Theorising Practices, Time, and Emotions. Time for Sociability at the Potsdam Conference?

Abstract So far, practice theory has not considered in detail how practices contribute to the constitution of time. This paper aims to address this lacuna by investigating what role emotions play in this process. By referring back to early to mid-twentieth-century German thought, it is argued that, during the performance of practices, there are two processes evolving: time to practice and time in practice . These processes not only help people to construct a sense of linear time by enabling them to refer back to a past and help to anticipate a future, but it is also within these performances that heterotemporality is constructed. In both these processes, emotions play a critical role; not only are sentiments of time created, but also a particular Stimmung is established that mitigates the ambivalences of these experiences and lead to different attributions of meaning to the same political event. To empirically substantiate these claims, this paper investigates sociability events during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945.