Postmodern Time And Space In Fiction And Theory 3030374483, 9783030374488, 9783030374495

Table of contents :
Series Editor’s Preface......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 11
Degree Zero......Page 25
A country road. A tree.......Page 27
Frankenstein’s Very Modern Monster......Page 30
Human Nature, or the Evolution of Evolution......Page 35
Nature and the Space of the Nation......Page 38
Digging Deeper......Page 41
Crusoe Sows the Seeds......Page 46
Robinson Lives!......Page 49
IV. Posthuman, Postnaturally and Post-Apocalyptic—The Last Post(s)?......Page 50
Chapter 3: The Space of the City......Page 55
The Flâneur Goes Shopping......Page 56
Mingle, Tingle......Page 58
More Soberly......Page 60
Carceral Uniformity, or the Fugitive in Phantasmagoria......Page 61
Metropolis......Page 63
Troglodytes and Traffic Jams: Dostoevsky and Kafka......Page 64
Paralysis Metropolis and Marketing: Joyce’s “Araby”......Page 67
The End of Geography......Page 69
2000, an Urban Space Odyssey—Into “Thin Air”?......Page 71
Robinson in London......Page 74
Two Tales of the City......Page 76
The Real Tale......Page 77
I. Modernist Times......Page 79
The End of the Line: Buddenbrooks......Page 80
The Secret Agent and Time Machines......Page 82
Going Around and Around......Page 87
Technology, the Simultaneous Poetry of Everyday Life, and Ulysses......Page 89
Postmodern: Most-Modern......Page 96
Pilgrim Time, Capitalist Time and the Time of the Tourist......Page 98
Different Times......Page 104
Finally …......Page 106
Bombshell......Page 108
No Business Like … A Gesamtkunstwerk......Page 113
Destroying the Destroyer......Page 115
Ping......Page 117
Soup of the Day … is One-Dimensional......Page 120
Addiction......Page 123
The Noise......Page 126
Magma......Page 127
Electrickery......Page 130
The Practice of Parataxis......Page 132
Art of the Impossible......Page 133
Time and Space......Page 136
Shared Surfaces......Page 137
An Advertisement for Emancipation?......Page 140
The Pilgrim’s Progress......Page 143
Airport-ness......Page 147
Here or There?......Page 150
I Am a Camera......Page 151
A Novel Idea......Page 154
Pleasure Class......Page 156
Flight......Page 160
Chapter 7: Conclusion......Page 162
Index......Page 169

Citation preview

GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory Michael Kane

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15002

Michael Kane

Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory

Michael Kane Dublin Business School Dublin, Ireland

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-030-37448-8    ISBN 978-3-030-37449-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In Memoriam Carmel Kane (1926–2018)

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain identifiable and well-known places (e.g. vii

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Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyse and explore the significance of space, place and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, TX

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The Space of Nature 15 Degree Zero  15 I. Post-Romantic  17 II. Post-Darwinian  25 III. Post-Christian … Post-Extractivist?  31 IV. Posthuman, Postnaturally and Post-­Apocalyptic—The Last Post(s)?  40 3 The Space of the City 45 I. The Nineteenth-Century City  46 II. The Modern City  53 III. The Contemporary City  59 4 Postmodern or Most-Modern Time 69 I. Modernist Times  69 II. More Recent Times  86 5 The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction 99 I. The Age of Mechanical Reproduction  99 II. One-Dimensional and Monosyllabic 108

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III. The Age of “Electrickery” 117 IV. Art Works in Shared Spaces? 123 6 Travel: From Modernity to…?135 I. From Pilgrim to Tourist… to the Airport… to the “Selfie” 135 II. From Faustus to Houellebecq’s Platform 146 7 Conclusion155 Index 163

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is an attempt to make some sense of the present, particularly in relation to suggestions that notions of time and space have relatively recently undergone an extraordinary transformation. Like most attempts to grasp the present, this one involves a return to the past in order to review where we’ve come from and how we got to where we are, wherever that is (and it may seem increasingly difficult to figure that out!). The past—and the present—here explored is that of Western Modernity and its cultural, literary, theoretical legacy—a modest undertaking indeed. This author seeks to trace connections between some modern(ist) literature and theoretical discussions of modernity and contemporary literature and theoretical discussions of postmodernity, the posthuman—or whatever we call the contemporary period—in order to place that “contemporary” in the wider context of modernity. Indeed, as the term “postmodern” has perhaps seen its day, in the words of Andreas Huyssen, the “discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback” and this has been accompanied by the “rise to prominence” as David Cunningham puts it, “of a category of ‘the contemporary’ as a somewhat unstable means of defining the distinctive character of ‘our’ historical present”.1 1  David Cunningham, “Time, Modernism and the Contemporaneity of Realism”, in The Contemporaneity of Modernism, D’Arcy and Nilges (eds.). New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2016, p. 49. Cunningham quotes here from Huyssen, “Modernism After Postmodernity”, New German Critique, 99, 2006, p. 1. See also Theodore Martin, “Introduction: Theses on

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kane, Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_1

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“The contemporary” may seem a particularly empty and shifting label, but then so also, one might say, is “the modern”—empty until one begins to fill it with whatever one sees as its “distinctive character”. Putting together “the modern” (going back a couple of 100  years) and “the contemporary” may be the best way of beginning to grasp “the distinctive character of ‘our’ historical present”—and indeed the historical character of our apparently so distinctive (and perhaps distinctively distracting, all-­ consuming and ahistorical) present. This “putting together” may lead to a (perhaps illusory) sense of narrative continuity or continuities—or just a series of thought-provoking connections, some perhaps surprising juxtapositions and new readings of classic literary texts that do nonetheless add up to a review of some of the significant trends of modernity. This author seeks to re-trace some of the cultural genealogies of the present cultural moment and understand how it has evolved out of the ‘classically’ modern. “Mapping modernist continuities” is the title David James gives his introduction to The Legacies of Modernism; this book could be said to attempt to map some modern (and not necessarily just modernist) continuities—and mutations.2 However, it is not intended as some kind of grand narrative of modernity; rather, it offers essays on different, overlapping, intersecting topics all relating to the mutation of notions of space and time through modernity to the present: “The Space of Nature”; “The Space of the City”; “Postmodern or Most-Modern Time”; “The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction” and “Travel: from Modernity to…?”. Writers and theorists have been offering insights into the meanings of modernity in relation to the natural and the urban environment and indeed time and space for a very long time. This book brings many of these insights and interpretations together—to review and to inspire further interpretation of modernity and of the “contemporary”. The essays assembled here are, indeed, “essays”—attempts to explore certain key aspects of the legacy of modernity.3 They may, of course, be the Concept of the Contemporary”, in Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism and the Problem of the Present, New  York: Columbia University Press, 2017 and Theodore Martin, “The Currency of the Contemporary”, in J. Gladstone, A. Hoberek and D. Worden (eds.), Postmodern/Postwar  – and After: Rethinking American Literature, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016, pp. 227–239. 2  David James, The Legacies of Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 3  To a certain extent Brian Dillon’s comments on the genre of the essay are applicable. See Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.

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read in isolation, but they are parts of the broader discussion of transformations in notions of space and time in modernity … postmodernity … the “contemporary”. Several works of literature are drawn on, referred to and commented on throughout; some writers—such as Defoe, Mary Shelley, Kafka, Conrad, Joyce, DeLillo and Houellebecq—feature prominently, providing certain leitmotifs in these explorations of modernity. The overall focus is, however, not so much on individual works of literature, or writers, as on constellations of ideas, particularly on what Raymond Williams termed “the residual”—residues of the past that linger on and continue to exert influence, in some form or other, in the present cultural moment. As Williams writes, “the residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.”4 Such residues are often rather complicated and even contradictory; teasing out some of those complications and contradictions is what the author seeks to do in the book. These essays have been inspired and influenced by very many different cultural critics—often those associated with the Frankfurt School but also by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Paul Virilio, Stephen Kern, Fredric Jameson and Jacques Rancière. The idea for the book partly arose from reading suggestions from several quarters that we have only very recently witnessed an utter transformation of our sense of time and space and feeling that this needs to be put in the context of the continuing transformations of modernity itself. Such words as “time” and “space” may seem rather meaningless, abstract concepts until we come to realize how much we constantly attempt to make sense of our actual day-to-day experience by measuring it against some—perhaps vague, perhaps shifting, sketchy—patterns referring to wider temporal and spatial contexts. Those wider notions themselves are not usually colourless, empty abstractions either, but are deeply influenced by experiences and perceptions of history, culture, geography, but ultimately, of course, by the material conditions, as Marx would say, of people’s lives, by how they live. In the early twentieth century the playwright J.M. Synge noticed how inhabitants of the Aran Islands often left the door on the southern side of their cottages open to let in the air, and told the time of day by the position of the door’s shadow on the floor. If the wind was coming from the south, however, they closed that door and  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 122.

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opened a door on the northern side of the house, leaving everybody at a loss as to the time of the day. As Synge writes, “When the wind is from the north the old woman [of the house] manages my meals with fair regularity, but on the other days she often makes my tea at three o’clock instead of six.”5 At the dawn of the twentieth century, in one remote part of Europe, at least, the sense of time could depend on the direction of the wind—this precisely at a time when clock times and time zones were being officially standardized around the globe. In his book The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, Stephen Kern shows how it was particularly technical innovations in transport and communications around that time that led to a wide-ranging transformation of the senses of time and space.6 At the same time, of course, local, traditional, geographically, historically and culturally specific senses of time and space persisted, and still do, just as the wind still blows on the Aran Islands. While Kern focused on the period around 1900, it has more recently been suggested that we are currently experiencing a thorough-going—and thoroughly disorientating—transformation of our perceptions of time and  space. Fredric Jameson, for one, noted how late-twentieth-century ­“postmodern” culture seemed to involve a decline of the sense of time— and particularly of the past, of history—and a corresponding rise in the awareness of space. He claimed we are “today dominated by categories of space, rather than by categories of time”.7 But then even the spaces of postmodernity, as Jameson described them, were particularly disorientating. Jameson described the confusing interior of the Bonaventura hotel in Los Angeles as a classic example of “the latest mutation in space”, of what he termed “postmodern hyperspace”, that “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world”. For Jameson, of course, this was a “symbol and an analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of 5  John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1998, p. 17. This episode is referred to by E.P. Thompson in his classic essay “Time, WorkDiscipline and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present, No. 38, Dec. 1967, pp.  56–97 (Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749). 6  Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 7  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Tom Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 72f.

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our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (p.  83). This “waning” of a sense of time and this disorientating “mutation in space” were evidently significant aspects of “the cultural logic of late capitalism”. Around the year 2000, Paul Virilio was writing alarmingly about a profoundly disorientating transformation of humanity’s senses of time and space. The use of new information, communication and media technologies tends, according to Virilio, to abolish “the reality of distance” as well as of time intervals to such an extent that we are witnessing a breakneck— and dangerous—“acceleration of reality” and nothing less than the “end of geography”.8 While Jameson suggested we were increasingly “dominated by categories of space, rather than by categories of time”, Virilio declares at one point: “Here no longer exists; everything is now” (p. 116). “Now” may well be a category of time, but “everything is now” implies there is, literally, “no time like the present”, no awareness of a dimension of time linking the present with the past, no sense of time passing. Our senses of both time and space, Virilio appears to suggest, have “now” been superseded by this one word (and one focus): “Now”. Not long after Virilio’s “Now”, the geographer Nigel Thrift—no fan of Virilio—wrote of the development of a new “awhereness” (sic), a new sense of space arising out of a “posthuman” realization that we cannot now separate out the human from the technological so easily. According to Thrift: “What was called ‘technology’ has moved so decisively into the interstices of the active percipience of everyday life that it is possible to talk about a new layer of intelligence abroad in the world”. This affects spatial “awhereness”: “increasingly human originary spatiality has become not just accompanied but suffused by a metrical space made up out of an army of things which provide new perceptual capacities.”9 This new sense of space—and of where we are, and who “we” are in relation to it—arises with the development and use of new technologies, as well as a new “awhereness” of the integration of technology into every aspect of (post) human life. While new, it is also, as Thrift points out, comparable to some previous transformations of space and geography—such as the laying down of roads, pipes and cables in the nineteenth century.  Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, London: Verso, 2005, p. 9.  Nigel Thrift, “From born to made: technology, biology and space”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 30(4), Dec. 2005, pp. 463–476, p. 472. 8 9

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It is, of course, not just in posthuman/postmodern or contemporary times that humanity has witnessed a sudden, disorientating transformation of its sense of time and space; this is something that has been going on for a very long time. Technological innovations are inclined to bring huge changes in the ways people live and think—and these did not just begin in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s. Constant technological innovation, social change, upheaval are features of Western modernity itself, going back several centuries. The nineteenth century French poet Baudelaire captured the spirit of modernity for all time as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”.10 Modernity is, as Anthony Giddens has described it, a “post-­ traditional order”, where people can rely less and less on traditional knowledge and ways of life, finding rather that they need to change to adapt to a constantly changing environment.11 This is part of the “extreme dynamism of modernity”. A related aspect of that “extreme dynamism” has been what Giddens describes as the “separation of time and space”. With the onward march of modernity, the sense of time has become increasingly separated from the immediate locality and integrated into a standardized, synchronized global network—and this has been happening ever since the diffusion of clocks in towns in the fourteenth century. The development of increasingly accurate maps also enabled the individual to situate him or herself in a much wider context than that of the immediately visible surroundings. Nevertheless, and at the same time, of course, most people still lived most of their lives without moving beyond the visible horizon of their locality. That world beyond the horizon was, however, rapidly coming closer.12 It is not, then, just the arrival of TV, or computers, or postmodernity, or biotechnology, or the internet that is transforming our sense of time and space and disorientating us. This disorientation and reorientation have been going on for a very long time. The pace of change may, however, be accelerating—and that is bound to make it all the more disorientating. 10  Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (trans. by P.E.  Charvet), London: Penguin, 2010, p. 17. 11  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. 12  Bruno Latour neatly describes the ‘project of modernization’ as “a vector going from the local to the global”: “It is toward the Globe with a capital G that everything would begin to move […]. A marker that was both spatial—represented by cartography—and temporal— represented by the arrow of time pointing toward the future.” Latour reminds readers that this was a vision that aroused not just enthusiasm “among those who profited from it”, but “horror […] among those it has crushed along the way”. Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (trans. by Catherine Porter), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018, p. 26.

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It is worth remembering that the revolutionary and disorientating transformation of notions of time and space—while not just a feature of the last few decades—is still to be considered as a distinguishing characteristic of a particular historical era—of modernity itself. Any attempt to grasp our current “situation”—to figure out where we are, to overcome our disorientation (and possibly to begin to look for a way out of it)—will probably inevitably require a critical look at that (very broad) historical context. One might say, much as Adorno and Horkheimer said of the Enlightenment, that modernity must examine itself. But then this has been happening all along—in literature, in theory, writers and thinkers have been for centuries not just reflecting the times, but critically reflecting on the times—and indeed on what was happening to the sense of time and space. Virilio’s dictum “Here no longer exists; everything is now”—characterizes the Zeitgeist not just of the dawn of the twenty-first century, but of the several centuries we think of as “modernity”. The very word “modern”, after all, is derived from the Latin modo, meaning “just now”. The focus on “now”, rather than on the tradition and the legacy of the past, is an inherent part of the modern consciousness going back several 100 years— at least to when Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus impatiently put down his books (and his study of the wisdom of the past) and set out to experience the world for himself. In one fell swoop, Faustus shifted the focus from (the study of) the past to (experiencing as much as possible in) the present—and burst the confines of his study (a particular place, “here”) to begin to explore the entire globe. About to embark on his new life as a modern, thrill-seeking globe-trotter, Faustus declares: All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command.13

His horizons have suddenly become very wide indeed. This was perhaps the real beginning of a world-view Virilio associated with the rise of the internet at the end of the twentieth century and that he described as “globalitarian”.14 “Globalitarianism”, one gathers, is an even more total and global version of common or garden totalitarianism. 13  Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, London: Nick Hern Books, 1996, A-text, Act I, Scene i, line 58. 14  Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, Chapter 2.

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If the connection with Faustus seems a little far-fetched, one should recall that the writer Thomas Mann based his great novel on the tragic rise of totalitarianism (with a “t”) in his own country in the twentieth century on the tragedy of that very character. It may not be absolutely clear that there is a causal connection between a Faustian impatience with the past and desire to focus on the present on the one hand and a mad quest for global domination on the other, but modernity now appears to have indeed involved all of the above. Zygmunt Bauman, for one, has written much on the link between modernity and a quest for total and global, supposedly “rational” knowledge of—and control over—every thing and every body.15 According to Bauman: The typically modern practice, the substance of modern politics, of modern intellect, of modern life, is the effort to exterminate ambivalence: an effort to define precisely—and to suppress or eliminate everything that could not or would not be precisely defined. Modern practice is not aimed at the conquest of foreign lands, but at the filling of the blank spots in the compleat mappa mundi.16

Put like that, it almost sounds as if the actual “conquest of foreign lands”, of which there has admittedly been not a little in modern times, and even the mass “extermination” of millions of actual human beings were merely accidents, unintended consequences of a modern intellectual fascination with precise definitions and filling in blank pieces of paper. Much as Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, the modern religion of “reason” could be used to justify anything—and has been. Hence the title of Bauman’s book Modernity and the Holocaust. “For as long as there has been a modern culture,” Marshall Berman writes, “the figure of Faust has been one of its culture heroes”.17 Berman’s epic exploration of “the experience of modernity” opens with a detailed discussion of Goethe’s Faust. The title he chose for his book, however, is the line from the Communist Manifesto “All that is solid melts into air”. Berman’s subtitle, “The Experience of Modernity,” clearly identifies the phrase of Marx and Engels as supremely capturing that experience, which, 15  See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 and Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. 16  Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 8f. 17  Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso, 2010, p. 38.

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of course, it does. Marx and Engels were writing in the mid-nineteenth century about the dynamic and modernizing—even revolutionary—effect of the rise of the bourgeoisie. “Constant revolutionizing of production,” they wrote, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.18

The “experience of modernity” has been, Berman’s title neatly reminds us, the experience of modern Capitalism under the auspices of the bourgeoisie and the dynamism inherent in Capitalism tends, as Marx and Engels suggested, to melt—Everything. Such an experience clearly also has implications for the sense of space. People tend to orient themselves in relation to objects in their environment that they perceive to be more or less solid and fixed, but if “all that is solid melts into air”, one is left with no landmarks, only “air”. Perhaps this is the ultimate version of Jameson’s very disorientating “postmodern hyperspace”, that “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world”. One could perhaps pointedly rephrase Virilio’s line thus: “Here no longer exists; everything is air!” Unfortunately—to say the least—the air that has been the real end product of modern bourgeois capitalism is, as we have increasingly become aware over the last few decades, not the fresh air of freedom, but the all-­ too-­polluted air of the late “Anthropocene”. The first of two chapters on space in the following—“The Space of Nature”—opens with some ­all-too-­prophetic mid-twentieth century evocations of landscapes of devastation. This chapter begins by quoting something Theodor Adorno wrote about Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, suggesting that Nature was in a certain sense “finished” (and this by the 1950s!) and goes back from there to review some of the ways in which Nature has been reflected on 18  Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in McLellan, (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 248.

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and written about since the time of the Romantic poets. There is a discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here as well as of the important Romantic topic of “the sublime”, briefly bringing in some insightful comments from Bruno Latour on the contemporary “sublime”. How ideas about the workings of nature and what is “natural” have been used for (human) political purposes—particularly since the spread of Darwin’s theories—are the subject of the following section. The chapter then explores various suggestions that modernity has entailed some fundamentally harmful attitudes to nature, referring here to Naomi Klein on climate change, among several others. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is discussed as an example of the “extractivism” Klein referred to… before some exploration of the relation between the idea of Nature and postmodern culture. Modernity, to say the very least, has involved an utter transformation of this space and of the human sense of space in relation to it. The second chapter on “space” here is entitled “The Space of the City”. “The Space of Nature” has, after all, been “squeezed out” by the increasing amount of space required by the growth of cities and the rapid pace of global urbanization that has utterly transformed the human spatial environment over a relatively short period of 150 years or so. This is, of course, a crucial aspect of the “experience of modernity” and indeed of “postmodernity”/“the contemporary” as more than half of the world’s population already lives in urban areas and the rate of global urbanization accelerates. This chapter puts together some of the many literary and theoretical reflections on ways in which modern city life affects people’s lives, on how the Groβstadt (metropolis) transforms Geistesleben (mental life), as Georg Simmel put it at the beginning of the twentieth century. Comments from Rem Koolhaas and Paul Virilio on the experience of “the city” ca. 2000 lead back here to a discussion of observations on the nineteenth-­ century city and the progress of modernity from writers such as Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, Michel Foucault and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Depictions of the early-twentieth-century city by Franz Kafka, Georg Simmel and James Joyce (“Araby” in Dubliners) are put in the context of the developing narrative of the relationship between “the city” and modernity. The chapter returns to the experience of the city ca. 2000, referring to theorists Paul Virilio and Richard Sennett, before focusing on Don DeLillo’s portrayal of Manhattan on one day in April 2000 in Cosmopolis. It seems, by the end of the chapter, there have been two tales of the city that have been told repeatedly in different ways.

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This is then followed by a chapter focusing on the trickier and more abstract matter of the transformation(s) of the sense of time in modern/ postmodern/most-modern times. Opening with Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that there has, in “postmodern” times, been a “waning” of the “great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality”, this chapter explores some of the many treatments of the topic of time in modern culture, speculating that any shift imputed to “postmodern” times was already noticeable in “high-modernist” times. Works referred to include Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Stephen Kern’s book The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 is frequently drawn on for the insights into the effects of new technologies on the sense of time in the early twentieth century. Kern neatly summarizes the argument of his detailed study thus: From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought.19

The point is that while it is fair to say that the period around 1900 witnessed a great number of technological innovations that transformed the “dimensions of life and thought”, it is also the case that we are still witnessing such technological innovations and the transformations of the “dimensions of life and thought” are ongoing. These innovations and transformations are part of the long march of modernity—and even of what one might term the frenetic, drunken dance of postmodernity. One of the questions explored here is whether it is possible, as some have ­suggested, to distinguish between modernity and postmodernity—or “the contemporary”—on the basis of attitudes to time. The next chapter is an attempt to review the ways in which notions of art—of what constitutes a work of art, what culture is and how we relate to it—have perhaps shifted over the past century or so, and largely as a result of technological innovations in the media environment. The readjustment of notional boundaries around art—defining it (imaginatively) in  Kern, p. 1.

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time and space—and between art and life is also altering our own sense of time and space and this too is transforming the “dimensions of life and thought”. The title of this chapter—“The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction”—deliberately recalls the title of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on the effects of the age of mechanical reproduction, of modern media, on the very notion of art. This chapter proceeds from a discussion of how time and space are at issue in Benjamin’s essay to look at the position adopted by Adorno and Horkheimer, also relating to the “time and space” of the work of art. A passage from Émile Zola’s novel charting the development of a department store in nineteenth-­ century Paris—Au Bonheur des Dames—and a piece of avant-garde prose by Samuel Beckett are considered as bearing out something of the debate between Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer here. What really happens to the status of the work of art—and particularly of the artistic image—in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction (and the age of Capital) is still an interesting and tricky question, and this is the subject of this chapter referring to theorists such as Debord, Baudrillard, Jameson, McLuhan, Virilio, Bauman and Rancière as well as to DeLillo’s novel White Noise, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. The chapter closes bringing up Jacques Rancière’s concept of “shared surfaces” and his apparent resolution of the debate on the “time and space” of the work of art that goes back to Walter Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer. The final chapter looks then at the topic of travel—as another quintessential feature of modernity, postmodernity, or even, to use the title of a book by Marc Augé, “Supermodernity”. Modernity would be almost inconceivable without the development of ever speedier means of transport enabling access to places further and further away. postmodernity— or should we say Supermodernity—has seen the exponential rise of the global tourist “industry”, as well as of a new archetypal Western character, as Bauman suggests—“the tourist”. The underside of this widespread participation in leisure travel is, as Augé already pointed out in the 1990s, not so pleasurable: increasingly, as he wrote, this is “a world where […] transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty towns […])”.20 The proliferation of such “transit points and temporary abodes” is clearly another aspect of the “progress” of modernity 20  Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. by John Howe), London: Verso, 1995, p. 78.

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itself, for Augé invokes Baudelaire’s famous characterization of the modern when he further describes this as “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral”. This chapter includes comments from Augé and others such as Guy Debord, Richard Sennett, Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Virilio and Rem Koolhaas on the impact of travel and tourism on our places, the places we travel through and to, and our sense of place as well as of ourselves. Some of the literary texts brought in here are Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Michel Houellebecq’s Platform. One of the difficulties that constantly crops up in writing a book such as this is the question of what term to use to refer to the present cultural period. postmodernity? Supermodernity? The Posthuman? The Postnatural? The term “postmodernity” for a time seemed useful in provoking discussions about whether something—or a number of things—had radically changed, bringing about an end to what was considered “modernity” and maybe the beginning of something new. But the term “postmodernity” may seem paradoxically dated and old-fashioned now. Augé’s “Supermodernity” seems to capture the sense arising in the following— that the present is characterized by the culmination of a number of trends that have been developing for a very long time—and that perhaps have become more and more extreme in recent times, much as suggested by Anthony Giddens’s label “radicalized modernity”. Posthuman? postnatural? Bruno Latour at one point declares: “We are not postmodern but, yes, we are postnatural.”21 The term “Postnatural” could indeed be used to describe the present as it does seem as if the “Anthropocene” has really left no aspect of nature untouched, but then of course the “Anthropocene”— while indicating the present era, suggests a very broad understanding of “the present”—as the “Anthropocene” goes back a very long way, as far back as modernity itself, to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, or even to the “discovery” of the Americas.22 Lynn White jr. reminds us of the long history of humanity’s interventions in (and interference with) nature and of the deep historical roots of our ongoing ecological crisis—as well as of the deep-seated religious, philosophical and cultural attitudes 21  Bruno Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics”, A Lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011, p. 9, http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf (accessed 13.9.2019). 22  See Simon L.  Lewis, Mark A.  Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, 519, March 2015, pp.  171–180. Bibcode:2015Natur.519..171L. https://doi.org/10.1038/ nature14258.

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that have added fuel to the fire.23 Rather than settling on one term to label the present time, perhaps the important thing is to attempt to understand the present better by looking at how it is emerging from or is still influenced by some of those “deep-seated religious, philosophical and cultural attitudes” associated with some of those concepts/labels come up with to describe the times we are emerging from, or are still in—the “modern”, the “postmodern”, the “supermodern”, the “posthuman”, the “postnatural” and the “Anthropocene”. The title of this book perhaps suggests a grand historical survey, but really the chapters contained here are exploratory essays, essais, attempts to review some aspects of the cultural legacy of modernity, to see how we got to ‘here’, to try to understand something of what ‘here’ is. But then, as Virilio reminds us, “Here no longer exists; everything is now.” “Now” is perhaps an appropriate word with which to conclude an introduction—and to focus all attention on what follows. So: “Now!…”

23  Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”, Science, New Series, 155(3767), Mar. 10, 1967, pp.  1203–1207, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1720120 (accessed 13.9.2019).

CHAPTER 2

The Space of Nature

Degree Zero Possibly one of the most devastating descriptions of the end result of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”—the era when humanity’s impact on the natural, physical environment of planet Earth as a whole has transformed utterly the nature of the planet itself and its atmosphere1— came from Theodor Adorno, writing (in 1961) about Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie (1957)/Endgame. The play opens with the words “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”. The time, Clov tells wheelchair-bound Hamm, is “Zero”, “the same as usual”, and the scene all around, observed by Clov through a telescope is “zero … zero … 1  An era dating back, according to some, to the Industrial Revolution, or to the aftermath of the “arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492” and the “resultant mixing of previously separate biotas, known as the Columbian Exchange”. See Lewis, Simon L.; Maslin, Mark A. (March 2015). “Defining the Anthropocene” (PDF). Nature, 519: 171–180. Bibcode:2015Natur.519.171L. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258. David Matless writes: “What is the Anthropocene if not an extraordinarily effective play on words, joining the specificity of the human to the breadth of geological time to mark the remarkable capacity of one species?” Matless, “The Anthroposcenic”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(3), 2017, p. 365. According to Bruno Latour: “This is what the definition of the Anthropocene could do: it gives another definition of time, it redescribes what it is to stand in space, and it reshuffles what it means to be entangled within animated agencies.” Latour, “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene—a personal view of what is to be studied”, www.bruno-latour.fr (accessed 18.7.2018).

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kane, Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_2

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and zero”. When Hamm suggests that they have been forgotten by nature, Clov replies “There’s no more nature”.2 Adorno comments: The condition presented in the play is nothing other than that in which “there’s no more nature”. Indistinguishable is the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans; it is permanent catastrophe, along with a catastrophic event caused by humans themselves, in which nature has been extinguished and nothing grows any longer.

Not even Clov’s seeds will ever germinate. One could be reminded of the lines in T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland referring to “that corpse you planted in your garden last summer” and wondering “has it begun to sprout?”3 Images of nature as an infertile “wasteland”—Eliot’s, Beckett’s, Adorno’s (one might well add Cormac McCarthy’s in The Road)—have haunted the twentieth-century imagination, and perhaps for very good reason in a century where nightmare-like but all too actual historical reality left too many corpse-strewn wastelands of war and mass murder, and humanity indeed at the same time entered “the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans”.4 One might well wonder whether nature itself has in recent times well and truly and all too literally become “nature morte”, captured, turned into man’s work of art and then cast into the dustbins of history by its own offspring, rather like Nell and Nagg, Hamm’s “cursed progenitors” in Beckett’s play. In a powerful essay entitled “Capitalism: A Ghost Story”, Arundhati Roy presents a grim picture of the early twenty-first-century afterlife following upon so much devastation of both nature and humanity: 2  Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in Beckett, Dramatische Dichtungen in Drei Sprachen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. 3  T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”, I The Burial of the Dead, Line 71, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land (accessed 17.9.2019). 4  In a chapter simply entitled “Weather: Western Climes” Theodore Martin offers what he calls a “meteorological history of the Western”, a genre associated with images of vast natural landscapes dwarfing human affairs, perhaps evoking a sense of geological time rather than human, historical time. Martin suggests that the history of the Western in fact reveals a history of the impact of global warming on our weather. Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism and the Problem of the Present, New  York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

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In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new post-International Monetary Fund (IMF) “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.5

I. Post-Romantic A country road. A tree.6 It had perhaps been a short life. “Nature” (or a “modern” idea of it, the idea we possibly still hold on to) was possibly only really discovered—or perhaps even invented (much like the spinning jenny)—around the beginning of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. The wildness of untamed Nature was needed as an idea to represent an alternative to (or perhaps just a counterpart of?) the rise of an increasingly rationalized, bureaucratic, urban society—the gradual construction of the “iron cage”, in Weber’s famous phrase, of modern “disciplinary”, “panoptic”, “carceral” society (as Foucault puts it), of a “totally administered society” (Marcuse), and of Deleuze’s “society of control”.7 If the idea of Nature was conceived as an alternative to industrial, urban society, around the late eighteenth century, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest what had become of this idea by the mid-twentieth century, when they write: “Nature is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to society, and is therefore denatured. Pictures showing green trees, a blue sky, and moving clouds make these aspects of nature into so many cryptograms for factory chimneys and service stations.”8 But perhaps they always were.9  Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, London: Verso, 2015, p. 8.  Beckett’s famous description of the scene at the opening of Waiting for Godot. 7  G. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), pp. 3–7. 8  Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, 1997, p. 149. 9  Raymond Williams highlights the precise simultaneity of the development of a taste for ‘landscaped’ gardens with “natural curves” around the large houses of wealthy landowners and the completion of a “system of exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park boundaries”, involving straight lines and “mathematical grids”. Williams, The Country and the City, Nottingham: Spokesman, 2011, p. 124. 5 6

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson could wax lyrical about the vastness of Nature (the vastness of Emerson’s paragraphs adding to the general sense of vastness), writing: At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. […] Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. […] Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year.10

A century earlier Rousseau—the philosopher perhaps most associated with the opposition between nature and culture—inspired generations of Romantics and post-Romantics by extolling the virtues of nature above those of civilization, to the extent of claiming at one point “a state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and […] a thinking man is a depraved animal”.11 For late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-­ century Romantics, “sublime”, immeasurable, boundless Nature seemed an attractive alternative to what Culture was turning into—to the increasingly measured, defined, controlled spaces of the “chartered streets” of William Blake’s “London”, for example, an alternative to the effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Nature, one might say, needed to be constructed as rapidly as modern cities.12 In almost boundless “spontaneously overflowing” verses, Wordsworth declares himself a “worshipper of Nature”, a “lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; 10  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1844), first paragraph, https://archive.vcu.edu/ english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/nature1844.html (accessed 30.9.2019). 11  Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind and is it Authorised by Natural Law? (trans. by G.D.H. Cole), Section I, paragraph 9, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/rousseau/inequality/ch01.htm (accessed 30.9.2019). 12  According to Philippe Descola, the dualist opposition of Nature to Culture only really took hold in the late nineteenth century and lingers on unhelpfully in contemporary thought. Descola, The Ecology of Others (trans. by Gobbout and Luley), Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013, p. 31. Now, he writes, “it has become increasingly difficult to believe that nature is a completely separate domain from social life”. Where, he asks, “does nature stop and culture begin in regard to global warming, in the thinning of the ozone layer, in the production of specialized cells from stem cells?” (p. 81f.).

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and of all that we behold / From this green earth”, setting the solace he derives from the landscape around Tintern Abbey against the “din / Of towns and cities”.13 While there is a great difference between such an attitude to nature and a perspective that sees in nature only a pile of resources to be exploited, there is a sense in which nature is not simply being worshipped by the Romantics but also being used, and not just as an antithesis of the distressingly dirty towns and cities, but to feed the Romantic imagination—and self-image of the Romantic poet. The poem “Tintern Abbey” is, in fact, less focused on the landscape than on the “composition” of the memories, the moods, the meditations and the mind of the poet himself. Romanticism— and its association with Kant’s thought in particular—has been described as a kind of second Copernican revolution in philosophical/epistemological terms, where the imagination becomes central rather than merely peripheral in the production of knowledge.14 This in fact sounds rather more like a reverse Copernican Revolution—for whereas Copernicus removed planet Earth and humanity from their presumed central position in the universe, leaving the earth and its inhabitants whirling around the sun, the Romantic emphasis on the centrality of the creative imagination, on the human mind, seemed to comfortingly restore man (and particularly men threatened with marginality—poets and dreamers in an age of industry and commerce) to his central and dominant position and could be said to have rescued and reinvigorated anthropocentrism. Thus, while Wordsworth, in The Prelude, refers to nature so much and at such great length, the real subject of the poem is the “growth of a poet’s mind”—and that is evidently a vast topic, an expanse even more vast and boundless than the most sublime romantic natural landscape—and possibly even threatening to overshadow it. It is perhaps not such a contradiction of Romantic thought at all, that a century and a half after Emerson’s essay, one might well find that it is not “Nature” but rather human civilization which is “the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance”.

 William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey….”, https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tinternabbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798 (accessed 30.9.2019). 14  See Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture, London: Routledge, 1988. 13

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Frankenstein’s Very Modern Monster It is fitting, then, that such a classic of Romantic fiction as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus seems to offer a critique (one might even say an “ecofeminist” critique) of both mankind’s technological over-reaching and the (masculine) Romantic Promethean imagination itself—and to point to a parallel between the two. The novel, in fact, with its “three concentric layers of narration” as well as its two titles, epigraph, preface and introduction, draws a dizzying series of parallels between the lives and activities of men, gods, mythological and literary characters and the main players in the Book of Genesis. It is “undeniably true that Mary Shelley’s ‘ghost story’”, Gilbert and Gubar assert, “is a Romantic novel about—among other things—Romanticism, as well as a book about books and perhaps too, about the writers of books”.15 It is also clearly a novel about science and nature—and how men relate to both.16 It continues to be relevant on several levels, not least as, in the words of Descola, “one does not have to be a great seer to predict that the relationship between humans and nature will, in all probability, be the most important question of the present century.”17 On one level, of course, Frankenstein is a wild, fantastic, Gothic tale, the central event of which seems so utterly unrealistic that one might not take it seriously at all. On another, however, Victor Frankenstein is the prototypical modern scientist “embued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature”18 and “Frankenstein’s ‘being’ is the monster of modernity”.19 Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, is a novel about man’s relationship with nature in the early industrial and technological 15  Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” (Extract from The Madwoman in the Attic), in Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (Hunter ed.), Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996, p. 226. Kim Hammond argues that, rather than simply expressing Romantic fears about science and technology, as has been assumed in many readings, the tale offers a “critical questioning of both anti-Enlightenment Romanticism and anti-Enlightenment science”. Hammond, “Monsters of Modernity: Frankenstein and Modern Environmentalism”, Cultural Geographies, 11, 2004, pp. 181–198, p. 181. 16  A great many critics, including Gilbert and Gubar, have explored the topic of gender in the novel. 17  Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others, p. 81. 18  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, Chapter II, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, p. 39. 19  Kim Hammond, “Monsters of Modernity: Frankenstein and Modern Environmentalism”, Cultural Geographies, 11, 2004, pp. 181–198, p. 184.

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age—and of course a warning, as it soon becomes obvious that Victor goes way too far in “penetrating” those secrets and unleashes violent forces way beyond his control. As an economist and one-time Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis reads it, the warning is relevant to our continuing relationship with machines and discussions of the consequences of greater automation and AI. To its nineteenth-century readers, it was a warning “that, if they were not careful, instead of serving humanity technology would create monsters to enslave us, terrorize us, possibly even destroy us”.20 Victor, in seeking to create life in the laboratory, in playing God, Woman, Prometheus all at once (and a few other roles as well), is clearly playing—in Promethean fashion—with fire. Yet, the novel is not just about one man’s “madness”—or the madness of Promethean “science”: parallels are suggested in the early pages between Victor’s burning ambition—the literal equivalent of which is passed on to the monster who intends to burn himself at the end—and that of the explorer, Robert Walton, who opens the novel writing in his letters to his sister of his pursuit of “glory” around the North Pole. “Do you share my madness?” the dishevelled Victor Frankenstein asks Walton (p. 28). A further parallel is drawn between Victor’s “madness” and the “soaring ambition” (p.  38) of his friend Henry Clerval, who, “resolved to pursue no inglorious career, […] turned his eyes toward the East, as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise” (p. 69). While Victor’s interests from an early age had been directed towards learning “the hidden laws of nature” and “the secrets of heaven and earth” (p. 36f.), both Walton and Clerval had once harboured literary ambitions. Both had been inspired by poetry: Walton particularly mentions “The Ancient Mariner”, a poem also quoted by Frankenstein himself—and both had written poetry. A further link between Frankenstein’s scientific ambitions and the Romantic, literary imagination may be hidden in the name Victor itself, which was apparently a name Percy B. Shelley used in childhood.21 The “modern Prometheus” is perhaps not just the obviously crazy, eccentric, amateur scientist then, but comes in many, significantly male, guises.22 It is his imagination and 20  Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to my Daughter about the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism, London: The Bodley Head, 2017, p. 114. 21  See Christopher Small, “Shelley and Frankenstein”, in Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition (ed. by Hunter), p. 205. 22  However, one should add that Mary Shelley also suggests parallels between Frankenstein’s creation of life and women’s giving birth, as well as with her own writing/creation/giving birth to the novel as her “hideous progeny” in the 1831 Introduction. Gilbert and Gubar

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ambition which, after the so-called second Copernican revolution, are now at the centre of things. Victor Frankenstein is, as Kim Hammond writes, a “Romantically predisposed scientist”.23 The plot of Frankenstein, so much focused on the words and actions of the male characters—Frankenstein, the monster and Walton—takes place against the backdrop of some very dramatic natural landscapes, particularly the Alps and the Arctic, as well as against the “backdrop” of the female characters in the novel. There may be a connection. Superna Banerjee refers to “Shelley’s critical engagement with the universal cultural ideology that defines man as an autonomous being separate from and in control of his natural environment […] to which realm woman is perceived to be closer than man”.24 If the relations between man and nature have indeed been typically aligned with patriarchal notions of gender— and who would doubt that they have?—one might say that the particularly wild, dramatic landscapes of the novel and so favoured by the Romantics tended to threaten (at least on a hypothetical, imaginary level) any (masculine) sense of being “autonomous” and “in control of his natural environment”. Nature for the Romantics might be thrillingly imagined as having the upper hand over Culture. Meanwhile the “real” female characters fade further into the “backdrop”. The mountain landscape around Chamonix is constantly described as “sublime” and fills Frankenstein with “sublime ecstasy” (p. 97) as he goes on a cheering walk to forget the fact that he has created a very angry monster in his laboratory and, as if that weren’t enough, is also responsible for two murders. He had been significantly “insensible to the charms of nature” when he was engaged in his monstrous project; he did not “watch the blossom or the expanding leaves”. But now, just as he is enjoying all and others have in fact argued that both Victor Frankenstein and his creature/monster can be understood as ciphers for female figures, expressing anxieties about the position of women in society, female sexuality and motherhood. 23  Hammond, “Monsters of Modernity: Frankenstein and Modern Environmentalism”, Cultural Geographies, 11, 2004, pp. 181–198, p. 189. 24  Banerjee writes that Shelley provides a “critique of the positioning of the natural and the cultural as hierarchical and gendered conceptual absolutes”, thus prefiguring Latour’s arguments on the modern conceptual opposition between nature and culture. Banerjee, “Home is where Mamma is: Reframing the Science Question in Frankenstein”, Women’s Studies, 40, 2011, pp. 1–22, p. 2. Latour briefly mentions that feminists studying witchcraft trials have shown how “hatred of a large number of values traditionally associated with women” helped to render “grotesque all forms of attachment to the old soils”, a quintessentially modern attitude. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth (trans. by Catherine Porter) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018, p. 72.

