Modern Europe: Conferences
"The Practices of Everyday Life," November 14, 15, and 16th 2003
This workshop brought together scholars who engage the implications of the practices of everyday life for the more canonical preoccupations of historians - social and political negotiations and transformations, the production of meaning, behaviors of nation-states, and the transmission and representation of the past.
Historians working out of particular historiographical and philosophical traditions have used the terms "the everyday" or "everydayness" to mean quite different things. Some have used it as a synonym for the history of the disempowered and/or illiterate, others have used it to describe the reconstruction of the lives of all classes when not at labor. Yet others have focused on the everyday as the domain in life where formal, particularly state, power is at its most fragile. The approach of this workshop was, rather, the everyday as a site of linkage between the abstract and the concrete.
It is, for example, in everyday bureaucratic practices at the post office, regulation of opening and closing times, age and other access restrictions to certain commodities and sites of consumption, zoning, road layouts and street signage. that the state is most often directly encountered by a nation's inhabitants. Three sessions of the conference will address how three major state forms - authoritarian, colonial and democratic - shape the everyday (and how those inhabiting those states respond).
In parallel, it is while shopping, while seeing advertisements, while on vacation, but also while at work, that "the economy" or the "economic system" is most directly experienced. It is often assumed by scholars working on Western Europe, Japan, and the Americas in the 20th century that capitalism generated a unique form of everyday life. By inviting both scholars who have worked on economies defined as "communist" and those defined as "capitalist" we re-engaged those assumptions.
We were equally interested in the lived experience of abstractions other than the political and the economic, particularly those of time and space. At all moments in the life-cycle, the experience of individual or familial time (both necessarily embedded in mortality) may be dissonant with institutional and national time (often framed in at least the hope of immortality); how are those dissonances expressed or resolved? What are the consequences when they are not?
Space too is lived in daily trajectories through and across it. Having invited scholars who have worked on the importance of interior spaces and objects in the construction of memory, others who have studied the politics of domestic space, and others who have worked on people's use of state-constructed monuments, discussed how everydayness is instantiated in the built environment. That is, how are people shaped, as well as shape, the built (and unbuilt) environment they inhabit?
Speakers: Leora Auslander, Joelle Bahloul, Richard Bosworth, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Gal, Catriona Kelly, Nicole Lapierre, Stephen Lovell, Alf üdtke, Erica Peters, David Scobey
"Critical Theory in the 21st Century: Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination After 10 Years
Program of events
Keynote Address: Craig Calhoun
Session 1: History
William H. Sewell, Jr. "Postonian Marxism and the History of the French Revolution:
Some Preliminary Thoughts"
Gary Wilder, "Critical Theory and the Poverty of Historiography"
Andrew Sartori, "Towards a New Method for Colonial Concept-History"
Mark Loeffler, "Rethinking 20th Century Economic Transformations"
Session 2: Theory
Edward LiPuma, "Reconstructing the Relationship Between Culture and Economy:
Postone's Notion of Labor as a Social Mediation"
Paul Manning, "Words and Things, Goods and Services"
Bo-Mi Choi, "A Humanity Without Domination: The Dialectic of Labor in Theodor W. Adorno"
Session 3: Praxis
Manu Goswami, "Temporality and Utopia"
Devin Pendas, "Time, Labor and Political Fragmentation: Postonian Critical Theory and Identity Politics in West Germany"
Jason Dawsey, "The Social Conditions of Freedom: The Anti-Capitalist Politics of Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination"
Response from Moishe Postone