Abstract

From articles-fragments-scrounging-primary evidence-sources-references- facts-propaganda (the above quotation dated 1595 is the earliest of my fragments), I assemble here a history of synchronized swimming, or at the least, I compose an essay in which I ponder synchronized swimming at the same time as I tread against the flow of the established methodology of “sport history” Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy – the unavoidable obstacles of their passions. … The genealogist … must be able to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats – the basis of all beginnings, atavisms and heredities. … Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. [It] identif[ies] the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely – the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us. On genealogy, historical methodology, “items” and “pondering,” I am influenced by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin insisted, “I have nothing to say, only to show.” Benjamin kept thousands of word passages, poetry pieces and “wish images” that he juxtaposed, fit, and disassembled to archive the arcades of the world through which he wandered. In her vast study of Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss describes this project of Benjamin: The case of the ponderer is that of the man who already had the resolution to great problems, but has forgotten them. And now he ponders, not so much about the thing as about his past meditations over it. The thinking of the ponderer stands therefore in the sign of remembering. . . . The memory of the ponderer holds sway over the disordered mass of dead knowledge. Human knowledge is piecework to it in a particularly pregnantsense: namely as the heaping up of arbitrarily cut up pieces, out of which one puts together a puzzle. [. . .] The allegoricist reaches now here, now there, into chaotic depths that his knowledge places at his disposal, grabs an item out, holds it next to another, and sees whether they fit; that meaning to this image, or this image to that meaning. The result never lets itself be predicted; for there is no natural mediation between the two. I humbly create my history of synchronized swimming to be Benjaminian. Verf.-Referat