30.11.-01.12.23 - Workshop "Tilting Figure Commonplace: Paradoxes of the doxa"

Workshop "Kippfigur Gemeinplatz: Paradoxien der doxa", 30.11.-01.12.2023, Institute of German Studies and Media Cultures, TU Dresden

Organization: Dr. Bernhard Stricker()

Venue: Wiener Straße 48, 01219 Dresden, room 0.16

Keynote:
Prof. Dr. Anna-Louise Milne (University of London, Paris): "A Common Place, or the Limits of Idiom"

Program

Commonplaces do not enjoy a good reputation. Phrases, formulas, platitudes, clichés, stereotypes, proverbs, idioms or slogans - they are all frowned upon as "preformed phrases" (Gülich 1970), not only for stylistic but also for ideological reasons. As the epitome of bourgeois narrow-mindedness, they have been the subject of criticism at least since Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Flaubert 2004; 2017), not only for their banality, but even more so for their fixity: commonplaces thus indicate a downright "ossified thinking" (Blaicher 1987). Against the backdrop of the modern imperative of originality and the dynamics of permanent innovation, this criticism could have a paradoxical tradition-building effect. "Avoiding the commonplace is," in Raymond Queneau's words, "the whole essence of poetry" (Queneau 1976).

On closer inspection, however, the commonplace proves to be a thoroughly dazzling phenomenon that is by no means as rigid and inflexible as its critics would have us believe (Compagnon 1997; Milne 2001). Unsurprisingly, literature since modernism has by no means only referred to commonplaces in a negative way, in the mode of demarcation - rather, they are no less ubiquitous in literature than in non-literary contexts. Not only have commonplaces been inscribed in almost all literary genres, but the forms, procedures and functions in which they are used are also extremely diverse: To name just a few concise examples, they range from characterization of figures in the novel (Proust 2020; Menasse 2006) to language reflection in poetry (Wiemer 1971; Aichinger 1978), from the surréalists' experiments with proverbs (Éluard/Péret 1995) to Jenny Holzer's language installations in public space (Holzer 1996; Holzer/Dinkla/Guay 2006). The commonplace, as exemplified by the poem by Safiye Can quoted above, can develop genuinely creative, linguistic qualities. And with good reason: the idiomatic character of many commonplaces means that their meaning is often not made up of the meaning of the individual elements of the expression, but that they form a fixed semantic unit. Thus, commonplaces can oscillate between the aspects of banality and profundity by alternately actualizing either their figurative or their latent literary meaning.

The workshop aims to stimulate a methodical re-perspectivization of the commonplace by focusing on it as a 'small form'. This concept is used to characterize a disparate group of historically variable, short textual forms which, due to their particular fluidity and mobility, cannot be described by means of rigid genre conventions, but only from a praxeological perspective (Jäger/Matala de Mazza/Vogl 2020). Small forms, as they have experienced a rapid upswing, especially under the pressure of the "acceleration imperative" of modernity (Gamper/Mayer 2017), are thus not self-contained, but are determined by their embedding in contexts of use. If we transfer this concept of small form from the textual level of literary forms to the linguistic level of even smaller 'pre-formed phrases', we can describe the astonishingly dynamic circulation and the great functional and semantic variability of the supposedly rigid commonplace in the contexts of its use. If we look at the 'performativity' of the commonplace, it proves to be not merely ambiguous, but downright paradoxical: a tipping figure (on the philosophy of the tipping figure with reference to Wittgenstein, see Fortuna 2012).

The paradox of the commonplace is that its formal quality is based on its recognizability, but according to the findings of linguistic phraseology, there are no objective characteristics that would allow a phrase to be identified beyond doubt as a commonplace and to be distinguished from a freely formed sentence (cf. Hallsteinsdóttir/Farø 2006). The commonplace becomes determinable as such only through a 'reflective judgment' (Kant 1990), which relates the particular proposition to its general form. If this means that no sentence is simply a commonplace, but that sentences can be understood as commonplaces or not - both by the author and by the recipient - then the commonplace by no means dispenses with individual judgment and 'semantic autonomy', as its critics carelessly assume (Hampe 2016). How a commonplace is understood can be just as much an expression of tacit agreement with current conventions as an indication of a foreignness between self and other, a boundary at which opinions differ.

Questions of linguistic and social or life form thus prove to be closely intertwined in the commonplace and challenge the question of the extent to which the commonplace can be understood as a sign of an "afterlife of the topical" (Fuchs 2023): as doxa materialized in "concrete thinghood" (Plett 2000, 225), in which the very self-evidence of being able to talk to each other, which is the basis of political participation (Arendt 2016), becomes clear. If, on the one hand, the commonplace can be related to the problem of what Kant describes as the 'form of communicability in general' in relation to the judgement of taste (Kant 1990), the commonplace also comes into view as a means of linguistic 'formalization' or 'technization' within the lifeworld (Blumenberg 1981). A possible vanishing point for considerations of the commonplace is the question of the extent to which current developments in the field of AI-based language models merely represent the consistent further development of a tendency towards mechanization already inherent in human speech (Weatherby 2022) or whether the commonplace has ultimately become a historicizable phenomenon due to the possibilities of automated, machine-based communication in our present.

If the commonplace in this sense literally provokes the formation of theory, then conversely it is precisely the commonplace that reveals the extent to which every observation of linguistic phenomena already changes them through the attention it devotes to them (Paulhan 2009). Therefore, according to the hypothesis, commonplaces set processes of reflection in motion that take shape not only in the mode of theory, but also in the form of literary texts, which can make the reflexivity between observer and observed and the resulting paradoxes thematic without the risk of self-contradiction.

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In the form of lectures, joint readings and discussions, the workshop aims to "teach us to see abysses where there are commonplaces [...]" (Kraus 1987, 373). The texts for joint reading will be made available in advance in a reader. Guests are welcome. Please register at .

Bibliography:

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