culture of time and space review

8/2/2019 Culture of Time and Space Review

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Peter N. Stearns

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Robert WohlSource: Journal of Social History, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Summer, 1985), pp. 635-641Published by: Peter N. StearnsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788254 .

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REVIEW ESSAY

The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. By Stephen Kern (Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983. 372 pp. $25.00).

Between 1880 and 1914 technology, in the form of a series of spectacular inventions,transformed the world and the way that Europeans and Americans experienced it. The

electric light blurred the age-old distinction between day and night; the telephone and

the wireless made it possible for people to communicate across enormous distances

instantaneously; the bicycle, the automobile, and the steamship accelerated the speedwith which people could move through the world and enlarged the range of their

effective action; the cinema offered the imagination a new way of telling stories; andthe airplane opened up to human locomotion the dimension of the heavens, formerlyreserved for God and angels, reduced the significance of natural barriers like rivers,seas and mountains, and provided the possibility, for the first time, of looking at the

world from the top down.

Historians of this period have not sufficiently taken into account the magnitude of

these changes and the effects they had on the generations who underwent them. It

is easy enough to understand why. They were unsure of how to go about establishing

convincing and verifiable connections between technology, a domain which they happilyleft to specialists, and the mainstream of culture, politics, and social-economic structures

in whichthey,

ashumanists,

felt more at home.They

knew that the new inventions

must have left their mark on feeling and experience; they paid passing homage to them

in their books; but they possessed no analytical instrument for studying the revolution

in perception and showing how it expressed itself in thought and action. Stephen Kern

has taken up this daunting challenge and written a book that manages to be both

impressively learned and a pleasure to read. One of its most distinctive features is

its ambition and the immodesty of its claims. By eschewing caution and pulling all

stops, Kern forces us to rethink the nature of cultural history: does such a disciplineexist and if so, what should be its methods and its objects of study?

Since Kern goes to some pains in his introduction to present his book as original,let me begin by indicating in what its originality resides. Despite the austerely

philosophical, almost Einsteinian ring of Kern's title, his main purpose is quite inkeeping with the dominant tradition of cultural history: he wishes to characterize the

distinctive nature of European (and to a lesser extent, American) culture during the

years between 1880 and 1918 and to discover common themes. To use old-fashioned

language, he is in search of "the spirit of the age." Moreover, the material which he

marshalls in order to make his argument- the philosophical writings of Nietzsche,

Bergson and Husserl, the novels of Proust, Joyce and Mann, the paintings of Cezanne,

Picasso, Balla and Delaunay, the sculpture of Boccioni, the poetry of Mallarme and

Apollinaire, the music of Debussy and Stravinsky, the sociology of Simmel and

Durkheim, the social and political writings of Sorel, and the scientific theories of

Mach and Einstein ? will be familiar to readers of Axel's Castle, Consciousness and

Society, The Banquet Years, 1900, and Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, all books on which Kerndraws.1

Less conventional, though, are the topics on which Kern focuses his inquiry:

European and American perceptions of space, as they were given cultural expressionbetween 1880 and 1918. To be sure, historians of philosophy, literature, and painting



636 journal of social history

have long regarded time and space as central preoccupations of this period; but Kern

has approached these in a novel way. Instead of surveying the use of time and spacein selected fields of cultural activity (painting, the novel, music, architecture, for

example), he presents us with a series of chapters entitled "The Nature of Time," "The

Past,""The Present," "The Future," "Speed," "The Nature of Space," "Form,""Distance,"and "Direction." The advantage of these exotic and unhistorically abstract categories,which Kern has borrowed from philosophy, psychiatry, and map making, is that theythrow the reader off his balance, prepare him to view the period with fresh unjaded

eyes, and give Kern the opportunity to introduce familiar material in unfemiliar contexts.

"Prominent figures such as Proust," notes Kern, "have been interpreted with such

uniformity that their contributions to the cultural landscape have tended to become

as solid and fixed as a rock." (p. 3) Kern breaks up the opus of these much studied

figures; he separates them from the people with whom they have ordinarily been

associated; he pairs them with new and unexpected company; and by doing this, he

hopesto

expose"fresh surfaces" of their work.

