-1

archive,category,category-blog,category-124,qode-social-login-1.1.3,qode-restaurant-1.1.1,stockholm-core-2.3,select-child-theme-ver-1.1,select-theme-ver-8.9,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,paspartu_enabled,menu-animation-underline,fs-menu-animation-underline,header_top_hide_on_mobile,,qode_grid_1300,qode_menu_center,qode-mobile-logo-set,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-6.6.0,vc_responsive

In Blog

Elsewhere, elsewhen: planetary analogues as time machines

clemens finkelstein

Summary: From a dynamited Arizona cinder field to a sealed Houston habitat, planetary analogue sites manufacture time, suppressing Indigenous histories to rehearse speculative futures in a revealing act of temporal asymmetry.

Fig. 1: USGS Astrogeology team blasting craters at Cinder Lake, outside Flagstaff, Arizona to mock up a section of the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity. (1968, USGS, public domain).

Cratering the present

From 1967 to 1968, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) dynamited a corner of Arizona into the Moon (Fig. 1). Between 28-31 July 1967, on a black cinder field northeast of Flagstaff, engineers buried hundreds of explosive charges and detonated them in carefully staged sequences, excavating 47 craters whose sizes and positions replicated, at a 1:1 scale, a patch of the Sea of Tranquillity recently photographed by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter programme (1966-1967) to select the most suitable landing site for Apollo 11 in 1969 (Figs. 2-3). A second round that October brought the count to 143 craters, and, in 1968, a larger field of several hundred craters was blasted nearby.[1] The detonations were layered in time as well as space: astrogeologically determined ‘old’ craters were blasted first, then partially buried; ‘intermediate’ and ‘young’ craters followed, so that the finished field would display a fabricated stratigraphy.[2] Millions of years of meteorite bombardment were compressed into a few days of anthropogenic demolition work. Astronauts in pressure suits then trudged across the Cinder Lake Crater Field, rehearsing traverses they would later perform 250,000 miles (400,000 km) away.

Fig. 2-3: Left: Cinder Lake Crater Field #2 (1968, USGS public domain). Right: Sea of Tranquillity, Apollo 10 oblique view of the western portion, NASA ID: as10-29-4321 (1969, NASA JSC, public domain).

Cinder Lake is an early and unusually literal specimen of a now-global practice: the planetary analogue. Planetary analogues are sites on Earth that are made to stand in for extraterrestrial environments such as the Moon, Mars and the icy moons of the outer planets. Some of these surrogate sites may be found in deserts, lava fields and meteorite-impact craters, or in polar deserts whose geology or chemistry resembles that of another world, enabling scientists to test instruments and rehearse the search for extraterrestrial life. Others are built as sealed habitats and isolation chambers in which crews experience the confinement of voyages that have yet to leave Earth. Either way, the scientific literature treats the analogue predominantly as a spatial surrogate: a stand-in for somewhere else.[3] But look again at what the engineers produced at Cinder Lake. Beyond just a model of a place, they built a model of its environmental history. The craters were blasted in sequence to fake a stratigraphy, old before young, so that the field would read as the outcome of an aeon of meteorite bombardment. They forged a temporal order as much as a geographical one. The spatiotemporal forgery even demanded a second – quieter yet no less violent – operation that erased the Indigenous communities that had once inhabited these lands and whose oral traditions still carry the story of the 11th-century eruption of Sunset Crater Volcano that buried the basin in the black cinders the USGS would one day blast into a replica Moon.[4] They and their descendants then had to be subtracted so that another world’s deep past could take their place. The site gave up – or more accurately, was made to give up – its own time to host another world’s. This is the structural pattern I want to track here. Planetary analogues are not, in the end, merely machines for simulating space; they are machines for constructing time. Each one repeats the same three operations visible at Cinder Lake: import an alien past, rehearse a speculative future and suppress the local present that stands in its way. Further, these operations run essentially in one direction. The terrestrial site gives; the planetary referent takes; nothing returns. Whereas discussions of the analogue trade chiefly on its spatial symmetry, I want to trace its temporal asymmetry to read planetary analogues as time machines obscured by staging visual resemblance.

Fig. 4: Finding a gypsum deposit at Gemini Hills in the Haughton Impact Crater (20 July 2009, Brian Shiro, public domain).

Elsewhere: the allotopic environment

When astrogeologists study the Haughton impact crater on Devon Island or the hyperarid soils of Chile’s Atacama as proxies for Mars, the claim is as temporal as it is spatial (Fig. 4). Once upon a time, roughly four billion years ago, Mars, the reasoning runs, contained liquid water, a denser atmosphere and perhaps the conditions for life. Earth retains environments that resemble the vanished Martian world. The analogue site therefore functions as a window looking both onto another place as well as that distant planet’s past, a fragment of alien deep time conveniently preserved in our own backyard.[5] This is a remarkable historiographical manoeuvre in which analogue scientists play historian. They select a surviving trace, argue for its representativeness and use it to reconstruct an inaccessible elsewhen. The difference, however, is one of scale and direction. Where the historian reads a 16th-century notarial register as a trace of its own past, the analogue scientist reads a Devonian lakebed as a trace of somewhere else’s. A past belonging to a different world entirely. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the recent planetary turn obliges historians to think human-scale and geological-scale time together.[6] The analogue radicalises that demand. It asks us to braid Earth’s geological time with that of another planet at a single terrestrial site. The analogue relation draws temporal meaning out of the terrestrial site and exports it elsewhere.

Fig. 5: Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) with associated infrastructure and barren landscape on Tallurutit Devon Island (17 July 2013, Joseph Palaia, public domain).

Elsewhen: the allochronic environment

In 1983, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian published a critique that stung. Time and the Other argued that Western anthropology systematically denied coevalness to the peoples it studied. Fieldwork demanded shared time – sitting, talking and eating in a common present – yet the resulting monographs cast their subjects as primitive, traditional and premodern inhabitants of an earlier epoch. Fabian named this discursive expulsion from the shared present allochronism: the Other was not merely elsewhere; the Other was elsewhen.[7 ] What happens when we extend Fabian’s critique from peoples to places? Consider Devon Island. To the Inuit of Nunavut, it is Tallurutit (Inuktitut: ᑕᓪᓗᕈᑎᑦ), a name said to liken the streaks across the island’s landscape to the tattooed lines of Inuit women’s chins. In English-language reference works, it is the world’s largest uninhabited island, a polar desert in the Canadian High Arctic. Uninhabited is doing suspicious work in the preceding sentence. Archaeological traces of human presence on the island reach back about 4000 years. At Dundas Harbour, the stone remains of a Thule settlement some thousand years old sit within walking distance of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost established in 1924 to assert Arctic sovereignty. A post sustained in the 1930s by Inuit families relocated, disastrously, from Baffin Island, and abandoned in 1951.[8] The island holds these histories in its permafrost. Yet since 1997, it has been something else: Mars. The NASA Haughton–Mars Project (HMP) operates from the rim of a 23-kilometre impact crater punched into the island around 31 million years ago. For several million years thereafter, the crater held a lake, ringed by boreal forest and home to early seal relatives.[9] Now cold, dry, rocky, windswept and barely vegetated, the crater is routinely described as one of the most Mars-like places on Earth (Fig. 5). Analogue astronauts rehearse spacewalks across its floor, and a winding gully has even been rechristened Astronaut Canyon.[10] For the analogue to function, Devon Island’s own time must be evacuated: 4000 years of Inuit and pre-Inuit presence, the colonial archive of the RCMP post, the living political present of Nunavut. All of it becomes static in the signal. The landscape, instead, is recast as pre-human. A ready-made fragment of Mars, which is to say, of a world where (human) history has never happened. This is allochronism applied to terrain. Where Fabian’s anthropologists consigned living peoples to the past, the analogue consigns storied landscapes to a condition outside terrestrial history altogether, so that they may serve as blank pages for an extraterrestrial narrative. And here the temporal asymmetry bites hardest, because the exchange is lopsided. Devon Island lends Mars its surface, its light, its loneliness; in return, it is given a description – uninhabited, barren, Martian – that quietly overwrites everyone who has ever lived there. The island is a palimpsest thick with inscribed time. A single sweep of the eyes across that crater encompasses the Oligocene impact, the Miocene lake, the thousand-year-old Thule dwelling, the abandoned colonial post and the rehearsed Martian future. None of them is synchronous with the others; all of them are present at once. This is a condition that the historian Reinhart Koselleck describes as ‘the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’, in which every place is a sediment of layered, non-simultaneous times.[11] The analogue site is perhaps the purest laboratory specimen exemplifying his insight. Miocene crater, Thule ruin, colonial outpost and rehearsed Martian future stacked in a single field of view. The planetary analogue, however, unlike the historian, acknowledges only one layer and relegates the rest to a state of interference.

Chronotechnics

So far, the analogue has trafficked in pasts both borrowed and buried. Its third temporal commodity is futurity, where architecture takes over from geology. At the Johnson Space Center in Houston stands Mars Dune Alpha, a habitat of roughly 160-square-metres designed by BIG–Bjarke Ingels Group and 3D-printed by ICON from a concrete-like material, in which successive volunteer crews of NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) programme have lived for 378 days at a stretch, pretending to be on Mars (Fig. 6). The pretence is built, not merely imagined, and what is built is mostly time. Programmable lighting manufactures a day where the Texan sun is sealed out. Communications with the outside world are artificially delayed by up to 22 minutes each way, because that is how long radio signals take to crawl between Mars and Earth. Astronomical distance is simulated through the medium of time. Even the floor plan stages temporality, grading the interior from private sleeping quarters through shared galley to workstations: personal time, social time, mission time. All these temporal dimensions are zoned in plywood and printed concrete. I want to call such infrastructural enactment a chronotechnics: an architecture whose primary product is a temporal regime.[12] The planetary analogue thus joins a long lineage from the medieval monastery that disciplined the day into liturgical hours to the industrial factory that disciplined it into shifts to the prison that made timetables into walls.[13] The analogue habitat, however, adds a twist none of its forebears attempted in that the time it imposes does not yet exist. The monastery enforced religious time and the factory that of capitalism, both times of the present. Mars Dune Alpha enforces the daily rhythm of a Martian settlement that has never been built, may never be built, and whose actual texture nobody can know for certain. Its inhabitants live inside an architectural conjecture: Ernst Bloch’s ‘not-yet’ (Noch-Nicht) poured in concrete.[14] The deepest confirmation that the planetary analogue’s medium is time came from an experiment that abolished landscape entirely. Mars-500 locked six male participants inside a modular, windowless complex on the outskirts of Moscow for 520 days, from 2010 to 2011, to simulate a round trip to Mars. The study was conducted by the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). There was no red sand standing in for Martian regolith, no horizon, nothing Mars-like in sight. What the crew endured instead was pure duration: the transit time, the communication lag, the slow accumulation of confinement and isolation. Strip away the scenery and the simulation loses nothing essential, because the scenery was never the point. You can simulate Mars without reproducing a single square metre of its surface. You cannot simulate it without reproducing its time. There is a paradox coiled inside all this rehearsal, and the historical theorist Zoltán Boldizsár Simon has devoted several books to its components. His early account of the unprecedented sets the trap: the planetary analogue exists to prepare for an event whose defining property is that nothing can prepare for it.[15] A first descent onto Mars would be, in his terms, a rupture without precedent. And rehearsing the unprecedented seems a contradiction. The analogue manages the contradiction by manufacturing precedents: by generating, in the present, a synthetic past for a future that has not happened. Simon’s more recent work suggests why this is more than a curiosity of spaceflight. In The Fabric of Historical Time (2023), written with Marek Tamm, the authors distinguish temporality from historicity and describe historical time as a fabric in which many temporalities and historicities coexist, overlap and clash rather than a single trajectory.[16] The analogue site is a place where that fabric is deliberately torn: a single thread of it, the speculative Martian future, is drawn forward while the rest are cut away. In Plurihistoricity (2025), Simon fittingly argues that contemporary societies no longer inhabit one shared regime of historical change but several conflicting regimes at once, among which he counts the technological dream of expansion into space alongside the prospect of extinction and the unfinished reckoning with colonial injustice.[17] The planetary analogue is where two such regimes meet on the same ground: the colonial pattern of clearing land of its inhabitants, now performed in the service of a spacefaring future.[18] Devon Island and the Cinder Lake fields are more than mere simulations of other worlds; they are sites where incompatible histories are forced into a single plot. This is why the rehearsal leaves a residue in the participants. When the first crew someday descends to the actual Martian surface, they will meet it partly as a repetition of Devon Island, of the Atacama, of a dynamited cinder field in Arizona. The pre-furnishing is not only institutional but felt. Reflecting on the halfway point of being sealed inside Mars Dune Alpha for a year, the CHAPEA commander Kelly Haston remarked: ‘I actually apparently really love being on Mars’.[19] The hedge in that sentence — ‘apparently really’ — registers the strangeness by which an affection is borne for a Mars one has never visited (and may never), through a place that is, essentially, a printed sandbox in Houston. This is what the planetary analogue finally produces. More than anticipating the future, it pre-furnishes the future with memories of surrogate experiences.

Fig. 6: Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) habitat at NASA Johnson Space Center; 360-degree view of the ‘sandbox’ outside the habitat, used for simulated extravehicular activities (Image: Bill Stafford/NASA, public domain)

Temporal asymmetry: a preliminary sketch

The concept of temporal asymmetry is established in the philosophy of physics, where it denotes the structural differences between our relations to the past and the future: we remember one but not the other, causes precede effects, and entropy increases.[20] In historical theory, the phrase appears only fleetingly, and the relation I give it – a lateral, unidirectional transfer of temporal identity between places – has not, to my knowledge, been isolated as such.[21] In the above sketch of temporal asymmetry produced by planetary analogues, a site is conscripted to carry another’s past or future; traffic runs in one direction, and the subordinate site pays for the privilege by suppressing its own historical time. Elsewhere is made to stand for elsewhen. So why should historians care about a concept distilled from such a peculiar practice? Because the planetary analogue is a diagnostic caricature of the historical method. Every act of historical comparison performs a miniature analogue operation. Periodisation, comparison, and the denial of coevalness are all temporal transfers, and most are asymmetric. The planetary analogue simply performs the transfer with bulldozers and dynamite at a scale and literality that make the operation impossible to overlook. It is a temporal machine twice over: a machine that manufactures time for its users and a machine that reveals to attentive historians the time-manufacturing embedded in our own most routine procedures. The analogue does to a cinder field what every history does to its sources; it simply leaves the evidence lying in the open. That visibility comes with an obligation that the concept must confront. If temporal asymmetry names a unidirectional transfer in time, then an analysis content to describe it from the outside risks reproducing the trajectory it set out to critique: narrating other places’ conscription in the same extractive grammar that it diagnoses. Whether temporal asymmetry can be thought from elsewhere, through epistemologies of time other than the Western historicist approach this sketch has assumed, is the question on which its critical purchase ultimately depends.[22] I am unable to settle this here. Nevertheless, the planetary analogue itself offers a clue, because the asymmetry it enacts is never complete. Somewhere northeast of Flagstaff, the craters blasted in 1967 and 1968 to rehearse the 1969 Moon landing are still faintly visible, softened by half a century of Arizona weather (Fig.7). A fake lunar landscape slowly becoming an authentic Earthly ruin, acquiring at last a past that is genuinely its own. Landscapes, it turns out, may resist permanent conscription into other worlds’ chronologies. Histories seep back. If the planetary analogue is a machine for sending places elsewhere in time, then the task it sets the historian is to tend the seepage, and to restore coevalness to the places we sent elsewhen.

Fig. 7: Cinder Lake with San Francisco Mountain and adjoining neighbourhoods, Coconino County, Arizona (John Mason, USGS, March 2011, public domain).

[Published 21.7.2026 
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.
For the previous entry in this series on temporal dis:connectivity, click here. To read the introduction to the series, click here.]

[1] On the construction and crater counts, see 'Cinder Lakes Apollo Training Area History', Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, 2026, accessed 24 June 2026, https://www.fs.usda.gov/r03/coconino/recreation/discover-history/cinder-lakes-apollo-training-area-history; R. Greg Vaughan et al., Walk in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts: a field guide to northern Arizona astronaut training sites, ed. Philip A. Pearthree, vol. 55, Field Guide, (Boulder: Geological Society of America, 2019). [2] Paul Sweitzer, Paul Sweitzer Collection (Flagstaff: Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, 1979), NAU.PH.426. [3] See F. Foucher et al., 'Definition and use of functional analogues in planetary exploration', Planetary and Space Science 197, no. 105162 (2021) 10.1016/j.pss.2021.10516; Louisa J. Preston and Lewis R. Dartnell, 'Planetary habitability: lessons learned from terrestrial analogues', International Journal of Astrobiology 13, no. 1 (2014); Richard Léveillé, 'A half-century of terrestrial analog studies: from craters on the Moon to searching for life on Mars', Planetary and Space Science 58, no. 4 (2010); Sheryl L. Bishop, 'From Earth Analogues to Space: Learning How to Boldly Go', in On Orbit and Beyond: Psychological Perspectives on Human Spaceflight, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch (Berlin: Springer, 2013). [4] Mark D. Elson, ed., Sunset Crater Archaeology: The History of a Volcanic Landscape, vol. 37, Anthropological Papers (Tucson: Center for Desert Archaeology, 2011). See also Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil Gutierrez, eds., Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017). [5] See Rafael Navarro-González et al., 'Mars-Like Soils in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life', Science 302, no. 5647 (2003). [6] Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). [7] Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). For a critique that extends and complicates Fabian’s argument, see Kevin Birth, 'The creation of coevalness and the danger of homochromism', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24, no. 1 (2008). [8] Shelagh D. Grant, Polar imperative: a history of Arctic sovereignty in North America (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010). [9] Natalia Rybczynski, Mary R. Dawson and Richard H. Tedford, 'A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia', Nature 458, no. 7241 (2009). [10] Pascal Lee, 'Mars on Earth: The NASA Haughton-Mars Project', Ad Astra May-June (2002). [11] Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). [12] On Chronotechik (chronotechnique), see Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media, trans. Anthony Enns (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). [13] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004). [14] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1995). See also Alexander C.T. Geppert and Tilmann Siebeneichner, '"Lieux de l’avenir". Zur Lokalgeschichte des Weltraumdenkens', Technikgeschichte 84, no. 4 (2017). [15] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). [16] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, The Fabric of Historical Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). [17] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Plurihistoricity: On the Historical Cultures of Extinction, Justice and the Historical Profession (London: Routledge, 2025). [18] See Katherine G. Sammler and Casey R. Lynch, 'Apparatuses of observation and occupation: settler colonialism and space science in Hawai’i', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 5 (2021) doi.org/10.1177/02637758211042374. [19] Elisha Sauers, 'This NASA crew has survived Mars for six months — sort of', Mashable, 30 December 2024, https://mashable.com/article/nasa-chapea-mars-crew, last accessed: 24 June 2026. [20] Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1987). [21] The phrase surfaces in discussions of Arthur C. Danto’s narrative sentences and of the gap between agents’ forward-looking uncertainty and historians’ retrospective knowledge. See Jonas Grethlein, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine, trans. Experience and Teleology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). [22] See Nancy D. Munn, 'The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay', Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992) doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.000521.

bibliography

Armstrong-Fumero, Fernando and Julio Hoil Gutierrez, eds. Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017. Birth, Kevin. 'The creation of coevalness and the danger of homochromism'. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24, no. 1 (2008): 3-20. Bishop, Sheryl L. 'From Earth Analogues to Space: Learning How to Boldly Go'. In On Orbit and Beyond: Psychological Perspectives on Human Spaceflight, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, Berlin: Springer, 2013. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1995. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 'Cinder Lakes Apollo Training Area History'. Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, 2026, accessed 24 June 2026, https://www.fs.usda.gov/r03/coconino/recreation/discover-history/cinder-lakes-apollo-training-area-history. Elson, Mark D., ed. Sunset Crater Archaeology: The History of a Volcanic Landscape Vol. 37, Anthropological Papers. Tucson: Center for Desert Archaeology, 2011. Ernst, Wolfgang. Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media. Translated by Anthony Enns. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Foucher, F., K. Hickman-Lewis, A. Hutzler, K.H. Joy, L. Folco, J.C. Bridges, P. Wozniakiewicz, et al. 'Definition and use of functional analogues in planetary exploration'. Planetary and Space Science 197, no. 105162 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2021.10516. Geppert, Alexander C.T. and Tilmann Siebeneichner. '"Lieux de l’avenir". Zur Lokalgeschichte des Weltraumdenkens'. Technikgeschichte 84, no. 4 (2017): 259-76. Grant, Shelagh D. Polar imperative: a history of Arctic sovereignty in North America. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010. Grethlein, Jonas. Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine. Translated by Experience and Teleology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. doi: doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139628815. Horwich, Paul. Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1987. Koselleck, Reinhart. Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Translated by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Lee, Pascal. 'Mars on Earth: The NASA Haughton-Mars Project'. Ad Astra May-June (2002): 15-17, 51-53. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004. Léveillé, Richard. 'A half-century of terrestrial analog studies: from craters on the Moon to searching for life on Mars'. Planetary and Space Science 58, no. 4 (2010): 631-38. Munn, Nancy D. 'The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay'. Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 93-123. https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.000521. Navarro-González, Rafael, Fred A. Rainey, Danielle R. Bagaley, Becky Hollen, J., José de la Rosa, Alanna M. Small, Richard C. Quinn, et al. 'Mars-Like Soils in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life'. Science 302, no. 5647 (2003): 1018-21. Preston, Louisa J. and Lewis R. Dartnell. 'Planetary habitability: lessons learned from terrestrial analogues'. International Journal of Astrobiology 13, no. 1 (2014): 81-98. Rybczynski, Natalia, Mary R. Dawson and Richard H. Tedford. 'A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia'. Nature 458, no. 7241 (2009): 1021-24. Sammler, Katherine G. and Casey R. Lynch. 'Apparatuses of observation and occupation: settler colonialism and space science in Hawai’i'. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 5 (2021): 945-65. https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1177/02637758211042374. Sauers, Elisha, 'This NASA crew has survived Mars for six months — sort of', Mashable, 30 December 2024, https://mashable.com/article/nasa-chapea-mars-crew. Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár. History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. ———. Plurihistoricity: On the Historical Cultures of Extinction, Justice and the Historical Profession. London: Routledge, 2025. Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár and Marek Tamm. The Fabric of Historical Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Sweitzer, Paul. Paul Sweitzer Collection. Flagstaff: Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, 1979. NAU.PH.426. Vaughan, R. Greg, Kevin Schindler, Jeanne Stevens and Ian Hough. Walk in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts: a field guide to northern Arizona astronaut training sites. Field Guide. Edited by Philip A. Pearthree. Vol. 55, Boulder: Geological Society of America, 2019. Continue Reading

21 July 2026

In Blog

̶S̶h̶a̶h̶i̶d̶ — Iranian-German cinema beyond patronym, beyond borders

arnika fuhrmann

Fig. 1

The film Shahid (2024, 84’) documents the quest of director Narges Shahid Kalhor to rid herself of part of her last name, Shahid. Narges, played by Baharak Abdolifard, arrives at the Kreisverwaltungsamt (municipal administration authority) of her Munich neighbourhood to submit her application for a name change. As the official (Carin Huber) behind the glass lists the documents required, each term is superimposed on the screen until it fills entirely: proof of registration, registration of nationality, official photo ID, naturalisation certificate, proof of residence, criminal record, income certificate, detailed statement of the grounds for application and a psychological assessment of emotional distress — the latter of which Narges does not have. The frame breaks and actor and director confer on how to proceed. The viewer understands that a name change in Germany would require an entire parochial-patriarchal system to be satisfied or overthrown. The latter is precisely where Shahid’s inventive quest to exceed both German and Iranian genealogies of naming and descent sets in.

Fig. 2: Narges Kalhor. Shahid. Germany: ZDF, 2024. Film. Cinematographer: Felix Pflieger.

Shahid’s establishing scene opens on a hand moving slowly, with shadows passing over it. Ambient drums underwrite a naked body’s rise from sleep on the ground. Shapes move around the body and slowly crystallise into male dancers. This figuration of an individual’s waking and rising — perhaps, coming into personhood — in the midst of a collective structures Shahid throughout. We cut to the outside of a building in Marktstraße, a generic street in a slightly distressed German town (a coincidentally available film set). On the street a man is posting a bill, and a mailman is gathering up letters from the ground, as Narges steps out in red jacket and yellow hat to unlock her bicycle. The morning’s ordinariness is interrupted by passersby walking backwards. Out of the building dances the troupe that had circled Narges’s naked body earlier:

Amidst loss Amongst that Amongst this At the centre’s core,[1]

recites the group leader (Nima Nazarinia), whom we will later come to know as the ancestor responsible for the surname Shahid. Narges continues:

Awaiting slumber From fate’s outcome Which amid layers of history Is lost and found.

Fig. 3: Narges Kalhor. Shahid. Germany: ZDF, 2024. Film. Cinematographer: Felix Pflieger.

As Narges departs on her bicycle, the almost all-male dance troupe in long gowns follows in slow motion, continuing the song. The music picks up rhythm as Narges begins to sing:

Within wind’s passage Wind that is history History that is wind Personal Collective history . . . Within never-ending chaos The path to alienation The path to disconnection’.

As pedestrians walk backwards on the street, Narges continues:

My tomorrow Their yesterday Tomorrow, their yesterday Beyond yesterdays Beyond tomorrows Awaiting slumber From fate’s outcome Which amid layers of history Is lost and found.

As Narges finishes, ‘Tomorrow to certainty / Tomorrow to certainty / Tomorrow to certainty’, the group comes to a stop in front of the Kreisverwaltungsamt. How has Narges arrived at this point? The recitation tunes the viewer in to the intricate critical history that is to follow as Shahid asks, what drives history? What are its layers? In which direction is the ‘wind that is history’ blowing? How can ‘my tomorrow’ exceed ‘their yesterday’? What adheres to existence post-refuge? How can one drive out that which is imposed? And why does director Kalhor need both the concrete and the poetic to express this? Co-written by Aydin Alinejadsomeeh, Shahid has been called a hybrid film and was shown both in documentary festivals as well as awarded a prize as best feature film (Hessian Film and Cinema Prize, 2024).[2] The 2024 Berlinale announced Shahid as: ‘Ambiguous autofiction with visual arcs, songs and poems: a tragicomic, defiant act of self-empowerment in exile’. Shahid’s naming of that which it seeks to expel proceeds with harsh factual clarity on the one hand, while delving into fantasy on the other. The jury for the Hessian prize notes, ‘Shahid is more than a hybrid, it is a powerful miracle on screen!’ The film becomes both all too concrete and deploys poetry, music, dance and painting to underwrite its critique. Irony, play and the aesthetics of the happenstance (or of relative scarcity) inform its approach to myth as well as to documentation. These components dismantle both Iranian genealogies that bear religious, colonial, and authoritarian elements as well as harmful German genealogies exemplified by a rigid name-change law with roots in Nazism. Roughly nine minutes into the film, the process of applying for the name change starts all over again, as it will several more times. Accompanied by the dancers, Narges now also rides her bike to therapy sessions in the hope of acquiring the last required document. As she explains patiently to therapist Ribbentrop (Thomas Sprekelsen): ‘A shahid is a martyr, someone who is willing to die for his faith’. But, she stresses, a ‘shahid is someone who no longer exists. Someone who is dead’. In the scene that follows a hipster schoolmaster (Saleh Rozati) uses a painted storyboard to tell the story of Narges’s great-grandfather, who fought for a liberal Islamic democracy in Persia. His death in 1907 at the hands of ‘a terrorist while praying’ bestowed the name Shahid on the family henceforth. In conversation with Ribbentrop, Narges dismisses the very idea of a shahid and proclaims: ‘Diese Männer und ihre Geschichten sind mir scheißegal’. (‘These men and their stories, I don’t give a damn about them’.). Later she will add force to her rejection of masculinist history: ‘I don’t believe in your God. I don’t believe in you. I don’t believe in your heroism’ and, in Persian, ‘I believe neither in you, nor in your male God’. Halfway into the film, the long segment ‘Behind Shahid’, reveals Narges Kalhor’s own story, combined inventively with behind-the-scenes footage of the making of Shahid. In 2009, while visiting a film festival in Nuremberg from Iran, Narges was suddenly unable to return home and had to seek asylum in Germany. Newspaper articles in German, English and French recounting this event (‘Daughter of Ahmadinejad Adviser Seeks Asylum in Germany’) accumulate on the screen. ‘Behind Shahid’ also includes original, dispiriting footage from the Zirndorf refugee camp in Bavaria where Narges was housed. The director, however, accompanies the history of her exile from Iran with relentless self-critique: ‘Not everyone gets asylum in three months, as I did’. Only once in the film does Narges centre her own traumatic experience. In this scene, the director appears as herself, listening in on a recorded conversation between her actors Baharak and Nima. In this recording her actors critique her as a ‘rich kid’ making films in Germany (‘The best business is now “DIVERSITY”!’), while they are still waiting for their asylum hearings. Upon listening to this dialogue, director Kalhor says: ‘I understand Baharak’s and this man’s [a fellow refugee who had appeared earlier] frustration. Because of my family name, I got out of the camp quickly. I understand this anger. He was probably not doing well. . .’ But then she continues, ‘I was also fucked. I was not doing well either. I am not doing well either . . .’ Tears stream down Narges’s face and the film again breaks the frame as team members discuss how to proceed with the shoot. In a post-screening Q & A at the Iranian Film Festival Munich 2024, Kalhor recounts that she had in fact scripted the scene. Shahid’s final segment, ‘The Illusion of Shahid’, undertakes a feminist deposing of the ancestor. This time the story of the name Shahid is told as that of Narges’s great-grandmother. Throughout the film, storyboards have apprised us of the director’s calibration of the history of the ancestor (and that of therapist Ribbentrop’s name!). This time the storyboard even becomes animated as the great-grandmother moves her lips in a forceful dismissal of previous interpretations of the story of the shahid. Throughout Shahid irreverent improvisation on Persian cultural elements serves to reclaim traditions currently occupied by conservative forces. From its use of verse and a version of Persian painting to its deployment of Revolutionary posters and footage, such defamiliarisation aids in rewriting both Narges’s and Iranian history.

