Notes

1  The literature on the early cinema’s relation to popular arts is simply enormous. Three good references on the subject are the classic (and no longer current) volume on the prehistory of cinema and early cinema, C.W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965)—Ceram mentions Annabelle Butterfly Dance and Annabelle Serpentine Dance on page 17; Thomas Elsaesser, Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990); and David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

The work of Tom Gunning is especially important, not least for exfoliating relations between the cinema and the culture of modernity (including its manifestations in popular culture) and for his understanding of the affinities between early cinema and the avant-garde. See “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Film, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 56–62; “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33; “From Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19, no. 4: 25–63; and “Tracing the Individual Body AKA Photography, Detectives, Early Cinema and the Body of Modernity,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Leo Charney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 15–45.

2  The insistently repeated declaration that the popular arts are as aesthetically rich and spiritually rewarding as the great high arts is a counter-proposal that accepts the characterization of the origins of the cinema but makes a virtue of film’s purported provenance in popular entertainment.

3  These ideas were promulgated in France by Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880–1918) circle and in Italy by thinkers associated with the poet and dramatist Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). Among those in Apollinaire’s circle was Ricciotto Canudo (1877–1923), who as early as 1908 saw the cinema as “plastic art in motion.” Canudo had proclaimed in “Naissance d’un sixième art: Essai sur le cinématographe” (Les entretiens idéalistes, 25 October 1911) that the sixth art would be

a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of Time (Music and Poetry). The theater has so far best realized such a conciliation, but in an ephemeral manner because the plastic characteristics are always different. The new manifestation of art should really be more a Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time, as in music and poetry, which realize themselves by transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution…In a most astonishing apotheosis, the Plastic Art in Motion will appear.

See Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” trans. B. Gibson, D. Ranvaud, S. Sokota, and D. Young, in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 58–65 at 59; emphases in original.

Canudo’s “Naissance d’un sixième art” was originally published in Les entretiens idealists, 15 October 1911, and reprinted as “L’esthétique du septième art” (The Aesthetics of the Seventh Art) in Fernand Divoire’s posthumous collection of Canudo’s writing, L’usine des images (The Image Factory [Paris: Étienne Chiron, 1927], 13–26). (Canudo is generally credited with coining the term “le septième art” for the cinema—the term still has currency in French writing on film). The reason for the discrepancy between the two titles is that Canudo’s first enumeration of the arts, which followed Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on the Aesthetic, 1835), included in the spatial arts architecture, sculpture, and painting and in the temporal arts music and poetry; on a later enumeration he expanded the temporal arts to include dance. Canudo’s belief that the cinema is a synthetic art (he used the expression “an art of concilation”) resembles D’Annunzio’s ideas about cinema: both thinkers thought of the cinema in essentially theatrical terms and were influenced by Wagnerian (theatrical) ideas about a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art).

In France, there were three strains in the early celebration of the cinema as being an art with potentials similar to those of the other great high arts. One strain, represented by Canudo, Émile Vuillermoz (1878–1960), and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942), extolled its potential for Romantic creation; another strain, represented by Élie Faure and Jean Epstein (1897–1953), celebrated its plastic dynamism (cinéplastique or photogénie de la mobilité), which endowed the cinema with the quality of cinégraphie; and a final strain, represented by Louis Delluc (1890–1924) and Léon Moussinac (1890–1964), and of a somewhat more populist bent, lauded it for particular features of its realism that gave it a unique character among the arts (this last strain was renewed by André Bazin). The second strain in particular valorized the rhythmic capacities of the cinema, which endued the cinema with a character closer to the aural media than to plastic arts.

4  Faure’s work seems especially important: he proposed the notion of cinéplastique to extend Canudo’s idea of the cinema as being a collective, temporal, and spatial spectacle that synthesizes all the arts. See Élie Faure, “De la cinéplastique,” in L’Arbre d’Eden (Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès, 1922), 304–18. Faure used his concept of cinéplastique when he extolled the work of Charlie Chaplin: “Il organise l’univers en poème cinéplastique et lance dans le devenir, à la manière d’un dieu, cette organisation capable d’orienter un certain nombre de sensibilités et d’intelligences et par elles, de proche en proche, d’agir sur tout les esprits” (He organizes the universe into a cineplastic poem and projects into the future, in the manner of a god, an organization that is capable of guiding a certain elite of sensitivity and intelligence, and through them, step by step, of acting on all minds). Faure, “Charlot,” in ibid., 277–303, and reprinted Esprit nouveau 4–6 (New York: Da Capo, 1968), 658–64 at 659.

5  Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” in Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913), 3–37 at 6–7.

6  The last three or four decades have seen the concept of aesthetic experience under systematic attack: the most recent contender for the role of dragon slayer is the relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud and his many followers as set out in Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998), English trans. Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002). Advocates of this position argue that the aesthetic experience, rather than taking place between the individual viewer and the art object, develops out of the interhuman interactions and dialogic exchanges that take place in the aesthetic process (a polemical term, coined to highlight the fact that the process of interaction has displaced the aesthetic object as the focus of aesthetic interest). The artwork, which emerges through this aesthetic process, is affected by the environment in which it is presented and by the audience members, which as often as not, become collaborators in the production not just of meaning, but of the aesthetic process itself. Where modernists had proposed that artistic meaning emerges in an autonomous realm constituted by a private symbolic space, proponents of relational aesthetics argue that human interactions and social context are of key importance in making meaning. Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012) offers a bracing critique of this position.

7  Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” 25–26.

8  Ibid., 27.

9  Ibid., 25.

10  Ibid., 29.

11  Edward Bullough, Aesthetics (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1957), 94.

12  Ibid., 99; collected in Oswald Hanfling, ed., Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 160.

13  Ibid., 100; collected in Hanfling, ed., Philosophical Aesthetics, 160.

14  Roger Fry, “Retrospect,” in Vision and Design (New York: NAL, 1974), 298; reprint of the original Chatto and Windus edition (1923, 1956).

15  Fry, “Retrospect.” His reference to “our pagan spectator” is humorous, and based on the hypothetical spectator’s unconcern for fidelity to the biblical account.