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the sublimity of the Alps, he encounters the very embarrassing product of his imagination he was hoping to forget. While, on the one hand, it seems that in the novel Nature has been “penetrated” by the likes of Frankenstein and Walton, on the other, “sublime” Nature seems to function as a powerful, silent commentator on the foolish activities of men. On the “third hand”, however, one might say, the “pathetic fallacy” is constantly invoked to provide the mood music for what is about to happen: “sublime” Nature simply reflects the extreme emotional states of men. The “sublime”—such a significant aesthetic category for the Romantic encounter with nature—had perhaps always more to do with humans than with nature itself. As Edmund Burke explained it in 1757: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger […] is a source of the sublime”. He elaborated further on: The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.25

Some might call it sadomasochism—or at least a kind of hypothetical/ theoretical/“sublimated” sadomasochism. This “delight” in the idea of pain is all in the mind of the human (male) beholder, of course. While the “sublime” might seem to be all to do with a notion of Nature impressively surpassing men’s powers, in fact it had more to do with a masculine pleasure—or “delight” rather—in flirting with an imaginary master/mistress and tentatively transgressing titillating boundaries. One might say that the Romantic idea of the sublime registered the beginning of a (one-sided) sadomasochistic attitude to, and relationship with Nature that could develop alongside the less ambivalent, more straightforwardly domineering and exploitative attitude of the Industrial Revolution. Men could delight in the idea of pain and danger, in the hypothetical possibility of being annihilated by some awesome, natural power, in the sense of their smallness in the face of Nature’s vastness—as a way of testing their ­boundaries and actually making themselves stronger, “delighting in the 25  Edmund Burke, An Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas concerning the Sublime and the Beautiful, Part One, Section XVIII, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/ 15043-h.htm#PART_I (accessed 30.9.2019).

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inner feeling of [their] moral superiority over the pure violence of nature”,26 for that too was part of the sense of the sublime. Bruno Latour characterizes the feeling of the “sublime” thus: “What a delicious thrill to set our size alongside that of galaxies! Small compared to Nature but, as far as morality is concerned, so much bigger than even Her grandest display of power!”27 Who was really bigger than whom here? Who was more powerful? Nature—or humankind? Who was to dominate whom? Bruno Latour writes of how it nowadays no longer seems possible to think of nature as “sublime” (at least this side of the moon—no “sublunary sublime”, one might say). In this era termed the “anthropocene”, he writes: “We realise that the sublime has evaporated as soon as we are no longer taken as those puny humans overpowered by ‘nature’ but, on the contrary, as a collective giant that, in terms of terawatts, has scaled up so much that it has become the main geological force shaping the Earth.”28 In the context of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the word giant evokes the monster created by Victor Frankenstein, who survives his creator and who is intending to destroy himself by burning in the end. Perhaps Frankenstein shows the arrival of the “anthropocene”, the arrival of this giant, the moment when once “sublime” nature pales into the background and is overshadowed by a new “sublime”, the immeasurable, boundless consequences of man’s technology and Promethean ambition, and it is this that becomes, in Emerson’s words, “the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance”. Latour claims: “We are not postmodern but, yes, we are postnatural (p.  9).” Perhaps Mary Shelley was already in 1818—in the midst of Romantic times—showing the dawn of the “postnatural” era, and the end of “Nature”, almost as soon as it had begun. The violence unleashed by Frankenstein’s scientific experiment outstrips the drama of the Alpine landscape. The “new sublime”, one might say, is also characterized by a kind of sadomasochistic relationship—no longer between man and nature (somehow thought of as “woman”), but 26  Bruno Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics”, A Lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011, p. 4, http://www. bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf. 27  Latour, p. 2. Note “Her” gender! 28  Latour, p. 3. Latour also suggests one way in which the legacy of the Romantic sublime continues: “What is so strange about this abysmal distance between our selfish little worries and the great questions of ecology is that it’s exactly what has been valorised for so long in so many poems, sermons and edifying lectures about the wonders of nature” (p. 2).

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between man and the creations of his technology, and this is figured towards the close of Shelley’s novel in the all-consuming, mutually destructive relations between Frankenstein and his monster as they pursue each other, each now an uncanny Doppelgänger of the other, across the Polar icecap.29

II. Post-Darwinian Human Nature, or the Evolution of Evolution The preface to Frankenstein of 1818 opens with a reference to a Dr Darwin who considered “the event on which this fiction is founded […] as not of impossible occurrence”. This was apparently Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution has of course had an enormous impact on the evolution of humanity’s relationship with nature and understanding of itself. Nature—at least for those who accept that human beings have evolved from other species—may no longer be regarded as our great Other, the opposite (and opponent) of human culture and civilization, or as something over which we simply have (or have been given) dominion, but rather as the stuff we are made of. That realization might have led to a more ecologically friendly attitude to nature and the environment than had hitherto been typical, but, of course, it is not so clear that this is what happened. If one consequence of the theory of evolution could have been a transformation of a tradition regarding nature as Other—if not Mother— and this is a consequence that is still evolving and seeping through in some sectors of the population at least, perhaps the consequence that was more generally drawn at the end of the nineteenth century was, with much talk of “degeneration” and “eugenics”, not that humanity as a whole was related to other species, but that too many human beings had not evolved very much and were indeed all too animal-like. Rather than spreading a greater understanding of humanity’s kinship with other natural species, Darwin’s theories could all too often be used to establish or prop up social and political hierarchies among human beings based on supposed degrees of distance from (and superiority to) the rest of nature. This has surely 29  “Machine-slaves or machine-masters?” is a heading in Varoufakis’s chapter on the “The Haunted Machine”. The answer to this, of course, depends on who owns the machines, but even they may not be fully in control of those machines—or the bigger machine. Varoufakis, Talking to my Daughter about the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism, London: The Bodley Head, 2017.

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been the most socially prevalent aspect of Darwin’s legacy, less really to do with nature itself, than with a particular kind of nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century human politics—often (though certainly not exclusively) socially conservative, elitist, racist and/or fascist. In the late twentieth century phrases such as Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” could be used to “naturalise” and thereby apparently put beyond question a particularly ruthless form of capitalist ideology, one for which a supposedly unfettered “free” market was natural, and anything else, such as any form of state intervention or regulation (that might take account of what was best for society as a whole, or the species … or the natural environment of the planet), was “unnatural”. In the early twenty-first century, Henry Giroux writes of a “new culture of cruelty” where “the survival-of-the-fittest ethic and its mantra of doing just about anything to increase profits now reach into every aspect of society”.30 Darwin’s enduring if perverted legacy is all around us in the form of a particular understanding of human nature that seems to legitimate a “culture of cruelty” on every level and his ideas have probably been more influential in the political and economic spheres, than on our understanding of our relationship with nature. Dissemination of the theory of evolution no doubt made it harder to maintain a literal belief in the Book of Genesis as a full and accurate account of the origin of species and of humanity’s position with regard to the rest of nature. It also served to undermine a traditional moral system associated with Christianity and could be seen as having facilitated the replacement of any notion of what was “good” and what was “true” with a primal philosophy of the “survival of the fittest”, promoting a vision of nature—and human nature—as a ruthlessly brutal struggle for survival and nothing else (that “universal struggle”, as Pip puts it in the first paragraph of Great 30  Henry A. Giroux, “In the Twilight of the Social State: Rethinking Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History”, Truthout, Jan. 4, 2011, https://truthout.org/articles/in-the-twilightof-the-social-state-rethinking-walter-benjamins-angel-of-history/ (accessed 24.7.2019). Giroux characterizes American society as “a society in which politics are entirely driven by a Darwinian corporate ideology and a militaristic mind set that atomize the individual, celebrate the survival of the fittest and legitimate ‘privatization, gross inequalities and an obsession with wealth,’ regardless of the collective moral depravity and individual and social impoverishment produced by such inequities.” See also for example, Rodolfo Leyva, “No Child Left Behind: A Neoliberal Re-packaging of Social Darwinism”, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 7(1), June 2009, http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/ PDFs/07-1-15.pdf (accessed 24.7.2019).

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Expectations). Zygmunt Bauman reminds us that “Hitler’s language was replete with references to the ‘laws of nature’”.31 The Nazis may have given the world the most extreme example of where this could lead, but many late-twentieth-century proponents of the virtues of the “free market” also appeared to continue in the tradition of justifying their policies by appealing to a particular version of the “state of nature”. Once it had been summed up in Spencer’s all too memorable phrase (1864), “nature” could be used to justify the most extreme acts of brutality. Nature—in the twentieth century—would not be just a pretty picture. Things might have turned out rather differently, however, if only more attention had been paid to a part of humanity’s evolutionary legacy highlighted by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Here they write, “Around six or seven million years ago the branch of the evolutionary tree from which we have emerged split from that which led to two different species of ape: chimpanzees and bonobos. Genetically we are equally closely related to both of them.”32 While chimpanzees may be known for establishing hierarchical social structures headed by a dominant male, bonobos seem to be much more egalitarian and more peaceful animals, even engaging in sexual activity “frequently and in any combination of sexes and ages” to “relieve tensions in situations which, in other species, might cause conflict”. According to Wilkinson and Pickett, a section of DNA, known to be important in the regulation of social, sexual and parenting behaviour, has been found to differ between chimps and bonobos. It is perhaps comforting to know that, at least in this section of DNA, humans have the bonobo rather than the chimp pattern, suggesting that our common ancestor may have had a preference for making love rather than war.33

It may thus—despite appearances—be in “our nature” to do the same. Yet since the late nineteenth century so many crimes against humanity have been carried out (by humanity) in honour of a concept of Nature as more concerned with war than love. In fact, crimes against humanity have been carried out in honour of a strange mixture of different versions of Nature, of Mother Nature in a variety of guises. The “survival of the fittest”  Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge: Polity, 1991, footnote p. 31.  Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 203. 33  Wilkinson and Pickett, pp. 204–205. 31

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phrase alone could be (and has been) used to justify much barbarity. Then by the early twentieth century, Nature and the idea of the Nation—of various nations—had formed at least two rather contradictory kinds of alliances. Modern attitudes to Nature have always been full of contradictions, or even, as Maria Kaika puts it, “quintessentially schizophrenic”.34 Nature and the Space of the Nation There was first of all the post-Romantic association of the idealized nation of various countries with a dreamy and much less violent vision of nature than the “survival of the fittest” one—the nation imagined as a sparsely populated or deserted, pleasant, aesthetically appealing landscape to be admired from a position of rest, inspiring peace and calm. In the 1880s and 1890s poet-magician W.B. Yeats simultaneously conjured up images of the magical “waters and the wild” of the West of Ireland and an idea of a “de-anglicized” nation of Ireland. There was of course a long-­established tradition of co-opting images of the natural landscape for national iconography in many countries. The external as well as internal decoration of many European public buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries include so many references to the natural landscape and the fruits of the land. In the age of electricity, skyscrapers and industrialized warfare, many nations seemed particularly to need to draw comfort and some sense of stability and national identity from promoting images of themselves as some kind of “green and pleasant land”. It was equally understandable that the England conjured up nostalgically by some of the young soldier-­ poets of the First World War was a peaceful rural idyll, where one might be surrounded by “all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, as in Edward Thomas’s poem “Adlestrop”. National governments promoted the identification of the nation with images of the natural landscape of its territory in both wartime and peacetime propaganda campaigns. Posters of the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) campaign depict emphatically jubilant Aryans beaming in their Volkswagen against the romantic backdrop of a clearly equally Aryan alp or a bend in the Rhine. The alliteration of “Blut und Boden” [blood and soil], a phrase associated with R.W.  Darré, Nazi Minister for Agriculture, lent itself to an act of prestidigitation, one might say, magically persuading more or less rational people that human beings grew out of the soil like trees. This is a trick  Maria Kaika, City of Flows, New York and London: Routledge, 2005, p. 14.

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performed by modern nations generally: if the national population could be imagined as somehow rooted in a Romantic landscape, nation and nature were truly one. On the other hand, Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and the evolution of species were soon transferred to fears about the lack of healthy evolution (out of and away from raw nature) and possible physical degeneration (back into the animal kingdom) of large swathes of the national populations of various European countries and their fitness to fight coming up to the First World War. It was Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton who founded the journal Eugenics in 1883. Eugenics, “the science of human heredity and art of human breeding”35—a little bit of genetic engineering promoting the “good” genes and “removing” (one way or another) the others to enable the “breeding” of healthy, well-developed national populations—caught on in too many countries in the early twentieth century, with the establishment of Eugenics societies and the holding of International Eugenics Conferences in London and New York between 1912 and 1932.36 It did not take such a leap of the imagination to get from these ideas to the “modern fertilizing process” carried out by scientists under laboratory conditions in the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” at the opening of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932). Nor—as we now know—was it such a leap to the gas chambers either. For Zygmunt Bauman the “spirit of modernity” was characterized by what he calls “gardening ambitions” and he opens a section headed “the practice of the gardening state” quoting Frederick the Great: It annoys me to see how much trouble is taken to cultivate pineapples, bananas and other exotic plants in this rough climate, when so little care is given to the human race. Whatever people say, a human being is more valuable than all the pineapples in the world. He is the plant we must breed […].37

Immediately afterwards Bauman quotes R.W.  Darré, subsequently Nazi Minister of Agriculture, who in 1930 wrote the following:

 Quoted by Bauman in Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 32.  Bauman mentions how between 1907 and 1928 21 states of the U.S. enacted “eugenic sterilization laws”. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 36. 37  Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 27. 35 36

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He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds […]. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who […] carefully tends what needs tending, and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light and sun … Thus […] questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought [….] We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very centre of its culture.

Bauman suggests that this was the kind of attitude that prevailed not just in Nazi Germany with well-known disastrous consequences, but that characterized in large measure “the spirit of modernity” itself, a spirit that was inclined to view society and the state as a garden in which order was maintained and actively produced by “ruthlessly eliminating the weeds”, whoever it was decided these were. In modern times (particularly around the early twentieth century), Nature—and the human population—was to be shaped, manipulated, managed efficiently and ruthlessly by the gardener government in power that had the means to do so. This was a view that could be traced back to enlightenment ideas associating the growing of pineapples and populations. One might think also of the British policy of “plantations” in Ireland and of the long history of the “enclosures” in Britain, both of which shaped the landscape and the population for a very long time indeed.38 It seems that horticulture and agriculture have a lot to answer for. To sum up: on the one hand, it seems that the “survival of the fittest” view of nature could be used to justify any kind of harsh brutality (on the part of species and states), and, on the other, rather contradictorily, the state could be seen as a garden whose plants needed to be protected from the “harsh rule of natural forces” (by “ruthlessly eliminating the weeds,” of course). 38  Stephen Daniels and Briony McDonagh give a ‘thick description’ of the long process of enclosures and landscape change in Northamptonshire in England going back further than the parliamentary enclosures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mentioning how “like the slave trade or the Irish famine, enclosure has been enlisted as one of the social crime scenes in the global narrative of modernization…” Their focus in the paper is more specific. Already between 1578 and 1607, they write, “more than 27,000 acres in the county [of Northamptonshire] had been enclosed and almost 1500 people evicted.” Daniels and McDonagh, “Enclosure Stories: Narratives from Northamptonshire”, Cultural Geographies, 19(1), 2012, pp. 107–121.

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Michel Foucault would call this “a biopolitics of the human race”.39 The twenty-first century “culture of cruelty” described by Giroux above just carries on the tradition, a tradition that has all too often become “second nature”.

III. Post-Christian … Post-Extractivist? Digging Deeper So much of the above has to do less with real attitudes to nature itself than with the use—or misuse—of a certain idea of nature—especially Darwin’s idea of Natural Selection—for particular human political purposes. It has, however, been argued that, despite Darwin, Western attitudes to nature itself have in fact remained fundamentally all too influenced by not so benign aspects of Christian tradition. In an article with the title “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, Lynn White suggests that it was particularly the Christian story of creation that established man’s dominance over the rest of nature and writes that it was Christianity, “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen”, that “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends”.40 Whereas in Antiquity “every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci”, by “destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects”. It was this attitude, White suggests, in tandem with the Western traditions of Technology and Science that were themselves “cast in a matrix of Christian theology”, that has brought us to our ecological crisis: Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of

39  See Michel Foucault, Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, Fontana and Bertani (eds.) (trans. by Macey), London: Penguin, 2004. 40  Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”, Science, New Series, 155(3767), Mar. 10, 1967, pp. 1203–1207, p. 1205, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1720120 (accessed 13.9.2019).

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the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. (p. 1206)

This was the kind of attitude which prevailed in the Western traditions of science and technology which White also briefly explores, pointing out, though it seems almost stupid, as he says, to “verbalize it”, that “both modern technology and modern science are distinctively Occidental”. Certainly, Western science is “heir to all the sciences of the past, especially perhaps to the work of the great Islamic scientists of the Middle Ages”, but “by the late 13th century Europe had seized global scientific leadership from the faltering hands of Islam” (p.  1204). It has, then, been a particularly Western tradition of science and technology combined with a Western Christianity inclined to assure man of his God-given superiority to nature that has brought us to this pass. White, of course, is not alone in casting a critical eye on the Western scientific tradition. In Modernity and Ambivalence, Bauman writes that: “Modern science was born out of the overwhelming ambition to conquer Nature and subordinate it to human needs” (p. 39). This is the first line of a section suggestively headed “Science, rational order, genocide”. In 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer were making similar connections. They open Dialectic of Enlightenment by referring to Francis Bacon, the “father of experimental philosophy” and of the Enlightenment itself, “the program” of which was “the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy”: “the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. […] What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.”41 Lynn White also refers to Bacon and suggests, “The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850” (p. 1203). But of course, that is when it really took off—in “widespread practice”. There was surely another side to science too of course. Not all scientists have been out to “conquer Nature and subordinate it to human needs”. Surely very many modern scientists have been inspired by a desire not to “conquer Nature”, but to understand better how the natural world works out of genuine interest, without ulterior motive. It is science too which  Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, p. 3f.