Fig. 4: Narges Kalhor. Shahid. Germany: ZDF, 2024. Film. Cinematographer: Felix Pflieger.

‘The Illusion of Shahid’ moreover uses double exposure to layer the action and multiply the actors beyond the actor-director double that has appeared throughout. As screenwriter Aydin Alinejadsomeeh recounts, this technique of doubling helped alleviate the production’s dearth of actors due to budgetary constraints. But doubling in this segment also produces depth for psychic dimensions and for a story neither only of the past nor only about Iran. Narges concludes: ‘My issue is not about my grandfather, nor about my name, nor about his revolutionary ideals, nor about his faith, nor about his wife. My concern is to end this vicious circle’.

Fig. 5

Instead of the original dance troupe, it is now her therapist, the municipal official and other white Germans who dance around Narges and, finally, around an empty space. At this point Narges has left the house and is walking determinedly through a landscape composed of iconic scenes from world history. She is carrying a gun and her mission is to kill the shahid. When she finally faces the shahid, however, she cannot pull the trigger and ultimately lowers the gun. Instead Baharak-Narges (the actor) is embraced by her double, director-Narges.

Fig. 6

While pernicious genealogical ties may not have been severed and the ancestral name not expunged after all, Shahid has performed a rigorous critique of Iranian and German patriarchal genealogies and shown the near-impossibility of their revision. The film has undertaken a feminist recalibration of history in both countries. More importantly Shahid has held out as an aspiration an existence beyond the patronymic in both national contexts. Shahid embarks on thorough self-critique, while revealing the cost of such political rigor and of life in exile, partially privileged as it may be. The film externalises this self-critique in scripted dialog and its continuous breaking of its own frame. Narges Kalhor-Baharak Abdolifard is ‘Acting to Play [Her]self’; at the same time, she is playing out entire histories as well as their overcoming.[3] At the end of the film, she has not killed the shahid. Still, the ancestral shahid who had pursued her so tenaciously throughout the story has faded. There are no heroes and no martyrs. Narges has neither sacrificed herself nor her principles. In May 2025 I met director Narges Kalhor at a Munich street festival. When I asked whether her name change had in fact succeeded, she recounted the following story. After Shahid was awarded numerous prizes, the Film University of Babelsberg invited her to teach as a visiting professor. The school’s website, however, announced Narges’s classes as being taught by ‘Mrs. Shahid’. She laughed and spoke of the necessity of a Shahid 2. Narges Kalhor may not have expunged the traces of the shahid or of that which enchains us, but she has nevertheless taken her viewers beyond patronym and beyond borders of nation and self.

[1] All text quoted from the film derives from the English subtitles translated by Nicholas Coleman and Roya Arab. [2] Shahid was Kalhor’s first feature film. Premiering in Berlin in 2024, it received the Caligari Film Prize and CICAE Arthouse Cinema Award. The film’s languages include German, English, Farsi and Hebrew. It was produced by Michael Kalb and ZDF. Notable earlier and other works of Kalhor’s include Shoot Me (2013), In the Name of Scheherazade (2019), Sensitive Content (2023), and Love Your Nails (Berlinale 2026). See Narges Kalhor, 'Narges Kalhor: Filmmaker & Video Artist', Narges Kalhor, 2026, accessed 22 February 2026, https://nargeskalhor.de/. [3] Thomas Waugh, 'Acting to Play Oneself: Performance in Documentary (1990)', in The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

bibliography

'Narges Kalhor: Filmmaker & Video Artist'. Narges Kalhor, 2026, accessed 22 February 2026, https://nargeskalhor.de/. Waugh, Thomas. 'Acting to Play Oneself: Performance in Documentary (1990)'. In The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Continue Reading

7 July 2026

In Blog

Dreaming in millennia: longtermism and the problem of temporal dis:connectivity

roland wenzlhuemer

[Summary: Longtermism's moral arithmetic promises to safeguard humanity's distant future, but its inability to bridge the gap between present action and millennia-long consequences reveals a profound temporal dis:connectivity with troubling political and ethical implications.]

The longtermist wager

Consider a decision about where to donate money. One option saves several hundred lives in the coming year through the distribution of anti-malarial mosquito nets in sub-Saharan Africa, an established and relatively effective way to save lives. Another option funds research into artificial-intelligence safety to keep future AI systems from dominating or even exterminating humanity. The second option saves no one today. Its effects, if any, will be felt across civilisational timescales. Expected utility, however, demands the second option. Overwhelmingly. If even a small reduction in the probability of an AI-induced catastrophe affects a fraction of our descendants into the deep future, the arithmetic reduces every near-term intervention to insignificance.[1] Nick Bostrom made the longtermist logic explicit: ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives’.[2]

Fig. 1: The centre of longtermists' moral attention (Image: MHoltsmeier)

This is the core wager of longtermism:[3] the moral weight of the future is so vast that it should dominate our ethical calculus today. It is an idea that has migrated from speculative philosophy into philanthropic strategy, technology ethics and — with increasing self-confidence — into the governance of artificial intelligence. Yet longtermism is also a doctrine defined by a profound temporal dis:connectivity: a simultaneous insistence on connection to a distant future and a structural inability to bridge the gap it invokes. Longtermism holds that the most important feature of our actions today is their impact on the far future, meaning at least millennia, if not aeons. One of its most influential philosophical statements is the ‘case for strong longtermism’, which argues that in the most significant decisions facing agents today, every option that is best overall is best because of its effects on the far future and its benefits there dwarf anything achievable in the near term.[4] The argument rests on several premises. For the current purposes, I will concentrate on only three, leaving aside prerequisite convictions such as the idea that the survival and expansion of humanity over the coming millennia is of universal value or that current suffering and supposed future wellbeing can be compared at all. First, demography: the expected number of future human or human-like beings is astronomically large. Even on conservative assumptions – an Earth-bound civilisation without digital sentience – the number of future people runs into hundreds of trillions. On permissive assumptions involving space colonisation and digital minds, Bostrom estimates lower bounds of 10³⁴ to 10⁵⁴ subjective life-years to be lived in the future.[5] Second, morality: temporal distance is morally irrelevant – the wellbeing of a person in the far future counts as much as that of a person today. Third, causality: we can meaningfully influence this enormous future today, most importantly by reducing the risk of existential catastrophe. This third premise builds directly on Bostrom’s foundational 2013 paper, which established existential risks, understood as threats to the existence of Earth-originating intelligent life or the destruction of its potential for desirable development – as a morally distinct category requiring absolute priority.[6] His maxipok principle (maximise the probability of an OK outcome, where an OK outcome avoids existential catastrophe), translates this logic into guidance. The implication is stark: ‘If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy’.[7]

Hari Seldon’s problem

Longtermism thus appears as a radical but rational reorientation of moral priority. It asks us to look past the child who will die tonight of a preventable disease and the community devastated by famine towards a future so remote that it can only be grasped in statistical abstractions. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is a science fiction classic from the 1950s, which was recently revived as an Apple TV series. It builds on mathematician Hari Seldon devising psychohistory, a science that treats human civilisation as an aggregate statistical system and predicts the arc of events across millennia.[8] By way of psychohistorical prognosis, Seldon knows that the Galactic Empire will fall and a dark age of 30,000 years will follow, but he also knows that careful intervention can shorten that period to a mere 1000 years. Hence, he founds the Foundation, trusting that the causal machinery of history will continue his plan long after his death.

Fig. 2: Hari Seldon, the fictional prophet of longtermism (Image by Vishchun)

Psychohistory is an exhilarating idea. It is also, as Asimov’s narrative demonstrates, a fantasy. The plan works only because Asimov grants Seldon’s equations predictive power that no real science of history possesses. The Foundation’s plans are repeatedly disrupted by individuals whose actions deviate from the statistical model. The whole apparatus depends on assumptions that collapse the moment they are interrogated: that the future is legible from the present, that causal chains can be traced reliably across millennia, that knowledge of the far future is, in principle, available to us. They make psychohistory more a reductio ad absurdum than a flattering analogy. Yet, longtermism makes precisely these assumptions.

Where the connection breaks

The idea of dis:connectivity challenges binary thinking about global processes. It holds that connections and disconnections – interruptions, detours, absences, resistances – are not opposites but co-constitutive elements of how globalisation works.[9] Applied temporally, the concept draws attention to how the relationship between past, present and future by continuity as well as rupture and the tension between them, by the moments when the thread tears, when projections diverge from occurrences. Longtermism invites exactly this analysis. It asserts powerful causal and moral connections between our present choices and the lives of people centuries hence. But this connective thread is frayed at every joint. The temporal dis:connectivity of longtermism displays many facets, and they compound each other. Hence, longtermism faces a cluster of interlocking objections that collectively undermine its claim to guide present action.

Fig. 3: Continuing a long tradition of imagining the future as woven threads (Image: A Golden Thread by John Mulhuish Strudwick)

The longtermist case rests on calculations that have the air of analytical rigour while resting on speculative foundations. Estimates of existential risk, future population sizes and the value of additional centuries of human existence are multiplied to yield astronomical numbers, yet each variable is extrapolated from limited historical experience and scaled across timescales for which no empirical basis exists. The procedure resembles the Drake equation in its formal elegance as well as its epistemic emptiness. The Drake equation estimates the number of communicating civilisations in the galaxy by multiplying several factors: the rate of star formation, the fraction with planets, the fraction of those capable of supporting life and so on. The result looks like a calculation. But almost every variable is either unknown or inferred from an n=1 sample: the Earth. The equation generates no knowledge; it structures ignorance so that it resembles knowledge. Longtermist arithmetic works in precisely the same way. The probability of existential catastrophe this century, the size of the future population, the causal efficacy of present interventions across millennial timescales — none of these can be grounded in anything more secure than informed speculation. Multiplied together, they produce numbers of compelling precision. But such seeming precision derives from the mathematical operation, not from the underlying speculations. Even granting that present actions can shape the distant future, our ability to predict how degrades rapidly with temporal distance. Drawing on chaos theory, Askell and Neth show that past conditions in complex dynamic systems become ever more irrelevant to remote future states,[10] which means that even an agent who assigns no special priority to the present has strong reasons to focus on near-term consequences, simply because those are the ones she can actually estimate. Thorstad sharpens this point further: the longtermist case that the astronomical value of future lives necessitates (and justifies) immediate action depends on the unsupported assumption that existential risk is currently very high but will soon drop to negligible levels.[11] He argues that if the risk of human extinction persists for a very long time, expected future benefits shrink dramatically, and none of the arguments offered in their support – human wisdom, economic growth, space settlement – proves convincing. There is, finally, a fundamental problem that the longtermist literature largely passes over. Longtermism does not merely claim that future people matter; it claims that we can identify, from our vantage point, what will constitute a good life for them. But our conception of human flourishing is itself historically contingent and continuously evolving. The history of moral thought offers little support for the assumption that the values we hold today will be recognisable, let alone authoritative, across millennia. To shape the far future according to present notions of the good compounds rather than dissolves the problem of dis:connectivity at the heart of the longtermist project. Taken together, these issues reveal a tension inherent in the longtermist project: temporal dis:connectivity in a precise sense. Longtermism insists on connectivity, on the causal and moral thread linking present action to distant futures. The causal connecitivity, however, cannot be validated, and even its most careful proponents acknowledge its deep uncertainty. Not only do we lack information about the future, but the connection longtermism asserts is constituted by the very breaks and absences it cannot acknowledge. The causal chain is frayed; epistemic access is blocked; the moral framework is contested; structural expectations are underdetermined. And yet the longtermist must assert all of these to get the argument off the ground. One might object that uncertainty is no reason to abandon the effort. All consequentialist reasoning involves uncertainty; that is what expected-value calculations are for. But the dis:connectivity leads to structural uncertainty that cannot be reduced by gathering more information, because information becomes less available in principle the further forward we project. And it is asymmetric: the astronomical stakes that longtermism invokes are only compelling to those who accept a specific set of speculative assumptions.

Moral arithmetic and its consequences

These philosophical tensions might remain abstract if longtermism were merely a position in academic ethics. But the moral arithmetic of existential risk, once it acquires institutional momentum, generates consequences that deserve scrutiny. Consider how longtermist logic devalues present life. Compared to longtermism’s hypothetical future, current catastrophes seem statistically irrelevant. Bostrom described the two world wars, AIDS and the Chernobyl disaster as ‘mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life’ from a cosmic perspective.[12] The political consequences of this stance are worrying. In his dissertation, Nick Beckstead argued that saving lives in poor countries deserves less priority than protecting lives in rich countries because the latter have greater leverage on the long-term future.[13] Toby Ord writes that although it is sometimes difficult to believe in view of the many ‘setbacks and exceptions’, ‘[y]et at the largest scales of human history, where we see not the rise and fall of each empire, but the changing face of human civilisation across the entire globe, the trends toward progress are clear’.[14] Thus, past and present suffering disappears in the noise of the large scale and is overshadowed by the looming future. The implications extend further still. Bostrom’s 2019 paper on the vulnerable world hypothesis argues that guarding civilisation against technological catastrophe through ‘black ball’ technologies (i.e. technologies that make it easy for individuals to build weapons of mass destruction, e.g. bio-engineered viruses and home-made nuclear devices) might require, and thereby implicitly justify, expanding preventive policing and global surveillance.[15] The logic is consistent: if the alternative is existential catastrophe costing 10⁵⁴ life-years, almost any present-day constraint on liberty becomes negotiable. The longtermist framework not merely neglects the present; it casually justifies overriding it. Elizabeth C. Hupfer has shown that this logic is not accidental to extreme longtermism. Her Far-Future Priority Objection demonstrates that even weaker formulations, combined with the effective-altruist framework of importance, tractability and neglectedness, inevitably collapse into prioritising the far future, engendering systemic neglect of near-future people in the most need. In a world of scarce resources, longtermism ‘may result in the global affluent turning their backs on these populations’.[16] Alex McLaughlin, approaching longtermism from political philosophy, identifies a structural tension at the heart of the movement’s politics. Despite presenting itself as above political cleavages, longtermism is underpinned by strong, controversial, ‘elusive and unattractive’ politics.[17] Longtermists invoke political authority and institutions when these serve their agenda, while treating democratic contestation as an obstacle to the long-range thinking they prefer.