16  Ibid., 298–99.

17  Ibid., 300–301.

18  Harold Osborne, “Semantic Abstraction,” in Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 28–41. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

19  Camille Pissarro, quoted in an article by Robert de Villeherve, Havre-Eclaire, 25 September 1904; cited in Osborne, “From Impressionism to Expressionism,” in Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art, 46.

20  This viewpoint deems the imaginative play that narrative induces to be (generally speaking) deleterious, since it can hinder the absorption an artwork should engender: encouraging a reader/viewer/listener to speculate about the future course of events pulls him or her away from engagement with immediate sensory experience.

21  For my purposes here, I prefer the more obscure term gnosiology to epistemology because it avoids the suggestion embedded in allusions to ἐπιστήμη (episteme)—which Plato in the Theaetetus (201d) defines as “justified true belief” or “true opinion with logos” (that is, true opinion that has a rational argument to establish it and so conveys absolute certainty)—that real knowledge is grounded in deduction. I hope the term gnosiology avoids the suggestion that the knowledge that matters arises out of deductive reasoning and that it conveys better the idea that the knowledge with which we are concerned (gnosis) comprises phenomenological, personal and transpersonal, subjective, mystical understanding, and even what Plato calls νοῦς (noûs).

22  Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 139–45, at 144.

23  William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 609.

24  Ibid., 631.

25  This immediacy is the basis of a criticism that is often advanced to counter these modernist arguments. That counter-argument is forcefully stated by Gianni Vattimo, who traces the insight back to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002):

Thus abstractly defined, aesthetic quality is given to the individual in an experience that has the nature of the Erlebnis, namely as a lived, momentary, and ultimately epiphanic experience. Gadamer quotes in this context a relevant passage from Dilthey’s Leben Schleiermachers: “each one of the Erlebnisse is complete in itself, it is a particular image of the universe which eludes and explicative connection.” [Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (1870), vol. 1, ed. Hermann Mulert (Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter & Co., 1922), 341] But this meaning of the romantic Erlebnis is still linked to a pantheistic vision of the universe. The Erlebnis of twentieth-century culture, and of Dilthey himself, is instead an experience whose meaning is totally subjective and devoid any ontological legitimation: whether in a poem, in a landscape, or in a musical score, the sovereign subject distils the totality of meaning in an entirely arbitrary way, depriving it of any organic connection with its existential and historical situation or with the “reality” within which it lives. Founding aesthetics on the concept of Erlebnis leads to a dissolution into an “absolute series” of discrete temporal points, or discontinuous “punctuality” that “annihilates both the unity of the work of art and the identity of the artist with himself, and the identity of the person understanding or enjoying the work of art.”

Gianni Vattimo, “Hermeneutics and Nihilism,” in The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 122–23.

26  Cited in Cecily Mackworth, Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist Life (New York: Horizon Press, 1963), 86. Note that what Apollinaire states here lends support to the thesis I will soon propose, that plasticity is a mark of postmodern art and thought.

27  Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read (Forest Row: Artists • Bookworks, 2002), 18–19; the passage also appears in the excerpt from Les peintres cubistes in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 220–48 esp. 223–24.

28  Cited in Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 129–30. Tom H. Gibbons points out in “Cubism and ‘The Fourth Dimension’” that the use of the term fourth dimension to refer to a higher spiritual realm dates back at least to the seventeenth century. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687) wrote of a fourth dimension inhabited by spirits in his Enchiridion Metaphysicum (Handbook of Metaphysics, 1671) “that besides those THREE dimensions which belong to all extended things, a FOURTH also is to be admitted, which belongs properly to SPIRITS.” Gibbons, “Cubism and ‘The Fourth Dimension’ in the Context of the Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Revival of Occult Idealism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 130–47 at 134 and 134n22.

29  C.W. Leadbeater, The Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants, and Phenomena (1895) (Los Angeles: Theosophical Pub. Society, 1918), 3–4.

30  Ibid., 9.

31  Ibid.

32  Quotations in this paragraph are from C.W. Leadbeater, Clairvoyance (1899) (Los Angeles: Theosophical Publishing House, 1918), 37. As we will see, this description of the fourth dimension resembles that of Maurice Princet (1875–1973), a geometer who was a fellow traveller with the Cubists and who influenced the Cubists’ notions about the scientific/metaphysical nature of their artistic innovations; thus, we will connect Cubism’s quasi-scientific interest in attaining a non-anthropocentric viewpoint to Theosophical teachings.

33  André Salmon, Souvenir sans fin, Première époque (1903–1908) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1955), 187; Souvenir sans fin, Deuxième époque (1908–1920) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1956), 24.

34  Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 4ff. There is a user-friendly book that discusses the influence of Jouffret’s treatise on Picasso (focusing in particular on his Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910), written by a contemporary artist with an interest in higher-dimension geometries: Tony Robbin, Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). It offers a vigorous defence for understanding the fourth dimension through projective geometry (as Jouffret understood it) rather than through the more common slicing methods.

35  Esprit Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions et introduction à la géométrie à n dimensions (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1903). Humanists might find help in Arthur I. Miller’s discussion of Jouffret’s and Princet’s ideas in his Einstein, Picasso, 101, 106–17, 122.

36  See Miller, Einstein, Picasso, 106–17. Note that Miller more or less suggests that the interest in Jouffret’s geometry extended beyond Picasso—that Picasso led the way with Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and that many other painters followed. There is no doubt whatsoever that Princet influenced Jean Metzinger and Marcel Duchamp—both artists testify to his influence—as well as the Section d’or group. But how quickly Picasso’s synthesis of the discoveries he made while creating Les demoiselles d’Avignon actually went out into the art world is hard to judge. Picasso kept the painting in studio until 1916 and was very secretive about it.

37  Leo Stein, Journey into the Self: Being the Letters, Papers, and Journals of Leo Stein, ed. Edmund Fuller (New York: Crown, 1950), 123.

38  This is the sort of emphasis analyzed in Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

39  Guilds developed around this time, and acquired political force when they allied themselves with monarchies against the feudal landlords.

40  See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); and Koyré, La révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli (Paris: Hermann, 1961; in English, The Astronomical Revolution, London: Methuen, 1973). See also Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

41  Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration (1621), in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), iv, 32.

42  Regarding the interrelation of craft and theory in the Renaissance and the during the Scientific Revolution, Clifford D. Conner, A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanics” (New York: Nation Books, 2005), is wondrously insightful.

43  Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. and ed. Edward MacCurdy (New York: George Braziller, 1955), 853.

44  Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement, 13.

45  The passage I have just quoted from Leonardo da Vinci continues with an assertion that can be construed as one about the inextricable relations among capital, craft, and knowledge. Addressing the academics who denied him the status of a man of letters, he writes, “if you call [painting] mechanical because it is done for money, who fall into this error—if indeed it can be called an error—more than you yourselves? If you lecture for the Schools, do you not go to whoever pays you the most?” (Leonardo, The Notebooks).

46  Edgar Zilsel, “Problems of Empiricism,” in The Social Origins of Modern Science, ed. Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 171–99 at 174.

Giorgio di Santilla does a splendid job in showing that the motivations for the Church’s prosecuting Galileo were not theological (Pope Urban VIII was one of Galileo’s champions). The real culprits were the Aristotelians in the universities, who did not like having a rude mechanical (and, worse, a man trained in desegno) offering scientific pronouncements. See di Santilla, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

47  J.V. Field, “Mathematics and the Craft of Painting: Piero della Francesca and Perspective,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J.V. Field and Frank A.J.L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74.

48  Furthermore, as the Greeks did, I believe that the power maintaining beings in existence has to do with their “esse-nce.”

49  Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 22.

50  Ibid., 23.

51  Ibid., 24; emphases in original.

52  One thinks of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921), a work that also arose out of a moral passion about saying what can be said clearly, lest turpitude be the consequence. However, the early Wittgenstein argued that the important questions cannot be put into language, since they do not concern matters that can be known apodictically (that is, can be stated in the form of analytic propositions), nor can they be pictures accurately mirroring the structures of states of affairs (Wittgenstein’s technical way of saying that they are not what Hobbes called matters of fact). Consequently, these questions have no meaningful answers. Wittgenstein witnessed the collapse of both Boyle’s and Hobbes’s programs for achieving certainty on the questions that really matter; that collapse would trouble him his entire life.

53  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. 1, Ch. 4, “On Speech,” in Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 21. Shapin and Schaffer quote this passage in Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 100 (though using the Harvard Classics edition, rather than Oakeshott).

54  Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 102.

55  See Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik” (The Question Concerning Technology, 1954; originally presented as a lecture, in Bremen, in 1949). See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), in particular its final chapter; and Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for a Technological Age, trans. David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Arendt’s commentary on technology is especially relevant for our purpose. Arendt sees human activity as having a constitutive role in the making of the human condition. She writes:

The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers. (9)

The “things produced by human activities” become the conditions of their producers. What is made comes to have a role in making the maker.

56  Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 22.

57  Ibid., 25.

58  Ibid., 45. This position is identical with the Wiener Kreis’s famous verificationist criterion of meaning.

59  Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 225.

60  Ibid., 225.

61  Ibid., 225.

62  Ibid., 333–34.

63  At least one scientist raised questions about how the action of the pump should be interpreted—about how nature responded to the stress the machine put on it. The Jesuit Franciscus Linus published a tract, titled Tractatus de corporum inseparabilitate, in quo experimenta de vacuo, tam torricelliana quam magdeburgica et boyliana examinantur, veraque eorum causa detecta, ostenditur, vacuum naturaliter dari non posse unde et aristotelica de rarefactione sententia…demonstratur. Accessit solutio difficillimi illius problematis aristotelici de duabus rotis, quae licet valde inaequales, aequales tamen orbitas describunt (autore Francisco Lino), that denied that Boyle’s air pump produced a vacuum. “Linus said there was no vacuum in the Torricellian space. This was apparent because one could see through that space; if there were a vacuum, ‘no visible species could proceed either from it, or through it, unto the eye’” (ibid., 157). To explain the sustained height of the liquid, he suggested there was “a certain internal thread (funiculus) whose upper extremity was attached to the finger [blocking the top of the inverted tube] and whose lower extremity was attached to the surface of the mercury” (ibid., 157).

64  Strictly speaking, one can have an n-dimensional Euclidean geometry, but non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometries were linked both historically and by the reasons thinkers had for being interested in them.

65  David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 9.

66  Ibid., 8.

67  Plotinus, Enneads (ca. 250 CE), trans. S. Mackenna (London: Penguin, 1991), IV.8.

68  G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesung über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics), ed. H.G. Hotho (Berlin and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1835–38).

69  Donauschtil (Donau style or Donauschule; Danube School), a school of painters, from the first third of the sixteenth century, including Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538), Wolf Huber (1485–1553), Jörg Breu the Elder (ca. 1475–1537), and Rueland Frueauf the Younger (ca. 1470–sometime after 1545).

70  A splendid book about what the Italian painters owed Arabic science is Hans Belting’s Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). The subject of Belting’s book is the transformation of “a scientific theory into an artistic practice,” of “an Arab visual theory into a Western pictorial theory” (27). I have some disagreements with the book about the nature of that transformation. Still, it is a remarkable achievement.

71  Translated from Johannes Kepler, Harmonices mundi, cited in Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. and ed. C. Doris Hellman (New York: Dover, 1993), 265–66.

72  Of course, transcendent and empirical approaches to artmaking coexisted in the latter half of the nineteenth century: Impressionism is a scientific form of painting, one that attempts to capture the transitory play of light on the surfaces of objects—and it conveys a great deal of optimism about (what at the time was understood as) “the modern.” The Cubists were not quite as secure in their beliefs about the realm of the senses—so Picasso turned to painting what he knew (and what he knew he sometimes related to mathematics), not what he saw.

73  Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (New York and London: Continuum, 2013), 9.

74  Ibid., 1; emphasis in original.

75  Ibid., 11. Readers will remember that in Il saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623), Galileo Galilei asserted that the universe “is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.” In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 237–38.

76  Henry, Barbarism, 12. Italics as in original.

77  Ibid.; italics as in original.

78  Ezra Pound, “Review of Jean Cocteau’s Poésies,” The Dial 70, no. 1 (January 1921): 110.

79  The idea that narrative is capable of truly reflecting only pastoral life, not modern existence, is one that still troubles many scholars, though, strangely, they are comfortable with asserting that narrative reflects social existence, which is what the truncated remark can be taken to imply.

