Adler: Force Fields of History. Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Returns
Caroline Adler, M.A.: Force Fields of History. Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Returns
This project situates Walter Benjamin’s essay Moscow – the result of his journey to post-revolutionary Moscow in the winter of 1926/27 – historically and conceptually within the framework of Benjamin’s own writing practice. My focus lies on the mode of representation as construction of Benjamin’s so-called Moscow Diary towards the form(ation) of the essay itself. Furthermore, the project highlights the role of this writing in relation to the “continual organizational changes” of the young Soviet Union.
Within the historical moment, described by Benjamin as a ‘force field’, the demand for vividness and intelligibility is brought, in Benjamin’s work and in this project, into tension with forms of abstraction, construction, and montage. Engaging with (for example) Goethe’s concept of ‘tender empiricism’, Friedlaender’s doctrine of ‘creative indifference’, as well as the Soviet ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) – such as the pictorial-statistical experiments of Soviet pedagogy – Benjamin investigates that conflictual relationship between reality and representation: “The integration of personal thoughts with a preexisting force field” was, according to Benjamin, what the new Soviet life committed itself to. Nonetheless, art and literature were brought into constructive techniques that were supposed to enable the emancipative release of ‘tremendous energies’ for the revolution.
Conceived as a study on Benjamin, this research project also aims to contribute to a revaluation of the synergies of modernity, which is not only to be found in the movement of the Soviet avant-garde, but directs its attention to the pragmatic factors of a literarization of lifeworld and the reformatting of force relations and knowledge systems within historical states of exception.