” (Lane 1966: 344). Assessments like these further fueled doubts and disbelief about the official lone gunman theory and once again highlighted the relevance of (audio-)visual sources of the event. In 1975, the general public finally had its first chance to see the Zapruder film as a motion picture in full length. Robert Jacob Groden, a young optics technician, obtained a bootleg copy of the film and enhanced its quality. According to Groden, the stabilized frames, clear color, and improved image quality resulted in a considerable increase in information to be derived from the film (cf. Groden 1993: xiii). The remastered version was passed over to ABC and was first shown on Geraldo Rivera’s late-night show Good Night America. Based on the film, the studio guests agreed that the fatal headshot most likely hit Kennedy from the front, which was outright inconsistent with the official version of the government. The screening of the film caused a nationwide shock and again a new inquiry was demanded. In 1976, the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was founded.4 That same year, a nationwide poll indicated that 80% of the American public believed in a conspiracy (cf. Trask 2005: 233). In the following years, public access to the Zapruder film has been provided through various video and DVD releases, and there are still new versions appearing: versions with high-definition image scanning, digitally re-mastered frames, and 3-dimensional scale models of Dealey Plaza based on the Zapruder footage. These new visualizing procedures lend themselves well to an ongoing interpretation process. Every new adaptation promises to amplify the information rate gained from the original images, and new technical devices are multiplying the possibilities of interpretation. Art Simon notes that “the move from the film image to computerized display produces a new piece of evidence modeled on but in a different register than the original Zapruder footage” (Simon 2013: 46). With the increasing number of different versions an increase in divergent and conflicting interpretations of what really happened that day in 4 | The HSCA concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The Committee’s conclusion was based on audiotapes of a police officer who allegedly reported the sound of shots fired on Kennedy. Because the Zapruder footage was silent, these tapes – referred to as ‘acoustical fingerprints’ (cf. Trask 2005: 237) – finally seemed to allow for the Zapruder film to be read properly, and thus for the case to be solved. Later this approach was revealed to be a failure, for the recordings did not coincide with the assassination (cf. ibid. 2005: 251ff.), and random noises were mistaken for gunshots.

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November 1963 can be observed. The images, treated as mute witnesses, leave ample room for a wide variety of translations and interpretations. In this case, materiality apparently is not a hindrance to making sense, as Dieter Mersch asserts (cf. Mersch 2004: 79ff.), but on the contrary provokes new attempts to assign meaning time and again. In addition, materiality does not always necessarily refer to a transmedial ‘real’ but can also point to characteristics of the medial production process itself. This in turn has given rise to new speculations. In recent years, a re-thinking of the Zapruder film’s reliability can be observed. While generations of conspiracy theorists have seen the Zapruder film as a trustworthy source of history, the number of those who question the film’s authenticity and classify it as a fraud has by now increased. One of the most prominent representatives of this view is James H. Fetzer, who argues that his opponents’ argument – that the photos and films are authentic because they consistently fit together – is not compelling, because they could “have been altered for that purpose. They might ‘fit together’ by design” (Fetzer 2003: xv). It seems as if the digital age’s oft-diagnosed referential crisis also affects the assessment of the Zapruder film. Simon notes that “the Zapruder film registers, perhaps better than any other single film text, the shifting status of film representation over the last thirty years” (Simon 2013: 35). A close examination of the Zapruder footage then seems to prove its own fakery rather than to disclose what really happened. This brief summary of the film’s reception history makes clear that after a short time of limited access to the Zapruder film, which contributed to the establishment of its auratic character, by now an analytical overdrive can be observed: everything seems possible, even a large-scale fraud. The film that was supposed to help resolve a crime thus itself becomes the object of endless investigations. The Zapruder film of course was not considered the only piece of evidence in investigations of JFK’s assassination, yet its reading seemed to lend itself well to the integration of various theories and contexts. That is why the Zapruder film can be seen as a prime example of the ambivalent relationship between presence and evidence. In the following, I will further elaborate on this point.

E x ample : “A P icture S pe aks a Thousand W ords ” In 1991, Hollywood director Oliver Stone caused quite a stir with the release of his motion picture JFK. The movie is about former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who in 1969 accused businessman Clay Shaw of having been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. During the trial the first public showing of the Zapruder film took place. In JFK, Stone takes sides with Garrison’s conspiracy accusations.

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Before the district attorney shows the Zapruder film to his audience in the courtroom, he makes use of diagrams of the so-called ‘magic bullet’ that passed through Kennedy’s neck and Governor Connally’s chest, wrist, and thigh. Garrison claims that the bullet would have had to perform a trajectory that contradicts the rules of physics. Garrison’s argument that the alleged trajectory is physically impossible largely relies on the ability of diagrams to create evidence by externalizing inferences and literally illustrating causal relationships (cf. Ernst 2014). The diagram is considered to be a medium which explicitly operates with schemas of visual perception (cf. ibid.). Garrison suggests that if the single-bullet theory was wrong, then the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone was wrong too. With this demonstration and others, Garrison provides the context for his interpretation of the Zapruder film. His argument is brought forward in a manner that rhetorically emphasizes the difference between showing and telling. “A picture speaks a thousand words,” Jim Garrison points out at the beginning of his argumentation. This metaphor explicates an implicit understanding of the difference between visual and verbal expression by contrasting pictorial meaning production with discursive meaning production. In the following sequence of Stone’s JFK a typical mode of reading of the Zapruder footage is demonstrated. The Zapruder film is finally shown to the audience in the courtroom, yet the audiences of Stone’s film see a completely different version. While the diegetic motion picture brought before the court is screened at its proper speed, the version created through the montage slows down at certain points; details are enlarged and cross-cut with reenacted sequences. Garrison, who previously often supported his argumentation by using a pointer, is supported by this editing decision, as it reinforces his deictic gestures. In the montage of the Zapruder film an intersection between single frame and motion picture takes place, which produces context and provides more detail at the same time. The movie serves as timeline and as magnifying glass. Detail and context, singularity and duration here find themselves intermingled.5 The single frames are treated like photographs, which was the prevalent form in which the Zapruder film had been made public in the first decades after its publication. This manner of reading creates an interrelationship between two media: photography and film. I choose the term intersection in order to describe a something-in-between that displays functions attributed to each single medium respectively and mixes them up in an intermedial relation. In 5 | This corresponds to the handling of evidence in the case of Rodney King, who in 1991 became victim of brutal policy violence supposedly out of racist motives, but the amateur recording of the crime was also used by the defense attorney to prove his delinquency.

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this regard intermediality is not understood in the ontological sense of two substantially isolated but converging media; rather it implies that the mediality of a medium can be defined only through functional and formal specifications. In this respect, intermediality is based on a tertium, an analogical comparison between different aspects of medial forms and functions. Therefore it is also possible to speak of metaphorical intermediality (cf. Scheid 2005: 22ff.), where the metaphorical transfer amounts to understanding one medium in terms of another. This understanding is always incomplete, for it conceals certain aspects in favor of others (cf. Kirchmann 2013: 79). The concept of metaphorical intermediality allows considering the validity of claims of medial differences and of discursive assumptions about medial specificities (cf. ibid.). Accordingly, these discursive attributions have become form and contribute to the ascription of media-specific functions. One highly influential attribution is the notion that photography is like a trace, as it seems to maintain a physical connection with the ‘real’ in the mechanical and opto-chemical reactions of analogous photography. The fact that digital photographs are very often subject to the same ascription supports the argument that the materiality of the medium is not the decisive factor here. In JFK, the Zapruder film is likewise considered to be composed out of single photographs, and assumptions about photography are then transferred to the film, which, as we have seen, was common throughout the history of the Zapruder film’s reception. The film footage was fragmented into single frames in order to achieve a higher resolution of certain details. In Oliver Stone’s movie the search for relevant details is executed through selective visualization; during the screening of the Zapruder film Garrison directs the attention of his audience to certain key frames by enumerating them meticulously. The vividness of his descriptions is intensified for the audience of JFK by the montage, which quickly alternates between enhancements of and stills from the Zapruder footage, reenacted sequences, and close-ups of Garrison holding his fervid speech. Garrison’s argumentation simultaneously benefits from the seemingly straightforward evidence provided by the trace-like photographic record and its location in a coherent filmic timeframe. Roland Barthes described the perceived immediateness of the photographic image in contrast to discursive mediation, anticipating several major points of the debates on presence. According to Barthes, the special quality of the photographic image lies in its ability to exceed the culturally connoted meaning of symbolic systems. From this point of view the image presents itself as pure denotation. He argues that “[t]he photograph is literally an emanation of the referent” (Barthes 1996: 80) and “a certificate of presence” (ibid. 87). For Barthes, photography is phenomenologically characterized by a specific form, whose sign-quality is maintained through a causal connection with the ‘real.’

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His conception of photography seems to correspond to Charles S. Peirce’s notion of an index as “a sign which refers to the [O]bject that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that [O]bject” (Peirce 1998: 291). Peirce himself mentions the photograph as an example of indices, for it establishes in the very moment of the exposure an existential one-to-one relation between the parts of the photograph and the parts of the object (Peirce 1983: 65). Indices therefore seem to be characterized by a pre-reflexive and pre-semantic instantaneousness, but Peirce also notes that “it would be difficult if not impossible, to instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality” (Peirce 1960: CP 2.306).6 Furthermore Peirce points out that two basic types of indices must be distinguished: genuine and degenerative indices. Genuine indices are effects that refer to causes (for example a footprint), while degenerative indices reverse this relationship (for example a pointing finger) (cf. Peirce 1960: CP 5.75). Degenerative indices therefore intentionally refer to the object by creating an associative link, while genuine indices are causally linked to it. In most cases these two types of indexicality cannot strictly be isolated from each other. Uwe Wirth calls the simultaneousness of the genuine and degenerative form “indexical interference” (Wirth 2007: 97). Usually the identification of a genuine index relies on the degenerative type as a frame of reference. Indexical interference is thus always part of an inferential process (cf. Wirth 2007: 59; Jäger 2008: 297ff.). This becomes especially apparent in criminal investigations, where the notion of traces as evidence is derived from. A fingerprint at the scene of a crime for example is classified as circumstantial or indirect evidence; although it is causally related to a certain fact it still relies on an inference to connect it to the conclusion of a fact.7 Garrison’s taking of evidence is based on the supposedly self-evident evidence of the photographic image as a certificate of presence in the mode of genuine indexicality. But in order to understand what actually can be seen on the image, an associative link in the mode of degenerative indexicality must be established, which is demonstrated in Stone’s JFK through the excessive support of Garrison’s deictic gestures by the montage. The crucial point here is the assumption that the amateur footage of Abraham Zapruder constitutes 6 | References to the Collected Papers are abbreviated as CP followed by the volume and paragraph number. 7 | According to Ginzburg, the basic principles of detective work – the search for traces and the significance of minor, seemingly negligible details – is also a characteristic of the so-called evidential paradigm that emerges towards the end of the 19th century in the human sciences (cf. Ginzburg 1979). This complex set of historical conditions has obviously been very inspiring for a modern form of conspiracy theories that ostensibly rely on scientific methods in order to support or reject a hypothesis (cf. Klausnitzer 2007: 8).

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a genuine index; thus the medial form is supposed to be ontologically tied to a certain semiotic quality. The advantage of the image over verbal expression is thus further reinforced by its embedment in the medial frame of reference that seems to guarantee immediate evidence. The immediate evidence of the photographic image seems to require no further discursive mediation even though it relies on the use of degenerative indexicality, which already leads the attention of the audience to certain specific details. This reading of the Zapruder film is based on a metaphorical intermediality that establishes a reference framework for the interpretation process. The trace-like photographic image promises to give an indexical guarantee, but the impression of genuine indexicality relies on a metaphorical transfer. The location of single details in a filmic timeframe then provides the opportunity to draw further conclusions from the examination of the footage. The metaphorical intermediality therefore establishes an intersection of the filmic and photographic record that endows the Zapruder footage with its dual nature as timeline and magnifying glass in the interpretation process. However, without the discursive attribution of a genuine indexicality, the difference between showing and telling could not serve as the basis of the interpretation. Reference as the physical trace of the ‘real’ or as a residual presence of the past is unthinkable without inference. It relies on a framework that is based on the notion of film and photography as reliable sources of immediate visual evidence. Although the possibility of manipulation must be acknowledged, a belief in the indexicality of mechanically reproduced images – motion pictures included – builds a cultural or symbolic framework for the interpretation process. It therefore seems correct to assume that degenerative indexicality is always prior to genuine indexicality at least as far as technical media are concerned, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. But what consequence follows for the status of evidence from the unreliability of genuine indexicality? As stated by Jäger, one must distinguish between epistemic and discursive evidence. According to him, the first refers to a subjective mental state of immediate certitude and the second refers to the public readability of evidential procedures. While epistemic evidence relies on the transparency of media procedures and the invisibility of their evidential effects, discursive evidence occurs when media procedures become the focus of attention (cf. Jäger 2006: 45f.). Jäger therefore also speaks of the difference between ‘evidence through production’ and ‘evidence as production.’ The American law of evidence is an example of the discursive type of evidence, for it encompasses the basic principles that govern the proof of facts in a legal proceeding. Types of legal evidence include testimony, documentary evidence, physical evidence, and of course film footage like the Zapruder home movie. In this respect, the law of evidence can be seen as a paradigmatic example of the importance of examinable rules of argumentation and explanation for the specification and legitimacy of

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claims of validity, especially when circumstantial evidence and the burden of proof are concerned. The promise of this kind of confirmability also seems to motivate Garrison’s use of diagrams of the ‘magic bullet.’ Diagrams are generally expected to provide the opportunity to deliver substantive evidence by illustrating inferences. However, only the first kind of evidence – epistemic evidence – seems to require no discursive mediation. In debates on presence, the increased attention paid to the sensual perception of the ‘real’ and a proclaimed postsemiotic turn have also led to a reontologisation of evidence. Still Jäger emphasizes that evidence always remains the result of medial operations and meaning production instead of building an incontestable assured guarantee (cf. Jäger 2008: 310). He therefore argues that epistemic evidence seems to be connected with a mode of transparency rather than being grounded on a transsemiotical ‘real’ (cf. Jäger 2006: 48). Jäger states that solely under the condition of an undisturbed mediation process, in the mode of transparency, an effect of the immediate presence of the designated as transsemiotical ‘real’ is produced (cf. Jäger 2008: 292/310). He therefore speaks of two kinds of visibilities, which generally exclude or replace each other: the visibility of the medium, i.e. the evidential procedure, and the visibility of the mediated, i.e. evidence as the result of the evidential procedure. The reading of the Zapruder film, however, can serve as an example of the interdependence of these two kinds of visibilities. Because of its allegedly genuine indexicality, the film at first glance seems to provide unambiguous knowledge, which lends it an aura of epistemological evidence. In this vein, David R. Wrone, a critic of the official account of the JFK assassination, notes that “[t]he movie conveyed shocking and convincing evidence that a conspiracy had indeed murdered President John F. Kennedy” (Wrone 2003: 69). But the same movie also seems to provide evidence supporting the official lone gunman theory. Both theories are based on the same images. The images’ incommensurate excess precludes semantic closure – obviously, the eye virtually sees more than it can actually read. The opposition between visual and verbal presentation cannot be conclusively resolved, and thus provokes conflicting translations. However, the discrepancy can be rhetorically operationalized, and the impression of immediate evidence of the image can be transferred to its verbal explications. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian already described this kind of transfer between image and language as hypotyposis, which means “a representation of things so expressed by words, as to seem rather to be seen, than heard” (Quintilian 1774: 115).8 To avoid confusion, in English the term ‘hypotyposis’ 8 | “[P]roposita quaedam forma rerum ita expressa verbis, ut cerni potius videantur quam audiri” (Quintilian 1995: 286 [IX 2, 40]).

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is often used to refer to evidence at large. In rhetoric, hypotyposis is an umbrella term for various techniques for describing things vividly so as to create the impression of seeing things before the mind’s eye. As an act of verbal visualization, it is used to increase the orator’s persuasiveness. Rhetorical devices like hypotyposis can be understood as a targeted endeavor to bring about a failing of linguistic functions (cf. Holert 2002: 208) and thus the value of imagery is more clearly brought to the foreground. In our example, the excess of the image, which defies meaning production, is used for the rhetorical production of evidence. In opposition to the claim that medial transparency is a precondition for unproblematic evidence, the failing or opacity of one medium (language) thus is the reason for the evidential power of another (image). Opacity therefore should not be unhesitatingly equated with a lack of evidence. Even when evidence is not at stake, the characteristics of the medium need not necessarily stay out of the field of attention. Quite on the contrary, emphasizing their special role in the mediation process provides a discursive effect of evidence. The mediality of the medium is not ontologically founded, but is itself the result of a discursive process, at least when technical media are concerned. The reflexivity of the recognized media conditions constitutes an integral part of the evidential process, which contradicts the widely shared notion that the more unremarkable media are as media, the more effectively they are functioning (cf. Mersch 2004: 80; Jäger 2012: 27). Media are not as such transparent or opaque; their transparency or opacity rather depends on the field of comparison in intermedial relations or semiotic interferences.9 In opposition to verbal expression, visual presentation seems to convey evidence without discursive mediation, but this should not be misunderstood as an ontological quality of images. The assumed genuine indexicality of the film is the result of comparing it with photographic images that are considered to be like traces. Like genuine indexicality, the notion of epistemic evidence seems to be inappropriate at least as far as technical media are concerned. It becomes apparent that expecting Abraham Zapruder’s home movie to clarify exactly what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas falls short of the film’s characteristics. Garrison’s reading of the Zapruder film in JFK fails the object it attempts to analyze: the film as film is effaced by being fragmented into single frames. “A picture speaks a thousand words,” Garrison remarks in order to affirm the film’s importance as documentary evidence, but his own interpretation contradicts this assessment: visibility is completely translated into readability. 9 | According to Fohrmann, this can be generally said about the constitution of the mediality of a medium (cf. Fohrmann 2004).

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The specific mode in which the Zapruder film has been read is bound to perpetuate doubts and disbelief and to endlessly fuel new conspiracy theories. Furthermore, admission of the images’ lack of epistemic evidence as well as speculations about the Zapruder film being a complete fabrication have led to new loops of interpretation. Therefore the event continues to exert its presence, for it cannot be conclusively resolved or translated into one single narration once and for all. The volatile tension between presence and meaning, which is characteristic of events in general, is endlessly prolonged. Various contexts have been included in the interpretation process that range from perceived media properties and the reception history of the Zapruder film to a US-specific distrust of authority. The ambiguity of the images produced in the interpretation process is a source of rhetorical evidence and challenges it at the same time. Oliver Stone’s JFK makes clear how the otherness of the image can be rhetorically functionalized while at the same time its interpretation is ancillary to linguistic meaning production. Theories of presence heavily criticize some tenets of the linguistic turn, while paradoxically adopting others. Language is still seen as the paradigm of meaning production. The rejection of hermeneutics and the emphasis on presence therefore find their equivalent in the preference for the image. But language remains the frame of reference to describe the image as the wholly other. Therefore the image seems to be accessible only in its negativity; the alleged characteristics of the image remain the result of its comparison with language. Obviously we are confronted with an intersection on the basis of a metaphorical relation that initiates and motivates attention to materiality. The materiality of communication therefore reveals itself to be a discursive effect. As such it can be rhetorically functionalized with a strong emphasis on its presentative immediateness. Additionally, the self-imposed restriction to aesthetics as the exemplary realm of semantic ambiguity in recent debates on presence obviously contributes to the conception of presence as the opposition of unambiguous meaning production. But our example shows that in other sectors of society, like the judiciary, the function of presence is not necessarily incompatible with propositional meaning. Presence has an ambivalent character that can be situated between the permanent deferral of meaning production and the production of meaning in the evidential process. The oftenemphasized unspeakability of presence in recent debates (cf. Habermann 2011: 27) is therefore probably best understood as a rhetorical strategy of its own.

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W orks C ited Anon. (1966): “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” in: Life Nov. 25, pp. 38-53. Arnold, Gordon B. (2008): Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television and Politics, Westport: Praeger. Barthes, Roland (1996): Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, transl. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Bruzzi, Stella (2005): “The Event. Archive and Imagination,” in: Alan Rosenthal/ John Corner (eds.), New Challenges for Documentary, Manchester/New York: Manchester UP, pp. 419-431. Burke, Peter (2001): Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, New York: Cornell UP. Butter, Michael (2014): “Konspirationistisches Denken in den USA,” in: Andreas Anton/Michael Schetsche/Michael K. Walter (eds.), Konspiration. Soziologie des Verschwörungsdenkens, Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 259-276. Caruth, Cathy (1995): Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Baltimore/New York: Johns Hopkins UP. Dayan, Daniel/Katz, Elihu (1994): Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History, Cambridge/London: Harvard UP. Dean, Jodi (2002): “If Anything Is Possible,” in: Peter Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation. The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, New York: New York UP, pp. 85-106. Eggers, Michael (2001): “Trauma,” in: Nicolas Pethes/Jens Ruchatz (eds.), Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, Reinbek: Rowohlt, pp. 602-604. Ernst, Christoph (2014): “Moving Images of Thought – Notes on the Diagrammatic Dimension of Film Metaphor,” in: Frank Adloff/Katharina Gerund/David Kaldewey (eds.), Revealing Tacit Knowledge. Embodiment and Explication, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 245-277. Fenster, Mark (2008): Conspiracy Theories. Secrecy and Power in American Culture, rev. and updated ed., Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Fetzer, James H. (2003): The Great Zapruder Film Hoax. Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK, Chicago: Catfeet Press. Fohrmann, Jürgen (2004): “Der Unterschied der Medien,” in: Jürgen Fohrmann/Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.), Die Kommunikation der Medien, Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 5-19. Ginzburg, Carlo (1979): “Clues. Roots of a Scientific Paradigm,” in: Theory and Society 7.3, pp. 273-288. Goldberg, Robert Alan (2001): Enemies Within. The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, New Haven/London: Yale UP.

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Groden, Robert J. (1993): The Killing of a President. The Complete Photographic Record of the JFK Assassination, the Conspiracy, and the Cover-up, New York: Viking Penguin. Groh, Dieter (1992): “Die verschwörungstheoretische Versuchung oder: Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Good People?,” in: Dieter Groh (ed.), Anthropologische Dimensionen der Geschichte, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 267-3. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Diesseits der Hermeneutik. Die Produktion von Präsenz, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Habermann, Franz (2011): “Zu einer Poetologie der Präsenz. Theorie – Metaphysik – Unsagbarkeit,” in: Tanja Prokić/Anne Kolb/Oliver Jahraus (eds.), Wider die Repräsentation. Präsens/z Erzählen in Literatur, Film und Bildender Kunst, Frankfurt: Lang, pp. 21-48. Hofstadter, Richard (1965): The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, New York: Knopf. Holert, Tom (2002): “Evidenz-Effekte. Überzeugungsarbeit in der visuellen Kultur der Gegenwart,” in: Matthias Bickenbach/Axel Fliethmann (eds.), Korrespondenzen. Visuelle Kulturen zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Gegenwart, Köln: DuMont, pp. 198-225. Hölscher, Lucian (2002): “Ereignis,” in: Stefan Jordan (ed.), Lexikon Geschichtswissenschaft. Hundert Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart: Reclam, pp. 72-74. Jäger, Ludwig (2006): “Schauplätze der Evidenz. Evidenzverfahren und kulturelle Semantik. Eine Skizze,” in: Michael Cuntz, et al. (eds.), Die Listen der Evidenz, Köln: DuMont, pp. 37-49. —, (2008): “Indexikalität und Evidenz. Skizze zum Verhältnis von referentieller und inferentieller Bezugnahme,” in: Ludwig Jäger/Horst Wenzel (eds.), Deixis und Evidenz, Freiburg: Rombach, pp. 289-315. —,  (2012): “Bezugnahmepraktiken. Skizze zur operativen Logik der Mediensemantik,” in: Ludwig Jäger/Gisela Fehrmann/Meike Adam (eds.), Medienbewegungen. Praktiken der Bezugnahme, München: Fink, pp. 1341. JFK (1991): USA, dir. Oliver Stone. Kemmann, Ansgar (1996): “Evidenz,” in: Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 3. Eup – Hör., Tübingen: Niemeyer, Sp 33-47. Kirchmann, Kay (2013): “Sinn oder Sinnlichkeit? Eine filmhistorische Fallstudie vor dem Hintergrund von Foucaults Freud Kritik,” in: Christoph Ernst/ Heike Paul (eds.), Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 77-94.

