Carolin Behrmann (Florenz): Towards a Visual Common Sense? Navigating Visual Normativity in Times of Uncertainty

Abstract

The ongoing global pandemic challenges critical and historical approaches to questions of norms and the "common sense". The Covid19-crisis that seemingly unites humanity under the same conditions of vulnerability, changes the life of communities and their „common spaces of appearances“ profoundly. Hannah Arendt has called the sensus communis a “sixth sense that we not only all have in common but that fits us into, and thereby makes possible, a common world”. Common sense denotes the sense "for" the community, not the self-evident in daily life. But what we have known as a common and shared reality has changed radically, lost its visibility and left public spaces. Then again in times of increasing mediatization and digitalization a "visual common sense" seems to increase, as we experience the mutual shaping of visual media and social life, that change social practices and cultural life fundamentally. In times of increasing internationality and wide-ranging cultural encounters and global conflicts, from the 17th century on, the question of a common ground of different cultures, communities and societies has gained in topicality. Especially in times of crisis when the community itself might be called into question, culture upholds and preserves what binds a community together. The presentation will address the production of a "common sense" as an organized body of thought that will be approached from a cultural and phenomenological perspective. Considering Giambattista Vico’s famous shift towards iconic thinking and the iconicity in language, it focuses on the question, to what extent visuality, understood as the making of visual experiences of seeing, imaging and picturing, shaped the notion of a "common" or "community sense" and thus also the notion of legal normativity. The working hypothesis is, that the widely discussed notion of a common ground of humanity is connected to the consumption and production of a rising awareness and self-awareness of the visual field. Along with recent discussions about symbolic norm enforcement regimes that assume it is culture itself that produces legal normativity, it will ask how regimes of visibility are constitutive for the larger imaginary of humanity and the notion of the "common sense".

Zoom Link: https://uni-bonn.zoom.us/j/96953383685?pwd=L3NMZFBuek5PLzNTeTlGMGw3ekR1dz09
Meeting-ID: 969 5338 3685
Password: 973299

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Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Carolin Behrmann studierte Kunstgeschichte, Philosophie, Europäische Ethnologie sowie Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften in Berlin, Tübingen und Bologna. Von 2005 bis 2011 war sie als Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin tätig, wo sie mit einer Arbeit zum Thema „Tyrann und Märtyrer. Bild und Ideengeschichte des Rechts um 1600“ promoviert wurde. Ihre Forschung wurde von 2008 bis 2009 mit einem Fellowship durch das Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, gefördert. Nach ihrer erfolgreichen Promotion war Carolin Behrmann am Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin tätig. Von 2014 bis 2019 leitete sie als Forschungsgruppenleiterin (W2) das Forschungsprojekt „The Nomos of Images“ im Minerva-Programm der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. 2020 war sie Fellow an der Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, New York, wo sie sich mit dem Thema „Visual Common Sense“ (17.-18. Jh.) befasste. Darüber hinaus ist sie Assoziierte Wissenschaftlerin am Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut.

Seit Oktober 2020 ist Dr. Carolin Behrmann Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg „Recht als Kultur“ in Bonn.