"The present is nothing but an hypothesis," wrote Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities. In contemporary culture as well, utopian thinking in moments of possibility seems to be a central space of thought and action, not least in the context of technodeterminism. We seek to analyze the epistemic conditions of experimentation and the possibilities for knowledge production and political agency.
The theme of our conference, experiment (Versuch), is a semantically rich term that resonates with ideas of form, epistemology and the history of science, and, more broadly, the temporality of possibility and action. The historical avant-gardes, for example – Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, etc. – attest to the political dimension of formal experimentation. Our theme can also be seen in terms of the self-experiment (Selbstversuch), a key concern of German literary and scientific culture from the late 18th century, from Goethe's Faust to early experimental psychology.
The Enlightenment’s centering of the subject gave rise to the perceived suitability of the human for scientific study – the production of knowledge of the body, emotions, and psyche – and to the epistemological problem of indexing all knowledge to the specificities of the human subject. While in the 19th century, experiment often represented a kind of verification or a straightforward process of knowledge production, by the turn of the 20th century the epistemic opposition between reality and possibility had become central. In turn, the distinction of possibility from reality began to position the possibility of experimenting as utopian. Theodor Adorno offers another formulation by associating the experimental gesture with artistic disposition: “…the artistic subject practice methods whose objective result it cannot foresee.” Such an experimental thinking of possibility, however, is antithetical to escapist fantasy, since it does not aim at abstract sketches of alternate realities that can never be realized, but at the liberation of possibilities inherent in the empirical structures of reality.
We welcome papers from all disciplines that engage with experimental thought or practice in various fields with a connection to German studies and through various media (exhibition, film and photography, literature, new and digital media). This could include race, gender, queer, trans, and critical disability studies; science and technology studies; literary studies; eco-criticism; media & museum studies. Possible questions include:
What is the relationship between literary experimentation and political notions of utopia?
How is the body used as an experimental space and what are the consequences for the relationship between humans and technology?
Have the ways of producing knowledge through (self-)experimentation changed with the emergence of increasingly advanced generative AI technologies?
How is gender and our self-perception of gender constructed in the interactive space between humans and technology?
Please use the following link to submit your abstract by December 1st, 2024. Presentations should be in English or German and not exceed 20 minutes in length. The conference will be held in person at the University of California, Berkeley on Fri. Feb. 28 and Sat. Mar. 1, 2025. We aim to provide support for accommodation. We intend to publish the proceedings in an experimental format.