The jour fixe initiative frankfurt celebrates the book release of Die Zukunft des Fortschritts with a book launch and discussion with Kerstin Schoof, Stefan Vogt and Elfriede Müller and invites you to snacks, drinks and a get together in the courtyard afterwards.

Can progress still be saved? 

In its first book publication, the jour fixe initiative frankfurt asks about the possibility of progress in light of the urgent need to look ahead, in search of inspiration and imagination for a different society.

In social discourse, progress is often only imaginable as "innovation" or "growth." Music, art, and literature are also largely characterized by the repetition of the same old thing, by nostalgia and "retromania." Are we haunted by missed futures, as Mark Fisher argues? Ideologically and in real terms, the future is being stripped of its foundations by a scarcity of time and financial resources. It is not possible, however, to simply pick up where we left off in 19th- and 20th-century thinking about progress: embedded in the European notion of progress are mechanisms of colonial and postcolonial domination that postulate an alternativeless path to "modernity." 

How can the idea of an emancipatory social, cultural and technical development be thought and lived today? Can there be a concept of progress that takes into account inequalities between societies, cultural spheres or forms of knowledge?

The reading will be in german.