Semantic Transformations in the 20th Century: Rationalization, Aestheticization, Technization, Medialization (revised first application)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Geulen
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258180652

The project analyzes semantic transitions in the development of modern self-perception over the course of the 20th century. It focuses on the intellectual origins of four major ideas that have shaped both the self-understanding of contemporaries and modern research: Rationalization, Aestheticization Technologization, and Medialization. These ideas are related to four different stages in the development German intellectual history. The social sciences around 1900 turned the classic notion of rationality into the idea of a 'rationalization'; German modern artists between the World Wars claimed not only to reflect upon social reality but to aesthetically transform it; the catastrophic experiences of technological progress until the mid 20th century gave birth to the idea of a 'technological society'; and the introduction of audiovisual media evoked the notion of a general medialization of the world. Thus, rationality, aesthetics, technology and the media all became conceived of as world building forces that, detached from their origin in the human intellect and objectified to processes, would integrate past, present and future and thereby would make a controlled history possible. The various forms and examples through which processes of rationalization, aestheticization, technologization and medialization were conceived of and conceptualized, expressed a crossover of experiences and expectations: they referred to highly dynamic forms of change, while at the same time promising to control it; they objectified cultural accomplishments into natural processes and at the same time imagined their manipulation; they postulated basic structures of development, while at the same time drawing utopian visions of the future. In the course of 20th century German intellectual history, the notion of rationality, aesthetics, technology and media represented four subsequent stages of objectifying human intervention into natural processes. Thus the project consists of four case studies: The first case-study focuses on the semantic history of scientific knowledge around 1900. The second case-study investigates the debates among artists, politicians and social reformers on the relationship between 'fact' and 'fiction' in Weimar and early Nazi-Germany. The third case-study explores the ways in which technology became a medium of reflecting catastrophic historical experiences between the 1930s and 1960s. And the fourth case-study examines the semantic transformation of political concepts in the context of their audiovisual representation since the 1960s. Together the four case studies explore four overlapping, but decisive semantic fields of social self-understanding in Germany over the last one hundred years and thus intend to outline some first essential patterns in the semantic development of 20th century historical consciousness and socio-political self-understanding.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants