Jenseits des Illustrativen

English summary: In multidisciplinary approaches and case studies, this volume combines two central fields of recent historical research from antiquity to the twentieth century: the own momentum of visual media and political communication beyond a narrowly institutional notion. The political is thought to be generally characterised by the striving for broad recognition of resources of authority. Political communication, therefore, revolves around regulatory provisions, rules of...
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English summary: In multidisciplinary approaches and case studies, this volume combines two central fields of recent historical research from antiquity to the twentieth century: the own momentum of visual media and political communication beyond a narrowly institutional notion. The political is thought to be generally characterised by the striving for broad recognition of resources of authority. Political communication, therefore, revolves around regulatory provisions, rules of interaction and power relations and, above all, their collective acknowledgement. From this perspective, a wide variety of pictorial rhetoric about obligation and liability comes into view. Extending the classical canon of political iconography, it ranges from individual works of art over artefacts distributed by mass media to performative acts as well as mental images and languages. In essence, the volume focuses on the contribution of visual (re-)presentations to such order-keeping and action-enabling discourses. To what extent did and do actors rely on pictorial strategies of plausibilisation for legitimising their claims to normative hegemony? German description: Der Band fuhrt in multidisziplinaren Zugangen und Fallstudien von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert zwei Leitfelder der neueren historischen Forschung zusammen: das Eigengewicht visueller Medien und politische Kommunikation jenseits institutioneller Begriffsverengungen. Sofern das Politische durch das Streben nach kollektiver Geltung von Autoritatsressourcen gekennzeichnet ist, ruckt ein breites Spektrum bildlicher Verbindlichkeitsrhetorik uber die klassische politische Ikonographie hinaus in den Fokus. Im Kern richtet sich das Augenmerk auf den Beitrag visueller (Re-)Prasentationen zu solchen ordnungsstiftenden und handlungsermachtigenden Diskursen. Inwieweit setz(t)en Akteure auf piktorale Plausibilisierungsstrategien, um ihre normativen Hegemonieanspruche zu legitimieren?