OfAC member, Diann Bauer will be speaking at the Government of Times performative symposium in Leipzig, DE. Curated by Le Peuple Qui Manque. Other speakers include: François Cusset, François Hartog, Maurizio Lazzarato, Émilie Notéris, Benjamin Noys, Lionel Ruffel, Camille de Toledo, Tiphaine Samoyault

HALLE 14, Center for Contemporary Arts, Leipzig.
May 28th, 2016
1:30 to 7pm

Born from a modernity at the end of its rope, a « presentist » regime of historicity has emerged since the late 1980s. A symposium-perfomance will be imagining alternative regime of historicity for the future.

No one doubts that an order of time exists — or rather, that orders of time exist which vary with time and place. Historian François Hartog explored crucial moments of change in society’s « regimes of historicity » or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. According to Hartog, contemporary Western societies have entered from 1989 a new “regime of historicity” (régimes d’historicité, a synonym for temporal order) in which the present has become omnipresent. Hartog calls this regime of historicity “presentism”and defines it as an invasion of the present into the realms of the past and future. The present is therefore experienced as an acceleration of our social lives and finally as enclosure where the perspective of the future is no longer reassuring, since it is perceived not as a promise, but as a threat. We would call also this tyranny of the present through a social acceleration – to accelerate to be at a standstill – melancholia…