Chronopolitics: Time of Politics, Politics of Time, Politicized Time

Begin: Thursday, 16 September 2021, 16 h (Central European Summer Time, UTC +2)
Organized by:
Tobias Becker, Christina Brauner, Fernando Esposito
in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London, ZZF Potsdam, Leibniz Research Alliance "Value of the Past" and the Arbeitskreis Geschichte + Theorie

Funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung.
The conference is in English.

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its importance is frequently overlooked: politics rely on time, timelines and timing; time can be an instrument and also a subject of politics. Clock time, summertime, calendars, working hours and leisure time impact everyday orders of time. Political actors use time as a resource as well as to legitimize or delegitimize policies and politics, for instance, when differentiating between conservatives and progressives or when constructing “primitives” existing outside of (modern) time as objects of civilizing missions, development aid and modernizing projects. More generally, politics aims at creating futures in the present—or at preventing them from being created. The “politics of time” is strongly connected to the question, how social change is understood and managed.

The international, interdisciplinary conference “Chronopolitics: Time of Politics, Politics of Time, Politicized Time” engages with exactly these issues and interrelations. It aims to systematize debates about chronopolitics, temporality and historicity and to bring together researchers working on these subjects. The emphasis on chronopolitics also connects traditional fields of historical inquiry—politics, society, economy—with the history of temporalities, showing, in this way, that it has relevance outside of its immediate subject. The conference also wants to stimulate reflections how historiography and related disciplines are themselves producers of “characteristic images of history and temporal order” (Charles Maier). Neither time nor history are ahistorical givens but are changeable and have their own histories and are thus in need of historical investigation.

The first panel “Synchronicity. The Simplification and Coordination of Time” looks at the construction of non-synchronicities or temporalities of difference, while the second, “(Post)Colonial Temporalities, or: Pluritemporality”, explores conflicts between colonial and Western temporal regimes and scrutinizes eurocentrism as chronocentrism. The third panel, “Ideological Temporalities from Communist to ‘Neoliberal’”, studies the transformation of ideological temporalities in the last third of the twentieth century focussing on (post-)communist and “neoliberal” temporalities. The fourth panel, “A Tale of Many Historicities”, focusses on historicity as a specific form of temporality. It takes up the critique of a history in the singular, closely entangled with teleological narratives of modernisation and the call for pluritemporal histories.

PROGRAM

All times given in Central European Summer Time (UTC +2).

THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2021
16.00-16.15 h
Christina von Hodenberg / Martin Sabrow: Welcome
16.15-16.30 h
Tobias Becker, Christina Brauner, Fernando Esposito: Introduction
16.30-17.00 h Break

Keynote I
Chair: Kathleen Davis
17.00-18.30 h
Dipesh Chakrabarty: Anthropocene Time and the Clash of Geological and Human-Historical Time
18.30-19.00 h Break

Panel 1: Synchronicity. The Simplification and Coordination of Time
Chair: Tim Neu
19.00-20.30 h
Burak Onaran: Politics, Time and History in Turkey: A Case Study of the Coup d’État of 1960
Helge Jordheim: Realigning Time: The Politics of Timelines after the 22 July Attacks in Norway
Alexander Geppert: Synching the Planet on July 21, 1969

FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2021

Panel 2: (Post-)colonial Temporalities, or: Pluritemporality
Chair: Benno Gammerl
14.00-15.30 h
Mirjam Hähnle: Multiple Layers of Temporality in 18th Century Travelogues about the Middle East
Mirjam Brusius: Excavating and Burying Temporalities: Archaeology and the Historical Construction of Time
Andrea Nicolas: Legacies of Time: Political Calendar-Charters and the History of Generations (Oromo/Ethiopia)
15.30-16.00 h Break

Panel 3: Ideological Temporalities from Communist to “Neoliberal”
Chair: Daniel Morat
16.00-17.30 h (Post)Communist Temporalities
Juliane Brauer: The GDR as a Radical “Modern Regime of Historicity”
Marcus Colla: Time and Politics in the Age of Late Socialism
Adéla Gjuričová: Measuring the Tempo of Democracy: Time as an Element of Post-Communist Transformation
17.30-18.00 h Break
18.00-19.30 h
Evening lecture: Margarita Rayzberg, Blake Smith: Academic Chronopolitics: Failure, Fast and Slow

SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2021

Panel 3: Ideological Temporalities from Communist to “Neoliberal” (cont.)
Chair: Tobias Becker / Christina Brauner
14.00-15.00 h “Neoliberal” Temporalities
Benjamin Möckel: What has posterity ever done for us? “Future generations” in the political discourse of the 1970s
Elizabeth Cohen: The Political Value of Time
15.00-15.15 h Break

Panel 4: A Tale of Many Historicities
Chair: Allegra Fryxell
15.15-16.45 h
Fernando Esposito: Gleichzeitigkeiten or: Present Pasts
Ethan Kleinberg: The Pasts that Haunt Time: Deconstructing Historicist Temporality
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon: The Conflicts of Political and Technological Time
16.45-17.00 h Break

Keynote II
Chair: Martin Sabrow
17.00-18.30 h
Christopher Clark: Time, Power and History
18.30-18.45 h Break
18.45-20.00 h
Final discussion and end of conference