Image Worlds Aesthetic Experience and the Problem of Hermeneutics in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Starting with a reflection on the relation between semiotics and hermeneutics, the author in “Image Worlds: Aesthetic Experience and the Problem of Hermeneutics in Social Sciences” votes for a phenomenology of the image. Between and beyond sign and symbol the image is taken as a reality of its own à la Alfred Schutz and as the fundamental model for any explorative procedure of meaning in a social world. In the second part of the contribution this phenomenology of the image is used for an empirical case study of a media event. The performance of a media star from Eastern Germany in a so called “Ostalgia Show” (a neologism derived from the German word for East and nostalgia) is interpreted as a solution of the cultural crisis after the reunification of the country.