Events

Program

“The Foundation of the Social in Spatial ‘Leib- Centered’ Experiences. The ‘Inconspicuousness’ of Space as an Addition to the Communicative Paradigm”
Thomas Dörfler (Jena) und Eberhard Rothfuß (Bayreuth)

Starting with two empirical insights from research projects on sustainability and self-empowering social-space relations of civil society actors and marginalised people, we would like to give reasons why reconstructing the meaning structures and typification of “resonant forms of life” (H. Rosa) are a core methodological and theoretical stance to analyse contemporary forms of social (dis-) integration. With “resonant forms of life” we mean relations towards nature, others, buildings, situations etc. which correspond to our corporeal senses, our “lived body” (Merleau-Ponty). The first empirical case will focus on gardening practices in the “Ecostation Waldsassen” (Bavaria) to create “self-efficacy” of unemployed people. The second case will address the atmospheric colonial-built environment in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) to reconstruct the “bodily recognition” of afro-diasporic inhabitants in their “lived (traumatic) space”.

We do this because we think that a certain theoretical scope of the spatial as a foundation for social relations is missing in contemporary theory. While “communicative constructivism” encounters space in the shape of socio-spatial “(re-)figurations”, we think it’s worth to add a Leib-phenomenological perspective to current discussions to found the constitutional influence of space for social relations ‘deeper’ in the phenomenal sphere of the self and society. Arguing that self and society are ‘derived’ from the spatial dimensions of life by the constituating “Unscheinbarkeit” (“inconspicuousness”; see Figal 2015) of spatial presence, ‘giving space’ for cognitive and social experiencing is according to G. Figal the basis of all possible knowledge of the world.

Therefore, the lecture is based on the proposition that the “corporeal dimension” of the social is widely neglected in contemporary theory and should be analysed according to M. Merleau-Ponty and R. Gugutzer as “leibliches Erkennen” (“bodily recognition”) of socio-spatial arrangements. It is, according to them, the starting point of subjectivity as the spatial contributes “inconspicuously” to any aspects of the “life-world”. To be able to handle it as a societal knowledge base, it is maybe not enough to follow up the pathway of A. Schütz and G.-H. Mead on the “generalized/symbolized other” founded in common “Du-Erlebnissen”. They are corporeal experiences which are ‘suspended’ (Hegel) in words, narrations, images etc. – but their spatial shades did not vanish in signs, language: They are an ‘effective’ relic of the spatial and bearer of possible shared similar experiences – and therefore open to methodological reconstructivism (f. i. narrowness, vastness, urbanity).