If insecurity is the signature of the present, “more or less” conveys a feeling of general uncertainty. Unanticipated events and phenomena that are difficult to control seem to be on the rise, with the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and above all the “turning point” of the Russian attack on Ukraine. Phenomena are also becoming “more” in senses other than the political and economic: information, images, and literary genres are represented by the omnipresent metaphor of flood. In addition, diagnoses of continuous acceleration, decline, or even apocalypse are virulent in public debate and on social media – as well as in humanities research devoted to observing the present.
At the same time, there is more and more insistence that there should be less of everything on the whole, with calls for degrowth or zero growth as well as tiny houses, in addition to compression and ascetic (self-)practices ranging from special nutrition to non-consumption. With tl:dr (too long; didn’t read), people on the internet defend their own – short – attention spans. What all of these practices of becoming less have in common is that they positively inflect critique of the results of overconsumption without giving up the idea of consumption altogether; they formulate one regime of consumption among others, under ethically defensible auspices.
With the annual theme “More or Less,” the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI) will explore this pendular movement in 2023/2024, asking what has or will become more or more or less, and when and why, and what the consequences may be.