80  Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.” In English: “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409–24 at 410. Simmel’s writings offer much to students of urban visual culture, and their relevance to the themes of this book are profound. Unfortunately, I cannot take up that topic in this volume. Readers can consult David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and (regarding similar ideas on vision) Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein, “On the Visual Constitution of Society: The Contributions of Georg Simmel and Jean-Paul Sartre to a Sociology of the Senses,” History of European Ideas 5 (1984): 349–62.

81  Immanuel Kant, “Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment: Analytic of the Beautiful,” in Critique of Judgment §7, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 47.

82  Ibid., §1, 37.

83  Ibid., §18, 73; emphasis Bernard’s.

84  Ibid., §19, 74.

85  Ibid., §16, 65.

86  Ibid., §1, 38.

87  Ibid., §20, 75.

88  Ibid., §2, 38.

89  Ibid., §2, 39.

90  Of course, that an object stimulates a pleasurable response and that the pleasure be disinterested are not sufficient conditions to warrant the claim that the object conditions pleasure of a specifically aesthetic sort. This is something on which Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft is not precise: we need a criterion to distinguish aesthetic pleasure from disinterested pleasure that is not aesthetic. One possible ground for distinguishing aesthetic from other pleasures is that aesthetic pleasures derive from sensations that have been formed into ever more encompassing organizations that exhibit emergent properties. This would be consistent with Kant’s remarks that deny aesthetic value to “the charm” of mere sensations and that affirm that form alone is aesthetically relevant.

91  Kant, “Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment,” §6, 45–46.

92  Ibid., §15, 63.

93  Kant, “Critique of the Teleological Judgment: The Objective Purposiveness of Nature,” in Critique of Judgment, §6, 205.

94  Kant, “Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment: Analytic of the Beautiful,” in Critique of Judgment, §15, 62.

95  Ibid., §15, 64.

96  Ibid., §15, 64.

97  Ibid., §9, 53.

98  Ibid., §9, 54.

99  Ibid., §9, 52.

100  I have argued for this claim. I point out, however, that it is not canonical.

101  Kant, “Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment: Analytic of the Beautiful,” §15, 63.

102  Ibid., §14, 61.

103  Immanuel Kant, “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements: Transcendental Deduction,” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), §§A104–5, 134–35.

104  We have here the germ of ideas that Hegel was later to develop: that artworks give concepts (in the Hegelian, not the Kantian sense) material embodiment and that these concepts have a tendency to become too vast, too general, too complex, too abstract.

105  Kant, “Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment: Analytic of the Sublime,” in Critique of Judgment, §49, 157–58.

106  Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896). In English: Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 201.

107  In fact, the artists and thinkers associated with the Cubist and Futurist movements had to read Bergson selectively and to overlook the way that aspects of Cubist and Futurist practice failed to conform to Bergson’s aesthetics. A very good article on this topic is Ruth Lorand, “Bergson’s Concept of Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 39, no. 4 (October 1999): 400–415.

108  “Les systèmes philosophiques ne sont pas taillés à la mesure de la réalité où nous vivons.” Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (1934) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 1.

109  In the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, Bergson’s philosophy was taken up by thinkers associated with various esoteric movements, by the Symbolists, by Futurists, and by Cubists (and artists affiliated with the many schools—for example, Section d’or, Purism, and Synchromism—that developed aspects of the Cubist program or were otherwise influenced by Cubism). However, Bergson’s philosophy was not taken up whole, and the elements these groups selected to support their positions do not, when isolated from its whole, accurately represent the character of Bergson’s philosophy. Furthermore, they read Bergson almost as a contemporary Schopenhauer. The German philosopher’s ideas about the role of art resonated with the Symbolists and were commonly embraced by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists. Schopenhauer proposed that the world we know of in experience is a realm of mere appearance, that reality itself is a mercilessly restless striving force he called Wille (Will), which impels us to maintain our lives even though they consist, for most part, of nothing other than suffering. However, art enables us, by allowing us to shift our attention to something akin the Platonic forms instead of the illusions of the material world, to be momentarily freed from our service to Will and to become subjects possessing a higher knowledge. Through art, we experience intimations of the forms of the Will, without actually performing voluntary acts. Schopenhauer argued that music is the highest art of all because it mimics most exactly the Will’s restless striving.

Bergson, too, proposed that there is a reality concealed from common (rational) understanding, an élan vital, that art releases from daily life’s harsh toil; and that music comes closer to conveying this durée and the flux of life. Like Schopenhauer, he believed that we are locked into a life of misunderstanding. The agent of this entrapment, however, is not a merciless will, but the intellect. Moreover, the intellect is not wholly deleterious, but has a legitimate function—however, we have gone too far allowing it to dominate our lives and, consequently, have neglected intuition. Bergson’s philosophy encourages us to afford intuition a wider scope. However, his philosophy is not an exposé of the near savagery of intellect, as Schopenhauer’s was of the Will’s unrelenting cruelty. Besides, Bergson maintained that art leads us back to the world: instruction in renunciation is not the goal of Bergson’s philosophy (as it was of Schopenhauer’s). Bergson’s philosophy offers something closer to a hierophantic view of reality.

Neither Cubism nor Futurism really preached renunciation, in the way that Symbolism did. That said, Futurism certainly makes a distinction between an absolute reality (dynamism) and the world of appearances (the world of objects) that conforms remarkably well with Schopenhauer’s model. The Cubists strained in that direction, especially by embracing ideas of higher dimensionality and space-time. Understood in that way, Schopenhauer can be read as a philosopher of the incipience of electrology. (The Cubists’ fascination with the new world of industrial forms provided a counterbalance to any interest in a world beyond time. Note also that this form of novelty was experienced as hierophantic—these industrial forms were the new form of poetry.)

