This question offers the central thread for a research collaborative led by Christian Flow (Mississippi State University), Laetitia Lenel (Humboldt University Berlin), Anna-Maria Meister , Richard Spiegel (Princeton University) and Janina Wellmann (Leuphana University Lüneburg). With the timeliness of knowledge in the foreground, we want to think about knowledge-production as a constellation of parallel, intersecting, and interfering time horizons, each with its own virtues, vices, apparatus, and exigencies. What are the different meanings of being “on time” for a ministerial official, a philologist, an economist, or a lab technician? How and for whom, we ask, can knowledge be premature or tardy, up-to-date or obsolete? We are after the many granularities of time to be found in different cultures and the distinct temporal orientations identifiable in different spaces, periods, and contexts. We are interested as well in time’s material manifestations: the instruments and media in which different time regimes are instantiated, bounded, controlled; the time scales to which computer programs and models of possible future events are calibrated; the economic constraints and market projections that condition the planning of technological, medical or business applications. Projects meant to be “timeless” will be examined alongside historiographical questions about “availability”: which versions of the past are accessible from which vantages, and what sort of ruptures make new world-views, new experiments, new investigations, new discoveries possible? By assessing the restless tension between the timelessness and timeliness of knowing, between fixed truths and fluid contingencies, our collaborative attempts to refocus the conversation from “knowing what” and “knowing how” to “knowing when.”
After a conference panel at HSS in Seattle and regular workshops, we will convene with a series of international scholars in June 2020 (virtually) to work on an edited volume or special issue tackling these questions.
