Doctoral Thesis by Chrysi Papaïoannou
Book [Contribution] by Chrysi Papaïoannou
Call for Papers by Chrysi Papaïoannou
‘Time discipline’ is a term encountered in a number of anthropological, historical and sociologic... more ‘Time discipline’ is a term encountered in a number of anthropological, historical and sociological studies whose aim is to examine the disciplinary effect of regulated time on lived experience. Such studies have critiqued the conception and practice of time as a unit of measure by analysing, for instance, the relationship between the invention of the Gregorian calendar and World Standard Time, and the establishment of world trade and a global economic system (J. Le Goff, 1980; S. Kern, 1983); the imposition of clock-time and calendar-time on agricultural societies leading to the
making of a ‘capitalist time-consciousness’ (E.P. Thompson, 1967; N. Thrift, 1981; J. Fabian, 1983); or the internalisation of measurable, objective time through “the silent normative force of temporal norms, which come in the form of deadlines, schedules and temporal limits” (H. Rosa, 2010: 41). Conceived in the spirit of such a critique, this stream invites papers that build on and expand the parameters of this critical tradition.
Workshops & Collaborations by Chrysi Papaïoannou
'Tracing Arguments' is a one-day student-run workshop that aims to offer FAHACS students the oppo... more 'Tracing Arguments' is a one-day student-run workshop that aims to offer FAHACS students the opportunity to reflect on the PhD writing process, increasing dialogue among students working within similar fields, but also facilitating cross-disciplinary exchanges among students undertaking art historical, cultural policy, museological, philosophical, or practice-led projects.
The first 'Tracing Arguments' was conceived and organised by Ana Baeza Ruiz, Chrysi Papaioannou, and Liz Stainforth with the kind collaboration and contributions of Professor Griselda Pollock, Dr Richard Checketts, and Dr Abigail Harrison Moore and took place on 17 April 2015 at the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies (FAHACS), University of Leeds.
Conference Presentations by Chrysi Papaïoannou
‘Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be cut.’ Thanks to the influential... more ‘Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be cut.’ Thanks to the influential exegesis of Marxist scholar Michael Löwy (Fire Alarm), this extract from Walter Benjamin’s celebrated montage-work One-way Street has come to stand for a Benjaminian chronopolitics of kairós: a time to seize the moment, to attack the ‘empty, homogeneous time’ of historicism and capital-time, and to confront the immediate danger of fascism. While acknowledging the centrality of kairós in Benjamin’s philosophical conception of history, in this paper I shift the parameters of the discussion and suggest a new means of conceptualising the relationship between chronos and kairós – and between historical continuity and rupture, and self-determination and contingency. To do so, I revisit Benjamin’s historical-materialist propositions from ‘On the Concept of History’ and the complementing epistemological entries from the Arcades Project, bringing them into dialogue with essays that foreground quotidian forms of time, and which remain resolutely historical because of – not despite – their ‘unexceptional’ status. Such forms of time are articulated through childhood recollections; theologically-inflected images of divining and fortune-telling; or habitual repetitions of movement in the urban landscape. Or they emerge in thought-images such as the charged battery, the Kabbalistic notion of tikkun, the kaleidoscope-that-must-be-smashed. Through attending to the historicity of quotidian time, and its constitutive relationship to the exceptional time of Jetztzeit, this paper thus sketches a chronopolitics against romanticised conceptions of revolutionary rupture and against Benjamin’s flirtation with Schmittian sovereignty, in a mode of being-in-history itself politically urgent for our own post-2016 predicament.
This paper will engage with the question of uneven and combined development through a discussion ... more This paper will engage with the question of uneven and combined development through a discussion of the theoretical problem-category of ‘the avant-garde’. Occupying a liminal position between sociological field, periodising category, and artistic genre, the category of the avant-garde articulates some of the key problems that underpin ongoing debates on the singular character of modernity, while also highlighting the contested epistemological terrain of what may be termed ‘cultural area studies’. Although area studies has received prolonged and extended critical reappraisal within political science, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the epistemology of area studies is perpetuated within Anglophone arts and humanities, both discursively and institutionally. While elaborating on the implications of specifying the avant-garde through national or regional terms, such as ‘the Polish avant-garde’ or ‘the Latin American avant-garde’, I suggest that the category of the avant-garde, in its fluctuation between its socio-cultural meaning of bohemianism and its art-historical meaning of a tradition of formal experimentation – and in the manner in which such fluctuation is made manifest in the literary modernist sub-field of ‘avant-garde studies’ – exposes the fraught relationship between national cultural inheritance and socio-economic development. Recent Anglophone and Italian historiographies of the intellectual and literary circle Neoavanguardia provide a case in point: both inside and outside the linguistic and epistemological borders of ‘Italian studies’, these historiographies treat the avant-garde as a placeholder for a historical narrative of deprovincialising Italian culture, where, crucially, such deprovincialising entails a spatiotemporal movement from a provincial, backward realism to an international, up-to-date modernism. Reflecting on this instance of cultural area studies (an instance itself approached comparatively rather than specifically or exceptionally) thus enables us to revisit the question of mediation between (cultural) modernism and (socio-economic) modernity through a chronopolitical lens, and further investigate the relationship between cultural form, political intent, and historical periodisation.
