Review of Adam Kuper's "Culture: The Anthropologists' Account"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

As Kuper states, “The core of this book is … an evaluation of what has been the central project in postwar American cultural anthropology” (x). More explicitly, in the first part of the book, he details the French and German ideals of culture that grew out of the Enlightenment. “Part Two: Experiments” looks at how Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, and Marshall Sahlins respectively have constructed anthropologies of culture in response to various intellectual influences. As he explains in the moving introduction, he lived through South Africa during the Apartheid when the very concept of culture was used to legitimize the most inhumane kinds of violence and racism imaginable. Because of this, Kuper is very much a skeptic when it comes to any kind of belief that use of the word “culture” communicates any objective, essential quality about people or the way they live their lives.

As I hinted at above, the argument starts in Europe, and migrates across the Atlantic Ocean. Kuper suggests that German intellectuals (Mannheim, Jaspers, and Mann more recently, but the concept dates back to Herder) believed in Kultur or Bildung – a kind of “cultured state by way of a process of education and spiritual development” which is “bounded in time and space and is coterminous with a national identity” (30). The French version of culture, with its haughty, transnational cosmopolitanism and materialism was perceived to be a direct threat to local distinctive cultures. 

Kuper then goes on to detail Talcott Parson’s conception of culture as a tripartite endeavor between the psychologist, anthropologist, and sociologist, each of whom would understand culture as a semiological system of how we use symbols. He calls Geertz a Parsonian, and takes him to task for analyzing signs and symbols outside of social structure. He gives a detailed account of Geertz’s hermeneutical account of the Balinese cockfight in his book “The Interpretation of Cultures,” suggesting that Geertz’s lack of sociological concern in his anthropology leaves only an idealist approach to interpretation which is radically separated from social conditions.

David Schneider, the second anthropologist Kuper takes up, is known for his study of kinship relations. However, he completely divorced this pursuit from anything like an idea of “relationship” or “blood lines.” It should be noted that this is a fairly extreme version of relativism that not even many anthropologists adopt, and Kuper goes to lengths to point this out. Schneider makes the somewhat peculiar statement that “since it is perfectly possible to formulate … the cultural construct of ghosts without actually visually inspecting even a single specimen, this should be true across the board and without reference to the observability or non-observability of objects that may be presumed to be the referents of the cultural referents” (133). For Schneider, culture is wholly symbolic and arbitrary.

The best part of the chapter on Marshall Sahlins is Kuper’s retelling of Sahlins’ debate with Gananath Obeyesekere, the Princeton professor of anthropology. At the heart of the debate was the nature of rationality of “native peoples” (the debate specifically focused around Captain Cook and the Hawaiian Islands). Obeyesekere maintained that anything short of admitting that native people and Westerners think similarly is another way of saying that they are hopefully different, irrational, and uncivilized. Sahlins, however, holds that the rationality of native peoples is wholly and completely unknowable to those in the Occident. The closing chapters of the book are scathing rebukes of postmodernism, and especially its influence on the American anthropological tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, claiming that it has “a paralyzing effect on the discipline [of anthropology]” (223). 

The twentieth century has certainly given the reader plenty of reasons to look askance at the very notion of culture. However, I am not sure that I am ready to completely do away with it as a powerful explanatory tool, no matter how diaphanous it may occasionally seem. I would definitely recommend the book for anyone interested in trends in twentieth-century American anthropology, and especially their intellectual genealogies. Whatever conclusions you have drawn about culture and what it means, I can guarantee you that this book will challenge them, and will do so thoughtfully. 

Review of Kim Townsend's "Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This is a really beautiful extended essay on a variety of interdisciplinary themes, from sociology to culture to philosophy to college life at Harvard at the end of the nineteenth century. Townsend, one of whose academic interests on his Amherst page is listed as “American Literature and Culture, 1865-1925,” earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and it’s obvious that the culture both grew on him and continues to fascinate him. 

As the title divulges, this is a book largely concerned very much with what could be called the “cult of manhood” at Harvard between approximately 1865 and 1905, focusing heavily on both the colleagues and students of American philosopher and pragmatist William James. Because of the time period covered, Townsend’s interest is almost exactly coeval with the leadership of Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s longest serving president, from 1869 to 1909. James, Eliot, and Lowell (the President who directly followed Eliot) all believed that Harvard was a kind of intellectual confraternity. This language, both inside and outside the institution of higher education, sounds old-fashioned, and it is. We never hear people speak this way anymore. Depending on who was speaking, there were various amounts of misogyny, imperialism, and racism behind these declarations, with William James being perhaps one of the more liberal and humanistic, and the big, bold blustering of Teddy Roosevelt (class of 1880) holding up the other side of the spectrum. 

