Research Initiative "The Disruptive Condition"

This interdisciplinary research initiative explores a specific socio-historical experience: whether described as a permacrisis, as multiple crises, or a “Zeitenwende”, the experience of time in the present is out of joint. This experience does not seem to begin with the pandemic, the war, or the public perceptions of resource scarcity and climate change. In addition, this socio-historical experience of a constant crisis mode differs from the crises and ruptures of the past – and yet it is linked to them. The accelerating development of technology and capitalism increases this experience of rupture on multidimensional levels. Whether it is the disturbed perception of time in the communication society, financialized capitalism, the entanglements of the Anthropocene or permanent insecurity as worry and existential fear: the experience of time is disruptive.

On the one hand, we are interested in the immanence of the logic of interruption, fragmentation, decay and breakdown; in short disruption, insofar as it is constituted as a formative element of contemporary societies. On the other hand, we ask ourselves how do we want to live in a disruptive time? What decays under the disruptive condition? What opportunities arise from the disruptive experience? How do we want to inhabit the world experienced as disruptive? What infrastructure and grammar permeate the disruptive experience? What does knowledge production mean under the disruptive condition? Which collective identity is revealed under the disruptive condition?

The project aims to work out elements of this mode of broken experience with the objective of a critical description and analysis of the diverse conditions of their social constitution as well as their effects.

For further information:  Research Initiative "The Disruptive Condition"