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Klausnitzer, Ralf (2007): Poesie und Konspiration. Beziehungssinn und Zeichenökonomie von Verschwörungsszenarien in Publizistik, Literatur und Wissenschaft 1750-1850, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004): Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia UP. Lane, Mark (1966): Rush to Judgment. A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald, London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Mersch, Dieter (2002a): Ereignis und Aura. Untersuchungen zu einer ‘performativen Ästhetik,’ Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —, (2002b): Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis, München: Fink. —, (2004): “Medialität und Undarstellbarkeit. Einleitung in eine ‘Negative’ Medientheorie,” in: Sybille Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität, München: Fink, pp. 75-96. —, (2010): “Materialität und Formalität. Zur duplizitären Ordnung des Bildlichen,” in: Marcel Finke/Mark A. Halawa (eds.), Materialität und Bildlichkeit. Visuelle Artefakte zwischen Aisthesis und Semiosis, Berlin: Kadmos, pp. 21-49. Nohr, Rolf F. (2014): “Ich bin nackt. Wie Video im Film Unmittelbarkeit erzeugt und Geständnisse provoziert,” in: Kay Kirchmann/Jens Ruchatz (eds.), Medienreflexion im Film. Ein Handbuch, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 173-186. Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2009): Real Enemies. Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, Oxford/New York: Oxford UP. Paul, Gerhard (2006): “Von der Historischen Bildkunde zur Visual History. Eine Einführung,” in: Gerhard Paul (ed.), Visual History. Ein Studienbuch, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 7-36. Peirce, Charles S. (1960): Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. I-VI, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 2nd printing, Cambridge: Harvard UP. —, (1983): Phänomen und Logik der Zeichen, ed. Helmut Pape, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. —, (1998): The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2 (18931913), ed. the Peirce Edition, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP. Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius (1774): Quintilian’s Institutes of the Orator. In Twelve Books, transl. J. Patsall, 2 vols., London: printed for B. Law and J. Wilkie. —, (1995): Ausbildung des Redners. Zwölf Bücher, ed. and transl. Helmut Rahn, 3rd ed., Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges. Ramsay, Robin (2013): Who Shot JFK?, Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Scheid, Torsten (2005): Fotografie als Metapher. Zur Konzeption des Fotografischen im Film, Hildesheim: Olms.

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Simon, Art (2013): Dangerous Knowledge. The JFK Assassination in Art and Film, Philadelphia: Temple UP. Swami, Viren/Coles, Rebecca (2010): “The Truth Is Out There. Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles Look at Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” in: The Psychologist 23.7, pp. 560-563. Trask, Richard B. (2005): National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film. Mr. Zapruder’s Home Movie and the Murder of President Kennedy, Danvers: Yeoman Press. Vågnes, Øyvind (2011): Zaprudered. The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture, Austin: U of Texas P. White, Hayden V. (1990): The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. —, (1999): “The Modernist Event,” in: Hayden White, Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, pp. 66-86. Wirth, Uwe (2007): “Die Interferenz von Indexikalität und Performativität bei der Erzeugung von Aufmerksamkeit,” in: Christian Kiening (ed.), Mediale Gegenwärtigkeit, Zürich: Chronos, pp. 95-109. Wrone, David R. (2003): The Zapruder Film. Reframing JFK’s Assassination, Lawrence: UP of Kansas.

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“Still Standing Like Timeless Islands” The Presence of Postindustrial Spaces in The Ruins of Detroit (2010) Susann Köhler

I ntroduction In Northeastern and Midwestern cities of the United States the process of deindustrialization resulted in a considerable expansion of urban ruination and abandonment. Massive plant closings, disinvestment, and the relocation of production sites radically transformed many city areas into challenging postindustrial spaces with empty factory sites, abandoned family homes, and modernist architecture in decay. As visual reminders of the manufacturing past and its prosperity, postindustrial ruins have become symbolic signs of urban (economic) vulnerability and loss in America’s so-called Rust Belt region.1 One prominent example for the effects which North America’s deindustrialization process has had on metropolitan regions is the city of Detroit. Within decades of the postwar period, its urban center radically transformed from an industrial center of the automobile industry to a postindustrial shrinking area leaving many residents trapped in a circle of unequal opportunities, poverty, economical decline, and widespread abandonment (cf. Sugrue 2005). Photographers have expressed a vibrant interest in the everyday material presence of ruin in USAmerican postindustrial cities and created a substantial visual archive of urban ruins throughout the last twenty years. The photobook The Ruins of Detroit (2010) by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre is among the more prominent contemporary representations of decaying postindustrial spaces in Detroit.2 The book meticulously frames the scale and scope of abandonment and studies 1 | On the process of deindustrialization in the United States see Bluestone/Harrison (1982) and Cowie/Heathcott (2003). 2 | Other photo collections and photobooks that depict Detroit include for example Vergara (1995; 1999) and Moore (2010).

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deindustrialization’s far-reaching repercussions on urban spaces and former production sites. Ruin photographs express a need to engage with the presence of the past, negotiate the cultural meanings of ruined spaces, and to uncover the implicit meaning structures of neglected traces of US-American material culture. In this paper, I will argue that ruin photography is a cultural practice that frames urban ruins as present monuments of the past in order to develop a critical aesthetic sensibility for a new postindustrial urban environment. The medium of the photobook offers a framework in which loss and urban vulnerability are embedded in a set of complex visual strategies that foster a critical reflection on urban decay. By using Marchand and Meffre’s photobook as an example, I will examine how ruin photography engages with the legacy of heavy industry in postindustrial regions. I will especially focus on the representation of industry, former production places, and warehouses in the photobook. Significant about these specific representations is their focus on the material quality of urban ruin, their (implicit) art-historical references, distinct spatial iconography, and reference to the aesthetic concept of the sublime, which describes a distinct affective quality of the ruin photograph. Affective responses to ruination can be related to strategies of aesthetic framing that negotiate experiences of loss and vulnerability in the medium of photography. The starting point of this essay is therefore a discussion of postindustrial ruin in relation to a discourse on presence, affective encounters of the material world, and aesthetic experience. In this context, photographic theory has contributed to the discussion of presence and its effects created by media materiality and temporality.

The C oncep t of P resence and (R uin) P hotogr aphy Contemporary debates in the humanities and social sciences are concerned with presence as a form of everyday experience or extraordinary moments of intense feeling and with its embeddedness in social settings and articulation in various cultural and religious practices (cf. Ernst/Paul 2013a; Gosh/Kleinberg 2013; Gumbrecht 2004). Presence, in a basic definition of the concept, can be defined as a bodily, affective, and immediate appropriation of the world and its objects. As an (extra-)ordinary experience, it is not based on propositional knowledge and thus is not thoroughly expressible through language, but requires various forms of translation and presentification. The paradigm of presence emphasizes a form of ‘being in contact’ with the material world over an exclusively meaning-based discourse. In his book The Production of Presence, literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht criticizes the seemingly “uncontested centrality of interpretation” in the humanities and their neglect of a “presence-based relationship to the

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world” (2004: xv). In targeting the disregard of presentist experiences in meaning-based societies, Gumbrecht demands to shift back scholarly attention to the potential if only elusive experience of something which language can only insufficiently express. By claiming the existence of and direct relation to some reality in the realm of (aesthetic) experiences, he radically opposes Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive theory, which denies any notion of presence, transcendental referent of the sign, or center of origin of the semiotic system (cf. Derrida 2005). While Gumbrecht maintains a binary opposition between an “a-semiotic presence” and “semiotic discourse” (cf. Ernst/Paul 2013b: 12), he nevertheless identifies a driving force of oscillation between presence and meaning effects. He states that “the tension/oscillation between presence and meaning effects endows the object of aesthetic experience with a component of provocative instability and unrest” (2004: 107-08). In Gumbrecht’s understanding, moments of presence are essentially produced by the materialities and aesthetic configurations of objects. He therefore identifies presence effects especially in relation to aesthetic objects, sporting events, or literary texts. They denote short-lived (extraordinary, epiphanic) moments of intense feeling which are removed from the ordinary, markedly everyday experience of time and space (cf. ibid. 97-99). Moments of aesthetic presentist experience accentuate the sensuous dimension of any encounter with the material world and defy outright explanation and symbolic codification.3 The un-coded, affective and instantaneous realm of experience, which remains outside of the semiotic paradigm, has been discussed in photographic theory in significant ways as well. Roland Barthes introduces the concepts of the punctum and studium in his much debated book Camera Lucida to identify two different levels of engagement with the photographic picture: an uncodified (highly subjective) affective response to and the meaning-based study of the medium. They are as much “co-present” (1981: 42) as, from a methodological 3 | In his discussion of presence, Gumbrecht does not account for the potential interrelation of presentist experiences with (tacit) dimensions of knowledge. It is one premise of this essay that presence in form of aesthetic experiences is pre-structured by different forms of implicit understanding. These tacit dimensions of meaning/ knowledge exceed outright explanation by language, comprise individual and collective experience, and relate to bodily as well as sensuous knowledge (cf. Adloff/Gerund/ Kaldewey 2015; Shotwell 2011). Alexis Shotwell, for instance, refers to tacit knowledge that is expressed in aesthetics as sensuous knowledge. Sensuous knowledge combines different forms of tacit knowing and understanding such as skill-based knowledge, bodily knowing, potentially propositional knowledge, and affective or emotional understanding (cf. Shotwell 2011: 3-28). Shotwell contends that “we know the world otherwise through this sensuous knowledge, and that knowing is beyond, beneath, and other than rational, cognitive, propositional knowledge” (ibid. 49).

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perspective, in opposition to one another. The perception of a photograph, according to Barthes, can thus yield a dynamic process that oscillates between non-semiotic and semiotic levels. For Barthes, the studium is a form of (conventional) reading of the photograph along the lines of culturally specific codes. Everything on the level of the studium is identifiable, propositional, and assigns specific cultural meanings to the image. Here, the individual viewer interprets the picture on the basis of specific contextual frameworks and his/her cultural (and potentially tacit) knowledge. As the studium pertains to the content and form of the photograph, it also alludes to the picture’s underlying symbolic structure that Barthes has already described in his early semiotic theories (cf. Barthes 1977b; 1977c). Barthes’ concept of the punctum, however, will “break (or punctuate) the studium” (1981: 26). In this sense, he characterizes the punctum as a moment of “unsettling disturbance” which defies instant classification, semiotic interpretation, and explanation. As a moment of intense feeling (or shock), it echoes some of the characteristics essential to presence effects. With respect to its temporal structure, for example, the punctum appears suddenly. In addition, Barthes claims that this punctual element is “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (1981: 27). Experiencing the punctum is thus not an active choice but a passive momentum in the perception of the image that is triggered by the viewer’s individual experience. As a consequence, the punctum is as much a characteristic of the photographic image as a specific form of attention by the viewer. Barthes states that “the punctum […] is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (1981: 55). Throughout his book, Barthes describes different types of the punctum. At the beginning of his study, he defines the concept as an unsettling detail of the photograph which is unique to the individual viewer and determined by his/her socio-historic background (and dimensions of tacit knowledge). The punctum as detail is characterized as an affective response by the viewer.4 The viewer interrupts the study of the photographic image because of something that is triggered by his/her individual memory, experience, and historical background. Secondly (and for the purpose of this essay more importantly), the punctum refers to the specific temporal structure of the photographic image. As Barthes states in the second part of Camera Lucida, in which he further scrutinizes the ontological character of the photographic image: “I know now that there exists 4 | Affect, in this context, can be defined as “nonconscious and unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body” (Gould qtd. in Shotwell 2011: 22). It constitutes an inarticulated and thoroughly implicit dimension that fosters a bodily reaction. Following this definition, Barthes’ description of the punctum can be interpreted as a form of (presentist) affect.

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another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’) than the ‘detail.’ This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis on the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation” (ibid. 96). For Barthes, the photograph confronts the viewer with a thing that “hasbeen-there,” in front of the camera, by necessity (1981: 96). In his point of view, the photographic image always represents a “past presence” and develops a paradoxical temporal and spatial dynamic: one of “spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority” (1977c: 44). Photography’s dynamic shift from “presentation to retention” (1981: 90) is a powerful source of nostalgic and melancholic feeling because it inevitably displays a form of absence and exposes the viewer to the vanishing of time. Barthes’ main tenets and arguments are connected to a discussion of presence because they comprise a reflection on the significance of materiality, temporality, and affect in the realm of aesthetic experience. His late theoretical and methodological shift from semiology to phenomenology, however, can be criticized for its understanding of photography as a medium with a seemingly direct relation to the realities of the past.5 I therefore refer to a conceptualization of presence not in the sense of an immediate, direct affective experience, but in terms of aesthetic strategies that, as a form of presentification, foster presentist effects. It can be argued then that the materiality of postindustrial space and its complex temporality of presence and absence yield effects that relate to discourses on presence and simultaneously negotiate these effects in symbolic terms. Ruin photographs turn an ordinary presence of urban ruination into a decontextualized extraordinary presence of aesthetic, melancholic contem­ plation. In the following, I will analyze the specific aesthetic strategies which expose the layers of a present past, create a sense of history, and develop a sensibility for postindustrial urban aesthetics. In order to do so, I will particularly focus on the representation of industrial sites in the opening pages of the photobook The Ruins of Detroit. As a series of eighteen photographs of Detroit’s industrial facilities, the book’s first photographs not only set the tone and aesthetic that will recur throughout the subsequent photographic arrangements/displays, but also crucially define the symbolism of ruin in postindustrial Detroit. Marchand 5 | In response to Barthes, poststructuralist theories have therefore defined photography instead as a medium that is embedded in a complex structure of social, historical and cultural codes and power relations (cf. Burgin 1982a). In Burgin’s seminal anthology, critics like Allan Sekula describe any inherent, pre-symbolic meaning of the photographic image as “folklore” and an “established myth of photographic truth” (Sekula 1982: 86). Photography rather is a “practice of signification” (Burgin 1982b: 2; emphasis in original) whose meaning and message is determined by specific contexts and (institutional) power structures.

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and Meffre carefully frame Detroit’s modern industrial architecture in decay and reinterpret these “buildings of neoclassic inspiration” (2010: 42) as silent testimony to the fading existence of past times.

F r aming I ndustrial D ecay : The R uins of D etroi t (2010) Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photobook The Ruins of Detroit is a largeformat art book that unfolds a vision of Detroit as a city of abandonment and ruin. In over two hundred photographs, taken over the course of five years between 2005 and 2010, the book paints a picture in which the city’s industry, broad-scale infrastructure, and extensive neighborhoods build a dramatically loose network of deserted spaces which have lost their former significance and immediate practical function. Buildings that are still standing in between empty blocks and neighborhoods are described as “timeless islands” (ibid. 42) which have endured the dramatic transformations of the city and persist as traces of a still visible past. Postindustrial spaces like Detroit’s abandoned Packard Motors Plant or iconic Michigan Central Station are marked by the photobook as abandoned sites that need to be recognized for their historical value. Marchand and Meffre try to invest these ruins of present-day urban environment with new meanings. They interpret them as monuments of history which need to be preserved. A series of eighteen photographs at the beginning of the photobook is used to introduce the breadth of Detroit’s former industrial sites and production facilities. Although the layout of the book does not suggest a division into single chapters, these photographs compose one of several thematic sections in which images are grouped together according to a specific logic, as for instance their location within the city or their representation of a certain type of ruin (such as industrial sites, office buildings and theaters, or apartment houses). These individual sections establish categories used to create visual order, a form of unity in a seemingly chaotic, disassembled spatial environment. Seeing these photographs as a coherent arrangement, I follow a definition of the photobook as a medium that presents single photographs according to a certain logic, consistency, and narrative scheme (cf. Di Bello/Wilson/Zamir 2012; Parr/ Badger 2004). The meaning of the single photograph thus derives from the sequence of images, its interrelation with texts, and the overall formal design of the book. Ruins of Detroit is a carefully designed photobook in which historic descriptions – long captions and comments – give context information that provides an interpretive framework for the individual ruin photograph. Its text passages relate urban ruin to the city’s history, its past development, and its current symbolic state of postindustrial decay.

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Since the formal presentation of photographs in photobooks matters for interpretive purposes, the first photograph of the ‘industry section’ is especially noteworthy (Fig. 1). As an extreme close-up view, the photograph shows a dirty, broken window pane through which the viewer can see the site of an abandoned industrial plant. The lower half of the photograph displays the upper floors of an industrial façade with broken windows and destroyed brick walls. In its middle section, the rooftop of the building and a recognizable water tank lead the viewer’s gaze into the background of the image where other parts of the seemingly same building structure continue to appear. The photograph was taken from the inside of a building on an apparently higher floor. It prominently foregrounds the dirt and cracks of the window as well as its black frame that divides the image in two equal halves. The focus is on the window and thus leaves the industrial buildings behind slightly blurred. Although it is untitled, the viewer (even if he/she does not have any prior knowledge about Detroit and its industrial production facilities) can recognize the same building structure in the following pictures, where it is identified as Detroit’s Packard Motors Plant. In contrast to the following image sequence, this photograph poses a challenge to aesthetic conventions in architectural photography in that it counters a plain, straight-lined composition. It foregrounds the ruined states of materials, denies a clear vision of what is situated in front of the camera, and (through its tight framing) highlights the fact that single photographs are mere extracts from a broader temporal and spatial context. It seems as if this photograph is positioned at the beginning of the photobook in order to ask its viewers to see beyond the surface of things and to dismantle the complex structure of different layers, materialities, and semantic levels represented in the ruin photograph. In a sense, the photograph therefore offers a self-reflexive comment on the photobook’s trajectory, which is to closely study postindustrial spaces and to foster a critical engagement with the structural complexity of urban ruination. Throughout the following sequence of industrial images, the section develops a specific aesthetic dynamic: a changing emphasis on the representation of interior settings, wide-angle representations of empty industrial spaces, and close-up views of materials or technical equipment. What is being conveyed in these photographs (together with captions) are pieces of information about the complexity and logic of production processes implemented through spatial settings. The massive concrete floors of plants carried by an endless number of pillars once ensured a thoroughly rationalized use of space as various assembly lines and multiple production stages were combined under one roof. Contemporary ruin photographs show these production floors littered with waste and severely damaged. Flaking paint, stripped cables, broken wood planks, and stalactites formed by intruding water and chemicals highlight the decayed status of several industrial buildings and warehouses. Plants start to grow on ground

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floors and rooftops, and moss sprawls over damp soil. The implications of nature reclaiming human-built environments, famously outlined by Georg Simmel in his essay on ruin, might suggest a romanticized vision of decay – a slow process of transformation that naturalizes the process of urban ruination (cf. Simmel 1959 [1911]). In Marchand and Meffre’s photographs, however, the element of human destruction and neglect becomes forcefully visible and subverts an altogether uncritical perspective on urban ruin.

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, “Window, Packard Motors Plant,” The Ruins of Detroit, 2010. Photo courtesy of the artists. When Marchand and Meffre concentrate on the interior of buildings, they provide a vision of postindustrial space usually hidden from public access. In many of these interior pictures, the source for contemporary ruin photography’s contemplation and critical reflection of the past is the allusion to modernity’s technological vibrancy and the steady creation of industrialized consumer products. In the emptiness of once densely populated working areas, the past is eerily traceable through the residues of building materials, office supplies, and also personal items. The presence of these remaining objects and traces manifests the genre’s link to the uncanny and haunted. When, on the other hand, the two photographers focus on the architectural complexity of buildings, their straight-line designs, and the monumental dimensions of machines, technical facilities, and production halls, they develop a specific iconography of space. Many ruin photographs (in particular of the Packard Motors Plant) convey a sense of the enormity and scale of the city’s empty space, rusted machinery, and industrial modern architecture through broad-scale framing and distant perspectives, the use of wide angles and panoramic views (Fig. 2). The eerie absence of people shifts any focus of

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concrete living situations, socio-political realities, and economic challenges to an abstract, but nevertheless significant, vision of places in ruin. Constructed large-scale emptiness of space is a pictorial strategy which translates ordinary (i.e. everyday) experiences of ruination into one of extraordinary aesthetic appeal. In this respect, Marchand and Meffre’s photographs follow an aesthetic tradition in architectural and industrial photography that values form, the specific architectural character of places, and the seemingly awe-inspiring dimension of new urban spaces and technology.6 Repeatedly, the classicism and functionalism of these architectural buildings designed by Albert Kahn are mentioned. Such iconic references interlink derelict places and ruin photography with a discourse on the sublime, albeit from a new angle. Because ruin photography primarily relates to places of destruction and devastation, the sublime has been discussed most notably in terms of a “destructive sublime” (cf. Orvell 2013). The destructive sublime describes a mesmerizing as much as morbid and terrifying excitement for places that relate to experiences of neglect, displacement, suffering, and death. It is, Miles Orvell argues, an aesthetic experience that challenges the viewer in moral terms for getting aesthetic pleasure out of loss and calamity (ibid. 647). By using pictorial conventions to reference a (destructive) sublime dimension of the ruin, the photobook markedly emphasizes the aesthetic quality of urban ruination. On such a level, the ruins of the city are decontextualized from their immediate historical and structural complexity of urban transformation and represented for the purpose of abstraction and symbolic codification instead.7

6 | Examples include the early twentieth century industrial photography by Charles Sheeler and Margaret Bourke-White. Both artists had a particular interest in modern industry and machinery and photographed industrial sites in Detroit and Cleveland. They depicted factories and new urban architecture as clean and empty spaces of manmade power that were turned into icons of modern development (cf. Stomberg 1995). 7 | The book therefore develops a perspective on Detroit’s postindustrial space which does not account for the various rehabilitation projects of the city and its communities. Strategies for revitalization include, for example, the formation of urban gardening and farming communities, local art/museum projects, and various city government recovery actions. In comparison to the photobook’s focus on the past and historicity of places, these projects develop an altogether different focus on Detroit’s future economic potential and urban development. In contemporary debates about postindustrial decline, media representations such as ruin photography have therefore often been described as an exploitative form of regional portrayal. Pictures of dereliction and decay are accused of being sensationalist aesthetic interpretations of sites that relate to displacement, loss and suffering (cf. Leary 2011). Considering the framework of a photobook, however, it is my contention that ruin photographs are embedded in a

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Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, “Northern Part, Packard Motors Plant,” The Ruins of Detroit, 2010. Photo courtesy of the artists. This level of abstraction is closely tied to a symbolism of ruin which is outlined in the introduction to the first section as well. In a longer text passage, which sets the tone for the book’s forthcoming representations of postindustrial spaces, it is explained that [t]he state of the ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of a change of era and the falls of empires. Ruins are a fantastic land where one no longer knows whether reality slips into dream or whether, on the contrary, dream makes a brutal return into the most violent of realities. Therefore they appear to be a natural and sublime demonstration of our human destinies and of their paradoxes, a dramatization of our creative and self-destructive vanities. A decisive moment in which one could suddenly catch a glimpse of his condition past, present and future at once. (Marchand/Meffre 2010: 16)

Within this paragraph, decay is identified as the driving force of history; an idea that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of history as a process of catastrophe and ruin rather than linear progress. By rewriting history through the perspective of decay, the German philosopher famously intertwined the ruin motif with the rhetorical figure of allegory and the concept of melancholy (cf. Benjamin 2009). In this nexus, ruins become allegories, visual expressions of a process in which history becomes part of a natural cycle of decay. In allegory complex image-text meaning structure that undermines accusations of a seemingly simplifying interpretation of urban decay.

