Concept and Experience of Contemporaneity
For art theorist Peter Osborne, the contemporary captures a new form of historical time that both presupposes and overcomes the globalization of the world. It is based on the communication technology that makes global simultaneity possible, but it amounts to the construction of a »broad present« (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht) that contains many pasts that can be called up and many imaginable futures.
This does away with many periodizations that understand the present in terms of a specific past or a specific future. While the concept of globalization was still oriented towards an emerging world of the free movement of goods, people and information, the idea of the contemporary contains the notion of a necessary plurality of interconnected worlds, each of which seems to speak for all.
The experience of the contemporary cannot, of course, be reduced to the mere simultaneity of different worlds. It obviously requires reference to certain events, certain signs or certain movements that allow us to experience ourselves as beings on a common earth.
The project aims to provide an answer to two questions: What is the purpose of contemporaneity? And: How does contemporaneity come true?
Heinz Bude studied Catholic theology and then sociology in Tübingen and at the Free University of Berlin. He completed his doctorate with a dissertation on the impact of the Flakhelper Generation and his habilitation with a thesis on the history of the origins of the 1968 generation. He worked at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research for over twenty years and was a University Professor of Macrosociology at the University of Kassel from 2000 to 2023 and has been the Founding Director of the documenta Institute in Kassel since 2020. His research has two focal points: On the one hand, the sociology of generations, which for him is part of a social history of the present, and on the other, the introduction of the concept of social exclusion, which draws attention to cross-cutting fault lines in the social structure of contemporary societies. In 2016, the German Sociological Association awarded him the prize for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Public Sociology.
Abschied von den Boomern, München: Carl Hanser 2024 (Bye, Bye Boomer); mit Bettina Munk und Karin Wieland, Aufprall, München Carl Hanser 2020 (Violent Collision).
Solidarität. Die Zukunft einer großen Idee, München: Carl Hanser 2019 (Solidarity. The Future of a Big Idea); Das Gefühl der Welt. Über die Macht von Stimmungen, München: Carl Hanser 2016.
(The Mood of the World, Cambridge: Polity Press 2018);Gesellschaft der Angst, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2015 / (Society of Fear, Cambridge: Polity Press 2017).
Es geht um den Begriff und die Erfahrung von Zeitgenossenschaft. Die Zeit, die einfach so vergeht und möglicherweise plötzlich kommt, braucht offenbar eine Genossenschaft, die ihr dazu verhilft, sie selbst als historische Zeit zu sein. Das geschieht heute unter der Bedingung einer kommunikationstechnisch hergestellten Gleichzeitigkeit, die Menschen rund um den Globus miteinander teilen können.