Foucault in the Bush. The Social Life of Post-Structuralist Theory in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg

Abstract This essay seeks to make critical theory an object of ethnographic con-textualization and inquiry through an exploration of the social life of post-structuralist theory in 1980s East Berlin. The 'Prenzlauer Berg Scene' of artists and writers utilized post-structuralism as a distinctive register for defining their social identity and as an analytical and interpretive paradigm for articulating their alienation from the state-crafted language of GDR public culture. The essay discusses how the subversive practice of post-structuralism in the Prenzlauer Berg came at the price of linguistic exclusion and political withdrawal from mainstream GDR society. In conclusion, it is argued that the Prenzlauer Berg case emblematizes the difficulty of politicizing expert theoretical registers since these registers' objective critical 'power' relies upon structures of epistemic inequity that cultivate distinctions between critical experts and naïve practitioners. Keywords: Critical TheoryIntellectualsDissident CommunitiesEast Germany