Whatever their distortions of the Bergsonian system, it seems to me the Cubists and Futurists recognized that the creative, participatory relation that Bergson maintained the individual has to the universe can serve as a model for the creative, participatory relation they hoped to bring about between the observer and the artwork. For example, when Apollinaire noted that “le peintre doit avant tout se donner le spectacle de sa propre divinité et les tableaux qu’il offre à l’admiration des hommes leur conféreront la gloire d’exercer aussi et momentanément leur propre divinité” (a painter must first and foremost afford himself the sight of his own divinity, and the paintings he gives me to admire will allow them too, for a glorious moment, to exercise their own divinity), he was thinking in very Bergsonian terms. See Guillaume Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques: Les peintres cubistes, première série (Paris: E. Figuière, 1913); reprinted, Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1950), 7; in English, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Reid, 10.

110  Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 90–92. The source for Crary’s quotation from Johannes Müller is Müller, Elements of Physiologie, trans. William Baly (London: Taylor and Walton, 1848), 1064.

111  The Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius were considered the most skilful painters of the fourth century BCE, when skilful μίμησις (mīmēsis, imitation) was the criterion by which artists were judged. Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, CE 23–79) recorded a story concerning a competition between the two. Zeuxis finished his painting first, and a crowd gathered to appraise it. Zeuxis drew aside the curtain covering the painting, revealing an image of a bowl of fruit that included grapes; when he did that, a flock of birds flew down to pluck from the grapes from the bowl. That made Zeuxis certain he would win the competition. When Parrhasius finished his painting, he invited Zeuxis and the crowd to his studio. When Zeuxis arrived, he asked Parrhasius to draw the curtain covering his painting aside, so he could see the image, but Parrhasius demurred, saying that it couldn’t be done. So Zeuxis himself tried to lift the covering, only to discover that an image of a curtain was the painting. Zeuxis allowed that Parrhasius had won the competition because Zeuxis’s illusion had only fooled birds, but Parhassius’s had fooled a fellow craftsperson.

112  It is worth pointing out that crisis in vision is part of a more general crisis of perception and crisis of reality that I discuss throughout this work. If I stress this one aspect of a more general crisis, it is because the ocularcentric European tradition had accorded special importance to vision, and had analogized vision and knowledge, and the revelation of vision’s limitation seemed particularly troubling. The shift from visual to acoustic space, outlined in Marshall McLuhan’s historiography, brought into question fundamental epistemological assumptions of the modern era.

113  Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, vol. 1, ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 72–73.

114  From Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #329, “Leisure and Idleness,” following the Kaufmann translation (New York: Random House, 1974), 259. Nietzsche was absolutely prescient on this topic. The passage continues:

“Rather do anything rather than nothing”: this principle too is just a noose to throttle all culture and good taste. Just as all forms are visibly perishing by the haste of the workers, the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements are also perishing. The proof of this may be found in the universal demand for gross obviousness in all those situations in which human beings wish to be honest with one another for once—in their associations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders and Princes: One no longer has time or energy for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for otium at all. Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence and overreaching and anticipating others. Virtue has come to consist in doing something in a shorter time than another person.

The phenomenology of present-day lived reality produces neurasthenia, or even, as in Nietzsche’s case, mental collapse.

115  G.W.F. Hegel, “Preface,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), Preface §20, 11.

116  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §798, 485.

117  The passage cited is drawn from Allan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17.

118  George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959), ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 14. Based on a series of lectures broadcast on the CBC in 1958.

119  Ibid., 5

120  Ibid., 120.

121  If Nietzsche’s earliest conception of will differs from Schopenhauer’s, it was probably in being a more exalted conception: Nietzsche claimed that when the intellect does not oppress or denigrate it, the will possesses a marvellously free and amoral character; moreover, he celebrated the will’s force and power.

122  F. Nietzsche, “Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipziger Jahre” (Autumn 1867), qtd. in Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), 72.

123  F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1982), 46–47.

124  Ibid.; emphases in original.

125  Even before Plato, thinkers proposed ideas about the ineffability of the higher truths. But Plato’s remarks on ineffability of the Good in the Republic will be familiar to all. A strain in Medieval philosophy known as negative theology also asserts that the attributes of God cannot be expressed in language. There is a direct line from Hamann’s thought, through Herder and Goethe, to that of the Symbolists.

126  These characterizations of James Doull’s thoughts are drawn from Graeme Nicholson, “Heidegger and the Dialectic of Modernity,” in Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull, ed. David Peddle and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 378.

127  Ibid., 378.

128  Heidegger’s address is printed as Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University (1933),” in Philosophical and Political Writigs, ed. Manfred Stassen (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 2–11 at 11.

129  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 14. This passage outlines a conception of the genesis of vision that has clear parallels with that of the great American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and Brakhage acknowledged that.

130  Sigfried Giedion studied with the German art historian Heinrich Wöfflin (1864–1945), who laid out the historiographical logic of the change from Baroque (and Mannerist) art into Classical art. Giedion, too, laid out a historiographical logic, though his is different from Wöfflin’s: that fact is particularly clear in his Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). Unlike Wöfflin’s, Giedion’s historiography related changes occurring in the symbolic stratum to changes occurring in the material stratum. Wöfflin and Giedion were significant influences on McLuhan, who in his own way laid out a cultural historiography that, like Giedion’s, was concerned with the interrelations of changes on the two strata.

The ideas that Giedion draws on Minkowski first presented in a now famous talk at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians delivered on 21 September 1908. A transcript appears in translation in Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time,” in Hendrik A. Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, and Hermann Weyl, The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity (New York: Dover, 1952), 75–91; the passage from Minkowski I cite in this paragraph is the second sentence of the address (p. 75).

131  Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 14.

132  Ibid., 436. Compare Giedion’s comment to this remark McLuhan made on the idiosyncratic (and syncretic) Cubo-Futurist author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake:

One of the principal intellectual developments of the past century or so has been the supplanting of linear perspective by a multi-locational mode of perception. Among critics of Picasso this new mode is sometimes referred to as a “circulating point of view” in which a view from above may suddenly become a view from every where at once.

“Inside Blake and Hollywood—Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake by Northrop Frye; Magic and Myth of the Movies by Parker Tyler,” Swanee Review 55, no. 4 (October–December 1947), 710–15 at 710.

133  Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan, October–November 1910, 60, cited in Miller, Einstein, Picasso, 167. Robbin, Shadows of Reality, is the source of my remark concerning the Kahnweiler portrait.