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has revealed how much human activity has damaged the natural environment, and it has in fact been mainly scientists who have argued that human beings need to change their ways in order to stop destroying Nature altogether. One should equally point out that there was of course also much more to the influence of Christianity than the promotion of human beings’ sense of superiority over the rest of nature and the justification of man’s ruthless exploitation of nature. White looks back to the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi, “the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ” as embodying “an Alternative Christian View” and a rather more ecological one. As he writes: The key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures. (p. 1206)

Saint Francis, according to White, “proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it”. Having argued that the “roots of our trouble are so largely religious”, White suggests that “the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not” (p.  1207). We must rethink the tradition we’ve come from—because it continues to have such a deep influence on how we think and act. White ends by proposing Francis as a “patron saint for ecologists”. One may perhaps take solace then from the fact that the present Roman Catholic Pope chose the name Francis for himself and refers directly to Francis of Assisi—“the patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology”42—in the title and opening of his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Sì’” on the subject of the relationship between human beings and the environment, “our common home”. He is clearly re-emphasizing the more eco-friendly side of the Christian tradition that White was also interested in reviving—the Christianity not of mastery and power over the natural world and other human beings, but of Christ-like humility, of Saint Francis’s famed respectful attitude of fellowship towards the natural world. The Pope even (very) briefly concedes that an “inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology” may have had the less benign influence White 42  Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Sì’, http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/ pdf/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf, p. 9.

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mentioned too, leading to a “wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world” and a “Promethean vision of mastery over the world” (p. 87). Saint Francis of Assisi, on the other hand, “would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name ‘brother’ or ‘sister’” and Pope Francis writes: If we approach nature and the environment without this openness [of Saint Francis] to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters […]. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled. (p. 11)

All too often, however, and particularly over the past 200 years, reality has been turned “into an object simply to be used and controlled”. The Pope is clearly arguing for a very fundamental and wide-ranging change of attitude; it is for him much more than a matter of replacing a few lightbulbs with energy-efficient ones. It is not even “just” a problem of global warming and climate change: this issue cannot be extricated from the social question of how people view and treat each other. What both White and the Pope appear to suggest is that the fundamental problem is an attitude of mastery towards the natural environment (and other people, as the Pope argues—and Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out long before), a “Promethean vision of mastery over the world” that the Pope concedes came from an “inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology” and White considers was very directly inherited from Christianity. Both propose the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi as offering an alternative model for relating to the world, relating to both the natural environment and other human beings in a spirit of (Franciscan) fellowship, rather than mastery. One wonders whether, in writing of that “Promethean vision of mastery over the world”, Pope Francis was thinking of Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. When White claimed that it was only really after 1850 that “the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature” really became widespread, perhaps this had something to do with the percolating influence of Darwin/Spencer’s view of nature as “the survival of

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the fittest” and the naturalization of all struggles for power inferred from it. The new scientific view of the “origin of species” rather put into question the Christian worldview and the benign aspects and moral restraints of the Christian tradition—humility, non-violence, reverence and so forth. It also surely served to undermine certain Enlightenment ideas about civilization—ideals of civilized, rational, “enlightened” democratic behaviour and society—and the benign aspects and moral restraints associated with this tradition. At the same time the idea of “the survival of the fittest” continued and added (fossil) fuel to the darker, less benign traditions of both Christianity and the Enlightenment—viewing man as lord over nature and promoting the use of calculating, instrumental reason to exploit everything and everyone around. Naomi Klein uses the term “extractivism” to characterize the attitude that has prevailed in the West since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, a belief in the virtue of extracting raw materials from the earth, a “nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking”.43 She too, like Adorno and Horkheimer and White, looks back to the figure of Francis Bacon, even suggesting this Francis as the “patron saint” of the “modern-day extractive economy”, quoting him enjoining the reader to “as it were hound nature in her wanderings” and not “to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object” (170). This was the birth of our tragedy: “These ideas of a completely knowable and controllable earth animated not only the Scientific Revolution but, critically, the colonial project as well, which sent ships crisscrossing the globe to poke and prod and bring the secrets, and wealth, back to their respective crowns” (170). The fossil-fuel-burning engines and machines of the Industrial Revolution greatly speeded up the process of extraction and required ever more extraction—to fuel the extraction process itself. Klein also brings out in her brief history of the world since the Scientific Revolution, rather like Adorno and Horkheimer (and indeed Pope Francis), how the attitude to nature as a collection of resources to be extracted and exploited coincided with a similar attitude to people—to be colonized and/or exploited as cheap “human resources”. The “great power of fossil fuels”, with their “promise of liberation from nature”, “is what allows today’s multinationals to scour the globe for the 43  Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, London: Penguin, 2015, p. 169.

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cheapest, most exploitable workforce, with natural features and events that once appeared as obstacles—vast oceans, treacherous landscapes, seasonal fluctuations—no longer even registering as minor annoyances. Or so it seemed for a time” (173f.). The history of “extractivism” may be coming to an end—as humanity is forced to face both the depletion of the earth’s natural resources and the disastrous consequences associated with climate change. It is high time, Klein argues, to get “beyond extractivism”—to extract ourselves, one might say, from this historical hole. The first thing one should do in such a situation, according to proverbial wisdom, is to stop digging. Crusoe Sows the Seeds Perhaps the literary archetype of Western “extractivism” (and Urvater of modern Western man) was Daniel Defoe’s character Robinson Crusoe, whose shipwreck occurs precisely as he is “scour[ing] the globe for the cheapest, most exploitable workforce” and who quickly learns to “scour” his immediate natural environment for the resources he needs not just to survive but to thrive and prosper. Robinson Crusoe in some sense may be said to have fathered several modern offspring: the modern-day DIY enthusiast, the extreme adventure-seeking holidaymaker, the twenty-first-­ century “forager”, and Tom, the character played by Richard Briers in the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life. In some sense Robinson Crusoe can be seen as having been the founding father of a family of ideas and desires growing through Western modernity: ideas and desires to do with escape from Western modernity itself; escape from the “trappings” of increasingly urban, bureaucratic, industrial, rationalized civilization involving an ever-­ increasing division of labour and demanding ever more specialization on the part of individuals; escape to start afresh and from scratch, to learn how to be self-sufficient, get back to basics, get “back to Nature” of course, as a way of getting back to one’s human nature. As Ian Watt writes, “If Robinson Crusoe’s character depends very largely on the psychological and social orientations of economic individualism, the appeal of his adventures to the reader seems mainly to derive from another important ­concomitant of modern capitalism, economic specialization.”44 However, Crusoe’s character himself clearly does manifest the “psychological and social orientations of economic individualism” and appears to rather  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, London: Penguin, 1985, p. 78.

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naively conform to—or simply express—the developing mainstream, capitalist, imperialist, “extractivist” attitude to the natural (and human) environment that has prevailed in Western modernity (while accompanied by an undercurrent of nostalgia, regret and utopian desire for an alternative). Crusoe may not quite get as far as digging for coal or drilling for oil but he clearly sees Nature as a collection of resources to be used rather than admired as either “beautiful” or “sublime”, or held up as a superior counterpart to civilization in any Romantic or post-Romantic fashion. In fact, readers will probably be amused at how, almost immediately after his shipwreck, Crusoe so coolly maintains his “business is business” (and very much busy-ness) outlook and very hastily sets about single-handedly rebuilding the main features of the society he has left—even though this will be a “civilization for one”. As Terry Eagleton says, “We half expect him to open a corner shop.”45 Clearly not wishing—in his utter solitude— to do without the aspiring middle-class essential life-strategy of one-up-­ man-ship (more Margot here, in terms of The Good Life, than Tom), Crusoe proudly tells the reader that he has not just one, but two residences on the island, referring to his huts as his “country-house” and his “sea-­ coast house”, and he has established two “plantations”. Conveniently for Crusoe, Man Friday turns up just as he is looking for an extra pair of hands to help with his expanding business. By the end of the novel what had been in the era B(efore) C(rusoe) a deserted natural paradise has been turned into Crusoe’s personal “collony” to which he “sends” “women, being such as found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them” and “a good cargoe of necessaries”, so that all can be used in the process of “planting”.46 The lesson is clear, Ian Watt suggests: “Follow the call of the wide-open places, discover an island that is desert only because it is barren of owners or competitors, and there build your personal Empire with the help of a Man Friday who needs no wages and makes it much easier to support the white man’s burden.”47  Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 36  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 2nd last paragraph. 47  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Penguin, 1985, p. 96. A rather different reading is offered by Steve Mentz who emphasizes the contemporary relevance of Defoe’s story of survival as an “allegory of the human response to ecological disaster” and argues that “Crusoe’s shipwreck points to a symbolic renovation of swimming as a way of responding to eco-catastrophe”. Steve Mentz, “‘Making the Green One Red’: Dynamic Ecologies in Macbeth, Edward Barlow’s Journal, and Robinson Crusoe”, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 13(3), 2013, pp. 66–83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/jearlmodcultstud.13.3.66, p. 76. 45 46

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The era of global trade discovered a whole world of Nature—and human beings—just waiting to be used. Terry Eagleton describes Defoe’s writing as “flushed with the buoyancy and boundless vitality of capitalism in its pristine stage”: In an essay entitled ‘The Divinity of Trade’, he [Defoe] sees Nature itself as a kind of capitalist, who in its unfathomable bourgeois wisdom has made bodies able to float so that we can build ships in which to trade; has hung out stars by which merchants can navigate; and has carved out rivers which lead straight to the eminently plunderable resources of other countries. Animals have been made meekly submissive so that we may exploit them as instruments or raw materials […]. Short of manufacturing the oceans out of Coca-Cola or implanting in us a biological need for Nike footwear, Nature has scarcely missed a trick.48

Where this attitude might lead is now fairly clear. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has a guest appearance in Max Weber’s narrative tracing a historical relationship between Protestant asceticism and the rise of capitalism over centuries. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Crusoe is very briefly mentioned as encapsulating the transition from religious asceticism to ascetic capitalism. This is the point where “as in Robinson Crusoe, the isolated economic man who carries on missionary activities on the side takes the place of the lonely spiritual search for the Kingdom of Heaven of Bunyan’s pilgrim, hurrying through the market-place of Vanity.”49 While Weber’s principle focus is on the relationship between Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, in the closing pages he also shows a prophetic insight into the likely future development of the relationship between capitalism and what might come to be called “extractivism”. He famously comes up with the dark image of the “iron cage” to describe the constraining world economic and cultural order the capitalist journey was leading humanity into, and suggests the possibility that, failing the ­appearance of “entirely new prophets” or of a “great rebirth of old ideas and ideals”, one might end up with “mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance”. He does also, however, men Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction, p. 26.  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Routledge, 2007, p. 119.

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tion something that might forcefully bring about an end to the 400-year-­ long history he has been describing—and a new beginning: [W]hen asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism […] with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.50

If that is what might free us from the “iron cage”, it sounds like a “consummation devoutly to be wished”. On the other hand, one might find it depressing to think that the human race will have to wait till then before one can expect any fundamental change of direction. Robinson Lives! As a footnote to the narratives of Defoe—and indeed Weber—one might mention Patrick Keiller’s film essay Robinson in Ruins (2010). About to survey the contemporary English landscape around Oxford, the narrator of Robinson in Ruins quotes a passage from Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (1996): “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” Both were somewhat easier to imagine by 2008 as Keiller made his film, juxtaposing images of the English countryside including many fenced-off military installations and ruins of the twentieth-century industry with day-­by-­day headlines of the unfolding financial crisis that September as well as reports from climate scientists. This is put in a much wider historical context too as the “postnatural” landscape reveals a history of Enclosures, appropriation and expropriation going back to Elizabethan times. From a car park Robinson had at the outset surveyed “the centre of the island on which he was shipwrecked”: “the location”, he wrote, “of a Great Malady”. 50  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 123.

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IV. Posthuman, Postnaturally and Post-­Apocalyptic—The Last Post(s)? In the meantime, we have become “postmodern”, according to some, “posthuman” according to others, if not yet “post-extractivist”. The late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century “posthumanist” case rests partly on the breaking down of a conceptual boundary separating humans and animals, ultimately deriving from the implications of Darwin. This was one of the three “crucial boundary breakdowns” behind Donna Haraway’s talk of chimeras and cyborgs in “The Cyborg Manifesto”; the other dissolving boundaries, according to Haraway, are those between the organism and the machine and even that between the physical and non-physical. Humans, she argues, need to recognize that they are cyborgs—hybrids of biology and technology, nature and artifice. Frankenstein’s “monster”, one might say, had children after all.51 It might not be so easy—or desirable—to isolate humanity from (the rest of) nature (or technology) any more, to assume that an anthropocentric perspective is the only or the best way to see things, as has been assumed for so long. As Francesca Ferrando writes: “In contemporary academic debate, ‘posthuman’ has become a key term to cope with an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-­epistemological as well as scientific and bio-technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”52 Of course, if humanity may no longer be thought of as what it once was, the same might be said of nature too: posthuman nature is perhaps a kind of postnature. Bruno Latour indeed declares: “we are postnatural.” It is ironic—and Latour sees irony here too53—that, if there are eco-­ friendly motives behind post-anthropocentric posthumanism, and an attempt to overcome anthropocentric attitudes to nature that served only 51  Kim Hammond suggested that “from Haraway’s amodern perspective we can read the ‘being’ [Frankenstein’s monster] as a cyborg symbol of technoscience”. Hammond, “Monsters of Modernity: Frankenstein and Modern Environmentalism”, Cultural Geographies, 11, 2004, pp. 181–198, p. 193. 52  Francesca Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations”, Existenz, 8(2), Fall 2013, pp. 26–32. 53  Bruno Latour, “Waiting for Gaia…”, p. 3: “What is so ironic with this anthropocene is that it comes just when vanguard philosophers were speaking of our time as that of the ‘posthuman’; and just at the time when other thinkers were proposing to call this same moment the ‘end of history’.

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short-term (and ultimately self-destructive) human-centred goals, these have come just precisely at a time when it is too late, when we have arrived, as Adorno put it, at “the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans.” The posthuman, one might say, is in fact, “all too human”, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase. Adorno continues: “it is permanent catastrophe, along with a catastrophic event caused by humans themselves, in which nature has been extinguished and nothing grows any longer.”54 The catastrophe has perhaps been the result of a long-standing, dualistic notion of nature as our great Other, as the opposite of culture and civilization. This, according to Latour, has been the Modern “ideology of ‘nature’”, an ideology that attributed “exteriority” to objects, insisting on “seeing things from the outside”, from “the vantage point of the universe” rather than the “vantage point of the earth”, allowing “nature-as-­universe” to obscure “nature-as-process” and that “introduced into the notion of ‘nature’ a confusion from which we have still not been extricated”.55 This persistent view may however have been undermined somewhat, on the one hand, by the theory of evolution establishing continuities between humans and the natural world—and also, on the other, by the all-­ encompassing effects of the “anthropocene”, the rapidly advancing progress of human civilization colonizing every inch and every aspect of the globe, to the extent that nothing remains unaffected by human activity. Nothing remains that “was not made by humans” and “nature has been extinguished”. What people mean when they use the term “postmodern” seems to be in part precisely this, the sense that this is an era when “culture has subsumed nature”, as Dana Phillips writes, and it seems we have “found a substitute for ‘the natural world’” in the postmodern world where “nature no longer seems to be necessary”.56 One might think of Jean Baudrillard’s characterization of the (late twentieth century) age of “Simulacra and Simulations” as a map—a human, cultural artefact—with no territory/ 54  Theodor W. Adorno, and Michael T. Jones, “Trying to Understand Endgame”, New German Critique, no. 26, 1982, pp.  119–150, p.  122f., JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/488027, https://doi.org/10.2307/488027. 55  Bruno Latour, Down to Earth (trans. by Catherine Porter) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018, pp. 64–74. 56  Dana Phillips, “Is Nature Necessary?”, in Glotfelty and Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp.  204–222, p.  213 and p. 215.

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landscape/nature preceding it.57 If, once upon a time, humanity almost realized that nature was the stuff it was made of, nowadays nature seems increasingly to be the stuff made by humans—at least with human fingerprints (and carbon footprints) (and plastic) all over it. Latour suggests an appropriate term to describe the present is “postnatural”: “We are not postmodern”, he writes, “but, yes, we are postnatural.”58 However, while Adorno’s comments on Beckett’s Endgame suggesting that “nature has been extinguished” certainly encapsulate a feeling that has become increasingly widespread, these times are also simultaneously haunted by the fear that Nature has not gone away at all, but is about to strike back, or is already striking back in almost apocalyptic fashion—and this is conceived in anthropomorphic/anthropocentric language of course, as “striking back”, as “revenge”. When the floodwaters are not actually lapping at the door or around the sofa, early twenty-first-century children of the “anthropocene” can sit back and enjoy the “clifi”—a genre of entertainment appropriate for the era of climate change.59 Films such as The Day after Tomorrow (2004) provide a little post-sublime titillation, still “delightfully” giving the audience an “idea of pain and danger” without them actually “being in such circumstances”—though of course they may be “the day after tomorrow”. Watching catastrophe on screen can be cathartic. The truly awesome becomes merely “awesome!!!!” More austerely, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) told a grim tale of grim survival in a hostile post-apocalyptic landscape, the “ruins of 57  Baudrillard was, of course, turning around a tale by Borges according to which the “cartographers of the empire” drew up a map so detailed that it covered the entire territory of the empire itself. With the decline of the empire, the map disintegrated until it was nothing but a frayed fragment and the territory underneath was revealed again. In the late twentieth century, however, according to Baudrillard, the territory no longer precedes the map at all; in fact, it is the landscape of the territory itself that has decayed and all we are left with is the map itself—a world of “simulacra and simulations”. 58  Latour, “Waiting for Gaia…”, p. 9. 59  They may also be inspired to go out themselves and take a few ‘pics’ of perhaps what David Matless terms “the Anthroposcenic”—“landscape emblematic of processes marking the Anthropocene”. Matless, “The Anthroposcenic”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(3), 2017, p. 363. The scene Matless explores here is the result of erosion on the East Anglian coastal landscape. ‘Anthroposcenic’ perhaps suggests more serene calmness than the kind of extreme weather events that appear to bring out the urge in many of us to engage in some sublime aesthetic-erotic flirtation with the possibility of ‘pain and danger’ up close—and take ‘selfies’ of ourselves doing it. Anthroposcenery anyone? Or perhaps Umweltkatastrophenfreude?

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nature and culture alike”, as one critic has written,60 “permeated”, in the words of another, “with the ashes and bones of a ruined America” after the end of civilization.61 Locations remain generally vague in the novel and time seems to have stopped, like the clocks, at 1:17, less than forty years ago.62 As De Bruyn comments, “when nature and culture are devastated, the novel shows, the meanings we have attached to space and time dissolve”. We are left with a “non-world”, the “absolute nowhere of global ruin”.63 It seems that in the first decade of the twenty-first century the end of the road was in sight.64 Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” (1952) can be read as an early example of twentieth-century “clifi”. While Hitchcock’s famous film (1963) apparently domesticates the disaster, turning it into a domestic, oedipal affair, where the very angry birds seem to embody, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, a “discord, an unresolved tension” “in the intersubjective relations between the main characters”65 (the mother, the son and his prospective love interest), du Maurier’s story is quite different. The sudden aggression of air-borne flocks of wild birds in rural Cornwall and all over Britain is compared to the wartime air-raids the British experienced in the 1940s, but the reason for these attacks is ultimately inexplicable. The reader is just informed that “On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter” and nature—the birds—suddenly turns viciously against human beings, attacking, killing at random and 60  Ben De Bruyn, “Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes: Care, Ruin and Vision in McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism”, English Studies, 91(7), November 2010, 776–789, p. 776. 61  Peter Middleton, “Fictions of global crisis”, in David James (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 206. Middleton traces continuities in the evocation of disaster and apocalypse from early twentieth-century modernism (Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, James) to contemporary fiction. 62  Cormac McCarthy, The Road, London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2006, p. 54. 63  De Bruyn, “Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes…”, p. 782. 64  Theodore Martin points out that however much the never explained apocalypse has reduced life in the novel to the barest minimum, it has apparently given the father something rather valuable—the “ability to work in direct, unalienated relationship to the ruined world around him”. Martin rightly suggests that “survival offers its own satisfactions in The Road”. Theodore Martin, “Survival: Work and Plague” in Contemporary Drift, New  York: Columbia University Press, 2017. One might thus perhaps compare The Road with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as novels concerned not just with survival after disaster, but with the satisfaction of doing physical work, of getting away from a modern world of alienated work and doing it oneself. 65  Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 98f.

