In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

476 FRAMES
subjecthood and agency relate to what Western culture has called, since
the late eighteenth century, "historical time." But I will cut short what
threatens to become an infinite (and obsessive) regression. The point is
that even those who, like me, no longer believe in learning from history
or in historical agency (and who therefore are reluctant to continue
writing narratives of history) still need specific textual forms whenever
they want to write and speak about the past. What we need, more
precisely, are genres capable of becoming forms of Anschauung. Perhaps
such genres cannot avoid producing effects of totalization-but we have
recently come to understand that they at least need not take the shape
of narratives.
This distance vis-a-vis the form of the historical narrative has opened
the way for two basic types of experiments. One might attempt, as
Ferdinand Braudel did in his book on the Mediterranean world, to write
the history of a space. In such a discourse, the possibility of attributing
all points of reference to a certain space allows one to perceive unity
amid the diversifying effects of time. Or one might try, as I have done in
this book (an experiment that seems to have more literary than historiographic
predecessors-think of Ulysses), to write the history of a short
span of time, a history in which the possibility of attributing all points
of reference to this span of time allows one to perceive unity amid the
diversifying effects of spatial distance. The Mediterranean world is considered
a unity, although we know that the Mediterranean of the twelfth
century was not the same as the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century.
The year 1926 is considered a unity, although we know that 1926 in
Berlin was not the same as 1926 in Paris. The Anschauungsform which
emerges from the latter experiment-in particular, from the discussion
of authenticity in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, Blunck's Kampf der Gestirne,
and Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven-can perhaps best be characterized
as a "field" (and I of course mean "field" in its disciplinary rather
than agricultural sense). A field is, first of all, a space comprising a
number of possibilities that are available everywhere within its limits.
This corresponds to my claim that all the arrays, cultural codes, and code
breakdowns that I have described (and others besides) were available as
a potential throughout the Western cultural world in 1926. Second,
positionality is crucial within any field-despite the general availability
of a number of options, which gives it homogeneity. For instance, we
have seen that it was quite likely for German writers, in 1926, to opt for