Abstracts
Ada Borkenhagen (Leipzig): Optimized Bodies – fighting death in the context of aesthetic medicine
Self-design and the optimization of the body will become massive hypes in the near future. These are the results of the research project „Körperwelten 2020“ [body worlds 2020]. Hence, the most promising future markets are intimate plastic surgery and the professionalization of body-tuning techniques. Body-optimization has become an omnipresent promise of redemption in the 21th century. Particularly in the field of aesthetic surgery eternal youth and the overcoming of death are being staged as a promise of redemption in a stunning concretistic manner. On the basis of an analysis of the successful reality show „The Swan – Endlich schön!“ [The Swan – beautiful after all!] the steady ambition to optimize the body by means of beauty as well as in terms of a representation through rebirth will be outlined. In this vein, the debts the "pursuit of happiness" owes to the body will also be dealt with.
Heinz Bude (Kassel): Fear as the key to meaning of the whole thing
Fear does not only apply to a threat one seeks to offset, but in the context of a existential-philosophical tradition it also represents a privileged access to the very existence of the modern human being, which is, as Max Weber puts it in a heroic tone, obliged to lead its life by its own terms. Thus, the lecture poses the question which kind of significant question the experience of fear for the flexible human being in capitalism of property-individuals raises.
Eve Chiapello (Paris): Optimization in Context of Financialisation
The presentation will focus on the specific kind of optimization that is required in the context of financialisation. Actually, the concept of optimization supposes that some kind of calculation is made, comparing some costs or resources of consumption with some outcomes. In the context of financialisation, this calculation tends to be made in terms of “investment”. An investment is supposed to yield returns, and this kind of optimization implies that one has to choose to invest in the projects that promise the best returns on the investment. A development of new metrics can be noticed extending the notion of return in order to also include social or environmental returns. So, in order to colonize our minds, the notion of return is stretched beyond the strict economic return. Nevertheless, this triggers important changes for this kind of optimization tends to force people to neglect actions when the effects are not high enough or sure enough. One of the most preoccupying aspects of this situation is the impact this mindset has on public policies. In the end, the investor’s paradigm implies the necessity to choose between people not in terms of actual needs to address but in terms of expected returns. This can be analyzed as the latest expansion of the project-based society. Not only are individuals supposed to become entrepreneurs of themselves, but they also need to attract investments to their person by assuring investors that they will deliver good returns. This implies to look at people as human capital.
Alain Ehrenberg (Paris): The two meanings of the notion of social pathology: Toward an anthropology of adversity in individualistic societies
Through psychiatric syndromes, many tensions of society are at the foreground. Most of the prob-lems grouped under the heading “mental health” – depression, addictions, ADHD, and others – tend to be systematically subject to social and political concerns about what is right, fair, unfair, good, bad; they tend to be a soul-searching area of life in society and have become objects of intense and ongoing social controversy. The controversies at issue revolve around the argument that these conditions are in fact not only illnesses requiring treatment, but also social illnesses involving values and ideals inherent to our way of life. At stake are the values we attach to our social relations – in school, the family, and the workplace, and by extension, in society as a whole. Although these illnesses affect people individually, they also manifest a common illness or problem that is social, even socio-political in nature. This question of the value of social relations, of their human value, cannot be set aside: it is an intrinsic characteristic of these subjects; it belongs to their grammar. The speech explores the idea that mental health practices deal with the relations between individual afflictions and social relationships.
Eva Illouz (Jerusalem): Intimacy and Self-worth as receding points of the horizon
If the late modern self has become a platform for the endless perfectibility of the self, surely intimacy is the best site to verify that claim as it demands the ongoing monitoring of one's own and another's subjectivity. The question raised by this paper is whether such self-monitoring toward perfectibility generates ontological security or whether, as I argue, it generates uncertainty and lack of trust.
Vera King, Benigna Gerisch, Hartmut Rosa et al. (Hamburg, Berlin, Jena): ›There’s a lot of progress, but that doesn’t mean it’s getting better‹. Contradictions of perfection in the accelerated modernity
The incessant increase of performance and productivity as well as constant self-improvement are considered necessary in order to keep pace with an accelerated, competitive modernity. Hence, in different social fields and in everyday life activities, various necessities of optimisation and new efforts in terms of perfection emerge. Thus, the demand for constant improvement and increase in efficiency does not only have effects on work and education, but also on family life, parent-child- and intimate relationships, in respect to body and self, in the public as well as in the private realm. Of particular interest in this context are the interrelations between culture and psyche as well as the shifts of meaning in regard to ‘pathology’ and ‘normality’. Hence, this speech discusses psychic and social conditions and results as well as contradictions and risks of optimisation.