Brouhaha: Worlds of the Contemporary

Within the hypermediated age where knowledge production is decentered and horizontal, the experience of lived time has become a concordance of temporalities. The literary imagination, which was emblematic of modernity and thoroughly connected to the book as a support structure, has now become integrated within a much vaster regime of publication. Thought concerning the world is from now on a thought concerning a plurality of worlds.

By way of six guiding threads (exposition, media, controversy, publication, institutionalization, archaeology), this essay describes the transformation of cultural forms and visions of history.