When the guardians of the future design the future

The practical influence of longtermist thinking is concentrated in a small network of philosophers, technologists and philanthropists based in Oxford and San Francisco. This community goes beyond theorising about the distant future and actively shapes institutions to govern it.

Fig. 4: The guardians of the future are conveniently the economic elite of the present (Image: Alex Kotliarskyi)

Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru offer an incisive characterisation of this network. In a recent paper, they argue that longtermism is in fact the apex of a bundle of overlapping ideologies, which they term TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism. These schools share a common structure: they deploy speculative futures, including civilisational extinction narratives, to justify technology and governance arrangements that concentrate power and sideline present human welfare.[18] On this account, longtermism is an ideological formation more than a philosophical position, one that, by inflating the stakes of the far future to astronomical proportions, justifies almost any present-day sacrifice. Major AI companies – particularly those based in the US – sit at the intersection of these debates. Take Anthropic, the AI company founded by former members of OpenAI. By the standards of AI companies and at the time of writing, Anthropic enjoys a reputation for responsible development. Its stated mission is to ensure that the world safely navigates the transition through transformative AI, framed explicitly in terms of long-run civilisational stakes. The company has published detailed specifications for the values and behaviour of its AI model Claude, known as Claude’s Constitution.[19] The primary author is Amanda Askell, whose philosophical work on longtermism is among the most rigorous and self-critical in that tradition and whose arguments provide some of the most powerful objections to longtermist overreach. That Askell herself is uncertain whether her work constitutes an attack on or a defence of longtermism is telling: it reflects a genuine intellectual honesty rather than a programmatic commitment.[20] Moreover, dedicated effective altruists and longtermists such as William MacAskill and Owen Cotton-Barratt ‘gave detailed feedback or discussion’ on Claude’s Constitution.[21] The resulting document contains recognisably longtermist elements, like the priority assigned to avoiding catastrophic and irreversible outcomes and framing safe AI development as among humanity’s most consequential tasks, but it lacks an equally elaborated counterweight. Also conspicuously absent from Claude’s Constitution is an account of the wellbeing of present people that could morally anchor those long-term priorities. Without such an anchor, the longtermist elements simply elide present-oriented values. The asymmetry is more structural than intentional: catastrophic future risk is named, theorised and operationalised; the claims of those suffering now are not given equivalent weight or conceptual elaboration. This matters because the connection longtermism asserts between present action and distant futures is beyond validation. When the justification for overriding present concerns rests on speculation, the absence of a present-oriented counterweight in the governance of a popular AI system is a gap through which the temporal dis:connectivity at the heart of longtermist reasoning passes, quietly, from philosophical puzzle into practical governance. Whose present interests might be discounted in favour of whose imagined futures? The mosquito-net donor and the child who would have died of malaria are, in this calculus, almost worthless. The AI safety researcher speculating about trillion-person futures is, by the same logic, among the most important humans ever. The asymmetry is not a side effect. It is the point. And it is, on reflection, morally absurd. Hari Seldon’s equations worked because Asimov declared it so. In the real world, the future resists calculation. Rather than a counsel of despair, this is a reason to attend with urgency to the people and the problems in the here and now.

[Published 23.6.2026 
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.
For the previous entry in this series on temporal dis:connectivity, click here. To read the introduction to the series, click here.]

[1] Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, 'The Case for Strong Longtermism', in Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, ed. Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). [2] Nick Bostrom, 'Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority', Global Policy 4, 1 (2013): 19 https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12002. [3] There is an axiological as well as a deontic strand of longtermism. The former claims that in the most important decisions we face today, the effects on the far future are the most important determinant of the value of our options. The latter says that we ought to choose options that are best for the far future. For the sake of comprehensibility, I conflate the two in this piece. [4] Greaves and MacAskill, 'The Case for Strong Longtermism'. [5] Nick Bostrom, 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis', Global Policy 10, no. 4 (2019): 18 https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12718. [6] Bostrom, 'Existential Risk Prevention'. [7] Bostrom, 'Existential Risk Prevention', 19. [8] Isaac Asimov, Foundation (New York: Gnome Press, 1951). [9] Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer, 'Introduction', in Dis:connectivity and Globalisation: Concepts, Terms, Practices, ed. Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci, and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025). [10] Amanda Askell and Sven Neth, 'Longtermist Myopia', in Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, ed. Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). [11] David Thorstad, 'High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation', Philosophy & Public Affairs 51, no. 4 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12248. [12] Nick Bostrom, 'Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards', Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1 (2002): 4. [13] Nick Beckstead, 'On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future' (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers, 2013), 11; Bostrom, 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis'. [14] Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (New York: Hachette Books, 2020), 18. [15] Bostrom, 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis'. [16] Elizabeth Hupfer, 'From Bednets to Rocket Ships: Efficiency in the Long-Term and Neglect for the Present', Journal of Applied Philosophy 42, no. 2 (2025): 1193 https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70014. [17] Alex McLaughlin, 'Visionaries and Crackpots, Maniacs and Saints: Existential Risk and the Politics of Longtermism', Ratio: An international journal of analytic philosophy 38, no. 4 (2025): 273 https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12449. [18] Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, 'The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence', First Monday 29, no. 4 (2024) https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636. [19] Anthropic, 'Claude's Constitution: Our vision for Claude's character', 2025, accessed 25 March 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/constitution. [20] Askell and Neth, 'Longtermist Myopia', 296. [21] Anthropic, 'Claude's Constitution'.

bibliography

'Claude's Constitution: Our vision for Claude's character'. 2025, accessed 25 March 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/constitution. Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. New York: Gnome Press, 1951. Askell, Amanda and Sven Neth. 'Longtermist Myopia'. In Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, edited by Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett and David Thorstad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. Balme, Christopher, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer. 'Introduction'. In Dis:connectivity and Globalisation: Concepts, Terms, Practices, edited by Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025. Beckstead, Nick. 'On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future'. PhD Dissertation, Rutgers, 2013. Bostrom, Nick. 'Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority'. Global Policy 4, 1 (2013): 15-31. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12002. ———. 'Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards'. Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1 (2002). ———. 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis'. Global Policy 10, no. 4 (2019): 455-76. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12718. Gebru, Timnit and Émile Torres. 'The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence'. First Monday 29, no. 4 (2024). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636. Greaves, Hilary and William MacAskill. 'The Case for Strong Longtermism'. In Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, edited by Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett and David Thorstad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. Hupfer, Elizabeth. 'From Bednets to Rocket Ships: Efficiency in the Long-Term and Neglect for the Present'. Journal of Applied Philosophy 42, no. 2 (2025): 1190-209. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70014. McLaughlin, Alex. 'Visionaries and Crackpots, Maniacs and Saints: Existential Risk and the Politics of Longtermism'. Ratio: An international journal of analytic philosophy 38, no. 4 (2025): 268-78. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12449. Ord, Toby. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. New York: Hachette Books, 2020. Thorstad, David. 'High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation'. Philosophy & Public Affairs 51, no. 4 (2023): 373-412. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12248. Continue Reading

23 June 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Festac ’77: navigating dis:connections in postcolonial pan-African festivals, legacy, and memory

gideon morison

The year is 1977. Lagos, a bustling postcolonial city and the then-capital of Nigeria, was preparing to host one of the biggest cultural events in the history of the Black world: the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC '77. The streets were colourfully decorated with festival flags and banners bearing the iconic mask of Ancient Benin’s Queen Idia, adopted as the festival’s logo (see fig. 1).[1]

Fig. 1: The festival emblem depicting a mask of Queen Idia (Image: International Festival Committee, CBAAC)

The city and a few other locations — especially Kaduna and Kano — became massive construction sites, hosting dual-purpose development and modernisation projects in General Yakubu Gowon’s post-civil-war infrastructural renaissance plan, the Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (3Rs) Programme. This led to the construction of new motorways to ease Lagos’s notorious traffic congestion, a racecourse in Kaduna, hotels and guest houses, and a festival village. However, a gleaming new National Theatre Complex, equipped with cutting-edge technologies in modern staging, emerged as the hub of the event.[2] The scale of the festival and its venues revealed far greater ambitions that went beyond restoring the nation's reputation in the wake of the kwashiorkor crisis in Southeastern Nigeria during the civil war. The goal was to showcase Nigeria’s international prestige and newfound oil wealth and to project a welcoming atmosphere to the over 17,000 Black and African descendants from about 55 countries attending the festival. Nigeria sought to present itself as the de facto leader of the Black world.[3] FESTAC ’77, FESMAN Dakar 1966, PANAF Algiers 1969 and the Zaire Music Festival Kinshasa 1974 were ‘postcolonial pan-African festivals’ – a series of cultural festivals organised and held across Africa after independence between 1966 and 1977, mostly planned and financed by states, to demonstrate Pan-African unity and envision a renascent Africa.[4] Here I explore the ideational and political transformations that shaped the agenda of FESTAC ‘77, highlighting the dis:connections in its organisational process and the tensions that underpinned these processes.

Dis:connective pathways to pan-African renaissance through festivals

The origins of postcolonial pan-African festivals are often traced to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). These congresses generated ideas for organising festivals to demonstrate the objectives of a renascent Africa, and they established an organisational model for the inaugural staging in Dakar. Although postcolonial pan-African festivals emerged as a cultural project promoted by a broad coalition of groups loosely connected by the objective of promoting pan-African unity through socio-political, intellectual and cultural contacts between the continent and its diaspora, their organisation and visions of development were often contradictory and disconnected. The seeds of these disputes first became visible at the congresses. Though envisioned as a ‘Cultural Bandung’ for intellectual discourse on postcolonial pan-African culture and political development, the intense intellectual exchange at the congresses pitted the Négritude movement against most other Black/African intellectuals, notably Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Richard Wright.[5] While the Négritude camp, led by Léopold Senghor, championed a Black/African heritage that sought not only to reclaim the elements of Black identity and culture erased by colonialism, but also to recognise Africa’s cultural, social, economic and political contributions that could enrich a future ‘civilisation of the universal’, Fanon and other artist-scholars criticised Senghor’s worldview as politically insufficient, essentialising and elitist.[6] For these ‘radical’ artist-scholars, African heritage and culture had the potential to improve the economic and social experiences of the masses, rather than merely celebrating spiritual connections that served the social elites. Thus, the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, held in April 1966 to demonstrate Négritude as a path for Africa’s postcolonial development, provoked strong reactions in the African Renaissance movement. Beyond ideological disagreements over the theoretical limits of Négritude in postcolonial development, some considered the organisation of FESMAN to be exclusionary, which gave rise to the Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) in Algiers as a counter-festival.[7] PANAF was one of the most revolutionary and representative pan-African events of the 20th century.[8] The organisers of the festival attracted participants from all member countries of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Black diaspora movements worldwide, national liberation movements in Africa, as well as representatives from the Middle East and Asia.[9] In contrast to FESMAN, PANAF focused on demonstrating the inextricable link between culture and the ideological struggle for the liberation of the continent from the forces of colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism.[10] At PANAF, Négritude was denounced as ‘neocolonial pacifism’ and instead a Pan-African Cultural Manifesto was published as a guiding principle for Africa's radical cultural practices and revolutionary postcolonial future.[11] The next major postcolonial pan-African festival was scheduled to be held in Lagos in 1970 as a continuation of the Dakar event, but due to the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–70) and organisational shortcomings, the event did not take place until 1977. In the meantime, Zaire ‘74 in Kinshasa emerged as a stopgap event between Lagos ‘75 and later FESTAC ‘77. Since Zaire ’74 was mainly focused on music and linked to Mobutu’s power and interpretation of the African cultural renaissance — Mobutuism — it has been largely ignored in the literature on postcolonial pan-African festivals.[12] The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac) Lagos 1977 was the largest and grandest postcolonial pan-African festival of the era. Following ideological rivalry within the pan-African renaissance movement, Festac '77 was organised as a compromise event to reconcile extreme ideological positions and paths towards Black/African renaissance. Its organisers drew inspiration from both the cultural heritage of the continent’s past civilisations and the contemporary radical spirit to propose a developmental pathway towards a technology-driven Black/African cultural modernity. According to Nigeria’s then-military-head-of-state, Olusegun Obasanjo, this pathway led through the adoption of modern technology, industrialisation and technological advancement.[13] However, Senegal’s campaign for the exclusion of the North African Zone (especially Algeria) from parts of the festival not only led to a diplomatic dispute between Senegal, Nigeria and Guinea on one side and the North African countries on the other, but also to organisational crises in the International Festival Committee (IFC). This crisis led to Senegal’s withdrawal from the festival and the quiet resignation of Senghor as one of the festival’s patrons, as well as the dismissal of Alioune Diop as secretary of the IFC.[14] Although Senegal was readmitted to the festival a year later in a ‘spirit of solidarity and unity’ after mediation from a panel of prominent artists led by Wole Soyinka, the negative media coverage the crisis triggered, along with other organisational crises such as the ‘squandermania’ affair, ‘dos Nascimento’ affair and the ‘Fela’ affair, dampened interest in the events and played a central role in tarnishing the legacy and memory of the event at the national level.[15]

Archiving Festac ‘77 and its contradictory memory

Following the example of FESMAN in 1966, Festac ’77 was hosted with a focus on preserving its memories through archiving.[16] Given that colonial archives were instrumental in propagating negative narratives and perceptions of the continent, it is not surprising that organisers of postcolonial pan-African festivals sought to preserve both the spirit and memories of these festivities by archiving and building institutions. Thus, Festac ’77 led to the establishment of various cultural institutions that served as the physical and institutional legacies of the event in Nigeria. Of these, the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC) stands out for its archiving mandate. CBAAC was founded as a pan-African institution based in Nigeria to function as a research centre to preserve the collective memory of the festival and promote African arts and civilisation in a globalised, yet fragmented cultural space (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2: the CBAAC Office in Broad Street, Lagos (Photo: Gideon Morison)

The archive holds all the materials used at the festival in trust for the 59 Black and African countries and communities that participated. This includes key materials, documents and minutes of the International Festival Committee (IFC) as well as artistic collections and artefacts. It also seeks, acquires and holds rare cultural objects of Black/African heritage through donation or repatriation from public and private institutions worldwide. Envisioned as a multidimensional agency with a strategic pan-African mandate to preserve, promote and propagate Black/African cultural and creative heritage, the centre’s collection currently comprises approximately 1300 audio-visual materials from Festac ’77, 13,579 books and publications, and over 1200 artworks and artefacts, distributed across four archival departments: museum, archives, audio-visual collection and the library (see fig. 3). Considering the ‘collective and collaborative’ nature of its collections, the pan-African vision of its mandate and the contested legacy of its commemorative event, CBAAC has attempted to navigate the disconnections of Festac ’77 by projecting a more positive and inclusive narrative of the event through programmes, events and initiatives. However, this narrative of the festival offers an overtly national perspective, placing disproportionate emphasis on Nigeria as the host nation at the expense of a pan-African vision, despite the broad range of contributions that made it a unique pan-African experience.[17] The implication is that, just as ‘host-nation omnipotence’ became an institutional practice, generating tensions and discontinuities in postcolonial pan-African festivals, it also accounts for dis:connective archiving and a certain operational dynamic in CBAAC. Central to this dis:connective dynamic is the fact that the archive operates in the administrative and operational structures of the Nigerian government in terms of funding and personnel, and it is almost completely disconnected from the operational agendas of Pan-African institutions like the African Union, apart from occasional contacts for event promotion and commemorative festivities. Apart from this, the memory of the festival in the country is contested. This contestation is shaped by a combination of negative press about the corruption and waste that characterised the event’s organisation, the derelict physical condition of its legacy projects – Festac Town and the National Theatre – due to ineffective maintenance, negative religious reinterpretation of the festival’s spiritual dimensions in Nigeria’s burgeoning Pentecostal Christian circles, and, until recently, the decline of historical studies in educational curricula. Taken together, these factors weave a unique web of dis:connective narratives around the legacy and memory of Festac ’77, both nationally and transnationally.

