Marking: Race, race-making, and the writing of history

structures and transformations of the world in the small details of life; to re-capture people's expressions-in all media-of their experiences of those abstractions, while also attempting to understand the forces shaping the multiple grids mediating those expressions; and, finally, to analyze how concrete and mundane actions in the everyday may themselves transform the abstract structures of polity and economy. '6 The crucial injunction here is not that we should privilege the study of everydayness over other aspects of human experience but, rather, elaborate the nexus between the 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 the large and "important" are articulated with and expressed through the small and "unimportant," and vice versa-requires that we explicate more precisely the relation between individual agency and structural frameworks, on the one hand, and that we conceptualize more clearly just how one's consciousness of self and other are formed, on the other. The issue of understanding the formation of the human subject is clearly fundamental to such an inquiry and perhaps the least well investigated by historians. Among the diverse approaches to this question, I find Martin Heideg15 This literature is vast, and I will not attempt to provide a bibliography here. Perhaps the 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 the 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 the 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 the Writing of History 9 ger's exploration of the philosophical puzzle of existence a provocative and stimulating place to begin, especially for historians.17 In the process of reengaging the 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, the everyday is merely part of the method of inquiry, an illustration and instrument of his chain of reasoning, but it underscores and demonstrates, nonetheless, the fact that conscious human selves are socially formed and revealed.18 One of the primordial ways in which the self is knowable or realized-and thus one might say constituted-is through its interactions with everyday life, where other entities and other selves are encountered. The predominant mode of one's conscious living is within and through the physical "out-there" and in relation to the common mass of humanity. Moreover, through one's everyday encounters with existence, through one's consciousness of one's own mortality and selfhood, is disclosed something about the 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 the 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