However, the narrow topic of “manliness at Harvard” is not sustained for the entire book. Townsend is interested in James’ early life, especially the time he spent in his late twenties suffering from what was then identified as “neurasthenia” - what we might today call bipolar disorder or possibly depression. There are judicious interludes describing James’ pragmatism, which I’ve always found a peculiar flurry of Emersonianism and Stoicism. James’ writing has always struck me as having so much that is American in it. Its ability to temporize, its relentless sympathy with religiosity, to create itself anew – these were always attractive qualities. However, I was always put off by its explicit disinterest in metaphysics or ethics, even if I might invariably disagree with its conclusions. Whatever my personal opinions of James’ thought, Townsend has an infectious passion for James the man and James the teacher, as well as Alice (his sister) and Henry Sr. (his father). 

Townsend also covers several elements of ordinary college life, especially the sea change in opinion that was occurring in sports. Before the 1860’s, sports were an afterthought at Harvard, a distraction from the scholarly pursuit of Latin, Greek, and Dante. After the Civil War, a decidedly pro-sports faction arose; some were moderate in their advocacy, thinking that a healthy body was just as important as a healthy mind, while others (especially Roosevelt) couldn’t possibly conceive of becoming a man without rowing crew or being on a football team. President Eliot bemoaned the rise of sports, seeing it as an unnecessary incursion into collegiate culture, but suffered it silently for the most part. Townsend also details how Eliot, the great reformer that he was, regretted the rise of specialization and professionalism associated with college education, holding the older, humanist position that it was the duty of every person (that was, for a long time, every man) to better himself through the pursuit of learning, not just of those who wants to crudely utilize their education for monetary gain. 

While the central figures are undeniably Eliot and James, the peripheral ones abound: George Santayana, Henry Adams, Nathaniel Shaler, Gertrude Stein (whose passion and interest in James was undying), Teddy Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Even though these people were all at the elite educational institution that Harvard became during the last third of the nineteenth century, it’s still wonderful to think that so many great minds mixed there not so long ago, and the book provides generous excerpts from their letters. Above all, Townsend provides a portrait or a specific time and culture in American history which is truly past. So much of it strikes us modern readers as crude and full of machismo, and we must not make the crucial mistake of being too quick to pass judgment. There is also a lot that inspires and emboldens the imagination here: it would be easy to idealize and romanticize the time and place, even for its many obvious flaws. This is a careful balance of biographical information, intellectual history, and college life which deserves to be taken seriously by anyone compelled by these subjects.

Special thanks to my Goodreads friend Lauren who kindly sent me this book (as she generously has so many others).

Review of William R. Everdell's "The First Moderns" | Dedicated to Michał

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Books of intellectual history with this size and scope are always difficult to talk about. I’ve read some that were abysmal failures, while others were highly successful. If I had to place this one along a spectrum, it’s certainly close to the latter for a couple of reasons. First, a point which has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself, but that I admire nonetheless: it was written not by an academic with narrow scholarly interests, but a wonderfully eclectic generalist, William Everdell, who has taught in the Humanities Department at St. Anne’s School (yes, a private high school) in Brooklyn for the last forty years. There’s something about the passionate amateur that I’m perennially attracted to. I don’t think we have enough of them. 

“The First Moderns” is good not only for what it covers just as well as other related books of intellectual history, but also because it covers a lot of relatively new territory. We know the usual suspects: Einstein, Rimbaud, Whitman, Russell, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Picasso, and several dozen others. The names of Edwin Porter, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Valeriano Weyler, however, usually don’t make it into books of this kind. Do people even recognize these names anymore? Everdell also widens the scope of the book by covering not only names, but topics that usually don’t get mentioned. We are used to hearing Modernism defined in terms of music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Very rarely do we see mathematics and science discussed, let alone the invention of the concentration camp. 

The theme into which Everdell successfully manages to fit most of his vignettes is that of discreteness, continuity, and discontinuity. One doesn’t ordinarily think of something like mathematics as being potentially Modernist, but the discussion of Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege makes wonderful sense in this context. They explored topics like infinity (actually, infinities), set theory, and the theoretical fundamentals of the field, including questions like, “What is an integer?” All of this work blurred the traditional lines of continuity and discontinuity that earlier logic and mathematics had felt so confident with. We also get a wonderful and highly intelligent, though non-technical, account of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work with statistical mechanics and his defense of atomism. If matter is made of atoms – millions of them – how do we discover anything about a concept as abstract as “energy”? Everdell details the ways in which Boltzmann invented new mathematical tools to think about energy and entropy as statistical averages of extremely complex states. The work of Boltzmann and the people after him showed how, when multiplied by trillions and trillions, tiny, individual discrete atoms can have physical properties en masse like temperature, energy, or entropy (which are all, in fact, related to one another). Again, we see how the information about discontinuous atoms can in fact yield useful information about matter when thought of as continuous. 

And even when we get lessons from art history, or music, or poetry with which we are perhaps almost familiar, Everdell adds new contexts, new names, and new layers that enable each chapter in the book to potentially morph into a book of its very own. He gives a beautiful account of Seurat’s invention and exploration of pointillism, the “invention” of blank verse with Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, and a whole chapter on Hugo de Vries’ discovery of the gene and Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory.

Books like this, in their inexhaustible attempt to explain what a concept (like Modernism) might mean to wide swaths of human experience and creativity inevitably can be as a bit listy. “He was important … and so was this, but don’t forget her…” et cetera, and Everdell hasn’t fully escaped that here. But if that bothered me, I would never read this kind of book – a kind of book which I love very much. I read this sort of stuff to learn about new connections between ideas they already knew of, and I can handle the narrative jumpiness if the information is presented in an intelligent way, and Everdell is certainly the kind of intellectual cicerone who is going to teach you something fascinating. If you’re interested in this time period and intellectual history as a field, I would recommend William M. Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” To be honest, it’s dry as hay and not nearly as interesting as Everdell’s book, but his sense of curiosity and the amount of sheer information covered is truly impressive. It complements the information in here nicely.

Review of William M. Johnston's "The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Johnston makes a concerted effort to leave absolutely no stone unturned. He begins with a brief adumbration of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emphasizing its frivolity, decadence, and rampant materialism, especially among the nobility. The kind of bureaucracy that we associate with the writings of Karl Kraus and Kafka were only too real for Austrians, a mixture of both uniformity and indolence, or as Johnston says, “absolutism mitigated by Schlamperei.” He includes sections on both university life and military culture, apart from which Austrian social life would have been unrecognizable. Both religion and anticlericalism were fundamental, too.

The amount of information and number of names in this book can be exhausting, and this coming from someone who reads books on graduate-level syllabi for fun. It was so tiring, that after reaching the 300 page mark, I had to set it down for a week to find the energy to finish it. None of this is to say that I did not enjoy the book; I did, and I learned a great deal from it. But it does suffer from a surfeit of ambition. Because of the sheer number of names and ideas mentioned, it might in fact serve many people better as a reference work, rather than a book that you sit down and read from cover to cover.

There are a number of minor cavils I have with the book. 1) Hungarian intellectuals get about fifty pages at the very end, and the only major figures discussed are Georg Lukacs and Karl Mannheim. 2) Johnston continually refers to people by the geographic region from which they come and their religion, often starting sentences with, for example, “this Silesian Jew” or “that Viennese Lutheran,” even when these identities have no relevance to his discussion of their ideas. 3) He refers to several figures as “Marcionists,” but only explains how they are Marcionists once he is more than halfway through the book. 4) While his designation of many of these seminal figures as “therapeutic nihilists” is at times convincing, Johnston uses the phrase to pigeonhole some ideas into narrow categories at the cost of investigating their true complexity. 5) Lastly, as I have hinted at before, the book reads as more of a compendium of ideas and names than a book which presents a thesis, argues against or for it with evidence, and presents a conclusion. 6) Lastly, there is no mistake about the focus here: it is almost wholly intellectual history. The words “and social” could easily have been dropped from the title of the book, and would have given a fairer impression of what was presented between its covers.

None of this should discourage anyone with a real sense of gusto for this type of history. The real meat of the book is in its utterly exhaustive attempt to mention and account for every aspect of Viennese intellectual history. These are just a few of the areas that he covers: economic theory, psychology, legal theory, social theory, the history of “Austro-Marxism,” music and music criticism, the visual arts, the writing of history and historiography, art and art history, philosophy (and not just generally – the philosophy of science, mathematics, logic, and the Vienna Circle), religion and theology, the social trends in Bohemian Reform Catholicism, and the birth of what can properly be called “geopolitics.”

