Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and social construction of temporality

Gumbrecht: “We have to rethink political organization”

Michał Sutowski speaks with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht - philosopher and literary theorist, Professor at Stanford University published here in Political Critique 23 January 2015

uses term history for old mode of perception:

'I try to historicize History, admitting that it is still around, but no longer as the dominant way under which we think about time and make our experience with regards to time.'

'I have a different understanding of the end of history than my Stanford colleague, Fukuyama. Certainly, there is no such thing as a literal end of history: there will always be transformations, there will always be new events, unexpected events – in that sense, history continues. What differs is the regime d’histoire, the chronotope. History – in the Hegelian sense – was the chronotope of the 19th c. and most of the 20th c. It can be characterized by three features. First, you progressively leave the past behind, and the further behind you leave it, the less its orientational power matters. Second, the future is an open horizon of possibilities from which you can choose. Third, between the past and the future the present has shrunk to an imperceptibly short moment. Such a construction of time comes from the 18th c. and was so heavily institutionalized throughout the 19th and 20th century that people thought: “this is time in and by itself”'.

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Production of Presence

All the World's Futures

Okwui Enwezor curating  56th Venice International Art Biennale 2015:  tackling global politics and disorder, and the disconnect between how things are and how they appear.

copied from AN
The Nigerian-born international writer and curator promises to look back over the 120-year history of the Biennale as a parable from which to consider historical narratives and counter-narratives. Taking on an at once global and fragmented worldview, the exhibition aims to reflect on the disconnect between how things are and how they appear.

Asking ‘How can the current disquiet of our time be properly grasped, made comprehensible, examined, and articulated?’, Enwezor has initiated a multi-layered approach to the exhibition, using three intersecting sub-themes as a way of facilitating multiple perspectives. These are: Liveness: On epic duration; Garden of Disorder; and Capital: A Live Reading

Liveness: On epic duration will consider the whole exhibition as a stage-set for changing narratives. With this, Enwezor is positioning All the World’s Futures as “a program of events that can be experienced at the intersection of liveness and display.”

Garden of Disorder proposes a simultaneously irreverent and deeply serious reappraisal of the current geo-political climate. Inspired by its location within the Giardini – the enclosed exhibition garden famed for its imposing national pavilions that through the microcosm of artistic diplomacy play out a form of world politics – artists are invited to create new work taking inspiration from the historical concept of the ‘garden’ as a paradisiacal site for tranquility, pleasure, order and purity.

A live reading of the four volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital will occur daily over the seven months of the Biennale, gradually evolving into a series of work songs, librettos, script readings, discussions and film screenings. Artists, theorists, students, performers and members of the public will be invited to present their concepts and ideas around Capital today.

“Capital is the great drama of our age,” says Enwesor. “Today nothing looms larger in every sphere of experience, from the predations of the political economy to the rapacity of the financial industry. In All the World’s Futures, the aura, effects, affects, and spectres of Capital will be felt in one of the most ambitious explorations of this concept and term.”

Venice Biennale president Paolo Baratta adds: “It is not the first time that an exhibition faces a world filled with uncertainty and turmoil whilst the ‘garden of the world’ appears to us as a “garden of disorder”, and it is also not the first time that faced with a complicated reality, an exhibition responds with the enthusiasm and dynamism evident in the one we are in the throes of organising.”

Links to useful resources

Central Land Council

AIATSIS

'Most culturally sensitive exhibition'

Aboriginal art unfit for Western eyes Indigenous Australia show is one of the most culturally sensitive projects in the British Museum's history 

By Anita Singh, Arts and Entertainment Editor, The Telegraph

10:29PM BST 02 May 2015

Bringing great Australian indigenous works of art into the light at British Museum by Gaye Sculthorpe

Bicornual basket. Mulgrave River region, near Cairns, Queensland, before 1900. British Museum

Indigenous Australia enduring civilisation at the British Museum

Indigenous Australia enduring civilisation

Guardian summary of launch
Jonathan Jones review 21 April 2015

Kungkarangkalpa (detail) Kunmanara Hogan, Tjaruwa Woods,
Yarangka Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Myrtle Pennington.
Tjuntjuntjara Great Victoria Desert Western Australia 2013.

'What is civilisation? Westerners tend to think it has something to do with Greek statues and classical music. No wonder they failed to recognise it when they saw it in the great southern continent that James Cook claimed as a British possession in 1770. The expressions of civilisation that could be clearly seen all over Australia were so different and so unfamiliar that Aboriginal culture was denied to even exist.

No people has been quite so consistently disparaged by Europeans as Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, whose tragic story is movingly told in this thought-provoking exhibition.'

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Blog posts from British Museum here by Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent, Rachael Murphy etal

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Events

French researchers

Aboriginal communities should not be closed ! 
By Martin Préaud, Barbara Glowczewski and 16 French researchers working in Australia - 27 avril 2015

'invasion is not a linear process'

'So just imagine one day getting told that your suburb will « be closed ». That you won’t have access to electricity, water, health care and education for your children any longer, i.e. to the services that every other citizen of the country where you live is entitled to. The reason ? Not a war, as is the case in many places where populations are forced to flee and hide, but the simple fact that the government has decided that you cannot live more than 100 kms away from a town, sharing with others a « lifestyle » in a community deemed « unsustainable and unlikely to attract development opportunities for the future ».' Read full article here