Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History

Abstract

structures and transformations of world in small details of life; to re-capture people's expressions-in all media-of their experiences of those abstractions, while also attempting to understand forces shaping multiple grids mediating those expressions; and, finally, to analyze how concrete and mundane actions in may themselves transform abstract structures of polity and economy.'6 The crucial injunction here is not that we should privilege study of everydayness over other aspects of human experience but, rather, elaborate nexus between remote or global levels of that experience and its immediate or micro-local expressions. The task of sorting out how these different levels of analysis are linked-that is, understanding how large and important are articulated with and expressed through small and unimportant, and vice versa-requires that we explicate more precisely relation between individual agency and structural frameworks, on one hand, and that we conceptualize more clearly just how one's consciousness of self and other are formed, on other. The issue of understanding formation of human subject is clearly fundamental to such an inquiry and perhaps least well investigated by historians. Among diverse approaches to this question, I find Martin Heideg15 This literature is vast, and I will not attempt to provide a bibliography here. Perhaps practitioner best known to and most influential among American historians is Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1984). For an example of de Certeau's influence among African-Americanists, see Robin Kelley, 'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in Jim Crow South, Journal of American History, 80 (June 1993): 75-112. (The approach discussed below is quite different from de Certeau's, however.) 16 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, Calif., forthcoming, 1995), quoted by permission of author. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1995 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 05:14:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Marking: Race, Race-making, and Writing of History 9 ger's exploration of philosophical puzzle of existence a provocative and stimulating place to begin, especially for historians.17 In process of reengaging age-old ontological problem of being, Heidegger elaborated a notion of the everyday and, through it, a painstaking epistemological reconstruction of how we come to know ourselves as conscious beings. In his inquiry, is merely part of method of inquiry, an illustration and instrument of his chain of reasoning, but it underscores and demonstrates, nonetheless, fact that conscious human selves are socially formed and revealed.18 One of primordial ways in which self is knowable or realized-and thus one might say constituted-is through its interactions with life, where other entities and other selves are encountered. The predominant mode of one's conscious living is within and through physical out-there and in relation to common mass of humanity. Moreover, through one's encounters with existence, through one's consciousness of one's own mortality and selfhood, is disclosed something about nature and limits of actual human existence. With these insights, Heidegger lays a theoretical basis for our understanding that human experience, motivations, and behaviors must ultimately be understood as grounded in social processes and framed by historical moments. Thus models of human thought and behavior deduced from premise of an isolated individual-a constellation of emotions, psychology, material aspirations, or rather one whose behavior and motivations are reducible to those terms-are inadequate at best; at worst, simply