134  Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du cubisme (Paris: Figuière, 1912); according to the anonymous, but standard, English translation (Cubism [London: Fisher Unwin, 1913], 35), this reads: “moving around an object to seize several successive appearances, which, fused in a single image, reconstitute it in time.” One of the book’s most important features is that it understands Cubism as a realist movement that extended the new realism of Courbet.

135  For Richardson’s rebuttal of the prevailing view, see John Adkins Richardson, “Cubism and Logic,” in Modern Art and Scientific Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 104–27.

136  Meyer Schapiro, “Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art,” in Schapiro, The Unity of Picasso’s Art (New York: George Braziller, 2000), 49–149.

137  See Sam Hunter, Modern French Painting 1855–1956 (New York: Dell, 1956), 194ff.; and László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Theobald, 1947).

138  Against such claims about simultaneity, offered both by Metzinger and by Giedion, Richardson in Modern Art and Scientific Thought contends:

Still, what is most peculiar about Metzinger’s theory, in view of its prominence, is that at the very time he was propounding it, Einstein was proving the impossibility of establishing the simultaneity of any two events that do not occur approximately [sic], that is, side by side. So far as the Special Theory of Relativity is concerned, the sole difference between it and classical science lies precisely in Relativity’s denial of the absoluteness of the simultaneity of spatially separated events. Had the Cubists really been consistent with the new developments in physics they would have demolished simultaneity! After all, the presentation of simultaneous images had been common practice in architectural and machine drawing since the Renaissance, by way of elevations and projections which showed at once the top, sides, front and back of an object. (110)

139  Tom H. Gibbons in “Cubism and ‘The Fourth Dimension,’” makes an interesting point in this connection:

As Cecily Mackworth remarks in her biography of Apollinaire: “Occultism was fashionable in intellectual circles…Fortune-tellers, sorcerers, practitioners of the black arts, thrived in Paris at the time, and some of them, like the Sar Péladan and Stanislaus de Guita, had one foot in the world of literature and the other in that of occultism. Apollinaire’s circle, with its strong taste for everything bizarre, was in touch with many of these sorcerers and Apollinaire has named some of them in the poem entitled Sur les prophéties. (147)

And further:

It is particularly interesting to learn that “Apollinaire as well as Picasso and Max Jacob had frequented [the “Sar” Péladan] in their Montmartre days” and that Pèladan “had been momentarily interested in Cubism,” for there is surely much that the founder of the Symbolist salon of Rosicrucian painters and author of L’art idéaliste et mystique would have found congenial in the aspirations of the young Cubist painters. Max Jacob, Picasso’s intimate friend of that time, was, as is well known, an earnest student of CabCabbalism and occultism. (ibid.)

Gibbons cites Mackworth, Guillaume Apollinaire, 125, for the first passage he cites, and ibid., 126 for the second; the parenthetical interpolation in the second passage is Gibbons’s.

140  This passage appears in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 223–24.

141  Schapiro, “Einstein and Cubism,” 54.

142  Ibid., 63.

143  This point is made in Gibbons, “Cubism and ‘The Fourth Dimension,’” 131; he cites Fry, Cubism, 119, for the first phrase he quotes; and ibid., 111–12, for the second.

144  In that connection, I might point out that “Zur Elekrodynamik bewegter Körper” reconciles Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light.

145  Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 443–44.

146  As Giedion pointed out, Minkowski offered an alternative formalization of the special theory of relativity that in place of the algebraic treatment that Einstein offered, relied on the new unit of space-time. Minkowski introduced that unit, and it is that concept that is supposed to furnish the connection between relativistic physics and Cubist painting and poetry. In introducing the idea Minkowski famously declared, “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time,” in Hendrik A. Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, and Hermann Weyl, The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity (New York: Dover, 1952), 75–91 at 75.

147  On the anachronisms in the statement, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “A New Facet of Cubism: ‘The Fourth Dimension’ and ‘Non-Euclidean Geometry’ Reinterpreted,” Art Quarterly (Winter 1971): 410–33. Henderson writes that

contemporary popularizations [of the sort Edward Fry alludes to] of the theories of Einstein and Minkowski did not exist [and that] the mistake of art-historians anxious to explain references to the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry has been to read back into Cubist writings of 1911 and I912 a breakthrough in physics which was not published until 1916. (417)

In 1916 Einstein, with the general theory of relativity, embraced and developed the Minkowskian formalization of relativity theory in terms of space-time. Gibbons in “Cubism and ‘The Fourth Dimension’ adds, citing The Times, 8 November 1919 at 12:

Henderson’s argument is supported by the fact that the official index to The Times reveals no mention of Einstein until after the 1914–18 war. It was not until 7 November 1919, almost exactly a year after Apollinaire’s death, that on page 12 The Times carried the announcements: “Revolution in Science: New Theory of the Universe: Newtonian Ideas Overthrown,” informing its readers on the following day that “Dr. Albert Einstein[’s]…astronomical discoveries were described at the meeting of the Royal Society on Thursday as the most remarkable since the discovery of Neptune, and as propounding a new theory of the universe. What was being reported in 1919 was of course the validation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916) by observations of the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919.” (132)

148  Ibn al-Haythan (965–ca. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, composed Kitab al-Manazir between 1011 or 1021; a Latin translation, De aspectibus or Perspectivae (Book of Optics), appeared at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century.

149  Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 95–96.

150  Schapiro, “Einstein and Cubism,” 59.

151  Gleizes and Metzinger, “Du cubisme,” excerpted as “From Cubism, 1912,” in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Chipp, 207–16 at 207–8.

152  Henry, Barbarism, 8–9.

153  Schapiro, “Einstein and Cubism,” 60.

154  Regarding the Cubists’ alleged indifference to the work of the Impressionists, it behooves one to acknowledge that some of the Cubists felt an affinity with Impressionism: Picasso had a great interest in and respect for Édouard Manet (1832–1883), a painter close to the Impressionists; and Fernand Léger—admittedly a painter whose work differed from Cubism in important respects, but one whose thoughts were aligned with those that gave rise to Cubism—admired the Impressionists very much, most of all for their innovations in handling colour and light and for their interest in modern life. Regarding the crises of perception, I have identified and commented on that matter in the sections titled “The Senses Disconnection from Reality” and “Producing Facts.” Over the long run, the question as to whether the senses accurately mirror the world (and the larger issue of the veracity of perceptual reports) became exigent and importuned thinkers’ attention when Helmholtz announced his idea of specific nerve energy. That issue is connected with the rise of the electromagnetic conception of reality.

155  I have introduced the emphasis. The manifesto first appeared in La gazzetta del popolo (2 February 1940) and later was published (without any credit going to Puma or Masnata) in a Roman journal, Autori e scrittori 6 (June 1941), under the reduced title “La matematica futurista immaginativa qualitativa.” An English translation appears as “Qualitative Imaginative Futurist Mathematics,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 298–301, at 299; however, the editors state in their notes on the manifesto that its appearance in Autori e scrittori was its first publication and give 1941 as the publication date and “La matematica futurista immaginativa qualitativa” as the full title—nevertheless, they note Puma’s and Masnata’s collaboration with Marinetti.

156  The original comment is “quand l’homme a voulu imiter la marche, il a créé la roue qui ne ressemble pas à une jambe. Il a fait ainsi du surréalisme sans le savoir.” Guillaume Apollinaire, Les mamelles de Tirésias (1917); reprinted in Apollinaire, L’enchanteur pourrissant, suivi de Les mamelles de Tirésias et de Couleur du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 94. It also appears in Apollinaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Michel Decaudin (Paris: A. Balland et J. Lecat, 1965–66), 865–66.

157  Willard Bohn, “La quatrième dimension chez Apollinaire,” Revue des lettres modernes 530–36 (1978), special issue Guillaume Apollinaire, 14: 93–103 at 102. He also suggests something I take to be true, viz., that Apollinaire’s methods and outlook relied on intuition (these methods were buttressed by the poet’s interest in Henri Bergson’s philosophy) and were (as Bergson’s outlook was) opposed to the belief that science offers a truer picture of reality than an image arising from a participatory experience of reality. Bohn writes, “c’est l’intuition créatrice qui donne naissance à l’œuvre d’art par un procédé tout à fait opposé au raisonnement déductif/inductif de la science” (“La quatrième dimension,” 95–96).

158  Karl Lambrecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit. Deutsche Geschichte series (Berlin: Gärtner, 1902; Freiburg im Breslau: Hyfelder, 1904); Willy Hellpach, Nervosität und Kultur (Berlin: J. Rade, 1902).

159  This speed-up of life and the piling of images on top of one another are marvellously suggested in Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographes made between 1882 and 1904, the very period we are commenting on. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

160  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 409–10. Simmel develops this theme in a telling direction. Drawing on Pierre Janet’s distinction between lower and higher mental processes, he notes:

The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable—as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan type of man—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena. (410–11)

161  Earlier developments set the stage for this study of the body as a system operated by electricity. Around 1780, Galvani, working at the University of Bologna, found that electricity applied to a frog’s leg (later he extended the study to other animals) would cause its muscles to contract. Helmholtz repudiated the vitalist strain in his teacher’s, Johannes Müller’s, belief that a nerve impulse can serve as an example of a body’s vital function and thus cannot be measured experimentally. Around the same time, Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), another student of Johannes Müller, who is known as the “father of experimental electrophysiology,” used a sensitive apparatus he developed to detect what he called “action current” in the frog’s nerve. He showed that this current is the cause of muscular contraction. Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, and Brücke developed the theory that the body is a material entity whose operations are electrical in nature. Together, they rejected the assumption that living beings are animated by vital forces of a different nature than those that operate in inorganic nature and that are governed by special biological laws. They resolved to explain all biological phenomena by the same laws as are applicable to occurrences in physical and chemical realms. Sigmund Freud studied medicine with Brücke (as did two of Freud’s associates), and that commitment undertaken by the Physikalische Gesellschaft (which the three founded) is reflected in Freud’s Entwurf einer Psychologie (A Project for a Scientific Psychology, [1895], part of Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928), first published in German in 1950, and in his efforts to erect a science of psychodynamics.

162  Helmoltz had been Brücke’s lab partner and friend in medical school. There is another important thinker who treated the mental apparatus as an energy system. The year before the publication of Brücke’s Vorlesungen, Sigmund Freud enrolled in medical school at the University of Vienna to study with Brücke, who was then the director of the university’s physiological laboratory. For six years, Freud concentrated on biology, doing research under Brücke’s supervision. Freud went on to develop a theory that the mind is a dynamic energy system and that among its major concerns were the vicissitudes of psychic energy. John Bowlby, Separation: Anxiety and Anger (New York: Basic Books, 1973), notes:

The psychical energy model that Freud brought to psychoanalysis came, not from his clinical work with patients, but from ideas he had learned many years earlier, especially when he was working in the laboratory of his admired professor of physiology, Brücke. During the 1840s, Brücke had been one of a group of dedicated young scientists, of whom Helmholtz was the leader, who were determined to show that all real causes are symbolized in science by the word “force.” Since the achievements of the Helmholtz school soon became famous, it was natural that Freud, working under one of their number, should have adopted their assumptions. (401)

163  Anson Rabinbach, in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), brilliantly lays out the cultural dynamics of complaints of lassitude and the diagnosis of neurasthenia that was given as an explanation.

164  Around 1910, Every Woman’s Encyclopaedia, which offered entries on “How to Choose a House,” “How to Arrange a Table,” “An Idea for the Arrangement of Sweets,” “The Servant Question,” “How to Arrange Chrysanthemums,” and “How to Obtain Servants,” dispensed advice to women on how to deal with “Children Who Suffer from ‘Nerves’”—and did so under the rubric of “Health and Hygiene in the Nursery”:

The nervous child is a far from uncommon phenomenon in the twentieth century. This is the age of neurotic women, who, like the proverbial Irishman, do not know what they want and won’t be happy when they get it. It is the century of “rush,” of strenuous men working at express speed. The natural result is the prevalence of neurasthenia amongst old and young, men and women alike. Even children are not exempt. The “nervy” child is the natural offspring of neurotic parents. The neurotic temperament is characterised by an abnormal capacity for emotion. Neurotic people feel more keenly joy, sorrow, or pain. They control their emotions with difficulty. Under proper management, the neurotic boy or girl may grow into a brilliant man or woman. Neurasthenia is simply the neurotic temperament run riot. So that, when children suffer from “nerves,” they should be taken in hand right away. It depends upon the mother whether the neurotic child, who is generally clever and bright, will degenerate into a faddist, a “cranky,” difficult man or woman, or achieve brilliant success in after life. (Everywoman’s Encyclopedia, vol. 2 [London: W.B. Horner & Son, ca. 1912], 867–68)

165  F.G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). On the topic of the exhaustion of energy reserves, see page 9.

