Everybody: A Transnational Iconography

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Anna Schober-de Graaf
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; Art History
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 270437670

This project aims to draw up a cultural-historical iconography of the figure of the everybody, with a particular focus on its more recent history. "Everybody" refers to a type of figure used in films and photography, but also in political propaganda, advertising or in the internet, to appeal to all of us and to testify to the truth or reality of what is portrayed. These figures are familiar under terms like the common man, common woman, "everyman/woman", "the man in the street", "the girl next door" or "people in general". All these figures are often accorded a utopian role that is critical of the present order of things. They then appear as a "new man/ woman" and thus function as vehicles of a myth of a "new life". This research project concentrates on how the figure of the everybody appears in visual media, which since the first decades of the 20th century have become the culturally dominant dissemination channels of social discourses. In drawing up such an iconography the project focuses in particular on the period of transition from the employee culture of "organised" modernity to the creative culture of late or post-modernity - that is, from approximately 1960 to the present. However, this period is not regarded as a homogeneous "block". Instead, two periods of transition will be looked at in greater detail: the upheaval around "1968" and the period around 1990, which is often described under the catchphrase "the end of the welfare state". The starting point of the study is film representations of the everybody - with the medium of film being supplemented in the course of the research by examples of other visual media (political advertising, product advertising, intermedia art, photography and the internet) that have contributed significantly to the visual figuralisation of the everybody and are characteristic of the two main investigation periods. Within this study framework the research project will pursue three primary objectives: The first objective is to draw up a plural and transnational iconography of the figure of the everybody since 1960. The second is to locate exemplary figures of the everybody in a longer tradition of political-democratic figures of popularisation that began with the change towards potential republican or democratic political systems in the 18th and 19th centuries. The third is to critically and comparatively discuss the current philosophical conceptualisations of the everybody as a figure of thought for the diagnosis of the present as they appear in relation to the examples of visual culture being studied. By completing these goals the project will analyse the mediating, socialising and mobilising role the figure of the everybody exercises in a contemporary context, marked by increasing mobile, plural and often transitory group-building processes, by a celebration of "individual initiative" and a pronounced scepticism vis à vis the universal.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria