This book was triggered by the recent geopolitical shifts and the turn towards an allegedly post-factual era. An Orderly Mess gives a timely diagnosis of the current dissolution of the modern order, while highlighting the opportunities of messiness. The essay focuses on the temporal and spatial dimensions in which messiness becomes apparent today: broken time lines and fragmented spaces. Messiness is framed by a blurring of the world orderings inherited from modernity. Against the backdrop of rapid digitalization, we may find ourselves again in a phase of transition toward new ways of world ordering. The focus on messiness reveals the different patterns of order and disorder that underpin the current process of transition. In the second half of the volume the author revisits her 1989 book on Eigenzeit, which explored how moderns experience time, or are exposed to it. A quarter century later she finds that the new inventions of technology have challenged the traditional meaning of time (and also of space) even more, increasing the non-simultaneity of human existence. Today, small devices channel into one's fingertips medial Eigenzeit: the time that one has to oneself in order to spend it with those who are absent. The past has shrunk and the present extends to the future: "there is no pre-determined future, only a future that is as radically open as it is inherently uncertain."
| ISBN: | 9789633862315 |
| Publication date: | 10th October 2017 |
| Author: | Helga Nowotny |
| Publisher: | Central European University Press an imprint of Amsterdam University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 100 pages |
| Genres: |
Philosophy of science Philosophy |
This book was triggered by the recent geopolitical shifts and the turn towards an allegedly post-factual era. An Orderly Mess gives a timely diagnosis of the current dissolution of the modern order, while highlighting the opportunities of messiness. The essay focuses on the temporal and spatial dimensions in which messiness becomes apparent today: broken time lines and fragmented spaces. Messiness is framed by a blurring of the world orderings inherited from modernity. Against the backdrop of rapid digitalization, we may find ourselves again in a phase of transition toward new ways of world ordering. The focus on messiness reveals the different patterns of order and disorder that underpin the current process of transition. In the second half of the volume the author revisits her 1989 book on Eigenzeit, which explored how moderns experience time, or are exposed to it. A quarter century later she finds that the new inventions of technology have challenged the traditional meaning of time (and also of space) even more, increasing the non-simultaneity of human existence. Today, small devices channel into one's fingertips medial Eigenzeit: the time that one has to oneself in order to spend it with those who are absent. The past has shrunk and the present extends to the future: "there is no pre-determined future, only a future that is as radically open as it is inherently uncertain."
An Orderly Mess features in the following genres: Philosophy of science, Philosophy
An Orderly Mess is available in Paperback
An Orderly Mess was written by Helga Nowotny and published by Central European University Press an imprint of Amsterdam University Press
An Orderly Mess has 100 pages
£34.16