Disruption in the Arts Culture & Conflict Edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Catherine Nesci Editorial Board Arjun Appadurai ⋅ Claudia Benthien ⋅ Elisabeth Bronfen ⋅ Joyce Goggin Lawrence Grossberg ⋅ Andreas Huyssen ⋅ Ansgar Nünning ⋅ Naomi Segal Márcio Seligmann-Silva ⋅ António Sousa Ribeiro ⋅ Roberto Vecchi Samuel Weber ⋅ Liliane Weissberg ⋅ Christoph Wulf Volume 11 Disruption in the Arts Textual, Visual, and Performative Strategies for Analyzing Societal Self-Descriptions Edited by Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, and Johannes Pause ISBN 978-3-11-056586-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058008-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057975-8 ISSN 2194-7104 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952778 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: pixabay.com Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com TableofContents Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, and Johannes Pause Disruption in the Arts: Prologue IX I Conceptual Approaches Lars Koch and Tobias Nanz Aesthetic Experiments On the Event-LikeCharacter and the Function of Disruptions in the Arts 3 Moritz Mutter Scandalous Expectations Second Order Scandals in Modern Society 27 Mario Grizelj Ekstasis andParadoxa The Miracle as Disruption 37 Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, and Johannes Pause Imagined Scenarios of Disruption AConcept 63 II Media Tanja Prokić Disruptive Storytelling Notes on E.T.A.Hoffmann 85 Christoph Kleinschmidt Perturbing the Reader The Riddle-character of Artand the Dialectical Impact of Contemporary Literature (Adorno, Goetz, Kracht) 105 VI TableofContents Johannes Pause Expansions of the Instant Disruptions of Time in Contemporary German Literature 117 Marie-Sophie Himmerich Disruption, Photography,and the Idea of Aesthetic Resistance Sophie Ristelhueber’sGulf WarPhotographs 133 Johannes Binotto Closed Circuits ImmanenceasDisturbance in High Definition Cinema 171 III Body Anna Schürmer Interferences Posthuman Perspectives on Early Electronic Music 189 Daniel Eschkötter The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin Jean-Luc Nancy,Claire Denis, and Trouble EveryDay 211 Tanja Nusser “They starve to death, but who dares askwhy?” SteveMcQueen’sFilm Hunger 231 Elisabeth Heyne Writing Aphasia Intermedial Observation of Disrupted Language in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur 247 IV Power Tobias Nanz The RedTelephone AHybrid Object of the Cold War 275 TableofContents VII Lars Koch Christoph Schlingensief’sImageDisruption Machine 291 Katrin M. Kämpf and ChristinaRogers Citizen n-1 LauraPoitras’s Citizenfour as aReparativeReading of aParanoid World 315 V Archive Elfriede Jelinek Notes on SecondaryDrama 337 Teresa Kovacs Disturbanceinthe Intermediate SecondaryDramaasaParasite 339 FriedrichKittler Signal-to-Noise Ratio 347 Tobias Nanz Disrupted Arts and Marginalized Humans ACommentary on FriedrichKittler’s “Signal-to-Noise Ratio” 363 Contributors 369 Index of Subjects 373 Index of Persons 379 LarsKoch, TobiasNanz, and Johannes Pause Disruptioninthe Arts: Prologue The essaycollection “Disruptioninthe Arts” examines, from acomparative per- spective,the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in con- temporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not derived – at least not solely – from presentingits audiencesand recipients with openlypolitical content.Itrather derivesfrom using formal means to create aspecific space of perception and interaction: aspace thatmakeshegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizingtheir self-evidence and ultimatelyrendering them selectively inoperative.The contri- butions in this volume conceptualize various historical and contemporary poli- tics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies,and which are concerned not just with the “narcissistic” exhibition of art as art,but also, and aboveall, with the creation of anew “common horizon of experience” (Stegemann 2015:156). In doing so, they combine the analysis of paradigmatic works,procedures and actions rangingfrom E.T.A. Hoffmann to SteveMcQueen, with reference to central theoretical debatesinthe fields of literature, media, and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By applying the concept of disruption from media and communication studies (Shannon and Weaver 1949) to configurations and constellations in the aesthetic domain, they show on the basisofconcrete examples how,within aconflict-bound social frame of reference, textual, visual,auditive or performativestrategies disclose their own ways of functioning, intervene in automated processes of reception, and thus workdirectlyorindirectlytostimulate asense of political possibilities. Thus, if