The CERC Annual Conference 2024 began on November 14 with an inspiring lecture by Patrick Boucheron (Collège de France, Paris) on the role of historical scholarship in times of crisis. The welcome address by Birgit Münch (Vice-Rector for International Affairs) was followed by a lively discussion in which current political developments such as the US election were also addressed.
On November 15, a dense program in three sections offered a variety of contributions:
1. theory and literature: Anke Grutschus, Giuditta Caliendo and Paola Pietrandrea presented linguistic concepts; Paul Geyer analyzed morality and subjectivity in Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau; Michael Bernsen addressed how a European literary history can be written.
2. case studies: Christine Krüger looked at the peace movement (1848-1933); Markus Dauss spoke about symbolic and social orders of ruins; Christina Schröer examined secularization in Germany and France, while Werner Gephart analysed German and French patterns of thinking about crises (see below).
3. didactics: Sylvain Doussot and Nadine Fink suggested consciously reflecting on thought patterns in the classroom. Peter Geiss explored this in greater depth in the context of political upheaval, and Sarah Dietrich-Grappin addressed the role of the nation in foreign language teaching.
The event concluded with in-depth comments from Cheikh Sene, Gabriel Galvez-Behar and Roland Ißler as well as a discussion about future working groups.
Werner Gephart - Excerpt from the lecture
Habitudes de penser la “crise”
Sémantiques et pratiques en France et en Allemagne
Unfortunately, I can only present you with a sketch today. Actually, I never wanted to do that again, to tell others what one should actually do without having done one's work.
Nevertheless, I think the topic is extremely relevant and I also believe that a better understanding of the “crisis complex” and its cultural embedding can be helpful in finding practical solutions for crisis management. Of course, the exploration of cultural differences takes us into dangerous territory. Often, it is almost impossible to distinguish caricature from a deeper cultural knowledge of the “other”. The envy and competition of centuries are too deeply embedded in our minds and our habits of thinking about ourselves and the other.
The considerations are made more difficult by the fact that I represent a discipline that sees itself as a crisis science, namely sociology, which is generally agreed to be of French origin, but has also found its masters in Germany. So the sociologists' understanding of “crisis” may well have an indicative value, without, of course, being able to represent a “social semantics” that would not be concerned with the odium of the second-order burden of observation. In other words, what has settled as sedimented linguistic usage over centuries in the respective cultures requires completely different methods of analyzing the meaning of word field observations, the changes in meaning in a completely different text category: the literatures of the first, second and third order, of which I can offer you far too little...
Preliminary remark
Perhaps a preliminary remark on the context from which I would like to address this topic: In June of this year, I had the honor and pleasure of opening a research center that draws on Émile Durkheim to analyze crises:
The Émile Durkheim Research Centre would like to address the challenges of the 21st century, which manifest themselves in various crises that were first analyzed by Durkheim in their breadth and interconnectedness. We encounter these developments as consequences of climate change, as the return of war, as a dramatic crisis of democracy, the inequality of the distribution of wealth and prosperity on a global scale or the crises of the “mind” in times of extensive digitalization and the advance of artificial intelligence. We can add financial crises, pandemic crises, crises of meaning and interpretation, etc. to this list, as almost every aspect of the “human condition” and all spheres of modernity (Max Weber) are susceptible to crises. They trigger discourses on justice and, as a whole, lead to a kind of “crisis of justice” that radiates into all areas of society. Resentment, resistance and anger about existing living conditions are articulated worldwide in a sense of injustice that requires closer analysis. Depending on the media-influenced attention, these crisis phenomena are certainly being researched in the respective disciplines of the natural sciences and humanities. The systematic and comparative analysis of the causes, consequences and interconnections of these crisis phenomena, as it is carried out in the individual disciplines, however, this is neglected and deserves special research efforts.
In the context of this complex issue, a look at crisis semantics is - I hope - informative and at the same time useful for dealing with the overwhelming burden of crisis experiences that cannot be shaken off so easily:
The plan for my lecture is as follows:
- methodological reflections on why the “habitudes de coeur et de penser” can be a fruitful approach for comparing and analyzing interactions, a bit like I once tried to do in my book “Voyages sociologique. France - Allemagne”.
- A “voyage” from Saint-Simon to Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim to trace their obsession with the crisis theme, which perhaps only has to do with the fact that the “Revolution” is known to have taken place in France. Contemporary historical fiction will show how naturally financial crises, monetary crises, food crises, religious crises and political crises are spoken of. I do not want to treat Octave Feuillet's comedy, which bears the veritable title “La crise”, as a curiosity, but rather see the peculiarity of the discours amoureux in France confirmed by the lack of a parallel to this erotic tabloid play. Whether one should lament the absence of irony in the crisis theme in Germany is more a matter for connoisseurs of the “Kulturkampf” in Germany.
- Here we also encounter the longing for religion as a ferment of European societies, in Novalis and others, but the crisis of “Europe” is seen neither in Marx, nor in Simmel and Weber as a predominantly political one, but as an economic one in Marx, a crisis of culture in Simmel, even and above all in his “Philosophy of Money” or a universal-historically inspired world theater of the contradictory rationalities of the Occident in Max Weber.
- Perhaps we can then continue to observe the line to Bourdieu's “Misère du Monde” or the contradictions of late modernity in Habermas between “system and lifeworld” to see whether Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck can give us new insights into the découpage de l'objet and its healing....
So that's my program, which would take me at least two days or 12 lecture hours to complete...