DOC The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought by William R. Everdell online how to eng without registering eReader

DOC The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought by William R. Everdell online how to eng without registering

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Book description
This book is quite good, it is very readable, though Everdell (who teaches in a secondary school and is very smart) is a bit glib. He often tells us what Modernism is (and it sounds right), but without actually showing us (that is demonstrating in great detail) that it IS thus. Hence, the missing star. He is especially strong on science, math, music -- which he sees as key instances of the Modernist ethic of fragmentation and the ontological discrete (rejection of continua). In lieu of posting a proper review, I will simply append my notes, for whatever it is worth. The quote from Bernhard at the beginning comes not from Everdell, however -- but simply from stumbling on this passage while reading the two books together.When classicism says man, it means reason and feeling. And when Romanticism says man, it means passion and the senses. And when modernism says man, it means the nerves. (Hermann Bahr, The Overcoming of Naturalism: Sequel to Critique of the Moderns).Nature is parts without a whole... (Pessoa). The notion of unity is always an illusion, says Richard Zenith. Well, not quite. A relative, provisional, fleeting unity, a unity which doesnt pretend to be smooth and absolute, or even absolutely singular, which is built around an imagination, a fiction, a writing instrument -- this was the unity that Pessoa was betting on...The Book of Disquiet whose ultimate ambition was to reflect the jagged thoughts and fractured emotions that can inhabit one man...Thomas Bernhard on Fragments...He who reads everything has understood nothing, he said. It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment. But such drastic self-restraint requires so much courage and such strength of mind as can only rarely be mustered and as we ourselves muster only rarely; the reading person, just as the carnivorous, is gluttonous in the most revolting manner and, like the carnivorous person, upsets his stomach and his entire health, his head and his whole intellectual existence. We even understand a philosophical essay better if we do not gobble it up entirely and at one go, but pick out a detail from which we then arrive at the whole, if we are lucky. Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and perfect are basically abhorrent to us. Only when we are fortunate enough to turn something whole, something complete or indeed perfect into a fragment, when we get down to reading it, only then do we experience a high degree, at times indeed a supreme degree, of pleasure in it. Our age has long been intolerable as a whole, he said, only when we perceive a fragment of it is it tolerable to us. The whole and the perfect are intolerable, he said. That is why, fundamentally, all of these paintings here in the Kunsthistorisches Museum are intolerable, if I am to be honest, they are abhorrent to me. In order to be able to bear them I search for a so-called massive mistake in and about every single one of them, a procedure which so far has always attained its objective of turning that so-called perfect work of art into a fragment, he said. The perfect not only threatens us ceaselessly with our ruin, it also ruins everything that is hanging on these walls under the label of masterpiece. I proceed from the assumption that there is no such thing as the perfect or the whole, and each time I have made a fragment of one for the so-called perfect works of art hanging here on the walls by searching for a massive mistake in and about that work of art, for the crucial point of failure by the artist who made that work of art, searching for it until I found it, I have got one step further... (Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, A Comedy) (For a general bibliography of Modernism, see 363n.25; ch. 2 on Austria is very good, a summary of turn-of-the-century Vienna.)What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page . . . What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him. - William Gaddis, Albany, April 4, 1990вЂѓEliot and Dostoyevski are the most significant names here; none of Gaddiss reviewers described The Recognitions as The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoyevski (with additional dialogue by Ronald Firbank), but that would be a more accurate description than the Ulysses parallel so many of them harped upon. Not only do Gaddiss novels contain dozens of whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot, but The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon using The Waste Land as its text. The novel employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, collage, multiple perspective, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth; and both call for the same kinds of artistic, moral, and religious sensibilities. (Steven Moore on Gaddis)Theres a long cast of characters that drift in and out and we lose sight of Wyatt for long stretches. Names are changed! Identities are mistaken! Life and art are so entangled that their boundaries are not clear. We constantly, overhear fragments of conversations, catch glimpses of the characters as they hurry by....Modernism was global and transnational. There were five postal deliveries a day in Munich in 1900.It began by rejecting the heroic materialism of the 19th cen., as also Positivism, scientific determinism, and the idea of Progress (as well as the moral faith that went with it).Whereas the 19th century (cf. 9f.) believed all change was smooth (continuous; legato, rather than staccato in tempo) -- like the forbiddingly complex, but entirely harmonic development of a Brahms symphony -- Modernism introduced the idea of discontinuous change, leading to the conclusion in all fields that statistical and probabilistic descriptions of reality were truer than the old deterministic dynamics. Modern thought then gave up the stubborn belief that things could best be seen as steadily and whole from some privileged viewpoint; the belief in objectivity