Universal Images in Post Universalist Times

The universal does not have an easy standing in our times. It is deconstructed, accused of legitimising forms of power and domination of various kinds and of imposing a view by force, as it were. Many want nothing to do with the universal. The particular, even the singular, is placed in the foreground or even celebrated.

But is the universal so easy to shake off and get rid of? It has to do with world-views, values and attitudes as well as with questions and a search for meaning and attitude. We need it to address the widest possible circle, “all”, to which one can count oneself. In this respect, the universal is indispensable for creating a public sphere and cannot simply be put aside. 

In order to appear in public, the universal needs language and rhetoric, but also performance and visual presence. The starting thesis of the workshop is that universalisation as a practice consists also of images being produced, made public, but in the process being subjected to symbolisation and iconisation. In this form, they are exposed to an audience, with what is given to be seen is calculated as being related by the audience to a wider reservoir of symbols, signs and pictorial motifs, and at the same time being given new meaning through modification.

In the current media and art landscapes, which are characterised by diverse appropriation practices as well as by the proliferation of forms of protest characterised by the media alliance internet-live-appearance-mobile phone, tensions and conflicts in connection with the universalisation of images occur frequently and pronouncedly. For one thing, the agents who universalise images from their specific position are now multiplying. On the other hand, since the 1980s and in connection with new social movements, gender and queer studies, postcolonialism and decolonisation as well as deconstructive positions in the humanities and social sciences as a whole, universals have strongly been questioned and, if so, then only to be taken up further in deconstructed form. Accordingly, this workshop will bring together the question of images with a reformulation of the question of the universal. A further aim of the workshop is to address questions of appropriation, cultural transfer, intermediality and the negotiation of difference in connection with the problematic of the symbolisation/universal dimension of images.

Due to the complexity of this question and its location at the interface of various different disciplines, an interdisciplinary workshop with representatives from visual culture studies, cultural sociology, history and cultural philosophy seems to be appropriate for its clarification. 

In this context, the workshop will discuss

- To what extent and in what forms are values and attitudes of a universal nature expressed pictorially today?

- To what extent do the ways in which images communicate universal appeal in the present differ from earlier ways of an aesthetic relationality of images?

- To what extent does a mediation beyond the particular and singular take place?

- Are there different ways of understanding the universal? How does the universal differ from the universalistic?

- How does this affect the images themselves? To what extent are images, when they deal with the universal, iconic images? What role do transmedia transmissions and processes play?

- How can images lend presence to a call to ask existential, critical and/or meaning-related questions in relation to our relationship to the world?