This, then, is a cultural history that offers new readings of artifacts long identified

as modernist masterpieces. But it is also more than this, because Kern wishes to show

that the perceptions of time and space he has found to be characteristic of the period1880-1914 can be used to illuminate the events leading toward the outbreak of World

War One, the diplomatic crisis of July 1914, and the form the fighting took between

1914 and 1918. The last two chapters that precede the conclusion, "Temporality ofthe

July Crisis" and "The Cubist War," seek to demonstrate that Kern's method can be

used to unify the realms of elite culture and everyday life. Indeed, Kern's claims are

even greater. He argues that because time and space are universal experiental categories,

they offer a surer way of comparing different ages and cultures than those, like political

system, class, or family, which have heretofore been used. Kern conceives of his bookas a contribution to such a larger comparative project. And though he acknowledgeshis debt to the work of other cultural historians, such as H. Stuart Hughes, RogerShattuck, and Carl Schorske, he insists that his topics are more essential "from a strictly

philosophical point of view" because they penetrate to the foundations of experience.There is another feature of Kern's method, which I believe justifies more than any

other his claim to novelty. Most cultural historians resemble Kern in that they look

for themes that link synchronically cultural production in different fields. Few, however,have cast their net as widely or taken their evidence from such a variety of sources.

Kern feels none of the compunctions that caused Hughes, Shattuck, and Schorske to

narrow the scope of their inquiries in the hope that they would thus deepen the

significance of their findings. For him, the theme's the thing, the theory or the workof art an illustration of it. In seeking to illustrate a perception, which he considers

characteristic ofthe period, Kern will draw on sources as varied as a scientific paper

produced in Berne, a Chicago architectural space, a Parisian poem, a Milanese

sculpture, a Stockholm play, or a German geopolitical treatise. Kern acknowledgesthat there may be no causal connection among these cultural expressions. One maybe a direct response to the new technology; another may be quite independent of it.

But for Kern the theme takes priority over the context and integrity ofthe object; and

the thematic discoveries he makes convinces him that a revolution in structures of

human experience and forms of human expression was underway during the years

preceding the Great War. To explore that revolution, Kern uses juxtaposition, metaphor,

and analogy. Underlying his deployment of these devices, more commonly found in

poetry than history, is his belief that "any generalization about the thinking of an ageis the more persuasive the greater the conceptual distance between the sources on which

it is based." (p. 7) To link thematically the thought ofa German architect and a French

philosopher on a given subject is to penetrate more deeply the culture of a period



REVIEW ESSAY 637

than if one were to show connections between writers and artists in a city like Paris

or Vienna, or social thinkers in Italy, Germany, and France.

This is Kern's method; these are his claims. To what extent has he made them good?No doubt about it, the method of juxtaposition makes for lively reading, at least when

practiced by someone as clever and widely read as Kern. What, for example do ErnstMach, Jacob von Uexkiill, Emile Durkheim, Oswald Spengler, Paul Cezanne, Pablo

Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jose

Ortega y Gasset have in common? Answer: the realization that space is heterogeneousrather than homogeneous and that there is no privileged perspective from which to

observe a given event. An even more diverse list of witnesses, which ranges from

Albert Einstein to Frederick Jackson Turner, is summoned to demonstrate that duringthese years the nature of space was redefined. "The traditional view that space was

an inert void in which objects existed gave way to a new view of it as active and full."

(p. 152) Basing himself on the new developments in painting and sculpture, especiallyCubism and Futurism, Kern argues that spatial hierarchies dissolved, that backgroundand emptiness became positive elements in artistic, literary and musical compositions,and that analogies to this revolution in perception can be found in a whole rangeof cultural and political activities. "The old sanctuaries of privilege, power, and holiness

were assailed, if not entirely destroyed, by the affirmation of positive negative space."(p. 180) But Kern makes no attempt to demonstrate that those anarchists, radicals,and Socialists who were assailing "the old sanctuaries of privilege, power, and holiness"

thought in terms of "positive negative space." He is satisfied to affirm that the newart implied and indicated the possibility of the political questioning of traditional

hierarchies. (p. 179)Kern sees a direct connection between the collapse of form in culture and social

relations and changes in everyday life being brought about by the new technology.The creation of suburbs, made possible by improvements in mass transportation systems,blurred the distinction between the city and the country. The telephone diminishedthe significance of walls and opened up the sanctity of the home and the office to

outside penetration, just as the X-ray revealed the mysteries that lay beneath the body'sskin. The airplane and the wireless called into question the solidity of frontiers; while

the cabaret and the cinema brought together in a single space and a common aesthetic

experience people of different social classes who earlier had each had their own placesand forms of entertainment.