so crumbled that phenomenology and solipsism took over in every field and area. And finally, as looking at oneself produced a sense of consciousness that took an axe to formal logic and the belief that anything could be viewed simply. These things, then: statistics, multiple perspective, subjectivity, and self-reference...all devolved from the collapse of the ontological continuity assumed by the 19th cen., and led to the non-logical, non-objective, non-linear and essentially causeless mental universe we inhabit today.Modernism, then, was a culture of analysis, at home with the bits and pieces and contradictions, the social and cultural and psychological and ontological fragmentation of modern science and society. But what Modernists did not accept was the 19th century assumption that one could analyze nature without also analyzing the means we use to become aware of it (mind).Ch.3: Dedekind on continuity and discontinuity. Zenos paradox and the infinitesimal calculus; Positivism saw the observer as a fixed point, separate from the material reality he observed. Because Positivism was resolutely materialistic, it fell into conflict with mathematics, which (being wholly abstract) was still bedeviled by the problems of continua. Though the real number series (whole, rational, irrational) -- even between the integers 1 and 2 -- seemed to be unlimited, it was not (apparently) continuous. This problem of numerical continuty was solved by Dedekinds Cut. Then, Cantors ladder of infinite sets... and Freges not inrelated definition of number (as a set of sets). After this attack on the continuums of the calculus, and this focus on set theory -- which is (atomic), we enter a new era: the atomistic thermodynamics of Boltzmann, stop-motion photography, colorplane Cloisonnism of Gauguin, the divisionism of Seurat; the continuities of the old calculus were banished, along with fields in physics, fluidity of motion, the transitional browns of chiaroscuro in art. The digital had been born.вЂѓCh. 4: In Physics, the 20th century began with three transformations: (1) the digitizing of matter and energy into atoms and quanta [Planck]; (2) dealing with particles statistically and stochastically (probabilities and averages) [Boltzmann]; (3) the restructuring of space [Einstein]. (The idea of continuous fields in physics had been proven by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.) The real consequence of Boltzmanns probabilistic physics is that the universe was no longer strictly deterministic, for the state of the system was no longer simply a function of the state of the parts. The implications were colossal, and involved the postulate of complete disorder of molecules. Boltzmanns atomism (Boltzmann thought even time might be discrete, rather than continuous) was challenged by the view that energy is prior, and that atoms were but knots in the energy fields, which were continuous. But Boltzmanns atomism was about to enjoy a revival (including Josiah Gibbs and, even, Wittgenstein) -- eventually leading to Bose-Einstein (statistics of sub-atomic particles). Particles are discontinuous and unpredictable, Physics only a science of probabilities. There is no certainty.Ch. 5: Seurat and Divisionism. By dividing optical perceptions (not the objects themselves, but the optical perceptions of them) into their discrete elements, Seurat created a form of artistic atomism. For the mechanics of simultaneous contrast, see the concise, but excellent discussion at 70ff. The result, ultimately, was a complete fragmentation of colors, planes, and parts.Ch. 6: a good, brief essay on how Symbolism (MallarmГ©) emerged (c. 1886) from the DecadГ©nce of Le Chat Noir of the 70s, via Rimbauds Voyelles (89ff.), though this was still metrically conventional (in rhyming sonnets), unlike (1873) Une Saison en Enfer (which was metrically wild, partially even in prose). But it was only with Les Illuminations (1875), the manuscript Rimbaud handed to Verlaine at their final parting in Stuttgart, and which was not printed until 1885 (when everyone assumed, wrongly, that Rimbaud was already dead), that was the REAL breakthrough into Modernism came -- extravagant, discontinuous, incoherent, barely metrical... A kind of poetry that says nothing, made up of bits of dreaming, without coherence...the inexhaustible unexpectedness of the always adequate images (as Laforgue had put it in 1882). But unlike Rimbaud, who was maniacal (like the old Romantics), Laforgue was cool, polyphemous (in tone, not in topic), ironic.Aux armes, Citoyens, il ny a plus de raison!, wrote Laforgue... thus embracing the Modernist epistemology that holds that ambiguity is more than a style, and irony more than an attitude.... Emotions superimpose themselves in the minds of the poets without predictability, logic, or coherence, but cannot be rendered by rant or monologue. Probing for that incoherence and evoking it with words... is the poets work (p. 100).Ch. 7: RamГіn y Cajal (brain smudges). Of all the sciences, taxonomy (Adams task of distinguishing between things and naming them) is probably the least distinguished. Rutherford had said that all science was either physics or stamp-collecting; well, taxonomy is stamp-collecting. Biological taxonomy was put on a sound basis by Linnaeus (18th century).Ch. 8: The Concentration Camp; Ch. 9: Freud; Ch. 10: Modernism on the Verge, 1900; chs. 11-15: Planck, Russell, film (montage); St. Louis (Twain, Henry Adams, Scott Joplin); Einstein; Picasso.Ch. 17: Strindberg. For the idea of Modernism as a mixing and splicing of fragments of character, of scenes, for character as theme and variation (rather than substance), see pp. 258f., p. 261f. As he explained it in the plays [Miss Julie] preface, he had deliberately broken the personalities and motivations of his characters to pieces so he could put them back together again in a way that would seem more real: ....my souls (characters) are conglomerations...of past cultures as well as present wants, Scraps from both books and newspapers, fragments of mankind, torn-off samples of Sunday best clothing that have become rags, just as though soul is patched together...as modern characters, living in an age of transition, an age more restless and