Project Details
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SFB 1285:  Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of disparagement

Subject Area Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term from 2017 to 2022
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317232170
 
The CRC investigates phenomena of vituperation, humiliation, and disparagement across historical periods and cultures, approaching them as fundamental operations of societal communication. With the concept of invecti-vity, the CRC develops a new research perspective in the humanities and social sciences that is meant to grasp the preconditions and effects of disparaging communication, making them describable across contexts. In doing so, phenomena that have so far been considered in an isolated manner – framed, e. g., as incivility, blasphemy, defamation, hate speech, verbal or symbolic violence – are integrated into a common analytical framework. The CRC conceptualizes invectivity as a communicative mode in which conflicts are performatively generated, dynamized, and transformed. For the CRC’s approach to invectivity, the key point of departure are not the intentions of people engaged in disparaging actions; it rather assumes that invectivity realizes itself within a complex network of communicative actions, semanticizing responses by addressees and observers, and processes of aesthetic mediation and discursive negotiation. As a disruptive, stabilizing, and dynamizing element of social orders, invective communication forms communities and shapes societies, being destructive and productive at the same time. With its concept, the CRC develops a common terminological and comparative heuristic that brings the diverse topics and issues of its 15 sub-projects into conversation with each other, allowing for systematic and historical comparisons. On this basis, the CRC is working toward a synthesizing theory of invectivity. The exemplary ana-lyses in the CRC's sub-projects cover a broad historical spectrum, ranging from antiquity to the present. In addition to the historical dimension, the CRC, in its second funding phase, will increasingly focus on the cultural situatedness and entanglements of invective processes. In the second funding phase, the CRC aims to advance its concept, first, by attending to processes of involvement, i. e., to the processes by which people are drawn into invective events and configured as invectors or invectees. Second, the CRC will pay more systematic attention to conditions and effects of invectivity that have solidified into structures, e. g. in the form of social norms, media conventions, or epistemic orders. The CRC has identified three core dimensions of invectiviy that are particularly suited for retracing these processes of involvement and structure formation, and which will therefore serve as cross-project themes for the second funding phase: (1) normativity/morality, (2) narrativity/narratives, and (3) affectivity/emotions. Moreover, the CRC intends to evolve the concept of invectivity in the coming phase by exploring its border zones. To this end, the CRC will explore the three complexes of criticism, humor, and violence.
DFG Programme Collaborative Research Centres

Completed projects

Applicant Institution Technische Universität Dresden
 
 

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