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“history appears as nature in decay or ruins and the temporal mode is one of retrospective contemplation,” states philosopher Susan Buck-Morss (1989: 168). Contemplation is a genuine affective state of the melancholic observer who, unable to actively engage with the world, withdraws into an inner world of self-reflection, aware of the futility of human action and with foresight of the inevitable catastrophic events of time and history to come. The capacity of ruins “to place us at the end of a historical continuum” and at the same time to “cast us forward into the future ruin of our own present” (Dillon 2011: 13) is an essential quality in the photobook’s study of postindustrial spaces. The book’s representation of decay is related to an allegorical vision by the melancholic observer of historical change. In this respect, Marchand and Meffre’s photography takes part in a philosophic conception in which history is presented in terms of natural decay – a cyclical pattern of rise and fall, decay and renewal. Within this conceptual framework, photographs of Detroit’s industry become the essential cornerstone from which the visual narrative starts to explore the effects of deindustrialization on the complex postindustrial cityscape. As visual reminders of modernity’s failed dreams, these ruins are grounded in a cultural perspective that is critical of steady progression. This implied criticism is visually supported by the formal design of the photobook. By looking at the overall ‘narrative arc’ of the book’s representations, it becomes visible that the photographs are carefully arranged in a cyclical structure. The book displays photographs of the same industrial site (the Packard Motors Plant) at the beginning and the end. Thus, the photographic endeavor comes full circle and ends with a remarkably symbolic image of two small, shadowy figures who walk along the empty space and ruin of Packard’s industrial park – an image that suggests a ghostly return to the beginning. The ruins which Benjamin traced in his own generation and time were embodied in discarded objects of modernity’s consumer culture and his work contained a critique of capitalism. The photobook Ruins of Detroit, however, does not have a distinct political agenda and is not engaged in fostering a productive solution to Detroit’s structural crisis. The city’s urban landscape rather appears as empty scenery that invites the reverie of a distant melancholic perspective which foregrounds the allegorical semantics of decaying material objects and their historical significance. As a consequence of their specific focus on decay, Marchand and Meffre interpret contemporary Detroit as “a strange post-urban zone” (2010: 68) shaped by the forces of demolition and gradual transformation. The book’s vision of industrial ruin is therefore embedded in a slow process of decay which contrasts with ruins of natural catastrophes and wars, when sudden destruction leaves no place for quiet contemplation. Throughout the book’s visual discourse, life, mobility, and spirit remain absent. The viewer is invited to linger on still-life quality images with carefully balanced compositions and lighting effects. The Ruins of Detroit is a quietly

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arranged series of photographs that avoids unexpected interruptions in the perceptions of evenly displayed images. It captures single moments in the slow material decomposition of things, abandoned places, industrial facilities, and neighborhoods. The steady reappearance of decaying manufacturing sites, empty residential areas, and office buildings, which contain piles of forgotten and broken inventory, ultimately creates an uncanny atmosphere of desolation and loss.

C onclusion The aim of this essay was to rethink urban ruin in postindustrial photography in relation to a discourse on presence, aesthetic experience, and urban materiality. As I have argued, the ruin photobook, as a medium of representation, provides aesthetic strategies that foster a critical negotiation of affective responses to loss. Ruin photographs in books expose the legacy of the past, scrutinize its traces, and reflect upon the symbolic structures of postindustrial spaces. The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre is an intensive study of the material remains of the past and its potential aestheticism in a city that has come to represent the epitome of postindustrial decline. It translates the ordinary presence of urban ruination into a framework of symbolic codification and creates aesthetic effects that relate to the materialism of decay, the traces of a still present past, and the specific iconography of space. The large-scale presentification of single images per page, their high quality of print and technical detail supports the aesthetic dimension and affective quality of the ruin motif. In this respect, the photobook is a special form of representation that offers unique characteristics for the representation of photographs. As a rather antagonistic medium in times of online publication platforms, digital archives, and extensive museum displays of photography, the photobook not only foregrounds the aesthetic quality of images but also forms a compound visual sequence and photographic narrative that lends additional meanings to the single image. Ruin photography thus fosters a critical engagement with the structural complexity of urban ruination. In this context, Marchand and Meffre’s photobook unfolds an elegiac narrative of loss in which Detroit becomes a forsaken place that no longer provides necessary means and resources for a positive future development. The two photographers thus develop a vision of urban change that effectively stages loss and vulnerability as counter-narratives to a belief in progress.

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W orks C ited Adloff, Frank/Gerund, Katharina/Kaldewey, David (eds.) (2015): Revealing Tacit Knowledge. Embodiment and Explication, Bielefeld: transcript. Barthes, Roland (1977a): Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang. —,. (1977b): “Photography as Message,” in: Barthes, Image, Music, Text, pp. 194-210. —,. (1977c): “Rhetoric of the Image,” in: Barthes, Image, Music, Text, pp. 32-51. —,. (1981): Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography, transl. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, Walter (2009): The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl. John Osborne, London/New York: Verso. Bluestone, Barry/Harrison, Bennett (1982): The Deindustrialization of America. Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry, New York: Basic Books. Buck-Morss, Susan (1989): The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge: MIT P. Burgin, Victor (ed.) (1982a): Thinking Photography, London: Macmillan. —,. (1982b): “Introduction,” in: Burgin, Thinking Photography, pp. 1-14. Cowie, Jefferson/Heathcott, Joseph (eds.) (2003): Beyond the Ruins. The Meanings of Deindustrialization, Ithaca/London: Cornell UP. Derrida, Jacques (2005): “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in: Writing and Difference, transl. and introd. Alan Bass, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 351-70. Di Bello, Patrizia/Wilson, Colette/Zamir, Shamoon (eds.) (2012): The Photobook. From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, London: I.B. Tauris. Dillon, Brian (2011): “Introduction. A Short History of Decay,” in: Brian Dillon (ed.), Ruins, London: Whitechapel Gallery, pp. 10-19. Ernst, Christoph/Paul, Heike (eds.) (2013a): Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, Bielefeld: transcript. —,. (2013b): “Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften,” in: Ernst/Paul, Präsenz und implizites Wissen, pp. 9-32. Ghosh, Ranjan/Kleinberg, Ethan (2013): Presence. Philosophy, History and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century, Cornell: Cornell UP. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford UP. Leary, John Patrick (2011): “Detroitism,” Guernica. A Magazine of Art and Politics: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2281/leary_1_15_11/ (last accessed Sept. 15 2011).

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Marchand, Yves/Meffre, Romain (2010): The Ruins of Detroit, Göttingen: Steidl. Moore, Andrew (2010): Detroit Disassembled, essay by Philip Levine, Bologna: Damiani; Akron: Akron Art Museum. Orvell, Miles (2013): “Photographing Disaster. Urban Ruins and the Destructive Sublime,” in: Amerikastudien/American Studies 58.4, pp. 647-71. Parr, Martin/Badger, Gerry (2004): The Photobook. A History, Vol. 1, London: Phaidon. Sekula, Allan (1982): “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in: Burgin, Thinking Photography, pp. 84-109. Shotwell, Alexis (2011): Knowing Otherwise. Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Simmel, Georg (1959 [1911]): “The Ruin,” in: Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Georg Simmel, 1858-1918. A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography, Columbus: Ohio State UP, pp. 259-66. Stomberg, John (1995): “A ‘United States of the World.’ Industry and Photography Between the Wars,” in: Kim Sichel (ed.), From Icon to Irony. German and American Industrial Photography, Seattle: U of Washington P, pp. 17-25. Sugrue, Thomas J. (2005): The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton: Princeton UP. Vergara, Camilo José (1995): The New American Ghetto, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. —,. (1999): American Ruins, New York: Monacelli.

III. The Cultural Specificity of Presence: Rituals, Symbols, and Imagined Communities

The Presence of Sacralization The Configuration of Presence in Vladimir Sorokin’s Kremlin Made of Sugar Alexander Engel

– Кремль он целокупен быть должен. – Целокупен? – Целокупен. – Почему? – Как почему? Государево дело, садовая голова! Чтобы ни единой трещинки, ни единой щербины. Ни единого порока. Ясно? – The Kremlin has to be integral. – Integral? – Integral. – Why? – What why? It is Gosudar’s1 affair, blockhead! There shouldn’t be no single crack, no single irregularity. Not a single blemish. Is that clear? (Cорокин 2008: 246)2

1 | Gosudar [Государь] is a rather antiquated Russian term for the ruler of the country. Gosudar means the personification of government, which indicates its etymological affinity to the Russian term Gosudarstvo [государство]: “The word Gosudarstvo, today the Russian for ‘state,’ in those early edicts appears uniformly in its original meaning, as ‘Lordship’ or ‘Kingdom’ – a derivation from Gosudar (Great Lord or Ruler); it means either the Lord’s (tsar’s) personal government, the activity of governing, or his personal property, the domain over which he excercises his hardship” (Greenfeld 1992: 193). 2 | All further quotes also taken from the Russian edition of Kremlin Made of Sugar (cf. Cорокин 2008), which differs considerably from the German edition (cf. Sorokin 2012b) in its cover design, the font used, and in other ways. Unfortunately, an English edition of the book has not been published yet. All translations of the Russian and German quotes are mine.

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A Kremlin made of sugar – complete with all its towers, buildings and walls – is the guiding theme of the fifteen short stories in Vladimir Sorokin’s Kremlin Made of Sugar, as the book’s title already suggests. The short quotation above from the story “In the Factory” is taken from a dialogue between a supervisor and a worker in a state factory. The production of the Kremlins becomes a matter of national importance in Sorokin’s short story collection. Produced of Gosudar command the sugar-made Kremlins, so the basic idea of the following argumentation, serve as a medium for a seemingly religious presence that is merging with a sacralization of the state ruler. This essay approaches a specific version of the production of presence from the perspective of comparative literature studies by analyzing the phenomenon of presence in Vladimir Sorokin’s short story collection Kremlin Made of Sugar. I argue that the narrated configuration of presence is mainly based on the Russian icon tradition. In the following I aim to show how this culturally specific manifestation of presence takes place in a literary pattern of sacralization on the one hand and emphasizes its material quality on the other hand, which can be read as a continuation of the Russian icon tradition. Vladimir Sorokin is one of the most famous and controversial contemporary Russian writers. In 2002 Sorokin was the victim of an “anti-pornography” campaign of the organization Idushchie Vmeste.3 His books were disposed of in a large toilet bowl in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, which is close to the Kremlin and is frequented daily by many people. His descriptions of a fictional future Russia have often been interpreted as an attack on the state. Sorokin was subsequently often insulted and attacked publicly (cf. Horvath 2013: 110; Bershtein/Hadden 2007). Kremlin Made of Sugar is a collection of fifteen short stories which depict Russia in 2028 as a dystopia that threatens to become reality, and thus implies a critique of the current political and social situation in Russia. The Gosudar is the autocratic leader of a frightened Russian population disciplined by frequent executions of state enemies on public squares. Gosudar’s helpers, called Oprichniki,4 ensure the domination of the ruler through violent acts. Sorokin’s stories provide an analysis of different social environments and 3 | Idushchie Vmeste [Идущие вместе] was a pro-government youth organization in Russia. The leader of the organization Vassili Yakemenko became later the central figure of Nashi (‘Ours’) [Наши] (cf. Bershtein/Hadden 2007). Nashi was founded in 2005 as a state-sponsored youth movement. Nashi’s members were indoctrinated to act against the political opposition in order to avoid the formation of revolutionary movements in Russia (e.g. inspired by the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kiev in 2004) (cf. Horvath 2013: 85 et seq.). 4 | The term Oprichniki is already used in Sorokin’s earlier novel Day of the Oprichnik (cf. Sorokin 2012a), which is also a dystopian story. Oprichniki are the ruler’s most

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everyday situations. Despite sophisticated technologies such as holograms or “liquid clocks” (Cорокин 2008: 100), the living conditions of the population are more like those in the Russia of the 19th century. The future development of Russia’s society could be rather summarized as a step backward. The corporal punishment of a wife by her husband is interpreted as love (“Queue”). The United States of America is still the number one external enemy (“Cinema”). Labor camps are common and the inmates are forced to build the “Great Russian Wall” (“Grub”). All these stories contain traces of the Russian past that has returned in this society of the future. In the following analysis of Kremlin Made of Sugar the focus is on both the material and the immaterial levels of presence and its production. The material level comprises primarily tangibility and bodily experience; the immaterial quality can be found in the narrative pattern of sacralization, which realizes the interdependence of presence and tacit knowledge.

M aterialit y as O ne S tr and of S acr aliz ation – the I con Tr adition The icon represents the oldest pictorial medium of the Christian world. With the significantly increased interest in images in different scientific disciplines generally, the icon has returned, too. The cultural context and the historical dimension of the Russian icon tradition are essential to understanding the specificity of the production of presence in Sorokin’s short stories. In the following, I will thus briefly outline the history of the icon. The icon has been traced back to the Egyptian mummy portrait (cf. Schmidt 2009: 15), and a second step in its historical development was the Christ portrait in Late Antiquity. The idea of an image of heavenly origin did not start with Christianity though, but was adopted from the Western classical tradition. Vera eikon5 belongs to the type of non hand-painted images. It is frontal, exactly symmetric, and demonstrates the perfection of the divine. Another type of miracle images included the icons of Maria, in which the preChristian traditions of universal deities returned. The Egyptian god figure Isis, who was regarded as the mother of the ruler, was often depicted as a seated woman with a child in her lap. Isis was a protective goddess and a sorceress; her significance increased after 500 BC, when an Isis cult emerged that can be traced to Christianity. While the so-called unpainted picture was perceived as a miracle and marveled at in public, the icon of Maria over time became more trusted courtiers who ensure the ruler’s power by acting violently against the frightened people. 5 | Ancient Greek: Archeiropoeton; Latin: vera ikon; Russian: нерукотворная.

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and more used in private, as for example the Russian tradition clearly shows today (cf. Schmidt 2009: 18). The third step in the formation of the icon was the imperial portrait. Since Diocletian (who was Roman emperor from 284 to 305) the Roman emperor sent his portraits to the provinces of his empire, usually after his accession to power, and demanded that the people send tributes to his image as well as to his person. Far from the city the image was used in receiving and festive greetings. For Diocletian, the sending of images was connected to the presence of power (cf. Schmidt 2009: 20), whereas the Russian icon tradition added a new dimension that has been followed up until today. The icon was adapted into images of political leaders, of which images and wall paintings of Stalin and Lenin serve as an excellent example (see below). These images were ubiquitous – in the big cities as large paintings on the exteriors of countless high-rises, and as small pictures in many offices and in rural farmhouses. These images were intended to establish the presence of the sovereign und almighty ruler. This short historical overview shows that the icon has not lost its relevance in Russia to this day both in the religious as well as in the political sphere. Both spheres must be thought of as conditions of the culture-specific shaping of the Russian icon in today’s Russia.

The I mmanent Q ualit y of the I con The special status of the icon follows from its claim to directly establish the presence of the depicted and at the same moment to merge with the depicted. The arbitrariness of the sign is negated.6 The icon realizes a reverse perspective to those of the artist and the viewer. It does not reference or imitate anything, but bridges the difference between the material sign and the absent signified by means of ontological participation, which turns the sign itself into reality, that is, into the mysterious presence of the depicted. Obviously two different concepts of the sign are used here (cf. Florenksi 1988: 25); the icon represents not the Saussurean but a specifically Russian concept of the sign, which is important for my argument about how the configuration of presence works in Vladimir Sorokin’s Kremlin Made of Sugar. In the Russian adaptation of the Byzantine icon in the 10th century (cf. Lazarev 1997: 21) the icon becomes not only an integral part of the liturgy of Russian Orthodoxy, but also gains its original quality as the objectification of God.

6 | The concept of the arbitrariness of the sign (and the arbitrariness of the relationship between the signifier and the signified) goes back to Ferdinand de Saussure (cf. Saussure 1983: 67-68).

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The Russian icon stands in contrast to the Christian and Western devotional image, which is due to the different emphasis that is put on seeing and hearing in the religious sphere in Russia. The moment of looking has priority in the East, while in the West, the word is more important than the image (cf. Flogaus 2008: 213). This is partly due to differences in tradition and partly due to the emanation of the devotional image from the inner life of an individual believer, artist, authority, or community. In a devotional image, reality is not expressed as itself, but as it is seen and experienced by the artist; thus the human realm is still part of the devotional image. The icon is significantly different. The painter, the materials used, and the formal character of the depicted show the way to insight and understanding (cf. Küppers 1949: 19). The painting of icons has always been considered as liturgy and has been accompanied by prayer and fasting. Additionally to the painter’s calling by God the church chose him and gave him the order to paint an icon. This work was no longer in an occidental individualistic sense his, but the work of God. That is why the first icon painters were not mentioned by name. The painter’s personal piety ensured that he adhered to dogma and the demands of the sacred liturgy as well as to the painting instructions found in the old books on traditional icon painting. The whole process of creating the icon – from the choice of materials to the selection of its painter – implies that it is not from this earth. The mundane materials of which it consists were blessed with holy water. The painter was to cast off everything worldly when it came to the sacred task of making an icon. He did not use oil to make the colors, but egg yolk. The colors were not applied onto canvas or metal, but wood, which was slightly bowl-shaped, so that a natural framework was created by its outcurving rim. The icon finally was painted with protein for greater durability and a beautiful gloss (cf. Küppers 1949: 21). “Before the icon was handed over to the faithful people for worship, it received special sanctification by being anointed with myrrh. [...] Through this anointment, the icon [became] for the faithful in an even more unambiguous sense than before the repository of the Holy, of the Divine itself” (Küppers 1949: 22; my transl.). The holy icon actually and literally is the incarnation of the Divine in time. Thus, a connection between this world and the hereafter is created and guaranteed by individual icons that are put up in the homes of believers and in the iconostases of churches. The iconostasis is the preferred location of the icon. The origin of the iconostasis is not entirely clear, but it is the most important part of Russian Orthodox churches. Thus, the iconostasis is often referred to as the divide between the church as the symbol of this world and the holy of holies, i.e. the location of the Eucharistic sacrifice, seen as the symbol of paradise, or heaven. In no way can this divide be understood as excluding the faithful, though; rather, they are incorporated into the event by the moderator of

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the last supper passing through one of the doors of the iconostasis (cf. Küppers 1949: 26; Högy 1978: 16). For an introduction into the world of icons, the iconostasis is so important because it contains all types of icons. Later some icons were removed from the wall and found use as individual icons in private homes, especially in the socalled ‘beautiful’ corner of the house. These icons kept their original function of creating the connection between this life and the hereafter. Believers assumed that through the so-called house icons the Holy was realized. In the house icon the believers detected the mysterious Divine itself and included it in their family life. Transferred from the iconostasis, the icon, once integrated into the family and home, attains an omnipresent character in the sense of an actually incarnated presence (cf. Küppers 1949: 28-29). The veneration of icons can only be understood if one takes into account the phenomenon of physical objectification. The presence of the icon evokes emotions and a mystical experience in the believers. Kissing the icon, bowing, and genuflecting are ritually performed when entering a Russian Orthodox church. However, the icon’s importance is not limited to the local context of the church. In today’s Russia, the icon can be found on any car dashboard.7 The mass distribution of icons has not been accompanied by a loss of the peculiar quality of presence, though.8 Russian icon painting is accompanied by a strict theology of the icon (cf. Florenski 1988), and thus excludes any contingency beyond the specific configuration of presence. In conjunction with an increase in expressions of faith by Russians just after the collapse of the Soviet Union (cf. Krawchuk 2014: 1-16), the icon became an everyday companion and thus illustrates the renaissance of religiosity in Russian society.

7 | This is just one indication for the revival of Russian Orthodoxy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The current state of Russian Orthodoxy has been described as a rediscovery, and has become increasingly important for the national self-understanding of Russians (cf. Krawchuk 2014: 12). 8 | Walter Benjamin notes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (cf. Benjamin 1968: 217-252) that “[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (ibid. 220). I claim that the icon represents an exceptional case due to its immanent quality – it is made by God, not by the human hand of a painter.

The Presence of Sacralization

K remlin M ade of S ugar as I mplementation and C ontinuation of the R ussian I con Tr adition In Vladimir Sorokin’s Kremlin Made of Sugar the icon tradition and the immanent quality of the icon occur in two different ways: On the one hand, as a future version of the icon, as a ‘living portrait’ (“Marfusha’s Joy”) not of God but of the Gosudar. On the other hand, as a Kremlin made of sugar, which enables participation in the body of the Gosudar. In terms of the visible and tangible experience of materiality, which is very important for my argument, two peculiarities of the nature of the printed book must be emphasized. Firstly, the font used on the cover and for the headings of the stories is reminiscent of Old Slavonic characters. The beginning of the first story, “Marfusha’s Joy,” is completely printed in this quasi-historical font, which subsequently is used for each page header and thus is an important constant of perception during the reading process. The cover deserves special attention as a second outstanding feature of the Russian edition. It features the Russian coat of arms – the double-headed eagle –, which forms the tip of the sugar-made Kremlin and is usually eaten last by the protagonists of the stories. However, the double-headed eagle on the cover is rough and shiny, and thus resembles an object made of sugar. As the reader perceives the cover tactilely during the reading process and the Old Russian characters remain in the line of vision, the reader is integrated through the reading process also by the materiality of the book. The intention of these peculiarities is to restore the Russia of the 19th century not only on the narrative level but also in the perception of the reader, who is visually, tactilely and – due to the use of Old Russian vocabulary – cognitively affected. These elements are preconditions for the specific configuration of presence in my argumentation, which will thus be taken into consideration in my analysis of the narrative structure and content of Kremlin Made of Sugar. At first glance, a transfer back to the Russia of the past seems anachronistic, as the book’s dystopian setting is Russia in the year 2028. In this future Russia “smart machines” (“Marfusha’s Joy”) and “liquid clocks” (“The Poker”) are omnipresent. However, it is exactly this anachronism which makes it more clear how Russian society in the fifteen stories regresses into the 19th century. The motif connecting the past and the present is the sugar-made Kremlin. The first story, “Marfusha’s Joy,” in which the eleven-year-old Marfusha Sawarsin experiences the last Sunday of Christmas and gets a sugar-made Kremlin as a present, is already a picture of the ‘new Russia’: Теперь уже в Москве печи топят по утрам, готовят обед в печи русской, как Государь повелел. Большая это подмога России и великая экономия газа

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The icon as a “living portrait,” as it is always called in the stories, lives on as a future version – but the subject has changed. The Gosudar has taken the place of God. For sure, the religiosity of the people is still existent and the icons in the Russian Orthodox tradition as well (cf. Cорокин 2008: 10). However, the place of the Redeemer has been taken by the Gosudar. Even the salutation “Hail to you, Vasily Nikolayevich!” (Cорокин 2008: 16) expresses the belief that only a god-like leader can govern Russia. Religion, especially in the form of the icon tradition, and the civil-religious worship of political leaders, which has a long tradition in Russia, are here already strongly interwoven. In many cultures religion and politics are entangled, but the book acquires a specifically Russian character by appealing to the Russian icon tradition in images and through characters of political leaders – whether critically or affirmatively. The veneration of the icon continues with the usual rituals and today’s tendencies to sacralize Vladimir Putin, and the special relationship of the Orthodox Church with the Russian government (cf. Krawchuk 2014: 1-2) ends in a complete substitution of God through the Gosudar in 2028. The alliance between church and government nowadays fuels the patriotism the Russian Orthodox Church considers an integral part of Russian self-identity.9

9 | The Russian Orthodox Church’s self-understanding as bearer of national identity is an integral part of its alliance with the Russian government (cf. Olteanu/Nève 2014). In the mid-2000s the Russian Orthodox Church expanded its missionary activity and prioritized the ‘motherland’ over Human Rights (cf. Kazmina 2014).

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The continuation of the icon tradition and its reinterpretation as the sacralization of the ruler culminate in the Kremlin made of sugar, which in “Marfusha’s Joy” is introduced in all its sacrality: Вышла Марфуша во двор, сердце колотится. А по двору из всех шести подъездов уж дети нарядные идут. […] десятки, сотни детей! […] Шагают дети по Тверской в сторону Кремля толпой огромной. […] Идет Марфуша в толпе. Бьется сердце ее, замирает от восторга. […] Красная площадь под ногами Марфуши. Дух всегда захватывает от этой площади. Здесь награждают героев России, здесь же казнят врагов ее. Миг – и зазвенели куранты на башне Спасской: шесть часов! Остановилась река детская, замерла. Смолк гомон. Погасли огни вокруг. И наверху, на облаках зимних лик Государя огромный высветился: – ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ, ДЕТИ РОССИИ! – загремело над площадью. Закричали дети ответно, запрыгали, замахали руками. Запрыгала и Марфуша, Государем любуясь. Улыбается он с облаков, смотрят глаза голубые тепло. Как прекрасен Государь Всея Руси! Как красив и добр! Как мудр и ласков! Как могуч и несокрушим! – С РОЖДЕСТВОМ ХРИСТОВЫМ, ДЕТИ РОССИИ! И вдруг, как по щучьему велению, сквозь облака, сквозь лицо государя тысячи шариков красных вниз опускаются. И к каждому шарику коробочка блестящая привязана. Ловят дети коробочки, подпрыгивают, тянут шарики к себе. Хватает Марфуша шарик, опустившийся с неба, притягивает к себе коробочку. Хватают коробочки дети, рядом с ней стоящие. With palpitations Marfusha runs down to the house. From all six entrances of the building flow festively dressed children. [...] Dozens, hundreds! [...] A giant crowd of children on Tverskaya, that pushes toward the Kremlin. [...] Marfusha is a part of this crowd. Her heart beats wildly, then it almost stands still due to excitement. [...] Under her feet is the Red Square! The soul is always touched on this place. Where Russia’s heroes are honored, where its enemies are judged! Just an instant – and the chimes rang on Savior’s Tower: six hours! Immediately the flow of the children comes to stand. The noise dies. All the lights go out. And up there in the sky, by the snow clouds the huge face of the Gosudar shines. – GREETINGS, CHILDREN OF RUSSIA! – the voice of the Gosudar roars over the place. A cheering is the answer, the children are hopping and waving and yelling. Marfusha jumps, she marvels at the Gosudar. He smiles down from the clouds, his blue eyes look warm-hearted. How wonderful is the Gosudar of All Rus! How beautiful and how good! How tender and wise, how powerful and invincible! – MERRY CHRISTMAS, DEAR CHILDREN OF RUSSIA! And suddenly, as if by magic, thousands of red balloons fall from the midst of the clouds and the face of the Gosudar. To each balloon a shiny little box is attached. The kids

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The sugar-made Kremlin is distributed only once a year to children in the ceremony described. This ceremony is reminiscent of religious worship. Clearly a parallel to God is drawn here. Gosudar’s shining face in the clouds, the emotions of the children, and the Red Square as setting are highly charged with religious overtones. The introduction of the sugar-made Kremlin is compared to manna coming from heaven. From the beginning, the sugarmade Kremlin connotes religion, and is stored and considered as a partaking of Gosudar. In the icon sense it is understood as the direct presence of the Gosudar. The sugar is just the modeling mass, but a very well chosen one. Sorokin skillfully interweaves the icon tradition with the Soviet tradition of giving special food as presents to students each year on New Year’s Eve. As during socialism, the gift is consumable and the political gesture of the caring sovereign in every sense is extended to the religious savior symbolized by the sugar-made Kremlin coming from the sky. The Soviet tradition is just taken up partially to posit historical continuity, but the core remains the legitimization of the ruler by the Russian icon. In the other stories the Kremlin made of sugar not only serves a narrative function as an important anchor point, but is always treated as a ‘state affair’ and is consumed mostly communally, but always on special occasions. The story “Grub” takes place in a labor camp for the construction of the “Great Russian Wall” and tells of the everyday life of the prisoners who are permanently under pressure to pursue an unrealistic plan. Because schedules often cannot be met, the prisoners are often punished with a rod. However, even in this place the sugar-made Kremlin serves its uplifting function: Развернул платок. В платке лежала сахарная Спасская башня. Основание ее было обкусано, но верх с курантами и двуглавым орлом был еще цел. Полмесяца назад в лагере бригадир получил в посылке от жены из Твери две пары шерстяных носок, шарф, чеснок, сухари и сахарный Кремль с отломанной Боровицкой башней. Кремль этот на Рождество достался дочке Слонова. Боровицкую башню съели они с матерью, остальное решила послать отцу в далекую Восточную Сибирь. Шла посылка пять месяцев. Слонов, получив ее, сразу разломал Кремль, стены, внутренние соборы и постройки отдал нарядчикам, колокольню Ивана Великого – лагерному повару Томиьцу. Кутафью, Никольскую и Оружейную башни бригадир съел сам, сося их перед сном. Троицкую подарил старому лагерному корешу, корейцу Володе Паку. А Спасскую башню решил «определить в фонд юмора»: каждый день после дневного харчевания кто-то из его бригады должен был рассказать смешную

The Presence of Sacralization историю, по-лагерному – «притиснуть правильную байду». Если история была смешной, бригадир давал рассказчику откусить от Спасской башни. He [Slonov] unwrapped the cloth. On the cloth was lying a sugar-made Saviour Tower. Its base was bitten but the upside with bells and double-headed eagle was still intact. A fortnight ago in the camp the foreman had received a parcel from his wife from Tver with two pairs of woolen socks, scarf, garlic, breadcrumbs and sugar-made Kremlin with a broken Borovitskaya tower. Slonov’s daughter got the sugar-made Kremlin for Christmas. The Borovitskaya tower she ate with her mother and she decided to send the rest to her father to far eastern Siberia. The shipping took five months. After receiving it Slonov broke it immediately, gave the work distributors the Kremlin walls, interior and built cathedrals, and the camp cook Tomilets the bell tower of Ivan the Great. The Kutafiya, the Nicholas and the Armour towers the foreman ate sucking them at bedtime. The Trinity tower he gave an old camp chum, the Korean Volodya Pak. The Spasskaya Tower he decided to “determine the fund of humor”: every day after lunch one member of his brigade had to tell a funny story, in the camp slang – “a real pod.” If the story was funny, the foreman gave the storyteller a bite out of the Spasskaya Tower. (Cорокин 2008: 146-147)

A new aspect of the sugar-made Kremlin is added here. The consumption of the rarity constitutes a collectivizing moment; the Kremlin made of sugar is always distributed by a child (like Marfusha), usually to members of the family and friends. Pieces of the sugar-made Kremlin are often reserved for special events. The essential point is that it is always shared. It becomes a ritual of embodiment in different ways. The customary sharing of the Kremlin in the labor camp adds a special touch in that the reward is a bite from the Spasskaya Tower (Saviour Tower). Even amidst the greatest oppression, the Gosudar himself is not called into question. The prisoners eat pieces of a gift that is given by their oppressor. An interesting detail about the structural nature of the Kremlin is highlighted in this quote – the entanglement of politics and religion. While Ivan the Great is known as a very brutal ruler of Russia, in the structural design of the Kremlin, this does not represent a contradiction, not even in the short story “Grub.” Thus Sorokin in the previous quotation also resolves the contradiction and confirms the conviction of the people that theirs is a caring ruler. This inconsistency becomes even more obvious through a character in the story “Queue,” in which a dialogue takes place between two random strangers meeting in a queue. Queuing has a long tradition in Russia due to its economy of scarcity. Often, if someone happened to see a queue by chance he or she would immediately queue up without knowing what was on sale. Many foods were rarely available, so every opportunity had to be taken. Spontaneous

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conversations often ensued between persons queuing, just like in the story between Trofim and Vera. Once a week, Vera is corporally punished by her husband. Trofim wonders why that is and asks for the reason: – Ничего, я привыкла. [Вера сказала] – А тело ваше, простите, тоже привыкло? [Трофим спросил] – Меня пробить не просто. Да и хорошие снадобья имеются. Мази. – И вы не держите зла за муженька? – Что вы! Бьет – значит любит. А потом – он же не дерется, как пьяный, а розгою сечет, как по «Домострою» уложено. Мама моя вон мне обзавидовалась: в ихние времена-то смутные сечь жен не положено было, потому как безбожною Россия была. Мама говорит: «Ежели б меня отец твой покойный сек по субботам, мы бы сейчас жили в трехэтажном доме». – Нет, я не против порки по сути, но все надобно делать обдуманно … – It’s not that bad. I got accustomed to it. [Vera says] – And your body, with all due respect, it’s got accustomed to it too? [Trofim asks] – I’m tough. And there are good remedies. Salves. – And you are not in a pique with your hubby? – How should I? He beats me – that means he loves me. He is not one of those drunken bashers. He punishes me with the rod – just as the Old Russian tradition prescribes. My dear old mother envies me: In the chaotic times of her youth it was forbidden to chastise your wife, because at that time, God had abandoned Russia. If your blessed father had whipped me every Saturday at that time, we would live in a three-story house today, she says. – No, basically I’m also not against corporal punishment, but everything needs to be well considered ... (Cорокин 2008: 202-203)

Two interesting phenomena of Russian history are mentioned in this short quotation: First, corporal punishment, which was not uncommon before the 20th century; second, the ‘chaotic times’ of the 1990s, which are still called lawless by the people in Russia today.10 The longing for stability results in a return to the ‘true’ Russian traditions of the 19th century. “He beats me – that means he loves me” (Cорокин 2008: 202) is no longer a contradiction. The price for perceived stability is corporal punishment. The seemingly contradictory character of the caring sovereign is perfectly described in these few words and has been immortalized in the heart of Russia 10 | The ‘chaotic times’ of the 1990s is one possible reason for Putin’s statement that the Soviet break-up was the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the last century” (Allen 2005).

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as the Kremlin. In this story the Kremlin made of sugar is what the people queue for, but as breakage. The connection to the Gosudar in the story is established. However, traces not only of Ivan the Great can be identified in the conception of the Gosudar, but also of the Soviet cult of personality, which both leave their mark in this new interpretation of the Russian icon tradition.

Victor Govorkov, Stalin Takes Care of Each of Us in the Kremlin (1940) This propaganda poster depicting the ‘beloved father Stalin’11 at work in the Kremlin is a visual example of the cult of personality in the Soviet Union. In the stories in Kremlin Made of Sugar this cult of personality is an essential link between Ivan the Great and the fictional Gosudar in 2028. It is well known that Stalin’s oppressive rule of the Soviet people hardly affected his popularity 11 | That was and still is an often (also ironically) used epithet for Jospeh Stalin in the Soviet Union and Russia (cf. Поскребышев 1949).

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among the majority of the population. The formula “he beats me – that means he loves me” (Cорокин 2008: 202) also describes the population’s relationship with Joseph Stalin well. Nothing but the Kremlin (made of sugar) in its particular role is dedicated to realize this contradiction in the short stories. The Kremlin is THE reification of the entanglement of power and religion and likewise the political and religious heart of Russia. The official residence of the Russian president includes numerous religious buildings that illustrate not only the legitimization of the ruler by the Russian Orthodox Church, but also the personalized fusion of religion and state. Looking at the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower facing the Red Square and St. Basil Cathedral, this fusion is particularly evident.

Spasskaya Tower (August 2013) This tower is the parade entrance of the Russian president. Moreover, its presence is televised throughout Russia at least annually: Its clock is THE central clock in Russia, heralding the New Year on New Year’s Eve. Every Russian knows the melody of the bell tower. Sorokin addresses this special event in “Marfusha’s Joy” too. Particularly striking is the symbolism: The spire is the Soviet star, and over the entrance is an icon of the Mother of God. In this way the entanglement of church and state is also implemented structurally. The icon tradition, the symbolism of state power and the bell tower are anchored in the collective memory of Russians as the Spasskaya Tower, so it is not surprising that Sorokin selects the Kremlin as the central element of his

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stories. Where else if not on the Red Square with a view of the Spasskaya Tower should the sovereign distribute his gift – the Kremlin made of sugar – from heaven. The sugar-made Kremlin is tasted, felt, licked, dissolved in tea, or scattered in powder form. It serves the edification, the affirmation of fidelity, and the intoxication of the population. In “The Letter,” in which Praskovya writes a letter to her sister Sonya, the consumption of a sugar-made Kremlin evokes memories of Praskovya’s childhood, which are quite similar to Marfusha’s in “Marfusha’s joy:” Ой, Сонь, сейчас письмо это пиша, вот что вспомнила вдруг: как мы с тобою на новый Кремль смотреть ездили! И знаешь, почему я вспомнила? Вот почему! Я по Клаве Петровнето стучу, а сама досасываю кремлевскую стену сахарную! And – wow! – suddenly, as I am writing this letter to you, it occurs to me again how we went together to look at the new Kremlin! You wonder, why do I remember? I can tell you! While I am pounding the typewriter, I am sucking at a Kremlin wall, just imagine! (Cорокин 2008: 226)

Praskovya evokes the common experiences and the gift of Gosudar on the Red Square. At the same time, the Kremlin is sacralized by the mantra-like repetition of the words ‘Kremlin’ and ‘white.’ She remembers the day after the Gosudar’s order to paint the Kremlin white. The letter ends in the narrative mode of stream of consciousness – punctuation and correct spelling are absent. The effect of consuming the Sugar Kremlin is described forcefully as intoxication – the combination of ‘white’ and ‘Kremlin’ appears countless times on six book pages (cf. Cорокин 2008: 228-233) and thus underlines the trancelike state. The parallels to the ritual veneration of icons and complete devotion illustrate the replacement of God through the Gosudar. Sorokin seemingly dissolves the intangibility of the ruler into the presence of the sugar-made Kremlin. Due to this configuration of a synaesthetic presence the icon tradition is not only taken up but also continued in an intensified and expanded version in connection with religious presence. The sugar-made Kremlin is considered as something very exclusive and is consumed in different ways and in small amounts throughout the year. From time to time scraps of the Kremlin can be bought in rationed quantities in a food store. Undeniably the sacred value of the Sugar Kremlin is preserved in all stories and the synaesthetic character of the presence of the Gosudar highlights the phenomena of fear of and love for the ruler who cares for the people like Stalin.

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The S ugar -M ade K remlin as I nterdependence be t ween Tacit K nowledge and P resence The sugar-made Kremlin is not only the manifestation of the Gosudar’s power, but also an instrument for the national self-assurance of Russian characters in the stories. Beyond its function as the guiding theme in Sorokin’s stories it is both cultural repertoire and archive (cf. Taylor 2003). Explaining the difference between the two, Diana Taylor writes that “the rift […] does not lie between the written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)” (ibid. 19). Consequently, the sugar-made Kremlin can be seen as the product of an interaction between the archive and the repertoire within the stories. As the actually existing building it is a part of the Russian cultural archive, but simultaneously it is a repertoire in form of a ritual that uses the icon tradition but also reinterprets the ritual of consuming it. Taylor also writes about the possibility of reinterpreting a ritual: “What changes over the time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied” (ibid.). The Kremlin made of sugar became a national symbol, but also a medium for partaking of the Gosudar, who is caring for the Russian people and he (like his name) is the personification of the Russian government. Three strands come together in this national symbol: the building of the Kremlin (archive), the icon tradition (archive and repertoire) and the veneration of political leaders as a specifically Russian repertoire. The reinterpretation takes place through the future version of an icon in form of a Kremlin made of sugar and the associated ritual described in the stories. Taylor’s term scenario is very useful for analyzing the sugar-made Kremlin in Sorokin’s stories. Taylor suggests looking at “scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (ibid. 28). They make visible “what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes” (ibid.). Taylor’s remarks can also be applied to the function of the sugar-made Kremlin in the stories: “The scenario includes features well theorized in literary analysis, such as narrative and plot, but demands that we also pay attention to milieux and corporeal behavior such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language” (ibid.). Of course, the sugar-made Kremlin is fictive and can be consumed in different ways, with the narrative being just one aspect. Language itself is lacking and behavior and bodily sedimented cultural knowledge can only be observed or sensed, but it is present when the Kremlin made of sugar is consumed or talked about. How it is handled – collectively consumed or shared – and the understanding of it as a symbol of the caring Gosudar are exemplary forms of

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embodied and culturally specific tacit knowledge. The body is involved in this process and this is the key to the partaking of Gosudar. Both propositional and non-propositional embodied tacit knowledge are necessary. At this point, the cultural and embodied knowledge and presence are in a dialectic relationship. The key is a holistic experience of the ‘icon’ Gosudar. The presence of the sugar-made Kremlin is essential for evoking the implicit knowledge, or in the words of Taylor, “the repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are in the repertoire do not remain the same” (ibid. 20). On the one hand, this makes it possible to reinterpret the icon tradition and to apply it to the sugar-made Kremlin, and on the other hand, the cultural practices of using the sugar-made Kremlin are different – but the gift of the Gosudar as a part of the archive is fixed. Without the initiation by presence this process would stay a part of the archive. The moment of presence is a holistic one. It is based on the reverse perspective of the icon, which affects the viewer holistically. Pavel Florenski describes icons as “visible witnesses” of the iconostasis or as “living symbols” (Florenski 1988: 66): “Heaven and Earth, Higher and Lower, altar and church can only be separated from each other through visible witnesses of the invisible world, by living symbols of the union of the two – the holy creatures” (ibid.). The material merges with that which is depicted on it; it is dematerialized, so to speak. The icon loses its material quality and becomes a materially present image of God, and in another step, the presence of God. The simultaneity of its physical animation and the dematerialization of its earthly quality is striking. A separation between mind and body does not take place in the experience of the icon. This is the unique configuration of presence as regards the Russian icon (cf. ibid. 58). Regarding the sugar-made Kremlin the senses are affected holistically. The object is felt or tasted and in the same step the establishment of meaning is guaranteed by the archive and the repertoire, meaning the activation of the historically and culturally specific tacit knowledge of the icon tradition and the partaking of the body of the Gosudar. In the configuration of presence described above, the sugar-made Kremlin is the bridge to the sacralization of the Gosudar. This sacralization becomes a culturally specific pattern based on tacit understanding. It reinterprets the pattern of the veneration of icons and expands it to include political leaders in reference to the Soviet tradition of the caring father figure. The process of sacralization is a holistic process that needs all the components identified above for the configuration of presence and is initiated by the ‘living symbol’ icon that affects the sensual and cognitive levels. Specifically Russian is the merging of

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the icon tradition with the veneration of political leaders, which is seemingly dissolved in sugar in Sorokin’s stories. Incidentally, the Kremlin itself has been painted white on orders of the Gosudar in the stories. Today’s personalization of politics and the reduction of the government apparatus to Vladimir Putin culminate in the dystopian figure of a brutal Gosudar who persecutes and executes his opponents. Ultimately, the Gosudar himself is never physically present and only appears ephemerally and as equal to God. The religious character of presence indicates that presence is more than an intense synaesthetic impression, which cannot be described in words. Even the tangibility of the sugar-made Kremlin as a symbol and the concomitant synaesthetic presence of the Gosudar are inherent in a moment of the unattainable, which appears as a paradigm of the phenomenon of presence as regards the Russian icon. The icon in the Russian tradition represents an exceptional case of the configuration of presence. The culture-specific pattern of the veneration of icons and the quality of the icon (to produce immediately the presence of the depicted) are inextricably linked to the cultural repertoire that is always reproduced and thus affirms the culturally specific tacit knowledge that is manifested in traditions (cf. Taylor 2003). The reproduction and reapplication of the icon tradition rely on tacit knowledge and presence in their interdependence. The inherent characteristics of the icon (the connection between this world and the hereafter, as well as the incarnation of the depicted) require a tacit knowledge of the icon tradition, which is evoked and re-actualized by immediate presence. In Kremlin Made of Sugar this happens on both the level of affect and with recourse to tacit knowledge. Presence is overwhelming in its synaesthetic quality; it adapts the tacit knowledge of the icon, and continues and reinterprets it for the sacralization of the Gosudar.

C onclusion The Orthodoxy has returned to contemporary Russian society. The Russian Orthodox Church fuels nationalism and endorses the political acts of the Russian government in person of Vladimir Putin.12 The future dystopian Russian society in Sorokin’s Kremlin Made of Sugar is more and more becoming a realistic scenario. Ubiquitous icons are more than just a return of religion. In Russia the Orthodoxy and the government have formed an alliance in different times. Sorokin continues the current tendencies in Russian society and takes 12 | Similarly, Vladimir Putin has used religious rhetoric to legitimate political acts, for example during the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, when Putin called Crimean sites ‘sacred’ to Russians (cf. Thielmann 2014).

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up the icon tradition that emerges in the sugar-made Kremlin – the guarantor for the presence of sacralization. Both the material and the immaterial quality are indispensible for the configuration of presence. In Kremlin Made of Sugar a narrative pattern is recognizable that guarantees the production of presence in recourse to a culturally specific repertoire. Whereas the icon claims to establish a connection between God and man, the sugar-made Kremlin makes it possible to partake of Gosudar. The partaking of the Gosudar reaches a synaesthetic character, which also endows the figuration of presence with a special quality. It takes place holistically. The limits of propositional explication are overstepped, given the claim of the icon to configure presence directly. The sugar-made Kremlin is at first a substitute for Gosudar, but in conjunction with the reinterpretation of the Russian icon tradition it gains a strong presence, which goes beyond mere representation. Moreover, the cover of the Russian edition, which makes the Kremlin made of sugar tactilely present, suggests materiality as an important and pre-linguistic dimension of the constitution of presence. The reader is included in the process of presence by feeling the sugar-made Kremlin and participates consciously and unconsciously in the sedimentation of sacralization patterns. Assuming that religious phenomena remain impalpable and derive their power from being never entirely tangible, the sugar-made Kremlin tries to fill the gap between intangibility and tangibility in its synaesthetic character. The tension – the dialectic between the tangible and the intangible – is maintained in the figure of the Kremlin made of sugar.

W orks C ited Allen, Nick (2005): “Soviet Break-up Was Geopolitical Disaster, Says Putin,” in: The Telegraph, April 26 2005: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/europe/russia/1488723/Soviet-break-up-was-geopoliticaldisaster-says-Putin.html (last accessed April 13 2017). Benjamin, Walter (1968): Illuminations, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Bershtein, Evgenii/Hadden, Jesse (2007): “The Sorokin Affair Five Years Later on Cultural Policy in Today’s Russia,” artmargins.com: http://www. artmargins.com/index.php/featured-articles/121-the-sorokin-affair-fiveyears-later-on-cultural-policy-in-todays-russia (last accessed April 13 2017). Flogaus, Reinhard (2008): “Die orthodoxe Ikonentheorie des 20. Jahrhunderts. Schulen und Richtungen,” ZKG 119, pp. 203-231. Florenski, Pavel (1988): Die Ikonostase, Stuttgart: Urachhaus.

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Greenfeld, Liah (1992): Nationalism. Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge: First Harvard UP. Horvath, Robert (2013): Putin’s ‘Preventive Counter-Revolution.’ Post-Soviet Authoritarianism and the Spectre of Velvet Revolution, London: Routledge. Högy, Tatjana (1978): Russische Ikonen. Einführung in Bildtypen, Malweise und Sinn russischer Ikonen, Gießen: Schmitz. Kazmina, Olga (2014): “The Russian Orthodox Church in a New Situation in Russia. Challenges and Responses,” in: Krawchuk/Bremer, Eastern Orthodox Encounters, pp. 219-234. Krawchuk, Andrii (2014): “Introduction” in: Krawchuk/Bremer, Eastern Orthodox Encounters, pp. 1-14. Krawchuk, Andrii/Bremer, Thomas (eds.) (2014): Eastern Orthodox Encounters of Identity and Otherness, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Küppers, Leonhard (1949): Göttliche Ikone. Vom Kultbild der Ostkirche, Düsseldorf: Bastion. Lazarev, Viktor Nikitič (1997): Die russische Ikone, Zürich: Benziger. Olteanu, Tina/Nève, Dorothée de (2014): “Eastern Orthodoxy and the Processes of European Integration,” in: Krawchuk/Bremer, Eastern Orthodox Encounters, pp. 179-206. Поскребышев, A. (1949): Любимый отец и великий учитель, in: Правда, Dec. 21 1949, p. 11. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983): Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, London: McGraw-Hill. Schmidt, Christoph (2009): Gemalt für die Ewigkeit. Geschichte der Ikonen in Russland, Köln: Böhlau. Cорокин, Владимир (2008): Сахарный Кремль, Москва: Астрель. Sorokin, Vladimir (2012a): Day of the Oprichnik, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —, (2012b): Der Zuckerkreml, München: Wilhelm Heyne. Taylor, Diana (2003): The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham/London: Duke UP. Thielmann, Wolfgang (2014): “Kiew ist das russische Rom,” in: Die Zeit, March 20 2014, p. 60.

I mages Image 1: Victor Govorkov, Stalin Takes Care of Each of Us in the Kremlin (1940), etoretro.ru: http://www.etoretro.ru/pic58991.htm (last accessed April 13 2017). Image 2: Spasskaya Tower (August 2013); photographs made by the author.

The Macrocontext of (Extra)Ordinary Presence A Methodological Challenge Markus Gottwald

I ntroduction ‘Macro’ and ‘presence’ seem to be worlds apart. When sociologists talk of macrophenomena, they usually focus on large-scale entities like the state, social classes, and systems such as the polity, the law, or the economy. Furthermore, the term ‘macro’ is used to denote far-reaching processes of social change, e.g. the rise and fall of civilizations or, as a typical feature of modernization theory, the evolution and transformation of societies as a whole (cf. e.g. Parsons 1967, 1971; Eisenstadt 2000); since globalization has been discussed as a new major social trend, the vanishing point of sociological macro-analysis in principle has been either to describe the current shape of world society or to describe and explain its emergence and implications (cf. e.g. Wallerstein 1979; Meyer et al. 1997). Finally, macro-entities are said to be constituted by “emergent properties” (cf. Etzioni 1970) that distinguish them from a mere accumulation of individuals. All this clearly indicates that ‘macro’ does not only refer to trans-subjective structures and processes, but also to a transgression of social interactions in the here and now. In contrast, when it comes to presence, the here and now is central: not only in its common-sense usage does presence usually refer to collective or individual actions, interactions, and experiences hic et nunc. Consequently, presence is best understood as a micro-phenomenon. But is that really the case? In the following, I would like to argue the opposite. There are good reasons to understand presence as macroscopically enmeshed. However, by claiming this, I obviously challenge a current epistemological trend within the humanities, of which the debate on presence is representative. In sociology, this trend is particularly expressed by the so-called practice turn, which almost routinely questions macroscopic reasoning. In my view however, practice theory’s farewell to macrosociology is a little bit hasty; a good argument

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for this view can, interestingly enough, be found in the debate on presence, in that it urges us to analyze practices within their macroscopic contexts, which make up their complexity and even specificity. In this regard, this article wants to suggest a theoretical and methodological perspective: a technique of presentification, which makes use of extraordinary moments of presence. My argument is structured in five parts: Firstly, some remarks on the debate on presence and the practice turn will be made in order to elaborate on the specific epistemological claim they imply (II). Next, it will be shown to what degree and why practice approaches reject to speak of macro (III). That the debate on presence urges us to ‘bring the macro back in’ will be demonstrated in a third step (IV). The next section presents my theoretical and methodological perspective (V). The article concludes with an example (VI).

P resence and the P r actice Turn Presence In its common-sense understanding, the term ‘presence’ seems to simply mean being there at a specific time and place. Persons and things we denote as present are not absent, they are there, bodily or materially, and therefore they are typically constitutive parts of a social situation, or rather a social setting, which is constituted by persons’ interactions with one another and things ready at hand. This, of course, is a really simplistic understanding of presence which in no way fully reflects the current academic debate, even if it entails one elementary aspect of it. Presence, understood that way, could be regarded as ordinary presence – ordinary in terms of the myriads of social situations individuals are going through in everyday life. A closer look at the scientific debate, however, reveals that the term ‘presence’ mostly deals with extraordinary experiences that stand out from everyday life and can be evoked through religious rituals, aesthetic fascination, or the shocking arrival of unexpected events, for example news of someone’s death or a confrontation with strangers. All of these examples seem to have at least two things in common: Firstly, they obviously bear witness to moments of high intensity which stand in tension with taken-for-granted realities and routinized actions. Secondly, their intensity is grounded in a specific kind of awareness which is more sensually felt than rational-cognitively captured. This is also why it is claimed that intense moments of presence can’t be adequately communicated: either because they are transparent but not fully translatable into systems of propositional knowledge or because they are unintelligible and therefore conceptually incomprehensible (cf. Ernst/Paul 2013: 11). In short: presence marks experiences beyond the reflexive capacities of language; it denotes a

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genuine mode of Weltaneignung (appropriating the world) that is pre-lingual and therefore pre-interpretative in character; Weltaneignung takes place in direct contact with materially given things at hand, such as bodies or cultural artifacts of any kind. Hence the debate on presence is all about positioning this kind of Weltaneignung as an ineluctable epistemological category, which puts it in opposition to epistemological paradigms that for a long time have dominated the humanities, particularly phenomenology and constructivism in all its variants (e.g. social constructivism, structuralism, poststructuralism, systems theory). A major proponent of this view is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, whose book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004) is a harsh critique of the so-called Cartesian model of semiotic-hermeneutical thinking, which reduces the validity of knowledge and knowledge production to meaning-attribution and meaning-interpretation whilst discrediting nonhermeneutic research attitudes as substantialist. Not only is a specific mode of Weltaneignung dismissed as a consequence, but also a mode of unmistakable significance Gumbrecht refers to as “presence culture” (Gumbrecht 2004). The term “presence culture” is an ideal type (Weber) Gumbrecht introduces to pay attention to the fact that every cultural artifact communicates itself – outside of meaning attribution – in its given materiality. This applies even to the written text, the hermeneutic object par excellence: one may for example feel or smell the paper on which it is printed, or be delighted by its typography as well as by the text’s rhythm, all of which might evoke emotions and go far beyond semantics. On the basis of its materiality, the text is felt rather than interpreted. Therefore the term ‘presence culture’ highlights the corporeal dimension of knowledge. Knowledge originates from Erleben (experiencing) rather than from intentional and reflexive engagement. In other words, although humans live in a world of meaning, this world is also a world of material compactness and resistance which is in tension with the former, and it is just this tension Gumbrecht describes by acknowledging the world as oscillating between meaning and presence effects. It is important to note that Gumbrecht exclusively discusses the aesthetic dimension of presence. His central aim is to establish an epistemology which, when applied to academic teaching practices, is supposed to make students deictically aware of the preinterpretative dimension of research objects. As Gumbrecht tries to show by discussing a poem of Federico Garcia Lorca, it is not only the text’s meaning which matters, but above all Lorca’s written performance, which allows for a kind of affect-eliciting covibration that ultimately brings the poem’s reader closer to Lorca’s world than hermeneutics ever could (cf. Gumbrecht 2012: 309-331). In this regard, Gumbrecht’s talk of “presentification” so to say is a technique for actualizing the present, or for bringing the absent into the present by exposing oneself to the cultural artefact’s materiality (cf. Gumbrecht 2004). Gumbrecht’s plea for an epistemological recognition of presence however is not restricted to

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the significance of aesthetic moments and presentification in the classroom; he also tries to show that both can be seen as integral parts of the cultural repertoire by which contemporary modern lifeworlds are characterized. Quite in accordance with sociological diagnoses of the present age, e.g. the ‘experience-driven society’ (‘Erlebnisgesellschaft’ in the original German, cf. Schulze 2000), Gumbrecht notes an overwhelming desire for extraordinary moments as a means to realize oneself and become one with the world. The enormous popularity of sports events for example might be explained by the epiphanies they promise. Sports events moreover demonstrate that the intense moments of presence craved by individuals may also be commercially produced and marketed. One can find a similar example in current modes of producing historical knowledge, the mediation and appropriation of which nowadays frequently relies on events for which the physical and the sensual are of particular importance. Good examples for this are medieval fairs, the reenactment of historical battles, and the animation of historical events and places via virtual reality. The acquisition of historical knowledge is more than studying texts; history has to go beneath the skin, and should be experienced bodily. In this regard presentification means, as Gumbrecht puts it, “the possibility of speaking to the dead or touching the objects of their world” (2004: 123). If Gumbrecht with his diagnoses is right, then an epistemological presence-terminology is indeed needed, since it might produce a methodology to capture contemporary culture and society more adequately.

Practice Turning to social theory, here too an epistemological and methodological trend can be noticed which lays great emphasis on the significance of bodies and materiality. That this trend seems to be more than a fleeting fashion is demonstrated by being labeled a “turn.” After the linguistic turn and the cultural turn now a practice turn can be witnessed, even though it is worth mentioning that this turn goes hand in hand with a whole bunch of other turns. Without going into too much detail, I will for now mention only some characteristics of the practice turn (cf. Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012). First it has to be stated that one can’t speak of a general and internally consistent theory of practice. Practice is an interdisciplinary term used in philosophy, history, cultural theory, anthropology, and sociology; there are diverse sociological approaches in which practice plays a central role, most prominently Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Despite the heterogeneity of these approaches, a core understanding of practice can be identified. Paraphrasing Theodor R. Schatzki (cf. 2001: 2), practice can be defined as doings and sayings in the here and now, as embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity

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organized around shared practical skills and tacit understanding. Given this definition, it is essential to note that practice approaches consider the structure and structuration of the social order – or the social per se – as being expressed, produced, and reproduced through practices. That is to say that the social (or culture) is neither a mental-cognitive nor a textual phenomenon one can find in cognitive schemes or in codes of discourses and communication, but has rather to be considered as a conglomerate of mundane techniques of using things (bodies or cultural artifacts), of behaving and speaking, or even ways of thinking and understanding the world as such (cf. Reckwitz 2003). Along these lines, every human activity can in principle be described as practice, for example specific ways of organizing, lovemaking, doing gender, or writing an article. This moreover shows that practice is not to be confused with individual actions and interactions that need to be coordinated; practice rather refers to specific styles of acting and patterns of already coordinated actions. Individuals are regarded as merely carrying out rather than intentionally initiating practices. It is needless to say that this notion challenges a wide range of established theories and concepts; practice approaches basically claim to oppose a common kind of sociological theorizing which holds that the genesis of social order is particularly bound to either individuals’ motives and plans or to abstract ideas, values, norms, functions, roles, and even symbolic systems. The latter is not only in line with interpretative critiques of grand theories such as Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, which is accused of producing sociological artifacts, but is also a critique of approaches by Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz that seemingly hypostatize the semiotic level. The former again quite rightly points to the fact that social order is not exclusively constituted through explicit knowledge which actors consciously or reflexively use in coordinating actions; quite to the contrary, acting is mostly pre-reflexive and routinized, and social order thus particularly depends on tacit knowledge. Consequently, the axial dimension that theories of practice build on is the “tacit dimension” (cf. Polanyi 2009), because this is exactly where the rules by which practices become bound and shaped are supposedly located and transform pure behaviors into collective activity. Another reason for the importance of tacit knowledge is its wide applicability and multifacetedness: Due to the fact that tacit knowledge is embodied knowledge, and therefore practice first of all means habitual and coordinated action, the practice turn is not least a body turn. Bodies are considered as socialized, skilled bodies, as media of knowledge appropriation and knowledge memorization, and perhaps more importantly, as media of communication, that is to say as carriers of “nonlinguistic sign systems: clothing, postures, gestures, facial expressions, and glances” (Hirschauer 2008: 979; my transl.). The latter makes the practice turn a performative turn, because the practical understanding which guarantees the flow of interaction is mainly generated by performing bodies. So it’s not the

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body as such, but bodies in action which function as carriers and transmitters of knowledge. Culture theory has paid increasing attention to performances, which is demonstrated for example by the popularity of ethnographic studies and recent research that uses theatrical performances as an instrument of data collection. Regarding the latter, one only needs to think of Richard Schechner’s and Victor Turner’s attempts to get access to the emotional structure of foreign cultures by staging rituals in the context of seminars (cf. Turner 1982) – the similarity to what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls presentification is obvious. Schechner’s and Turner’s research in particular draws attention to the fact that currently, an emotion turn is also under way. That is because the body can display various emotional states: nervousness, for instance, may be displayed by shaky hands, fear by goose bumps, grief by tears, etc. In other words: Researchers have begun to analyze the body as a genuine medium of presentification. The body seems to bring the absent into the present: invisible frames of mind become visible – bodily expressed – signs. To sum up briefly: It’s a moot point whether practice approaches should be considered as theories of presence or whether the debate on presence should be considered as a specific manifestation of the practice turn within the humanities. In any case it seems obvious that both the debate on presence and practice approaches indicate an epistemological turn. That is, both consider bodily acquired and expressed realities as the reality as such. However, there are still great differences, particularly in the case of theorists of presence who postulate a kind of authentic immediacy in terms of a pre-interpretative real presence. This, in my opinion, is an assumption theorists of practice would hardly agree with. Although they focus on non-lingual, bodily mediated communication, they wouldn’t claim that communication beyond meaning is possible. On the contrary, they would insist that bodies are meaningladen thanks to habitual schemes and tacitly transferred and mimetically appropriated practical skills. Therefore practice theorists would also argue that the immediacy of extraordinary moments is a mediated immediacy that is mediated by incorporated meaning. Thus also emotions and affect are grounded in acquired schemes and may arise when these schemes are activated by the specificity of an implicitly typified situation. Emotions can function as a “pre-reflexive corporal evaluation” (Adloff 2013: 103; my transl.) that allows an attunement to situational conditions and requirements. Accordingly, emotions are important forms of communication (cf. Collins 2004), which – in view of the debate one actually feels compelled to highlight this – are clearly used intentionally in order to impress and manipulate others or rather, to influence situations – which is why assessing the authenticity of emotions is so important in many communicative situations (e.g. love relationships). Finally, if incommunicability is a characteristic element of extraordinary presence, it may result from a specific characteristic of tacit knowledge, namely

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the problem of adequately explicating it (cf. Polanyi 1985). Theories of practice in particular therefore raise doubts about an unmediated immediacy in the sense of Gumbrecht’s authentic experience of presence with good reason. It seems much more plausible to assume that there is a strong interconnection between intense moments of presence and tacit knowledge (cf. Ernst/Paul 2013). Nevertheless, I would claim that theories of practice too cling to a kind of epistemological promise which crucially relies on the idea of immediacy and authenticity. In the following, I will discuss this further in relation to another part of my argument, namely that the practice turn can be seen as a crucial challenge for macroscopic reasoning.

The P r actice Turn and M acroscopic R e asoning Due to the fact that practices have to be understood as doings and sayings in the here and now, and practical coordination first and foremost is assumed to be organized around bodily skills and signs, practices are necessarily public. The research on practices therefore follows a clear analytical and methodological rule: Conclusions have to be developed from observations of the social as such. So, what actually matters is the observable “site of the social” (cf. Schatzki 2002), the setting in which the social is performed hic et nunc. Practice theories thus are strictly empirical. Furthermore, practice theories do not derive from laboratories, big survey data, and normally not even from the memorized stories of interviewed individuals, but from experiences the researcher makes in direct interaction with actors in their “natural” environments. Ideally, practice theories have to build on so-called “natural data” collected via ethnographic research. Since the main interest of practice analysis is the emergence of social order in situ – the accomplishments of practical selections, and the ways of practical understanding – participant observation is basically a must. To get an idea of the incorporated “practical reason” (cf. Bourdieu 1999), researchers have to expose themselves to the fields of practical reasoning. That is to say, data collection is based on sensual immediacy and requires the researcher’s bodily engagement. It can therefore be said that the researcher’s body is the most important research instrument, because the tacit knowledge s/he wants to explore and to explicate in field reports only transmits itself by sharing the doings and sayings in the field (cf. Breidenstein et al. 2013). In practice theory it thus is the exclusive reference to situations and the researcher’s co-presence which seem to eliminate the risk of producing sociological knowledge which one may dismiss as artificial or “scholastic” (cf. Bourdieu 2001). All the above-mentioned attributes support the view that practice theories are purely microscopic, because when looking at the sociological micro-macro debate one will realize that micro is mostly associated with observable units,

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typically individuals and small groups, or else interactions of limited scope (cf. Knorr-Cetina 1981; Münch/Smelser 1987: 356). And in a certain manner practice theories indeed are in line with what Randall Collins (2004) defines as “radical microsociology,” namely a sociology which considers the social as exclusively made up of situations and encounters of human bodies. The radicalism of such an approach thus can be found in the assertion that macrostructures strictly speaking do not exist. To quote Collins: “What is ‘empirical’ meets us only in the form of microencounters, and any macrostructure, no matter how large, consists only of the repeated experience of large numbers of people in time and space. Our macroconcepts are only words we apply to these aggregations of microencounters” (Collins 1987: 195). In other words: Macrostructures are nothing but myriads of microsituations chained up with each other. In this way Collins particularly opposes a kind of macrosociology which construes its concepts out of statistics and survey data, e.g. by painting a picture of a societal hierarchy on the basis of surveys asking individuals about their income, occupation, or attitudes. It’s not that Collins dismisses this kind of research as sociologically worthless. He warns, however, against equating survey aggregations with real things (cf. Collins 2004: 259-263). Such “structures do never anything; it is only persons in real situations who act,” as he puts it (Collins 1987: 195). This is an argument practice theorists would basically agree with. They also insist on the fact that entities typically deemed meso and macro – say markets and organizations – only become real or visible by doings and sayings in everyday-life interactions (cf. Coulter 2001). Thus theories of practice obviously follow a central tenet of Collins’ “radical microsociology” by translating macro-concepts into their micro-foundations. However, even if this is correct, most practice theorists would still reject the view that practices are purely micro. Quite the contrary, as a general rule they criticize the micromacro binary per se as spurious. Most prominently one can find this view in the work of Anthony Giddens (cf. 1984), who considers the micro-macro debate as a sham which causes an unfruitful division of labor within sociological research, because usually one side or the other is given undue preference. Giddens also criticizes Collins for insinuating that structure must be something beyond the actors’ activities; as already mentioned, it is one of practice theory’s distinctive features to claim just the opposite. In Giddens’ theory this is described as the duality of structure, whilst Bourdieu considers habitus as “structured structures ideally suited to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1999: 98; my transl.). When it comes to the question how practices spread and stabilize over time and space besides through symbolic systems and modern mass media, it is the ability of bodies and things to accumulate, transmit, and connect knowledge that is highlighted, most pronouncedly so in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (cf. Latour 2005). In practice theory there is no Durkheimian collective subject confronting individuals with abstract forces.

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The social is taking place at one and the same flat level. This also holds true for Giddens’ systems, which are nothing more than time-and-space-transcending practices which are only reproduced and become effective in situations (cf. also Archer 1988). It is for this reason that he can claim that studying the structuration of systems means studying how interactions become produced and reproduced (Giddens 1984: 25). For macro-research in principle this means studying how situations become interlinked over time and space and which unintended consequences may result from this. Since practice theories ideally build on empirical data collected via participant observation, it is not surprising that a possible equivalent to macro-research may be found in “multi-sided ethnography” (cf. Marcus 1995), which seems to promise the exploration of trans-situational and trans-local practice patterns (cf. Schmidt 2012). A good example of how this might work is provided by Karin Knorr-Cetina and Urs Brügger’s analysis of financial markets, in which they show how the foreign exchange market is constituted by a virtual community of traders and their common usage of things like computers, desks, headsets, etc. Tellingly, KnorrCetina and Brügger avoid calling this a macro-analysis by labeling what they examine a “global microstructure” (cf. Knorr-Cetina/Brügger 2002). The term “global microstructure” in principle makes very clear that practices should be understood as something in-between, neither micro nor macro. The question, however, is if such an understanding of the social really is what social order is all about, because even if the exploration of practices is strictly based on finegrained empirical research ideally built on the sensual experiences researchers make in situations of co-presence, one might nevertheless ask whether sociology is well advised to consider the social order as nearly exclusively anchored in practical skills and tacit understanding. And in a certain sense one can indeed get the impression that even within practice theory there exists a faint suspicion that something is amiss, because even if practice theory is shying away from speaking explicitly of micro and macro, there nevertheless seems to be an urge to find compensatory strategies, e.g. by sounding out the possibilities of combining practice theory with discourse theory, by probing the possibilities of reconstructing far-reaching interconnections of practice patterns which might be understood as a kind of macro-aggregation (cf. Reckwitz 2003), and finally, with reference to Bourdieu’s Distinction (cf. Bourdieu 1987), by complementing the perspective of participant observation with statistics (cf. Schmidt 2012: 257261). In view of all this, one feels prompted to ask if there aren’t good reasons to assume that the macro is a form of social order in its own right that goes beyond practice. In the following, I will try to show that this is an absolutely sound assumption. Interestingly enough, an instructive hint corroborating this assumption can be found in the body-focused debate on presence. We shall therefore return to Gumbrecht.

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P resence and the H idden Tempor al C omple xit y of P r actice As mentioned above, according to Gumbrecht it is characteristic of today’s lifeworlds to create an overwhelming desire for intense moments of presence, which seems like a good enough reason to work out an epistemology of presence. His argumentation, however, doesn’t stop there; he also tries to explain where this desire stems from and what it is fueled by. The explanation he gives is that time, or rather the modern conception of time, is eroding. It is well known that pre-modern cultures are dominated by an occasional and cyclical understanding of time which hardly differentiates between the past and the future, whereas modern culture has a linear conception of time which allows for the conceptualization of future, present, and past, with the future being considered as an open horizon of possibilities (cf. Rammstedt 1975). Therefore a constitutive condition of modernity can be found, as Reinhart Koselleck (2004) has argued, in an ever-widening gap between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation,” which means that projections into the future have more and more become the guideline of human activities, whereas past experience has been losing its restrictive power. The French Revolution in particular as well as scientific and technological innovations promoted faith in society’s manageability and in the predictability of the future. Thus “progress,” “historical awareness,” and “acceleration,” i.e. shortened innovation cycles, are what the modern time regime stands for. However, even if the semantics of progress is still nurtured, the enthusiastic belief in progress has come to an end. Against the backdrop of anthropogenic catastrophes (e.g. environmental disasters and economic crises), which have turned planning and calculation into permanent crisis and risk management, the open future seems to close again. This is where the erosion of the modern time regime manifests itself most notably; because ‘progress’ forces individuals to leave the past behind, this has also consequences for their relationship to history. Since about the 1980s, an exuberant culture of remembrance has emerged, which Gumbrecht (cf. also Assmann 2013) interprets as a mainly media-driven crisis of indifference. Contemporary societies are drowned by an “ever-available past” simultaneously narrated in a huge variety of diverse “language games” (Lyotard 2004) – history diffuses into manifold histories. Therefore Gumbrecht concludes that the modern time regime is superseded by a new chronotope he calls “broad present” (cf. Gumbrecht 2014), by which he means that the present is besieged and flooded from two sides – on the one side there is the excessively preserved past, on the other there is an uncertain and pressing future requiring permanent risk management. The overwhelming desire for intense moments therefore is caused by a kind of mental overload, or rather by decision fatigue. Against this backdrop, presence can be seen as a new modus vivendi which

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might offer a way out. It is important to note, however, that Gumbrecht’s view of things is anything but new, which becomes evident when one considers the sociological literature on time. What he describes as “broad present” is in some respects a variation of what Helga Nowotny (1993: 47) calls “stretched present” and what Hermann Lübbe (2003: 399) envisages when he speaks of the “shrinking present.” Lübbe shares with Gumbrecht the emphasis on the flooding of the present with the past, while Nowotny shares with Gumbrecht the emphasis on the increased significance of special moments. However, Lübbe and Nowotny differ from Gumbrecht in that they more strongly emphasize the time pressure individuals nowadays are under. In some way or other, time pressure is supposed to be an effect of the acceleration of social life already identified by Koselleck as one of the characteristics of modern time regimes. The most recent account which considers acceleration as the megatrend of contemporary societies is provided by Hartmut Rosa (2005). However, going beyond Koselleck, Rosa claims that the acceleration of social life has now reached a transition point which manifests itself in “frantic stagnation” (Virilio 1997). That is to say that individuals’ sense of time is best described as follows: “nothing remains as it is, although nothing actually changes” (Rosa 2005: 479; my transl.). This sense of time is exactly what, according to Gumbrecht (cf. 2012: 49-66), caused the (re-)discovery of space and materiality. The crucial difference however is that Rosa explicitly tries to figure out the sociological factors which promote this sense of time. In doing so, Rosa makes us aware of a sociological theory which his literary studies colleague quotes only in passing. Besides technological innovation, commodification, and a change in values, Rosa particularly stresses an allembracing change in social structure, which, drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, he relates to functional differentiation (cf. Rosa 2005: 295-310). With good reason functional differentiation can be considered to be an engine of acceleration: Firstly, because the differentiation and separation of specific social domains (e.g. the economy, politics, science, religion, the arts, etc.) enables processes of rationalization by which each of these domains becomes more efficient and effective in realizing self-defined goals (see already Weber 1988). In addition, rationalization also creates new opportunities for action so that every domain – or rather functional system – can bolster innovation, not least because pushing unselected opportunities into the future is also a possible selection. As regards the latter, Niklas Luhmann (1980) speaks of the “temporalization of complexity,” which he considers to be a typical feature of modern, functionally differentiated societies. And because there are always more opportunities available than can actually be realized temporalization generates selection pressure, and therefore change. A second reason why functional differentiation inherently has an accelerating effect derives from synchronization requirements. Due to the specificity of their internal modes of

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operation and the services they provide to each other, all functionally differentiated systems are permanently forced to coordinate their horizons of expectation. As a result, internally developed expectations are extremely susceptible to revision. According to Rosa (2005: 352-390), the increased awareness of stress and the lack of time a lot of people suffer from today can be clearly traced back to the problem of synchronization. Since individuals are engaged not only in one system (e.g. the family) but in many (work, religion, education, etc.), they are almost at every moment required to deal with the necessities and contingencies of synchronization which differentiation imposes on them. Thus we can state: Functional differentiation seems to be a wellfounded sociological explanation for the erosion of the classical modern time regime which Gumbrecht considers responsible for the emergence of the desire for intense moments of presence.1 What, however, can we learn from Gumbrecht’s work about theories of practice by reading it through the lens of differentiation theory? In light of the above the answer is obvious: it’s all about synchronization. If there is anything we can learn from current theories of time, then it may be the fact that practices hic et nunc take place within wider contexts of action – contexts however which are ruled by their own logics of time (cf. Nassehi 2008, 2009, 2011). Accordingly, every practice is inherently fraught with the problem of synchronization, or, to be more precise, every doing and saying necessitates synchronization. Time, as Norbert Elias (1988) already observed, is the instrument of social coordination par excellence. However, owing to the increasing complexity of modern society, the complexities of coordinating abstract time(s) have come to the foreground. More specifically: workplaces, educational institutions, the media and news production, public transportation, stock markets, politics, etc. all operate according to their own logics of time. There is a wide variety of schedules, time tables, calendars, and deadlines which fill up and structure situations through “temporal regularities” (cf. Zerubavel 1981: 1-30), that is, sequences, durations, temporal locations, and rates of recurrence. The crucial point thus is that several of these time regimes can occur in parallel in every micro-encounter, during which therefore a variety of time references and schedules have to be coordinated practically at every 1 | It is noteworthy that Gumbrecht argues normatively insofar as that he considers aesthetic moments of presence as a kind of refuge from a thoroughly alienated world. In this regard it could be said that he actualizes the bourgeois discourse on authentic inwardness and primordial subjectivity. And even Rosa’s analysis, which is much more dystopian, seems to be fed by the same bourgeois discourse. This discourse was, of course, initiated at the early beginnings of differentiation and individualization, but has become dubious in view of the consequences of ongoing differentiation. Against this backdrop one can claim that their systematic reflections finally end up in nostalgic laments (cf. especially Nassehi 2009).

