Zur Reflexivität des Populären und seinen historischen Ermöglichungsbedingungen

In its research program, the CRC 1472 ‘Transformations of the Popular’ has argued that “the long conceptual and problematic history before 1950 should be conceived as a prefigurational space of the popular” (Döring et al. 2021: 19). In this working paper, our interdisciplinary group of scholars addresses the question of how the historical dimensions of the transformations of the popular were already evident before the transformation stage around 1950. We propose to better understand the corresponding observations not as ‘prefigurations’, but as enabling conditions for the transformations of the popular. The plausibility of these assumptions is illustrated by examples from the projects of the Collaborative Research Centre, which explore the phenomena of pop, popularization, and populism not only from the mid-20th century but already from around 1800.