How are statements and attitudes communicated to the public today? What role do images, films, videos, visual productions, performances and the visual arts in general play in this? What repertoire of artistic devices, visual motifs, modalities of invocation, patterns and framings, narratives are used? How has this répertoire evolved over different times and spaces and how has it been challenged, transformed and repeatedly reinvented?
In this project I deal with such questions by exploring the iconology and theorisation of a central invocation and showing figure that is used to address the audience: Everybodies. ‘Everybody’ refers to a type of figure used in films and photography, but also in political popularisation processes and advertising or in the internet, to appeal to “all of us” and to testify to the truth or reality of what is portrayed.
In this project I aim to draw a cultural-historical icononology of the figure of everybody (which is also the nobody, the common man, the common women, the girl next door) with a particular focus on its more recent history. I am locating exemplary figures of the everybody in a longer tradition of political-democratic figures of popularisation that began with the change towards potential republican or democratic political systems in the 18th and 19th centuries. Finally I am critically and comparatively discussing current philosophical conceptualisations of the everybody as a figure of thought for the diagnosis of the present (for example in the work by René Girard, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler or Michel de Certeau) as they appear in relation to the examples of visual culture being studied.
This way I am analysing the mediating, socialising and mobilising role the figure of the everybody exercises in a contemporary context, marked by increasing mobile, plural and often transitory group-building processes, by a celebration of ‘individual initiative’ and a pronounced scepticism vis à vis the universal.
For first project results, please see the following books/ articles (selection):
Anna Schober, Von Engeln und Taxifahrern: eine Ikonologie von Botenfiguren. In: J. Probst (ed.): Politische lkonologie. Bildkritik nach Martin Warnke. Berlin: Reimer Verlag 2022, 215–233
Anna Schober, Mediators of Public Resonance: Cinematic Reflections on the Role of Iconic Figures of the’Everybody’ in Populist Political Processes. In: Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 24 (2), Helsinki University Press 2021, 92–109 (DOI https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.321)
Anna Schober (ed.), Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts: Attraction Images, London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Advances in Arts and Visual Studie) 2019
Anna Schober, „Particular faces with universal appeal: A genealogy and typology of everybodies”. In: The same (ed.), Popularisation and Populism through the Visual Arts: Attraction Images, London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Advances in Arts and Visual Studies) 2019, S. 59-79
Anna Schober, „Introduction“. In: The same (ed.), Popularisation and Populism through the Visual Arts: Attraction Images, London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Advances in Arts and Visual Studies) 2019, S. 1-17
Anna Schober, „Un uomo di strada diventa un leader populista: Arriva John Doe (Capra 1941) come riflessione cinematografica sul ruolo degli ‘uomini qualunque’ nei processi politici“. In: Cinema e Storia, No. 1/ 2019, Sonderheft Cinema e populismo. Forme, immaginari e genealogie condivise, 57–74
Anna Schober, „Everybody. Figuren ‚wie Sie und ich‘ und ihr Verhältnis zum Publikum in historischem und medialem Umbruch. In: Jörn Ahrens, York Kautt and Lutz Hieber (eds.), Kampf um Images, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2014, 241–270