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apparently threatening not just the local rural population, but the British state, the whole of Europe and human civilization itself.66 One might say the 1950s left us two apparently contradictory, yet equally persuasive visions of the apocalypse we now supposedly inhabit, a postnatural version and a literally posthuman one: Beckett’s Endgame (1957), according to Adorno, shows us a “condition” in which there is “no more nature” and “no remainder of what was not made by humans”; du Maurier’s “The Birds” (1952) leaves us with an image of a world in which there will soon be no more humans and where there will be “no remainder” of what was “made by humans”. These two apocalyptic visions seem to alternate in our consciousness. Maybe there is a feeling abroad that humanity is somehow slipping or flipping from a postnatural to a truly “posthuman” apocalypse—as a result of the very excesses of the “anthropocene”, an apparently almost complete victory of humanity over nature. The very fact that this term “anthropocene” has been coined could be taken to suggest that this human-­ dominated era may be nearing its end. About to smoke the “last fag” in the barricaded house, the central character of “The Birds”, Nat Hocken, “listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.”67 Du Maurier’s birds even silence the BBC.

66  This is perhaps an example of what Middleton terms “wild agency”. Peter Middleton, “Fictions of global crisis”. 67  Daphne du Maurier, The Birds & Other Stories, London: Virago Press, 2004, p. 38.

CHAPTER 3

The Space of the City

The spirit of modernity has constantly been defined in relation to the experience of life in the modern city—the modern city, as if there was only one. But increasingly, of course, there is only one, with the streets of cities and towns around the world lined with the same shop names, selling the same goods wherever one goes. This is the typical experience in what Rem Koolhaas dubbed the “Generic City”, the “post-city” with all the individual character of an international airport, where “the only activity is shopping”. “We didn’t think of anything better to do”, Koolhaas adds.1 Paul Virilio referred to the Meta-City, a global (or even “globalitarian”) city “whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere”— which, somewhat ironically, was a phrase Blaise Pascal used to describe Nature.2 If the city is the modern substitute of Nature—and, of course, it has increasingly literally taken its place over the past 150 years—one might say its shopping centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. “A city!”, Le Corbusier declared in The City of To-morrow, “is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature.”3 With noticeably less enthusiasm, Debord described that operation in The 1  Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City”, in Koolhaas and Mau, Small, Medium, Large, ExtraLarge, New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, pp. 1239–1264. 2  Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, London: Verso, 2005, p. 11. 3  Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow (trans. by F. Etchells), London: The Architectural Press, 1971, p. 1. Enthusing about how man’s combative relations with Nature (and apparently with Woman) lead to the building of ordered cities of straight lines and right angles, Le

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kane, Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_3

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Society of the Spectacle thus: “Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar décor.”4

I. The Nineteenth-Century City The Flâneur Goes Shopping In his own example of urban sprawl, his massive, unfinished “Arcades project”, Walter Benjamin traces the origins of the early-twentieth-­century department store to the Passages of Paris that were built in the early nineteenth century using the then new construction material of iron. These passages were “a recent invention of industrial luxury”, as one Illustrated Guide to Paris put it, “glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings” lined with “the most elegant shops”. “The passage”, the guide continued, “is a city, a world in miniature”.5 Already in the early nineteenth century, it seems, city, world and shopping mall were merging into one. All the world’s a passage, a shopping mall, and all the men and women merely consumers. In the late twentieth century Zygmunt Bauman named the stroller, and in particular, the consumer strolling around shopping malls, as a character typical of postmodernity, a distant descendant, he suggests, of Benjamin’s nineteenth-century flâneur, the man of leisure, idly strolling around the streets of Paris, but presumably not quite yet a member of the consumer society. For Bauman, it took quite a while for strolling around the city, once the activity of a minority leisure class, to mutate into pushing “strollers” around shopping malls, now “life itself” in postmodern times.6

Corbusier later writes: “Man undermines and hacks at Nature. He opposes himself to her, he fights with her, he digs himself in”, p. 30. 4  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (trans. by Nicholson-Smith), New York: Zone Books, 1995, paragraph 169, p. 121. On Debord and urban space see David Pinder, “Old Paris is no more”: Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle”, Antipode, 32(4), 2000, pp. 357–386. 5  Walter Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (Exposé of 1935), in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (trans. by Eiland and McLaughlin), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 3. 6  Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 92f.

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Walter Benjamin somewhat telescopes this development in his discussion of the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire as a flâneur. The gaze of the flâneur Baudelaire turns on the city is the gaze, as Benjamin interprets it, of the alienated man. Standing on the threshold between the middle class and the metropolis, but at home in neither, the flâneur, Benjamin tells us, seeks refuge in the crowd, “the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria”. Already here Benjamin sees the flâneur ending up doing his wandering through the aisles of the department store, “which makes use of flânerie itself to sell goods”. “The department store is the last promenade for the flâneur.”7 Flâneurs, crowds, phantasmagoria, department stores, goods. In the course of his discussion of flâneurs, Benjamin refers to a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), which begins by mentioning a phrase in German, “es laesst sich nicht lesen”, [it does not permit itself to be read] that could be said of a particularly unreadable book. The suggestion is that the Man of the Crowd himself is such a book, an impenetrable mystery, just as crowds in general and the city itself might be said to be unreadable, a subject whose story cannot be told except perhaps as a rambling detective story such as this one—a story with no crime, with no real detective and not much of a story either. Benjamin, however, manages to read the clues linking the flâneur’s fascination with crowds in nineteenth-century cities and a culture increasingly intoxicated with a particular kind of circulation, the circulation of commodities.8 Benjamin appreciates the fact that Poe’s story includes, “along with the earliest description of the flâneur, the figuration of his end”, for at one point Poe’s man enters a department store and “roamed through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city”.9 7  Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 10. 8  Richard Sennett points to a strange coincidence between William Harvey’s discoveries about the circulation of the blood and the birth of modern capitalism: “The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being. […] Adam Smith imagined the free market of labor and goods operating much like freely circulating blood within the body.” Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York, London: Norton, 1996, p. 255f. Sennett also “traces the path from Harvey’s discoveries about circulation in the body to the urban planning of the eighteenth century”, relating this to the spatial design of revolutionary Paris, Edwardian London and contemporary New York, all under the heading of “Arteries and Veins”. 9  Benjamin, “The Flâneur” in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (trans. by H. Zohn), London: Verso, 1997, p. 54.

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Mingle, Tingle Baudelaire had also referred to Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”, comparing the narrator of the story to the subject of his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859), the painter and illustrator Constantin Guy. Both are fascinated with fleeting impressions; both are like a child, who “sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk” (presumably no longer really like a child in that respect)—drunk that is, with “brightly coloured impressions”. Baudelaire’s emphasis on these fleeting, “brightly coloured impressions” and often quoted description of modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” have been seen as anticipating the spirit of Impressionist art. It could be said that the experience of modern life in the modern city (since the early nineteenth century) inevitably gives rise to a kind of impressionism, a view of life as consisting of countless fleeting impressions and fragments, where one’s field of vision wherever one looks is crowded with so many different things, moving in so many different directions at such speed, that it all becomes a bit of a blur. Baudelaire describes his “Painter of Modern Life” as a flâneur: “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. […] The lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity.”10 In his poem “Les Foules” (“The Crowds”) (1869) Baudelaire writes not only of “mystérieuses ivresses” (mysterious intoxications) at the heart of the crowd, but of “des jouissances fiévreuses” (feverish ecstasies), “cette ineffable orgie” (this ineffable orgy), “cette sainte prostitution de l’âme” (this sacred prostitution of the soul).11 Around the same time Walt Whitman was “singing” “the body electric” and giving a poem the title “City of Orgies” (1867). These literary flâneurs appear to derive much tingling from all that mingling. Benjamin, however, sees things a little more soberly: “The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers.”12 The world of nineteenth-­ 10  Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (trans. by P.E.  Charvet), London: Penguin, 2010, p. 12f. 11  See http://www.theflaneur.co.uk/lesfoules.html for an English translation of Baudelaire’s poem. 12  Benjamin, “The Flâneur”, p. 55.

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century capitalism was a strange place, it seems, where human beings became commodities, and commodities went out and got drunk, but then this capitalist confusion/merging of people and things has often been pointed out.13 The flâneur, for Benjamin, is indeed alienated man, a man who has become himself a commodity, just as other men had become commodities, as labour power to be bought and sold for profit (or subsistence— depending on one’s point of view). The flâneur was not just the prospective consumer, then, but also about to become the consumed. As the city of passages has been succeeded by the city of shopping centres, the flâneur has been succeeded by the strolling consumer, as Bauman points out, and latterly the flâneur is just as likely to be strolling (or “zapping”) through the “telecity” of screens, browsing through the virtual department store/city/world of the internet.14 On screen, online browsing has nowadays seemingly become almost the main occupation of human beings; browsing has become how people literally look at the world and at life. Here too, in the virtual world of the internet-flâneur, one might say, the prospective consumer becomes the commodity (to be exchanged between search engines and advertisers); the browser (in every sense) becomes the browsed. “The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers”, Benjamin wrote. Put like that it sounds as if the supposedly independentman-of-­leisure-flâneur, wandering around the streets for his pleasure, is deriving pleasure from surrendering that very independence, the sense of mastery and control one might associate with the male bourgeois individual of the nineteenth century. This is a case of the highly controlled, restrained, self-­consciously respectable and stiffly attired nineteenth-century bourgeois gentleman flirting with “surrendering” all that restraint, respectability and control, “going with the flow” of the crowd—and perhaps becoming, in his own eyes, in these moments of “surrender”, “womanly”.15 In any case, the flâneur was certainly flirting 13  In Great Expectations, Dickens offers several amusing instances where people become like things and things become surprisingly animated in the eyes of the young Pip. Both Dorothy van Ghent and Terry Eagleton make the connection between this role reversal and the realities of nineteenth-century capitalism. 14  Bauman, Life in Fragments, p. 93. 15  Gustave LeBon, in his Psychologie des Foules (1895), compared “les foules” and “les femmes”.

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with the boundaries of respectable, bourgeois masculinity, temporarily going over to its flipside, in indulging in “jouissances”, “ineffable orgies” and even “sainte prostitution”, the “sacred prostitution” of his self, that is, of his soul. Such were the antinomies of patriarchal, bourgeois civilization—complete restraint or complete lack of restraint, sobriety or drunkenness, sexual control or “ineffable orgy”—and they were so often projected along gender lines, class differences or national boundaries, as they are here on the “threshold”, as Benjamin puts it, between the bourgeoisie and the metropolis. More Soberly Not everyone found the big-city crowds intoxicating, as Benjamin points out immediately after this. For Friedrich Engels “the very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive”. Engels registers his shock at the “brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest” apparent on the faces of the crowds in the streets of London, where “each keeps to his own side of the pavement”.16 “The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate essence, and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.” Londoners have been “forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature” and a “hundred powers which slumbered within them […] have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully”. And it is in the city too that “the social war, the war of each against all” is openly declared and where “people regard each other only as useful objects”, “each exploits the other”, “the stronger treads the weaker under foot and the powerful few, the capitalists seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains”.17 Before Engels proceeds to describe in great, harrowing detail the living conditions of the working classes and provide a survey of mid-nineteenth-century life in British cities that is not exactly intoxicating, he informs us that during his stay in England “at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances”.  Quoted by Benjamin, “The Flâneur”, p. 58.  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (trans. by V. Kiernan), London: Penguin, 2009, p. 69. 16 17

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When Dickens’s character, the young Pip, arrives in London full of “Great Expectations” (presumably about 20 years before Engels) he does not find it so intoxicating either, though he does get a distinct whiff of alcohol off some of its greasier inhabitants, including an “exceedingly dirty and partially drunk minister of justice” who asked him if he “would like to step in and hear a trial or so”, for a small fee, promising a “full view of the Lord chief Justice in his wig and robes—mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and presently offering him at the reduced price of eighteen pence”.18 Great Expectations is a novel in which people in the city are often compared to inanimate objects/commodities and supposedly lifeless things become rather animated, usually to great comic effect. One thinks for example of Mr Wemmick, the lawyer’s clerk, whose duties apparently require him to present himself at the office with a “square wooden face” and “post-office of a mouth” so that he had the “mechanical appearance of smiling”. Pip notices how much his features soften the further he gets from the office and the closer he gets to his home in Walworth—and how his mouth and face tighten and harden again by degrees as he approaches the office. Wemmick in the city is a very sober version of Benjamin’s intoxicated flâneur, a “commodity around which surges the stream of customers”. A person must become an object in an environment where, as Engels found, “people regard each other only as useful objects”. Terry Eagleton writes in a chapter on Dickens: “We have entered a phase of social history in which the real power seems to have been taken over by material things … while human beings themselves, falling under their tyrannical sway, are reduced to the level of coalbuckets and candlesticks.”19 Carceral Uniformity, or the Fugitive in Phantasmagoria Very soon after Pip’s arrival in the big smoke we get the impression that the early-nineteenth-century city of London is not quite going to meet his expectations. In fact the first sights he is presented with by his enthusiastic tour guide, the said “partially drunk minister of justice”, are the precincts of Newgate Prison, a yard “where the gallows was kept, and also where people were publicly whipped, and then […] the Debtors’  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, London: Penguin, 2003, Vol. II, Chapter 1, p. 165.  Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 146.

18

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Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged”. Pip’s London could be said to be a pretty graphic example of the “carceral city” Michel Foucault writes of in Discipline and Punish. Foucault argues that since the late eighteenth century the same efficient means of surveillance, control and correction that were first developed to keep a large number of prisoners under observation in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon were increasingly employed in all kinds of other institutions such as schools, hospitals and factories as well. The general populace could thus be kept under control, could in fact be incarcerated, by a whole network of disciplinary institutions, very often actual buildings, such as the “grim stone building”, Pip is told is Newgate Prison. Foucault concludes Discipline and Punish with an extract describing the carceral city of Paris in 1836: “this is the plan of your Paris, neatly ordered and arranged, here is the improved plan in which all like things are gathered together. At the centre, and within a first enclosure: hospitals for all diseases, almshouses for all types of poverty, madhouses, prisons, convict-prisons for men, women and children. Around the first enclosure, barracks, court-rooms, police stations, houses for prison warders, scaffolds, houses for the executioner and his assistants. At the four corners, the Chamber of Deputies, the Chamber of Peers, the Institute and the Royal Palace.”20 In the carceral city, according to Foucault, the prison is “linked to a whole series of ‘carceral’ mechanisms which seem distinct enough—since they are intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort—but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization”.21 It is perhaps difficult to square this vision of modern times and the modern city as increasingly “carceral” with Baudelaire’s characterization of modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”. Surely the “fugitive” is precisely someone (or something) who (or which) flees incarceration. The modern city is frequently associated with the notions of constant rapid movement, change, of inconstancy in fact, of fleeting impressions, brief encounters, of overwhelming variety, of phantasmagoria. How then could it possibly be compared to a prison—which involves precisely the antithesis of freedom of movement, where discipline and uniformity rule out any hint of phantasmagoria? 20  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (trans. by A. Sheridan), London: Penguin, 1991, p. 307. 21  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 308.

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II. The Modern City Metropolis Georg Simmel weighs up these (or at least rather similar) opposing claims on the meaning of modern city life in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)—indeed here he even offers a psychological explanation of the link between phantasmagoria and uniformity. In his essay Simmel explored some of the psychological effects of the metropolitan environment and wrote of the city dweller’s reaction to the stress of city life. To deal with the constant assault on the nerves by an overwhelming number and variety of “stimuli”, people living in the city tend to develop a “protective organ”, that is, an over-developed intellect as well as a blasé attitude, to save having to respond to each new stimulus. In other words, faced with overwhelming phantasmagoria, city folk opt for uniformity and routine, shielding themselves from the “slings and arrows” of excessive “stimuli” with a “protective organ” which could put one in mind of the hard carapace of Gregor Samsa’s beetle-like back in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” (see below). Simmel also explores how the city environment itself tends to grind down individuality and favour the development of a rational, impersonal, objective culture. As the centre of the money economy the city promotes a calculating attitude, the reduction of the world “to an arithmetic problem”, the reduction “of all quality and individuality to the question ‘how much?’” The emphasis on quantity is reflected in the attitude to time. In the city we find the “punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule”. Simmel asks us to imagine the chaos that would result if all clocks and watches in Berlin were to “suddenly go wrong in different ways”. “Punctuality, calculability and exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence […]. These traits […] favour the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, and sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within.”22 22  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Frisby and Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture, London: Sage, 1997, p.  177. Simmel refers here to the “passionate hatred of men like Ruskin and Nietzsche for the metropolis” coming from an interest in the “unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision for all alike”. In The Gay Science Nietzsche voiced his objection to the over-rationalization of modern life, to what Simmel referred to as “the reduction of the world to an arithmetic problem”: “What? do we actually wish to have existence debased in that fashion to a ready-reckoner exercise and cal-

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Such arguments tend to reinforce the view that the metropolis does not in fact signify infinite variety, constant movement, phantasmagoria at all, but a flat and grey tone of infinite sameness. Yet Simmel also points out how the concentration of large numbers of people in a small space leads to an ever greater division of labour, or specialization and mentions, as an extreme example of this, the occupation of the quatorzièmes—“persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons”. Individual eccentricities of dress, manner, interests, character are also more likely to flourish in the city as people seek to stand out from the crowd. So, while city life in one sense grinds down the individual and favours the development of what he calls “objective culture” in which the individual becomes a “mere cog”, in another it promotes differentiation of individuals and further allows for an unprecedented degree of personal freedom, unimaginable in traditional, rural communities. There are two ways of looking at the city then, and Simmel manages to look both ways at once. Troglodytes and Traffic Jams: Dostoevsky and Kafka The triumph in the “carceral city” of “objective culture” in which the individual becomes a “mere cog” in the inhuman machinery of modernity is evidently part of what drives Dostoevky’s “underground man” underground, or at least to take refuge and moan loudly and profusely in the four walls of his apartment in St. Petersburg, “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world”.23 The only way for this city dweller to avoid becoming a “mere cog”, or, as he puts it, a “piano key” or an “organ stop” to be played on, to escape succumbing to the “conclusions of natural science and mathematics”, the “two times two makes four” mentality of rationalistic modernity and the feeling that he is a mere, predictable statistic or number himself, is to become the “sick”, “spiteful” and “unattractive”, self-conscious, irrational and contradictory urban “troglodyte” that he is. The only other way to avoid becoming a “mere cog”, Dostoevsky culation for stay-at-home mathematicians?” Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom/The Gay Science (trans. by T. Common), Macmillan, 1924, Aphorism. 373. Science as a prejudice. https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/n/nietzsche/friedrich/n67j/ (accessed 30.9.2019). 23  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (trans. by M. Katz), New York: Norton, 2001, p. 5.

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apparently suggested, was to rediscover the value of non-rational religious faith and a traditional Russian soul irrationally rooted in the soil.24 However spiteful and arrogant the Underground Man may seem, his spite and arrogance are clearly symptoms of his frustration at his lack of freedom, of his sense of being a prisoner of the “carceral city” of modern times. The hero of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, Gregor Samsa, can be seen as another prisoner of the city, another urban “troglodyte”, confined to his apartment bedroom. While the “underground man” becomes “sick, spiteful and unattractive” and a mass of self-destructive contradictions in order to avoid becoming a “mere cog”, Gregor Samsa appears to adopt the more straightforward strategy of transforming himself into an enormous beetle, for much the same reason. As he lies on the hard shell of his back with his pitifully thin little legs waving uncontrollably in the air, physically unable to get out of bed, he considers the exhausting, dehumanizing routine of his usual working life as a travelling salesman.25 His extraordinary metamorphosis into an “Ungeziefer”—some kind of vermin— appears to have saved him, for the moment, from that “rat race” of modern, urban commercial life.26 The absurdity of that life is brought into sharp focus by Kafka’s presentation of the thought processes of Gregor, who, as enormous beetle, still thinks in terms of the human “rat race” and suffers very modern, urban stress. Kafka’s writing so often captures “the experience of the modern big-­ city dweller”, as Walter Benjamin puts it, an experience Benjamin breaks down into two parts: the sense of being “at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom”; and some awareness of the great complexity of the world apprehended by modern science. To illustrate the latter, Benjamin quotes a passage from Arthur Stanley Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical 24  In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky complained that the censors had deleted a passage where he had “deduced from all this the necessity of faith and Christ”. Extract from letter reproduced in Norton edition, p. 96. 25  His physical transformation is, as Ruth V. Gross, puts it, “the only escape from his minddeadening existence”. Gross, “Kafka’s Short Fiction”, in Julian Preece (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 89. 26  One might well compare Henri Lefebvre’s description of the “untragic misery” of the “daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day”. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, selected, translated and introduced by E. Kofman and E. Lebas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 159.

