Abstract
This chapter reflects on how the live performing arts in our contemporary culture and society might contribute—in comparison to other media like film and television—to the public sphere as defined by Jürgen Habermas in terms of free accessibility for everybody (open to all), the ambition to be free from power and propaganda, and the contribution to matters of general interest. The chapter presents two opposing notions of the performative turn: the performative turn in our contemporary culture and society, considered in terms of mediatization, which continuously and increasingly restricts the public sphere, and the performative turn in the arts, which radicalizes the critical potential of art as a counterbalance. The epilogue reconsiders the public sphere against the background of current socio-political developments.
The more complete the world as representation, the more inscrutable the representation as ideology
(Theodor W. Adorno 1963 [1952–53], 71—my translation)
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Jens Schröter’s (2011) concept of ‘ontological intermediality’ as one of the models of discourse about relationships between media in which medium specificity is the key issue.
- 2.
‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights,’ United Nations, accessed 3 September 2017, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html
- 3.
In this context, we could also refer to computer games, especially to the large majority of narrative computer games that put the players into the position of a character in the world presented in the game. Such computer games could be considered as remediations (Bolter and Grusin 1999) of mainstream feature films: the spectator of the film as an invisible witness, who identifies with the hero in the film world, has been replaced by the player of the game as a character of the game world or as the one who controls the hero of the game world like an avatar by making him/her do what the games demands—according to the rules of the game—in order to make something happen.
- 4.
I refer to the final chapter of the fourth volume of The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser (1999 [1951]).
- 5.
Validity claim (in German: Geltungsanspruch) is a central concept in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. There is not a clear definition of the concept. What he means by it becomes clear by looking at the different validity claims that he distinguishes. The ‘basic’ validity claims that he distinguishes are truth, rightness, and sincerity, each being related to a specific mode of social action, speech act, and world perspective. Authenticity is specifically (not exclusively) related to aesthetic utterances. Most important is that Habermas emphasizes that there is always an inextricable link between meaning and validity. Knowing what something means always also means knowing under which conditions something can be accepted as true, or right, or sincere.
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Kattenbelt, C. (2018). Intermedial Theatre in a Mediatized Culture and Society. In: Arfara, K., Mancewicz, A., Remshardt, R. (eds) Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75343-0_2
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