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conference is meant to be oriented toward the future of theoretical considerations
about the past. There are several reasons to think that history considered
as a field of study which originated in the early 19th century (when it
began to be taught at the University) is in a deep crisis. However, the
word "crisis" does not need to be taken in a purely negative sense and
considered as synonymous with degeneration or connected with the postmodernist
discourses of various "ends" and "deaths." The Greek word "crisis" originates
in Hippocratic medicine, where it indicates a "turning point" of a disease,
a sudden change for better or for worse. In this sense, "crisis" may be
connected with the word "kairos" - a proper time, a time of opportunity
and fulfilment, a chance, a moment pregnant with some revealed meanings.
Crisis/kairos is a metaphorical designation of a cultural moment pregnant
with promise and new beginnings. In historical thought, as well as in cultural
critique in general, our time might be considered a proper moment to "begin
again."
The following project presents a position to be discussed, and not one which is generally accepted and we would like to pose this as a question, not as something generally accepted today, because it is not. Several observations could stand at this "critical moment" as points of departure for considerations about the future of theoretical reflections on the past and the ways it can be conceptualized, studied, presented, and taught: 1. In the present world, we seem to perceive the process of "disappearance of the past." The past in its material dimension is apparently vanishing, but it can be saved in the mental dimension - thanks to memory. Thus, debates on the problem of memory and traces of the past or evidences of experience (versus the modernist concepts of history and sources) that have been flourishing since the late 80s, still determine the field for future debates. 2. One the basic themes for contemporary discussions in the human sciences circulates around the problematic of subject, subjectivity and identity. There are many signs that indicate the collapse of the notion of coherent subject, replaced by a subject that lacks a stable structure and base and that is always in a state of "becoming," dispersion or splitting. This new "weak subject" does not seem to need history and tradition as guarantees of its identity. On a general level, the same could be said about national identity or gender identity. In this way, a fundamental role of history as a reservoir of tradition to which the subject must refer in order to build its identity and to prove its value has been undermined. Tradition, stability, constancy, "attachments" - values that are prevented and safely stored by history - are not values that are appreciated in the postmodern world. They have been replaced by temporality, novelty, provisionality, and diversity. History now seems to be a "garbage bin" of used ideas which from time to time may be "recycled." Hence, a question arises: do we need history any more? 3. The idea is to speak not only about history, but about different approaches to the past in order to avoid limiting the scope of the debates to specifically Western or European tradition. History as such (in its modernist shape) is closely connected with a nation-state ideology (it might be argued that it is precisely an ideology of the nation-state), and as such it was incorporated into the Western discourse of violence which carries with it the "sins" of anthropocentrism, logocentrism and sexism. 4. There is a tendency to rethink the concept of the human sciences based and built on the Aristotelian tradition. Paul Veyne insists that history remains a "sublunary" and, therefore, Aristotelian science. The question is, then: what would it mean for the future of historical studies to go deeper into the past - deeper (and beyond) the Aristotelian definition of difference between history and poetry? What would such a break with the "Aristotelian tradition" in the human sciences and especially in history imply? 5. What would reflections on the past look like, if thinking in metaphors had the same value as cause-and-effect thinking? 6. The globalization of the present world is connected with its geographical and not historical unification. Space - one of the basic concepts in historical thinking - has become more important than time. The concept of time itself is being radically rethought. The ideas of linear time and progress have been undermined. As a result, recent research has foregrounded discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, rhythmic time, even gendering of historical time. Should historians resist these new ways of construing the historical process? 7. At present, In the human sciences there is a clear tendency towards interdisciplinarity and the "blurring of genres." Should we be afraid of losing history's status as a distinct discipline? Perhaps it is not so much that we need history in the future but that we need historicity as a basic feature of the human sciences in general? The primary goal of the conference: "Time, Space and the Evidence of Experience (Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Past)" is to debate the basic concepts of thinking about the past in an interdisciplinary perspective as historical time, archeological space, and anthropological experience. Other suggested topics include: -
categories that would oppose or "rewrite" the modernist categories of thinking
about the past;
The
conference will take place at the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz
University, ul. Św. Marcin 78, 61-809 Poznań, room 331 on March 10th, 2000.
PROGRAM Morning
Session: 9.00-13.00
Afternoon
Session: 14.00-18.00
All papers will be published in a pre-conference volume. Ewa
Domańska, Department of History,
Adam Mickiewicz University
Designed by Andrzej Leszczewicz, February 14, 2000
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