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World on the physics—and the “physical” difficulties—involved in walking through a doorway, including Eddington’s conclusion that “verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door”.27 Gregor Samsa’s extraordinary exertions— as a modern big-city beetle—in opening the door of his room, slowly and painfully turning the key with his mouth, could be said in some way to bear this out. Or one might think of the man perpetually hoping to cross the threshold in Kafka’s story/parable “Vor dem Gesetz”—“Before the Law”. The experience of the “modern big-city dweller”, it seems, can involve extreme difficulty in moving through the smallest distances—if not “incarceration” in the “underground” or in the apartment—in an environment where everything seems to be moving at speed in different directions all the time. Life, as every “modern big-city dweller” is aware, has become incredibly complicated. On the one hand the modern city appears to be the site of extreme mobility; on the other the city can hamper movement or even imprison. This was already evident at Pip’s arrival in London in Dickens’s novel—a novel about “great expectations” of upward social mobility—when the stagecoach he is travelling in gets in to the “ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London”, and one of the first buildings he visits is Newgate Prison (p. 163f.). Despite expectations, one might conclude, the city appears to impede mobility. Urban transport in the London of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) is anything but rapid: “time itself seemed to stand still” and “all visual evidences of motion became imperceptible” as the “metropolitan hackney” Winnie Verloc’s mother is travelling in crawls across the city.28 A century later, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis also features a painstakingly slow journey across town. In this case the vehicle is a stretch limousine that inches along the streets of Manhattan in the year 2000 at a speed slower than walking pace, a snail’s pace that contrasts ironically and pointedly with the breakneck speed of the flow of financial information across display screens both inside and outside the car. Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis hampers his ­movements and he becomes confined to his room until he becomes completely immobile, but his demise dramatically liberates the movement of the rest of the family, who, we are told, travelled with the electric tram “ins Freie vor die Stadt” 27  Walter Benjamin, “Max Brod’s Book on Kafka”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 140. 28  Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, Chapter 8, p. 157.

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(“to the open countryside at the edge of town”).29 There is perhaps an apparent parallel in the ironic juxtapositions of both Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and DeLillo’s Cosmopolis: both seem to point to an ironic—or contradictory—coincidence of extremes of modern mobility and immobility in the city. Similarly to “Metamorphosis”, Kafka’s story “Das Urteil”, “The Judgment”, also ends with the death of the central character and an image of finally unhampered movement, in this case of freely flowing traffic going over a bridge. Somewhat bizarrely Kafka apparently wrote to his friend Max Brod that when he composed that sentence about traffic going over the bridge at the end of “The Judgment”, he was thinking of a “starke Ejakulation”, a strong ejaculation.30 The more one is confined, immobilised, stuck or held up—in traffic or otherwise—one supposes, the more exciting a little bit of movement of the traffic can be. Paralysis Metropolis and Marketing: Joyce’s “Araby” The tales of the city in James Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses are all set in Dublin around the same time Simmel was writing on the influence of the metropolis on mental life. It could be said that Joyce switched from one view of the city to the other: from Dubliners with its stories of “paralysis”—that is, immobility—of characters such as Eveline trapped in one way or another in a grim—and grimy—environment, to the perpetuum mobile of Ulysses, evident in the ceaselessly wandering words and imaginations of the two Blooms as well as in the shape-shifting narrative itself. Each of these works has its own very distinctive mood and perspective on the same city around the same time—alternative perspectives that correspond in many ways to the recurring opposition between the oppressive, carceral city and the city of “intoxicating” variety and phantasmagoria. One of the early stories in the collection Dubliners seems to play around these alternative variations on the theme of the city in the mental life of a young boy. “Araby” opens giving the boy’s impressions of a very dull, depressing, dimly lit city environment, of brown houses surrounded by “dark dripping gardens” and “dark muddy lanes”. Some light enters the 29  Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970, p. 99. Kafka, The Metamorphosis (trans. by S. Bernofsky), New York: Norton, 2014, p. 117. 30  This story has been mentioned by various people, including Karl H. Ruhleder in the first paragraph of “Franz Kafka’s Das Urteil: An Interpretation”, Monatshefte, 55(1), Franz Kafka Number (Jan. 1963), pp. 13–22.

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boy’s life in the person of “Mangan’s sister”, whom he saw “defined by the light from the half-opened door” and later lit from behind as she stood at a railing. The story very subtly evokes the boy’s confused fascination with the girl, or with an image or idea of the girl—or perhaps rather his fascination with his own fascination—which he translates in his mind into the language of religion. Her image becomes in his imagination a “chalice” he bears through the noisy streets of the city and “her name sprang to [his] lips at moments in strange prayers and praises”. Yet he hardly speaks to her and we never learn the girl’s name, but when she asks him if he was going to “Araby”, the name of a bazaar/fair on an oriental theme actually held in Dublin in Joyce’s youth, all his thoughts turn to the syllables of this “magical name”—a translation, one might say, of his fascination/desire, now into the language of late-nineteenth-century “Orientalism”.31 “It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.” But she can’t, and the boy promises to buy her something there, if he goes. His uncle’s lateness returning home almost prevents the boy from taking the late train across the city to the mysterious East, and when he gets to the building “nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness”. There are still a few bright lights, however, and a few stalls open, but it is the end of the evening and men are counting money. The boy approaches one of the stalls and “examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets”, but leaves without buying anything in a state of disappointment and dejection, having seen through the magic of “Araby”—and his own “vanity”. The prospect of “intoxicating” variety and phantasmagoria in the city held out tantalizingly by that “magical name” had turned out to be a cheap commercial trick. As for the girl: she has seemingly become “lost in translation”. She may, however, have been a translation herself from the start. The “magical name” of “Araby” is, after all, not a literal translation of “Mangan’s sister”, and represents something more than that “material girl”, rather as the light behind her as she stood at the railing. Perhaps that something is a certain “magical”, romantic mixture of light and darkness that the syllables of “Araby” and the girl come to represent—and this is 31  On the historical bazaar that Joyce attended in his youth as well as on the “Orientalist” context and the specific Irish interest in the Orient, see Heyward Ehrlich, “‘Araby’ in Context: The ‘Splendid Bazaar,’ Irish Orientalism and James Clarence Mangan”, reprinted in Joyce, Dubliners, a Norton Critical Edition, Norris (ed.), New  York: Norton, 2006, pp. 261–283.

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juxtaposed with ideas of freedom and confinement pervading the story right from the very first sentence: “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.” It is the search for freedom and light in the “blind”, “feebly” lit city that takes the boy to search out “Araby”, but he finds the lights have already been turned out when he gets there. Walter Benjamin saw a certain inevitability in the fact that Poe’s flâneur, the “man in the crowd” at one point enters a department store and “roamed through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city”.32 Perhaps there is a parallel to be drawn with Joyce’s young flâneur in “Araby” whose wanderings lead him to another “labyrinth of merchandise”. Joyce’s story of course very neatly shows how the “labyrinth of merchandise” is overlaid upon the “labyrinth” of sexuality (and the “labyrinths” of religious, Romantic and Orientalist mystery) in the “labyrinth” of the modern city. One could perhaps provocatively suggest that Joyce’s “Araby” is really a story about “marketing”. The word is actually used in the text to mean “shopping” in the line: “On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels.”33 “Araby” could be said to be a tale about “marketing” in both that sense of “shopping” and the more common, current meaning. The boy’s nascent sexual desire has suffered the fate of desire in the city—and of everything and everyone in the city—become commodified, translated into the language of commerce/capitalism, ended up as merchandise circulating among merchandise. There is not much freedom to be found in this “splendid bazaar”.

III. The Contemporary City The End of Geography At the end of the twentieth century Paul Virilio offers yet another vision of the city as increasingly carceral. Virilio sees the whole world rapidly turning into one great “world meta-city”, of which “local cities” are now only districts or suburbs. This is the “virtual city”, the “deterritorialized meta-city” of a globalized, or, as he puts it, “globalitarian” world where distances have been cancelled out and we have witnessed the “end of geography”—and  Benjamin, “The Flâneur”, p. 54.  James Joyce, “Araby”, in Dubliners, M. Norris ed., New York: Norton, 2006, p. 21.

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apparently the beginning of a new way of spelling “totalitarian”. Our very notions of space as well as of time have been overturned by the development of telecommunication technologies and the constant live broadcast of world news—as well as of the most intimate personal, emotional and bodily details. We live in a world of “tele-­surveillance”, a world of immediacy, instantaneity, “real time” “that is constantly ‘tele-present’ 24 hours a day, 7/7” inevitably leading, according to Virilio, to a “fundamental loss of orientation”. According to this view, the city—as a more or less distinct geographical location—no longer exists at all in a thoroughly globalized world of instant communication and “real time”. “Here no longer exists”, Virilio writes, “everything is now.”34 Globalization—or “Globalitarianism”—has involved, as Virilio sees it, the integration of everything and everyone into a “single world advertising market”, the “unfurling of an advertising space which stretches to the horizon of visibility of the planet” (17). Unfurling above this global space one could perhaps imagine billions of flags emblazoned with the legend “Welcome to Araby!” Richard Sennett expresses similar ideas about a transformation of space, writing of how the “new geography” combined with the effects of the mass media are tending to lead to ever greater “disconnection from space”, “sensory deprivation in space” as well as a pacification of the body. Rather like Virilio, Sennett mentions “the experience of speed” as a problem: Space has thus become a means to the end of pure motion—we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them. The look of urban space enslaved to these powers of motion is necessarily neutral …. The driver wants to go through the space, not to be aroused by it.35

While this may sound like a somewhat familiar critique of the barbarity of the present day compared with the supposed rosiness of the past, Sennett goes on to argue that the “sensory deprivation which seems to curse most 34  See Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, Chapter 2. Rem Koolhaas writes of the rise of the Generic City: “The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace.” “The Generic City” in Koolhaas and Mau, S, M, L, XL … p. 1250. 35  Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p.  17f. Le Corbusier rather liked the idea of urban spaces made for speed: “The street is a traffic machine; it is in reality a sort of factory for producing speed traffic.” Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow, p. 131. He also wrote: “A city made for speed is made for success” (p. 179).

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modern building, the dullness, the monotony and the tactile sterility which afflicts the urban environment” is actually related to “deepseated problems in Western civilization”, problematic relations between bodies and spaces that go back a very long way indeed. In fact, “Judeo-Christian culture is, at its very roots, about experiences of spiritual dislocation and homelessness”.36 So much focus on the “other world” of the “afterlife” tends to encourage speeding through this one. The spatial problems of Western cities may not be solved just by pedestrianizing a few streets. Virilio’s talk of a more recent “fundamental loss of orientation” recalls Fredric Jameson’s similar characterization of the specifically postmodern experience, famously illustrated by the example of the disorienting “hyperspace” of the interior of the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles. What both Jameson and Virilio are concerned about is, of course, not the difficulties of hotel guests finding their way from the bar to their bedrooms of an evening, but the political disablement that arises from living in a disorienting world, where nothing seems to stand still long enough for ordinary citizens to get their bearings in relation to their political and economic environment, not to mention actively intervene in it. There is of course the counterargument—at least to Virilio’s position—that it is precisely the media of “live transmission 24/7” that allow the general public to monitor the political environment as well as to respond to it “in real time”. Virilio would presumably counter that this is all just so much easily tolerated twittering that doesn’t really impinge on the real, faceless, “globalitarian” masters who thrive on the “fundamental loss of orientation” of the masses beneath them. If this is a correct assessment of the global situation, it is of course a pretty serious matter. 2000, an Urban Space Odyssey—Into “Thin Air”? One might well relate Virilio’s talk of the rise of a “world meta-city” of a “globalitarian” order and the memorable line that “everything is now” to Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), a novel set in Manhattan on one day in April 2000, subsequently adapted for film by David Cronenberg.37 The  Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, New York: Norton, 1992, p. 6.  Peter Boxall argues that DeLillo’s novels of the early twenty-first century, similar to those of other writers, “suggest a new technological-economic complex that produces a different kind of time, a thin, simultaneous time” which he too relates to Virilio. While DeLillo’s earlier work seemed to express “a running out of late- twentieth-century time”, “a gathering sense of finitude”, his work after 2000 “evince[s] an extraordinary lack of spatial or temporal 36 37

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central character—super rich, super smart, super young cyber-capitalist, Eric Packer, described by one critic as “a kind of third Twin Tower, a monolithic symbol of global economic hegemony”38—inches across Manhattan in a futuristic, technology-packed stretch limousine in order to get a haircut on the other side of town. For Packer (as for many people nowadays) “everything is” not so much “now” as “next”. Constantly scanning the globe (or rather his screens of financial information, of rapidly scrolling digits) for the “next big thing”, he surrounds himself with the latest technological gadgets while referring to such objects and even the words used to refer to them as obsolete as soon as they have been invented. At one point he is joined by his “chief of theory” who gives him some intellectual stimulation as they crawl through Manhattan, stopping to admire a bewildering display of constantly updated financial information on the side of a building on Broadway, a “hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of international news”. Their journey comes to a standstill in the middle of an anti-capitalist riot which they apparently enjoy as entertaining street theatre, as thrilling spectacle. “Destroy the past, make the future”,39 Packer’s chief of theory explains, is the categorical imperative of capitalism; the destruction of the riot is just part of the dynamic of the system itself. In Cosmopolis DeLillo presents us with a city and a world hurtling at breakneck speed into the future hurling everything overboard, consigning everything, including itself, to what it regards as the dustbins of history in the mad rush to the future. “You’re dealing with a system that’s out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute”, Packer’s chief of theory declares with a (hysterical) laugh. Her comments here and elsewhere, for example, when she speaks of the “acceleration of time”, sound very much akin to Virilio’s apocalyptic warnings of the dangers of the “dromosphere”, of the “acceleration of reality”.40 The anti-capitalist protesters in DeLillo’s novel re-phrase the awareness, a sudden and drastic failure of the bonds that hold us in time and space”. Peter Boxall, “Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century”, Contemporary Literature, 54(4), 2012. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819533 (accessed 1.8.2019). 38  Randy Laist, The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Critique, 51, 2010, pp.  257–275, p.  258. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610903379966 (accessed 31.7.2019). As the reference to the central character as “a kind of third Twin Tower” suggests, Laist reads Cosmopolis as a “post-9/11 novel”. 39  Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, London: Picador, 2003, p. 93. 40  Randy Laist also makes the connection with Virilio in “The Concept of Disappearance”.

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opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, referring to the “spectre of capitalism”, but a phrase that more accurately captures the spirit/spectre of late Capitalism as depicted in Cosmopolis is the phrase Marx and Engels used to describe the relentlessly revolutionary “cultural logic” of capitalism in general—“all that is solid melts into air”. The process may have speeded up by the year 2000, and it appears to affect the youthful über-­ Capitalist Eric Packer himself very rapidly over the course of the day and the novel, but it was very much around a long time before that, according to Marx and Engels. A fundamental feature of Capitalism—and of modernity itself—is this constant ditching of the past and focus on innovation, on the new and the now (after all the modo of modernity). “Everything is now” is itself then not a new idea, but goes back a very long way not just to the mid-nineteenth century of Marx and Engels, but to whenever the clocks of modernity—and capitalism—started ticking. “To be modern”, as Marshall Berman put it, is “to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’”.41 Moreover, if the phrase “All that is solid melts into air” is an accurate portrayal of the dynamic of modern capitalism, one might perhaps extrapolate from this to say that capitalism is actually, despite what its devotees may think, the pursuit of “thin air”, the pursuit of emptiness. What this would mean for the too, too solid city—and all “solid” places (as well as what Hamlet termed “this too, too solid flesh”)—is perhaps what we are already witnessing (as all eyes turn away from the physical world and people “in the flesh” in their immediate environment to the virtual city/world of the internet, for instance).42 The notion that the real goal of capitalism is “thin air” also makes sense in terms of Weber’s argument that the “spirit” of modern capitalism derived from the Protestant ethic and Christian ascetic tradition, themselves very much focused on “thin air”, one might say. It would make sense also in terms of Bauman and Sennett’s suggestion that much of the spirit of modernity can be traced back to a Judeo-Christian sense of “spiritual dislocation and homelessness” and a focus on the great, true home of the believer in the sky—that is to say in very thin air indeed. 41  Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso, 2010, p. 15. 42  Debord noted: “We already live in the era of the self-destruction of the urban environment. […] The technical organization of consumption is thus merely the herald of that general process of dissolution which brings the city to the point where it consumes itself.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (trans. by Nicholson-Smith), New  York: Zone Books, 1995, paragraph 174, pp. 123f.

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Robinson in London Referring to the (financial) City at the historic centre of the city of London as a “civic void”, Robinson, the companion of the narrator in Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994), declares: “The true identity of London is in its absence. As a city it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern. London was the first metropolis to disappear.”43 And yet the city appears to appear on screen—as a kind of haunting, impersonal presence (or absence?), comparable in some ways to the cities in the famous “city symphony” films of the early twentieth century, such as Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (1927). London is similar to these films in that the images do not present any central characters as such, but rather the life (or in this case perhaps death) of the city itself. What’s different is that Keiller’s images do not compose a harmonious whole, such as the life of Berlin or Paris over all the hours of a day from morning to night, but remain fragments—different places, buildings, scenes. These images are juxtaposed with a deadpan voiceover that refers to the thoughts and observations of the enigmatic character Robinson as he and the narrator wander around London rather as latter-day flâneurs with a laconic, self-consciously and archaically “literary” turn of phrase, out of sync with the scenes of London in the early nineties. Their apparently random walks around the city are perhaps akin to some of the “Arts of Urban Exploration” described by geographer David Pinder, particularly the “psychogeographical” “derives” of the Situationists as they drifted on foot through the city streets, studying “the ambiences and emotional contours of existing urban spaces and routes” and d ­ isrupting “dominant ways of seeing urban spaces”.44 Keiller himself acknowledges that he had been particularly intrigued by the surrealists’ “notion of changing a city by changing the way you look at it”.45 The literariness of  In an interview Keiller admits: “One of the possibilities offered by fiction is that fictional characters can make statements without their author knowing exactly what they mean, and this is one such statement.” https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/ patrick-keiller-london-robinson-trilogy (accessed 3.8.2018). 44  David Pinder, “’Old Paris is no more’: Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle”, Antipode 32(4), 2000, pp. 357–386, p. 370 and p. 379. See also Pinder, “Arts of Urban Exploration”, Cultural Geographies, 12, 2005, pp. 383–411. 45  Robert Yates, Interview with Patrick Keiller, The Guardian, 30 November 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/nov/30/patrick-keiller-london-original-interview (accessed 3.8.2018). Keiller, however, avoids identifying too much with the term “psychogeography”—out of respect for the original practitioners of the 1950s. See https:// www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/patrick-keiller-london-robinson-trilogy (accessed 3.8.2018). 43

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Robinson and his companion in London together with the constant, anecdotal and fragmentary references to various, different literary figures and historical personages of the distant past serve perhaps to make strange the “spectacle” of the modern city for the audience, breaking up any sense of the seamlessness of the present, modern state of affairs. If “destroying the past” is, as the chief of theory in Cosmopolis (among others) suggests, the categorical imperative of capitalism, this film dwells meditatively on bits and pieces of the past in ways that run counter to the prevailing ideology— of late capitalist space and time. London is an example of what the geographer David Pinder terms “dis-locative” art, dislocating “taken-for-­granted understanding of cities”, “a practice of subverting or disorienting cartography previously deployed by avant-garde groups such as the surrealists and situationists”.46 That is to run ahead a little: the topics of “time” and “the time and space of the work of art” are yet to be discussed in later chapters below. At one point in London the two flâneurs, having searched for the building where E.A. Poe went to school, stumble on the house where Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and reflect that they had gone looking for “The Man of the Crowd” and found a shipwreck instead. The word seems to apply to the city itself.47 Keiller’s later film Robinson in Space (1997) deals, as The Guardian critic put it, with “the unexamined vanishing of British industry into a hinterland of motorways, logistics sheds and huge ports that operated almost without staff”. The same critic continues: what the increasingly mythical duo find out as they tour about in their Morris Oxford, loitering in Tesco and eyeing up fetishware factories, is that modernity has simply absconded: Britain is as industrious as ever, except that commerce and invention now happen in ex-urban non-places and scarcely touch the run-down or well-heritaged cities.48

46  David Pinder, “Dis-locative arts: mobile media and the politics of global positioning”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27(4), July 2013, pp. 523–541, p. 532. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.803303. Pinder gives a very interesting discussion of contemporary artists’ reactions to the world of GPS. 47  In the later film Robinson in Ruins (2010) Robinson surveys “from a carpark” the “island on which he is shipwrecked”—“the location of a Great Malady”. 48  Brian Dillon, “Robinson in Ruins”, The Guardian, Saturday, 20 November 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/nov/20/robinson-ruins-patrick-keiller-dillon (accessed 2.8.2018).

