Abstracts of Selected Articles, Essays, and Studies.

The Modal Structure of the “Sense of Possibility” in Robert Musil’s Novel "The Man Without Qualities".

The conjunctivus potentialis is not only the conceptual but also the formal key to Robert Musil's conception of the novel, since, as Albrecht Schöne has shown, it permeates the linguistic form, the composition, and the modal structure of the work as a whole. Proceeding from this insight, the essay reconstructs the sense of possibility as a specifically modern disposition. It is grounded in the modern distinction between reality and fiction, which presupposes a level of meta-reflection through which the fictive becomes aware of its own mode of operation, as Dieter Henrich has argued. This reflexivity gives rise to an internal distinction between bound fictivity, embedded within a cosmological or eschatological framework that provides it with an external finality, and open fictivity, which is no longer subject to any such external finalization. In Musil's novel, however, the sense of possibility is further determined by an open fictivity that is intransitive in the sense of Hans Blumenberg's concept of self-preservation and is therefore directed neither toward concrete objects nor toward predetermined ends. From this results an openness to finalization that permits every possible finalization while simultaneously relativizing each as contingent. Contrary to Musil's own account, the sense of possibility is therefore not a utopian but an optimization-logical disposition. Its ontological locus is the abstract possibility-open modal structure that established itself in modernity as the dispositive of permanent surpassing, grounded in the equivalence of reality and fiction. The apparently fragmentary form of the novel corresponds to this modal structure, since the impossibility of completing its plot is the logical consequence of a guiding motif that structurally excludes every definitive conclusion.

The Romanticization of the World in the Face of the Law of Avant-Garde.

The study develops a systematic distinction between the aesthetic constructivism of Romanticism and that of the avant-garde by rejecting the thesis of a functional continuity between the two. Both share the programmatic ambition to overcome the separation between art and life and to constitute a new totality of experience. Yet the structural difference between the two projects reaches deeper, since it is of a modal-ontological nature. The infinity conceived by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis is a connectionist infinity of interconnectedness and intensity that intensifies the finite through reflexive condensation. By contrast, the infinity of the avant-garde is a constructivist infinity of continuation and utopian surpassing, governed by the dialectic of destruction and construction that Helmuth Plessner described as the Law of the Avant-Garde and that aims at the definitive construction of a new totality of experience. The avant-garde project therefore excludes both the openness to possibility characteristic of Romantic irony and the connectionist openness of the Romantic fragment. The central line of argument consequently distinguishes the Romantic poetics of becoming from the avant-garde practice of making. Whereas the poetic logic of Romanticism keeps the aesthetic object open as an ontologically ambiguous object, the instrumental logic of the avant-garde admits no structural ambiguity, since such ambiguity undermines the definitiveness of every utopia. The genuinely anti-Romantic moment of the avant-garde is therefore not historically accidental but substantial. It resides in the uncompromising manner in which the Law of the Avant-Garde, through a total break with the past, enforces a closed modal structure oriented toward a discontinuous future that is entirely incommensurable with the open infinity of Romantic reflection.

The Contingency of Life.

The essay addresses the systematic question of what the formula "the contingency of life" can mean beyond the mere indeterminacy or indeterminability of life. It answers this question from two theoretical perspectives that, independently of one another, problematize the philosophical and political centrality of life in modernity. The first perspective is Helmuth Plessner's historicization of life as the redemptive concept characteristic of an epoch, identifying life as the signifier of a specific cultural formation rather than as an anthropological a priori. From this perspective, the vitalist ontologization of indeterminability, which turns life into the epitome of the unavailable, is criticized as an immanent metaphysics of closure that perpetuates residual elements of salvation history in secular form. Against this conception, Plessner sets the infinity of possible determinations of life. The second perspective is Michel Foucault's concept of biopower. With the entry of life into history, life becomes the object of political technologies that enhance, normalize, and regulate it. Crucially, resistance to this power is directed toward the very same object: life as the totality of human needs, capacities, and possibilities. Bringing these two perspectives together reveals the common modal-ontological foundation of the epochal centrality of life, namely the ambiguity of contingency as oscillating between availability and unavailability. The contingency of life therefore does not designate the possibility of placing life itself entirely at our disposal, but rather the loss of its prereflective self-evidence and its double conceptualization either as the residual domain of the unavailable or as an object of disposition. The resulting absolutism of life has two poles: the vitalist pole of indeterminability and the biotechnological pole of determinability. These are not opposites but complementary manifestations of the same constellation. Against this absolutism, the concept of identity emerges as the expression of resistance and as the contemporary redemptive word.

