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Cancelled: "Culture and Politics of Small Things" Conference in Wroclaw, May 19 - 20, 2011
An Agenda for the European Cultural Policy
Wroclaw, Poland, May 19-20, 2011
In the times of liquid modernity, made of big things and big powers, where big shots make big deals behind closed doors, there is not much place left for small things of our everyday life. In the globalized world, our ordinary problems are completely dwarfed and, even if visible from our grass-root level, they seem insignificant even to ourselves. Flows of information that shape our social space-time decide what is real and what is not.
Under the spell and burden of enforced preoccupation with big things, we tend to overlook that they are big only because they simply reflect the structure of political power and are amplified by the media. Yet they are also big because we can easily recognize the global scale of their consequences.
Theory of chaos tells us that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Deccan Plateau may, through elusive interactions, affect trading on the New York Stock Exchange. We may also look as the immense historical experience of local social movements, like Solidarity, which managed to make substantial difference to the whole world. Such examples teach us that our disregard for small things encapsulates a moment of an ideological illusion: they seem to be small because we are educated into inability to pinpoint their consequences. Moreover, in practice we usually see only a tiny fragment of the puzzle and hence tend to neglect it easily.
That is why we need take a different approach: we have to look at big things as made of billions of small particles. We believe that we should start from an observation that all public decisions are an outcome of countless meetings behind the scenes, and that even biggest economies are the cumulative product of ordinary people’s everyday work. In other words, we should ask ourselves the question why we perceive small things as small.
In the times of self-made man and harsh competition, paradoxically, we are overwhelmed by the feeling of powerlessness. We lose our trust in democracy. It is here precisely where the politics of small things becomes important. According to Jeffrey Goldfarb, our everyday discussions around kitchen tables both constitute our reality and, when considered globally, generate significant political power. Inspired by Naomi Klein’s No Logo, we think that we can oppose the powers which reinforce our passivity not by fighting them, but rather blending with their motion and using them for the benefit of culture and society. One of them, in fact one of the greatest in contemporary world, the Internet, which easily can become a tool of a new oppression and a source of interpassivity, can also be used to foster social cohesion in the real world.
First day of the conference will be devoted to the discussion of the theory of politics and culture of small things. We expect to draw a mind map of ideas at our disposal.
On the second day we shall debate practical applications of the theory, and possible ways of solving the most urgent social problems.
By thinking seriously about small things we would also like to answer Zygmunt Bauman’s call for global ethics – not in a sense of universal moral law, but rather an ethical understanding inclusive enough as to embrace the problems of all individuals: all different, all equal.
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