Berlin, fin de millenium: An Experiment in Corporeal Ethnography

Abstract

This thesis is an experiment in corporeal ethnography. It displays ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Berlin between the autumn of 1999 and the spring of 2001. In a vertiginously changing city, a variety of corporeal itineraries of individuals take us through public and private spaces: the construction sites of the Potzdamer Platz, a claustrophobic hospital room, the collective ecstasy of raves, the exasperation and boredom of a receptionist in a corporate company, the eroticised night life of a Wine Club, the turbulent piano career of a teenager and streetscapes occupied by elderly survivors of the Holocaust and the new migrants that are re-populating the city. Taking Benjamin, Artaud and Kracauer's theoretical programmes seriously, and without resorting to their work as mere academic citation, I have tried to make their conceptual projects operational, not simply through the collection of a certain kind of data, but also by experimenting with the process of writing. The thesis advances a pointillist approach which moves across intimate, local, economic, political, and global boundaries. This pointillist approach aims to account for the complexity and fluidity of human experience, without becoming imprisoned within canons of "culture". Beyond the filters of causality, signification and linear temporality, by affirming fields of intensities and desire, this ethnographic experiment investigates the mediation zone between discourse and figure. The thesis focuses on specific individuals and their lives in order to dramatize specific predicaments. It experiments with an intransitive form of writing that attempts to draw closer to the experiences of those rendered marginal by more conventional and disembodied strategies. Rejecting the discursive and authorized version of the New Berlin, the thesis attempts to construct a radical vision of the city. Through the exploration of subaltern corporealities, this experimental work aspires to provide not only a different account of Berlin at the end of the millennium, but is also offered as a programmatic statement for an alternative anthropological practice.