The Geo-Politics, Techno-Politics and Sensory Politics of World War I

World War I was a European war over the future of the world. But the futures of the world that emerged from the war, including a yet more deadly war and a long period of cold confrontation, were quite unlike anything the belligerents, high and low, had expected. It is to the futures of this violent past that the series of three conferences on The Time of Destruction is dedicated.

Historically minded observers, who have begun to remove themselves from the tense confrontations of nostalgia and utopia this war had generated, have begun to step out of the fog of archives in order to contemplate what happened in the light of what came of it. The latter is so important, because we cannot act as if the war has yet to happen, its consequences have yet to unfold, and its shadows have yet to lift. We now know -- or, should we say, we could know if we took on the challenge of seeing this age of catastrophe as sediments of embattled futures - the kind of world that after even greater turmoil has become our world. Rather than looking in on World War I from the nineteenth century and consequently seeing it as a catastrophic flame-out of a prosperous, bourgeois age, we propose looking back on World War I from the other shore of the twenty-first century in order to see what the war begot.

More information:
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=17106