12. Jahrgang, August/September 2003, Nr. 4

Alfons Söllner
Adornos Amerika

(Summary: The »American experience« certainly was a formative but ambivalent period in Theodor W. Adorno’s intellectual development. The article firstly considers the »cultural shock« the emigré tried to overcome by means of abstraction. Secondly the theory of »Kulturindustrie« is interpreted as a normative and highly biased portrait of the american culture which, thirdly, is balanced by Adorno´s positive judgment on the american democracy as implied in his empirical research on authoritarianism.)

Bernd Greiner
Pubertätskrisen. Deutsche Amerikabilder im Umbruch der 60er Jahre

(Summary: The late 1960s can be seen as watershed years in German perceptions of the United States. On the backdrop of the Vietnam war, we witness manyfold manifestations of Anti-American prejudices – both on the left and on the right. And in many instances, contemporaries jumped on the opportunity to vindicate their long-held belief that the German record of violence was not an outstanding, but rather »normal« part of history’s maelstrom. And yet, the author argues, there is another, albeit rather ignored side to German imaginations of the United States. During the late 1960s, the ideological drive of traditional Anti-Americanism came to an end and gave way to much more nuanced reflections, which turned out to be persisent ever since.)

Andreas Reckwitz
Die Grenzen des Sozialen und die Grenze der Moderne. Niklas Luhmann, die Kulturtheorien und ihre normativen Motive

(Summary: The article seeks to clarify the basic structure of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the social and of modernity by contrasting it with contemporary theories of culture. Luhmann’s theoretical framework follows a »logic of separation«, where as theories of culture support a transgression of boundaries (between the social and the psychic,the modern and the traditional etc.). In the end, these analytical differences between systems theory and cultural theory seem to be motivated by opposing normative positions.)

Stephan Lessenich
Soziale Subjektivität. Die neue Regierung der Gesellschaft

(Summary: The late Michel Foucault’s analysis of the »neoliberal« governmentality is recently attracking more and more interest. The article seeks to identify the double ambivalence of the »neoliberal« agenda by analyzing the transformation of former welfarestate institutions into agencies disclosing a new »entrepreneurish self«. What appears to be an antietatistic and essentially individualistic agenda at first glance turns out to be a new mode of society governance. Consequently the notion of neoliberalism demands reconsideration as it forms itself a constitutive part of the present days governmentality understood as a genuine model for conceiving and governing reality.)

In der Literaturbeilage:
Klaus Naumann
Bombenkrieg – Totaler Krieg – Massaker. Jörg Friedrichs Buch »Der Brand« in der Diskussion

In jeder Ausgabe:

Wolfgang Kraushaar: Aus der Protest-Chronik

Nachrichten aus dem Institut