Integration and PerformanceThe Problem of Unity in the Occidental City - Braunschweig and Ulm in Comparison

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Franz-Josef Arlinghaus
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251759524

It is the goal of the project to contribute to a new way of understanding the occidental city. For this purpose, the municipal performances shall be analysed by way of a theoretical approach which up to now has not been applied to this topic. The project discusses a basic problem of the occidental city which, although identified already by Max Weber, has at best been implicitly dealt with for the time being.The pre-modern city consisted of a number of more or less independent groups (guilds, families) or quarters or sub-cities. In some cases their social structures made them clearly different from each other, and they definitely pursued their own, particular interests. However, to be able to enforce that autocephaly and autonomy against the feudal lord, a minimum of cohesion was necessary. For, too much factionalism could easily result in a split and thus a weakening of the municipality´s assertiveness.Studies on processions, feasts and covenant days have repeatedly pointed out to their community- and identity-creating potential. However, this has been done a) without connecting this to the above mentioned problem. Furthermore, most studies start out from a b) performance-based kind of communitisation or identity-creation which, after all, is based on psychological, individual emotions.This project suggests a different approach: Connecting to the concept of presence society and sociation among those present, it is 1)postulated that after all the municipality in its co-presence is only created by way of ritual acts. Based on this, 2) it is assumed that these acts were not about the creation of identity but about integration. Following Luhmann, integration is defined as the possibility of the cooperation of sub-systems or the flexible mutual adjustment of sub-systems. Thus, integration is much less in need of preconditions than identity.Performative acts were crucial for the cohesion of a municipal society not because processions and covenant days resulted in a psychically-based kind of communitisation. Rather, the core of such acts was in creating the independence of a city´s sub-groups while at the same time securing their cooperation in the context of the overall municipality. By way of performative acts, these diverging concepts were connected and related to each other. Thus, as is the assumption, these performances were about mutually adjusting the cooperative sub-associations as regarding their relationship to each other and to the city as a whole.What makes this project innovative is a) a different reading and interpretation of the sources, by applying a new theoretical approach, b) a different understanding of the meaning of performative acts for the municipality, and finally c) sketching a new image of the municipality which goes further away from the idea of the small-scale national state and is rather oriented at pre-modern structures of society.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants