Caveman Part 4 draft

Part 4
The Modern World

For us, the modern world will begin with the machine age, as in post-Industrial Revolution, the nebulous point at which business has moved from the home to the factory, and the world is just beginning to see the machines and inventions that will dominate the 20th Century. I know you would like to pin this down exactly at some point between 1811 (November 14th) and 1926 (May 8th), but history doesn’t have such nice neat chapters. If you’re worried that the modern overlaps the pre-modern, don’t. There is no bright line of modernity that we can cross from the old to the new. Our narrative instinct doesn’t like this kind of vagueness, but the dots aren’t always that easy to connect.

At this point, the big question is, with all that movement toward individuality that we saw in the arts and in politics, what is shaking in Thought that is going to make a difference?
We’re not going to go into every detail of it, just as we didn’t go into every detail of previous philosophies, but the big difference in the Modern world and what came before is the developing new approach to reality (and here there really is a bright line comparison between the old and the new). And to understand this, we have to think ontologically – we have to think about the nature of existence.
Let’s go back a bit. The Empiricists, like John Locke, thought that we could know reality through the experience of our senses, that we could understand the objective world by living in it, breathing it, seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, touching it. The rationalists thought that we could understand reality simply by using our minds to figure it out. They are obviously fundamentally in disagreement about approach to ontology, but they did agree that there was an objective universe that could be understood.
By the time we get to the Modern Age, the most prominent theorists believe that there is no way of knowing the objective world. They take empiricism or rationality or any brand of thought you like and point out that it all comes to you vis-a-vis you. That is, the only thing you can know is what it is that you, as an individual, know. Reality, to you, is your own subjective reality. As Kirkegaard put it, we have subjective existence modified by objective reality, but can only know the subjective.
This, in a word, is Relativism.
The objective world doesn’t matter anymore.
Taken to its logical extreme, the objective world may not even exist. And some postmodern thinkers do indeed posit that there is no objective reality. But Kirkegaard gives us a better construct. Our subjective reality is affected by the objective, but all we can truly know is the subjective. That is the core of Existentialism. From this, Sartre postulated that a man is defined by his actions, not his essence.
By the time we start analyzing the postmoderns, the construct of relativism is firmly fixed. You can read all the modern philosophy you want to get a better feel for it. As far as we’re concerned now, you need only understand the concept, and understand that the concept pretty much underlies all of modern Thought.

