Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BETWEEN THE TIMES (“Between the Times”: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe)

Teaser

Teleology and progressivism have never been systematically defined political concepts, yet they continue to dominate the political poetics for some of our most cherished pursuits, including democratization, Europeanisation, and emancipatory movements. In the past decade...

Summary

Teleology and progressivism have never been systematically defined political concepts, yet they continue to dominate the political poetics for some of our most cherished pursuits, including democratization, Europeanisation, and emancipatory movements. In the past decade, however, Europe’s present – the reality of an enduring and agonizing crisis – has tuned the tension between our tenaciously progressivist “horizon of expectation” and the newly disillusioned “space of experience” close to the point of exhaustion.In this time of a radical need for redefinition of Europe’s self-identity, progressivist public regimes of historicity are failing to deliver their elusive promise. Yet what are – if any – the alternative historicities for reframing our political horizons? The project seeks to answer this question both theoretically and historically.

Historically, the project focuses on the European interwar intellectual history when the demise of historicism and progressivism had become particularly visible and acquired distinctly political dimensions. It places an entire plethora of emerging anti-teleological visions of time across Europe at the center of some of its most innovative contemporary ethical, political and methodological pursuits. At the same time, we seek to challenge the sufficiency of the usual focus in interwar intellectual history on individual or two-three (usually, “Western” European) national contexts by following out the intersections and synergies between intellectual groupings in Germany, Romania, France, Britain, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Theoretically, we inquire into ways in which these alternative historicities and their legacies illuminate the present crisis of progressivism.

Work performed

\"The work performed from June 2018 – November 2019 can be summarized through four main sets of activities:

1) Project preparation: Recruitment of team members and joint planning of the activities. We hold regular research meetings with all project members every two weeks to discuss individual work-in-progress. There are also regular monthly supervision meetings. We also launched the project website on which we continuously report on our events and publications.

2) All team members have been conducting individual research, already resulting in peer-reviewed research publications.
The PI has been mainly working on her monograph that is closely based on the main thematic lines and research questions outlined in the project proposal. The first results, including efforts at comparative European intellectual history, have been published in two research articles (see publications).

Dr. Henry Mead was recruited as the project’s main expert on British intellectual history. He is working on his monograph on Modernist Myths of the Fall where he considers the motifs of sin, fallenness, eschatology, and temporality in modernist texts through a new lens concepts of temporality applied in the fields of conceptual and intellectual history.

Dr. Piret Peiker connects the project with a distinctly international scope to Estonian cultural history. She is working on her monograph Discourses of Modernity in Estonian Literature that is based on her doctoral dissertation and her new research on ideas of progress and rupture in Estonian intellectual history.

Dr. Tommaso Giordani is an intellectual historian working on French and Italian interwar thought, whose monograph The Uncertainties of Action. The life and afterlife of Georges Sorel studies a key critic of modern rationalist-progressivist political thought. The first half of the book centers on contextualizing Sorel’s thought, while the second part discusses the radical transformation of his ideas in the interwar reception.


Ksenia Shmydkaya is writing her dissertation titled \"\"Historical genre and women writers in the inter-war Europe: expressing the present through the past\"\".

Johannes Bent is writing his dissertation titled \"\"Ernst Troeltsch and the crisis of historicism in Interwar Eastern Europe\"\".

Prof. Daniele Monticelli joined the project in September 2019. He has just completed and submitted for peer-review his paper ‘Tracking the New: Lotman’s (Anti)philosophy of History’. He is also studying the intellectual environment in which the dystopian novels and movies of the interwar period emerged, with particular attention to the issue of history and temporality (far-away futures, ending catastrophes, lasting presents).

3) All team members have in addition to individual research been contributing to ‘work packages’. In the reporting period, we have been focusing on ‘work packages’ A (‘Anti-historicist hermeneutics/methods across disciplines’ and E (“European Intellectual History Between the Wars?”). Our first international workshop was dedicated to work package E, and it had an open call for proposals from which we selected 15 speakers.

4) Dissemination of project results
In addition to academic publications, all team members have communicated the first research results at several international conferences and workshops. We co-organized, together with the Archives, the annual international Yuri Lotman conference, ‘Time, History, Biography: Yuri Lotman in Context’.

We have also been keen on communicating our project themes, problems and results to the broader public. This has taken the form of contributing to Estonian National Broadcasting popular science TV and radio programmes, online teaching materials, giving interviews to nation-widely distributed magazines and newspapers, participating at art events and exhibitions, open days at the university, and giving guest lectures and seminars in and outside Estonian university, as well as non-academic e\"

Final results

The state of art is furthered by all project members in their individual research in a variety of ways, while here we list only the more theoretically framed contributions:
- The starting aim to reconstruct intellectual history comparatively and cross-nationally, especially the aim to explore in more detail Eastern European intellectual history, has proven novel and fruitful.
- While it is uncontested that in the ideological 20th century, ideas played a significant political role, there has been less clarity on how to specifically to connect ‘ideas’ to ‘politics’. We have preliminarily seen that because intellectual groupings were often formed exactly to address as broad a public as possible, they become a relevant locus where this ‘missing’ connection took place and might hence be retraced.
- Our preliminary research has also disclosed the hitherto only passingly explored connections between the earlier artistic avant-garde and interwar innovations in scholarship across disciplines – and we will be further studying these connections.
- In addition to highlighting the central role that the new temporal experience had in reshaping the ways in which the human world was understood at the time, we have also found that these anti-teleological currents need to be reconstructed as a comprehensive synthesis of: 1) ontological-philosophical; 2) ethical; 3) political; 4) methodological, epistemological pursuits.
In the next years, we plan to deepen this analysis, as well as disseminate its results. We expect to prepare at least three monographs in inter-war intellectual history, in addition to research article, but considering the excellent progress also the doctoral researchers are making, possibly even more.

Website & more info

More info: https://betweenthetimes.tlu.ee/en/home/.