The Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas is pleased to announce an upcoming talk by Dr. Kirill Chepurin (ICI Berlin) entitled: “Upscaling: On the Cross-Scalar Movement of Modernity.” We look forward to seeing you there.
Date: Wednesday, March 5
Time: 12.30-13.30
Location: H 232
Abstract:
This talk argues that “modernity,” emerging as epoch and normative program in Enlightenment and Romantic thought, is a cross-scalar category that has, from the outset, served to mediate across three scales: the global, the planetary, and the cosmic. As metaphor and as movement, modernity emerges from a cross-scalar disorder marked by the Copernican revolution and the colonial “opening” of the globe, disorder that continues in our age of increased planetary instability. Drawing on thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Sylvia Wynter, and on the interplay of the global, the planetary, and the cosmic in Romanticism, as exemplified by Percy Shelley’s poem Queen Mab (1813), I rethink the looping circumnavigational movement of modernity as a process of upscaling that aims to re-mediate the growing cross-scalar disorder into a universal order under the technological control of “man.” This process, I suggest, not only engenders the crisis we inhabit, but also necessitates an ethos of the planetary and cosmic commons that would oppose the logics of upscaling at the heart of modernity.
Bio:
Kirill Chepurin is a fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin and has published on German Idealism, philosophical and literary Romanticism, and the modern ideas of bliss, utopia, and the cosmic. He is the co-editor of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology (Fordham, 2021) and Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France (Springer, 2023). His monograph, Bliss Against the World: Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity, is now out with Oxford University Press, and he is currently working on a project titled Upscaling: On the Cross-Scalar Construction of Humanity.