Fig. 3: the CBAAC archives (Photo: Gideon Morison)

Epilogue

I’ve examined dis:connections in the organisational and archival processes of postcolonial pan-African festivals, focussing particularly on the legacy and memory of Festac ’77 in Lagos, Nigeria. Festac ’77 embodied Nigeria’s global ambitions and visions of postcolonial development, driven largely by its newfound oil wealth in the 1970s. However, its organisational and archival processes were characterised by major operational deficiencies, conceptual discontinuities, political tensions and logistical limitations that made the event the last hallmark festival of the era until the 1990s. While the archiving of this event has sought to navigate these disconnections through collective and collaborative pan-African initiatives, its embeddedness in the administrative and operational structures of the Nigerian government has produced a dis:connective dynamic that seems to perpetuate a ‘host-nation omnipotence’ that generated tension in the organisation of postcolonial pan-African festivals. Given the global nature of Black/African heritage and cultures, and the transnational aims of their promotion and remembrance, Festac ’77 and the CBAAC collection allow a critical reappraisal of the collaborative and disruptive processes that enabled the conception and organisation of postcolonial pan-African festivals, highlighting the inherent complexity and duality of their organisational and archival framework. [1] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, (Lagos: Modern Publication Co. Ltd., n.d.). [2] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, 13. [3] Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). [4] Gideon Morison, 'From Renaissance to festivalisation: Festival networks and institutional legacies of selected pan-African cultural productions, 1977-2019' (PhD LMU, 2022). [5] Guirdex Masse, 'A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists' (PhD Emory University, 2016), 13-14. [6] Samuel Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead": Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969)', in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). [7] Anthony Ratcliff, 'When Négritude Was in Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966', The Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 7 (2014). [8] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"'. [9] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"'. [10] Ratcliff, 'When Négritude Was in Vogue', 87. [11] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"', 134. [12] For an in-depth exploration of Zaire ’74 as a postcolonial pan-African festival, see Dominique Malaquais, 'Rumble in the Jungle: boxe, festival et politique', Africultures 2, no. 73 (2008). [13] Dayo Duyide, 'Obasanjo Opens FESTAC ‘77: Africans have come of age', in Festac ’77 – A Daily Sketch Souvenir (Lagos: Sketch Publishing Company, 1977). [14] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, 9. [15] Morison, 'From Renaissance to festivalisation', 170-76. [16] David Murphy, 'The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Art', in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). [17] Étienne Lock, 'Identité africaine et Catholicisme: problématique de la rencontre de deux notions à travers l'itinéraire d'Alioune Diop (1956-1995)' (Docteur Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2014).

Fig. 4: The Center for Performing Arts in Iganmu, Nigeria (Photo: dotun55)

Bibliography

Anderson, Samuel. '"Negritude is Dead": Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969)'. In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, edited by David Murphy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Apter, Andrew. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Duyide, Dayo. 'Obasanjo Opens FESTAC ‘77: Africans have come of age'. In Festac ’77 – A Daily Sketch Souvenir, Lagos: Sketch Publishing Company, 1977. International Festival Committee. Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts. Lagos: Modern Publication Co. Ltd., n.d. Lock, Étienne. 'Identité africaine et Catholicisme: problématique de la rencontre de deux notions à travers l'itinéraire d'Alioune Diop (1956-1995)'. Docteur, Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2014. Malaquais, Dominique. 'Rumble in the Jungle: boxe, festival et politique'. Africultures 2, no. 73 (2008): 43-59. Masse, Guirdex. 'A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists'. PhD, Emory University, 2016. Morison, Gideon. 'From Renaissance to festivalisation: Festival networks and institutional legacies of selected pan-African cultural productions, 1977-2019'. PhD, LMU, 2022. Murphy, David. 'The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Art'. In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, edited by David Murphy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Ratcliff, Anthony. 'When Négritude Was in Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966'. The Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 7 (2014): 167-86. Continue Reading

9 June 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Chronometric dynamite. Bones and fossils between temporal disruption and epistemological dis:connection

sina steglich

[Summary: Learn how the discovery of fossils and ancient bones shattered Christian chronology in the 19th century, forcing geologists, theologians and historians to forge new narratives of time, extinction and the origins of humanity.]
No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race, —whether or no we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or ‘diluvium’, to prove former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia.[1]

With these words, British geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) began his book The Antiquity of Man in 1863. Looking for the antiquity of man, Lyell was interested in the origins of human life on Earth. The problem had become increasingly urgent for him and his contemporaries since the discovery of human and non-human remains in caves and rock strata. Scientific discoveries and attempts to date and interpret them were coming into competition and conflict with the answers that Christian cosmology had long taken for granted. New origin stories had to respond to these findings.

Origin stories…

Origin stories are human coping mechanisms. Not only dating origins but also narrating them and thereby imbuing them with meaning are effective remedies against the overwhelming implacability of contingency. Those who sought to tame chance could always fall back on meaning through origin. In Judeo-Christian cosmology, this origin story is Genesis. Elaborated in the Old Testament with kinship relations, the age of the world and of humanity could be traced back genealogically to the progenitors Adam and Eve. According to the calculations of the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656), Creation could be dated to 23 October 4004 B.C. This ‘Ussher chronology’ relied solely on biblical passages, substantiating their validity with regard to Genesis as the record of Creation. But this cosmology began crack when one considered the world beyond scripture and the evidence of observation. What if the world itself were to object to the narrative of its own origins?

… as Thanatos stories

This is precisely what happened to the early geologists of the 18th century, who interpreted rock layers as chronologically stratified sedimentary deposits and, through their calculations, not only pushed back the age of the Earth but also applied entirely different time scales from those suggested by the Bible. As a result, the roughly 6000 years of the Christian narrative were no longer sufficient, so this cosmology required correction. The discovery of older fossils and bones was no less than a temporal disruption of the Christian chronological order.[2] Beyond the question of origins, the more important issue, however, was that these rock layers contained evidence pointing to prior life. Prior life, that is, not pertaining to individuals but to the entire species. And that, in turn, was the real challenge for anyone raised in the Christian faith: death could not be conceived of solely in individual terms, but had to be applied to entire species in the form of extinction. Fossils pointed to a history of death and told not stories of life, but stories of death.[3] The problem cut far deeper than merely dating: how could the extinction of species be reconciled with the Christian conception of Creation, in which everything was already in place and which, at most, was perpetually approaching perfection.

Expanding scales, shifting grounds

This problem bore twin children. First, this challenge intensified the more precisely geologists and palaeontologists defined Earth’s geological and biological history through their dating of rocks, fossils and bones. The constant correction and extension of the scales not only pushed back the assumed origin ever further back into the past but also required an ever finer division of time into geological periods and epochs.

Earth strata according to Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences, 7.

Such a provisionally defined origin, once set in motion and continuously adjusted, could hardly provide any relief. It was not a reliable foundation, but a shifting ground. Second, an abundance of empirical evidence, including relics of prior life that no longer had any surviving counterpart, constituted proof of the unthinkable: God gave life to creatures only to let them die out. This increasingly challenged the idea of perfectibility and thereby undermined a cosmology derived from the Bible or intended to be reconciled with it. But once discovered, the fossils and bones of extinct species remained in the world. They could not be denied as material evidence.[4] Consequently, it was not enough to merely extend the age of the world and adjust the geological time scale. Rather, Christian cosmology needed a narrative that took these findings into account.

Various forms of mechanism to strengthen ammonites, according to Buckland, The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation. Treatise VI, Vol. II: Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology, (London: William Pickering), plate 37.

(Missing) evidence: marginalisation strategies

One strategy was offered by the Scottish Catholic theologian Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) who explained in the preface to his Bible translation in a manner that was as pragmatic as it was explosive: ‘The writer does not amuse or tire his reader with long metaphysical discussions, about the nature of the universe, the generation of matter, cause and effect, time and eternity, and other such subtile and insolvable questions’, only to state, without further ado, that the ‘planet, called Earth, [may] have rolled in its little orbit for millions and millions of years; and have undergone […] millions of revolutions; before it was made the habitation of man’.[5] First, he refused to engage with the discussion of the origin of the world by framing it as an unsolvable problem, only to go on to admit that, in any case, one must assume it was several million years old and that humans had arrived and settled there only later. This theory did not quite fit with Genesis, a translation of which followed on the subsequent pages. Although this was an inconsistent and provocative twist, Geddes had taken a stance on the contemporary debates and responded to them. He attempted to integrate the issue while simultaneously marginalising it. Some years later, the German naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860) stumbled across the same problem and came up with his own marginalisation. In his work Views from the Dark Side of Science (Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1808), he tried to reconcile the fossils with the parallel existence of human life: ‘But even if there were […] no human remains to be found at all, that would still not be sufficient to prove that there were none at all at that time’.[6] His explanation for the lack of physical remains of humans was simple, yet difficult to refute: ‘In addition to this, the greater fragility of the human body — a quality that distinguishes humans from all larger animals — may also have prevented the remains of those ancient peoples from being discovered by later explorers’.[7] He considered them as more ephemeral and reversed the burden of proof: not missing testimonies were proof of the non-existence of man, rather their existence had to be assumed because the opposite could not be verified. Seen this way, the narrative of the Bible could hold true, because fossils and other creatures’ bones simply did not reveal the entire past.[8] Fossils and bones required that Creation be redated, but man could have been there from the very beginning. For the time being, Genesis was rescued.

From new narratives to new epistemologies: separating history from its ‘pre-'

But these strategies never solved the conundrum because they only concealed the underlying questions and were unable to resolve the epistemological core of the problem: the contradiction between Christian concepts of time and material evidence provided. Eyewitness accounts remained in conflict with faith. And faith was thus shaken. New narratives based on a different interpretation of the findings were therefore necessary cope. One such a strategy was separating human history from the history of the Earth. In the course of ‘inventing’ prehistory, sources from the past were strictly divided into those of human origin, namely, written records and ‘natural’ ones.[9] Thus, the understanding of the general historicity (of man) became disconnected from that of the Earth and all things natural.

August Ludwig von Schlözer limiting history to planet Earth and ‘recorded events’ by excluding the ‘archives of Saturn and Sirius’. von Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie, (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dietrich).

This separation was further solidified as a disciplinary distinction in the course of professionalisation and scientification during the 19th century. From then on, there was the history without a prefix, exclusively referring to humans who left written traces, and many siblings with prefixes, such as ‘natural-‘, ‘pre-‘ and ‘early-‘.[10] The latter was the province of research into bones, fossils, cave paintings and archaeological finds, which were not to be read but excavated. This disciplinary distinction based on source types mitigated the temporal disruption. In this interpretation, humans were no longer de-centred as latecomers by the fossils; rather, the exact opposite occurred: the fossils were excluded as prehistory from ‘proper’ history and relegated to a preliminary phase. However, effacing the temporal disruption gave rise to an epistemological disconnection, producing immense path dependencies.[11] For by restricting history to written history, it diachronically excluded everything that came before, for which there was no written record, and synchronically everything beyond the world of the written word, especially in regions beyond Europe and its expanding colonial spheres of influence. Our current effort to break up and diversify the monolith of history and to incorporate sources other than written records, such as oral history and material culture, into our understanding of the past is also a consequence of the disciplinary specialisation that necessarily resulted from the confrontation with fossils and bones around 1800 and the expanded timescales they required. Fossils and bones are chronometric dynamite first because they disrupted the Christian temporal order, which was bleeding plausibility. In a more fundamental sense, their evidence lit the fuse that eventually blasted the fissure between written history and its marginalised preliminary stages. As a result, anything that did not conform to this exclusive understanding of history was excluded from historical time. Africa as the continent without history is the most prominent stereotype of this epistemological closure. Engaging with these early geologists’, palaeontologists’, theologians’ and historians’ attempts to make sense of excavated traces of past lives, therefore, is not only of interest to historians of science. Every historian would do well to reflect on the fundamentals of the discipline and see its epistemological constraints not only as a Eurocentristic pitfall to be criticised and rejected, but as a coping mechanism of our disciplinary predecessors around 1800. Historicising this mechanism as a breach in modern historiography could initiate a deeper discussion of the discipline’s own stories of origin.[12]

[Published 26.5.2026
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.

Find the introduction here and the previous post here.]