The Visual End of the Signifier: On Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV".

The essay interprets Barnett Newman's monumental painting as the ultimate endpoint of abstract painting. It argues that Newman finally emancipates color from its instrumental function, since it no longer serves to represent an external reality, a symbolic system, or a metaphysical order. Even in its most radical forms, such as Cubism or the work of Piet Mondrian, classical European modernism continued to seek the representation of general structural principles of the world or harmonious systems of order. By contrast, Abstract Expressionism breaks decisively with the representational function to which classical modernist abstraction still remained committed. This second-order abstraction rejects coherent composition in favor of performative a-significance. The painting no longer conveys an overarching meaning but foregrounds the immediate sensory presence of color and material themselves. In this radical departure from representation—which still unfolds against the receding horizon of a distinctly European melancholy, always searching for a stabilizing principle of order—a new relation to the world emerges beyond the European tradition of representation. The work of art becomes a space of experience of absolute immanence, whose performative presence constitutes the visual aesthetic expression of a secularized and globalized modernity.

Modern Hopes: Individual Expectations in the Age of Unlimited Possibilities.

The essay takes its point of departure from Kant's third fundamental question: "What may I hope?" Although hope appears here as an anthropological category, its orientation toward happiness and morality also embeds it within the moral horizon of a particular society. This dual character of hope provides the starting point for a historical and systematic analysis of its modern structure. The process that Reinhart Koselleck described as the widening gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation reorients thought and action toward fictionally disclosed possibilities of an open future. Against this background, the French Revolution inaugurates a new temporal structure in which the discontinuity between origin and future becomes a constitutive feature of social life. At the same time, the hope of "living oneself," as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it, becomes the normatively charged formula of modern expectations of self-unfolding. The normalization of this hope within the individualized mass-democratic middle-class society of the late twentieth century corresponds to a form of anticipatory socialization that renders an open-ended conduct of life and the principled openness of the horizon of possibilities self-evident features of a mode of social integration grounded in social mobility. Within this constellation, however, modern hope undergoes a fundamental transformation. The imperative of permanent status work and the dominance of an abstract rationality of optimization transform the hope for self-unfolding into a permanent competition between reality and possibility. Under these conditions, the modern hope of living oneself divides into two opposing forms: on the one hand, intransitive self-unfolding within the horizon of an open horizon of possibilities; on the other hand, resistance to this abstraction through the medium of concrete identities. From this perspective, contemporary identity politics emerge as the concrete, transitive counter-form to the abstract openness to possibility that characterizes the relation to the self in modern middle-class society.

The Legitimacy of the Culture of Contingency.

This reply to Axel T. Paul's critique of Michael Makropoulos's theory of the culture of contingency restates its central arguments. Paul distinguishes four domain-specific forms of contingency between the Late Paleolithic and the present: the contingency of social action, political order, external nature, and, finally, human nature. The reply first argues that this typology rests on a systematic reduction of the concept of contingency. It brackets the reflexive deep structure of the modern consciousness of contingency and replaces it with a taxonomy of operative positings of contingency. As a result, the concept loses its analytical precision. Following Hans Blumenberg's concept of the culture of contingency, the essay argues that modernity constitutes not a domain-specific but a comprehensive, modal-ontologically grounded relation to reality: the conviction that what is need not be. This relation is not confined to particular spheres but characterizes the modern relation to the world as a whole. This also shifts the problem of legitimacy that Paul raises through his notion of the usurpations of the culture of contingency, since the very concept of usurpation already presupposes its illegitimacy. Drawing on Helmuth Plessner's analysis of the intransitive logic of surpassing characteristic of technology and on Blumenberg's concept of self-preservation, the essay therefore specifies the core of the issue: modern rationality is grounded in open-ended processes and abstract dispositions to act that, in principle, admit of no definitive finalization. Precisely for this reason, their limits cannot be ontologically presupposed but must be justified through arguments about the ends and consequences of concrete possibilities. The question of their legitimacy therefore cannot be answered in a partial way; it leads directly to the debate on the legitimacy of modernity.

Boundary, Horizon, and Modern Society.