The book’s coverage of most familiar figures – Freud, Kafka, and Strauss, to name a few – is perfectly adequate. However, it should really be most prized from rescuing dozens of names from the brink of obscurity. Of the more than seventy figures covered, I would imagine that more than half are probably not familiar to most of the English-speaking world. 

It has proven especially edifying for me in respect to some of the literature I have read on fascism. While certainly not a major theme, one can definitely perceive varying types of extremism forming before your very eyes as you read about some of the social and political theory of the time, especially in the sections on Othmar Spann and the increasingly popular anti-Semitism of the time. If you read German fluently, the book’s notes and bibliography combined run to almost one hundred pages, which should provide a good place to start, even considering the book’s age (it was originally published in 1972). I would recommend this book to anyone who was interested in the time period, but reading it through might not be for everyone. 

Review of Patrick Wilcken's "Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

If there was one reason why I tend to shy away from biographies, it would be because many biographers tend to be either hagiographers or attack dog hacks. Patrick Wilcken’s biography of Claude Levi-Strauss, maybe the most influential anthropologist of the twentieth century, avoids both of these. The result is a beautiful book that takes Levi-Strauss seriously and gives him the due consideration he deserves, but never becomes obsequious toward its subject. 

Aside from presenting the arch of Levi-Strauss’s life, he does the same thing for the place of academic anthropology in both the United States and Europe. In fact, as Levi-Strauss was doing his fieldwork in Brazil among the Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples, anthropology departments were just in their infancy. The giants in the field at the time were Malinowski, Mauss, and Boas, all of whose work seems oddly anachronistic now in the light of Levi-Strauss’s and his students’ influence.

Levi-Strauss’s training was in law and philosophy, but during his youth was constantly engaged with art (his father was a portraitist), music, and politics. While he was mostly interested in mythography and kinship studies, he occasionally wrote on art and music, which also maintained his interest. He was an avowed leftist during the interwar years, but he later turned inward and became apolitical. In his old age, he would become disgruntled at the growing multicultural nature of France, especially with Islam. 

In 1955, Levi-Strauss’s best-known book “Tristes Tropiques” appeared, a memoir which recounted his time spent among the aboriginal peoples of Brazil, and his only non-academic book. In it, he began to show the first signs of pessimism about the preservation of native peoples and traditions, and how Brazilian “civilization” was destroying them. 

Because of Levi-Strauss’s peculiar path – he chose to interrupt his formal work by accepting an invitation to do fieldwork in Brazil – he had difficulty reentering the academic world when he returned to France at the end of the 1940s. The eruption of World War II, during which he fled to New York City, didn’t help him getting back on track, either. While in the U.S., he found work at the New School for Social Research, where he would first gain contact with one of his biggest influences, Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson. It was only after Levi-Strauss borrowed from Jacobson’s linguistic structuralism that he himself became known as the father of structuralist anthropology. Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm that suggests culture – or language, or myth, or whatever else – can only be fully understand as an interrelationship between its smaller parts. This idea would be absolutely fundamental to Levi-Strauss’s later analysis of mythology and kinship systems. Wilcken seems to have a particular interest in showing how Levi-Strauss’s interest in structuralism as a formal method developed in tandem with his interests in Freud, Jacobson, art and literature.

Levi-Stauss’s work, while sometimes known for its cold formalism, was just as often attacked for its lyricism and overly subjective, aestheticized approach, especially in his mythography. I find this duality appropriate for a thinker who himself was always splitting things into twos and fours, and building n-dimensional matrices to suss out the true complexities hidden in the permutations that he spun out of his mythemes. 

Wilcken discusses Levi-Strauss’s most important work in a fair, even-handed way, devoting a whole chapter to “Tristes Tropiques” and quite a bit of time considering his epic, four-volume, two-thousand page “Mythologiques” quartet, the masterpiece of his middle career. With the exception of “Tristes Tropiques,” Levi-Strauss’s work has the reputation of being fantastically difficult, replete with charts and graphs of endogamous and exogenous kinship relations that probably only the fully anthropologically initiated can fully understand. And while Wilcken never really scratches the surface of Levi-Strauss’s ideas – this, while a wonderful biography, is by no means a form presentation of his ideas – the way he talks about his development goads the reader (or at least me) to want to learn more about him. To that end, I’ve dusted off a few related books in my library, including Levi-Strauss’s “Myth and Meaning,” Christopher Johnson’s “Levi-Strauss: The Formative Years,” and even “Tristes Tropiques” itself.