in what follows “disruption” is to be distinguished as ameta-cate- gory for the critical and artistic analysis of our times, the first thing that needs to be emphasized is the productive character of disruptions. Disruption designates interruptions – thus, not the definitive collapse or the destruction of habitual practices of reception and/or decoding.Inthe mode of disruption, the latter are not onlyrendered temporallydysfunctional but alsorendered visible in the samestroke; to paraphrase athoughtofMartin Heidegger, they exit the mode of aself-evident ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit)and moveinto the problem- atizing mode of present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit)(Heidegger2006:73–75;see also Rautzenberg2009:165 – 175). Analogous to the “mediality of media,” which becomes palpable in the course of disruptions (Kümmel and Schüttpelz Translated from the German by GregorySims. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580082-001 X Lars Koch, TobiasNanz, and Johannes Pause 2003:10), artistic disruptions set in motion adynamic of self-reflexivity,such that the constitutive conditions of art themselvesbecome the implicit or explicit object of the works in question. In the aesthetic domain, disruptions can occur as the resultofintentional strategies,that is, as “artistic means” (Gansel and Ächtler 2013:8), as effects of the medium-boundconditions of awork of art, or as the effects of interferencebetween different logicsofthe media. Disrup- tions additionallypossess the character of an event,since, due to their relational nature, they are bound to the handed-down forms of representation and recep- tion, which can onlybechallenged situatively. Adisruption becomes political when – following Jacques Rancière’stheses – it is bound up with a “dissensus” concerning different possible perspectiveson reality,such as when the contingency of aparticular aesthetic regime is laid bare, and at the sametime other “distributions of sensory experience and space” (Rancière 2010;trans.modified) are identified as possible. Forthis rea- son, works of artmust always first reproducethe hierarchical, representative forms of representation that they want to disrupt,sothat by means of aesthetic strategies of destabilization these forms can then be rendered fragile: political art “occurs” preciselywhere “asense of order and ordered meaning [geordneter Sinn]comes into contact with chaotic sensuality” (Sonderegger2010:32) – that is, into contact with the noise [Rauschen]that constitutes the disruption, where contingency turns into aesthetic experience.Thissimultaneous “processofenter- ing into and revoking power relations” is articulated in the aesthetics of disrup- tion as a “break with one’sown (pre)-suppositions, whether they are technical- moderndeterminants or aesthetic-romantic ideas”–which is whythe “gesture of breaking with one’s(pre‐)suppositions” can be considered the feature that is common to most of the works examined in this volume (Robnik 2010:26). As abi-stable (reversible) figure situated between order and disorder,aes- thetic disruption produces areflexivity that can be grasped methodicallyonly if it is broughtinto relation with other aesthetic concepts such as “performance,” “space,”“presence,”“body” or “affect.” In the contributions assembled here, “disruption” is therefore atheoretical starting point thatallows the most diverse aspectsofthe aesthetic to be comprehended: the particularlogics of perform- ance practicesand physicality that resist representation, the different aesthetic, temporaland spatial effects of textual, visual or audiovisual media, the interven- tion of new techniques – such as digital techniques – in aesthetic traditions, the perturbation of the mechanisms and expectations of reception aesthetics. Such strategies do not necessarilyhavetoproduce subversive effects in atraditionally “leftist,” politically progressive sense – the need for adifferentiated view of forms of aesthetic disruption is made clear by the adaptation of classicalcon- cepts of disruptiveguerrilla communication (Schölzel 2013) by the right-wing Disruption in the Arts: Prologue XI “Identitäre Bewegung” (Kökgiran and Nottbohm 2014), as well as the perfect fit between the “new spirit of capitalism” and the formsof“artistic critique,” and thereby certain aesthetics of disruption (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Pertinent to them all is anegative realism that critically addresses the contextual condi- tions in which worldmakingbecomes possible. In the first place, however,and practicallyspeaking,maneuvers of aesthetic disruption are atechnique of com- municative de-automation, whose attention-gainingpotential can be capitalized on for quite different purposes. The focus