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moment. And if I say ‘practically,’ I actually mean tacitly, because although the integration of temporal orders is worked out by doings and sayings in face-toface encounters, they are normally not an explicit subject of communication but rather an implicit part of the situation shaped by the persons’ biographies as well as by countless processes and artifacts which constitute the encounter’s surroundings. This is exactly what Zerubavel means by “hidden rhythms” – our all-embracing temporal situatedness and its “normalcy” (cf. 1981: 20). We typically do not become aware of the complexity of this normalcy unless the coordination of these “hidden rhythms” is threatening to fail, or actually does fail. On the basis of this theoretical presupposition one feels prompted to formulate an – of course cautious – assumption: Perhaps the increased awareness of acceleration or vice versa, the perceived loss of presence is best understood as a specific kind of reflexivity. That is to say, we practically become aware that abstract temporal orders obviously are in conflict with each other more than ever and that the tacitly accomplished coordination of different time references becomes ever more difficult. In other words: The different time references that structure micro-encounters normally operate to a large extent in the realm of the absent present; the diagnosis of acceleration, however, indicates that the absent present has become increasingly noticeable – for instance, as Gumbrecht would argue, by an intensified search for aesthetic epiphanies which we may possibly experience through sports events. Against this backdrop, we could even dare to formulate the following hypothesis: The practice turn, too, is prompted by the macro-dynamic temporal complexities that sociological time theory postulates, because these complexities are supposed to be responsible for the lost belief in political regulation and the feasibility of societal progress. This is exactly what caused the delegitimation of modernization theory à la Parsons, which finally gave way to the interpretative turn, the cultural turn, and last but not least the practice turn. If this hypothesis holds true, then one may actually claim that the practice turn seems to contradict its own social preconditions. Perhaps Armin Nassehi (cf. 2009: 219226) is right in stating that practice theory’s focus on situations and embodied actions was supposed to guarantee the authenticity of a scientific object that is elusive by nature, at least in contrast to the sensually perceptible and technically measurable objects of the so-called hard sciences. Therefore it could be said that even practice theory seems to pay homage to a promise of authenticity. So far it should have become clear that reading the debate on presence through the lens of differentiation theory seems to provide us with an outstanding argument, which is that reducing the social to the ‘site of the social’ and the practices we can observe there might be an analytical dead end, because this reduction does not leave enough room for social orders which do not simply merge in practices but have their own distinct quality, and therefore should be regarded as macroscopic contexts. Time, understood as a distinct

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dimension of social order – or rather the requirement of synchronization – illustrates this empirically and vividly. Perhaps one can use a term Koselleck (2013) has coined to describe this situation: practice in process is only one “temporal stratum” among others – a temporal stratum, however, which only constitutes the surface of practice, whereas the practice as such is much more complex as the surface reveals. This is the crux of the matter: We obviously cannot become directly aware of the full complexity of practice, because the situational synchronization of diverse temporal horizons primarily takes place tacitly. It seems to be a specific feature of practice to suppress complexity in order to maintain normalcy, which functions as a guarantee for self-reproduction. I think this is the blind spot of practice theories: neither are they able to see the far-reaching synchronization choices that practice is confronted with, nor are they able to see the actual synchronization capacities practice implies while it takes place, because they outright reject the micro-macro binary and any idea of ‘society.’ However, what would a theoretical and methodological alternative look like? A theoretical approach is needed that combines elements of practice theory with an ambitious macro-concept, and a methodological approach is needed that makes us aware of practice’s inherent mechanisms of complexity suppression. To say it with Gumbrecht, we have to look for a technique of presentification, a technique which may help us presentify the suppressed dynamics of macro-orders.

The P resentification of M acroconte x ts – M e thodological C onsider ations Theor y Before delving more deeply into theoretical issues I have to make further terminological clarifications, especially with respect to the conceptualization of the macro. It should have become clear by now that the approach advocated here is far from conceptualizing the macro as micro-encounters interconnected via media of distribution such as computers and the internet. When I speak of macro and/or meso, I think of mechanisms which ensure the coordination of actions, or rather the linkability of actions against the backdrop of an information-medium driven expansion of variety pools from which subsequent actions can be selected. This notion is held in particular by sophisticated theories of social differentiation, for instance Luhmann’s systems theory. According to Luhmann’s theory (cf. 1984), the problem of social order is clearly not the problem of how situations become connected which each other, but how actions and communications are selected and connected. As already stated, in this regard practice theories emphasize the significance of practical skills and tacit understanding. In

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principle, there is no reason to disagree with this assessment. Nevertheless, I am skeptical about the kind of analysis that exclusively relies on routinized acting and disregards other forms of coordination which solve the problem of social order on the basis of abstract, generalized explicit knowledge. This is evident in the case of organizations that coordinate actions via standardization and red tape, and also applies to functional systems that coordinate actions via media of communication. In other words: The understanding of macro I have in mind stresses processes of media evolution as driving factors of social differentiation and the constitution of societal complexity (cf. Luhmann 1997: 190-412) – not least the complexity of different temporal horizons. Of course, one might well argue that even systems theory has some reservations about the micro-macro binary (cf. Nassehi 2011: 137-140). The distinction between micro and macro, as for example Stichweh warns (cf. 1995: 403-404), runs the risk of misunderstanding the relation between interaction, organization, and functional systems as hierarchical, and hence of prioritizing the level of functional systems – an argument which is not unlike Giddens’ objection to the micro-macro binary. By taking this stance, one would get systems theory wrong: One can speak of different levels, but they are not hierarchically organized – systems theory is about different media forms of organizing selections, which inter alia allow clear demarcations between levels. In this respect, the question is rather how the transgression of systemic boundaries becomes organized, as Stichweh argues. I would indeed also argue that it is a mistake to relate the micro-macro binary to hierarchy. Matters of taste aside, it does make a difference whether actions are selected and coordinated via habitually established schemes or via explicit rules, regularities, standardizations, and generalizations which definitely allow a transgression of situations, and therefore it seems to me that speaking of macro is anything but misguided. In any case, systems theory is right in problematizing the transitions and the interplay between different levels of social order; the question however is if this includes the orderliness resulting from tacit understanding. Efforts at integrating practices into systems theory (cf. Nassehi 2011) can’t provide more than a superficial correction, because within systems theory’s architecture there is inherently barely room for something like habit-based coordination of action. For the methodological challenge discussed here, a theoretical alternative which from the very start considers the habitual coordination of actions as one mode of social order among others thus seems more promising. Such an approach can be found, as I would argue, in Joachim Renn’s theory of translation (2006), which in a way can be understood as a systematic pragmatist reformulation of Luhmann’s differentiation theory. Since this is not the place to explain a wellelaborated theory in its full complexity, I only want to point out here that Renn provides a heuristics which might help elaborate a methodological perspective from which it is possible to presentify practically suppressed macro-orders. One important theoretical precondition for this is that Renn (cf. 2006: 349-393)

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conceptualizes abstract macro-orders as explications of tacit knowledge that are stabilized via media, in the context of which it is important to note that he considers explication as an inherently emergent event because it is based on a shift in media, that is, a shift from habitus to language and writing, and finally to symbolic media of communication. In this way Renn is able to develop a heuristics which conceptualizes organizations as language-based and systems as based on symbolic media of communication (like money, the law, scientific truth, etc.), whilst shared habitus and mentalities make up an interaction-based milieu which again has to be thought of as separate from intentionally and creatively acting persons (cf. ibid. 397-442). Another aspect which makes Renn’s theory attractive for the methodological purpose discussed here is the way in which the interplay between all these entities is conceptualized. Insofar as macro-orders emerge from processes of explication, and explication means transforming tacit knowledge into propositional knowledge – standardized and generalized rules – it is only logical to think of re-specification as a process by which these abstract forms of knowledge are (re-)applied to unique situations (cf. ibid. 445). This makes it clear that the micro and the macro are reciprocally related to one another, and also that tacit knowledge plays a functionally crucial role with regards to the reproduction of macro-orders (cf. also Renn 2013, 2014). Since there is no general rule determining what does or does not constitute a situationally adequate usage of general rules, as Renn states with reference to Wittgenstein (cf. Renn 2006: 276-282), tacit knowledge is required to determine the application of general rules. Therefore, milieu-based know-how along with persons’ intentionality and creativity are indispensable re-specification resources. In short: Abstract macroorders only fulfill their coordinating function and become effective if they are translated practically; translation here, unlike in theories of practice, doesn’t mean that macro-orders merge into practices – rather, due to their contrasting media form, they have to be seen as contexts of practices, although these contexts appear as doings and sayings. In turn this also means that practices have to be considered as specific responses to the affordances and services functional systems and organizations produce and provide – systems and organizations may broaden as well as narrow the scope of practical selections. From this perspective, macroorders are not least constitutive conditions of practices, which finally may explain the formation of “practice patterns” theorists of practice advise us to reconstruct. All this indicates that – even if macro-contexts are practically translated and may appear as doings and sayings – everyday practices necessarily have to be considered as replete with macroscopic attributes. Against this backdrop, Renn’s pragmatist theory of differentiation actually suggests understanding abstract macro-orders as the absent present of all micro-encounters. But what does this mean methodologically? How may we derive a technique of presentification from Renn’s theory of translation?

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Methodolog y I think in this regard much can be learned from Erving Goffman, not least because Goffman makes it very clear that the distinction between the interaction order of face-to-face encounters on the one hand and macrostructures on the other is anything but artificial, as is claimed by practice theorists. On the contrary, not unlike Luhmann or Renn, Goffman assumes a kind of loose coupling between micro and macro entities that he describes with the term “interface” (cf. Goffman 1983). Despite the fact that Goffman underlines the interaction order’s autonomy, he considers the orderliness of interactions as macroscopically influenced. Of course, Goffman never worked out a precise macrosociological framework, and thus his outline of the interplay between micro and macro is also far from elaborate. However, that isn’t really important for the methodological challenge we are confronted with, namely figuring out a technique of presentification which may help us reconstruct macro-dynamics as the absent present of practices. In this respect another central assumption of Goffman’s sociology is important, however, namely the maintenance of normality as a characteristic of interaction orders. Following Goffman, it can be said that the orderliness of interactions is obviously based on a specific practical know-how persons apply while engaging in face-to-face interactions, that is to say, they typically know how to behave in and how to adapt to situations in order to keep interactions going precisely because they know that interactions may collapse at any moment. Therefore, as Goffman (1967) empirically exemplifies, tact and interaction rituals are outstanding means of protection and repair mechanisms for stabilizing interactions in time – means and mechanisms which permanently produce or guarantee a kind of situational normality despite below-the-surface contradictions and conflicts. I think that this characteristic of the interaction order can be a suitable starting point for answering the question of how to presentify macro-dynamics, because it should have become evident by now that the practical knowledge Goffman identifies as essential for the orderliness of interactions might indeed be important to the process of re-specification that Renn’s pragmatist theory postulates in regard to the application of abstract systemic rationalities and of organizational rules and semantics to individual situations. In fact, now we can even dare to formulate the hypothesis that it is precisely this kind of practical knowledge which to a certain degree immunizes the flow of practice against interruptions by macroscopic temporal conflicts. That is to say, the persons engaged in interactions implicitly make use of socialized skills which enable them to deal with the incommensurateness of different timeframes and schedules imposed on them by a vast number of systems and organizations. Renn’s pragmatist theory of differentiation, however, forces us to go even a step further, since it stresses that the meaning of actions depends on temporal horizons which

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differ with reference to the media forms that integrate actions into contexts of action. Hence, completely different perceptions and conceptualizations of time have to be translated into one another during interactions. From that perspective, it becomes clear how difficult and demanding the performance of practices really is, which sources of disturbance practices are exposed to, and which suppression efforts are required to keep the flow of practice going. Thus we can conclude that it is particularly a lack of common background which may upset interactions, since background knowledge also comprises the practical skills and implicitly known conversational conventions Goffman talks of.2 This then may also overturn the suppression of macro dynamics. On the other hand however, it is conceivable that in precisely that respect the macro can function as a kind of stabilizer, since it provides the interacting persons with clear guidelines of communication that may help maintain communication. This sort of macro stabilization of interaction can even – if not typically – be found in the materially given surroundings and the arrangement of things. We only have to think of the physical arrangement of supermarkets, which forces us to wait in a checkout line. Be that as it may, with regard to our methodological problem the crucial point is that the doings and sayings we can observe deal not only with diverging temporal orders that are imposed by abstract systems, but also with diverging forms of time. This demonstrates what exactly the problem of social order is all about – its unlikeliness and the question how unlikeliness transforms into likeliness. Compared to relatively simplistic practice theories that reduce social order to tacit understanding, a pragmatist theory of differentiation makes us actually aware of this. Additionally, reading the pragmatist theory of differentiation through the lens of Goffman (or vice versa), the methodological challenge discussed here transforms into the following perspective: If we ask for the potential bearers of macroscopic elements, then all practices we can identify as mechanisms by which interactions are balanced, repaired, and stabilized – that is to say, the mechanisms tacitly (and also reflexively) at work to keep interactions going – can be regarded as the most likely candidates. In other words: When we analyze the practices of micro-encounters, whether in the form of field records or in the form of interview transcripts, we have to look out for text passages where a kind of emotional flickering and vibrating is noticeable, where narrative interruptions, delays, stammerings or stumblings appear that seem to make evident that an emotional swing takes place that forces the interacting persons to undertake efforts at normalization. In such text passages, we can possibly observe that 2 | Of course the liveliness and the stability of interactions can also benefit from implicitly shared expectations. When Collins (2004) speaks of “emotional energy” or “emotional coordination,” one can assume that there is a milieu at work, which is an aspect however that Collins fails to take into account.

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the skills used there constitute a reaction to macro-dynamic demands, which have to be suppressed. Finally, we can state that the technique of presentification we are searching for should build on methods of in-depth analysis which show a high sensibility to intense moments of extraordinary presence, because – by definition – these are the moments that recursively need to be normalized. Normalization, as was highlighted by Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (2014), is a genuine clue to understanding the constitution of social order. In accordance with the argument suggested here, normalization can be regarded as a “response” (cf. Waldenfels 2012) to practically interwoven but nevertheless conflicting forms of social order.

C onclusion I will conclude with an example: Some time ago, I was sitting in a café near my office. There I witnessed the following scene: Two men in their mid-thirties entered and sat down. It quickly became clear that they were sociologists who worked at the university. One of the men obviously had to prepare a conference talk. The other man, obviously not only a colleague but also a friend, seemed to help him by discussing some crucial questions. Both seemed to be in a good mood and were permanently joking. Then suddenly the mood seemed to turn. The man who had to prepare his talk started to complain to the waitress that his coffee had not been served yet. His friend stayed calm and said: “Come on, she’s doing what she can, see, this place is really crowded,” and then added: “You’ll be fine, everything will work out well.” Both then continued discussing the talk to be prepared. After a while, the atmosphere seemed to turn again. The man who had stayed calm before now showed signs of nervousness, and began moving back and forth on his chair. Noticing this, his friend asked him: “Do you have to go?” He answered: “Yes, I must pick up my son from kindergarten, take him to his mother and then I must hurry to make it to my lecture on time, you know my seminar students will evaluate my course at the end of the semester.” His friend then asked the waitress for the bill. She gave him a friendly smile and replied: “Sorry, shift change, I’m already on my way to class, my statistics lecture starts in five minutes and my professor doesn’t tolerate lateness.” Both men looked baffled, but accepted the delay. Even if the above is a very simple, quotidian example, it should nevertheless be obvious that the described scene involves a variety of temporal orders of which more than a few collide, for instance class schedules, the shift schedule of the café, the time regimes of scientific careers, family organization, kindergarten hours, etc. These conflicting time orders are – unconsciously or consciously –

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interactively suppressed and therefore operate on a latent level, but, crucially, assert themselves from time to time and become explicit, although not semiotic. This, perhaps, is best exemplified by the man moving back and forth on his chair, because there are two ways to interpret this behavior: Firstly, as an intentional act: the man wants to signal his friend that he needs to leave without telling him outright; secondly, as anything but intentional: despite the fact that he doesn’t want to further upset his friend and tries to radiate calm, his body communicates stress. While the practice turn makes us aware of such nuances, it does not provide any explanations, simply because practice approaches inherently provide only descriptions. I would argue that analyzing practices against the backdrop of a theory of society is more fruitful. Such an approach would then possibly allow us to reconstruct situations such as my example as practice governed by time references and schedules crucial in struggles for positions which at the same time is counterbalanced by macrotemporalities deriving from other abstract domains or specific milieus.

W orks C ited Adloff, Frank (2013): “Gefühle zwischen Präsenz und implizitem Wissen. Zur Sozialtheorie emotionaler Erfahrung,” in: Ernst/Paul, Präsenz und implizites Wissen, pp. 97-124. Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al. (eds.) (1987): The Micro-Macro-Link, Berkeley: U of California P. Archer, Margaret S. (1988): Culture and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Assmann, Aleida (2013): Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen. Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne, München: Hanser. Bourdieu, Pierre (1987): Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard UP. —, (1999): Sozialer Sinn. Kritik der theoretischen Vernunft, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —, (2001): Meditationen. Zur Kritik der scholastischen Vernunft, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Breidenstein, Georg et al. (2015): Ethnographie: Die Praxis der Feldforschung, Konstanz: UTB Konstanz. Collins, Randall (1987): “Interaction Ritual Chains, Power and Property. The Micro-Macro Connection as an Empirically Based Theoretical Problem,” in: Alexander et al., The Micro-Macro-Link, pp. 193-206. —, (2004): Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton UP. Coulter, Jeff (2001): “Human Practice and the Observability of the ‘MacroSocial,’” in: Schatzki/Knorr-Cetina/von Savigny, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, pp. 29-41.

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Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2000): “Multiple Modernities,” in: Daedalus 129.1, pp. 1-29. Elias, Norbert (1988): Über die Zeit. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie II, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Ernst, Christoph/Paul, Heike (2013): “Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften,” in: Christoph Ernst/Heike Paul (eds.), Präsenz und implizites Wissen, Bielefeld: Transkript, pp. 9-32. Etzioni, Amitai (1970): “Elemente einer Makrosoziologie,” in: Wolfgang Zapf (ed.), Theorien sozialen Wandels, Köln/Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, pp. 147-176. Garfinkel, Harold (2014): Studies in Ethnomethodology, Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony (1984): The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, Erving (1983): “The Interaction Order. American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address,” in: American Sociological Review 48, pp. 1-17. —, (1967): Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, New York: Doubleday Anchor. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford UP. —, (2014): Our Broad Present. Time and Contemporary Culture, New York: Columbia UP. —, (2012): Präsenz, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Hirschauer, Stefan (2008): “Körper macht Wissen – Für eine Somatisierung des Wissensbegriffs,” in: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (ed.), Die Natur der Gesellschaft. Verhandlungen des 33. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Kassel 2006, pt. 2, Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus, pp. 974-984. Knorr-Cetina, Karin (1981): “Introduction. The Micro-Sociological Challenge of Macro-Sociology. Towards a Reconstruction of Social Theory and Methodology,” in: Karin Knorr-Cetina/Aron Victor Cicourel (eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology. Towards an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociology, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 1-47. Knorr-Cetina, Karin/Brügger, Urs (2002): “Global Microstructures. The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets,” in: American Journal of Sociology 107, pp. 905-950. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004): Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York, Columbia UP. —, (2013): Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

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Latour, Bruno (2005): Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory, Oxford: Oxford UP. Luhmann, Niklas (1980): “Temporalisierung von Komplexität. Zur Semantik neuzeitlicher Zeitbegriffe,” in: Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie moderner Gesellschaft, vol. 1, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 235-300. —, (1984): Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —, (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, vol. 1., Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —,  (2005): “Weltzeit und Systemgeschichte,” in: Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 128-166. Lübbe, Hermann (2003): Im Zug der Zeit. Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart, 3rd ed., Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer. Lyotard (2004): The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester UP. Marcus, Georg E. (1995): “Ethnography in/of the World System. The Emergence of Multi-Sided Ethnography,” in: Annual Review of Anthropology 24, pp. 95-117. Meyer, John W. et al. (1997): “World Society and the Nation State,” in: American Journal of Sociology 103.1, pp. 144-181. Münch, Richard/Smelser, Neil J. (1987): “Conclusion. Relating the Micro and Macro,” in: Alexander et al., The Micro-Macro-Link, pp. 356-387. Nassehi, Armin (2008): Die Zeit der Gesellschaft. Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Zeit, reprint with a new essay titled “Gegenwarten,” Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. —,  (2009): Der soziologische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. —, (2011): Gesellschaft der Gegenwarten. Studien zur Theorie moderner Gesellschaften II, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Nowotny, Helga (1993): Eigenzeit. Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefühls, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Parsons, Talcott (1967): Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. —, (1971): System of Modern Societies, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Polanyi, Michael (2009): The Tacit Dimension, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Rammstedt, Otthein (1975): “Alltagsbewußtsein von Zeit,” in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 27, pp. 47-63. Reckwitz, Andreas (2003): “Towards a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing“, in: European Journal of Social Theory 5.2, pp. 245-265. Renn, Joachim (2006): Übersetzungsverhältnisse. Perspektiven einer pragmatistischen Gesellschaftstheorie, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

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—, (2013): “Praktische Gewissheit und die Rationalität zweiter Ordnung. Zur gesellschaftstheoretischen Analyse des impliziten Wissens,” in: ZTS – Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie 1.2, pp. 56–81. —, (2014): “Die Form des Milieus. Vergemeinschaftung, multiple Differenzierung und die tiefenhermeneutische Makroanalyse” in: Peter Isenböck/Linda Nell/Joachim Renn (eds.), Die Form des Milieus. Zum Verhältnis von gesellschaftlicher Differenzierung und Formen der Vergemeinschaftung, ZTS – Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 1st special issue, pp. 304-338. Rosa, Hartmut (2005): Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Schatzki, Theodore R. (2001): “Introduction. Practice Theory,” in: Schatzki/ Knorr-Cetina/von Savigny, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, pp. 1-14. —, (2002): The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Schatzki, Theodore R./Knorr-Cetina, Karin/von Savigny, Eike (eds.) (2001): The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London/New York: Routledge. Schmidt, Robert (2012): Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Schulze, Gerhard (2000): Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart, Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus. Stichweh, Rudolf (1995): “Systemtheorie und Rational Choice Theorie,” in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 24, pp. 395-406. Turner, Victor (1982): From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ Publications. Virilio, Paul (1997): Rasender Stillstand. Essay, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Waldenfels, Bernhard (2012): Hyperphänomene. Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979): “Aufstieg und zukünftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen Weltsystems. Zur Grundlegung vergleichender Analyse,” in: Dieter Senghaas (ed.), Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 31-67. Weber, Max (1988): Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I, Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Zerubavel, Eviatar (1981): Hidden Rhythms. Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: U of California P.

