Lars Koch

This article aims to introduce the concept of „Invecticity“ as a new perspective for social and cultural studies. It understands phenomena of insult and debasement, of humiliation and exposure as – cross-cultural and epoch-spanning – basic operations of societal communication. Due to their disruptive, stabilising or dynamising effects on social order, invective communication have the potential to unite and shape societies. This article subsumes such phenomena under the term Invectivity. The term includes all aspects of communication (either verbal or non-verbal, oral or written, gestural or graphic) that are used to degrade, to hurt or to marginalize others. Manifestations and functions of the Invective are not systemised under strict patterns but medially, politically, socially and aesthetically contextualized depending on the diverse historical contexts and complex constellations they occur in. Thus, they can only be properly understood as performative events which develop through the interaction of ascription, response and follow-up communication as well as by means of the social, discursive and media conditions in which they arise.

This article understands George Orwell’s 1984, Gerd Ruge’s Metropol, and Ralf Rothmann’s Hotel der Schlaflosen as literary investigations of the emotional complexes of the renegade in the context of Stalinism. All three texts, it is argued, bring into focus different aspects of an affect space constituted by a crisis in the epistemology of enmity and a resulting hermeneutics of suspicion. While Orwell is primarily concerned with the mass psychological effects of hate, Ruge is interested in the ubiquity of fear among those who must fear being declared renegades. Rothmann’s short story, in contrast, portrays the subjectivity of an executioner who is capable of mass murder because he operates with absolute moral indifference.

'Heimat' is booming to a degree that can rightly be called a renaissance. Noticeable is not only the variety of claims to "readjust" and "reframe" the concept, but its role within a conservative attempt to recalibrate societal conditions as well as the circumstances of the humanities and cultural studies. The 'not-newness' of the expression, thus, forms the core of an attitude of enlightenment and rehabilitation which attempts to rearticulate 'Heimat' in order to affirm a sense of 'natural' belonging, whether on a local, regional or global scale. In view of a global debate about experiences of precarity and insecurity towards the future, the return to strate-gies of naturalization and embeddedness may not be all too surprising, but from a cultural studies perspective it is no less unsettling. It is by no means a harmless reactivation of tradi-tion(s), but unveils a will to naturalization whose normative force must not be underestimated. The current political climate calls for the cultural studies to observe and describe 'Heimat' using methods and media to analyze and account for its normative implications. However, this examination can only show the desired effects if it makes transparent its own conditions and strategies. This special issue on "precarious Heimat" assembles disruptions of 'natural' belonging and inquires after the techniques, the places, the discourses and actors of this particular way of producing human-nature-relationships and reality. In their opening essay, Solvejg Nitzke and Lars Koch discuss the objectives and failures of 'Heimat' as a device of renormali-zation and disruption management, thus opening the floor for a collection of 'Heimat'-analyses, which spans dinosaurs, primordial humans and extraterrestrial beings; covers Germany, Austria, France, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Senegal and the United States of America and even a view of the whole Earth.