[1] Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation (London: John Murray, 1863), 1. [2] See Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976); Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (New York: Science History Publications, 1976). [3] On Thanatos (hi)stories, see Peter Schnyder, 'Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens', in Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, ed. Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards, and Maximilian Bergengruen (Freiburg: Rombach, 2012), 119. [4] See David Schulz, Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 58. [5] Alexander Geddes, The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. (London: J. Davis, 1792), ii. Emphasis in original. [6] Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnold, 1808), 214. Author’s translation. [7] Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite. [8] See Lena Kugler, 'Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit', in Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Bies, Sean Franzel, and Dirk Oschmann (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017). [9] See Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (New York: Liveright, 2024). [10] See Sina Steglich, 'Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das "Prä-" vor die Geschichte kam', Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022) https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003; Martin Deuerlein, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah, 'Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der 'Tiefenzeit'', Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025). [11] See David Černin, 'Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory', in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, ed. Aviezer Tucker and David Černin (London: Bloomsbury, 2025). [12] See Marianne Sommer, 'Experimenting with Bones', in Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, ed. Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis (Boston: Brill, 2016).

bibliography

Bowler, Peter J. Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Buckland, William. The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation. Treatise VI, Vol. II: Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology. London: William Pickering, 1837. Černin, David. 'Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory'. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, edited by Aviezer Tucker and David Černin, London: Bloomsbury, 2025. Deuerlein, Martin, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah. 'Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der 'Tiefenzeit''. Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025): 5-10. Geddes, Alexander. The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. London: J. Davis, 1792. Geroulanos, Stefanos. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. New York: Liveright, 2024. Kugler, Lena. 'Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit'. In Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Bies, Sean Franzel and Dirk Oschmann, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017. Lyell, Charles. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. London: John Murray, 1863. Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Schnyder, Peter. 'Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens'. In Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, edited by Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards and Maximilian Bergengruen, Freiburg: Rombach, 2012. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft. Dresden: Arnold, 1808. Schulz, David. Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. Sommer, Marianne. 'Experimenting with Bones'. In Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis, Boston: Brill, 2016. Steglich, Sina. 'Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das "Prä-" vor die Geschichte kam'. Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022): 26-38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. von Schlözer, August Ludwig. Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dietrich, 1772. Continue Reading

26 May 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Everything moves, or does it? Empires and im:mobility

claire louise blaser

In 1937, British India issued a series of postage stamps featuring the newly crowned King George VI. In them, the monarch shares the frame with an unlikely cast: a postman on foot, an ox cart, a horse-drawn carriage, a camel, a train, a steamer, a motorcar and an airplane (fig. 1). As David Arnold (Warwick) noted in his keynote for the workshop Empire and (im-)mobility in South and Southeast Asia, 19th and 20th centuries, this series depicts an ‘imperial ordering of mobilities’ in miniature: a visual narrative of progress from human- to animal- to machine-powered mobility that also reminds us, however, that these varied modes of transportation and communication were all connected.

Fig. 1: British India postage stamps, King George VI Transport Series, 1937. (Public domain)

Held in New Delhi on 6–7 February 2026 and co-organised by Siddharth Pandey (Munich/New Delhi) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Munich/Zurich), both fellows at gd:c, the workshop invited participants to consider how mobility and immobility have been historically shaped, enabled and enforced in relation to one another. Over two days, scholars traced the movement of bicycles, planes, machines, seamen, writers and criminals across borderlands, oceans and empires. Relating the (post)colonial contexts of South and Southeast Asia to the British and Dutch Empires, the event also sought to open transimperial perspectives on the history of im:mobility. As Arnold observed in his keynote, historians of these regions have long studied movement through migration, trade, epidemics and the circulation of ideas. The workshop’s contribution therefore lay less in demonstrating that movement has a history than in exploring the analytical utility of im:mobility for historians in terms of what it can reveal about how empires were governed and infrastructures built, how people imagined space, and how bodies experienced the world.

Fig. 2: The organisers Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Siddharth Pandey)

Fig. 3: Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Abhimanyu Pandey).

Power: regimes of im:mobility

A central theme that emerged throughout was that im:mobility makes power visible. Several contributions tackled questions like who gets to move, who gets stopped, why and how; they focused on regulation and governance, revealing colonial rule as a project that relied on controlling motion. Yet, as several papers showed, that control was always incomplete. Colonial and postcolonial regimes alike had to contend with the fact that their visions of absolute regulation of their constituents’ im:mobility were often at odds with the practicalities of implementation. Michaela Dimmers (New Delhi) demonstrated this tension in her account of British Indian prisons. Convicts, she showed, were simultaneously highly mobile through no will of their own and intensely immobile through their confinement. The penal regime aspired to total control, but the everyday realities of prison show that im:mobility was constantly negotiated and compromised in practice. Abhimanyu Pandey’s (Ahmedabad) paper focused on how im:mobility is tied up with the notion of remoteness, viewing the latter as a governmental category. In Spiti, on the Indo-Tibetan border, colonial and postcolonial regimes alternately restricted and expanded access through mobility infrastructures in the interest of state sovereignty. Focusing on a different border, Vaibhav Bhardwaj (Delhi) traced how criminal mobility became a test case for fragile state sovereignty after the partition of British India. The movement of criminals between India and Pakistan challenged newly drawn borders, turning criminal mobility into a territorial dispute and a performance of sovereignty. Similarly invoking the instability and malleability of mobility regimes after partition, Naina Manjrekar (Bombay) showed how the recruitment and movement of seamen between India and Pakistan can be read as a clash between established colonial and newly forming postcolonial regimes of im:mobility. Shivangi Jaiswal (Venice) also reflected on links between labour and mobility through a case study of Indian workers who were sent to wartime Britain for technical training in the 1940s. Her contribution demonstrated how even a colonial-era regime that explicitly sought to enable both physical and social mobility was tightly controlled and socially stratified.

Knowledge: techno-mobility, infrastructures and im:mobile ideas

A second cross-cutting theme at the workshop concerned the relationship between mobility and knowledge. In the 19th and 20th centuries, mobility and its meanings were bound to new technologies that transformed how people moved in space. Several papers explored the emergence of this modern ‘techno-mobility’: im:mobility mediated by machines, infrastructures and technical expertise. Philipp Krauer (Zurich) told the story of the ‘Java bogie’, a locomotive component that travelled from Switzerland to the Dutch East Indies and eventually to colonial India. This case study unsettles narratives of direct technological diffusion from colonial metropoles to their peripheries by including lateral transcolonial conncections and European countries without colonial possessions. Andreas Greiner (Washington, DC) traced how interwar imperial aviation forced a renegotiation of airspace sovereignty. Here, inter-imperial technological rivalry ran up against the practicalities of planning intercontinental aerial routes, forcing empires such as the Dutch, British and French into ‘involuntary interdependence’, each reliant on access to the colonial skies of others. Oishi Dhar (Mānoa) zoomed in on Bengal, where over the 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian entrepreneurs adapted steam navigation technologies and ‘vernacularized’ them, transforming the steamship into a tool of swadeshi economic self-reliance and shipping ideas of anti-colonial assertion to new shores. Arnab Dutta (Groningen) examined the Greater India Society, whose intellectuals responded to imperial restrictions on Asian mobility by imagining alternative international migration regimes; the resulting visions of, for example, an ‘Asiatic Lebensraum’ reframed im:mobility in the anti-liberal logics of biologised civilisational units and population ecology. Teuku Reza Fadeli (Jakarta) and Harald Fischer-Tiné's papers both focused on an everyday technology of mobility, the bicycle, and considered how this technology was rendered governable in colonial Indonesia and India, respectively, by restricting and policing its use. At the same time, both contributions also showed how those restrictions, which in Fischer-Tiné’s framing constituted a form of ‘mobility inequality’, gradually eroded, leading to appropriations of cycling that challenged imperial and class hierarchies.

Fig. 4: gd:c goes mobile, discussing im:mobility 6000 km from headquarters (Photo: IIC Dehli).

Experience: embodied, imagined and symbolic im:mobilities

Throughout the workshop, participants repeatedly discussed who moved, how that movement (or its absence) felt and what symbolic value it carried. Several papers attended to mobility as a bodily experience, or how walking, cycling and even standing still leaves traces in muscle and memory. Fadeli and Fischer-Tiné also focused on such aspects in their papers. In urban colonial Indonesia, for example, police manuals prescribed posture and speed for cyclists: colonial governance there was enforced by regulating the behaviour of bodies in motion. In colonial India, European observers questioned whether ‘oriental’ bodies could master the ‘steel horse’. Both contributions made clear that im:mobility was not only a question of technology and governance, but also fundamentally of cultural and social symbolism. Siddharth Pandey explored this symbolism of movement, and how it could transform over time by shining light on a unique mode of mobility: ‘malling’, as residents of Shimla describe the act of walking on the town’s Mall Road. He explained how an activity that, in the colonial era, was a symbol of racial and social segregation, could become a more democratised leisurely practice in the postcolonial period, though it continued to be seen as a performance of social and political status. Mihir Jha (Delhi) showed how railway connectivity transformed the imagination of Chhotanagpur in colonial East India. New mobility infrastructure, he argued, brought upper-class travellers from Calcutta to the region, which opened a new way of reading the landscape — one that romanticised its pastoral and picturesque character, all while obscuring the industrialisation that made it accessible. Gregory Goulding (Philadelphia) traced mobility's symbolic life through the travelogues of Rahul Sankrityayan. The writer once styled himself a free-spirited wanderer challenging imperial restrictions on movement but later deployed the tropes of travel writing to incorporate the Himalayan region of Kinnaur into the imagined space of the new nation.

What else can im:mobility do for historians?

This workshop demonstrated that the mobilities paradigm, while certainly not novel, remains what Arnold called a ‘productive provocation’ for historians of South and Southeast Asia. Bringing together these diverse papers reinforced the value of thinking about the interconnections between different forms of im:mobility, as opposed to considering each mode or machine as an isolated case study. This perspective recentres marginalised aspects of mobility history. Arnold’s call to attend to animal mobility was a particularly salient example, laying out a convincing case for a multispecies history of im:mobility. Arnold also pointed to a central methodological challenge many papers grappled with implicitly: it is difficult for historians to capture the experience of im:mobility, as they mostly encounter it through mediated forms, like photographs, travelogues or stamps, each of which carries its own conventions and agendas. Several presenters illustrated their papers with striking photographs, making evident that visual technologies have long shaped how mobility is imagined and valued. Such images did not merely document im:mobility, but actively shaped its meanings, infusing it with symbolic values like modernity, authenticity and social status. The discussions also highlighted questions for future research. Participants pointed to the need to explore the relationship between mobility and immobility more explicitly and to attend to im:mobility’s historical stratification in terms of how journeys repeat or reinvent themselves with reference to previously charted paths. Finally, one form of im:mobility remained curiously underexplored: social im:mobility. In the concluding discussion, the concept of ‘motility’ – the potential for movement as a type of social capital – was suggested as a helpful approach to consider how the (in)ability to move shaped hierarchy, aspiration and identity in colonial and postcolonial societies. Continue Reading

12 May 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Nonlinear and counterintuitive: the timeline of fashion(s)

aliena guggenberger

[Summary: Explore how fashion's nonlinear relationship with time — from fast-fashion's daily drops to the cyclical revival of historical styles — reveals the shifting temporalities of our modern era.]

Fig 1: A springlike interpretation of autumn/winter 2026 at Dior / Dior © Giovanni Giannoni/WWD, Dior Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection [PHOTO]

As temperatures rise, social life shifts toward the promise of summer. Yet, from spring onwards, autumn/winter collections with coats and knitwear are already on display in department stores and online shops. During Paris Fashion Week (autumn/winter 2026) at the beginning of March, Jonathan Anderson showcased a surprisingly summery vision of winter fashion with flowers on short dresses for Dior, presented en plein air in the Tuileries Garden. What feels like a seasonal mismatch is in fact a symptom of changing temporalities in the fashion industry and its counterintuitive logic. The traditional two-season model has expanded into a near-continuous cycle of drops and micro-collections. Many department stores refresh core assortments every six to eight weeks, while fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M introduce new items weekly. At the extreme end of this spectrum, ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein update their inventories daily, adding hundreds to thousands of new items every single day.

Fig 2: Ultra-fast fashion brands drop thousands of new items daily / screenshot AG

Fashion, in this sense, no longer mirrors the present season; its mission is to anticipate the next, operating on a timeline increasingly disconnected from (climatic) reality and structuring consumer desire around a future that has not yet arrived. But how is that pace even possible?

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

The acceleration of the fashion system and the maintenance of a fully packed fashion calendar, with pre-collections and interim drops, are possible as business models only because they rely structurally on reuse. Here, ‘reuse’ does not refer to the eco-friendly repurposing of existing items, but to the continual reactivation of existing designs, silhouettes and aesthetic codes in newly produced clothes. In some cases, contemporary designers deliberately draw on historical references and the established house codes of brands like Balenciaga, Chanel or Dior, creating collections that both acknowledge the past and meet the audience’s expectation for continuity and recognisable brand identity. Building on growing consumer fascination with fashion archives as connecting tools between past and present, brands are starting to unlock their heritage to deepen the narratives behind the clothes. In February, Maison Margiela launched Folders, a project consisting of a publicly accessible cloud drive as an evolving archive that shares an exploration of both physical and digital materials from the house’s history, dating back to its founding in 1988.

Fig 3: In the exhibition ‘Fashion and Time’ (Metropolitan Museum), garments from different periods conversed across time / both: © Metropolitan Museum, Nicholas Alan Cope (Selected Images | The Metropolitan Museum of Art); (Left) Gabrielle Chanel Suit, spring/summer 1963 haute couture. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009, Gift of Jane Holzer, 1977 (2009.300.525a–c) / Karl Lagerfeld for House of Chanel, spring/summer 1994. Courtesy of CHANEL Patrimoine Collection, Paris // (Right) Mrs. Arnold, Dinner dress, ca. 1895, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Sally Ingalls, 1932 (2009.300.643a, b) / Comme des Garçons, ensemble, fall/winter 2004–5. Gift of Comme des Garçons, 2020.

Fashion does not merely produce novelty; it reorganises what already exists, which is clearly visible in the current resurgence of Y2K fashion, where key pieces of the early-2000s such as the crop top and low-rise jeans have re-entered contemporary wardrobes. As the example of the corset illustrates, even seemingly obsolete garments and styles are experiencing comebacks. Once dismissed as a relic of the Victorian era and nearly abandoned by the 1920s, the corset was revived in the 18th-century-inspired creations of Vivienne Westwood and more recently through the fascination with costume aesthetics fuelled by historical films and series. What was formerly underwear, once criticised for deforming the female body, has been transformed into outerwear embedded in red-carpet styles and everyday youth fashion, recoding its affective meaning from constraint to empowerment.

Fig. 4: Corset, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia (Costume Institute)

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Walter Benjamin had already observed in the 1930s, when Paris couturiers returned to the styles of la belle époque, that fashion proceeds nonlinearly: ‘The stream gradient of every fashion current… originates from what is forgotten (Jede Strömung der Mode … hat ihr Gefälle vom Vergessen her)’.[1] As Philipp Ekardt points out in his book Benjamin on Fashion, the most focused treatment of the subject can be found in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), where he draws partly on the theoretical reflections of the sociologist Georg Simmel and fashion critic Helen Grund (1886–1982).[2] Ekardt shows that, for Benjamin, fashion is not merely a symptom of modern capitalism but a cultural ‘chronotechnology’ that structures historical time by repeatedly reactivating elements of the past within the present. The concept of the tiger’s leap in Walter Benjamin’s thought originally served to describe a sudden, dialectical moment in history in which the past is violently seized and made present. In the context of fashion, this metaphor helps to understand the rearticulation of what has gone out of style. Extending the idea of the leap as an almost violent seizure of the past can be read not only in terms of time but also in relation to space and globalisation. Innovation in fashion often emerges through acts of appropriation that draw not just on earlier moments in history but on forms from other cultures, allowing something new to appear under the guise of what already exists.

