UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Vertical Turn: Topographies of Metropolitan Modernism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1857736f Author Haacke, Paul Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Vertical Turn: Topographies of Metropolitan Modernism By Paul Christoph Haacke A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Robert Alter, Chair Anton Kaes Michael Lucey Spring 2011 1 Abstract The Vertical Turn: Topographies of Metropolitan Modernism by Paul Christoph Haacke Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Robert Alter, Chair This dissertation argues that the dominant vertical orientation of metropolitan modernist culture was put into question above all in response to World War II and the global emergence of the Cold War. While grounded in Comparative Literature and Film Studies, it also engages with interdisciplinary questions of philosophy, history, religion, economics, media studies, urban studies, art, and architecture. The first part demonstrates the growing fascination with vertical height, aspiration and transcendence in modernist aesthetics and everyday life, and the second part focuses on the critical suspicion of such transcendence in literature, film, and theory after World War II. The afterward discusses how this history helps us better understand the more horizontalist rhetoric of globalization and new media that has become dominant since then. My argument is that, in response to new developments in technology and metropolitan experience over the course of the long twentieth century, trans-Atlantic writers and artists became increasingly interested in vertical ideas of aspiration and transcendence that diverged from both romantic ideas of spiritual inspiration and realist ideas of mimetic reflection. Although there were critics of this modernist vertical turn already during the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, it was put into question above all after World War II, when more postmodern tropes of suspension, circulation and sprawl – and theoretical concepts of deconstruction, immanence, and deterritorialization – began to gain prevalence. After the destruction of European and Asian cities from above, American metropolitanism ascended to the world stage even while its national landscape became more suburban, decentralized, and mass-mediated. During the Cold War “balance of terror,” First World capitalism also became more decentralized as it expanded further into the Third World, and Fordist methods of vertical integration and nationalization began to be replaced by more transnational methods of horizontal integration, production, and distribution. Thus, while the first half of the long twentieth century could be symbolized by the skyscraper and the airplane, the second half has come to be recognized by more horizontal images of suburban sprawl, extra-terrestrial images of zero-gravity in outer space, and multi-linear images of telecommunications networks and media flows. Although distinct, these two historical movements of the twentieth century may be conceptualized as part of an overall geopolitical 2 turn from European to American dominance, from vertical modernism to horizontal globalism, and, in terms of metropolitan cultural capital, from Paris to New York. That said, despite the utility of these broad generalization and terms, I ultimately argue that they also call for critique. More specifically, my first chapter, “The Aesthetics of Aspiration,” introduces my argument that metropolitan modernist writers and artists became interested in ideas of vertical transcendence in relation to contemporary material developments in urban space, architecture and aviation. Here I focus on spatial conceptions of urbanism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in writings by Guillaume Apollinaire, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. My second chapter, “Metropolitan Ascendance and Catastrophe,” begins with a short history of American architectural verticalization, especially as it was critiqued by John Dos Passos and Frank Lloyd Wright, before focusing on French writings about New York City by Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel de Certeau, among others. Here I show how these critics turned from Paris to New York in order to come to terms with the increasing commercialization, secularization and Americanization of twentieth-century modernity. In my next chapter, “The Aesthetics of Suspension,” I show how major post-World War II American novels by Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon each responded to wartime violence and trauma by dispelling the modernist aesthetics of aspiration in favor of new ideas of historiography, immanence, and “vertical wandering.” My fourth chapter, on “Alfred Hitchcock and the Displacement of Terror,” focuses on the 1958 film Vertigo, and the post- war French novel on which it was based, in order to show how the meaning of this eponymous term was reoriented from the horizontal to the vertical in relation to lingering anxieties about wartime destruction. Finally, my Afterward, “On the Horizon,” considers appeals to horizontal equality and flow in more recent discourses of urbanism, globalization, and new media. i THE VERTICAL TURN Topographies of Metropolitan Modernism Alexander Calder, “Vertical Constellation With Bomb” (1941) By Paul Haacke ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. • Woolf’s “Leaning Tower” • The Spatial Turn • Modernism and Metaphor • Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis and Verticalism • Historical Materialism, Technology and the Built Environment • Summary Chapter One The Aesthetics of Aspiration: Metropolitan Modernism and the Vertical Turn 17. • Apollinaire’s Turning Towers • Kafka and the Irony of Transcendence • Modernism, Aviation, and Mrs. Dalloway • Stephen Dedalus and the Modernization of Ascension • Leopold Bloom’s Comic Gravity Chapter Two Metropolitan Ascendance and Catastrophe: French Responses to the Rise of New York 66. • The American Secularization of Verticality • Excursus 1: The Vertical Imperative and the Tyranny of the Skyscraper • Excursus 2: Manhattan Transfer • Le Corbusier’s Catastrophism • The Geopolitical Turn: Lévi-Strauss • Under the Whole World’s Sky: Sartre • Belonging to the Future: Beauvoir • Against Panopticism: Certeau and the World Trade Center iii Chapter Three The Aesthetics of Suspension: Vertical Wandering in the Post-War American Novel 115. • The Age of Anxiety and the Burden of History • Dangling Men: Heller and Bellow • Historical Relief: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five • Pynchon and the Irony of Immanence Chapter Four The Vertigo of Verticality: Alfred Hitchcock and the Displacement of Terror 147. • French Twist • The Metropolis and Depth Psychology • The Centripetal and the Centrifugal • Recognition, Displacement and the Time-Image Afterword On the Horizon 171. • Immanence, Globalization and Equality • Uneven Development and Horizontal Flow • The Problem of a Multi-Layered Dialectic iv Acknowledgements First I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Robert Alter, and my dissertation advisors, Michael Lucey and Anton Kaes, for supporting this project and pushing me to keep moving onward and upward. I am also grateful to David Henkin, Chris Nealon, and Linda Williams, who agreed to read drafts and offer comments. Thanks also to the many other professors who have helped guide my thinking during my time at Berkeley, including Charles Altieri, John Bishop, Judith Butler, Anthony Cascardi, Pheng Cheah, Tim Clark, Cathy Gallagher, Martin Jay, Victoria Kahn, Rob Kaufmann, Thomas Laqueur, Francine Masiello, Eric Naiman, Miriam Sas, Barbara Spackman, and Anne Wagner. I would also like to thank those scholars, colleagues, and friends whose personal insights have helped me at key points in the development of this project, including Réda Bensmaïa, Emily-Jane Cohen, David Damrosch, Amanda Dennis, Sneha Desai, Alex DeLooz, Katrina Dodson, Harris Feinsod, Norman Gendelman, Lily Gurton-Wachter, Tom McEnaney, Stephen Miller, Meredith Tenhoor, and many others who are too numerous to list here. Special thanks to Bettina for being so present irrespective of distance, and to my parents for supporting me from the beginning. 1 Introduction In the spring of 1940, four months before her London home was bombed in the Blitz and one year before she took her life, Virginia Woolf presented an essay called “The Leaning Tower” for the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton, England. Here, Woolf attempted to conceptualize the established tradition of literary education as an “ivory tower” of privilege, prestige, and capital that determined the potential success of a writer: “It is a tower of the utmost importance; it decides his angle of vision; it affects his power of communication.”1 According to her argument, the aristocratic tradition of British arts and letters was shaken by the Great War, and as a result, its metaphorical tower started to lean. As more left-leaning writers grew self-conscious about their “high station” and “limited vision,”2 they also became increasingly disturbed by the economic and cultural capital that the tower had