All right. Let’s focus in a little. Let’s talk about the 20th Century. The Modern Age of the 20th Century.
As far as the Modern Age is concerned, it is important to remember that it is different from previous ages in dramatic ways (and this difference is a very important aspect of modernism). Before the Modern Age, everyone lived in their grandparents’ world, which was their grandparents’ world. That is, if you were born in 1700, your life was virtually no different from your parents’ life, or their parents’ life, or their parents life, going back as far as you want. Technological advances were slow, and would have little effect on you. The biggest change in your century might be the development of a better plow. This means more rutabagas come rutabaga season, but not much else.
Starting with the Modern Age, your world is completely different from your grandparents’, or even your parents’. Look at my grandmother. She was born in the early 1880s. The airplane had not been invented. Nor had the radio. Or the car. Or Coca-Cola (1886). When she died, in the early 70s, she could have theoretically watched a movie on the Concorde while drinking a Diet Coke. My grandmother’s grandmother, however, lived through no such evolution of technologies (or beverages). Airplanes, radios, and cars (and television, among other inventions), changed the world in the Twentieth Century. In major ways. From, say, 1850 or so, there seems to be change after change, and they seem to come faster and faster. And this is still true. If you were born before 1990, you were born in a world where the letters WWW at best referred to Walla Walla, Washington. There was no Internet to log on to. If you were born before 1981, there was no PC. If, like me, you believe that the information transmission aspects of the Internet are a major revolution, than you probably have managed to have it occur entirely during your lifetime. (Considering that instant transmission of information requires a fast pipeline, and ubiquitous fast pipelines like cable modems are a product of the turn of the millennium, this particular revolution is still wearing diapers.)
So what are some of the particulars of the Modern Age? Well, if information and knowledge are important, then the fact that news now travels fast (compared to the past, although slow compared to us today), may be key. Look at the progression: word of mouth, Guttenberg, international sailing ships, telegraph and telephone, radio. Think about the difference in information processing with and without the Internet. Radio is a comparable historical difference.
By (loosely) the 20th Century, the Modern Age has become the age most (Western) people live in. And what are some of the important things that comprise that age?
· Mechanization. The world of manufacturing has become the world of assembly lines. No longer does a craftsman make a chair. A mindless human cog at point 27c on the assembly line screws in his assigned chair bolt.
· Mass murder in warfare. The American Civil War was only a local taste of the new meaning of war, where instead of a few professional troops maneuvering against one another, vast armies slugged it out for long periods at great human cost. World War I had a staggering effect on the European mind. Eight and a half million people died for little or no change in the geopolitical map (except, of course, the blaming of Germany and the ensuing World War II). A war that probably shouldn’t have happened stripped nations of an entire crop of young men. Imagine the effect today if we took every single person in college and killed them. It would be comparable.
· The end of colonialism. Or at least the end of the nations of the West as they had been previously conceived. The kings were dead, mostly. The adventures abroad were coming to an end. This is closely linked with the political aspects of WWI.
· The rise of the communism. The concept of the state is radically different under Marx than previously. Capitalism is the de facto fundamental underpinning of economics in the West from time immemorial. Communism is an attack on that fundament. And a successful one, transforming entire nations. Could there indeed be a world where the state was designed to support the worker?
· The birth of popular culture. The Modern Age begins to approach universal literacy. Everyone reads newspapers, anyone can read books. Radio allows music to reach a mass audience. Movies are a new art form, primarily for a mass audience. Suddenly there are such things as “bestsellers,” popular music (especially jazz, insofar as there’s an “intellectual” pop). This can be seen as tying into the mechanization, mentioned above. All those cogs in the factory are, at least, making a living, and popular culture is how they spend their money. (A Marxist might say it’s how they waste their money.
· Scientific breakthroughs. Albert Einstein should probably get the credit for the most mind-boggling science, since he claimed that matter equals energy. He is also responsible for quantum (which he vilified) which claims that, essentially, the universe is based on probabilities rather than certitudes, and which therefore leads to the ultimate relativistic universe (reality is dependent on how you measure it, or even more simply, reality depends on you). It’s one thing when philosophers say the world is relativistic. It’s another thing altogether when scientists prove it.
· On the practical level, technology gives us automobiles, which allow people total personal mobility, and flight, which eliminates borders of time and space in much the same way as did the Theory of Relativity.
· Urbanization. The cities are growing as economies shift; people are moving away from their personal center (the farm they never ventured more than a few miles from). And cities are, metaphorically, a lot crueler than small towns.

The upshot of all of this is that world has gotten “bigger” and people feel “smaller.” People are no longer the center of the universe, they’re cogs again, the way Plato painted them in class systems. Except now they’re cogs in an inhuman, perhaps even inhumane, machine. In essence, we see a movement from humanism to dehumanization.
And now the conceptualized Modern Age can be examined. In the age of humanism, we celebrated the individual. What do we do in the age of the Modern? How should things be done in this new world we have created? For us, in our history of Narrative, the story of stories if you will, how do the narrators – the artists – react? They’ve seen and lived in the Modern Age, and they also know and understand the past. What does the thinking artist do that is a “new” way?
What we will see is a redefinition of the creative process, or at the very least a new examination of those processes. And this redefinition defines, for us, modernism . In these redefinitions, Narratives are taken to their extremes, and then past them. In pre-modernist narrative, it was about the story, the content. In the modernist narrative, it’s about the telling of the story.

In a nutshell, it’s no longer about the narrative, it’s about the narration.

“Let me tell you what happened.”

Painting

Let’s take a look at painting in the pre-modern. Painting consists of a variety of basic concepts.
· There is composition, the way the painting is arranged. There are actually rules of composition, a compendium of right and wrong about the organization of elements in a design.
· There is perspective, which imparts realism to a painting, so it looks more lifelike.
· There color and brush technique, the basic skill sets that the artist must master to have painting look right.
· Paintings can be used for record-keeping, for instance, capturing the portrait of a famous (or not famous) person or event.
· Storytelling. A painting can be a story of mythological gods and goddesses, or religious figures, or any events real or imagined.
The thinking artist looks at these concepts and asks, what do they mean? They are the accepted principles, but are they correct? Are they necessary? And by the way, this raises the question, is the artist among the leading thinkers of the time? Since the great humanistic age, I would answer yes. If great thought is limited to great thinkers, it is sterile. Great thought must find its expression in great actions.
One key issue facing painters at this point is the invention of photography. Whereas once, if a moment was going to be recorded historically, it was drawn, now it can be photographed, with infinitely more realism. A photograph can provide a completely accurate portrait of a sitter in minutes. Photography almost immediately becomes the de facto medium of record-keeping, replacing painting in this area, and replacing a need for painting in this area. And in some cases, photographs can exist solely for the presentation of esthetic beauty.
If you’re sitting around seriously thinking about art, about making a statement, how do you do it in the Modern Age? You throw out the old, stop thinking about the subject of the painting, and start thinking about the process of painting
You replace the importance of the narrative with the importance of the narration.

What if perspective didn’t matter anymore?
Look at Picasso, where a subject’s eyes are on the same side of the face. Picasso isn’t saying that his subject is a flounder. He’s questioning perspective, and turning it on its ear (or on its eyes).
Cubism is an attempt to create three dimensions in a painting (which is all that perspective is about). In Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” the subject of a painting is not only three-dimensional, it is now moving, no longer caught in time. Duchamp kills two birds with one stone (the static quality of a painting and the two-dimensionality).

What about paint itself?
In the old, we used paints in different colors to capture reality. Now, with the Fauves (the “wild beasts”) color explodes on the canvas, and the painting is about color itself as much as its subject. Rather than mixing subtle realistic colors, wild colors are taken right from the tube.
In the old, you learned how to apply brushstrokes onto the canvas. In the new, you just splash the paint on the canvas like Jackson Pollack.

What about content?
In the old, the subject matter was clear. In the new, you have surrealism, the creation of a new alternate reality.
“My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.” - Rene Magritte

In the old, painting was about the subject matter, or about beauty, or both. A painting incorporated paint, brushstrokes, composition, perspective. Now, instead of painting a picture of gods or the neighbors or even the effects of light (the Impressionists), a painting is about painting. Or about paint, or about brushstrokes, or about composition or about perspective.
We have, obviously, invented abstract art. Where the painting is about the painting.

Music

There are comparable experiments/develops in the other arts. Noticeably, music becomes atonal, which is analogous to painting becoming abstract. Just as to the thinking visual artist new techniques were needed to replace the old, to thinking composers new scales were needed to replace the old ones. The simple elegant math of steps and half steps is invaded by science, for instance, and we get12-tone scales. All the tools of the musician are open to discussion and replacement, as were all the tools of the painter.
One thing we didn’t comment on with abstract art was whether or not it was aesthetically pleasing, i.e., pretty. Nor will we comment on whether atonal music is listenable. We are not here to criticize, but to assume that music is what musicians make.
4'33" (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds) was a piece written by John Cage, who originally studied under Arnold Schoenberg, the creator of the 12-tone method. 4'33" is entirely silent; it’s name denotes its length. How much more abstract can music get?