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Looking at fashion history reveals recurring patterns that are often mistakenly seen as uniquely modern, such as the slow-fashion movement as a reaction to fast fashion. Over a hundred years ago, contemporaries were already criticising the rapid pace of the ready-to-wear industry and the perceived ‘haste’ of fashion change. In the years preceding the First World War, several designers and artists associated with the reform dress movement endeavoured to establish timelessness as a guiding principle in women’s fashion. This ideal found expression in loose, simple silhouettes and a deliberate reference to classical antiquity, as seen in designs of Hedwig Buschmann, Madeleine Vionnet and the Delphi Dress of Henriette and Mariano Fortuny. The aim was to create more practical garments that contrasted with the restrictive and expensive, ever-changing couture wardrobe.

Fig 5:(left) Hedwig Buschmann’s Neue Frauentracht, 1910; (right) Clarisse Coudert wearing a Delphi Dress, 1917 // AG / Public Domain Conde nast fortuny - Delphos gown - Wikipedia

The logics of fashion — the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake and the cyclical recurrence of stylistic forms — were seen as symptomatic of a fast-moving modernity then as now. However, the very perception of speed must be assessed differently in a pre-digital age. In this context, Georg Simmel argued in 1905 that the faster fashions change, the more it reflects the nervousness of the era: ‘Changes in fashion reveal how nerves can be dulled to stimuli. As an age becomes more nervous, the more quickly its fashions change’.[3] This inevitably raises the question: how nervous is our own era?

Changing catwalks

After the collapse of the European and North American financial markets in 1929, the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture reduced the size of its members’ collections from approximately 400 to 100 designs. This enforced rarefaction of haute couture consolidated what has since become a defining marketing paradigm: the production of extraordinarily costly, highly exclusive garments accessible only to a narrow elite. It thus stands in stark contrast to the fast-fashion industry above, whose logic is predicated on mass production, accelerated turnover and broad consumer accessibility. While the expansion in the fast-fashion product lines and compression of their product cycles has led to a much broader range of items to be presented, the fashion shows themselves are growing ever shorter and more condensed, lasting barely 10 minutes. It is not the mass of garments, but the pace of the industry that has been transferred to the shows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this accelerated rhythm was briefly interrupted: lockdowns and travel restrictions forced the industry into a moment of deceleration, as shows were postponed, cancelled or shifted to remote formats. Yet this disruption remained temporary and the fashion calendar soon returned to its familiar fast-paced rhythm after the pandemic.

‘The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer in a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archaeological dig’. Hussein Chalayan in the show notes to Medea (Spring/Summer 2002)

One of the designers that invoked time most intensively in his early collections is Hussein Chalayan, framing them in themes of memory and future archaeology (e.g. 1993: the tangent flows). In his show One Hundred and Eleven (2007), garments mechanically transform on the runway before the audience’s eyes, successively revealing silhouettes from different decades. The fluidity of time was represented by an enormous clock in the background which, like a time machine, functions as a double image in fashion, signifying both compulsory change and the fluid, relentless time of its own history.[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjnuHmxRbxI&t=642s The nonlinearity — or even anti-linearity — of fashion is also reflected in spatiality. The traditionally linear catwalk has increasingly been dissolved and deconstructed in 21st-century scenography. A striking example is OMA/AMO’s Cube Field set design for Prada Menswear (spring/summer 2012) at the Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas, where the audience was arranged in a grid, abolishing the primacy of the front row.

Conclusion: continuities

If fashion history appears fragmented, it is only because we tend to read it linearly. Seen through the lens of nonlinear temporality, the reappearance of silhouettes, materials and stylistic gestures is not an anomaly but an enduring principle. The exhibition Fashion and Time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) captured this dynamic by drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. Supported by a dynamic exhibition design by visual artist Es Devlin, who shaped the galleries into vast clock faces, each marking 60 ‘minutes’ of fashion, the exhibition stages a series of curatorial flashbacks that allow garments from different periods to converse across time (see the images above). The pace of fashion makes it virtually impossible to be keep up and be fashionable. But as Elena Esposito puts it, the constant turnover produces a paradoxical stability.[5] Precisely because trends are known to be short-lived, they function as reliable temporal markers. Fashion thus structures social time through cycles of anticipation, novelty and obsolescence, revealing how modern societies organise themselves around shifting yet patterned timelines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7B-xr346JU&t=18s

[Published 23.6.2026 

temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.

This is the first post in the blog series on temporalities that Susanne Quitmann introduced yesterday.]

[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [2] Philipp Ekart, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), AP 393, lines 496-97. [3] Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode, ed. Hans Landsberg, Moderne Zeitfragen, (Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905), 11. Author’s translation. [4] Allessandra Vaccari, 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy', ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009). [5] Elena Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004).

bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ekart, Philipp. Benjamin on Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Esposito, Elena. Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie der Mode. Moderne Zeitfragen. Edited by Hans Landsberg. Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905. Vaccari, Allessandra. 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy'. ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009): 12-19. Continue Reading

28 April 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

temporal dis:connectivity: a new blog series

susanne quitmann

This series of blog posts explores how time – both as an idea and as a lived experience – has shaped our global world. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, it examines what happens when global connections are delayed or rushed, and how societies have understood and organised time in a modern, increasingly interconnected world. By focusing on these shifting rhythms and perceptions, we’re exploring what they reveal about the nature of both globalisation and about time itself. Globalisation is often described in simple terms: either the world is becoming more connected, or it is pulling apart. The concept of global dis:connectivity, developed at gd:c, challenges this binary view. It argues that connection and disconnection are not opposites but exist side by side and constantly shape one another. Interruptions, resistances, absences and detours are not exceptions to globalisation; they are a central part of globalisation. We often become most aware of our interconnectedness when it falters: wars, economic crises, pandemics and supply chain disruptions remind us how deeply entangled our lives are. Even nationalist or isolationist movements, which appear to reject globalisation, operate through international networks, revealing the paradoxes at the heart of our global age. Temporalities is one of three research focusses at gd:c. Much research on globalisation has focused on space. As a case in point, the three previous research focusses at gd:c were disruptions, absences and detours. However, those are not only spatial phenomena; they are temporal too. They involve pauses, delays and acceleration. Historians and scholars from other fields have increasingly turned their attention to how societies understand and experience time. Particularly over the past two decades, research has shown that time is not simply a neutral backdrop to events. It is shaped by culture, politics, technology and power. As early as the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck argued that modern societies developed a new sense of historical time, one in which the future was no longer seen as predetermined but open and fundamentally different from the past. Stephen Jay Gould, in his reflections on geological time, explored how cultural narratives shape our understanding time and history. His work continues to influence debates about the Anthropocene and Big History, which stretch our sense of both time and space.

Jess-Hans Martens, Ship’s clock (Schiffsuhr), Freiburg im Breisgau, c.1865, Deutsches Uhrenmuseum, Furtwangen (2006-131). CC BY-SA.

In the modern era, experiences of and ideas about time were closely tied to globalisation. Steamships, railways and the telegraph seemed to shrink space and time, bridging geographical distances and accelerating life. Migrants and traders experienced both rapid movement and prolonged waiting. The introduction of Greenwich Mean Time as an international standard in 1884 created a shared global reference point for communication and commerce, even as it divided the world into time zones and met significant resistance.

The World Time Zone Chart, 1921, from the Ministry of Transport, Maritime Transport Division’s Search and Rescue charts of New Zealand and the Pacific, Archives New Zealand (ABPV W3111 Box 4/ 63),. CC BY 2.0.

Global time zones necessitated precise technology to quantify time objectively. Such technology spread around the world, but Sebastian Conrad has shown that they could also be adapted to fit local customs of timekeeping.^[1] Time was a political tool as well. European powers used temporal terms to justify colonial domination, casting non-Western societies into what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably calls the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’.^[2] This blog series invites readers to rethink globalisation and global history through the lens of time. By focusing on interruptions, accelerations, time keeping and competing temporalities, we explore how attention to time can transform our understanding of global processes, past and present, and our understanding of history itself.

[Editor's note: Published 27.4.2026. Click here for the next post in the series]

[1] Sebastian Conrad, '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century', Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821n doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. [2] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.

bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Conrad, Sebastian. '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century'. Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821-48. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. Continue Reading

27 April 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

gdc voices part iii: research. in. action.

[Editor’s note: this post continues the series of interviews with our postdocs. For previous entries, see here and here.]

What collaborations, events and publications in the past, present or future show how the three research focuses are driving research at gd:c and beyond?

AG: If you want to see the three focusses in motion, the gd:c bridging conference 2025 is the obvious starting point. Bridging the initial era of gd:c (2021-2025) with the second (2025-2029), the bridging conference brought together the team, the directors, the advisory board as well as current and former fellows. This shows where cultural infrastructures stop being scenery and become methods of inquiry: the venues, platforms, institutions and networks that sustain cultural production while subtly shaping who is granted access, visibility and voice. SQ: And at the bridging conference, time became impossible to ignore. The panel on temporalities made that very clear. Elizabeth DeLoughrey took us into deep time and the deep sea. Siddharth Pandey followed movement, memory and transformation in Shimla in the Indian Himalayas. Ulinka Rublack unpacked the layered temporalities embedded in the global ecologies of early modern dress commodities. Different archives and different scales with a shared insight: globalisation is not only about space. It is also about pace, delay, repetition and uneven timing.

The temporalities panel at the gd:c bridging conference (left to right: Siddarth Pandey, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Ulinka Rublack, Susanne Quitmann; photo: gd:c)

CF: That again is where laboratories come in. The lab is not just a room with equipment; it is a way of making worlds comparable (and potentially improveable). Laboratories extract, isolate and translate environments into models and data. That makes connections travel. But it can also sever abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them. In that sense, labs connect infrastructures and temporalities: they organise access and authority, and they structure time through protocols, calibration, waiting and projection. SQ: Precisely such connections are why the gd:c summer school matters. Out of our diverse research environment, this particular format is where early career researchers and practitioners workshop methods together. It is one of gd:c’s most direct ways of building a shared language across disciplines and engaging with works in progress. AG: The 2024 summer school, Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives, made that tangible. Organised by Christopher Balme, Nikolai Brandes, Hanni Geiger, Nic Leonhardt and Tom Menger, it brought grad students, postgrads and creative practitioners together in a week of lectures, master classes and hands-on formats, plus excursions that connect theory to real sites and their politics. Shannon Jackson’s lecture, Delivery systems: ecological infrastructures across the arts, set the tone. Infrastructures are the delivery systems for culture, power and possibility. Master classes by Eve Olney, Ursula Ströbele and Shannon Jackson deepened the conversation, while Dasha Sotnikova’s zine-making workshop translated analysis into practice. Excursions to Munich’s Architecture Museum and the Gasteig HP8 cultural complex grounded the discussion in the city’s institutional landscapes.

2024 summer school Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives (Photos: gd:c)

CF: Looking ahead, the 2026 summer school, Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity, continues that momentum by focussing on laboratories as built, protocol-driven environments. They are spaces that stage rehearsals, isolate variables and project futures. They promise preparedness and resilience, but they also raise hard questions about uneven labour, risk and exposure. Who gets included in the future worlds and scenarios that are being rehearsed, and who bears their costs? The programme foregrounds experimental pedagogical formats ranging from conceptual studios and hands-on exercises to field excursions in order to explore the lab itself as a method participants can actively stress test.

Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity. gd:c summer school 2026.

SQ: And the 2027 summer school deals explicitly with temporalities. We want early career researchers to help shape the gd:c research focus on temporal dis:connectivity by tracing its conceptual and material tensions across fields and by co-developing a shared analytical framework for bringing diverse disciplinary projects into dialogue. AG: Beyond recurring formats, the focusses also generate projects and publications. Sometimes the most immediate case is the institute itself. I am currently researching the chain of ownership of the building that houses gd:c, which was a house of haute couture until 1963. Its transformation into a research institute shows how cultural infrastructure is continuously reinterpreted and reactivated. The building is not a neutral container. It carries histories, spatial habits and reputations while being repurposed for new forms of research and community. SQ: On the publication side, we’re developing a gd:c blog series that makes temporalities visible in a quick, accessible format. Short contributions from scholars from gd:c and beyond explore temporal dis:connectivity, referring to how divergent temporal frameworks shape global connections and disconnections, and how global connections, in turn, produce new temporal regimes. The topics range widely – fossils, dance, stars and more – but the throughline stays sharp: in a global perspective, we cannot think about time in the singular. CF: I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but once you tune in to laboratory logics, you start seeing them everywhere: in field stations, observatories, simulation facilities, archives, exhibition spaces, and art and design studios. Labs make complexity workable. They translate environments into standards, models, datasets and test beds, so ideas, methods and future imaginaries can travel. But they also make dis:connectivity uncomfortably visible: what gets extracted, what gets excluded, what becomes legible, and what remains opaque. That’s why our research focusses don’t stop at gd:c. They permeate scholarly and artistic collaborations as well as the events where our research moves into the public conversation. To name a few ventures into the broader debate, the gd:c Voices blog, our bi-annual journal static, and our ongoing film Q&A series, which brings global filmmakers and films into dialogue with wider audiences about globalisation’s many affects and effects.

gd:c magazine static

AG: And if you’re curious what else we have brewing, consider this your gentle nudge to stay in touch. Drop by our website and various social channels to keep your finger on the pulse of gd:c. We look forward to seeing you around to come dis:connect with us. Continue Reading

14 April 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Let’s talk contraception: two accounts of a single workshop

Ophelia Wach (the convener)

Contraception is neatly structured along the lines of gender. The meteoric rise of the pill in the 1960s has reinforced hormonal methods for those born as women as the heteronormative default for contraception worldwide. Feminist movements question not only the well-known side effects, but also the unequal distribution of contraceptive work. Bridging between autonomy and control, the workshop on contraceptive equity in practice at gd:c asked doctors, counsellors and users how they navigate the deeply gendered practice that is contraception. Our two authors paint two pictures of the discussions, one from the perspective of a research student (Samara Relkovic) and the other a curious journalist (Romy Hölzel). The dis:connectivity lies in the divergence between the equal roles of the two people involved in conception and the social norms that apply to them as gendered subjects when it comes to contraception.

Negotiating reproductive responsibility

samara relkovic

Photo by Christoffer Voigt

Contraception is considered a private matter. It is decided between two people, organised as discreetly as possible, and is thus negotiated in seeming silence. Yet it is precisely this apparent privacy that conceals a central tension: while decisions about contraception are made in intimate contexts, their prerequisites, risks and consequences are anything but private. They are unequally distributed, politically framed and shaped by institutional conditions. In feminist theory, this shift is nothing new: ‘the personal is political’,[1] especially where questions of bodies, sexuality and reproduction are negotiated. Because contraception often appears as an individual issue related to self-determination, it is simultaneously outsourced to the private sphere, while its societal facets slip out of view. Who bears the risks? Who has access to knowledge? Who has access to methods, counselling, resources, and who does not? These questions concern not only individual bodies, but also interpersonal relationships and political structures, and thus the question of justice and equality. These very questions were addressed at the workshop on equitable contraception in practise, which took place in November 2025 at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect. It became clear that contraception magnifies gender roles, attributions of responsibility, economic logics and political priorities. Contraception was not discussed as a purely technical issue, but as interwoven processes of negotiation between individuals within societal structures, within political-regulatory institutions and within discourses.

