An international conference organized by the University of California, Santa Cruz, Presidential Chair's Research Group in the Philosophy and Culture of Time, Modernist and Avant-Garde Studies, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, and Central European University, Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies, Budapest.
The study of culture, society, and history has to confront the crucial role of temporality. The methodologies of the various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences are strongly affected by the ways in which time is conceptualized and incorporated into (inter)cultural knowledge. The conference will explore these issues in relation to artistic, media, historical, and political cultures, and will consider the role of time in aesthetic, literary, ethnographic, social, historical, political theory.
Emphasis will be laid on the material embodiment of time in objects, practices, and relational structures, the role of technologies in shaping time, the human experience of time.
A collective volume in English is envisaged on the basis of the conference, to be published in 2004 by CEU Press.
Friday, November 28
10:00-10:30 Opening Remarks: Sorin Antohi (CEU), Tyrus Miller (UCSC)
10:30-12:00 Session 1: Time and Cultural Politics
Chair: Deanna Shemek
Lisa Rofel (UCSC): Hetero-Temporalities of Post-Socialism
Richard Terdiman (UCSC): Taking Time: Temporal Representation and Cultural Politics
12:00-13:30 Lunch
13:30-15:30 Session 2: Making Pasts Present
Chair: Margaret Brose
Karen Bassi (UCSC): Zeus' Stone: Objects, Time and the Effect of the Fictional
Jonathan Beecher (UCSC): Fourier and the Saint-Simonians on the Shape of History
Jürgen Straub (TU Chemnitz/KWI): Time, Trauma, History
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-18:00 Session 3: Ontotheologies of History
Chair: Jörn Rüsen
László Kontler (CEU): Time and Progress -- Time As Progress. Enlightenment Perceptions
Aziz Al-Azmeh (CEU): God's Chronography and Dissipative Time: Vaticinium ex eventu in Classical and Medieval Muslim Apocalyptic Traditions
Sorin Antohi (CEU): Time in Ethnic Ontologies
18:00-19:00 Reception
Saturday, November 29
10:00-12:00 Session 4: Figuring Time: Tropes, Images, Narratives Chair: Tyrus Miller
Hayden White (UCSC/Stanford): Symbols and Allegories of Time
Jörn Rüsen (KWI): The Culture of Time. Towards a Universal Typology of Interpreting Historical Change
David Hoy (UCSC): The Time of Our Lives
12:00-13:30 Lunch
13:30-15:30 Session 5: Changing Eternities
Chair: Hayden White
Wai-Chee Dimock (Yale University): Deep Time, World Feminism
Tyrus Miller (UCSC): Eternity No More: Benjamin and the Eternal Return
Catalin Partenie (University of Bucharest): Plato on Time and Eternity
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-18:00 Session 6: From Natural to Techno-Scientific Time
Chair: Sorin Antohi
Britta Duelke (Frankfurt University): Quotations from a Polychronic Past: Dealing With Temporality in an Australian Aboriginal Community
Harald Welzer (KWI): The Social Genesis of Time in Early Ontogeny
Yehuda Elkana (CEU): The Contextuality of Time
18:00-18:30 Concluding Remarks: Sorin Antohi, Tyrus Miller