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Stephen Kern\u2019s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914 <\/em> (1983\/2003) is an enormously rewarding book. A few highlights. <\/p>\n In his introduction, Kern carefully examines how technological and cultural developments interacted during his time period. He eschews \u201ctechnological determinism in cultural history\u201d in favor of a nuanced spectrum of interactions. At times, technical developments directly affected culture: \u201cJames Joyce was fascinated by the cinema, and in Ulysses <\/em> he attempted to recreate in words the montage techniques used by early film makers.\u201d In other cases, technology provide \u201cmetaphors and analogies for changing structures of life and thought,\u201d as, for example, in the use of x-ray technology as a metaphor for \u201ca general reappraisal of what is properly inside and what is outside in the body.\u201d <\/p>\n In his research, Kern discovered that some analogies were more than analogies. Seeing camouflaged trucks, Picasso commented to Gertrude Stein that Cubism invented camouflage. Picasso didn\u2019t know it, but \u201cthe man who invented camouflage was inspired by the Cubists and explicitly acknowledged that debt.\u201d <\/p>\n Kern\u2019s first chapter examines the artistic, philosophical, and sometimes scientific protest against uniform \u201cpublic time,\u201d regulated by clocks and schedules. In reaction to the Newtonian idea that \u201cconceived of time as a sum of infinitesimally small but discrete units,\u201d a conception reinforced by the clock\u2019s \u201caudible reminders of the atomistic nature of time,\u201d painters played with depicting clocks with effaced numbers, depicting a fragmented rather than a uniform iron-cage time. <\/p>\n Or, painters depicted clocks in ways that contested the dominant conception of time. Kern\u2019s summary of Dali\u2019s Persistence of Memory <\/em> is superb: \u201cOne [clock] is hanging from a tree in a reminder that the duration of an event may be stretched in memory. Another with a fly on it suggests that the object of memory is some kind of carrion that decays as well as melts. The third deformed watch curls over a hybrid embryonic form \u2013 symbol of the way life distorts the geometrical shape and mathematical exactness of mechanical time. The one unmelted watch is covered with ants that seem to be devouring it as it devours the time of our lives.\u201d <\/p>\n Another form of protest came from philosophers (like Bergson) who represented time as a flux, or writers (like Edouard Dujardin and Joyce) who represented an alternative \u201cprivate time\u201d of consciousness that refused to submit to the uniformity of clock time. <\/p>\n Technological developments \u2013 the electric light and cinematic technologies \u2013 challenged the commonsense assumption that time was irreversible, and artists exploited the potentials of these technologies: \u201cOne day in 1896 [French cinema pioneer George Melies] was filming a street scene at the Place de l\u2019Opera and his camera jammed. After a few moments he got it going and continued filming, and when he projected the entire sequence it created the illusion that an omnibus had suddenly changed into a hearse.\u201d He began using the technique consciously, and in The Vanishing Lady <\/em> (1896) \u201ca skeleton suddenly becomes a living woman, implying both a jump in time and its reversal.\u201d Film editors began to cut, backtrack, and move forward to show earlier time later in the film, or simultaneous action. They ran films backwards, leading a critic to marvel at the effects: \u201cboys fly out of water feet first and land on the diving board, firemen carry their victims back into a burning building, and eggs unscramble.\u201d <\/p>\n Writers adopted these filmic techniques. Virginian Woolf said that writers should resist \u201cthe formal railway line of the sentence.\u201d And so much for Aristotle: Thomas Hardy commented on the new uses of time in literature, \u201cThey\u2019ve changed everything no. We used to think there was a beginning and a middle and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stephen Kern\u2019s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914 (1983\/2003) is an enormously rewarding book. A few highlights. In his introduction, Kern carefully examines how technological and cultural developments interacted during his time period. He eschews \u201ctechnological determinism in cultural history\u201d in favor of a nuanced spectrum of interactions. At times, technical developments directly affected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"yoast_head":"\n