SPP 1688:  Proper Times of the Aesthetic. Time and Representation in Polychronic Modernity

The Priority Programme pursues four comprehensive research objectives. First, it strives to show the fundamental importance of processes of representation to render the experience and reflection of time and to carve out new aspects and paradigms of temporality through the study of artefacts, of their formal structures and of their contexts. The Priority Programme aims to accentuate of the importance of non-propositional structures for our knowledge of time and to establish the concept of "Proper Times of the Aesthetic" as a key concept to describe epistemic formations within the field of modern concepts of time and temporality. Second, for the field of the arts the Priority Programme examines how reflections of time through works of art and investigations of time and temporality as crucial dimensions of the production and reception of art can be related to each other, that is to find out how knowledge of time and the temporality of various forms of representation are affiliated in the diverse arts. Third, the Priority Programme aims at a revision of the current image of modernity by relating questions of representation to the social and particularly to the scientific and technological dimensions of modernity, by delineating hitherto concealed elements of temporality in modernity, and by describing the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous as prominent feature of an inherently polymorphic and poly-chronic modernity. Established narratives of history shall be questioned, and new concepts of cultural processes shall be developed. Fourth, the Priority Programme discusses the comprehensive theoretical question of how knowledge is rendered through formal structures - in this particular case the knowledge of time and temporality -, and which role formal aspects play in the establishment of a pluralism of cultural studies. Using as example the articulation of temporality through form, the status of artistic and non-artistic renditions shall be determined; moreover, the Priority Programme challenges established notions of the status of unique works of art and of formal representation for the history of knowledge.

DFG Programme Priority Programmes

International Connection Austria, Switzerland, USA

• A Chronotopographical History of GDR-literature (Applicant Ostheimer, Michael )
• Aesthetic temporalities in the transnational space of the "Black Atlantic" (Applicant Genge, Gabriele )
• Aesthetic Temporalities of Literary Physics (Applicant Gamper, Michael )
• After Time: Permanence, Recursion, Prevention (Applicants Görling, Reinhold ;  Raimondi, Francesca ;  Schwarte, Ludger )
• Animal time. On the biodiversity of Modern Knowledge of Time (Applicant Kugler, Gisela Lena )
• Awareness: Techniques of Making-Present and Subjective Re-Appropriation of Time in Contemporary Dance (Applicant Brandstetter, Gabriele )
• Biological Times. Media, Technologies, and Architectures of Epistemic Temporality (Applicant Schmidgen, Henning )
• China's Modernity: Discourses of the Inbetween-Moment and the Apparative Media (Applicant Kramer, Stefan )
• Climate's Time. the Temporalization of Nature in Modern Literature (Applicant Horn, Eva )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Gamper, Michael )
• Currentness. On the history of references to the present in German Literature and the temporalization of the present around 1800 (Applicant Lehmann, Johannes )
• Dramatic times of Politics (Applicants Gamper, Michael ;  Schnyder, Peter )
• Entangled Island Times. A history of literature and knowledge of the Islandbiogeography between 1600 and 1850 (Applicant Borgards, Roland )
• 'Here You Leave Today': Aesthetic Proper Times in Theme Parks (Applicants Carlà-Uhink, Filippo ;  Freitag, Florian )
• Individual temporalities and reading communities: Structures of temporality and anglophone long novels from the 1970s to the present. (Applicant Griem, Julika )
• Language-based appresentations of material time-experiences. The relationship of object-aesthetic and social meaning in metaphors of time. (Applicants Rosa, Hartmut ;  Ziegler, Sabine )
• Les journées ne durent plus: Psychopathological Proper Time in German and French Literature from the Late 19th to Mid-20th Century (Applicant Bergengruen, Maximilian )
• On Asynchronous Concurrence: Synchronicity, Simultaneity and Superposition in Contemporary Novels and Films (Applicant Zubarik, Sabine )
• Picture - perception - time. reception aesthetics and its temporality (Applicants Grave, Johannes ;  Wegner, Reinhard )
• Polychronicity of the Market: Neoclassical Temporality in Projects of Economic Order since the 1970s (Applicant Langenohl, Andreas )
• Primeval Times and Environment. Staging Prehistory in Modern Age (Applicant Wessely, Christina )
• Religious times, media genres, technical implementation: an ethnography of audiovisual media practices among Shi'ites in Hyderabad (Applicant Eisenlohr, Patrick )
• Stages of Diversion. Temporal Economies in Popular Theatre of the 19th Century (Applicant Matala de Mazza, Ethel )
• Standstill - Scenes of Stasis and Latency (Applicants Gronau, Barbara ;  Görling, Reinhold ;  Schwarte, Ludger )
• Synchronisierung körperlicher Eigenzeiten und choreographische Ästhetik (Applicant Brandstetter, Gabriele )
• The Temporalities of Economics: The Model Form of Economic Theory (Applicant Langenohl, Andreas )
• Time and Form on the Move: Goethe's Morphology and its aftermath in the 20th century (Applicant Geulen, Eva )
• Time and Rhythm in Pictures. An aesthetic concept and its implications from the point of view of reception aesthetics (Applicant Grave, Johannes )
• 'Time has come today' Special time patterns of pop-musical chronotopes and their impact on the temporal differentiation of life worlds since the 1960s (Applicant Schrage, Dominik )

Spokesperson Professor Dr. Michael Gamper