hysterical at any rate than the preceding one, I have portrayed them as unstable and split...The dialogue therefore meanders around supplying themes in the first scenes, which are then developed, taken up, repeated, expanded, repeated like the themes in a musical composition. ....he was right about this mixing and matching of slices of life. It was the essence of what was to become the ultimate Modernism of composition. Eventually Strindberg would figure out that he could do this kind of mixing and matching with scenes, and thereafter it would be only a matter of time before he would discover how to mix in slices of what happens only in memory or imagination -- the discovery we now call theatrical expressionism...fragmented characters and disjunctive dialogue of Miss Julie..., the Ghost Sonata broke through in to a new theatrical space, discontinuous in all its parts,whether spatial, temporal, internal or external... The characters, double, redouble, evaporate, condenser, scatter and converge. But one consciousness remains above them all, the Dreamers:for him there are no secrets, no inconsequence, no scruples, no law. He does not judge, he does not acquit, simply relates.Ch. 18: Schoenberg, Music in no key. According to Schoenberg, his atonality involved two things -- first, to formulate ides in an aphoristic manner, which did not require continuations out of formal reasons; secondly, to link ideas together without the use of formal connectives, merely by juxtaposition (i.e, fragmentation and parataxis).Ch. 19: Joyce -- the novel goes to pieces. A mosaic of jagged fragments, wrote H.G. Wells of Portrait. Wrestling with the sheer size of the modern world and the centerless, forever expanding universe of undifferentiated human experience, they came up with the fiction we now call Modernist. The failure of focus and the collapse of traditional narrative is part of their discovery (301).Ch. 20: Kandinsky - art with no object. At 315ff., on Abstract (or non-representational) Art.Ch. 21: 1913 (Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg).Ch. 22: Heisenberg, Bohr, GГ¶del, Turing, Merce Cunningham, Foucault.Modernism has, as ingredients, five major interrelated ideas:(A) There is embedded in every system at arriving at truth a recursiveness or self-reference that automatically undermines the consistency of the system. At first only mathematicians understood the importance of the paradox of recursive self-reference (Everdell is talking here about Russells Paradox); but as soon as writers began to talk about writing, artists to make art out of art, and language to describe only language, it was seen that every general proposition would undermine itself through self-referentiality.(B) That objectivity, the possibility of mutual agreement on reality, gets no closer to truth then its contrary, a radical subjectivity bordering on solipsism. For non-mathematicians self-reference turned towards subjective solutions to the problem of knowledge. Positivism (for whom the observer was separate from the material reality that he observes) gave way to a revived subjectivity of the Romantics (Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Husserl), into stream-of -consciousness in literature (Woolf, Proust, Joyce), the dream in theater (Strindberg), and subjectivism in art.(C) That every truth implies the subjective perspective from which it was derived, and that no one of those perspectives is privileged. Subjectivity, however, was no guarantee of a singleness of vision. Narrators like Stephen Dedalus were no longer omniscient, perspectivism ruled from Nietzsche to Manet (Bar at the Folies BergГЁre) and Van Gogh (Bedroom at Arles), CГ©zannes multiple visions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, to literary irony (like multiple exposure in photography, to the spatial perspectivism of Cubism and of collage, to the temporal perspectivism of the Futurists (in painting) -- as, of course, in contemporary physics.(D) That any objective truths there are to be found are inductive in the extreme, seeming all to lie in statistical regularities..., that Is, statistics and stochastics... abandoning the bright, precise proposition for the fuzzy statistical approach, and the return of randomness.(E) And finally, most importantly of all, the premise from which they all drive, the assumption of ontological discontinuity -- which Everdell calls the heart of Modernism (p. 351) -- that is, fragmentation and atomism, digital rather than analog, a denial of the evolution, fields, seamlessness, and Entwicklng (of the 19th cen., and of Leibniz Principle of Continuity). Everdell discusses this first in terms of early 20th cen. science and mathematics, then turning to the arts. This particulate idea led, in painting to Divisionism, those separable snags of perception; sfumato (Rainaissance) became unfashionable, yielding to color blocks in Manets 1863 Dejeuner sur lherbe, or the use of color, tones, dots, and patches (Impressionism and Post-Impressionism), in Cloisonnism, in CГ©zanne and Fauvism, as likewise in Modernist music (Schoenberg) and dance. In poetry, transitions were abandoned, favoring the abrupt (as in collage). For Rimbaud, poetry is a juxtaposition of discrete fragments or remembered details, or simply of words shaken loose of their meaning...non-representational poetry. Stream-of-consciousness in the novel, too, is not made up of continua, but of these atomic snags of perception. And finally..., Modernism is an Age of Analysis. Everything is dissected, reduced, fragmented..., leaving unadorned hard edges...., nothing is smoothed over... Fragmentation and analysis, asynchronous, atonal...the very failure of the integrity of modern life, and modern lives, fragmented, unharmonious, divided against themselves..., the derangement of the senses and of reason, bemoaned by Modernist, but celebrated as the ultimate virtue by Postmodernists...a long-term objective consequence, presumably, of industrial modernity (p. 356)..., a digitization of ontology and aesthetics. Dance came late to Modernism; the dance of Isidora Duncan was fluid; one has to wait for the aperiodic, staccato choreography of Merce Cunnngham.
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