The essay develops two fundamental modalities through which societies project their scope and define their contours. Boundary and horizon constitute complementary yet ontologically opposed paradigms of closure. Boundaries delimit domains of reality and thereby imply a real outside that makes their transgression possible; horizons open domains of possibility and constitute an imaginary inside that can be extended indefinitely but never left. This ontological difference, still largely concealed in antiquity and the Middle Ages, emerges with the fundamental transformation of space in early modernity. The territorialization of the boundary and the simultaneous deterritorialization of the horizon open a potentially infinite horizon of possibility from which the constructivist relation to the world of European modernity arises, manifesting itself technologically as the mastery of nature, aesthetically as the autonomy of art, and socially as the malleability of society. Of particular significance is the distinction between two modes of fictivation, corresponding to two different and ultimately opposed modal-ontological paradigms: utopia and optimization. Utopia signifies the final closure of the horizon of possibility in an ideal and unsurpassable state; optimization, by contrast, denotes the situationally extrapolated, in principle unceasing, and open-ended a-signifying surpassing of every achieved state. Nineteenth-century bourgeois society transformed the shifting horizon into the emblem of a social dynamic in which surpassing replaced transgression and was historicized as the open-ended telos of progress. By the late twentieth century, the optimization society had habitualized this dynamic through the socializing infrastructures of self-unfolding, conditioning individuals for an open-ended conduct of life while making social mobility its structural norm. Contemporary cultural and identity-political boundary formations are therefore to be understood as lines of resistance against the social absolutism of possibility and the structural imperative of optimization. They do not represent a return to external boundaries but attempts at re-differentiation, re-concretization, and re-specification against a social order that has made the normalization of contingency its abstract principle of integration.

Socialization in the Infinite. Simmel’s Modernity.

This essay reconstructs Georg Simmel's sociology of modernity as one of the earliest and most systematic analyses of a society constituted through openness to possibility. In doing so, it contrasts Simmel's conception of an irreducibly open social order with Émile Durkheim's diagnosis of anomie. Whereas Durkheim interprets the dissolution of stable normative structures primarily as a pathological loss of social integration, Simmel understands the incompletability of modern society as the very condition of its productivity. Modern society is therefore not held together despite its openness to possibility, but through it. Competition is understood not merely as an economic mechanism but as the elementary social form through which an individualized society coordinates action without dissolving individual freedom into collective unity. From this perspective, Simmel's sociology anticipates a conception of modernity whose constitutive principle is neither substantive order nor normative consensus but the social organization of openness to possibility. His analyses of competition, money, metropolitan existence, and the individual are all rooted in this common modal structure. Rather than treating contingency as a deficit to be overcome, they reveal how modern society institutionalizes openness, mobility, and differentiation as enduring conditions of social integration. Against this background, Simmel emerges not simply as a diagnostician of modern culture but as a theorist of the productive incompletability of modern society. His sociology describes the social conditions under which openness to possibility becomes a stable form of collective life. In this respect, it provides one of the sociological foundations for a historical-systematic theory of modernity understood as a culture of contingency.

Plessner's Concept of Possibility.

This essay reconstructs Helmuth Plessner's philosophical anthropology as one of the most far-reaching conceptions of human possibility in twentieth-century thought. At its centre lies an understanding of possibility that resists every attempt to reduce modern contingency either to the plurality of existing alternatives or to an unrestricted openness of potentiality. Instead, Plessner's concept of possibility encompasses both the situational plurality of given options and the fictive capacity to transcend every existing horizon of possibility. Read in this way, his anthropology articulates the modal structure that distinguishes the modern awareness of contingency from its ancient counterpart. This interpretation is inseparable from Plessner's concept of culture. The essay argues that the irreducible enmity between culture and religion is not directed against particular religious traditions but expresses the categorical incompatibility of two fundamentally different relations to the world. Whereas religion seeks ultimate foundations and definitive meaning, culture remains constitutively open to the continual transformation of meaning and possibility. Plessner's deliberately emphatic formulation of an "absolute enmity" therefore designates not a historical conflict but the structural impossibility of reconciling a culture of contingency with every claim to final certainty. Within this framework, spirit emerges neither as a metaphysical substance nor as a faculty of theoretical cognition. Rather, it denotes the specifically human capacity to transform reality by continually opening new horizons of possibility. In this respect, Plessner's anthropology converges with Robert Musil's sense of possibility and Paul Valéry's conception of spirit as an irreducibly productive power of transformation. Spirit is not oriented towards preserving established realities but towards surpassing them. It is the anthropological principle through which the fictive dimension of modern contingency becomes possible. Seen from this perspective, Plessner's philosophical anthropology reaches far beyond the boundaries of its own discipline. It provides one of the anthropological foundations for a theory of modernity understood as a culture of contingency: a culture whose constitutive openness to possibility neither dissolves into arbitrariness nor culminates in definitive orders, but continuously generates new relations to the self and the world.