Kern is right to suggest that the preoccupation of intellectuals with the collapse ofform was related to changes taking place in society and the social structure. The crowd

became one of the most potent symbols of the age and a gauge of the anxiety theprivileged classes felt about the blurring of social boundaries and the rising tide ofwhat they increasingly called "the masses." But even when developing this theme, Kern's

juxtapositions are sometimes strained; and they put us on guard against the dangersof his method. It may be, as he claims, that the Eiffel Tower, constructed in 1889,eliminated the distinction between the inside and outside of a building; and also thatRobert Delaunay was responding to this innovation in his multi-perspectival paintingsof 1910-1911.Yet what is one to make of the fact that many of the apartment buildingsconstructed in Paris during these years were as solid and as impenetrable to light as

fifteenth-century Italian palazzi? In a similar way, Kern concedes that the divisioninto classes at the lower end of the social scale became especially sharp toward the

turn of the century; but this fact of political and social history does not fit in nearlyso well with his thesis about the revolution in spatial perception as Proust's observationthat the complex of aristocratic principles that had formerly protected the Guermantesand maintained their social isolation and prestige had ceased to function and wereno longer capable of keeping out the crowd: ".. .a thousand alien elements made their




way in and all homogeneity, all consistency of form and color was lost." (Proust quoted

by Kern, p. 193) The least that can be said is that the complexity of life in Europe

during this period does not lend itself to overarching generalizations that have no clear

geographical or social locus.The last chapters of Kern's book shift the focus from high culture to international

relations, diplomacy, and the actual fighting of the First World War. Kern wants to

show that changing attitudes toward time and space shed light on the factors leadingtoward the outbreak ofthe war. And here he makes an interesting point. The shrinkingof distance, brought about by increases in speed and new means of transport, created

strong tendencies toward international cooperation. Standard time was adopted by most

European countries in the late nineteenth century; twenty years later even the French

had to accept the humiliation of a time whose point of reference lay in England. Between

1900 and 1914 over two hundred international organizations were created, many to

regulateand control the use of the new

technology.Internationalists saw in these

developments sure indications that the world was becoming more unified and that

national isolation was a thing of the past. But when they went one step further and

predicted that these developments would bring in their wake international harmonyand reconciliation they failed to see the other side ofthe technological coin. For steamand electricity made possible the creation and control of far-flung empires and pushedthe European powers toward conflict. "It is one of the great ironies of the period,"observes Kern, "that a world war became possible only after the world had becomeso highly unified." (p. 240)

One of Kern's more stimulating ideas is that the European nations possessed different

conceptions of time and space, and that this helps to explain why and how they wentto war.

England and France, he says, had an internal coherence that Germany andAustria-Hungary lacked; thus sure of their inner core, the English and the Frenchcould radiate self-confidently outward toward their empires. The Germans, by contrast,were condemned by their geographical position to oscillate between a "bombastic

outgoing Weltpolitik? inspired by their belief that they lacked sufficient space to nourisha vital and growing population, and a "paranoid" fear of encirclement caused by theexistence to Germany's east ofthe boundless spaces of Russia. (p. 251) These different

spatial perceptions were reinforced by different visions ofthe past and future. England,France, and Russia could look back to long unbroken pasts and had every reason tobelieve that just as their country had always existed in the past, so would it alwaysexist in the future. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, by contrast, had only recently

become modern states and knew that the fragile political constructions that had notexisted yesterday might easily vanish from the scene tomorrow. When looking to the

future, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians saw dangers of a deterioration in theirrelative position and therefore believed that they must act in the shortest possible delaybecause time was running out. The English saw no reason to act, because they relished

things the way they were; and the Russians felt that time was working in their favorand thus did every thing possible to put off the moment of confrontation.

