In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

xii USER'S MANUAL
Theses
Since we do not know what to do with our vast and rapidly accumulating
knowledge about the past (history no longer having any obvious
pragmatic function), we should examine the more or less preconscious
impulses that may motivate our fascination with history. This
book presupposes that a specific desire is at work here: a desire "to
speak to the dead"-in other words, a desire for first-hand experience
of worlds that existed before our birth. In catering to this desire,
the book brings forth-more implicitly than explicitly-certain features
of what "we" (educated people within the Western culture of
1997) imagine "history" to be. We all seem to agree that we no
longer think history as a "unilinear" and "totalizing" dynamic of
"development." Beyond this negation, however, there is no single
dominant form of imagining and representing history. If we imagine
and represent it synchronically, as this book does, we realize that the
elements of such a synchrony do not converge into a coherent and
homogeneous picture. Nevertheless, and perhaps paradoxically, this
book suggests the existence of a "web" or "field" of (not only
discursive) realities that strongly shaped the behavior and interactions
of 1926. So strong indeed is this impression that, at least
implicitly, this book makes a plea against any claims for subjective
or collective agency. And how could a book concerned with historical
simultaneity not arrive at this very conclusion? After all, there are no
concepts of action and agency that do not require sequentiality as
their frame of reference. Yet this is exactly the one form of thinking
history with which the idea of historical simultaneity is incompatible.
Context
We cannot avoid the impression that the current intellectual situation
in the humanities-at least when seen from the present-marks a
comparatively weak moment. (Of course, such an impression may