Disruption in the Arts: Prologue

Abstract

The essay collection “Disruption in the Arts” examines, from a comparative perspective, the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not derived – at least not solely – from presenting its audiences and recipients with openly political content. It rather derives from using formal means to create a specific space of perception and interaction: a space that makes hegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizing their self-evidence and ultimately rendering them selectively inoperative. The contributions in this volume conceptualize various historical and contemporary politics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies, and which are concerned not just with the “narcissistic” exhibition of art as art, but also, and above all, with the creation of a new “common horizon of experience” (Stegemann 2015: 156). In doing so, they combine the analysis of paradigmatic works, procedures and actions ranging from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Steve McQueen, with reference to central theoretical debates in the fields of literature, media, and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By applying the concept of disruption from media and communication studies (Shannon and Weaver 1949) to configurations and constellations in the aesthetic domain, they show on the basis of concrete examples how, within a conflict-bound social frame of reference, textual, visual, auditive or performative strategies disclose their own ways of functioning, intervene in automated processes of reception, and thus work directly or indirectly to stimulate a sense of political possibilities. Thus, if in what follows “disruption” is to be distinguished as a meta-category for the critical and artistic analysis of our times, the first thing that needs to be emphasized is the productive character of disruptions. Disruption designates interruptions – thus, not the definitive collapse or the destruction of habitual practices of reception and/or decoding. In the mode of disruption, the latter are not only rendered temporally dysfunctional but also rendered visible in the same stroke; to paraphrase a thought of Martin Heidegger, they exit the mode of a self-evident ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and move into the problematizing mode of present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) (Heidegger 2006: 73–75; see also Rautzenberg 2009: 165– 175). Analogous to the “mediality of media,” which becomes palpable in the course of disruptions (Kümmel and Schüttpelz