Lectures:

April 20, 2009

Dr Mika Hannula, Turku, Finland/Berlin

"What's Modern in the Modern?Background and Presuppositions of Modernity"

The talk will address with a critical view the main presuppositions and the background of modernity. I will walk you through the conceptual history of enlightenment, continue with focusing on the three central mental "earthquakes" (in no order of appearance: Marx, Saussure and Freud) that changed - for good and for worse - our understanding of who where are, where we are from and where we might move towards. I will also present the outline of the whole series of five talks that deal with the history and the present articulations of modernity.

 

April 27, 2009

Dr Mika Hannula, Turku, Finland/Berlin

"Dark Side of the Moon - Modernity and Its Critics"

In the second talk of the Making Modern series, I will address the critical views on the illusion of win-win endless progression of modernity through the concepts of cultural alienation, instrumental reason and the embeddedness of the dark sides of modernity within the core of it. This will be done in dialogue with, in respective order, Freud, Adorno and Bauman.

 

May 11, 2009

Dr Mika Hannula, Turku, Finland/Berlin

What’s So Funny About Avant-Garde?

The third talk in the series on Making Modern focuses on the conceptual histories and rhetorics of avant-garde. The question of what’s so funny about it does not relate so much to the hubris of its protagonist, or on how silly many of their manifestations today seem.Instead, the task is to analyze the core presupposition of all avant-garde positions, especially the aim of striving through diametrical opposition and the outsiders perspective to achieve change and empowerment. My claim is that this is not only impossible but also self-defeating.

 

June 22, 2009

Dr Mika Hannula, Turku, Finland/Berlin

Plural Modernities and Social Imaginaries

The 4th lecture in the series looks with a critical yet constructive eye now on the developments of modernities from post-45 perspective. A perspective that sees the issue frames as in plural modernities and at the same time, acknowledging how these central issues of politics and society are never only about the mind (theory) but always both-and - a combination of hearts and minds (experiences).

 

June 29, 2009

Dr Mika Hannula, Turku, Finland/Berlin

Empire and the Everyday Talking Back:Post-Colonialist and Feminist Challenge

In the fifth and last of the series of talks within the framework of this summer semester focusing on Modern and Modernity, I will address the chances and challenges posed by both the post-colonial and feminist critique. From the former, I will focus on two novelist: Albert Camus, Salman Rushdie, and with the latter, I will articulate the issue of otherness and the other that is always within us with the writings of Julia Kristeva. I will also finish the series by summing up the roots and routes of a self-critical and reflective take on modernity that is not a sickness to be cured but part of our background that we constantly must relate to and confront with.