166  From A.D. Rockwell, “Some Causes and Characteristics of Neurasthenia,” New York Medical Journal 58 (1893): 590 apud Gosling, Before Freud, 12–13.

167  Möbius, who had training in philosophy and theology, was the least anti-psychiatric of this group, and he was one of the first and most forceful advocates of the view there are diseases that have specifically psychological origins (Freud referred to him as the father of psychotherapy). His analyses of the psychogenetics of hysteria helped shape current beliefs on mental illness. Another view he argued for had both good and pernicious effects: he made the distinction between endogenous and exogenous causes of nervous and mental illness, distinguishing between degenerative conditions in the nervous system itself (his idea of degenerative conditions also implied that these mental diseases get progressively worse over generations) and conditions caused by factors coming from outside the system. (Krafft-Ebing made a related distinction, between predisposing and occasioning or accessory causes.) In large measure, this distinction is still accepted today, but Möbius’s writings—for example, Über die hereditären Nervenkrankheiten (On Hereditary Neuropathology) (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1879)—gave them a form that made them attractive to the Nationalsozialisten and shaped their ideas on mental illness. No less pernicious in its effects was Möbius’s extremely popular pamphlet (it went through eight editions during his lifetime) Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the Physiological Idiocy of Women) (Halle: C. Marhold, 1900), for which he received much commendation but also occasional condemnation; Möbius developed further the arguments of that pamphlet in his Geschlecht und Kopfgröße (Sex and Head Size) (Halle: Marhold, 1903) and Beiträge zur Lehre von den Geschlechtsunterschieden (Contributions to the Theory of Gender Differences) (Halle: Marhold, 1903–7).

168  As concerns the treatment of female neurasthenics, some physicians, on the grounds of the presumed intimacy of the connection between a woman’s reproductive organs and her nervous system, concluded that women suffering from the condition should be referred to a gynecologist. The gynecologist usually prescribed ovariotomies and clitoridectomies. This mode of treatment led to controversies between gynecologists and neurologists, with the neurologists accusing the gynecologists’ treatment of being tantamount to abuse. Gosling, in Before Freud, points out that Joseph G. Kiernan, a neurologist who taught forensic psychiatry at Kent College of Law, wrote of the “evil effects of laying undue stress on the utero-ovarian manifestation” and that the effect of overemphasizing the role of the reproductive organs was to furnish “new material for morbid anxieties” (22). He also points out that Ludwig Bremer, a St. Louis neurologist, commented even more forthrightly on the situation: in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Bremer argued that surgical interference in the genital sphere amounted to “a crime, that its effect upon the woman is that of defloration. Her moral tone, her manner of judging things, is altered and lowered; with the consciousness of there being even the shadow of flaw on her virginity, those subtle qualities disappear which constitute the charm of girlish innocence; her mind is polluted, she is unfit for marriage and all this because her doctor happens to hold the opinion that by manipulating the uterus he can cure neurosis” (qtd. in Gosling, Before Freud, 22–23).

169  The deepest way of understanding this change in views about neurasthenia and depression is that it involves a transition from considering these states as products of a natural system to interpreting them as products of a symbolic system that serves to conceal our longings. That transition is of cardinal importance.

170  See Leendert Groenendijk, “Neurasthenia,” in The Freud Encyclopedia, ed. Edwin Erwin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 361–62, for several references to Freud’s ideas on neurasthenia around this time.

171  Sigmund Freud, Draft B, Letter to Wilhem Fliess, 8 Feburary 1893, in Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. J.M. Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 41–42. Remember, when reading this, that the central problematic of Wilhelm Fliess’s scientific inquiries was to formulate an account of biological phenomena in terms that were consistent with Helmholtz’s sciences—that is, to describe them in terms of the (thermo)dynamics of energy. The redoubtable Thomas Szasz, in Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), offers a compendium of quotations from Freud on the topic (with references):

“Undoubtedly there exist cases of juvenile neurasthenia without masturbation, but not without the usual preliminaries of overabundant pollutions—that is, precisely as though there had been masturbation.” “The use of a condom is evidence of weak potency, being something analogous to masturbation, it is a continuous cause of his [the patient’s] melancholia.” “Melancholia develops as an intensification of neurasthenia through masturbation.” “The insight has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primary addiction,’ and it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions—to alcohol, morphine, tobacco, and the like come into existence.” “What would you say if masturbation were to reduce itself to homosexuality?” (102–3)

172  The equivocation here is necessary. Some thinkers interpreted these findings as demonstrating that a human being is a machine that runs on electricity. Others maintained that nerve energy is a distinctive (that is, non-electric) vital force, but that one can learn much about that force from its similarities to electricity.

173  A fascinating book, by Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), points out that Bismarck’s system of social insurance sought to alleviate the health-destroying effects of modernization. Killen argues that socio-historical pressure to contain those harmful effects led to nervousness being understood as a somatic disorder caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization; he also traces the widespread effects that the notion of neurasthenia had on administrative policy (including the operation of factories). Killen does not make the comparison, but Bismarck’s social insurance legislation could profitably be compared to another somatic remedy for the afflictions of industrialization, viz., the Freikörperkultur movement as an aspect of Lebensreform. A historical analogy would be relevant, and instructive, but cannot be pursued here.

174  Cited in David Hayes, “Manufacturing Marshall McLuhan: On McLuhan’s Centenary: How One Writer Helped Introduce the Legendary Media Theorist to the World,” This Magazine 45, no. 2 (September–October 2011): 24.