Review of Philip Rieff's "Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This is one of the most bizarre books that I’ve read in a long time, and not only because it earnestly defends a point of view that can in many respects be called pre-modern, but because it does so in such a sophisticated way. Philip Rieff may be best known today for being the husband of Susan Sontag during the 1950s, and fathering David Rieff, who in turn became an established writer in his own right. He taught sociology at the University of Chicago (where he met and married Sontag after a very short courtship) and the University of Pennsylvania. He sustained a career-long attack on what he calls in this book and others “therapeutic culture,” which he expounded upon in earlier books including “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist” and “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” This book wasn’t written by Rieff. He knew out of the cultural mainstream his ideas were, and even admitted that this kind of book “wouldn’t have a constituency.” Two of his sociology students, Aaron Manson and Daniel Frank, cobbled together some of the notes that Rieff made and this book is the result.

Another peculiar thing about this book is that, despite its cover and accessible introduction, it is essentially a book-length response to the sociology of Max Weber, and essentially his writing on the concept of charisma, to which contributions were influential. Rieff thinks that culture is thoroughly interdictory – that is, that it is built around negative demands made on the people of that culture. (Think, for example, of the Decalogue, with its liberal use of “Thou Shall Nots.”) In fact, life under Mosaic law is one of the examples that he discusses in particular detail. He calls cultures that recognize a common set of interdictory themes as “creedal cultures.” In fact, a culture’s creed is what makes it a culture in the first place; without a creed, there can be no culture. While Rieff never pinpoints a time in history, we as cultural animals (I assume he’s talking about Western European culture specifically here) began to question and eschew this interdictory motif. He largely blames this on the writings of Weber, but not only him: he also has some pretty harsh things to say about Kierkegaard and, of course, his favorite hobby horse, Freud. One of the biggest signs of an anti-credal cultural (not really a culture at all) is the changing nature of charisma. Charisma, Rieff claims, used to refer to the power of moral transformative moral authority; Moses and Jesus are two preeminent examples. Now when we hear the word charisma, we think of someone who has merely personal panache and appeal. The moral aspect of the word has been subtracted from its contemporary use. And again, this is all Max Weber’s fault. 

None of this seems especially controversial. Every culture, even “liberal” ones (a word, as I show below, that Rieff bandies with never a dearth of disdain) have interdicts and prohibitions. Is there anyone that deny that our culture is not based on at least some interdictory forms? Don’t murder, don’t commit incest, don’t be a traitor to your country, et cetera, et cetera. But Rieff manages to say some pretty reactionary, and even anti-intellectual, things in the course of the book. Perhaps they might not seem too reactionary, considering what he thinks about the basis of culture, but I’ll let the reader judge. These are some of the passages that I highlighted from the first forty pages of the book. 

“The modern guru [the charismatic in the modern sense] represents the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent. It is in this sense that he is an exemplar, someone to follow” (p. 4). 

“Weber is himself the culminating expression, I think, of the Protestant pathos, which turns into evolutionism and progressivism, with its mystique of breaks with the established order as its highest expression of the intellect and of soul. This Protestant pathos, this mystique with breaks of the established order, is less than a revolution and more than a reform. It is that relentless lusting after progressive social change that characterizes the liberal era and leads straight into the Marxist pathos, with its generalized species man, who turns into an apparatchik and party functionary” (p. 7). 

“It is the rejection of rejection, by transgressive movements, of the entire notion of dangerous situations that has become the special object of fear and hatred in modern society. The liberal defense of these transgressions must itself bring liberalism itself crashing down, for in that defense, the liberals are defending the destruction of avoidance mechanisms which are necessary to the practice of liberalism itself” (p. 12). 

“Egyptian culture was the fixing of all possibility, including death, in certain forms. This is an entire society aspiring to be exactly as it is, in love with itself” (p. 17). 

“The moderns of Israel, especially the literary moderns, have accepted the terrible idea that they themselves can become as gods, to other persons, especially in the sexual encounter. Thus, in the modern novel there is a vengeful destruction of all limits on the sexual relation, its utter transformation into a coming struggle for power between one person and another” (p. 18).

“For then men no longer grasp their own limits; they become destroyers and worship only under the principle of power, which can only be fulfilled by breaking up ritualization as defensive similitudes of power in the struggle against power. The cool, analytical rejection of ritual, as “uncivilized” and “irrational,” is one with the hot, romantic yearning to bring down the roof of civilization. The rationalist rejection of ritual is one element in the large compound of anti-culture. The other element is the deritualizing of intimate relations, the dissolution of all manners and reticence, so that men leap upon one another, to achieve their own persons in the submission, unto death, of another” (p. 19). 

