Coordination Funds

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Hardly any field of cultural reflection can do without conceptualizations of power: Conceptions of religious or magical (power of creation, magic power), human (vis animae, motive power, will power), political (kratos, potestas, power, dominion, charisma), physical (gravity, force of attraction, energy), biological (procreative force, vital force, educational force), physiological (muscular force, perceptual force), or socioeconomic (labor force, purchasing power) forces point to the dominance as well as the plasticity of the concept of force and its derivatives. Since ancient poetics and rhetoric, handed down through the art and poetry teachings of the early modern period, the arts in particular have reflected their performance profile remarkably often in reference to the doctrines of force (creative power, imagination, movere). It is all the more astonishing that the transitions and adoptions between natural, cultural, and art-scientific uses of the concept of force have hardly been systematically investigated. The KFG "Imaginaria of Force" brings together a variety of disciplinary approaches to concepts of force and force-related terms in order to explore their formation and transformation in the arts. Together with internationally renowned fellows from various disciplines, the applicants of the first funding phase have spent the past four years investigating the modes of representation that have emerged historically to capture forces that are themselves intangible. The starting point was the observation that the word 'force' (Greek dynamis, Latin potentia) denotes the ability to exert effects, but that forces themselves cannot be perceived, but can only be read indirectly from their effects. The arts and the reflections on them, so the leading thesis, form a privileged place for the examination of the sensual presence effects of nonsensual forces, whereby through these medializations also scientific concepts experience modifications. The results of this fruitful dialogue between art, literature, and natural sciences will be used by in the second funding phase for concentrated research on aesthetic forces in order to investigate (1) their affinity to the non-quantifiable forces of the numinous, (2) their relationship to non-European models of force, and (3) contemporary creative, artistic, and literary engagements with practices of energy production.