FOR 5826:  The Makeability of the Self: Diachronic Perspectives on Self-Forming Processes in Media

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539990504

The 'self-forming' paradigm regards the self as 'makeable' and, at the same time, as entangled in numerous relations. The concept therefore serves as a corrective to outdated notions of a stable and sovereign self. In fact, the self constantly actively models itself, for instance, as it aligns with norms, ideals and discourses, and is thus shaped both externally and internally. Processes of self-modeling occur within aesthetic, technological, material, discursive, cultural, economic, political, and social potentialities and limitations, which are repeatedly and tentatively explored. From a historical perspective, self-forming processes can therefore be examined above all in media constellations, which particularly raise questions of the dimensions and limits of their 'makeability'. On the basis of these premises, the planned research group examines exemplary practices, products, and conceptualizations of self-forming from Greek antiquity to the 21st century. It focuses on the thought pattern of self-forming, especially in media productions - in various forms of images and in texts - with the intention of exploring time- and group-specific modes of self-forming from intersectional and transcultural perspectives beyond a Eurocentric universalism. Our analyses aim to introduce the paradigm of self-forming as a heuristic category into academic discourse and to demonstrate its relevance since the beginning of our comprehensible, i.e. linguistically or figuratively fixed, conceptualization about relational selfhood. By focusing on the constitutive moment of active shaping, we also want to relativize the model that is still effective in the humanities, despite all discursivization and problematization, of the sovereign, mostly white and male (creative) subject, which finds true and deep self-expression in self-reference and self-reflection. In order to distance ourselves conceptually from idealist subject philosophy and its broad and far-reaching implications, we use the conceptually neutral term "self". We understand this "self" as a node in a network of material, discursive, and procedural relations and configurations, which in turn are related to cultural, aesthetic and social norms. We do so with recourse to posthumanist approaches and Foucault's decentered "Subject", which is integrated into relations of power and production.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Algorithmic Self-Forming in 21st Century US-American Literature and Culture (TP 5) (Applicant Schober, Regina )
• Artistic practice, collecting and compiling as constellations of the self: transcultural exchange processes in global perspective (18th–21st century) (TP 3) (Applicant Troelenberg, Eva-Maria )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant von Rosen, Valeska )
• Female Self-Forming, “Persona” and the Makeability of the Self in (Early) Modern Portraits (TP 2) (Applicant von Rosen, Valeska )
• Making Something of Oneself: Resources, Social Mobility, and Biography in Self-Forming Processes in the 19th and 20th Centuries (TP 4) (Applicant Kreis, Reinhild )
• Moral Self-Education. The Stoic Theory of Virtue Attainment (TP 1) (Applicant Schriefl, Anna )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Valeska von Rosen