Please join the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago for a symposium on the ordinary, the subtle, the pernicious, in sum the “micro” dimensions of inequality, identity, feeling, and togetherness. Mutual Necessary Otherness will feature research talks by literary critics, sociologists, visual studies scholars, and music theorists, together revealing innovative concepts and methods for interpreting large issues of history and sociability that turn on minor gestures and details. Our symposium creates a space for all thinkers who study the undercurrents of social interaction in order to understand sedimented systems, knowledges, histories, and meaning.
Our interdisciplinary conversation will foreground and analyze examples of relation, affect, language, and embodiment that elude simple explanations. These moments, while small, powerfully crystallize structures of lived asymmetry. The most elusive aspects of race, gender, sex, ability, and class that fall within the private sphere can take on particularly insidious forms: underhanded compliments, involuntary facial expressions, affective discomfort, and coercive attributions of identity. Everyday acts of language-use, perception, and performance are micro-incidents that don’t rise to the level of “event” yet support the symbolic organization of power and difference. We aim to provide a space for researchers who share the belief that the intensive examination of the micro-scales of systems are indispensable to the study of our life-worlds. The timeliness of our event is shaped by explosive debates in both academic and public culture about covert manifestations of inequality, such as micro-aggressions, emotional labor, and symbolic violence. The visibility of these ephemeral behaviors has been revolutionized by social media—transformed by collective recording, circulation, and analysis.
Mutual Necessary Otherness borrows its title from the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose depictions of female friendship serve as a microcosm for enormous political and economic shifts in postwar Naples. In a manner similar to Ferrante, the symposium approaches the micro- as a level of sociality shaped by deep schisms and thinly veiled by tension, resignation, and friction —what Lauren Berlant treats as “de-dramatized” possibilities for renewed attachments, improvisation, and re-commitment to being-with others.
Our symposium will draw out four key lines of inquiry:
- What is the dividing line between the “micro-“ and the “macro-“? How do we define the dynamic between “micro-” moments and “macro-“ categories of race, gender, sex, ability, and class? Is their relation one of part vs. whole? analogy? Allegory?
- What can studying micro-social interaction teach us about our political and historical moment? Is the “micro-” a unique site of the political? By contrast, does the focus on idiosyncratic dynamics and situated examples exhaust efforts to generalize, unify, liberate?
- What are our methods for analyzing the micro? What tools are at the disposal of humanists versus sociologists? Do our interpretative models slant towards the reification of broad social issues? What about particular, heterogenous cases of political difference?