Re/defining the Matrix

The Editors: Anke Bartels, Michael Schultze and Agata Stopinska all teach at the University of Magdeburg and are on the board of the Transdisciplinary Forum Magdeburg which, among other activities, organises the annual Transforma Conference.

Spatio-temporal regimes have undergone a series of significant changes in the past 150 years or so, from the classically modern implication of a standard world time with its grid of 24 time zones in 1884 to the time-space compression ushered in by global capitalism and the more recent inauguration of a logic of global imperial interventionism. Historically, theoretical and performative resistances and counter-aesthetics to the modernist regime of empty homogeneous time (and space) are well documented. While this kind of critique is in many pockets still very much on the agenda, the hegemonic doctrines and realities of neoliberalism engender the necessity of new oppositional forms of practice and agency while simultaneously rendering such new forms impossible. The contributions in this volume engage critically and from current theoretical perspectives with questions of spatio-temporal regimes and subjectivities, both recent and historical.

Contents: Agata Stopinska/Michael Schultze/Anke Bartels: (Un)Tying the Knot: Time - Space - Agency. An Introduction - Dagmar Reichardt: Mapping Sicily: From Postcoloniality to Neo-Metaphorization - Maria Antonietta Mariani: Engraving Space: Maps, a World-Body Portrait - Hogne Øian: Linear Time: The Enemy of the Unemployed - Steven Arxer/John Murhpy/Linda Belgrave: Globalization and the Politics of Time - Agata Stopinska: Genders in Flux: Polish and Irish Velocities of Doing Gender - Orly Benjamin/Sarit Sambol: Surviving Spatial Oppressions Over Time: Israeli Working Poor Women's Localized Resistance - Agnieszka Kolodziej-Durnas: Time, Space and Agency in a Life Project: Polish Students' Reflexivity - Catarina Frois: Identification and Anonymity: Two Sides of the Same Coin - Steven Corcoran: Postulating Equality: Politics and Philosophy in the oeuvre of Jacques Rancière - Dirk Wiemann: Mountaineering with Hobbes and Milton: (R)Enunciations of Seeing and Agency in Restoration England - Jatin Waglé: Resistant Forms and Critical Subjectivities: Reading Adorno in Our Times and Other Languages - Leena Petersen: Poetics of the Intrinsic: On Walter Benjamin's Concept of Allegory - Rocío Orsi Portalo: Greek Tragedy and Poetic Agency - Ulf Schulenberg: Democratic Space and Poetic Agency: Emerson, Whitman, and the (Im)Possibility of Dissent - Holger Rossow: Time-Space Compression, Flexible Accumulation and the Problem of Political Agency in the Age of Globalisation - Tarja-Liisa Laaksonen: Situating Liberal "Organizational Development" and "Good Governance" Discourses in Globalisation and Political Contexts - Jörg Meyer: Agency Lost: Scientific Respectability and Real World Relevance as Pitfalls of Contemporary International Thought.