Still, Kern suggests, the war might have been averted had the leaders ofthe various

European countries not panicked under the pressure created by the new electronic

technology and their feeling that time was in short supply. "In the summer of 1914the men in power lost their bearings in the hectic rush paced by flurries of telegrams,

telephone conversations, memos, and press releases; hard-boiled politicians broke downand seasoned negotiators cracked under the pressure of tense confrontations and

sleepless nights, agonizing over the probably disastrous consequences of their snapjudgments and hasty actions." Kern acknowledges that there were a great many factorswhich led to the breakdown of peace; but he insists that the "sheer rush of events"was an independent cause that "catapulted Europe into war."(p. 260) The consequences



REVIEW ESSAY 639

of the acceleration of communication and the shrinking of space appeared most

dramatically in the last days of July when, with war an imminent possibility, generals

pushed diplomats from the scene and explained to monarchs and politicians that

mobilization could not be delayed, because distances could quickly be covered, and

that once the telegraph operators had sent their messages there could be no turningback. Kern rounds off his interpretation of the outbreak of war with a long simile

based on the sinking of the Titanic. "The captain [of the Titanic] raced against time

for the fastest Atlantic crossing. Another race took place between the armies of the

great powers, which rushed to mobilize toward the end of July as the diplomacy beganto founder." (p. 269)

Kern has some difficulty when he sets out to interpret the war in terms of the

perceptions of time and space that he uncovered in the culture of the prewar period.On the one hand, he notes that the war reversed the pre-1914 tendency toward the

exploration of private time and imposed a single homogeneous time symbolized bythe

synchronizedwrist watches soldiers wore while in the trenches. The war also broke

the sense of continuity with the past and the belief that the past could be useful in

understanding the present. On the other hand, the war represented the "apotheosisof the prewar sense of speed"

- witness the prominent role played in it by the rapid-

firing machine gun? and accelerated the prewar tendency toward increased contact

among the European peoples. Never before had they been so intensely involved with

one another or traveled so much: more Germans went to France and Russia in August1914 than ever before in such a short period of time. Above all, Kern thinks, the war

embodied on a massive scale the insights of Cubism about space. Like a Cubist canvass,the war could not be grasped from a single perspective. There was a front in the West,a front in the East, another in Turkey and the Mediterranean, a war on and under

the seas, and a war in the skies that symbolized the redirecting of Western man'sconsciousness toward the heavens. All spaces in the war were of equal value; no-man's-

land was the void or "positive negative space" that had so obsessed prewar artists and

thinkers. Indeed, the forms of Cubism were introduced in camouflage in order to

conceal men, equipment, and ships by breaking up conventional fields of vision. Rank

disappeared in the mud ofthe trenches, just as hierarchies had been dissolved in culture

before 1914. The terrain on which the soldiers fought itself resembled a Cubist

landscape. "Uniform crosses threw geometric shadows across the mass graves? a

final commemoration of the social leveling of the war." (p. 306)The pages rush by, and one's attention never flags. Kern is always ingenious and

sometimes brilliant in his observations. He sees connections, symbols, and "eerie

omens" everywhere, and conveys these insights vigorously in a prose that moves with

Stravinsky-like rhythms and crackles with the imagery of pre-1914 technology and

machines. But the new and deeper view of culture in this period that Kern promisedus in his introduction never quite comes into focus; and the method of fragmentingand then juxtaposing the work of individuals in widely separated fields and placesmakes impossible any systematic exploration ofthe impact of technology on the central

figures of the era. It is interesting, for example, to discover that the man on whom

Proust based Albertine was an aviator who perished in a crash; but it hardly leads

toward a new understanding of Proust's novel. The two themes Kern singles out as

characteristic of the period- the shift from public to private time and the triumph

of perspectivism? have

longbeen

recognizedas

important aspectsof

fin-de-sieclethought and modernist art and literature. More original is Kern's claim that these

developments were somehow linked to the collapse of hierarchies, the dissolution of

social forms, and the rise of democraey. But here I think he is mistaken. The new

conceptions of time and spacein so far as they had any impact on politics

- were

taken up by the enemies of democraey and integrated into the ideology of the new




mass movements.2 In politics the greatest enthusiast of movement and multiple

perspectives on reality was Mussolini; the leader who showed that subjective lived

experience could be used to unite large numbers of people for political ends was HMer.

