13316

Too Much. A global intellectual history of excess (too many people, too much stuff, too much information)

Leonie Wolters

Comments

Global history is about a lot - in this case: too much. The seminar explores global modernity through the lens of excess—examining how, in the 19th and 20th centuries, people, goods, and information came to be framed as too much. As disciplines such as statistics, economics, and information theory advanced, the world was increasingly imagined as a closed and measurable system. Population growth, industrial production, and the proliferation of information were quantified—and, at times, problematized—as overwhelming surpluses.

Relying on the work of historians and critical theorists, the course investigates the political and epistemological processes through which certain lives, commodities, and forms of knowledge were rendered superfluous. It also introduces intellectual and political responses to this framing—counter-narratives that challenge discourses of redundancy.

We consider three overlapping domains of excess:

? People: Drawing on scholarship that places the production of superfluous populations at the heart of modernity, we examine how specific groups—across colonial, urban, and global contexts—were categorized as excessive. We explore the emergence of population control as a governmental and ideological project, as well as its material and moral consequences.

? Stuff: The course traces an intellectual history of waste, planned obsolescence, and overproduction. We consider how material excess came to define modern economies and geopolitical divides, shaping a world split between South and North, East and West. Waste is studied not only as a byproduct, but as an active force in the remaking of global systems.

? Information: Turning to the digital age, we examine narratives of information overload and the construction of attention as a finite resource. We investigate how both "information" and "human attention" were redefined as measurable and manageable quantities. We also consider the history of a key solution that was developed in the 20th century: the search engine.

Across all three areas, the seminar critically engages with narratives of overwhelm and asks: Who gets to define what is too much? What are the consequences of those definitions? And what intellectual alternatives have been proposed to reimagine excess not as failure, but as possibility?