We have selected Du Contrat Social (On the Social Contract) as our annual theme for the academic year 2020/21. In this key work of the Enlightenment, published in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained the development of modern democracy based on the argument that all power must aim for the common good and certainly not for God’s grace.
More than 250 years later, we are taking this work as the starting point for our deliberations. The rules by which we organise our world at present are formulated explicitly in contracts or implicitly in social agreements. Contracts comprise written and oral agreements, as well astraffic regulations and all IT protocols, and also include complex ethical and political agreements. Implicit understandings, on the other hand, organise the ways we live together – such as forms of relationships, love, or rules of behaviour among friends or in families.
These agreements are shaped by cultural codes and subject to continuous socio-political negotiation processes. The common good, a term much used by the emerging bourgeoisie in the 19th century, has yielded in the 21st century to a great extent to the term philanthropy, and is a factor in the current political division of power. Against the background of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social, we aim to examine the current discourses sketched out above in micro and macro studies.
CDS empowers students by communicating precise content and methods in the following subject groups: Artistic Strategies, Science and Technology, and Politics and Economics. In the cooperative Cross-Disciplinary Capabilities teaching format, students link their knowledge, experiment, analyse and formulate new contracts. Students apply the content theoretically and practically in cross-disciplinary annual projects.
At the Angewandte Festival CDS students show excerpts from the annual projects as well as The Rousseau Fan(atic)zine, a collective installation and publication developed around the annual theme.
A festive table takes up the whole room. On the table is all that a Grande Fête needs. The space is dedicated to being together, to sharing, to touching and feeling a diversity. The space is dedicated to our research, to the material we have collected. It is filled with our ideas, our desires, dreams, jokes. We remember our favorite poems and recite our favorite lyrics. The Rousseau fan(atic)zine is a proposal of cross-disciplinary practice and a common language.