Possibility Matters
Programm
Friday, 04.12.2015
10.00
- Alice von Bieberstein and Aurélia Kalisky: Welcome and Introduction
10.15–12.30
Thresholds of Time (Chair: Arnd Wedemeyer)
- Janet Roitman: Anti-Crisis
- Aurélia Kalisky: Normal Men Don't Know That Everything Is Possible. On the Law of Evidence
- Alain Denault: The Denial of Massive Crime Using the Obfuscation of Legal and Financial Technicalities
- Discussion and Q&A
14.00–16.15
The (Unfulfilled) Promise of Closure (Chair: Rosa Barotsi)
- Başak Ertür: On Closure. The Judge and the Historian Revisited
- Alice von Bieberstein: No Virtue in Erring on This Side of Doubt. Denial of the Armenian Genocide
- Maria José de Abreu: The Invasion of the Martians. Radio Drama, Panic, and the Third Secret of Fatima
- Discussion and Q&A
16.45–19.00
The Promise of Science and its Other(s) (Chair: Maria José de Abreu)
- James Faubion: From Possibility to Plausibility. On the Epistemics of Scenario Planning
- Carlo Caduff: Pandemic Possibilities
- Cori Hayden: Pharmaceutical Equivalences, Commodity Dreams
- Discussion and Q&A
Saturday, 05.12.2015
10.00–12.30
Aesthetics of Alter(n)ity (Chair: Banu Karaca)
- Ralph Buchenhorst: Generation of Evidence vs. Negation of Evidence. History and Future of the Representation of Genocides Based on Shoah Remembrance
- Charles Hirschkind: Reflections from Granada on the Place of Islam in Europe
- Matthias Schwartz: Alternative Histories of Fascination. The Case of East European Popular Fiction
- Discussion and Q&A
14.00–15.30
Enacting Possible Realities (Chair: Preciosa de Joya)
- Aline Wiame: Ecologizing Thought. Latour's Theatre of Negotiations and Speculative (Pre)Enactments
- Katrin Solhdju: When Effects are the Criteria of Truth. Pragmatism and History
- Discussion and Q&A
16.00–17.30
Potentiality of Evidentiary Truth (Chair: James Bur ton)
- Erna Rijsdijk: Does a Poststructuralist Ethics of Researching War Lead us to Fiction?
- Shela Sheikh: Per forming the Politics of Memory. Grupa Spomenik, the Bosnian Genocide, and the Articulation of Justice
- Discussion and Q&A
The production of knowledge about the past as well as the future is frequently informed by speculative rehearsals of various possible scenarios. However, while the playful consideration of multiple unrealized possibilities is an operative principle of counterfactual historiography, it can always also render service to revisionism and outright denial. The latter, in particular, seeks to mobilize and coopt ideas of the open-endedness of interpretative processes in order to draw into question or delay the established consensus regarding the reality in particular of genocidal events. On the other hand, the future-oriented fields of risk management and crisis governance deploy speculation and possibility not in order to develop utopian visions, but in order to secure a more integrated control of future calamities. Simulation technology and scenario modelling make a point of integrating errors and anomalies in order to enhance response capacities vis-à-vis a constantly shifting horizon of uncertainty. Meanwhile, constructivist approaches propose pragmatic and experimental-fabulatory spaces in order to generate and practically enact possible alternative futures. The conference Possibility Matters brings together different disciplinary perspectives and individual case studies involving speculation and possibility, fact and factuality, the real and reality, provoking a systematic confrontation of the two divergent temporal horizons of contested histories and uncertain futures.
In collaboration with the University of Cambridge, thhe ICI Berlin, and with generous support of Fritz Thyssen Foundation
further information