Final Conference of the Sinergia Research Project «The Power of Wonder»
Disastrous events such as sudden volcano eruptions, the insidious extinction of species, unexpected industrial disasters, predictable financial or political-social crises cause the collapse of patterns and structures of human action and interpretation. The expectancy of disasters threatens the existing order of things and confront the present with a radically uncertain future. It challenges the scientific knowledge, institutionalised in universities, scientific societies, and academies since the early modern period, and its claim of validity. But it also concerns questions of representability and imaginability, aesthetic concepts and artistic processes. The conference will investigate how disasters and the expectancy of disasters have changed and are still changing the orders of knowledge, how they are dealt with aesthetically, narrated in literature and how they are fuelled, perpetuated, or overcome by narration.
Etymologically, the notion ‹catastrophy› connects the idea of falling or tumbling (κατά, ‹downwards›) with the idea of turning around (στροφή). In this way, it can be linked to metaphors which are crucial for the description of scientific ‹turns›. Such disruptions, whether caused by external events or also as a reaction to internal crises of the epistemic order, entail dramatic humiliations of collective world views.
Against this background, the conference’s focus lies primarily on the affective dimensions of disasters: moments of shock, disturbance, and horror that correspond to the suddenness of the event, as well as moments of profound bewilderment, wonder, curiosity and doubt that are connected to the temporality within which science and art come to terms with disasters.