History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life

191 Pages·2000·1.416 MB·English

by  Harry Harootunian

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HISTORY’S DISQUIET
Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question
of Everyday Life
Harry Harootunian
The Wellek Library Lecture Series
at the University of California, Irvine
C
new york
columbia university press
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Columbia University Press
Publishers Since1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2000Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harootunian, Harry D., 1929–
History’s disquiet :modernity, cultural practice, and the question of everyday
life / Harry Harootunian.
p. cm. — (The Wellek Library lecture series at the University of California,
Irvine)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–231–11794–9(cloth)
ISBN 0–231–11795–7(paper)
1. Civilization, Modern—20th century. 2. Europe—Civilization—20th
century. 3. Japan—Civilization—20th century. 4. Postmodernism—Social
aspects. 5. Postcolonialism. 6. Europe—Intellectual life—20th century.
7. Japan—Intellectual life—20th century. 8. East and West. 9. Asia—Study
and teaching. 10. History, Modern—20th century—Philosophy. I.Title.
II. Series.
CB427.H28 2000
909.82—dc21 99–056305
I
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable
acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10987654321
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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editorial note
The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory are given annually at
the University of California, Irvine, under the auspices of the Critical
Theory Institute. The following lectures were given in May 1997.
The Critical Theory Institute
Gabriele Schwab, Director
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For Holly, Claudia, and Jonathan, and the everydays
of their children Christine, Katherine, Patrick, Ani, and Andrew
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Now as many times before, I am troubled by my own experience of my
feelings, by my anguish simply to be feeling something, my disquiet sim-
ply at being here, my nostalgia for something never known....And the
light bursts serenely and perfectly forth from things, gilds them with a
smiling, sad reality. The whole mystery of the world appears before my
eyes sculpted from this banality, this street. Ah, how mysteriously the
everyday things of life brush by us! On the surface, touched by light, of
this complex human life, Time, a hesitant smile, blooms on the lips of
the Mystery! How modern all this sounds, yet deep down it is so ancient,
so hidden, so different from the meaning that shines out from all of this.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xiii
introduction
The Unavoidable “Actuality” of Everyday Life
1
. tracking the dinosaur
1
Area Studies in a Time of “Globalism”
25
the “mystery of the everyday”
2.
Everydayness in History
59
“dialectical optics”
3.
History in Everydayness
111
notes
159
index
169
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acknowledgments
I want to thank the members of the Critical Theory Institue at the
University of California, Irvine, for providing me the opportunity
to give these lectures. I especially want to thank Rey Chow and
Jim Fujii for making my stay pleasant and pleasurable in every
conceivable way, and Rey in particular for her valuable reading of
the original lectures. I also thank Carol Gluck and Bill Haver,
whose readings of the lectures have immeasureably enhanced my
revision, even if they can’t be held responsible for what I have
done. I want to record my thanks to Leora Auslander, with whom
I first taught a seminar on everyday life at the University of
Chicago, and to the students who made our job easy and exciting.
My colleagues Louise Young and Hyun Ok Park have generously
provided additional critical assessments of the lectures that I have
tried to incorporate and for which I am thankful. I want to thank
Masao Miyoshi for being around, and Katsuhiko Endo, Ken
Kawashima, and Alexandra Monroe, who cheerfully listened to
these lectures as they evolved during innumerable discussions.
Thanks also to Peter Osborne, whose Politics of Time has been
invaluable to my own formulations. But my deepest and most
enduring debt is to Kristin Ross, who listened to my initial, often
incoherent ramblings concerning the substance of the lectures and
who read them at every stage of their production with an eye for
both intelligibility and clarity that I’ve not always been able to
match. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Judy Geib and
Sabu Kosho for their cover design.
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HISTORY’S DISQUIET
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introduction
The Unavoidable “Actuality” of Everyday Life
The present! It is unfolding before our very eyes. When stepping out the
door, one sees there the spectacle in our here. Still more, it is contem-
porary custom one sees everywhere people go, in the multitude of house-
holds themselves, in the diverse places people congregate, in the parks
and gardens....And yet this now is, in actuality, moving.
—Kon Wajiro¯ (1929)
“And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for
me,” the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa exclaimed through one
of his numerous “heteronyms” Bernardo Soares, “the second floor
I live in on the same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the
same street as Life but in a different room; Art which offers relief
from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as
monotonous as life itself but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos
Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of
all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves which is
something beyond resolution.”1 Acutely attuned to everyday
modernity in Lisbon in the 1920s, the modernist poet Pessoa marked
the distance between the dull, routine monotony of everyday life,
filled with minutiae, and the lofty reflections that everydayness
inspired, between the past and the now of the present. Aware, more-
over, that in modern life no real difference separated the individual
life from the streets—both objects with a “common abstract des-
tiny” that signified only “insignificant value” (p. 23), he was never-
theless convinced that this world of “tedium” defined the terrain of
experience and determined the conditions for all reflection. Pes-
soa’s “diary” attests to the groundlessness of any transcendental
claim to subjectivity that by the early twentieth century, modernists
detected everywhere. This recognition accompanied the capitalist
modernization that was transforming urban sites into huge indus-