The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 : with a New Preface / Stephen Kern
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THE CULTURE OF TIME AND SPACE WITH A N E W PREFACE STEPHEN KERN Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright 0 1983 and 2003 by Stephen Kern All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Kern, Stephen. The culture of time and space, 1880-1918 : with a new preface / Stephen Kern. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-02169-X 1. Technology and civilization. 2. Space and time. 3. Civilization, Modern-19th century. 4. Ci\,ilization, Modern-20th century. 1. Title. CONTENTS Introduction 1 The Nature of Time 10 The Past 36 The Present 65 The Future 89 Speed 109 The Nature of Space 131 Form 181 Distance 21 1 Direction 24 1 Temporality of the July Crisis 259 The Cubist War 287 Conclusion 31 3 Notes 32 1 Index 363 INTRODUCTION Frum around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in tech- nology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and air- plane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream-of-con- sciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped con- sciousness directly. The result was a trans- 2 The Culture of Time and Space I formation of the dimensions of life and thought. This book is about i Speed, The Nature of Space, Form, Distance, and Direction-and t the way Europeans and Americans came to conceive of and experi- emphasize those developments that differ significantly from earlier ence time and space in those years. i periods. The idea for this kind of interpretation came to me from reading I followed two lines of thinking to arrive at these subtopics. The the works of phenomenologically oriented psychiatrists, who viewed i i three modes of time-past, present, and future4ame from philoso- their patients' mental lives in these terms. They used a categorical i phy and were part of Minkowski's conceptual framework. Even frame of reference to reconstruct their patients' experience of time, Henri Bergson (who insisted that the division of the flux of time into space, causality, materiality, and other essential categories. The work three discrete parts distorted its essentially fluid nature) used the of the French psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski, elaborated in a col- i terms repeatedly in his analyses. These modes of time seemed to be lection of case studies published as Le Temps uecu in 1933, was espe- natural, compelling, and comprehensive subdivisions for all possible I cially useful. While Minkowski explored other categories, the focus human experiences of time. Subtopics for space were more difficult of his attention was on time, especially on how his patients experi- to determine. In a discussion with Alan Henrikson, I learned that enced past, present, and future. He applied the phenomenological map makers identify four aspects of space that plane maps can method to understand patients who had acute psychotic disorders show-shape, area, distance, and direction. These categories sug- and could not reconstruct their lives genetically or historically as the gested a framework that was as comprehensive as those for time that method required. His method is particularly suited I had already decided on, so I combined "shape" and "area" into for psychotics, because it is often not feasible to link their prior per- "form" and added an introductory chapter on the nature of space as sonality with their current pathological personality, which is gen- I did on the nature of time. My categories thus encompass a wide erally too fragmented and disorganized. I adapt that aspect of the range of human activities and are mutually exclusive--except for the phenomenological method informally, for it is possibIe to identify materia1 on speed. I treat speed in a separate chapter because it was many origins or "causes" of changing ideas about time and space, widely discussed around the turn of the century as a topic in its own such as the scheduling requirements of railroads that directly neces- right, because the material on it would have been impossible to clas- sitated the institution of World Standard Time, or the telephone that sify as either exclusively temporal or spatial, and because as a junc- immediately and directly changed the sense of space. For all its di- ture of time and space it formed a natural transition between them. versity, the culture of an age hangs together more coherently than To avoid repetition I have dispersed single corpora among these does the mind of a psychotic. My primary object, however, is to sur- chapters. The work of Marcel Proust, for example, appears in chap- vey significant changes in the experience of time and space, includ- ters on the nature of time, the past, the nature of space, and distance. ing some for which I am able to identify no specific "cause." Hence I Prominent figures such as Proust have been interpreted with such do not explain why the telephone was invented or why the stream- uniformity that their contributions to the cultural landscape have of-consciousness novel began to appear. tended to become as solid and fixed as a rock. By cracking into such As basic philosophical categories, time and space are particularly routine interpretations, identifying different contributions from vari- suitable as a framework for a general cultural history, because they ous parts of their corpus, and distributing my discussion of them are comprehensive, universal and essential. among the subtopics of this study, I attempt to expose fresh surfaces Since all experience takes place in time and space, the two catego- and attribute those contributions to the precise modes of time or ries provide a comprehensive framework that can include such space that are appropriate. wide-ranging cultural developments as Cubism, simultaneous po- To illustrate further the comprehensive range of these topics, in etry, and ragtime music along with the steamship, skyscraper, and the two concluding chapters I survey how these changes shaped the machine gun. To avoid the crazy-quilt effect that such an assemblage diplomatic crisis and the actual fighting of World War I. Individuals of sources might create, I select only material that conforms to the behave in distinctive ways when they feel cut off from the flow of essential nature of each of the subtopics that make up the first nine time, excessively attached to the past, isolated in the present, without chapter+The Nature of Time, The Past, The Present, The Future, a future, or rushing toward one. Nations also demonstrate distinctive 4 The Culture of T~meand Space attitudes toward time. For example, the contrast between Austria- nomena such as class structure, diplomacy, and war tactics in terms Hungary, convinced its time was running out, and Russia, which felt of modes of time and space makes possible the demonstration of it had time to spare, is striking and is revealed repeatedly in diplo- their essential similarity to explicit considerations of time and space matic documents. The experience of space also varies considerably in literature, philosophy, science, and art. Put together, they create along natlonal lines: some countries, like Germany, believed they the basis for generalizations about the essential cultural develop- needed more; Austria-Hungary thought that its space was exces- ments of the period. And by interpreting the culture as a function of sively heterogeneous and distintegrating; Russia was universally time and space, it becomes possible to compare different ages and viewed (and feared) as the country with boundless space. These final different cultures topic by topic with less confusion than would be chapters illustrate how the changes in thinking about and experienc- involved in trying to compare historically and culturally specific in- ing these abstract philosophical categories were manifested in a con- terpretative categories such as parliaments, unions, families, or crete historical situation. The categories of time and space thus pro- bourgeoisies. It should be possible, therefore, to compare the experi- vide a comprehensive theoretical framework that allows not only the ence of time and space in the Renaissance or the Enlightenment with integration of many areas across the cultural spectrum but also inte- that of the fin de sie<lr to discover what essential changes occurred in gration along a theoretical vertical axis from "high culture" to popu- the intervening years. This study provides a contribution to such a lar culture and the material aspects of everyday life. larger historical project. Not every society has kings, parliaments, labor unions, big cities, By arguing that my topics are essential, I run the risk of implying bourgeoisies, Christian churches, diplomats, or navies. 1 do not mean that cultural histories with other foci are unessential. Researching to question the significance of histories of such entities but only to the culture of an age, over a number of years, with two topics con- point out that they are not universal. Time and space are. All people, stantly in mind, one inevitably begins to see everything in that con- everywhere, in all ages, have a distinctive experience of time and text, even the work of others who have classified and interpreted space and, however unconscious, some conception of it. It is possible sources differently. General cultural histories of the period, includ- to interpret how class structures, modes of production, patterns of ing some that focus on single nations or cities, have been inspira- diplomacy, or means of waging war were manifested historically in tional and suggestive in drawing my attention to sources and offer- terms of changing experiences of time and space. Thus class conflict ing a variety of interpretations of them.