Still no pill for men? Questioning the contraception gap

A central question of the workshop concerned the so-called ‘pill for men’. While the pill for women*[2] has been established as a contraceptive method since the 1960s and has become a standard method alongside the condom, the ‘pill for men’ has remained largely a utopia despite decades of research. At the same time, contraceptive methods such as the IUD and sterilisation for women* are becoming increasingly popular,[3] indicating growing demand for expanded contraceptive options – a trend that scholars associate with falling acceptance of the contraceptive pill. Meanwhile, the contraception gap between genders remains persists, with research and medical options for men*[4] remaining limited. This gap refers to the structural inequality in contraceptive options, the distribution of responsibility and the medical assessment of risk. While a wide range of medically recognised hormonal and mechanical contraceptive methods exist for women* – from the pill to IUDs to implants and sterilisation – men* are left with only condoms or vasectomies.[5] This structural inequality is due not merely to technical feasibility; it’s a symptom of the interplay of ethical, institutional and economic factors.

The politics of contraceptive risk evaluation or why responsibility remains gendered

One example of contraception for men is thermal contraception, in which the testicles are heated by external sources or daily elevation into the inguinal canal, significantly reducing sperm production. Smaller studies in France and Switzerland, alongside widespread self-experiments conducted outside official testing modalities, report effective contraception with comparatively minor side effects.[6] We lack large-scale clinical trials, reliable Pearl Index data and systematic long-term studies. Theoretical risks, such as a potential association between undescended testicles and cancer, are frequently cited as reasons against systematic research, despite the absence of solid evidence. In France, thousands of men* already use thermal contraception, sometimes under medical supervision, without regulatory approval. The discrepancy between actual practice and regulators’ caution reveals how the evaluation of contraceptive methods is strongly shaped by institutional priorities and risk perceptions and delimited to what is deemed investigable. Moreover, by prioritising pregnancy as the central metric of contraceptive risk, biomedical and regulatory systems reinforce structural gender biases, marginalising men’s* reproductive role and framing contraception as a predominantly female responsibility. A single-organism risk model prevails in pharmaceutical regulation. Benefits and side effects are assessed solely in relation to the body being treated. For male contraception, this means that hormonal and other body-altering methods are measured against a healthy male body; any deviation from this presumed ‘normal state’ is automatically regarded as problematic. By contrast, women’s* risks are evaluated primarily in light of potential pregnancy: side effects of hormonal methods, for instance, are deemed acceptable when weighed against the medical risks of pregnancy, thereby legitimising their market approval. A shared-risk model would instead assess benefits and harms relationally, relating male side effects to the health and social risks borne by a partner who could otherwise become pregnant, thus accounting for both individuals’ risks. If contraception were holistically understood as a shared responsibility in (hetero)sexual partnerships, men*, too, would be recognised as risk-bearing participants. Scholars advocate this relational model because it exposes how current standards obscure the distribution of risk between partners and thereby reproduce structural inequality.[7] Since regulators tend to neglect this relational model, health risks continue to be assessed differently depending on whose body is impacted. The result is a biomedical double-standard in which physically invasive interventions for men* appear ethically more problematic than comparable methods for women*.

Photo by Samara Relkovic

The contraception gap under the lens of invisible labour, heteronormativity and sexual health

The contraception gap is therefore not merely a technological deficit, but a product of divergent standards in biomedicine and ethics that materialise in everyday negotiations between sexual partners. It involves continuous planning, information management and risk assessment, much of which remains invisible. Coordinating appointments, researching potential side-effects, calculating costs and monitoring adherence all constitute a cognitive and emotional load. While contraception is formally framed as a shared responsibility, in practice this labour is often carried disproportionately by the woman*, reinforcing the contraception gap. Moreover, when reproductive health is normatively framed around pregnancy prevention, medical risk assessment and public discourse reduce contraception to a heterosexually defined practice. Other dimensions of sexual health are systematically neglected: prevention and testing strategies for sexually transmitted infections are treated as secondary, despite being relevant irrespective of gender, relationship structure and reproductive capacity. Queer lives and sexualities are marginalised, as dominant contraceptive discourses remain organised around heteronormative assumptions of pregnancy risk. This narrow focus matters. While reproductive risks continue to be framed predominantly as pregnancy risks, European public health authorities have reported sustained increases in bacterial STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhoea in recent years.[8] The shift in attention towards hormonal pregnancy prevention, coupled with the relative neglect of barrier-based protective strategies, therefore constitutes not just a discursive imbalance but an epidemiological concern. A contraceptive policy oriented towards the management of reproduction fails to address central aspects of collective sexual health and simultaneously reproduces a heteronormative constriction of sexual responsibility. Taken together, these dynamics reveal the contraception gap as a structural phenomenon rather than a mere technological absence. It is sustained by regulatory standards, research priorities and entrenched assumptions about whose body is expected to bear reproductive risk. As long as biomedical evaluation remains individualised, pregnancy prevention dominates sexual-health discourse, and the mental load of contraception is unevenly distributed, responsibility will fall asymmetrically. Closing the contraception gap therefore requires not only new methods, but a shift towards a genuinely relational understanding of reproductive risk and shared responsibility. [1] The slogan is attributed to second-wave radical-feminist Carol Hanisch. [2] This term refers to women and people who can become pregnant, and the associated contraceptives for ovulation suppression. [3] See the recent survey by the Federal Institute for Public Health (BIÖG) on sexual education, contraception and family planning: Faktenblatt: Sexualaufklärung, Verhütung und Familienplanung, Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Aufklärung, 7, https://shop.bioeg.de/pdf/DL-20251027-1600.pdf. [4] The term men* refers to men and sperm-producing people. [5] Although the condom is the most widely used contraceptive method in Germany and often reflects shared responsibility in practice, its comparatively limited efficacy under typical use means that an additional method is required anyway. [6] See Samuel Joubert et al., 'Thermal male contraception: A study of users’ motivation, experience, and satisfaction', Andrology 10, no. 8 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1111/andr.13264; Jean-Claude Soufir, 'Hormonal, chemical and thermal inhibition of spermatogenesis: contribution of French teams to international data with the aim of developing male contraception in France', Basic and Clinical Andrology 27, no. 3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12610-016-0047-2. [7] Christopher ChoGlueck, 'Still no pill for men? Double standards & demarcating values in biomedical research', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 91 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.11.010. [8] 'STI cases continue to rise across Europe', European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2025, accessed 19 February 2026, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/sti-cases-continue-rise-across-europe.

bibliography

ChoGlueck, Christopher. 'Still no pill for men? Double standards & demarcating values in biomedical research'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 91 (2022): 66-76. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.11.010. Faktenblatt: Sexualaufklärung, Verhütung und Familienplanung. Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Aufklärung. https://shop.bioeg.de/pdf/DL-20251027-1600.pdf. Joubert, Samuel, Jessica Tcherdukian, Roger Mieusset and Jeanne Perrin. 'Thermal male contraception: A study of users’ motivation, experience, and satisfaction'. Andrology 10, no. 8 (2022): 1500-10. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/andr.13264. Soufir, Jean-Claude. 'Hormonal, chemical and thermal inhibition of spermatogenesis: contribution of French teams to international data with the aim of developing male contraception in France'. Basic and Clinical Andrology 27, no. 3 (2017). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1186/s12610-016-0047-2. 'STI cases continue to rise across Europe'. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2025, accessed 19 February 2026, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/sti-cases-continue-rise-across-europe.

Responsibility, trust, contraception

romy hölzel

‘Contraception is about far more than just means and methods — it's about decision-making, responsibility and justice,’ says Samara Relkovic.[1] Murmurs of agreement ripple through the rows. The participants, a diverse mix of experts, students and people from other fields, are busily taking notes, nodding in recognition or simply watching attentively as the two workshop leaders, Samara Relkovic and Ophelia Wach, deliver their opening speech for the workshop Equal Contraception in Practice. The workshop, which took place at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, focussed on a topic that is often swept under the rug, taboo or dismissed as a ‘women's issue’: contraception. Over the course of eight hours, participants gained concrete knowledge from experts in various fields from sociology and gynaecology to activist organisations. With these diverse and interdisciplinary insights, participants engaged in discussion rounds on various aspects of contraception, developing both expertise and a better sense for the subject matter — a matter that most people will face sooner or later.

Photo by Christoffer Voigt

Fabian Hennig provided the first intervention, considering developments and research in contraception, such as hormonal and thermal methods, as part of his dissertation. The mood became more relaxed, and smiles spread across the participants' faces as Hennig presented his first slide showing current common contraceptive methods for men, which turns out to be rather short: ‘Condom, vasectomy,’ it read. Fortunately, the list of contraceptive methods for men currently in testing is somewhat longer. Hennig explains various methods to the audience, from sperm flow blockage to vasectomy to hormonal and thermal approaches. A ‘pill for men,’ as Hennig put it (though without much enthusiasm for the term), seems to have stagnated in research. ‘Historically speaking, men weren't really trusted to take the pill daily’ — followed by amused giggling that ran through the rows of participants. But then the atmosphere became more tense, with almost a hint of anger and frustration in the air, as Hennig explained that the side effects that might occur for men, which were identified while testing this pill, were considered ‘unreasonable’. The mood swings, depression and loss of libido were deemed too great a risk. ‘With male contraception, there are unrealistically high expectations — namely zero risk’, Hennig said. Further, the pressure in Germany to advance research in this direction is unfortunately not yet insistent enough. The almost palpable frustration of those present is interrupted — it's time for the first breakout session. In the first breakout session, participants with overlapping areas of interest came together. One or two experts also joined the discussion rounds to provide input, though even participants without particular expertise engaged enthusiastically in the exchange. Under the topic of Where is the progress?, one of the small groups exchanged opinions and thoughts relating to education: ‘What's missing is the impetus to question the status quo and the entire system in such a way that you think: “What can we do differently?”‘ said Louis Happel, a student and workshop participant. Gynaecologist Cornelia Höß also noted regarding education: ‘The topic of contraception should be part of young people's upbringing and should be discussed equally’. In schools and at home, contraception should not be taboo but actively addressed. The goal of the group work — getting to know other workshop participants and consciously engaging with the topic of contraception while simultaneously gaining new knowledge — seemed to have been fully achieved in the first session. The second presentation came from Louisa Lorenz, an education coordinator for sexuality and society. Her short presentation focussed on the topic of responsibility in contraception, which is famously one-sided: ‘Women are the main bearers of responsibility for pregnancy prevention’, Lorenz explained. The audience nodded in agreement. When Lorenz discussed one of her slides showing that men apparently massively overestimate their own engagement and responsibility regarding contraception, the listeners broke into brief, rather irritated laughter, as if the entire room were soberly shaking its head. The weight of responsibility for contraception that women usually shoulder became particularly clear when Lorenz listed the various steps necessary for the contraceptive method one by one or the preferred approach to be used. From going to the gynaecologist to constantly remembering to have the pill, condom or other means along when needed, the list is long. ‘Then you really notice why the burden is so high,’ said Lorenz, and the participants nodded in agreement. The third breakout session also revolved around the theme of responsibility. In the context of gender-specific differences in contraception, a lively discussion took place in one of the groups, with the focus not only on responsibility, but also on trust: ‘Contraception is very much about trust. Regarding contraceptive methods for men, women are confronted with the question: “Can I trust my partner, even when the most serious consequences rest with me?”‘ said Christoffer Voigt from the European Network for Shared Contraception. The group found that trust, along with a certain level of knowledge, education and, as banal as it may sound, money, are the most crucial prerequisites for contraception to proceed as fairly and equitably as possible between genders. But something else is needed too: communicating with each other, as the groups agreed. The negotiation of contraception is also based on compromises. As diligently as the workshop participants discussed, took notes and though, their concentration inevitably began to wane after eight hours. And yet everyone gathered for a final breakout session, this time on the topic of research and development. Even after almost eight hours of active participation, the energy was high, which is thanks to what Hennig reported in the ‘Research and Development’ group about ongoing research. Hennig talked about the barriers that are sometimes put in the way of developing male contraceptives. From lacking funds to lacking demand: research faces numerous restrictions. The conversation became particularly charged when it returned to side effects. ‘For other medical developments and research, the standard regarding side effects is not as high as for contraceptives for men’, Hennig explained. A statement that revived everyone again. After a day full of new knowledge, exchange, discussions and — as is to be expected with such a topic — anger and frustration, the workshop Equal Contraception in Practice came to an end. Despite visible exhaustion, it was obvious that all the education had stirred something in the participants’ minds. And even though the issues surrounding contraception can certainly drive one to despair, there remains hope. As workshop leader Ophelia Wach put it, ‘There is movement, even if there are always setbacks’. [1] The text was originally published in German, and all quotations have been translated. Continue Reading

31 March 2026

clemens finkelstein

Cratering the present

Elsewhere: the allotopic environment

Elsewhen: the allochronic environment

Chronotechnics

Temporal asymmetry: a preliminary sketch

bibliography

arnika fuhrmann

bibliography

roland wenzlhuemer

The longtermist wager

Hari Seldon’s problem

Where the connection breaks

Moral arithmetic and its consequences

When the guardians of the future design the future

bibliography

gideon morison

Dis:connective pathways to pan-African renaissance through festivals

Archiving Festac ‘77 and its contradictory memory

Epilogue

Bibliography

sina steglich

Origin stories…

… as Thanatos stories

Expanding scales, shifting grounds

(Missing) evidence: marginalisation strategies

From new narratives to new epistemologies: separating history from its ‘pre-'

bibliography

claire louise blaser

Power: regimes of im:mobility

Knowledge: techno-mobility, infrastructures and im:mobile ideas

Experience: embodied, imagined and symbolic im:mobilities

What else can im:mobility do for historians?

aliena guggenberger

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Changing catwalks

Conclusion: continuities

bibliography

susanne quitmann

bibliography

What collaborations, events and publications in the past, present or future show how the three research focuses are driving research at gd:c and beyond?

Ophelia Wach (the convener)

Negotiating reproductive responsibility

samara relkovic

Still no pill for men? Questioning the contraception gap

The politics of contraceptive risk evaluation or why responsibility remains gendered

The contraception gap under the lens of invisible labour, heteronormativity and sexual health

bibliography

Responsibility, trust, contraception

romy hölzel

Contact

Disclaimer

Social Media

Copyright