The term ‘avant-garde’ is inextricably linked with the notion of progress. From its nineteenth- c... more The term ‘avant-garde’ is inextricably linked with the notion of progress. From its nineteenth- century etymological origins in military discourse and its Saint-Simonian connotations of the artist constructing the future (see Egbert, 1967; Calinescu, 1987) to more recent proclamations of its contemporary relevance for the critique of capitalism (Roberts, 2015), the notion ‘avant- garde’ continues to be associated with what is progressive, advanced, ‘ahead of its time’. This paper re-visits German literary scholar Peter Bürger’s influential and still-widely-debated Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) to argue that the idea of the avant-garde put forward by Bürger, when considered through a narratological lens, can be revealed to be less progressivist, and more proleptic, in its historicity. Contra Hal Foster’s dismissal of Bürger’s narrative as progressivist (1994), my analysis suggests that Bürger’s avant-garde develops along two levels of narrative time, and in temporal tension with his main theoretical category, the institution of art/literature. This temporal tension results in what I term a ‘proleptic avant-garde’ – namely, an avant-garde giving the illusion of sequence yet disrupting linear causality. Such re-articulation of the avant- garde’s historicity as proleptic is then placed in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s famous image of the Angel of History (‘On the Concept of History’, 1940), further demonstrating that, long after the postmodern critiques of the meta-narrative of progress and pronouncements of the avant- garde’s death, the question of the avant-garde’s relationship to progress remains critical.
This paper sets out the groundwork for what may be termed a ‘Benjaminian comparativism’. Reading... more This paper sets out the groundwork for what may be termed a ‘Benjaminian comparativism’. Reading Walter Benjamin’s reflections on historical time, most notably in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) and the Convolute N of the Arcades Project (1927-1940) alongside Benjamin’s formulations on mimesis (‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, 1933; ‘Doctrine of the Similar’, 1933), I suggest that the question of chronopolitics in Benjamin’s work (understood as a politics of time but also as the time of politics) can be articulated in comparatist as well as decisionist terms. Thus, the figure of kairós (meaning the opportune and decisive moment), which has been foregrounded in Benjamin’s philosophy of history by Giorgio Agamben and Michael Löwy amongst others, is in this reading juxtaposed and complemented by Benjamin’s notion of ‘non-sensuous similarity’. Doing so can help us bring Benjamin’s critique of universal history into closer dialogue with the critique of linear historical development theorised in the context of postcolonial studies (by Dipesh Chakrabarty amongst others), while at the same time attending to the universalist dimensions that persist in Benjamin’s thought through his ruminations on Esperanto and the planetary.
This paper examines the underlying tensions that characterise recent theoretical treatments of th... more This paper examines the underlying tensions that characterise recent theoretical treatments of the avant-garde as notion and cultural phenomenon through a close critical reading of John Roberts’s 2010 essay ‘Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde’. The avant-garde is broadly understood as a periodising concept that brackets off the middle of the twentieth century with the ‘historical avant-gardes’ taking place before World War II and the ‘neo-avant-gardes’ after. Yet the avant-garde also functions as a notion of radical temporality, which, in the Benjamin-inspired words of Peter Osborne, “disrupts the linear time-consciousness of progress in such a way as to enable us, like the child, to 'discover the new anew' and, along with it, the possibility of a better future” (The Politics of Time, 1995). This paper explicates how an understanding of the avant-garde as a series of ‘isms’, and even more so, as a serialisation of itself (which results from its separation into the two sub-categories of ‘historical’ and ‘neo’ demarcating two separate historical moments) is profoundly at odds with an understanding of the avant-garde as a rupture of historical time. It thus argues that the idea of an avant-garde today intimates a much more complex temporality – and a more complex ‘politics of time’ – than has hitherto been acknowledged.
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Doctoral Thesis by Chrysi Papaïoannou
Book [Contribution] by Chrysi Papaïoannou
Call for Papers by Chrysi Papaïoannou
making of a ‘capitalist time-consciousness’ (E.P. Thompson, 1967; N. Thrift, 1981; J. Fabian, 1983); or the internalisation of measurable, objective time through “the silent normative force of temporal norms, which come in the form of deadlines, schedules and temporal limits” (H. Rosa, 2010: 41). Conceived in the spirit of such a critique, this stream invites papers that build on and expand the parameters of this critical tradition.
Workshops & Collaborations by Chrysi Papaïoannou
The first 'Tracing Arguments' was conceived and organised by Ana Baeza Ruiz, Chrysi Papaioannou, and Liz Stainforth with the kind collaboration and contributions of Professor Griselda Pollock, Dr Richard Checketts, and Dr Abigail Harrison Moore and took place on 17 April 2015 at the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies (FAHACS), University of Leeds.
Conference Presentations by Chrysi Papaïoannou
making of a ‘capitalist time-consciousness’ (E.P. Thompson, 1967; N. Thrift, 1981; J. Fabian, 1983); or the internalisation of measurable, objective time through “the silent normative force of temporal norms, which come in the form of deadlines, schedules and temporal limits” (H. Rosa, 2010: 41). Conceived in the spirit of such a critique, this stream invites papers that build on and expand the parameters of this critical tradition.
The first 'Tracing Arguments' was conceived and organised by Ana Baeza Ruiz, Chrysi Papaioannou, and Liz Stainforth with the kind collaboration and contributions of Professor Griselda Pollock, Dr Richard Checketts, and Dr Abigail Harrison Moore and took place on 17 April 2015 at the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies (FAHACS), University of Leeds.