In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AFTER LEARNING FROM HISTORY 433
individual profiles by focusing on the inclusions and exclusions through
which they are defined. What we could call "Central European culture
of 1926," for example, is obsessed with establishing a contrast between
the Soviet Union and the United States; it includes an image of Asia but
excludes, even as a geographic entity, most of Africa. At the same time,
Central European culture eagerly discovers and admires African-American
forms of expression. What this world-picture clearly renounces,
though (except perhaps in the case of France), is the existence of a
transcendental horizon (the concept of "world" is about to become a
purely immanent one). From a Latin-American perspective, in contrast,
the world-picture includes the United States and Europe but does not
seem to share the focus on the Soviet Union. Within such contiguities,
overlappings, and differences between multiple everyday-worlds, my reconstruction
does not-at least not intentionally-privilege any single
perspective or observer position. If many of the individual configurations
that I describe seem to center on references to the metropolitan cultures
of Berlin, New York, and Buenos Aires (rather than, say, the culture of
Paris), such a focus reflects, I hope, the effect of condensation and of the
mutual feedback between predominant structures of relevance in 1926.
This book tries to situate itself by identifying those places "where the
action was."
Finally, how can one find a substitute for the notion of "event" in the
context of an "essay on historical simultaneity"? Such a substitution is
unavoidable, because the traditional use of this concept presupposes a
plot structure (within which the "event" marks a turning point). At the
same time, however, events point to the interference of contingency, to
whatever resists total integration into the internal logic of a plot. In order
to find an equivalent for the concept of "event" within a reconstruction
of simultaneity, we have to focus on this second semantic component.
An "event" would then be whatever threatens the structures of existing
everyday-worlds without being accessible for formulation and interpretation
within them. In this sense, we could speculate about the uncontrollable
impact of technology (or of technology as it interacts with the
natural environments of everyday-worlds) as a potential stimulus for
events. Events could arise from the accumulated effects of different
cultural codes as they converge or diverge. Events could be a result of
external couplings by which everyday-worlds join with other everyday-