BER_F_05 The Image in the Digital Public Sphere: Loss of Experience and Relationship in Speechless Association

Objective / Research Questions

This research project, which argues explicitly from a Jewish perspective, is based on the observation that the image displaces the word as a medium for conveying emotions, knowledge, and experience. In everyday communication, the image increasingly functions as the key medium; it is self-evidently used as a faster and more easily consumable medium. This shift shows individual as well as social consequences, according to the hypothesis of the project.

With the displacement of the differentiated word by the (digital) stereotypical image, a person becomes a stranger to themselves: the image as a medium of world appropriation promotes a lack of relationships that does not support the cohesion of a differentiated, heterogeneous society but that rather popularizes homogeneous communities. This hypothesis is based on findings from Jewish history and anti-Semitism research in particular: the form-giving genre “image” tends to schematize and under-reproduce social complexity and social experience. According to the hypothesis, the image as a mass medium of communication and as the dominant means of depicting reality significantly promotes populism and anti-Semitism as a cognitive habitus. It should be investigated how and whether the stereotypical, pictorial appropriation of the world diminishes the essential experience of individual effectiveness and instead mobilizes resentment, ideologies, and hatred.

The question of social cohesion implies the question of what aesthetic means are used to create it and how it is actually shaped by a specific mediality. The research project is based on the assumption that aesthetic experience and social behaviour correlate.

Thematic reference to social cohesion

The simultaneity of pictorial performativity and digitalization of many areas of life and the contemporary call for unambiguity, community, authenticity, and identity stand – so it can be assumed – in a context that social philosophy has also brought to the term alienation (Jaeggi 2016). The question of the medium is inherent in RISC’s research focus and is of utmost relevance: it asks whether and how social cohesion can be established – or whether it is rather endangered by the dominant medium of the image. Furthermore, the question must be asked of how this process relates to phenomena such as (dis)solidarity, community, inclusion, and exclusion. The choice of genre, whether image and/or language, according to the hypothesis, has a decisive influence on what relationship we (can) enter into with ourselves and with others. This question arises both subjectively and objectively. The “visualization” of areas of life is evident; reference should be made here to the image memory of the internet, to commercial image worlds, and to the assumed factuality of imaging procedures in medicine and in the human sciences. The finding of a dominant image presence can hardly be dismissed. This illustration can certainly be understood as a blatant “iconic access” (Soldt 2009) to the subject. The social consequences of this iconic and stereotypical access to us – us as individuals and us as a society – need to be investigated (Burda/Maar 2004). The developments and sociopolitical reflections outlined above represent both a challenge and an opportunity for social cohesion. The cultural-technological change demands an emancipative and enlightened image-perception, especially in order to understand populism and anti-Semitism and to be able to take preventive and effective action against them. Stereotypy, hypostasis, and indifference are always inherent in both forms of cognitive habitus; the powerful medium of the image is to be tested philosophically, theologically, sociophilosophically, and psychologically.

The project makes a primarily conceptual and theoretical contribution. It investigates the significance of visual media as factors for the creation, strengthening, or erosion of cohesion. The project focuses on the discursive-communicative framework of political culture and the affective dimension of cohesion or the exclusive notions of cohesion (anti-Semitism and populism).