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“Modernity has absconded.” “All that is solid melts into air.” Hence the emptiness—the thin air—at the historic centre mentioned in London. “The true identity of London is in its absence. As a city”, Robinson told us, London “no longer exists”. But then around the same time Virilio found that “Here no longer exists” and wrote of the “end of geography”. The same idea might occur to anyone who “loiters” in Tesco, any large supermarket—or indeed the global(itarian) department store that is the “world city”. Two Tales of the City While Virilio’s apocalyptic scenarios and talk of the “end of geography” is strangely somehow appealing as well as entertaining—as apocalypse always is—and in some ways persuasive as a description of the contemporary experience of the space of the world and the city, others remind us that this is not the only way of looking at it. Nigel Thrift, for example, takes issue with several aspects of Virilio’s “esthetic of disaster”, including his relentlessly negative attitude, his tendency to exaggerate everything to the extreme and his lack of attention to the specifics of individual experience and details of everyday life. Thrift suggests Virilio’s argument shows a “fundamental misunderstanding of how cities and societies work, which is as generators of difference as much as of similarity”.49 The city, in all its specifi-city, can still be regarded as a place of great variety, heterogeneity and pluralism, not just disappearing in a “globalitarian” regime of ­constant surveillance and uniformity. The point has been made many times before. These tend to be the two tales of the city that have been told again and again: the uplifting story of the excitement of the bright lights, the constant movement, the variety and “intoxicating” phantasmagoria and the darkly foreboding narrative of the (increasingly) carceral city, oppressive, reductive, limiting and finally empty. Which is the true story of the city? After carefully weighing up both sides, Simmel seems to show that both can be true—the metropolis can be both oppressive and liberating at the same time, if in different ways, and ways that are often related (as action is to reaction). That is possibly the best answer one can get. It is probably fair to say that cities are neither universally dreadful places, where people 49  Nigel Thrift, “Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster”, Cultural Politics, I(3), p. 342.

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are simply more effectively oppressed than ever before, nor are they universally wonderful places, bursting with exciting variety and pleasure all of the time for all of their inhabitants. That may seem a rather banal position to arrive at—but it is not at all to say that the positive and the negative aspects of modern city life cancel each other out. The Real Tale Since the nineteenth century the quintessential experience of modernity has been particularly identified with the experience of city life. It is in the city that modernity could be defined as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” and where one could experience both the phantasmagoria of apparently infinite variety and perpetual movement and its exact opposite, the feeling of being incarcerated and paralysed. Both are feelings that tend to be promoted not just by the experience of modern city life, but by the experience of modern capitalism. They have always been closely linked. From Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth-century flâneur, inevitably mutating into a consumer—or even a commodity—in a department store, to Kafka’s travelling salesman/beetle, to Joyce’s young disappointed consumer, to DeLillo’s rich boy crawling through Manhattan traffic in his stretch limousine, these characters are shown to be not just city-dwellers at various stages of urban history in different places, but themselves so many products of capitalism at different stages of its development. Some indication of how that tale has unfolded is to be seen perhaps in the progression from Benjamin’s flâneur “roaming through the labyrinth of merchandise” to DeLillo’s young cyber-capitalist ending up in a dilapidated building, ­stepping over “a number of unfinished meals in styrofoam trays” and roaming around a room full of waste as he awaits his end.50 It is in the city of “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”, of phantasmagoria and the carceral, of consumption and waste where, paradoxically, given the apparent solidity of urban spaces, one could see modern capitalism melting “all that is solid into air”, turning space itself into that “hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols”, of “fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs” in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. As urban sprawl transforms the spaces of the entire globe at an accelerating pace and a vast scale, one may well wonder about the quality of that air—and who is claiming ownership of it.  DeLillo, Cosmopolis, p. 182.

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In an essay taking up Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “the right to the city”, David Harvey examines what he calls the “inner connection” between “the development of capitalism and urbanization”. Walter Benjamin, in his day, explored that connection in relation to nineteenth-­ century Paris. Harvey briefly surveys the unfolding of the connection between capitalism and urbanization from Haussmann’s reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century Paris on a grand scale up to the present day, when “the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale” and “gone global”.51 Larger and larger urban construction (and demolition) projects have been undertaken, he shows, in order to resolve crises of capitalism; they have been accompanied by the development of new financial instruments and institutions as well as entirely new urban ways of life— and the forceful removal/re-location of those in the way, usually the poor and underprivileged and usually out of the city to less valuable land. Harvey traces a direct line from Haussmann’s tearing through the slums of Paris, forcibly removing those who had been living in the centre, to huge construction projects and “contemporary urban processes in much of Asia (Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai)” (34). “Urbanization”, he concludes, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the ‘planet of slums’. (37)

In a world where “increasingly we see the right to the city falling into the hand of private or semi-private interests” (38), there is an urgent need to take back democratic control. There is.

51  David Harvey, “The Right to the City”, New Left Review, Issue 53, September/October 2008, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city. pdf (accessed 30.7.2019), pp.  23–40, p.  29. See also Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, selected, translated and introduced by E. Kofman and E. Lebas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996; Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City”, Journal of Urban Affairs, 36(1), pp. 141–154. http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/jua_rtc.pdf (accessed 30.7.2019).

CHAPTER 4

Postmodern or Most-Modern Time

I. Modernist Times Going forward, going backwards or going around and around –From postmodern to most-modern times

One of the most characteristic characteristics of postmodern times, according to Fredric Jameson, was to do with time—the “waning”, as he puts it, of “the great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and memory”. It is, as he says, “at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space, rather than by categories of time”.1 This is a problem, for Jameson, as it has to do with a “postmodern” “waning” of a sense of history, and of an ability to see and interpret the present (and the future) as part of a wider historical context. Yet this shift from time to space was already happening in “high-modernist times”—around the beginning of the twentieth century; it was perhaps one of the most characteristic characteristics of modern times. That is why, one may suppose, precisely such “thematics of time and temporality” were coming to the fore. Paul Virilio writes alarmingly of how the development 1  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Tom Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 72f. Of course, Jameson gave the disorientating interior space of the Bonaventura hotel in Los Angeles as an example of what he termed postmodern “hyperspace”.

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of information and communication technologies has led to an “acceleration of reality” and a profoundly disorienting revolution of the experience of time and space around the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, the very notion of the modern itself implies a revolutionary shift in the sense of time and certain changes affecting space particularly around 1900 already then were having an immense effect on the sense of time. Maybe it was Einstein, or maybe it was the earth-shattering explosions of the First World War, but something seems to have happened the sense of Time in Western culture in the early twentieth century. In reality (whatever that is), of course, several different factors contributed to what seems in retrospect to have been an almost seismic shift in the notion of time. Time— people’s sense of time, people’s notion of time—is, after all, as eminently cultural and historical as different ways of experiencing, measuring or marking time. E.P.  Thompson pointed out that time in pre-modern environments was often measured in relation to the typical time it took to complete a particular agricultural task or the time it took to say a particular prayer, mentioning the use of the phrase “pater noster wyle”—and even “pissing while”—to indicate “the passing” of units of time.2 It is understandable then that modern times –particularly the time of modernism, around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth—with concerns other than the agricultural or religious coming to the fore, brought with them different senses of time. If the nineteenth century could in some ways be imagined (in terms of one of its own classic cultural forms) as one very long and slow-moving Bildungsroman—a novel charting the education and development of a character over a lifetime, a narrative of growth, development, progress—the very possibility of imagining (life as) such a continuous, coherent, linear and progressive narrative seems to have come undone somewhere around 1900, that is, long before the arrival of MTV. The End of the Line: Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901) could be said in a way to mark the end of that possibility—just as it places a full stop at the end of the nineteenth century: the narrative is continuous, coherent and linear, but, of course, it is a chronicle charting the “Verfall einer Familie”, the cultural decay/decline of generations of a whole family of Luebeck Bürger over the 2  E.P.  Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present, 38, 1967, pp. 56–97. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.

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course of the “century of progress”, all contributing to the Bildung/forming of Hanno, the doomed youngest son. The novel depicts precisely the declining confidence in progress (and interest in business) of the younger generations of the family whose degeneration and decadence becomes evident (to Thomas Mann and his presumed audience) in their increasing interest in music and artistic matters rather than in the family business. This narrative of decline and decadence was part of a much wider European cultural narrative of degeneration, a story told, for example, in non-fiction works of “science” such as Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892)/Degeneration (1895) as well as fictional tales such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). This was probably the dominant metanarrative across Western Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century, inspired by Darwin’s narrative of evolution and especially the fear that it could go into reverse. Both of these—the narrative of degeneration and the narrative of evolution—as well as the narrative of progress of the “century of progress”, as narratives, were themselves ways of framing time, structuring or marking time, telling the time—making sense of time. Either things were getting better and better over the years or everything was winding down (like a clock going slow) towards the end of the nineteenth century, the fin de siècle, the supposed end of Western civilization and of everything else, including the energy of the sun.3 As the young child Hanno Buddenbrook significantly, if absentmindedly, draws two neat horizontal lines across the family tree below his own name—explaining “Ich glaubte … es käme nichts mehr” (“I thought … there would be nothing more”)—this clearly marks the end of the narrative of this family line as Hanno foresees it, an endpoint he projects and almost consciously aims for, as well as the projected end of the metanarrative of degeneration, which could only end in the death of civilization and the end of time.4 Hanno’s horizontal lines could also be said to mark the end of this very kind of long historical fictional narrative itself as a form more of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth.5 3  See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 104f. 4  Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1960, Part VIII, Chapter 7. 5  Thomas Mann, however, continued to write narratives of degeneration and decay in the years leading up to World War I, including Death in Venice.

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“I didn’t know what time it was” (Rodgers and Hart Song)

The Secret Agent and Time Machines Around the time that Buddenbrooks was published, Joseph Conrad was unravelling the narrative of Western progress and civilization in the relatively conventional, chronologically sequential, linear form of the account of Marlowe’s slow journey up the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1902). A few years later this narrative, narrative as such and time itself seem to fall apart altogether in his hands in The Secret Agent (1907). If Buddenbrooks was one way of telling the story of the end of time—drawing two neat lines under it—The Secret Agent could be said to be a more startlingly explosive way of marking the event. The novel revolves around the accidental explosion of a bomb intended for the Greenwich Observatory.6 “Go for the first meridian” is the instruction the secret agent receives from a sinister foreign diplomat.7 It is at once both an absurd and a significant target: this will be an attack on longitude—as well as on time itself. As the critic R.W. Stallman writes, the secret agent’s “mission is the destruction of space and time, as the great circle of Greenwich meridian is the zero from which space is measured and time is clocked”.8 It is worth noting that it was only since 1884 that this became established as the international standard. Conrad’s novel is set in 1886 and based on reports of an actual bombing at Greenwich in 1894. The invention of standardized (global) time apparently coincided with an explosion at the centre of time. The Secret Agent registers the shock of the explosion of a bomb and the ensuing disorientation in terms of both time and space in its very structure. The focus of the narrative shifts very abruptly backwards and forwards in terms of time, from place to place, from one character to another. It seems as if the chapters have been shuffled around like a deck of cards—or thrown in the air by the impact of a bomb. The actual explosion in Greenwich, we gather, has occurred somewhere between Chapters 3 and 4 and yet Chapter 8 returns to a time before it (without signalling this clearly to the reader, of course). The narrator reminds readers at one point that there are “sudden holes in space and time” (p. 105). The time of the bombing and the death of the one innocent victim are not narrated as they happen, and though this 6  One might, however, argue that what the novel really revolves around is love—the love of Winnie for her brother. 7  Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 70. Subsequent page numbers refer to this edition. 8  R.W. Stallman, “Time and The Secret Agent”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1, 1959, pp. 101–122, p. 103.

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is the “central” event it does seem as if the novel is really revolving around the enigma of Time itself (or those “sudden holes in space and time”) and the sense that the time is very much “out of joint”. Clocks and the time of day are constantly referred to. Stallman has even suggested that it is Time itself that is the real “secret agent” of the novel.9 Time in the novel is not linear, nor is it simply circular, nor evenly, nor objectively measured; it has rather been exploded into random fragments. Not only are events not narrated in chronological order but time seems to speed up and slow down abruptly—such as when Verloc, the secret agent, returns from the embassy in a fraction of the time it took him to get there “as borne from west to east on the wings of a great wind”, or when “time itself almost seemed to stand still” during the seemingly interminable cab ride across the city in Chapter 8, or when it slows down to the pace of the “tic, tic, tic” of blood dripping on the floor “like the pulse of an insane clock” (236). It is confusing for any reader to find him or herself in the middle of Chapter six abruptly brought back to a point in time in the middle of the previous chapter where the Assistant Commissioner’s train of thought had started wandering back to the past, while the narrative appeared to have transported the reader to a different time and place altogether. The novel seems to demonstrate that the sense of time is highly subjective and depends on a person’s train of thought and mood as well as on the context. Even characters apparently sharing the same time and space—such as the Verloc couple—are shown to be profoundly isolated from one another, as the narrative timeframes in their heads barely coincide. One of the only things they agree on, one might say, is when it is time to “put out the light”. Supposedly objective, standard notions of time—what Greenwich had only recently come to stand for—are, one might conclude, just abstract conventions that don’t need to be exploded by a bomb; everyday experience effectively pulverizes them. It was in fact, as Stephen Kern points out, just around the time of the introduction of standardized world time, of “public time”—centred of course in Greenwich—at the end of the nineteenth century, that novelists and others became greatly interested in the exploration of the experience of “private time” in the consciousness of characters. While new ­technological developments in transport and communication—train travel and the telegraph—led to the standardization of public time around the globe, “the thrust of the age was to affirm the reality of private time against  R.W. Stallman, “Time and The Secret Agent”, 1959, p. 122.

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that of a single public time”, as Kern writes. However, what Kern really seems to demonstrate is that the “thrust of the age” was going back and forth between “public time” and “private time”, a bit like the piston of a steam engine. Joseph Conrad “dramatized the tension between authoritarian world time and the freedom of the individual” in this plot centred on the project of “blowing up the meridian”.10 In expounding the theory behind his experiences of the year 802,701 A.D. the Time Traveller of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895 A.D.) could be said to have prepared some of the way for The Secret Agent, which is in fact dedicated to Wells, the “historian of the ages to come”.11 The dystopian novel not only brings up the increasingly relevant topic of the relationship between the sense of time and development of machines; the inventor of the Time Machine pointed out the connection between time and consciousness: “There is”, he says, “no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it.”12 Before exhibiting his particular clunky contraption for supposedly actual time travel, he explains that it is also first of all our consciousness that permits us to travel in time—to “get away from the present moment”: “If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence.” This is the kind of time travel that features much in The Secret Agent, as different characters depart from the present moment and travel backwards in their minds, each individually “à la recherche du temps perdu” and not simply coinciding with the present moment.13 If it is true that everyday life effectively pulverizes supposedly objective, standard notions of time, it is, of course, everyday experience of modern city life that might make one particularly aware of the parallel/simultaneous existence of a multitude of individuals with different conscious lives, different interests, perspectives, situations, narratives, 10  Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 34. 11  The irony pervading The Secret Agent may well extend to the dedication to Wells, as Martin Ray argues. Ray suggests that Wells’s political (socialist + eugenic) ideas may also have been parodied in the portraits of the anarchists in Conrad’s novel. Martin Ray, “Conrad, Wells, and The Secret Agent: Paying Old Debts and Settling Old Scores”, Modern Language Review, 81(3), 1986, pp. 560–573. https://doi.org/10.2307/3729180. 12  H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, London: Penguin Classics, 2005, Chapter 1. For a discussion of Wells’s Time Machine and the many other “Time Machines” of modernism see Charles M.  Tung, “Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarization of Time”, Configurations, 23, 2015, pp. 93–121. 13  Kern discusses Proust’s novel as an exploration of “private time”.

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senses of time all sharing a relatively restricted space. Conrad’s The Secret Agent is a great modernist portrait of the city of London at the end of the nineteenth century. It is here in the great modern city that individual consciousness was bound to become an issue—as Georg Simmel pointed out in his essay on “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). The “intensification of nervous stimuli” associated with urban life tends to mean: With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life.14

This along with the individuation or even atomization of city life goes surely some way to explain the increasing interest in individual consciousness—as well as in the unconscious—and “private time” on the part of both novelists and medical practitioners around the late nineteenth century. Free indirect discourse and interior monologue were eminently appropriate narrative techniques for writers of novels set in a modern, metropolitan world of heightened individual consciousness. What William James called the “stream of thought, of consciousness”15 became the subject of many a “self-consciously” modern novelist. It was also in the modern city that time was bound to become an issue. In the lines quoted above, Simmel referred to the effect on the nerves and on consciousness of the “the tempo […] of economic, occupational and social life”. City life involved getting used to faster rhythms and precise timing. Simmel wrote: “the relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos.”16 That “inextricable chaos” of the modern city is just about kept under control by a focus on standard clock time and might erupt again if, as Simmel suggests, “all the clocks and watches in Berlin” were to “suddenly go wrong in different ways”. Synchronizing watches—and the standardization of time internationally—was itself a response to the increasing potential for “inextricable chaos” in the modern 14  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Frisby and Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture, London: Sage Publications, 1997, p. 175. 15  Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 24. 16  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, p. 177.

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world. Conrad’s novel shows this “inextricable chaos” of the modern city coinciding with an explosion at the centre of standardized, synchronized “public time”. One might suggest then that one of the reasons for the great shift in the sense of time in modern times is the development of the modern metropolis constantly on the verge of “inextricable chaos”, where one was constantly reminded of the presence of the “aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests”, with different perspectives, narratives—and personal, private senses of time. One might say the modern city simultaneously promoted the development of two different types of “time machine” (and two different notions of time): the clock and individual consciousness, “public time” and “private time”, as Kern puts it. The Secret Agent—among many modern novels—constantly highlights the discrepancy between the two. City life, as Simmel points out, leads to an increasing focus on clock time out of the awareness of potential chaos. Of course, other aspects of modern life also contributed to an increasing focus on clock time—such as the development of modern technologies in transport and communication. It was after all the need to synchronize times—or rationalize time differences—in different places connected by railways and telegraph communication that led to the standardization of time around the globe over the years between the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 and the International Conference on Time in Paris in 1912. It was “revolutions in the realm of circulation” (i.e. transport) that led to the imposition of “the universal sense of abstract and objective time” and a “tightening of the chronological net around daily life”, as Harvey writes.17 Kern specifies the day and the hour “the Eiffel Tower sent the first time signal transmitted around the world” as “10 o’clock on the morning of July 1, 1913”: The independence of local times began to collapse once the framework of a global electronic network was established. Whatever charm local time might once have had, the world was fated to wake up with buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that travelled around the world with the speed of light.18

17  David Harvey, “Money, Time, Space and the City”, in Harvey, The Urban Experience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 172f. 18  Kern, p. 14.