Kern himself points out that Lenin, the

greatest

social leveller ofthe epoch, opposed

vehementiy the proliferation of spaces and times and went so far as to write a book

on the subject.I hesitate to criticize what Kern has written on the diplomatic crisis of July 1914

and the fighting of the war because I am not certain of what he set out to do and what

he thinks he has accomplished. Perhaps he is satisfied to be suggestive. Even so, I

am disturbed by the way that he molds ambiguous evidence to fit his theories about

prewar perceptions of time and space. Most historians would acknowledge that railway

technology, the new means of electronic communication, and mobilization time tables

played an important role in accelerating the pace of diplomacy and decision-makingin July 1914. This is not new. What Kern adds is his assertion that in 1914 the European

nations had distinctive attitudes toward time and space, and that these attitudes helpto explain their behavior when confronted by the threat of war. Geopoliticalconsiderations were no doubt decisive in the formation of the alliance systems; and

the "new"nations, Germany and Italy, had reasons to eooperate against the "old"imperial

powers, England and France. But it seems strained to argue that the Habsburg empirewas, in the self-image of its leaders a recent creation; and it is even more misleadingto suggest that England basked in the comforting thought that what had always been

would always be. Far from radiating self-confidently outwards, England in 1914 was

caught up with its own version ofthe Serbian problem in Ireland and looked forward

apprehensively to a future in which Germany was bound to be stronger and more

capable of threatening English overseas interests. Instead of focusing on national

differences in conceptions of time and space, it seems more fruitful to argue that theleaders of all the European nations feared a relative deterioration in their positionand felt under a growing pressure to act. Ultimately, the war was fought because it

was believed to be inevitable and because the major powers believed that not goingto war was even more dangerous than taking the risk of fighting. Though it would

be convenient for Kern's thesis if the war was experienced as the "apotheosis of the

prewar sense of speed," (p. 299) for those on the Western Front it was above all a

war of immobility and waiting. Blitzkrieg was not to come until 1939. And as for

singling out Cubist paintings as a metaphor for the Great War, I find it strange that

Kern, who gives us so many incisive readings of prewar paintings, does not bother

to ask whether those artists who portrayed the war visually had recourse to Cubist

forms and techniques. If he had, he might have discovered some surprises. Nor is

there anything Cubist about the cemeteries built to commemorate the fallen of the

1914-1918 war.

Cultural history is producing exciting work and attracting some ofthe brightest and

most adventurous historical minds; yet there seems to be considerable disagreement

among the practitioners of this field concerning what constitutes an interpretation and

what the proper object of study should be.3 Some focus on individuals and seek to

relate their work to the political, social, and psychological contexts in which they lived;others are fescinated by discourse and apply themselves to the decoding of texts floating

freely and independent ofthe contexts that produced them; still others look for structures

ofthought and feeling by means

of which an entire era can be understood. Some think

small; some think big. Some prefer the concrete; others are drawn toward the abstract.

Some take their subjects from the consciousness ofthe period; others impose on pastconsciousness categories of their own. But all must deal with the problem of the

relationship between the lonely mountain peaks of culture where the great minds dwell

and the densely populated lowlands where culture takes different forms and experiential



REVIEW ESSAY 641

change moves by different rhythms. Between 1880 and 1918 the new technology became

a stimulus to thought and art; during the same years it also transformed the way that

people lived, though not in any uniform way that lends itself to easy generalization.Both these topics deserve detailed exploration. Stephen Kern has confused and conflated

them, asserting rather than establishing connections by means of juxtaposition, analogy,and metaphor. The result is that he has not been able to provide a satisfying studyof either. Contrary to what Kern claims, I remain convinced that more detailed and

contextual inquiries have a greater chance of penetrating to deeper levels of experiencethan those, like his, which employ abstract categories. During the past thirty yearsthis has certainly been true in the field of fin-de-siecle studies.

University of California at Los Angeles Robert Wohl

FOOTNOTES

1. EdmundWilson, AxeTsCastle (New York, 1931);H. StuartHughes, Consciousness and Society(New York, 1958); Roger Shattuck, TheBanquet Years GardenCity, New York, 1958); EdwardR. Tannenbaum,1900 (GardenCity, New York, 1976);Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

(New York, 1980).

2. See Zeev Sternhell, M droite ni gauche (Paris, 1983), pp. 45-57.

3. The dilemmas of cultural history, as it is practiced today in France, are brilliantly set forth

by Roger Chartier in "IntellectualHistory or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,"in Dominick LaCapraand Steven L. Kaplan, Modern Intellectual History: Reappraisals andNew

Perspectives (Ithaca, New York and London, 1982), pp. 13-46.

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