The twentieth century saw many revolutions. Various transformations in the political, economic, social, technological and artistic domains not only inaugurated new eras, or at least discourses about new eras; they also often entailed a radical reorientation in the very conceptions by which any revolution could be thought. This beautifully edited collection of essays addresses itself to the particular revolution by which we came to understand the unity of space and time as ontological categories.
The twelve papers collected in this volume explore the consequences of conceptions of time and its relationship to space. Although originating from the revolution in mathematics and theoretical physics, these essays extend the thinking of space-time in a multi-disciplinary approach through the philosophy of space and time, social geography, post-Marxian social theory, new network theory, the philosophy of art and culture, musicology, evolutionary biology, historiography, psychoanalytic theory, and comparative literature. The result is a fascinating snapshot of a nearly universal transformation, but one that was only slowly realized, as the debates in one field reverberated across a vast terrain of discourse and discipline. In tracing the varied responses to the developments emanating from theoretical physics, the essays in this volume reveal how discontinuous but profound shifts in knowledge and aesthetics ultimately converge on a radically transformed horizon.
Contributors are: Peter Galison, Richard T. W. Arthur, Nader El-Bizri, Chunglin Kwa, Leslie Kavanaugh, Mary Lynne Ellis, Patricia Locke, Sander van Maas, Raviv Ganchrow, Josef Früchtl, M. Christine Boyer, and Antoine Picon.