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I. Within the quiet atmosphere, I sit as the guest. Before my eyes, the host prepares tea with graceful movements, and the only sounds I hear are the shaka-shaka sound of the tea being whisked and the shū-shū sound of the water boiling. In the sharpened atmosphere, other people never get in the way, and the world becomes one of only the host and guest. When the host prepares the cloth for the tea bowl and purifies the tea container, tea scoop, and tea whisk – each and every movement made naturally – my spirit relaxes, and I am given the feeling that the tea is the most delicious ever. (Fukuoka 2002: 10-11)

In this passage, taken from a set of essays written by Japanese high school students about their experiences learning the tea ceremony, Eri Fukuoka conveys the aesthetic draw of the practice for her: a heightened awareness to the simplicity of the surroundings and the refined gestures of preparing the beverage that determine the tastiness of the drink even before it reaches her mouth. Yet she felt “awkward and nervous” the first time she joined such a rarified performance. Watching a friend prepare the drink, “it seemed like a scene from a Japanese movie [nihoneiga]” as “each and every movement of the host [making the tea] showed her spirit and thoughtfulness.” Time, however, has narrowed this distance, and she has come to feel “at home” in the tea room (ibid.). The description, if straightforward, is nonetheless striking. How can simply observing the preparation of tea transform the beverage into something that is, by necessity, delicious? And why would it seem to a contemporary high school student like a scene – constructed and projected, perhaps even a bit idealized – from a Japanese movie? The questions engage two spheres rarely

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taken together: aisthesis and national iconicity.1 Yet an answer embracing both may be explored if one examines the operation of the extra-ordinary within the ordinary. For while tea drinking and socializing is unquestionably mundane, the tea ceremony hones these actions into rarefied form, retooling the body and transforming perceptual awareness. In so doing it recasts the unreflexive patterns of ordinary existence as an objectified expression of “Japanese tradition.” It is through an oscillation between parallels to and contrasts with everyday lifeways in Japan that the tea ceremony condenses and crystallizes the nation as an extra-ordinary version of the ordinary.

II. How does this work? The interpretation offered here draws on several years of work as an “observing participant” (Wacquant 2005) at tea lessons, gatherings, and events across Japan, as well as interviews with over one hundred tea practitioners. Complementing the ethnographic research are excerpts from essays written by members of high school tea ceremony clubs across Japan, which were submitted in 2002 for a competition hosted by the Urasenke School. As successful submissions, they were likely written and selected with an eye toward the kinds of experiences and meanings that the official tea schools endorse. Yet there is little reason to doubt their sincerity, and they differ little from the impressions of tea practitioners expressed in interviews, books, and other venues. If bodily practices are often acquired in a way that precludes much scrutiny (cf. Connerton 1989: 102-3), the essays provide a representation – an objectified abstraction – of the sort of being in the world that is cultivated through teachers’ dictates. Beyond indicating a range of transformations that the novices have undergone since beginning tea lessons, they also engage several of the paradoxes that constitute the tea ceremony as a symbol of Japan and condensed version of Japanese culture, as it is so often described both within and outside the country. Little in Japan is more commonplace than preparing tea, had any time of day as a refreshment or accompaniment to meals. Indeed, the dining room of a house may be called – if with slightly musty tones – the chanoma or “the tea space,” if the term is taken literally. Of the varieties on offer, green tea may predominate, but barley tea, buckwheat tea, and tea accented with toasted rice are frequently found too. Alongside them, English tea – more commonly known as “milk tea” – as well as a range of nouveau blends like “matcha au lait” no longer raise eyebrows. And if canned sodas supply an alternative to the 1 | Zubrzycki (2011) is an exception that looks at perceptual shifts and national symbols, but unfortunately limits her very sharp analysis to one ethnographic example.

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steeped, they are rarely to be seen without an equally wide range of bottled teas in any of the ubiquitous vending machines. But the drink prepared in the tea ceremony stands out from among them. Made from pulverized rather than steeped tea leaves, the liquid matcha appears an opaque and very green suspension. A “thin” variant is most common, prepared by whipping a scoop of the powder with some hot water in a small bowl until a frothy head forms. Still, it is not so easily had. If one splurges for kaiseki haute cuisine, it may appear in a final course, though perhaps a more common experience is a bowl of tea bought at a traditional tourist site, like a temple, or served at a national Culture Day celebration or town festival. The beverage’s exotic qualities have encouraged a boom in matcha-flavored products, with items from ice cream to cakes, crackers, chocolates, donuts, and coffees rolled out to lure new customers. All are typically marketed with Japanese inflections and catchphrases like “taste the tradition.” Yet though such products can be found in most convenience stores, actual bowls of matcha tea remain an uncommon, if familiar, drink for most. Nonetheless, in the tea ceremony – or what in Japanese is known as sadō/ chadō (“the way of tea”) or chanoyu (“hot water for tea”) – the tea itself is only of secondary importance. A full formal tea gathering is a four-hour social affair with the largest stretch of time spent enjoying a kaiseki meal with a dozen or so courses, accompanied by the formal preparation of thick tea and thin, as well as two formal preparations of the charcoal in the hearth, broken by stints in the garden. The most palpable difference from other ritualized feasts, like wedding parties, is the degree to which not norms, but highly scripted rules govern nearly all actions, gestures, and even conversation within the setting, down to the paths participants trace when walking in a room, how the lids on the soup and rice are opened, and the amount of the fingertips that touch the floor when guests exchange greetings among each other. If routine activities of eating, drinking, and socializing motivate the tea ceremony, the ritualized and aestheticized versions that constitute it ensure that the ordinary is keyed into the extraordinary within the tea room. Anchoring these formal procedures are a number of schools, with the head of each – an iemoto, often rendered “grand master” in English – embodying the authority over a separate style. The position is hereditary, passed down in a family, with the most prominent ones now in the fifteenth or sixteenth generation. The Urasenke School dominates the field, accounting for about 70% of practitioners, followed by the Omotesenke School, which embraces about 20%. Upwards of two million disciples and aficionados, nearly 90% women, fill out their ranks in Japan. The differences among the Schools are slight – whether or not a room is entered on the left foot or the right foot, for example – but are enough to keep most students to a single style, especially once patterned into the body. As does the system of certificates. Each grand master essentially

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sells permission certificates to students who want to learn a substantial part of the body of tea preparation procedures over which he has authority. The shortest preparation procedures for a single bowl of tea take about twenty minutes from start to stop, while the most complex can last nearly an hour, with the cost of permission increasing, of course, with obscurity. Learning these procedures (not, as might be assumed, attending the full four-hour gathering) form the bulk of what most practitioners do as practitioners. Indeed “doing tea,” as aficionados often refer to their hobby, largely means attending weekly lessons at which the teacher instructs a small group of students, often around five or so, in the different ritualized procedures for preparing the beverage. Principally, these vary according to the season, type of room, and sorts of utensils used, and by some counts number in the hundreds. The central concern of most tea instruction, as well as practice, is mastery of a correct form that regulates even the most minute movements.2

III. A more detailed look into the bodily discipline that constitutes tea practice and pushes forward its ritualized flow lends a base for contemplating the relationship between the ordinary and extra-ordinary. As mentioned above, preparing a bowl of tea comprises only a small part of a full tea gathering, but it can serve as a condensed version of the elements of comportment demanded in a four-hour affair. In the idealized form often featured in textbooks, though not far from actual practice, a host will serve tea to three guests, all kneeling patiently on tatami mats in a Japanese-style room. For the first few minutes, the host brings into the room the tea bowl, water jar, tea container, and other utensils that will be used. As she enters and leaves the room several times, all attention is concentrated on the quiet gestures of standing, sitting, turning, bowing, and opening and closing doors. After arranging the space, the host commences with purifying the utensils. She exhales and moves the tea bowl to the front of her body, picking it up towards the front, with the thumb of her right hand balanced on the lip, absolutely straight, and her hand curved around the side, fingertips aligned at an angle, shifting grip between her two hands. She moves the tea container closer as well, grasping it from the top, her palm arched over half the lid as she lifts the object in a smooth arc to the front of her lap. Removing a twelve-inch cloth of heavy silk from her kimono belt, she folds the silk square and wipes the lid of the tea caddy with a few stately gestures. 2 | For the past century, officially issued pictorial textbooks, now accompanied by videos, ensure the strict standardization of preparation procedures across the entire country. For more on how this is maintained, see Surak (2013).

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Although the movements are distinct, they flow in rhythm from one to another. To purify the small bamboo tea scoop, for example, she refolds the silk cloth and grips it lightly in a rounded left hand. The moment it is brought to rest on the lap, she extends her right hand to pick up the tea scoop, tilting her torso forward rather than stretching out the arm. To convey a sense of gravity and importance, she lifts the light object as if it were heavy – first raising the handle of the scoop and then the curved cup. The right hand, holding the object near the bottom, remains steady while the left sweeps the silk cloth along the body of the scoop three times – the first time decisively; the second, somewhat more swiftly; and the third, with a more concentrated note and slight pause at the end to lend a sense of closure as the cloth leaves the item. After the left hand, still grasping the cloth, comes to a rest on the lap, the right replaces the tea scoop. Exhaling, the host sets down first the curved cup and then the handle before relaxing the grip slowly and moving her hand back to the body as she inhales. The rhythmical flow and economy of movement impart a sense of relaxation, and the host – with the same precision – examines the tines on the tea whisk, opens the lid of the kettle, and warms the bowl. Finally, the tea is prepared. As the host picks up the tea scoop, she humbly touches her fingers to the floor. With a slight bow of the head, she invites the first of the three guests to try one of the sweets brought out before the procedure began. Lifting the tea container with the left hand and with a circular motion that would keep a kimono sleeve from dipping into the bowl, she brings it around to her left knee and measures two heaping scoops of green matcha into the bowl. Finally, with a dignified yet quiet gesture, she lifts the scoop and taps it on the side of the bowl to remove the remaining clumps of tea – yet careful not to rap with a force that might leave a hairline crack, and equally careful not to make too loud a sound, which might worry knowledgeable guests about such potential damage. The host then adds a sufficient amount of hot water to the bowl, turning the arm outward at the shoulder so that the scoop’s cup remains suspended in the same place in mid-air, hovering slightly above the bowl to avoid a sense of contamination or danger to the pottery that might be conveyed to the guests if it were to sink below the rim. Picking up the bamboo whisk, she mixes the tea into a frothy suspension, her wrist flicking rapidly on the end of a steady arm. She slows and withdraws the whisk with a circular motion, sculpting a small mound of foam on top. Turning the bowl twice so that its front, which may carry a design, faces outwards, she sets it out for the guest. The moment her hand leaves the container, her eyes flick briefly towards the first guest, who slides up to retrieve the tea – anticipation would convey greed and slowness suggest inattention. Returning to his place, he sets the bowl between himself and the second guest and, with his fingertips only partially on the floor in a semi-formal bow, he apologizes for being the first to drink. Then moving the bowl to the front of his knees, he offers the host a much lower

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formal bow and thanks her for preparing the tea. Finally he lifts the container onto the left palm, and while grasping the side with the right hand, raises the tea and bows his head in a final show of gratitude. Turning the bowl twice so that its front faces away, he drinks from the back as an indication of humility. After the first sip, the host inquires about the taste, and the guest responds, without fail, that it is delicious. These memorized greetings, like many in the ceremony, employ elevated, if archaic, terminology that is comprehensible, but rarely used in everyday life. Without setting the bowl down, the guest will finish the two ounces in a few sips – careful not to take too much time as the other guests are waiting. Finally, the object itself is admired. With the bowl on the floor in front of him, the guest places both hands on the ground as he takes in the overall appearance. Leaning forward, he then picks up the container with both hands, sensing its weight and general impression while turning it slightly to look for the seal of the maker impressed on its underside. All the while the bowl is kept near the ground – flipping it over in the air would send a nervous shiver to the host who may have laid out thousands or tens of thousands of Euros for it. After a final glimpse, the guest returns the bowl to the host. Even in the truncated description above, a tea performance – so intricately choreographed – is not to be confused with a casual call at a neighbor’s house for a cup of brew. Of course, this mundane version too has its ritual elements: visits occur in select spaces, tidied up or quickly made so; greetings open and close the session; conversation ranges over delimited topics; additional cups are always offered, even if social graces anticipate refusal. In the tea ceremony, however, such everyday customs appear in heightened, extra-ordinary form, refined into a strict sequence of controlled motions and precise placements. These activities, marked as distinctively Japanese qualities both within and outside the tea room, are a focal point of and refined through tea practice. In so doing, the ordinary becomes extra-ordinary, yet not entirely foreign, for the everyday equivalents continue to anchor the refined forms.

IV. A sense of the transformation and conversion between the ordinary and extraordinary can be gained from the collection of high school essays mentioned at the beginning of this article. Minako Watabe, for example, was so taken aback when she first entered the tea room at her school that a “Wow!” of surprise emerged from her lips. “I never knew that the school had a room that looked like a traditional Japanese inn [ryōkan]” where “the sunlight was radiantly reflected on the relaxing tatami mats.” Though she knew of the tea ceremony she had never experienced it, and was struck by the simplicity and concentration. “Once inside the room, everything that occurred was focused on very basic things –

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how to walk, how to open and close the door, how to fold the cleaning cloths.” A “pure interest” in these basics of everyday life drew her to the practice (Watabe 2002: 17-18). The same was a lure for Maya Morishita, who found that “the etiquette and motions for doing the tea ceremony also apply to everyday life” which includes “being grateful before eating the sweets, not showing guests dirty water, never forgetting to bow before talking to other people, how to stand up, how to enter a room, how to open and close doors, and how to bow.” Indeed, she claims, the tea ceremony itself “evolved from everyday life” and expresses it in its most refined form (Morishita 2002: 22). What does she mean by this? Within the tea room, everyday movements – standing, sitting, walking, drinking – are re-taught and re-patterned into the body to be carried off with this sort of elegant yet unconscious control. The forms learned are typically defined elsewhere, such as in the school system, popular media, and business manuals and etiquette books, as the correct or proper versions of a distinctively Japanese – as opposed to “Western” – action. Bowing, for example, features in many everyday interactions in Japan, as a part of opening or closing an interaction, showing comprehension, or acknowledging another person. Indeed, it is such a common reflex that even people talking on the phone can be seen genuflecting slightly. English textbooks issued within the school system introduce greetings with images of foreigners shaking hands and Japanese bowing. Yet being able to bow naturally, unthinkingly, does not mean that one knows how to bow correctly or formally, and it is typically one of the first things that a tea novice learns. Initiates will commonly curve their back and bend their head to only centimeters above the floor to suggest formality. In response, the teacher will show the students how to maintain a straight torso and bend at the waist as their hands move smoothly from their lap to form a small triangle with the tips of the fingers. Following a strict form similar to those found in Japanese-language etiquette books and business manuals, students are taught to count to three as they bow down, and then to hold the position for the same duration before returning upright, again to a count of three. The same applies to the rules of eating – almost equally detailed in the tea room, which closely track the “proper” forms dictated in ubiquitous manners manuals and women’s magazines (often set off in contrast from “Western” variants with cutlery).3 Novices are trained in how to correctly pick up chopsticks with three distinct 3 | Of course, Japan is not the only country where chopsticks are the norm, but even when parallels within Asia are made, Japanese forms are set off as distinctive to it. A manners manual, written by the Ogasawara family, which has claimed expertise over etiquette since the twelfth century, offers an example. It acknowledges that “Asian countries such as China, Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia also have a custom of using chopsticks, as do the Japanese, but they also use spoons” and thus “the Japanese are unique in the world for eating only with chopsticks” (Ogasawara 1999: 130).

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motions, where to place the lids of the soup and rice bowls, the polite order in which to eat morsels, and so forth. Throughout, ordinary gestures are refined into extra-ordinary forms, held as proper, even ideal, expressions of what is definitively Japanese.4 The formalism of the rigid rules, proper modes, and minutely prescribed actions might yield a tea experience that feels unnatural, aloof, or stilted. This risk, however, is softened by a stylistics of action that makes the tea world an inhabitable one in which the artful actions of preparing the beverage appear natural and smooth. Critical to the stylistics, as elaborated below, are a careful attention to handling objects and a vigilant consideration of others, which are harmonized through a sense of rhythmic interval. Most visually striking is the attention directed to how objects are treated – a focal point of tea training, which teachers even explicitly encourage. As one explained to her students, for example, “You must create a mood that makes the guest focus on them by projecting respect [for the utensils]. You need to think about how important that tea caddy is and let your body move in that way. As your hand moves close to it, you should immediately change due to its importance” (qtd. in Surak 2013: 205). Hikari Kogamo, in her essay, described a similar experience. At first she felt “out of place,” but gradually learned how to “move naturally” by learning how to do things “without extraneous movement” such that each motion expressed a “quietness and beauty.” Her teacher told her that “if you can feel grateful and be thankful to others” this will be expressed in a “conscientiousness when using and handling things” both in the tea room and “in everyday life.” The lesson, she describes, penetrated her deeply: “Though I’m the type of person never to stop for breath in my everyday life, this meant that I should pay attention to things.” Yet the significance of the physical transformation, for her, does not stop there. A keen conscientiousness of objects is increasingly important, she claims, not only for individuals, but for the nation. Indeed, she projects the extraordinary-made-ordinary as a means to reclaim a fading national essence. “As the materialistic Japan in which we live is losing its values, we no longer put enough importance on things themselves.” Rather, we need to be “thankful” for them. Tea training, she suggests, can instill those sensibilities (Kogamo 2002: 27-8). The careful handling of objects conveys not merely respect for them, but visually communicates the host’s attentive, respectful sensibility. Most visibly, such consideration is incorporated into the formal procedures that define the practice. Before the first guest drinks the tea, for example, she will, as a rule, 4  |  This is not to say that all Japanese possess such skills equally. The institutionalization of certain forms as a “proper” or “correct” (Japanese) way creates standards against which national members can be measured or for which national members may be held accountable.

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apologize to the others for being the first to imbibe in the beverage. The host will turn the bowl so that the front faces the guest when serving it, and the guest will humbly turn the bowl around again to drink from the back. And so forth. Yet consideration appears as well in the stylistics of how things are done. Not to appear greedy, guests wait until the tea bowl is set out and the host has removed her hand before moving to retrieve the drink. And when the bowl is returned, the host, careful not to give the impression of rushing the guest, waits until she has returned to her seat before collecting the bowl. The host will tap the remaining powder off the tea scoop in a manner careful not to make the guests nervous about cracking the bowl, and they in turn will handle the bowl carefully, keeping it near the floor, when examining it. Coordinating the vigilant consideration of others and careful handling of objects has a rhythmic tempo. It both marks off a temporality separate from the rush of the everyday life, where making a cup of tea rarely demands more than a few minutes, and marks a rhythm that propels the tea preparation forward. Guests, for example, learn how to politely remove the lids on the rice and soup bowl, in a simultaneous motion that opens the meal. Critical is an instant’s hesitation when all glance at the condensation of steam on the lids, said to recall morning dew, before setting them aside, with two careful hands – the moment of sensory sensitivity synchronizes the gesture across the group. Expressing feeling of mutual consideration between the host and guest is the attentive management when passing off the tea bowl, as described above. Only once the host’s hand leaves the bowl does the guest move to retrieve it – no motion made too soon or too late in order to avoid the impression of greed or carelessness. The temporal rhythm that conveys such valences is marked, most prominently, by an attention to “interval”, or ma, in Japanese. The third definition offered by the Daijirin dictionary specifies the concept’s aesthetic usage, describing ma as “the temporal interval between beat and beat (or movement and movement) in Japanese traditional arts (music, dance, theater, etc.).” In these arenas, the intervals are rarely symmetrical – the woodblocks opening a kabuki play, for example, will gradually increase speed until a final, hesitant strike welcomes the players. Tea training cultivates a sensibility to ma as a slightly irregular beat as well, as described above in the rhythmic flow of wiping the tea scoop, ending with a moment’s pause and release. Eri Fukuoka, in her essay, recounted a growing sensitivity towards “intervals” as among the things that put her at ease in the tea room. When she first took up the practice two years before, she “didn’t have a clue about how to behave” and felt “rather uncomfortable,” though with time, the difficult procedures came to her “naturally.” Crucial was developing a sense of the “interval” (ma) between each movement, and as an example she offers the way that the water ladle is removed from the kettle. “When it’s brought in front of the body, one waits for just a moment before going into the next movement.” This delicate pause – interval –

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in her mind keeps movements from being rushed and enables them to be done with a balanced spirit, and in so doing, it expresses what she deems a “spirit of harmony” or “Japanese spirit” [wa no kokoro] (Fukuoka 2002: 11-12). Teachers may combine both verbal and visual instruction to pattern such sensibility into a student’s body. As one teacher at a lesson taught a student in how to wipe the tea scoop, she cautioned, “You need to watch it when you take your hand away, otherwise the guests will feel uneasy. Not stopping, but doing it slowly is the most important.” The teacher closed her eyes while she pointedly recited the steps to the student, whose gestures accompanied the words. In the course of the flow, eyelids suddenly flying open, she broke in, “Wait, you put that down too fast. Do it again” (qtd. in Surak 2013: 205). The refined sense of rhythm and coordinated action is crucial to maintaining the flow and tempo of a gathering. The flow catches the participants, fluidly sweeping them from one point and depositing them at another, smoothing the social experience in an unnatural ritual. The temporal attentiveness to ma – and rhythm more generally – is directed towards making not good tea, but a good experience for the guests through a delicate sensitivity to nonverbal communication. As tea training retools the body, it also transforms the senses, enabling and cultivating new perceptual awareness within the initiates. Mayuko Yamane, in her essay, explains how this works. When she first began studying the tea ceremony, she thought of the seasons only in rough terms. “I only noticed if it was hot or cold or there were a lot of flowers.” One day at a lesson, however, she was served an exquisite sweet whose shape suggested the season and her teacher asked, “What do you think this sweet is named?” At the time, she was at a loss for words, but the learning experience encouraged her to become more sensitive to subtleties in nature. “Now when I walk across the fallen leaves, I notice the kushū sound, which lingers on with me afterward […]. When a cold wind begins to blow, I recall the pleasant autumn. The cherry blossoms in spring, scent of new leaves, the sunlight of summer, the trees of autumn in the cooling weather, and the snowflakes anxiously fluttering to the ground – each of these is beautiful. Japan’s four seasons are really incredible.” But for her, they exist not only in the wider world, but also in the tea room, where she first learned how to appreciate them. “Connected to that sensibility is the flower that the teacher always displays in the tea room, as well as the name chosen for the tea scoop, which always reflects the season. In the tea room, one can enjoy Japan’s beautiful four seasons” (Yamane 2002: 2). Eri Fukuoka, in the quotation opening this article, narrates her own experience of it. Before her eyes, “the host prepares tea with graceful movements, and the only sounds I hear are the shaka-shaka sound of the tea being whisked and the shū-shū sound of the water boiling. In the sharpened atmosphere, other people never get in the way, and the world becomes one of only the host and guest.” The experience itself is one of sensory transposition – what might be

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considered a form of synesthesia – as watching the tea preparation itself is enough to inform her of the exquisite taste of the tea, even before it reaches her tongue. “When the host prepares the cloth for the tea bowl and purifies the tea container, tea scoop, and tea whisk with each – each and every movement made naturally – my spirit relaxes, and I am given the feeling that the tea is the most delicious ever” (Fukuoka 2002: 11-12). Not only do the eyes taste in the tea room, but they are connected to a tactile sense as well. The host may select a few utensils that suggest coolness in summer or warmth in winter – glass bowls in August or thick earthen wares in February, for example. The sound of pouring water or the hiss of the kettle may be accentuated as well on such occasions for the same reason. Incense burned in the hearth – like that often burned at temples – releases a scent meant to recall purity. And though the matcha tea powder may be of varying quality, the range of tastes is narrow, and frequently the gusto with which the required compliment that “it is delicious” is offered is an indication of whether the thoughtfulness of the host was “tasted.” Indeed, much perceptual sharpening is aimed at expressing and experiencing attitudinal qualities of thoughtfulness through indirect means.