“Science needs its own Sabbatarian movement, an insistence upon what it is not to do, a time and sphere of constraint. The insoluble social condition of the scientists is that they are uncovenanted, without an interdictory form” (p. 25).

“The case histories for perversion that pass for modern literature and theater, by failing to transform private into public, are not art, but transgressive assaults upon the public, mounted in public. An anti-credal play could be a man opening his fly, and inviting an audience to do the same. In such an artistic condition, there can be no disobediences. No act needs justification because it means nothing whatever – like a Pinter play” (p. 37)

If any of these quotes appeal to you intellectually, then you’ll probably enjoy and agree with Rieff’s thesis, assuming that you’re willing to navigate his prose, which too often consists of elliptical bloviating. For committed liberals – and Rieff is so anti-liberal that this has nothing to do with the modern political usage of the word, but would include almost anyone who thought there was anything redeeming about the Enlightenment – his thesis is drawn in such overarching, bombastic language (as can be seen from the quotes) that your Weltanschauung will probably not be radically changed, but I found mustering the counterarguments to be fun and stimulating. In many ways, this book reads like it was written a century ago. I find it odd that people can still believe such things. But I’m glad I read this.

Review of Stephen Kern's "The Culture of Space and Time: 1880-1918"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This could have been a truly impressive book. I have a deep, abiding interest in intellectual history, and the subjects set forth in the title provide a fertile field of interdisciplinary study. The ideas themselves are interesting, if only Kern could have synthesized them in a new way or said something about them that hadn’t been said before, or more intelligently – but he simply doesn’t. In fact, the book is a little list-y, and what he chooses to write about becomes fairly predictable. 

To begin with, Kern presents a clumsy methodology in his forward, in which he tries to explain what originally piqued his interest in the topic, and how he has organized the book. He states that he got his organizing principle and some of his themes from the realm of philosophical phenomenology (that is, the philosophy of perception). He breaks up the chapters thus: 1) The Nature of Time, 2) The Past, 3) The Present, 4) The Future, 5) Speed, 6) The Nature of Space, 7) Form, 8) Distance, 9) Direction, 10) Temporality of the July Crisis, and 11) The Cubist War. The only problem is that the topics discussed in the book make these categories much less useful or intelligible than you would otherwise think. He never discusses why “Temporality of the July Crisis” (the events directly following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in July, 1914) couldn’t go into chapter two, three, or four, or why “The Cubist War,” which mostly discusses changing perspectives of time in Cubism, couldn’t be presented in chapter six. 

Kern’s interdisciplinarity is impressive, though, but this is countered by his unfortunate inability to rally the history into anything cohesive or compelling. He draws from the visual arts, philosophy, psychology, music, literature, the natural sciences, geographical and international relations theory, cinematography, communications and communications theory, and diplomacy, but leaves the threads all dangling at the end of the text. 

The book does have its moments. The chapter on distance discusses how changing perceptions of this quantity shaped the bourgeoning field of geographic theory and international relations. The chapter on the outbreak of the First World War looks at how time greatly contracted after the invention of the telephone and radio, and how this affected diplomacy (or attempts at it) leading up to the declaration of war. Both of these are topics which you rarely see dealt with in detail in intellectual history of this type, so I especially appreciated these parts.

If you’re familiar with the generation of cultural and intellectual history leading up to the end of the WWI, this book isn’t the kind of revisionist history that would enable you to re-conceptualize the way you think about these ideas. You get all the standard questions: Is time continuous or atomized? How do Proust and Joyce create a sense of private time (as opposed to a public time) in their novels? How did inventions like the telephone and bicycle change the public’s view of time and speed? These are fascinating questions, but ultimately nothing new to someone who is moderately familiar with the better books in the genre.

Readers looking for a quick-and-dirty intellectual and cultural history of the time could certainly do worse than Kern’s book, however they could also do better. Some of the better attempts that I’ve read recently are George L. Mosse’s absolutely stunning “Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars,” Modris Eksteins’ dependable but conservative “Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age,” and William M. Johnston’s hay-as-hay but necessary “An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938,” all of which I have reviewed on this site. None of share Kern’s methodology or cover the same territory, but parts of them discuss some of the material much better than Kern does.