In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AFTER LEARNING FROM HISTORY 419
to overcome the limits that birth and death impose on experience has to
do with humans' desire for eternity. It is this desire for eternity which
grounds historical and utopian discourses.
But such "irrational" desires are almost regularly concealed by explicit
functions and motivations adapted to the various intrinsic rationalities
of specific everyday-worlds. In our own social and economic environment,
there are indeed good enough reasons for the existence of computers,
fax machines, and prognostic methods-beyond their possible
grounding in a desire for omnipresence. Yet we lack similarly convincing
rationalizations for our knowledge about the past. This lack makes it
easy to see that what specifically drives us toward the past is the desire
to penetrate the boundary that separates our lives from the time span
prior to our birth. We want to know the worlds that existed before we
were born, and experience them directly. "Direct experience of the past"
would include the possibility of touching, smelling, and tasting those
worlds in the objects that constituted them.16 The concept emphasizes a
long-underestimated (if not repressed) sensual side of historical experience-without
necessarily being a problematic "aestheticization of the
past." For a past touched, smelled, and tasted does not necessarily become
beautiful or sublime. Some practices and media in our contemporary
historical culture seem to have reacted to this desire for sensual
experience. It would be difficult, for example, to explain the new enthusiasm
for archival research by adducing the mere need to accumulate
more and more historical documents. Rather, touching the original
manuscript of a text whose exact words would be more easily accessible
in a critical edition seems to make a difference for many scholars. Philological
editions on hypercard reinsert the reader into the simultaneity
of long-forgotten discursive environments. At the same time, filmmakers
pay more attention than ever to the meticulous reconstruction of historical
detail on every possible level-so that in movies such as The Name
of the Rose, Amadeus, or Mephisto it has become more important to
provide spectators with the illusion of living in a medieval monastery, in
late eighteenth-century Vienna, or in Berlin around 1935 than to engage
them in specific plots or arguments. Nowhere is this shift in the style of
historical culture more obvious than in museums. They long ago abandoned
the taxonomic principle which traditionally structured their exhibits,
and now tend to organize them as a reconfiguration of historical