The main theoretical theme of this course is the creation of the social. By this we understand the emergence of social expertise and in-built social representability. The newly formed, modernizing Romanian Principalities tried to organize representationally, to build in “objectivity” in their lands and people through statistics, collections and self-displays. The course focuses on how local social practices and spaces became both representable and real through the invention of the social.

The social explored in this course was not an essence present whenever individuals gathered and miraculously subsisting in their absence, but a historical project instituted in various ways, with different tonalities and shapes. It was a hybrid domain that cut across and reshaped previously existing or independent divisions, providing a new field for the forces already present. I specifically see the social as created by the ways in which experts and reformers constitute a field of technical/technocratic intervention and normativity out of the tensions of real-life, historically concrete societies and polities. I understand the social as inherently local, historical, material and conjectural, but also as part of large power and knowledge networks that sustain long conversations and projects.
We will look at two major transformations that started in the 1830s and 1840s, and at their articulations: cholera and “communism”. Both cholera and communism constituted, in different ways, connected representations and “stagings” of local modernity. By representations, following Timothy Mitchell, I understand not just “the making of images or meanings but … forms of social practice that set up in the social architecture of the world what seems an absolute distinction between image (or meaning, or plan, or structure) and reality, and thus a distinctive apprehension of the real.” The immediacy of the local social practices that founded the lives of the inhabitants of Moldavia and Wallachia at the end of the 19th century, was informed by the abstract plans of nation-building reform and their modernizing apparatus. They also emerged from long conversations about the relationship between science and the “social question”.

During this course we will see how between these apparently disparate instantiations of modernity there were important connecting threads. Individuals and theories moved around, and their life trajectories intersected all these national-professional worlds that were stemming from the logic and necessity of negotiating various models of rationality and progress. The failure of most of these projects only expanded the area of intervention, as it showed the need for better and larger expert-led changes, and made more visible the need for improvement, the “unmediated reality” of the collective body of the people and the nation. The social was created/staged as both real and lacking, desired and dangerous, by social-hygienic reform and the ghost of communism. We will be focusing on how individual trajectories intersected within national and transnational political and scientific projects, and on how the constant failure of modernization opened up even wider spaces prone to be modernized; not so much endpoints, but “turning points in a continuous series of projects”.

The course is organized both chronologically – the historical moments analyzed here are loosely successive – and in a star-like/radial manner: each class deals with one historical conjuncture and its significance, and details the political and intellectual biography of some representative characters. Some of these characters crisscross classes and themes mirroring, somehow, their real-life intellectual, emotional, and geographical trajectories.