About APAS
Aporias of Perfection in Accelerated Societies
Current cultural change in self concepts, relationship patterns and body practices
Heads of Project:
Prof. Dr. Vera King, Universität Hamburg (Speaker)
Prof. Dr. Benigna Gerisch, IPU Berlin
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Rosa, FSU Jena
A transdiscplinary project funded by the VolkswagenStiftung in association with the initiative “Schlüsselthemen für Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft” [key topics in science and society]. Funded Dec. 1st 2012 until June 30th 2017.
The project's pivotal starting point is the indication that modern Western societies are based on dynamical reproduction, as defined by permanent growth and innovation. Within the course of these dynamical processes new modes of progression in effectivity arise creating a fundamental change. Thus, dynamical growth not only implicates the acceleration of social processes in particluar but requires the ongoing optimization of social practices in numerous social environments. The various, partly inherent diverging logics of optimization within the different social fields must in turn be integrated on an individual level in terms of perfection.
On the one hand demands of optimization result from rationalization and an operative acceleration in various fields of social practices and generally tend to increase single parameters of lebensführung [lifestyle, way to lead a life]. On the other hand tendencies of perfection determine the entire lebensführung. In this respect we assume that the political, technological and economical alterations occuring since the 1990s have accelerated modern societies even more, provoking new demands of perfection and paradoxes for the individual lebensführung emerge challenging integrative capabilities.
Hence, the project is based on and guided by the assumption of a specific relation between acceleration, optimization and perfection which shall be analyzed on different social levels. We start with the supposition that the demands for a perfectionisitic lebensführung invoke biographical patterns and coping strategies, which tend to undermine the ressources regarding social relationships and psychic capacities - even though they are essential for social cohesion. We especially aim at analyzing the counterproductive results created by these demands of perfection.
From this perspective it is plausible to suppose relevant correlations between (aporias of) perfection and those phenomena and diagnoses that can be seen as typical pathologies for contemporary Western societies According to our hypothesis phenomena of exhaustion and excessive demands as well as pathological hyperbolic forms of (in particular body-manipulating) self-optimization can be seen as socially compounded developments and/or intensified symptomatic coping strategies. We assume that these practices become strikingly visible within those aporias of perfection. Therefore the project's intention is to compare groups of 25 to 40 year old women and men in respect to ordinary biographical patterns of optimization and perfection as well as coping strategies or overstraining scenarios in clinical groups.
Thus all subprojects focus on questions of how constant increase in social dynamics and competitive structures of recognition transform into coercions of perfection for the individuals. Each project concentrates on the ways in which these indications have an effect on relationships, concepts of the self and self-orientated body images. For that purpose a threefold, multidisciplinary approach was created mediating several social levels and combining different qualitative and quantitative methods:
The first subproject (Rosa) develops a matrix from the macrosociological perspective allowing conclusions of time-related social structures. This typology is further specified in the second project (King) by applying a microanalytic-orientated analysis of biographies including generational aspects of socialization as well as psychological patterns of processing/coping. Finally the third project (Gerisch) focuses on the psychological/psychodynamic consequences of these dynamics, in particular centering on the tipping point from self-optimization to self-destruction.
Overall the innovative benefit of this threefold research design is the possibility to explore the still open social theoretical questions regarding the complex interplay of social and individual factors in the context of the outlined cultural changes. Such findings are crucial to socialization theory and developmental research as well as to clinical, diagnostical and preventive fields and above all highly relevant for a sociological perspective.