Lecture (German)
July 2, 2010, 7 p.m.

The lecture interrogates Diderot’s metaphor of the Fourth Wall. Yet rather than adopting a theater historian’s perspective, it considers the Fourth Wall as a figure of reflection in cultural history that would seem to lend itself to an examination of the relationship between the public and private spheres and its historical transformations.
The Fourth Wall was originally conceived as a medium of the constitution of the subject. In an industrialized modern age that effaces individuality, however, it tends to become an instrument of blinding spectacle that fully unfolds its immersive power in mainstream cinema, the dominant medium of the twentieth century.
The artistic practices the lecture discusses aim to emancipate and activate the spectator—to recover or uncover the distances that have been inserted, the perspectives that have been obstructed, in order to open up new leeway for creative engagement. These are gestures that destroy and interfere; taken together, they form the arsenal of an interventionist response to an aesthetic crisis.

 
Christian Schulte
Cultural studies scholar. Professor at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media studies, University of Vienna. Taught at the universities of Osnabrück, Bremen, Berlin (FU) and Potsdam; has worked as a freelance journalist for press and radio, as an editor at the DCTP/Development Company for Television Program and as media scholar at the ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Numerous publications, including: Kluges Fernsehen. Alexander Kluges Kulturmagazine (2002), ed. with Winfried Siebers; Ursprung ist das Ziel. Walter Benjamin über Karl Kraus (2003); Der Text ist der Coyote. Heiner Müller Bestandsaufnahme, (2004), ed. with Brigitte Maria Mayer; Walter Benjamins Medientheorie (2005); Vlado Kristl. Die Zerstörung der Systeme (2010).