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	»The End of the Spectacle« Symposium at Podewil, Klosterstr. 68-70, Berlin-Mitte [4. + 5. December 2003] Mobility, acceleration, optimization, consumption and communication in real time: the Modern project for removing human boundaries has become reality. And that is why it is no longer spectacular, but normal. The spectacle presented by avant-garde Modernisms with their absolute social, political and aesthetic projects has shifted over into the everyday world of mass media culture and become the world we live in and take for granted. But the end of spectacular modernism has also put an end to scandals ensuing from the suffering this Modernism caused. Suffering, which once led to a sovereign act of resistance, and emerged as a genuine product of this Modernism for precisely that reason, has shifted into lautloses irren, into silent wandering, into a lack of direction, entropy and paralysis, into radical individualization and progressive erosion of solidarity. Spectacular criticism of the modern project for removing personal boundaries has shifted into everyday experience of the structural boundaries of this project: experience of interferences, friction losses, disintegration effects, the pointlessness of planning and the superfluity of individuals. This experience provokes new-old centralizations of humans within the social strategies of the present, whether this takes the form of invoking humanism, or of technically optimizing human nature – as though Modernism's spectacular project is to be tackled again, and with improved instruments. [Outline: Michael Makropoulos] The symposium will be prepared by   Prof. Dr. Michael Makropoulos, Freie Universität Berlin   Prof. Dr. Christoph Menke, Universität Potsdam   Harm Lux, Projectdirector The Symposium's language will be German. Please have a look on the German version of the webpage for a detailed programm!
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