The Key to Change. Interdisciplinary Essays in Cultural History

"The Key to Change" is a book of essays on the mechanism generating transformations from one cultural phase to another. In "The Age of the World Picture", Heidegger is probing into the factors leading up to the onset of a new order in light of which phenomena make themselves "modern and up to date": "What understanding of what is, what interpretation of truth, lies at the foundation of these phenomena?" A world picture - or rather a whole range of epistemological attractors - functions as a sign of recognition as well as a conceptual model articulation. Without common features, art objects could not be aligned under period terms. The history of their making can only be understood against the broader background of phase change. Each of the following essays is dedicated to some operator of change: the construction of a new identitarian narrative, transformative transmission, consistent matching of political views and narrative modes, evolution of genres, defamiliarization of precedents, dissemination of cultural models, the rewriting of tradition (through some differential operator which effects permutations on a previous domain of thematic and rhetorical elements), etc.