Blumenberg's Ontology of the Aesthetic Object.

This essay reconstructs Hans Blumenberg's ontology of the aesthetic object as one of the most rigorous philosophical attempts to establish the autonomy of aesthetic experience within modernity. Rather than interpreting the aesthetic object as a representation of reality or as an instrument of communication, Blumenberg conceives it as an irreducibly ambiguous phenomenon whose meaning can never be exhausted by conceptual determination. Its constitutive ambiguity is therefore not a deficiency of cognition but the very condition of aesthetic experience. The essay argues that this conception of the aesthetic continues Paul Valéry's reflections on poetic language while fundamentally departing from those theories of aesthetic autonomy that ultimately derive the legitimacy of art from its political or social function. Ambiguity does not signify indeterminacy awaiting conceptual clarification, nor does aesthetic autonomy acquire its significance through critique or resistance. Rather, poetic language constitutes a distinctive mode of world-disclosure whose legitimacy is intrinsic to aesthetic experience itself. Blumenberg's ontology therefore establishes the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere situated alongside theoretical cognition and technical action without being reducible to either. Its ambiguity is neither a deficiency nor a strategy of political opposition, but the positive condition of a specifically aesthetic relation to the world. The essay rejects those conceptions that reduce the aesthetic to beauty, ornament, entertainment, or a merely secondary cultural phenomenon. Instead, it reconstructs aesthetic experience as an autonomous mode of world-disclosure and a distinct form of cognition whose legitimacy cannot be derived from theoretical truth, technical utility, or political function. In this perspective, aesthetic experience is neither the representation of an already existing world nor the contemplation of beauty. It is a distinct mode of world-disclosure and world-opening. Its ambiguity does not merely reveal different meanings within reality; it opens possible worlds that transcend existing horizons of possibility. In this respect, Blumenberg's ontology converges with Paul Valéry's conception of spirit and Robert Musil's sense of possibility. Together, they describe the specifically modern capacity to transform not only reality but the horizons within which reality itself can be imagined.

Historical Semantics and the Positivity of Contingency. Modernity-Theoretical Motifs in Reinhart Koselleck.

The essay reconstructs Reinhart Koselleck's historical semantics as a highly reflexive theory of modernity whose significance extends far beyond conceptual history. Against approaches that explain modernity primarily in terms of multiple modernities, it argues that the decisive question is not the plurality of historical modernities but the transformation of the modal structure through which reality and possibility become historically related. The point of departure is a critical discussion of systems theory, whose ontologization of contingency deprives it of its historical specificity. In contrast, contingency is understood as a historically variable relation between reality and possibility, structured by the irreducible ambivalence between what is available to action and what remains unavailable to it. Following Koselleck's account of the widening gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation since the early modern period, the essay argues that modern contingency no longer concerns merely individual events but the horizon of possible events itself. The decisive innovation of modernity therefore lies in the fictionalization of the horizon of possibility, through which expectations become progressively detached from accumulated experience and acquire a genuinely constructive character. This transformation gives rise to the characteristic structures of modernity: the acceleration of historical time, the permanent openness of the future, and the normalization of crisis as an enduring condition. The essay then contrasts this open modal structure with the attempts characteristic of Classical Modernity to overcome contingency through comprehensive political, aesthetic, and technological projects of sovereignty. Finally, it situates Koselleck's historical semantics between modernist and postmodern conceptions of modernity. Rather than celebrating contingency or lamenting it, historical semantics reveals its positivity by demonstrating the irreducible reality-generating force of historically open possibility. In this respect, it offers an analytical perspective that transcends the conventional opposition between modernity and postmodernity.

