BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies//NONSGML Events//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://cenes.ubc.ca/events/event/ X-WR-CALDESC:Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies - Events BEGIN:VEVENT UID:20201028T2222Z-1603923756.2402-EO-16653-25@10.19.146.1 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTAMP:20260417T051426Z CREATED:20200909T222321Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200909T222321Z DTSTART;TZID=America/Vancouver:20181113T123000 DTEND;TZID=America/Vancouver:20181113T133000 SUMMARY: Ziegler Lecture: “Simmel’s Sense of Modernity: Adventures in Time and Space” DESCRIPTION: “Simmel’s Sense of Modernity: Adventures in Time and Space” Dr . Thomas Kemple Professor of Sociology\, University of British Columbia Amo ng the many ways of making sense of modernity\, one to say that the present is built on the ruins of the past\, and that experience itself is fragment ary\; another is to say that the contemporary […] X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:

"Simmel's Sense of Modernity: Adventures in Time and S pace"

Dr. Thomas Kemple
Professor of Sociology\, University of British Columbia

Among the many ways of making sense of modernity\, one to say that the present is built on the ruins of the past\, and that experience itself is f ragmentary\; another is to say that the contemporary world is a kind contro lled experiment on nature and ourselves\, but an experiment that now seems to be tragically out of control. The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simm el (1956-1918) suggests that the current moment might also be pictured as a kind of adventure\, a leap out of the everyday customs and habitual patter ns of previous periods of history and into a risky world that seems enticin g\, exciting\, unprecedented\, and unknown. Rather than sketching a broad c oncept of modernity\, however\, he examines particular cultural technologie s\, techniques\, and functions that have induced an historical shift from t he expansion of life into more-life to its intensification as more-than-lif e. This talk examines this thesis from Simmel’s last work Lebensanschau ung (1918) with reference to his remarks in Philosophische Kultur< /em> (1911) on the technoscientific magnification of perception and the int imate experience of flirting and sexual relations\, and his comments in the monograph Rembrandt (1916) on cinema and the art of dying. Despit e appearing as a haphazard mélange of topics\, these lesser known writings are systematic and methodical in ways that prefigure recent studies of medi a\, technology\, and culture.

Professor Thomas Kemple is author of Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama\, the Market\, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford 1995)\, Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism ( Palgrave 2012)\, and numerous articles in the Journal of Classical Soci ology and Theory\, Culture & Society\, and he is co-editor wi th Olli Pyyhtinen of The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel (Anthem 2017). He is currently working on a ethnographic study of community-based u niversity programs based in the city of Vancouver and in rural Guatemala. A co-edited collection with Mark Featherstone\, Reading the Body Politic : A John O’Neill Reader will be published this year with Routledge\, a nd his book on Simmel will appear later this year in Polity Press’s Classic al Thinkers Series.

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