In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

236 ARRAYS
and drifters. They came and went as though the clock had no hands"
(Dempsey and Dempsey, 180-181). [see Bars, Reporters, Revues] Walter
Benjamin is so eager to see Moscow and Soviet society liberated from
the pressures of time, that he actively ignores the Communist Party's
exhortations to accelerate the pace of labor: "I believe there are more
watchmakers in Moscow than in any other city. This is all the more
strange because people here make very little fuss about the time ... If
you observe the way they move about in the streets, you seldom see
anyone in a hurry, except when it is very cold. Always casual in their
attitude, they walk in a zigzag. Thus, it is interesting that posted in an
assembly hall there is a sign with the inscription: 'Lenin said that time is
money.' In order to proclaim this banality, they need to invoke highest
authority" (Benjamin, 1980, 70-71).
Yet the notion of "having time" is much more ambiguous than Benjamin
seems willing to admit. If increased productivity means yielding
greater profits for owners but intensified suffering for workers, liberation
from time's despotic rhythms has its obverse-namely, marginalization
from everyday life. In Johannes Becher's poem "Die Rumpf-Ruderer"
("The Torso-Rowers"), legless war veterans are depicted as cast out of
life's mainstream because they are unable to follow the pace of time with
their bodies: "They put me upright in a corner, against the wall. / A
blanket over me. The clock drips the hours. / It would be nice to limp
forward, one-legged" (Becher, 9-10) But while surrendering one's body
to a collective rhythm is a nightmare for Becher, he repeatedly associates
fast-moving clocks with the awakening and redemptive power of revolutions,
as in the following poem about revolutionary utopias:
The dying
Bodies snatched away at midnight
Rattling out of the floating beds
Clocks whirring, blowing faces
Haunt the crumbling space.
(Becher, 12; also 109)
As much as Becher longs for a revolt, he seems to admit that the pace of
revolutionary transformations inevitably entails chaos and new suffering.
The presence of timepieces amid such turmoil-even the presence of
timepieces whose movement is accelerated-guarantees at least some