Crisis and Contingency. Two Categories of the Discourse of Classical Modernity. (English Text)

The essay reconstructs the discourse of crisis in Classical Modernity as the historical conceptualization of a more fundamental experience of contingency. Rather than treating the numerous diagnoses of crisis as responses to particular historical circumstances alone, it argues that they articulate a transformation in the relation between reality and possibility for which the concept of contingency provides the more precise analytical framework. The crisis discourse of Classical Modernity thus appears not simply as a reaction to social, political, or cultural upheaval, but as the semantic expression of a historically unprecedented modal structure. Against historical narratives that oppose Classical Modernity and postmodernity as successive epochs, as well as political interpretations that identify them with competing ideological projects, the essay reconstructs their relationship as a systematic constellation of different conceptualizations of the same transformation. What distinguishes these conceptualizations is not the experience to which they respond, but the way in which they interpret and organize it. Whereas Classical Modernity generally seeks to overcome the openness of possibility through comprehensive orders of meaning, postmodern theories tend to affirm plurality as the appropriate response to the same condition. Both, however, remain situated within the horizon opened by the modern transformation of the relation between reality and possibility. The essay reconstructs this transformation through a deliberately heterogeneous constellation of authors, including Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Hermann Heller, Robert Musil, Karl Mannheim, and Helmuth Plessner. Their juxtaposition demonstrates that the decisive distinctions within the discourse of modernity do not coincide with established political or ideological divisions. Rather, despite their fundamentally different political commitments, these authors all seek to conceptualize the same transformation of the relation between reality and possibility. Their disagreements concern neither the existence nor the significance of this transformation, but its conceptualization and the philosophical, political, aesthetic, or sociological conclusions to be drawn from it. Their diverse vocabularies of crisis, alienation, sovereignty, possibility, objectivity, or historical consciousness therefore constitute different semantic articulations of a shared modal experience rather than competing descriptions of different historical realities. The essay concludes that the concept of contingency does not replace the concept of crisis but reconstructs its systematic foundation. Crisis is the historical language through which Classical Modernity interpreted the dissolution of ontologically guaranteed orders; contingency designates the modal structure that made this experience historically possible in the first place. Read from this perspective, the discourse of crisis becomes neither an outdated stage in the history of modernity nor a merely ideological reaction against it, but one of the most elaborate attempts to comprehend the cultural consequences of a world in which reality itself had become fundamentally open to possibility. The concept of contingency thus serves not as an alternative historical category but as a systematic perspective from which the implicit modal structures underlying the discourse of crisis become analytically visible.

Organized Creativity. Reflections on the "Aestheticization of the Social".

During the last decades of the twentieth century, Western societies underwent a profound structural transformation. The expansion of higher education, the growing importance of the new middle classes, the transition from industrial production to knowledge- and service-based economies, and the increasing significance of project-oriented forms of work established creativity as a general social expectation. Innovation ceased to be confined to science, technology, and the arts. It became the normative horizon of organizations, institutions, educational systems, and individual biographies alike. Against this historical background, the essay reconsiders the influential thesis of an "aestheticization of the social." Rather than interpreting creativity as the diffusion of aesthetic values into non-aesthetic spheres, the essay argues that creativity has become an organizational principle of a society whose institutional stability increasingly depends upon the systematic production of novelty. The emergence of creative industries, design thinking, project work, creative-writing programmes, innovation management, and entrepreneurial models of selfhood therefore does not primarily testify to the cultural triumph of art. It reflects the consolidation of a social order that reproduces itself through the organized expansion of possibilities. The essay consequently shifts the analytical focus from creativity itself to the historical conditions of its institutionalization. Creativity appears not as a timeless anthropological capacity or as the dominant cultural value of late modernity, but as the socially organized form in which the positivity of contingency becomes productive. What contemporary discourse celebrates as creativity is therefore less an aesthetic category than the institutional normalization of fictionalized possibility. The concept of an aestheticization of the social consequently describes an important historical phenomenon but mistakes its systematic foundation. What has become generalized is not aesthetic experience itself but a modal structure in which openness to possibility acquires organizational form. Creativity is therefore neither the opposite of rationalization nor simply its cultural correction. It is one of the principal mechanisms through which a consolidated modernity organizes the permanent production of alternatives and thereby reproduces its own openness.

Artistic Autonomy and Competitive Society. A Reconsideration of the "Economization of the Social".

