SFB 1285:  Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of disparagement

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317232170

The CRC investigates phenomena of vituperation, humiliation, and disparagement across historical periods and cultures, approaching them as fundamental operations of societal communication. With the concept of invecti-vity, the CRC develops a new research perspective in the humanities and social sciences that is meant to grasp the preconditions and effects of disparaging communication, making them describable across contexts. In doing so, phenomena that have so far been considered in an isolated manner – framed, e. g., as incivility, blasphemy, defamation, hate speech, verbal or symbolic violence – are integrated into a common analytical framework. The CRC conceptualizes invectivity as a communicative mode in which conflicts are performatively generated, dynamized, and transformed. For the CRC’s approach to invectivity, the key point of departure are not the intentions of people engaged in disparaging actions; it rather assumes that invectivity realizes itself within a complex network of communicative actions, semanticizing responses by addressees and observers, and processes of aesthetic mediation and discursive negotiation. As a disruptive, stabilizing, and dynamizing element of social orders, invective communication forms communities and shapes societies, being destructive and productive at the same time. With its concept, the CRC develops a common terminological and comparative heuristic that brings the diverse topics and issues of its 15 sub-projects into conversation with each other, allowing for systematic and historical comparisons. On this basis, the CRC is working toward a synthesizing theory of invectivity. The exemplary ana-lyses in the CRC's sub-projects cover a broad historical spectrum, ranging from antiquity to the present. In addition to the historical dimension, the CRC, in its second funding phase, will increasingly focus on the cultural situatedness and entanglements of invective processes. In the second funding phase, the CRC aims to advance its concept, first, by attending to processes of involvement, i. e., to the processes by which people are drawn into invective events and configured as invectors or invectees. Second, the CRC will pay more systematic attention to conditions and effects of invectivity that have solidified into structures, e. g. in the form of social norms, media conventions, or epistemic orders. The CRC has identified three core dimensions of invectiviy that are particularly suited for retracing these processes of involvement and structure formation, and which will therefore serve as cross-project themes for the second funding phase: (1) normativity/morality, (2) narrativity/narratives, and (3) affectivity/emotions. Moreover, the CRC intends to evolve the concept of invectivity in the coming phase by exploring its border zones. To this end, the CRC will explore the three complexes of criticism, humor, and violence.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Completed projects

• A - Invectivity in arenas of ritualised communication in the Roman republic and imperial period (Project Head Jehne, Martin )
• B - Poetic Invectives. Strategies of legitimation between literary tradition and fictitious orality (Project Head Pausch, Dennis )
• D - Invective asymmetrization. Diatribe duels in Italian and German Humanism (Project Head Israel, Uwe )
• E - Desacralization, resacralization, and othering: Protestant saints and ’the turks‘ in the interconfessional dispute of the 16th century (Project Head Münkler, Marina )
• F - Image provocation. Invective comedy and autonomous art 1500–1800 (Project Head Müller, Jürgen )
• G - Pamphlets, lampoons, and slogans. Dynamics of invectivity and the early modern public sphere (Project Heads Kästner, Alexander ;  Schwerhoff, Gerd )
• H - Arenas of invective mobilization in democracy and National Socialism. Berlin, Gelsenkirchen and Toronto 1924 to 1938 (Project Head Ellerbrock, Dagmar )
• I - The verdict against philistines: Forms, functions and dynamics of the invective against middle social strata in modernity (Project Head Schrage, Dominik )
• K - Theater of discrimination. Depiction and reflection of invective dynamics in contemporary theater, performance and action art (Project Heads Koch, Lars ;  Prokic, Tanja )
• L - Pop-cultural poetics and politics of the invective: Enfreakment and minstrelization as formations of the invective mode (Project Heads Kanzler, Katja ;  Schubert, Stefan )
• M - Invectivity in literary and cinematic representations of migration in Italy (20th/21st centuries) (Project Head Tiller, Elisabeth )
• O - The Meta-invective as a Resource: Social Movements as Laboratories of the Invective in the Contemporary History of Germany (Project Head Scharloth, Joachim )
• P - Invectivity on the web: the protection of privacy and personality, civil liberties, and the constitution of (digital) public spher (Project Head Müller-Mall, Sabine )
• R - Invective codifications of interculturality: Ethnographic situation analyses in qualification measures for institutions of the migration society (Project Head Greschke, Heike )
• Z - Central Task of the Collaborative Research Center (Project Head Schwerhoff, Gerd )

• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Dresden
• Participating University: Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf; Universität Leipzig
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Gerd Schwerhoff