January 2025

Conspiracy theories have received attention in public debates and research. What has not been explored and theorized is their production as a collaborative social process, and especially their complex social functions in different communicative contexts - everyday interactions, social media conversations, party politics, political protest communication, and others. This presentation outlines this gap and proposes to fill it by shifting the focus from believing in conspiracy theories to the problem of doing conspiracy theories. This perspective has the potential to improve our understanding of the current conjuncture of conspiracy theorizing as a conjuncture of freewheeling (empty) antagonism, and thus to prove insightful for understanding the production of contentious political knowledge more generally.

Kent Nagano will discuss his time as General Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera and the Philharmonic State Orchestra with musicologist Holger Noltze and author Inge Kloepfer. They will examine the current role of opera in democratic society and how it can bring people together, both as an institution and through its art.

The program will also feature music by Ernst Krenek, a composer known for addressing political themes in his works. His one-act opera The Dictator (1926), which depicts a power-hungry ruler who starts a war, explores social issues.

Additionally, Krenek contributed music for the reopening of the Hamburg State Opera after World War II, including his opera Pallas Athene weeps, written during his exile in the United States. This work serves as a commentary on the struggle for democracy.

The event is organized in cooperation with the Hamburg State Opera and the Opera and Democracy series of the Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles. It is curated by Thomas Mann Fellow Kai Hinrich Müller and has been hosted at various venues since January 2024.