The diagnosis of an economization of the social emerged alongside the transformation of advanced capitalist societies into competitive middle-class societies. Competition increasingly expanded beyond the economy into education, science, politics, culture, and everyday life. Evaluation, comparison, performance, and continuous self-improvement became the dominant principles of social organization. Within this historical constellation, artistic autonomy appeared increasingly threatened by market rationality, commercialization, and economic instrumentalization. The essay questions this interpretation by reconstructing competition not simply as an economic mechanism but as the characteristic organizational principle of consolidated modernity. Competition no longer regulates markets alone. It structures biographies, institutions, forms of communication, and expectations of individuality. In this respect, the expansion of competition cannot adequately be understood as the colonization of society by the economy. Rather, it expresses the institutional consolidation of a culture in which possibility itself has become the principal medium of social reproduction. This perspective also transforms the understanding of artistic autonomy. Art does not represent a residual sphere outside competition, nor does its autonomy disappear through economic pressures. Rather, artistic autonomy designates a categorically distinct mode of relating to possibility. Whereas competition organizes the continual realization and surpassing of existing possibilities, art explores possibilities that remain irreducible to practical realization, technical functionality, or economic utility. Its autonomy therefore consists neither in social isolation nor in political innocence but in a distinctive form of world-disclosure grounded in the fictionalization of possibility. The essay therefore argues that the concepts of economization and artistic autonomy become misleading whenever they presuppose separate social spheres whose boundaries are subsequently crossed. Both competition and artistic autonomy emerge from the same modern transformation of the relation between reality and possibility, yet they institutionalize this openness in fundamentally different ways. Precisely because of this common origin, artistic autonomy cannot be understood as the aesthetic victim of economic rationality. It represents an independent mode of knowledge that preserves the openness of possibility beyond the imperatives of optimization, comparison, and competitive realization.

The Infrastructural Construction of the "Volksgemeinschaft". Aspects of the Reich Motorway in National Socialist Germany.

This essay examines the Reich motorway not primarily as an engineering achievement or an instrument of economic and military policy, but as a political-aesthetic project. It argues that the motorway was conceived as an infrastructure through which technology, landscape, architecture, mobility, and collective experience were synthesized into a single vision of social order. Rather than merely serving transportation, the motorway became a medium for constructing the Volksgemeinschaft as a total social reality. Against interpretations that reduce National Socialist aesthetics to propaganda or ideological ornament, the essay reconstructs the modal logic of the project itself. It shows that technological construction and aesthetic design were inseparable components of a political rationality that sought to eliminate contingency by organizing reality according to an image of absolute coherence and perfection. In this perspective, the motorway appears as the infrastructural realization of a society in which every element was to be integrated into an aesthetically finalized whole. The essay therefore interprets the National Socialist synthesis of technology and aesthetics not simply as a characteristic of dictatorship, but as a specific response to the modern experience of contingency. It argues that totalitarian modernization was driven by the ambition to transform technical constructability into a definitive order of reality. The technically accelerated and aesthetically finalized project of totalitarian optimization thus amounted to a declaration of war on the imperfection of creation itself. Rather than accepting the openness and incompleteness of reality, it sought to replace them with an aesthetically perfected world whose apparent harmony left no place for contingency, plurality, or the unfinished.

A Myth of Mass-Cultural Urbanity. Potsdamer Platz from the Perspective of Discourse Analysis and Semiology.

This essay reconstructs the changing cultural meanings of Potsdamer Platz from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than treating the site as a historical object with a stable identity, it analyzes it as a semiotic and discursive construction whose significance has continually been redefined through literature, photography, film, journalism, architecture, advertising, and urban planning. The central argument is that Potsdamer Platz became a privileged object of modern myth precisely because it possesses no intrinsic symbolic essence. Unlike historical monuments or architecturally distinctive places, it is characterized by an exceptional openness to projection. Its relative lack of inherent qualities made it available for successive reinterpretations, allowing it to become a screen onto which changing cultural expectations, political imaginations, and aesthetic desires could be projected. From this perspective, the essay develops a broader theory of the aesthetic object. Its significance does not reside in fixed meanings but in its capacity to generate ever new meanings without exhausting itself in any of them. The aesthetic object thus possesses an irreducible ambiguity that distinguishes it from theoretical concepts and technical functions. It opens possible worlds rather than representing a single reality. The myth of Potsdamer Platz therefore reveals a fundamental structure of modern mass culture: the cultural productivity of aesthetic objects arises not despite, but because of their constitutive openness to multiple interpretations. Their apparent indeterminacy is the condition of their enduring symbolic power.