Temporalities and notions of progress and innovation formed in Western modernity have been instrumentalized to structure developments and ordering things. But past and present transformations are too complex and ambivalent to be adequately explained by monocausal and linear narratives of change. In the course of reflecting time and timing, the key concepts of modernist and economic notions of linear historicity as well as a strict sequentiality of stasis and change have been questioned. The modern conception of History has become just one possible manifestation within a plurality of histories conditioned by socio-cultural particularities. We are no longer interested only in the history of timetables, calendars, time markers or clocks – taking and making linear time and space as human universals – but in post-isms, pre-isms and ana-chronisms, react-ivations and revivals, devolutions, constant flows and nonlinear dynamics – in short, in timing trans/formations in the era of globalization, bio- and necropolitics and asymmetrical power relations. The Winter School 2013 analyses, discusses and challenges both modernist and postmodernist epistemologies as well as scientific paradigms of development and change from a historical, sociological, cultural and philosophical perspective.
Invited guests and the focus of their lecture
Prof. Dr. Rosi Braidotti (Philosophy, University of Utrecht)
Biopower, Necropolitics, Anthropocene, technology and human evolution
PD Dr. Antje Flüchter (History, University of Heidelberg)
Pre-modern and modern European-Indian encounter and perception, transformations of knowledge archives, non-linearity, modern narratives of linearity
PD Dr. Stefan Herbrechter (Cultural Theory, University of Coventry)
Postisms, postmodern theory, critical posthumanism, constructions of the future
PD Dr. Michael Kempe (History, Leibniz-Forschungsstelle Hannover)
Normative timing, spirality of time, possible and parallel worlds, chance, apocalypse, fall and decline, allochrony and repetition of time
