Research Project
Über die Medialität der Erfahrung in ihrer sozialen Situation
The project deals with the question whether subjectivity can be exhaustively grasped on the basis of a binary logic of “activity” and “passivity”, respectively of “doing” and “suffering”. I intend to inquire the limits of the idea that dimensions of experiencing and feeling, which always have socio-cultural implications and are socio-historically framed, must always resemble an “active doing” or a “passive suffering”. By discussing subjectivity, necessary conditions for the development of meaning and meaningfulness come into the center of my research, which I will formulate in their direct entanglement with socio-historical, socio-cultural and socio-material structures.
The working hypothesis assumes that the conceptual and thematic reduction to categories of a rigid activity or passivity of subjectivity is unsuitable to think along the impact that sociality has on meaning-making processes. Consequently, I ask how the processuality of subjectivity can be thought beyond activity and passivity. I posit that the processuality of subjectivity resembles an involved, operative mediality. It is involved, because a subject that is capable of experience always moves in a meaning-laden, non-neutral world and finds itself in situations with which it has to deal. Executing, because subjectivity, as being shaped by consciousness and perception, does not create the contexts of the surrounding world ex nihilo, but is essentially a medial condition for meaning-laden, social contexts.
The dissertation is written from a phenomenological perspective and addresses especially Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.