In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING·IN·THE·WORLDS OF 1926 477
authenticity, whereas opting for the simultaneity between authenticity
and artificiality (that is, "life") was a choice preferred by and associated
with American intellectuals. Positionality produces position-specific expectations
and (more important, and despite these expectations) the
possibility of mutual understanding, because, within a field, one can
always at least imagine those options which, due to one's specific positionality,
one is not likely to choose. Positionality within a field, then,
has to do with probabilities of choice and attribution; it never imposes
itself as an absolute constraint. Thus, Heidegger could develop and
cultivate, as a vision of horror, his ideas about life in the big city, whereas
Carl Van Vechten would probably not have been astonished to learn that
some philosophers in Germany preached an almost religious belief in the
authenticity of peasant ways of life. Third, and as a consequence of
positionality's being a matter of probability, the boundaries of historical
fields are vague. For example, even if one excluded Shanghai from the
Western culture of 1926, there were strong cultural and communications
links between Shanghai and the world of New York. Paris, in contrast,
was the center of the prevailing mental map of the West-but its culture
was, if one may say so, "less central" and more limited in options than
that of New York or Berlin.
Finally, I wish to emphasize one more time that, although positionality
generates profiles of likely choice and creates vague boundaries, the
complete set of options that define a field is potentially available at every
point within this field. For the people living in 1926, these options were,
as Heidegger says, "ready-to-hand," meaning that they were always
already in use-and only rarely the objects of reflection. For example,
some people would have considered authenticity the highest value of
human existence, while others would have hated authenticity-but
scarcely anyone would have spoken about authenticity and artificiality
as a binary opposition or a cultural code. The ability to notice and
conceptualize such oppositions and codes comes with distance: it belongs
to that being-in-the-world which Heidegger calls the "present-at-hand."
I have tried, in this book, to make arrays, codes, and code breakdowns
from 1926 present-at-hand again, so that these elements, especially by
evoking the idea or even the desire for the ready-to-hand, could suggest
the illusion of living in 1926. Yet the present-at-hand excludes the possibility
of ever really using what is made intellectually available. Thus,
while I certainly cannot prevent readers from wishing to opt for authen-