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This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of the 'social' based on Durkheim's philosophy of society is investigated as a 'collective representation'. It is proposed that this origin of the 'social' operates according to the 'spirit of postmodernism' which constitutes a common response to modernity, which later differentiates itself into the currents of sociology and postmodernism.

Starting from the recently translated biography of Max Weber by Joachim Radkau, this essay re-evaluates Weber's 'science of reality' in relation to his personality, the cultural context of the early twentieth century, and the position of Weber's thought in the sociological canon. The argument progresses through sequentially enlarged analyses, which propose that Weber's general style of thinking is a type of dissonant composition that places emphasis on the many relationships between cultural reality and the concepts derived from it, and not as much on its content. The logic of such a compositional approach to reality is based on similar principles found in sound and music, which Weber in fact uses in a more latent as well as more active form, to pursue his aim of a style of thinking as 'aesthetics of dissonance'. The latter is a sort of 'methodological wedge' that pries open the many layers of reality. As such, Weber's 'science of reality' is an early 'classical' example of a recent and much needed call for a social science as the 'art of listening'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]