V. Holding these threads together is a notion of the Japaneseness of it all – a theme that surfaces repeatedly in the essays, as well as in interviews, discussions, advertisements, books, movies, exhibitions, and demonstrations, among other sites. The tea room itself is like a “scene from a Japanese movie [nihoneiga]” (Fukuoka 2002: 11) or reminiscent of “a traditional inn [ryōkan]” (Watabe 2002: 17) – a particularly Japanese variant that stands in contrast to Western “hoteru” (hotels). As such, it is removed from everyday life in a way that encodes, and allows the experience of, a specific Japaneseness of it. The tea room can become a place where one learns how to appreciate “Japan’s beautiful four seasons” (Yamane 2002: 2), for example, and the resultant sensitivity may make an artificial flower “lacking a sense of seasonality” and “ignoring Japan’s four seasons” look “out of place” in a “Japanese-style entrance way [genkan no tokonoma]” (Wada 2002: 16). Students may learn a delicate timing that seems to express a “spirit of harmony” or “Japanese spirit” [wa no kokoro] (Fukuoka 2002: 12). This may also require students to cultivate a sensitivity to objects and others as well – an attitude that may appear all the more necessary as “the materialistic Japan in which we live is losing its values” (Kogamo 2002: 28). Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957/2009) remarked of seeing houses in their “native” Basque region of France, that – in their local setting – they do not strike the eye as particularly ethnic. But transposed to Paris, they “call out” to him as Basque, because there they stand in simplified, clarified form, omitting

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many of the practical details (the barns, the external stairs) that made them functional dwellings. In modern urban Japan, people in kimono kneeling on tatami mat floors and whisking tea invite a similar gaze. The tea ceremony can afford a “Japanese” experience because it is different – but not completely removed – from more mundane life. The practice takes elementary activities such as walking, bowing, and drinking, and refines them into the “proper” or “correct way of doing things, held as the ideal from which everyday variants putatively derive. The clarified forms, standing apart from the mundane, demand an awareness and attentiveness that sustains what many practitioners call a “Japanese experience.” Behind the label often stand “Western” variants that serve as a foil for defining national qualities – the “Western rooms” versus “Japanese rooms” or the handshake versus the bow that make ubiquitous appearance in text books, for example. But once the distinction between what is Japanese and what is foreign has become broadly disseminated, it can recede into the background and continuous reference becomes unnecessary. At this point a differentiation with everyday forms can call forth these extra-ordinary national significations – condensed expressions of the nation. Tea practice, as it retools the body and transforms perception, facilitates a heightened awareness and a surfacing of national valences encoded elsewhere through an oscillation between the everyday and rarefied, ordinary and extra-ordinary. A result is a place for a concentrated experience of Japaneseness within Japan, self-evident yet intense.

W orks C ited Barthes, Roland (2009 [1957]): Mythologies, London: Vintage. Connerton, Paul (1989): How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fukuoka, Eri (2002): “Chadō ni Kaimamiru Daiuchū,” in: Gakkō Chadō Taiken Ronbunshū, Kyoto: Chadō Urasenke Tankōkai Sōhonbu, pp. 10-12. Kogamo, Hikari (2002): “Chadō o Tōshite Kanjita Koto,” in: Gakkō Chadō Taiken Ronbunshū, Kyoto: Chadō Urasenke Tankōkai Sōhonbu, pp. 27-29. Morishita, Maya (2002): “Chadō to Watashi,” in: Gakkō Chadō Taiken Ronbunshū, Kyoto: Chadō Urasenke Tankōkai Sōhonbu, pp. 22-23. Ogasawara, Keishōsai (1999): Utsukushii Furumai, Kyoto: Tankōsha. Surak, Kristin (2013): Making Tea, Making Japan. Cultural Nationalism in Practice, Stanford: Stanford UP. Wacquant, Loïc J. D. (2005): “Carnal Connections. On Embodiment, Membership, and Apprenticeship,” in: Qualitative Sociology 28, pp. 441-71. Wada, Sakiko (2002): “Chadō to Deatte,” in: Gakkō Chadō Taiken Ronbunshū, Kyoto: Chadō Urasenke Tankōkai Sōhonbu, pp. 15-17.

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Watabe, Minako (2002): “Kokoro,” in: Gakkō Chadō Taiken Ronbunshū, Kyoto: Chadō Urasenke Tankōkai Sōhonbu, pp. 17-20. Yamane, Mayuko (2002): “Chadō to Watashi,” in: Gakkō Chadō Taiken Ronbunshū, Kyoto: Chadō Urasenke Tankōkai Sōhonbu, pp. 2-3. Zubrzycki, Genevieve (2011): “History and the National Sensorium. Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” Qualitative Sociology 34, pp. 21-57.

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Afterword Bodily Presence and Absence Bernhard Waldenfels

The central motif of this volume is presence. Presence is a mode of experience. It implies that we do not merely aim at, long for, look forward to, or count on something, but for that something to really exist. In this sense, presence is related to the temporal form of the present tense and to the spatial form of proximity, and thus to that which exists in the here and now. Even the metaphysical Always and Everywhere would vanish without its relation to the here and now, which is revealed in speech even before it is specifically expressed. We refer to a presence as bodily if the referent itself is present and if the person who refers to it is situated in the here and now. The here and now is self-referential. It belongs to the ‘deictic field’ as described by Karl Bühler in his Theory of Language. Yet a gap opens up within that which is present. By this we refer to ordinary/ extraordinary presence. Ordinary is whatever meets our expectations and appears at the usual time in the usual place. The primarily tacitly effective order, however, becomes conspicuous only when things do not proceed as expected; it makes its presence felt whenever something goes astray. The extraordinary can appear as a momentary aberration, like a blackout or slip of the tongue, or else as a momentous breach, like the assassination of the pretender in Sarajevo, which triggered the First World War, or the ‘discovery’ of America, which upended the world atlas. In any case, it is not merely supplementary. The order itself ultimately is extraordinary, as it is never entirely guaranteed, and everything familiar is interspersed with the alien, everything customary with the uncanny. “There is order,” il y a de l‘ordre, as Foucault phrases it (1966: 12); this means that every order could also be different. Traditional world- and lifeviews tend to dissolve this basic fact into an omnipresent, universal order, and even Western modernity, in which contingency has taken on a radical form, has attempted to subject this basic fact to universal conditions. Yet the order has become suspect. The debates in which the present volume participates reflect this basic problem in many facets. “Wild being” (Merleau-Ponty) or “wild thinking” (Lévi-

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Strauss), which constitutes a latent source of unrest, breaks through again and again when we encounter astonishing, terrifying, or uncanny phenomena that leave us shaken and upset. Our experience, which is never in control of itself, compels us to balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Both areas are separated from each other through a threshold. We cross such a threshold every day and every night when we fall asleep and when we wake up. Our senses run into such thresholds when tolerable levels are exceeded. The crossing of such thresholds has from time immemorial been accompanied by rituals – so-called rites de passage – which in enlightened times differ but never simply disappear. We cross thresholds on a grand scale when times change. Heralded by alarm signals, such changes often occur imperceptibly, and it is only after the fact that we speak of epochal thresholds. Zarathustra’s speech “The Stillest Hour” tells of “[t]houghts that come with doves’ footsteps” and in this way “guide the world” (Nietzsche 1883-1885/2008: n.pag.). The frenzy with which paradigms are replaced like car tires today should leave us suspicious. The area of tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary is, as this volume’s title also suggests, shaped by social configurations and cultural repertoires. These coalesce into an intermediate realm in which current experience organizes, stabilizes, and reorganizes itself. This begins at an early stage of infancy when the child must cope with the terrifying absence of its mother. One should remember the fort/da game played by Freud’s grandson by alternately throwing away and retrieving a wooden reel; in this way he sought to calm himself with a tiny ‘transitional object.’ Absence is not merely a characteristic of infantile helplessness; it accompanies every presence like a shadow. The question is only how the sociocultural intermediates with all their substitutes are anchored in our experience. * Phenomenology and hermeneutics offer a simple formula for bridging the gap between presence and meaning: something is regarded, labelled, intended, understood, treated, processed, and assessed (and so forth) as something. This as, which can be found in different versions in Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Cassirer, functions as a pivot that converts the extraordinary into the ordinary. By repeating the unrepeatable and unique, meaninglessness and disorder are provided with meaning and rules. This is not merely a formation through which forms are forced upon raw matter, but a transformation which converts the experientially given as well as ourselves as experiencers. Man as “the animal not yet properly adapted to his environment” (Nietzsche 1886/2009: n.pag.) becomes formally adapted. The As and How of experience effected in this way stabilizes and embodies itself in a constantly growing intermediate sphere of signs, symbols, insignia, rituals, practices, media, tools,

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and apparatuses, for which our body serves as mooring. It has proven successful as the primal medium, instrument, image, or script, and functions through the duality of lived body and material body as a junction between culture and nature, self and other. For a bodily grounded phenomenology and anthropology as developed by Merleau-Ponty or Plessner, for example, the materiality of meaning structures and rule structures that has recently been insisted on so vociferously is nothing new. The equilibrium between the ordinary and the extraordinary, however, is delicate, and can shift in one or the other direction at any time. I am now getting closer to recent debates that have also found their way into the present volume. Let’s begin with the ordinary. If one overemphasizes the ordinary and the normal, one is led in the direction of an ordinary devoid of the extraordinary. I say ‘in the direction,’ because the complete suppression of the extraordinary and the anomalous would silence the ordinary. The growing power of the intermediaries meanwhile misleads one into crossing over from the medium quo, which is traversed by experience, to a medium quid, which substitutes for experience. In the end everything is language, signs, images, machines, or networks. Language speaks, images become active, the screen becomes a public site, culture becomes digital culture, and the brain, which as an acting brain contributes to experience, emerges as an arbitrary agent that thinks and evaluates like a technological homunculus. Even soccer increasingly is played ‘mentally’ with the brain rather than ‘pedally’ with the feet, and plays in recent parlance have become ‘automatisms.’ Remembering and forgetting can hardly become more disembodied than in Facebook’s slogan ‘Delete It and It’s Gone!’ Such attenuation of vibrant, embodied experience is not only disquieting but also provokes resistance. In reference to Kant’s essay title “On a Dignified Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” one could speak of an enthusiastic tone that has been recently adopted, albeit not so much within philosophy but at its margins. Recently, the “production of presence” and a culture of intense presence have been promoted within the framework of a presentist hermeneutics (not to mention phenomenology). The author in question, who previously knew better, has increasingly advanced toward an extraordinary devoid of the ordinary. Pure presence is pitted against meaning and representation, materiality against sense and reference, the intensity of feelings against the discursive, presentation against form. The danger of the sensual disappearing into the sensational cannot be denied; it goes hand in hand with the daily overproduction of images. Florian Tatschner in his contribution vehemently opposes this eradication of affect by providing, with Heidegger, presence with a worldly background and an earthly foundation, by linking sense and sensuality, and by attuning the local to the global. Other contributions to this volume also have reservations against a

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production, construction, or fabrication of presence that delivers only artificial surrogates and, from a rhetorical view, ends in eloquent speechlessness. I will take the liberty of coming back to the talk I gave at the conference on (Extra)Ordinary Presence in Erlangen and which since then has been published elsewhere. There I oppose a position that pits against each other the phenomenology of experience and the semiotics of signs. They have a lot in common both factually and historically. An alternative that also becomes apparent in various contributions to this volume would amount to an extraordinary amid the ordinary. This would mean that moments of presentation or presentification and depresentation or depresentification are inherent in every kind of representation, which would also meet the prerequisites for the kind of responsive phenomenology that I have in mind. It is based on three cornerstones. First pathos (1) as an event that cannot be observed somewhere in the world but instead is bodily experienced by me, you, or us. This pathos becomes effective only through the response (2), through which that by which I am affected is transformed into something in which I engage in a specific way. In this way vague anxiety is transformed into a specific fear, and astonishment into a purposeful question. Generally, responding means that my words, actions, or desires have their origin elsewhere and can never be entirely my own. I do indeed produce what I offer as a response, but not what I have to, for better or worse, respond to. Between pathos and response moreover lies a gap that turns out to be the original form of temporal deferral and which I call diastasis (3). Measured against our expectations and precautions, the unexpected always comes too soon, which becomes especially noticeable in the case of a petrifying shock, whereas our response always comes too late and with an inevitable delay, which becomes especially apparent in the aftermath of traumatic events. It is only with normal events which proceed according to a given order and which can be counted upon to have determinate results that the gap begins to close. The bodily absence with which we began arises from the fact that the things affecting us or appealing to us pre-empt our actions and elude our grasp in advance. Something is extra-ordinary only if it deviates from the familiar; it is im-mediate only if it breaches established mediations. The hyphens indicate the indirect nature of these definitions; they suggest a broken connection, a division within the connection and a connection within the division. Disregarding these breaks leads to fantastic visions or obsessive syntheses. The mediate within the immediate, the absent within the present finds its strongest expression in the other self. Many French authors thus emphasize the invisibility of the other’s gaze, and for Levinas thus the “absence of the other is precisely its presence as other” (1987: 94). Similar ideas can be found in Roland Barthes, who is especially close to my pathic-responsive approach. In his phenomenology of photography, he too assumes a duality of the ordinary

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and the extraordinary. The studium as constant effort to enjoy the pictorial experience and relate it to a personal and cultural background is interrupted by the punctum, which pricks and strikes us like an arrow. The author here refers to a photo of his deceased mother, which like every absence touches upon death. * In conclusion I will point to several contributions in which the presence/ absence requiring our attention and elaboration takes shape in an exemplary way. Carolin Lano addresses a public event which stands out from ordinary crimes of violence through the nationwide attention it has received, namely the assassination of President Kennedy. It occurred at a specific place and time, yet the past presence has refused to end, it has persisted as part of a chain of technical, photographic and cinematic revisions which have caused the event to become ambiguous and polysemous. Neither is there a “transmedia” or “transsemiotic” reality which, as it were, is in plain view for all to see, nor is this a mere case of an interpretive controversy that could be solved by rational discussion. It is presence itself that won’t come to an end; it is the thing itself that isn’t merely itself. The tension between presence and meaning continues endlessly, because the event in need of interpretation, like any other traumatic event, receives its meaning only after the fact through the traces that it has left behind. The opposition between visual and verbal representation, between the graphic and the discursive becomes attenuated. That the eye sees more than can be said and known does not mean that it can do without words and signs. Drawing on Peirce, the author emphasizes the indexicality of signs, which as secondness constitutes an indispensable moment of semiosis. The event, however, is solely considered from the alleged perpetrator’s perspective. Were one to include the victim’s perspective, then the qualitative-emotional moment of the icon, which in Peirce is involved as firstness, would also become important. All those who by remembering have commiserated the violent death were to be considered as co-victims. To what extent the perpetrator should be regarded as a perpetrator is another question Musil in his novel The Man Without Qualities confronts us with in the guise of sexual murderer Moosbrugger. If the emotional component were taken into account, then the pathic would gain in importance. If our assumption that the pathos becomes effective only through the response is true, then this too would rule out a pure presence or actually actual actuality. ‘Actuality’ and ‘action’ are not only linguistically connected; this should also be kept in mind when searching for a “New Realism.” In Monika Sauter’s contribution presence acquires an ethical and religious dimension. The television series Preachers’ Daughters is concerned with reconciling the extraordinary presence of the divine with everyday life and especially with protecting the young evangelically raised girls it features from

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the temptations of the flesh. Here, the collective fetish of purity only heightens the fixation on the sexual. Even the bible is intentionally misread. When the series quotes from the bible for the first time it replaces Thess. 4, 7 “call unto holiness,” which by no means is restricted to abstention, with a “call to a life of purity.” More important than the bigotry of puritan family life though is the media production of a ‘reality’ that represents love and faith as ‘real.’ The author in this context refers to the “paradox of the constructedness of ‘reality’ TV.” One might be inclined to modify the old Augustinian phrase Si comprehendis non est Deus – “If you understand it, then it is not God” into “If you produce God’s presence it is not God’s presence.” Here one could also replace the divine other with the human other, whose bodily absence was mentioned earlier. William Jennings’ contribution is concerned with the problem of anthropotheologically grounded racism. The “presence of whiteness” signifies the hegemonic power of whites to impose on blacks their way of seeing and being seen, which literally gets under their skin and triggers a desire for a second skin. Beautification plays a special role in this constitution of the other. Beauty that according to the Platonic tradition shines out as splendor veri, as splendor of the true, turns into a social trap. The presence generated by the whites’ gaze becomes a reality, albeit a socioculturally produced and constructed one. “Whiteness is a tacit power because it is productive of life, albeit false life.” How can white supremacy’s silence be broken? This requires the depresentification mentioned earlier, which mitigates imposed presences. The author uses religious motifs such as conversion and redemption along with a redemptive aesthetics that also includes the Blues, which has its origins in a cultura militans. Extraordinary presence begins for us whites with listening to and reading these words as words from elsewhere. Finally, with Kristin Surak, we enter the realm of far-eastern culture. The Japanese tea culture presented to us here in such minute detail is a quiet, unobtrusive culture. Basic bodily movements such as sitting, standing, and genuflecting are refined; bodily gestures such as glances and touches are practiced; mute things like kettles and tea cups, quotidian sounds like the pouring of tea all add to a language of the senses. Everything is embedded in rituals and ceremonies; everything takes place in an in-between, in the realm of the enigmatic and ambiguous ma. An active and garrulous visitor from the West might think that this is an artificially produced, almost dollishly appearing presence. But is the allure of this presence not precisely its unobtrusiveness? The author notes that the ordinary and the extraordinary here merge in a very special way: The ordinary itself is transformed into the extraordinary. Goethe also understood this when he wrote in the West-Eastern Divan that “Always impossible doth seem the rose, [a]nd inconceivable the nightingale” (1819/2007: n.pag.). Does this mean that the extraordinary is familiar rather than strange, as the author surmises? To me it seems that the strangeness lingers on, even if

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the present moment, to again quote Goethe, is a “powerful goddess” (mächt’ge Göttin, cf. 1790/2003: n.pag.). Does the ordinary not have to first become unfamiliar in order to radiate its extraordinary splendor? And only its splendor? Japan enthusiasts should not ignore the smoldering violence below the surface of ceremonies and rituals, which has been subdued but not eliminated. This is also true of Japan, as its history proves. To strangeness also belongs a politics of the stranger. Translated by Sebastian Schneider

W orks C ited Foucault, Michel (1966): Les mots et les choses, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1790/2003): Torquato Tasso, Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10425/pg10425-images.html (last accessed Jan. 5 2017). —, (1819/2007): West-Eastern Divan. In Twelve Books, transl. Edward Dowden, Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/stream/westeasterndivan00goetuoft/ westeasterndivan00goetuoft_djvu.txt (last accessed Jan. 5 2017). Levinas, Emmanuel (1987): Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1883-1885/2008): Thus Spake Zarathustra. A Book for All and None, transl. Thomas Common, Project Gutenberg: http://www. gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm (last accessed Jan. 5 2017). —, (1886/2009): Beyond Good and Evil, transl. Helen Zimmern, Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm (last accessed Jan. 5 2017).

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List of Contributors

Alexander Engel is a doctoral student in comparative literary studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. His dissertation project is titled “Images of Russia: Iconographies of Presence.” His research interests are contemporary Russian and German literature as well as Russian iconography. Markus Gottwald  holds a doctorate in sociology. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg and a lecturer in sociology at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. His research interests are theories of society (multiple differentiation), the sociology of knowledge, organization studies, and qualitative research. Stephen Hamilton teaches systematic theology at Ruhr University in Bochum. He is the author of “Born Again”: A Portrait and Analysis of the  Doctrine of Regeneration within Evangelical Protestantism (2017).  His  current research interests include Ludwig Wittgenstein and theology, religion in North America, and hermeneutics. Willie James Jennings is associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale University. He was honored with the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and the American Academy of Religion Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion for his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010). He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Unfolding the World: Recasting a Christian Doctrine of Creation. Kay Kirchmann is professor of media studies at the Friedrich-AlexanderUniversity Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick. Das Schweigen der Bilder (1993) and Verdichtung, Weltverlust und Zeitdruck. Grundzüge einer Theorie der Interdependenzen von Medien, Zeit und Geschwindigkeit im neuzeitlichen Zivilisationsprozeß (1998).  Current research interests are media theory, aesthetics of film and television, media and temporality.

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Susann Köhler is assistant professor of American studies at the Georg-AugustUniversity of Göttingen. Her dissertation project is titled “US-American Ruins: Aesthetics, Memory, and Urban Decay in (Post-)Industrial Photography.” Her research interests are urban studies, cultural memory studies, and the history and theory of photography. Carolin Lano teaches theater and media studies at the Friedrich-AlexanderUniversity Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her dissertation is titled „Die Polyvalenz von Medienereignissen und die Medialität von Verschwörungsdiskursen.“ Her research interests are media rhetoric and comparative media studies. Heike Paul is professor of American studies at the Friedrich-AlexanderUniversity Erlangen-Nuremberg. She is the author of The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (2014). Her current research interests are affect studies and public feeling, empire studies, and contemporary North American literature. Monika Sauter completed her Ph.D. in American studies at the FriedrichAlexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her dissertation on discourses of presence in contemporary US American evangelical popular culture is forthcoming with transcript. Her fields of research are evangelicalism, popular culture, and affect studies. Kristin Surak is associate professor of political science at the University of London. For her book Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice she received the Outstanding Book Award of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Asia. Her research interests are international migration, nationalism, and political sociology. Florian Tatschner is doctoral student in American Studies at the FriedrichAlexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His dissertation project is titled “The Other Presences: Reading Literature Other-wise after the Transnational Turn in American Studies.” His current research interests are transnational American studies, border thinking, and systematic theology. Bernhard Waldenfels is professor emeritus for philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum and one of the most renowned contemporary German philosophers. He is the co-founder of the German Society for Phenomenological Research and has published widely influential works in the field of phenomenology and alterity/otherness, among them Der Stachel des Fremden (1990) and Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden (2006). His research interests are phenomenology, the Other and French philosophy.

Social Sciences Maik Fielitz, Laura Lotte Laloire (eds.)

Trouble on the Far Right Contemporary Right-Wing Strategies and Practices in Europe 2016, 208 p., pb. 19,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3720-5 E-Book PDF: 17,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3720-9 EPUB: 17,99E (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-3720-5

Andréa Belliger, David J. Krieger

Organizing Networks An Actor-Network Theory of Organizations 2016, 272 p., pb. 34,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3616-1 E-Book PDF: 34,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3616-5

Verena Rothe, Gabriele Kreutzner, Reimer Gronemeyer

Staying in Life Paving the Way to Dementia-Friendly Communities February 2017, 290 p., pb. 39,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3890-5 E-Book PDF: 39,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3890-9

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Social Sciences Sabine Selchow

Negotiations of the »New World« The Omnipresence of »Global« as a Political Phenomenon 2016, 234 p., pb. 29,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-2896-8 E-Book: available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-2896-2

Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, Ulrike Lindner, Gesine Müller, Oliver Tappe, Michael Zeuske (eds.)

Bonded Labour Global and Comparative Perspectives (18th—21st Century) 2016, 232 p., pb. 29,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3733-5 E-Book PDF: 26,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3733-9

Julia Sattler (ed.)

Urban Transformations in the U.S.A. Spaces, Communities, Representations 2016, 426 p., pb. 39,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3111-1 E-Book PDF: 39,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3111-5

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!