Architecture

Architecture remains fascinating in the Modern Age. Buildings become as modernist as abstract paintings or atonal music, and because the size of buildings make them impossible to disregard, their meaning turn modernism into public statements (and will, in the postmodern, be one of the great emblematic art forms).
Architecture as always been about the point or purpose of a building and the use of materials, a structural marriage of form and function. In the past, we have had the problem of holding up heavy masonry ceilings and walls. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution we get the next great phase of architecture, incorporating the use of cast iron and steel. Higher, broader and lighter buildings become possible. It is simply no longer as difficult to hold up a structure. Steel can hold up virtually anything because it’s so strong.
The steel girder presents an interesting problem to the architect. What do you do after 2000 years of domes, columns and flying buttresses? In those 2000 years there has been an encrustation of tradition, where big civic buildings incorporate of necessity “classical” forms and designs, and as a result, the civic idea is inextricably related in the mind to that classicism. A cathedral of the 15th Century looks like it does for both narrative and structural purposes. But what should a cathedral look like in the 20th Century, when even if the narrative purpose of expressing the infinite and the spiritual remains the same, we don’t have the same problem of holding up the walls?
There are a number of answers to these and similar questions. The first big answer is the creation of the skyscraper, which can be seen as the apotheosis of the Modern Age. There is plenty of modern architecture, and modernist architecture, that is not tall. But if this is a time of migration to the cities, the idea of buildings reaching into the sky is emblematic of grasp of the city itself. While to some extent a taller building can fit more people in it, so there is a point to its height aside from statement, ultimately there is a diminishing return as your need to provide elevator shafts outweighs your gain in office space. The elevator, the invention of which enables the skyscraper in a practical sense, also limits it. Nonetheless, New York engages itself in a continuing race to construct the tallest possible building, starting with the Woolworth Building and continuing up through the World Trade Center. If reaching for the sky is emblematic of a city’s grasp, being the tallest building is a statement of a city’s grasp on a global level.
The first Manhattan skyscrapers are, to our eyes, simply taller buildings, and the first wave culminates in the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Both constructed during the Depression, in virtually adjoining neighborhoods, they waged a literal race to see which would be the taller. In the end, the Empire State took the prize. Which was why King Kong had to climb it. Why would the world’s biggest monster climb, say, the fifth highest building?
The designs of these buildings is comparable. They are modernist in the art deco sense, full of streamlining to make them look, literally, “modern.” Streamlining is a concept of movement. You streamline an object, like a car or an airplane, to reduce its resistance to motion through a stream of air. Since skyscrapers do not, in fact, move, their streamlining is a statement of concept rather than a structural necessity. The 20s and 30s saw a lot of unnecessary streamlining: chairs, teapots, cocktail shakers. The classic martini glass may be the most modernist piece of glassware ever invented.
It is the glass box that apotheosizes modernism in architecture. This style of building follows the elegant art deco structures of the 30s. After the Depression and WWII, the Seagram Building, the UN building, and finally the World Trade Center, mark the simplest form imaginable for their function. Glass boxes, as tall as you want them (as long as you leave room for elevators). The WTC makes the clearest, simplest statement possible. Here is the tallest building in the world (until the Sears tower replaced it), a monument to international capitalism, in an elegant modern style devoid of (meaning-filled, contextual) decoration.
That’s why they wanted to knock it down.

As we’ll eventually see, it is often hard to differentiate between the modern and the postmodern in architecture. But it is not hard to understand what architects are trying to do. Take, for example, the Guggenheim museum in NYC.
The question is, what is the best way to look at an art exhibit? Presumably an art exhibit has a beginning, a middle and an end, a narrative imposed by the exhibit’s curator. Our innate narrative sense brings the curator to set an exhibit up as a narrative, and the visitor to observe it as a narrative. You want to make order out of it, so that the visitors will understand the content of the exhibit. Now you could post a lot of arrows in the building, originating with a Start Here and culminating in a This Way to the Egress (next to a gift shop). But that’s the old way. Or, you could design your building with a beginning and a middle and the end.
That’s exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright did with the Guggenheim Museum. It is a spiral, so it does indeed have a beginning and a middle and an end. Modern construction techniques allow it to be an inverted cone. And it’s an absolutely perfect place to mount and visit and art exhibit.
The perfect meeting of form and function.
And a building no longer needs to be a box.

Literature

If we’re going to talk about narrative versus narration, books have to be the easiest way to do it. Which is why we’ve saved them for last.
A novel is by definition a narrative. So the idea of a non-narrative novel, of a non-narrative narrative, is an oxymoron.
A classic.

A book is made up of a variety of elements, just as a painting is made up of a variety of elements. Plot, characterization, use of language, Aristotelian dramatic thrust – all these are necessary to make a narrative work. The modernist looks at these elements, and redefines them, or eliminates them, or turns them on their head, just as did the abstract painter. We’ll look at a few key examples.

