Historicizing. Questions for a Method of the Humanities and Cultural Studies

“Always historicize,” Fredric Jameson's famous motto from 1981, and Francis Fukuyama's 1992 assertion of the “end of history” marked the range of debates on historization in the humanities and cultural studies for a long time. Today, the situation has changed as familiar reference points such as the “nation,” “Europe” or even “the (one) world” as well as familiar understandings of modernity have become questionable in a globalised and pluralised present. At the same time, objects and areas are being historicized that previously were considered ahistorical: life, nature, the climate. Another test of what “historicization” means.

At the ZfL annual conference, speakers from literary and theatre studies, history, art history, philosophy and biology will discuss where these debates have taken us. Has each discipline developed its own sense for the necessity of understanding its objects as historical and developed its own methods for doing so? Who understands historicization primarily as alienation and distancing, who, on the other hand, with updating the past? Does the guild of historical scholarship historicize differently than the guild of literary scholars, does philosophy understand the history of its discipline differently than biology? And what does the broadening of theses disciplines by the cultural studies mean for the necessity and method of historicization? Might the postulate of historicizing even be useful for initiating a conversation between the disciplines about mutual questions?

Admission is free of charge, there is no need to register in advance.