Modelling Change: ALCA 2023
“Things change,” no doubt, and for many decades now changes in literature and the visual arts have often been conceptualized in two interconnected ways. First, artifactual change is taken as a sign of or proxy for deeper, systemic modifications (from old-fashioned “periods” to master changes like “rationalism,” “capitalism,” and “modernity”). To “historicize,” as Frederic Jameson enjoined us to do, means to imagine artifacts as registering the complex conditions that made them possible in the first place. Second, this brand of change is thought through the trope of rupture, since the various systems that relay one another — call them paradigms, epistemes, horizons or regimes — are held to be incommensurable, despite possible surface similarities.