James Joyce is a good start. He didn’t write much, but he was about as avant garde as they get. In the beginning of his career he wrote the short stories of The Dubliners, featuring those famous (to high school English students) epiphanies, where the characters become themselves in that internal moment of realization. Have you ever noticed that nothing much seems to happen in The Dubliners? If you’re not paying attention, or you don’t know what to look for, how do you know the story is over? Well, you turn the page and there’s a new story.
Compare this to an O. Henry story, where there’s clear action and an obvious movement of a resolution. There’s a big difference. In all the arts, there’s a big difference between the modernist and the non-modernist, the practitioner and the visionary, this school and that school. Don’t get the idea from anything I’m writing that everybody was doing the same thing. Far from it. While Picasso was painting people with eyes on the same side of their head, Normal Rockwell was painting heartwarming and realistic pictures of children playing hooky. Both had probably the same amount of fame and recognition and money in the bank.
It’s a big world out there.
Getting back to Joyce, he worked through a steady line of abstraction over the years. He toys with stream of consciousness in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and presents it full blown in Ulysses. The latter is a fascinating experiment, a novel that takes place entirely in one day, based on the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, filled with the stream of conscious language of the modernist. By the time Joyce got to Finnegans Wake, which is the literary representation of a dream, he had given up on every piece of what we would consider normal narration. The book has no dramatic arc: it’s written in a circle connecting the first and last pages. Joyce invented his own new allusive language. There is no story, no “characterization.”
I have never read anyone who claims to have read this book in its entirety. And it’s not just because of the dream structure. Compare Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It too is a dream, but in a classical novelistic structure. Finnegan is the way it is because that’s the way Joyce wrote it.
A book you really can’t read.
Like music you can’t hear?

William Burroughs clipped together disparate pieces of text. This is reminiscent of the Surrealist game “the exquisite corpse,” where multiple writers wrote phrases at random to form a story. The poet e.e.cummings stripped out all capital letters from his poetry, and used his own odd method of punctuation.

The end result of this sort of experimentation is narration without meaningful narrative (and often unreadable texts). All of this is bunched into the concept of avant garde, and these writers, as well as the abstract painters and atonal composers, very much identified themselves as avant gardists. My reading recommendation is The Avant Garde Finds Andy Hardy by Robert B Ray. It’s a book of film criticism that discusses some of the main threads of modernist and postmodernist critique, and a good introduction to the area overall.

Is there a cause and effect in all of this? Well, artists are creative thinkers in whatever world/time/place they exist. Their work (at least traditionally) is meant to last, so their work gives us an idea of those worlds/times/places. What the modernists are telling to us from where they are is that they are somehow detached from the reality of their world enough to be able to comment on it, and that they are incorporating the new ideas of this world into their work to make that commentary.
Henry Miller said that a true artist must understand science. The artists we’re talking about, whatever the art form, incorporate the science of their times into their work. Eventually, today perhaps, the two of occasionally indistinguishable.
As you can see, there is certainly no straight line here. There are all sorts of things happening, and many of them, and the theories explaining them, are contradictory. And as you move from the modern into the postmodern it gets even worse. There is a clear delineation between gothic and Romanesque styles of architecture, but if you look up modernist and postmodernist architecture, for instance, they will both claim certain buildings (e.g. the home of Frank Gehry). So have no fear in venturing into these modernist/postmodernist waters. If you’re studying a particular person, that’s fine—find out what that person is saying. But overviews, including this one, are awfully reflective of some one person’s subjective analysis, as compared to some objective truth.
Let me tell you what happened.
I will connect the random dots of my perceived reality.
But sometimes it’s better if you connect the dots yourself.

One last note. Don’t take any of this as being a total picture. Plenty of artists – good artists – were not modernists. Plenty of good artists disregarded modernism/astraction or responded to it differently. No value judgment is implied that an artist who was not a modernist was not a thinking artist. The existence of the modern forces any artist to decide what to do about the modern in his or her own work. Acceptance or rejection of the modern is a personal choice, and for us to claim that one is better than the other is to believe that our ideas on something as ephemeral as what is good art, are somehow correct. We will never make that hubristic error of judgment.