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Going Around and Around A focus on clock time gives a different sense of time than either a focus on an individual’s thoughts and fantasies or an awareness of a larger historical sweep of years, generations, centuries or indeed the time of the seasons or of daylight. It is hardly a coincidence that so many novels of modernist times tended to focus on the short time span rather than the long, slow march of generations or the lifetime of the Bildungsroman. One might think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, all set on one day. Probably the most extreme example is Joyce’s Ulysses, whose 900 odd pages are famously all set on June 16, 1904.19 There, as in The Secret Agent, the thoughts of characters are juxtaposed with the hours of the clock—though in a much more regular, chronological, fashion than in Conrad’s novel. Joyce’s famous schema shows how schematically each episode corresponds to a particular hour of the day. It is fitting that Leopold Bloom thinks at one point of a band playing “Ponchielli’s dance of the hours” (1876), as the novel he features in could itself be described as a kind of “dance of the hours”. In that regard it can also be compared to the so-called city symphony films of the 1920s—such as Berlin, Symphonie einer Grosstadt or Rien que les heures20—which similarly depicted the lives of the respective cities over the hours of the day. While the juxtaposition of city life with the clock could give a sense of structure to the portrayal of city life that might otherwise seem chaotic and random, with so many different things happening simultaneously, it could also lead to an impression of entrapment in senseless circularity, absurd repetition, eternal recurrence of the same, as the hands of the clock go around and around the same unchanging face. If modern life was lived with at least one eye on the clock, it could indeed be seen as a kind of “dance of the hours” or endlessly whirling musikalischer Scherz [musical joke], the subtitle of Johann Strauss’s “Perpetuum Mobile” (1862). The sense that modernity—or even postmodernity—is a machine 19  David Cunningham mentions both along with Proust as examples of a genre “focused […] directly on the experiential contemporaneity of ‘time itself’” and suggests Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis might be considered as a contemporary example of the genre. The recent examples might be “best understood as attempts to grapple with the consequences of an “ever more congealed and futureless present”, and to wrest some kind of precarious “meaning” from it”. Cunningham, “Time, Modernism and the Contemporaneity of Realism”, in D’Arcy and Nilges (eds.), The Contemporaneity of Modernism, New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2016, p. 60. 20  See the comparative study by Jefferson Hunter, “Joyce, Ruttmann and City Symphonies”, Kenyon Review, 2013, pp. 186–205.

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(evoking, inspiring, producing or) in perpetual circular motion is something that is still pervasive, as witness the more recent song and album with the title “Perpetuum Mobile” (2004), by the German band Einstürzende Neubauten. Well-known scenes in two films of the early twentieth century capture that impression of circularity and repetition associated with the focus on clock time and modern machines, juxtaposing this tragically or comically with the experience of ordinary human beings at the mercy of the modern time machine in their working lives. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) shows Freder heroically struggling to move the levers/hands of a machine with enormous clock-like controls. The routine ten-hour shift in this industrial plant is shown to involve carrying out the same repetitive and exhausting movements literally against the clock. At the end of the shift Freder collapses, arms outstretched, looking as if he has been crucified on a huge clock-face.21 A more comic, but equally pointed take on modern work-­ time is the scene in Modern Times (1936) where Charlie Chaplin is shown clocking in and working mechanically and repetitively at a conveyor belt before being himself conveyed along the belt and becoming hilariously caught up in the cogs of the machinery of modern time and motion. Kafka’s deadpan use of free indirect discourse to tell Gregor’s story from both the inside and the outside in “Die Verwandlung/ Metamorphosis” heightens the comedy and sense of absurdity in the relationship between modern man and the (alarm) clock.22 What causes Gregor’s greatest anxiety on the morning of his extraordinary physical metamorphosis is the fact that the alarm clock didn’t wake him at the usual four o’clock a.m., that he has missed the train and is going to be late for work—not that his body has suddenly been transformed into that of an “Ungeziefer”—something like an enormous beetle and he is lying on what is now the hard shell of his back with lots of tiny little legs waving uncontrollably in the air. Written in 1912, the story, and Gregor’s condition, could in part at least be seen as expressing the reaction of the average little man to the very big, increasingly complex and overwhelming modern world, the world Stephen Kern described as “fated to wake up with 21  One might think also of the many references to the clock in Lang’s film M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder. 22  For a discussion of the alarm clock and different kinds of time in “Metamorphosis” see Galili Shahar, “The Alarm Clock: The times of Gregor Samsa”, in A.  Cools and V.  Liska (eds.), Kafka and the Universal, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016, pp.  257–269. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbkjt9v.16 (accessed 1.8.2019).

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buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that travelled around the world with the speed of light”. This was part of the great Verwandlung/transformation/metamorphosis happening at the time that is the focus of Kern’s book, summarized in the opening lines: From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought.23

Surely that transformation was enough to make one lie in bed a little longer and miss the train for work! “The time is now”

Technology, the Simultaneous Poetry of Everyday Life, and Ulysses The ability to communicate instantaneously with someone far away by means of telegraph, wireless telegraph and then, for larger numbers of the general public, by telephone greatly contributed, according to Kern, to an awareness not just of events happening in faraway places, but of simultaneity. Kern begins his chapter on “The Present” on the night of April 14, 1912, the night when people on over a dozen ships became aware of the disaster befalling the Titanic within minutes of the distress call sent out by wireless telegraph. Unfortunately, of course, speed of movement had not kept up with the greatly accelerated speed of communication enabled by the invention of the telegraph, and the first ship, the Carpathia, having heard the message 58 miles away, did not arrive “until almost two hours after the Titanic went down with 1522 passengers”.24 The fact that lives were saved at all could be put down to the invention of wireless telegraphy. As the New York Times noted a few days after the disaster: “But for the  Kern, p. 1.  Kern, p. 66.

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almost magic use of the air the Titanic tragedy would have been shrouded in the secrecy that not so long ago was the power of the sea.”25 Kern reminds us that the “first distress signal by a ship at sea was sent in 1899” and the first wireless news service was established by the Marconi Company in 1904 (p. 68). News of the disaster of the night of April 14, 1912, had travelled around the world by the early morning. The well-known tragic story serves to illustrate a point about the effect of modern communication technology on the sense of time: “The ability to experience many distant events at the same time, made possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic, was part of a major change in the experience of the present” (p. 67f.). The major change was in the heightened awareness of simultaneity—the simultaneity of local events (possibly in the same city) and distant events (possibly across the Atlantic). If the telegraph heightened the awareness of simultaneity, “the telephone had an even broader impact and made it possible, in a sense, to be in two places at the same time” (p. 69). That, of course, implies a “major change” in the experience of place as well as of time. The geographer David Harvey also refers to this “new sense of simultaneity” in his discussion of “Money, Time, Space and the City”: “The rise of mass-circulation newspapers, the advent of telegraph and telephone, of radio and television, all contributed to a new sense of simultaneity over space and total uniformity in coordinated and universally uniform time.”26 Harvey’s emphatic repetition of the idea of uniformity in that last phrase is in keeping with another phrase referring to the accelerating “tightening of the chronological net around daily life” towards the end of the nineteenth century, but simultaneity did not necessarily imply uniformity. Before reviewing the enthusiastic celebrations of the sense of simultaneity as the spirit of the modern age in so many examples of modern ­literature, Kern discusses another innovation that led to a heightening of the sense of simultaneity that was “simultaneously” technological and artistic—the cinema: “Film expanded the sense of the present either by filling it with several non-contiguous events or showing one event from a variety of perspectives” (p. 70). It was, one might say, yet another “time machine” in an age of “time machines”—giving the audience the impression of being “in two places at the same time” and exploding the bounds  Kern, p. 67.  David Harvey, “Money, Time, Space and the City”, in Harvey, The Urban Experience, p. 173. 25 26

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of any particular situation in time and place, bursting “this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second” as Walter Benjamin suggested in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. “With the close-up, space expands”, wrote Benjamin, “with slow motion, movement is extended.”27 If the invention of still photography could be said to have enabled the capturing, freezing or stopping of a moment in time, cinema seemingly made it possible to juxtapose (using montage techniques) different events happening at the same time, to speed up, slow down or even reverse the passing of time. Early filmmakers played with all these possibilities to the great amusement of their audiences. If one follows Benjamin’s argument, this must have been a liberating experience as well as an entertaining one.28 Perhaps the real “secret agent” aiming to blow up the first meridian in Conrad’s novel is not just “time”, as one critic suggested, but the “time machine” of the cinema, never mentioned, but secretly there in disguise— or a combination of all the “time-machines” ticking at different speeds at the turn of the century. In ways reminiscent of the cinema, Conrad plays with abrupt juxtapositions, shifting perspectives, flashbacks, speeding up and slowing down the passing of time. One might compare, for example, the speed of Mr Verloc’s return from the embassy “as borne from west to east on the wings of a great wind” with the description of his mother-in-­ law’s journey across town when “time itself almost seemed to stand still”. Non-uniform simultaneity could be and was a source of excitement (and not just dark Conradian ironic tragedy) in the arts of the early t­wentieth century. Poets such as Apollinaire and Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara were inspired by their sense of the times to write “simultaneous poetry” with different lines to be read simultaneously by different voices, sometimes in different languages—such as in the Dada “Simultangedicht” “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer”. The aptness of the form to reflect the age is perhaps illustrated by the fact that an editorial comment in Paris-­Midi of February 23, 1914, described the actual headlines of a daily newspaper as 27  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 229. 28  One might say that all forms of art have always provided a sense of being in two places at the same time, of transporting the viewer, reader, listener somewhere else. This is the liberating effect of art that, for example, Jacques Rancière pays much attention to. One might also point out that some of the earliest films of the Lumière brothers—such as La Sortie de l’Usine and Arivée à la Gare—actually show the “free” movement of people being determined by precise markers of public/clock time.

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“simultaneous poetry”.29 While the use of wireless telegraphy and the telephone was turning the front pages of newspapers into avant-garde collages of the latest international happenings, the collages and “simultaneous poetry” of the international avant-garde simultaneously captured the “Zeitgeist”, the tempo of modern life and the accelerating news cycle.30 One should mention, however, that while scraps of newspaper headlines and photographs from magazines apparently randomly thrown together at odd angles in many an avant-garde collage could simply reflect the “Zeitgeist”, the intention was often pointedly satirical. One might think, for example, of Hannah Höch’s satirically titled “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands” [Cut with a kitchen knife through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany] (1919). Kern describes Joyce’s Ulysses as “the highpoint of simultaneous literature”, mentioning in the next line Joyce’s interest in cinematic montage and involvement in the setting up of the first cinema in Dublin, The Volta, in 1909. As Kern puts it, Joyce “improvised montage techniques to show the simultaneous activity of Dublin as a whole, not a history of the city, but a slice of it out of time, spatially extended and embodying its entire past in a vast expanded present” (p. 77). If history, according to Stephen Dedalus, was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, Joyce himself could be said to have woken up in a big way to the modern sense of simultaneity. As well as foregrounding the simultaneity of modern city life in particular episodes, the novel as a whole expresses Joyce’s own penchant for thinking on several different levels “simultaneously”, as witness the famous Linati schema or table setting out some of the many correspondences and layers of meaning in the different episodes, or the letter to Carlo Linati accompanying the schema in which he described his “damned monster novel” as “the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life) …. It is also a kind of encyclopedia.”31 Ulysses is clearly (or not so clearly) a lot of things at the same time, and that is the point—or at least one of several simultaneous points. The character of Stephen Dedalus himself is a case in point: he is at  Kern, p. 70.  This is parodied in the Aeolus episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, set in the offices of The Freeman’s Journal and peppered with facetious newspaper headlines. The title of the episode suggests some affinity between the journalistic prose of the day and wind. 31  Quoted by Richard Ellmann in Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber and Faber, 1984, p. 187. 29 30

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once understood as a credible, realistic fictional character whose story is being continued after he left Ireland for Paris bursting with ambition at the end of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man; he is a somewhat humorous “portrait” of Joyce’s younger self; his strange surname somehow positions him as the soaring and doomed son Icarus in the ancient legend of Dedalus and Icarus, which “hovers” in the background all through A Portrait; his first name was chosen as Stephen was the first Christian martyr; in terms of the parallels between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey Stephen plays the role of Telemachus, the son who goes out in search of his father, Ulysses; he is in the first episode simultaneously understood to be in some sense the grieving and existentially troubled son Hamlet as he has breakfast in the Elsinore-like Martello Tower in Sandycove, South County Dublin. A later episode shows us how Leopold Bloom/Ulysses was at that same time preparing his wife’s and his cat’s breakfast in another part of the city. In so many ways simultaneity is the name of the game in Joyce’s modernist epic. His famed use of the stream of consciousness shows how Bloom and Stephen and Molly are simultaneously physically in particular places in Dublin at particular times and wandering far, far away in their thoughts to other places and other times. Molly may never get out of bed in Ulysses but vast epic journeys through her own life, life in general, time and the universe take place in her head. Molly and Leopold are simultaneously at a certain moment in their lives on June 16, 1904, and re-living in their minds every other moment of their lives. Joyce’s (and Bloom’s) love of puns is itself at once an expression of his mischievous sense of humour and of a whole philosophy of life based on simultaneity. What is a pun, after all, but a play on words suggesting different meanings simultaneously? Almost every word on every page of Finnegans Wake is a pun, which, for Joyce one might say, is always mightier than the sword. Kern referred to Joyce’s Ulysses as “the highpoint of simultaneous literature” in the context of his discussion of a widespread cultural fascination with simultaneity arising out of the development of technologies in transport (railways) and communication (telegraph). Marshall McLuhan similarly makes a connection between Joyce’s work and the revolutionary new spirit of simultaneity of “the electric age”.32 The strange thing is that there is also (at the same time!) something very un-modern, almost medieval 32  Marshall McLuhan’s comments on Joyce and “the electric age” are referred to in a later chapter.

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about Joyce’s intricate system of correspondences and symbolically significant symmetries. One can see why Umberto Eco suggests Joyce remained “medievally minded from youth through maturity”.33 In A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man Joyce showed Stephen Dedalus absorbing the language and philosophical traditions—while simultaneously questioning the authority—of his Jesuit educators on his path to becoming an artist. Joyce even described Ulysses, as he was walking (with Wyndham Lewis) in the vicinity of Notre Dame in Paris, as having “something of the complexity sought by the makers of cathedrals”.34 Ulysses is at once the great modernist text, capturing the spirit of modernity—and at the same time at odds with that kind of modern spirit tending to dismiss the past—particularly the medieval and classical past—and focus on the practical, prosaic, literal, supposedly straightforward (and future-oriented) meanings of commerce and engineering, rather than the symbolic, metaphorical, multilayered, transcendent meanings of classical, medieval, religious, philosophical and literary traditions.35 Joyce humorously (and seriously) puts it all together, deliberately bringing Stephen Dedalus, supposedly representing the artistic, philosophical temperament, and Leopold Bloom, representing the commercial and scientific temperament, together to merge harmoniously (and facetiously) as Stoom/Blephen!36 Joyce’s “dance of the hours” shows modern life lived against and around the clock, as well as the sense of simultaneity associated with the awareness of clock time and city life, but it is the multilayered, polyphonic simultaneity of a huge amount of diversity, the irrepressible life of the mind rather than the uniformity of synchronized clocks that inevitably impresses the reader. Circularity may be inevitably associated with the face of the clock and the “dance of the hours” and, while this could be (and was often) seen as absurd, endless repetition of the same, Joyce gives what might be seen as the daily grind an epic context, ever widening circles of 33  Umberto Eco, “The Artist and Medieval Thought in the Early Joyce”, in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, ed. by J.P. Riquelme, New York: WW. Norton & Co., 2007, p. 332. 34  Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, London: Faber and Faber, 1984, p. xvii. 35  In an essay entitled “The Medieval Sill: Postcolonial Temporalities in Joyce”, David Lloyd discusses Joyce’s mingling of the modern and the medieval, pointing out that the “very structure of Ulysses, as later of Finnegans Wake” is largely based on “an intricate set of patterns determined by a medieval system of resemblances”. David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity, Dublin: Field Day, 2008, p. 84. 36  James Joyce, Ulysses, London: The Bodley Head, 1960, p. 798.

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philosophical, symbolical significance. Molly Bloom’s closing “Yes” seems to welcome with passionate enthusiasm the dawn of another day, another “dance of the hours” and an awful lot else besides. In Ulysses, circularity and simultaneity seem part of an alternative, non-­ linear and even anti-imperialist vision of time, history and the world. This is contrasted with the aggressive-progressive, “going forward” version of time of the imperialist and capitalist will to power in the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and the pompous school principal, Mr Deasy. Here Stephen answers the claim that “all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” by jerking his thumb towards the schoolyard, saying “That is God. […] A shout in the street” (p.  42). For Mr Deasy, progress, the empire and the accumulation of capital are neatly aligned to produce a linear version of time, history, theology—a very “grand narrative”. For Stephen, the anti-colonial, colonial intellectual, and for those on the wrong end of the imperialist path of power, triumph and conquest, history was “a nightmare”, and circular models of time were an attractive alternative to the aggression of the linear model pointed so directly at them. It is such an alternative that Joyce evokes in the “whirled without end” of Molly Bloom’s thoughts trailing off to infinity and in the “recirculation”37 of Finnegans Wake, never ending, but re-­awakening to begin again. Joyce’s circles and “recirculations” may be contrasted with less positive visions of circularity, such as in Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, where the troubled, innocent Stevie is given to drawing “circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos” (p. 76). One may also perhaps contrast both these modern visions of circles and ­circularity with the linear narrative of the story of generations of the Buddenbrooks, a linear model of time perhaps more typical of the nineteenth century than of the early twentieth—at least for some modernist writers and artists. It was at least partly a greater focus on clock time and a changing sense of space—the widening of an individual’s horizons in a globally connected space, as well as the increasingly dense space of the modern city—that lead to visions of simultaneity and circularity, rather than of gradual linear progression over time. Half-time  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, London: Faber and Faber, 1975, p. 582 and p. 3.

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II. More Recent Times Postmodern: Most-Modern When Lyotard defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”, he also opened the Postmodern Condition by relating the discussion back to developments occurring around 1900, that is, well before the period usually associated with the postmodern. The word postmodern, he writes, “designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature and the arts”. His book is intended to place “these transformations in the context of the crisis of narratives”. Lyotard was referring to widespread, extra-literary use of narrative in philosophical, ideological, social/sociological discourse to tell society as a whole some kind of coherent, linear story about itself, its past and its future goal that seemed to make sense, and could serve to legitimate the whole of the status quo or particular parts of it, such as even the practice of science. Lyotard uses the term modern to “designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth”. The postmodern, on the other hand, can be defined—“simplifying to the extreme”, as he says—as “incredulity toward metanarratives”, and this can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, not just to somewhere around 1960, or 1945 or 1939.38 That “incredulity” could be said to have already crept in to the family tree of the Buddenbrook family in the mid to late nineteenth century— as an incredulity towards the metanarrative of capitalist progress, of (ever-­expanding) business. For Thomas Mann, the genealogy of “incredulity” could be traced even further back to Schopenhauerian pessimism: in his novel, he has the character Thomas Buddenbrook read from Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818). The question—one of the questions—here is: how far back does one go to find the beginning of “incredulity toward metanarratives”, the supposed end of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern? Perhaps one is thinking of time in too linear and narrative a fashion, displaying too 38  J.F.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (trans. by Bennington and Massumi), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. xxiii f.

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much “credulity” towards a “metanarrative”, tracing the transition from modern to postmodern along a linear, all too linear timeline, in posing such a question? Another question readers inevitably find themselves posing is: to be really (credibly) postmodern, to exemplify Lyotard’s “definition”, would one not logically have to be incredulous about it as constituting another “metanarrative”? But then, “incredulity” has actually long been considered an inherent part and even an essential aspect of modernity. Being modern fundamentally involves consciously departing from tradition, questioning inherited attitudes, ways of doing things and ways of life—adopting an attitude of “incredulity”, in other words. Modernity is, as Anthony Giddens puts it, a “post-traditional order” and one of its most prominent characteristics is what he calls “reflexivity”, which could perhaps be translated as “incredulity toward metanarratives inherited from tradition or the past”.39 Incredulity towards metanarratives, then, is not something particularly new and “postmodern”, but intimately related to the idea of the modern—going back several centuries. Lyotard himself pointed this out as he was coming to the point about “postmodern” “incredulity towards metanarratives”, mentioning that “science has always been in conflict with narratives” and that “judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables”. Modernity—going back to the time of the Renaissance—is the age of science and scientists are supposedly those who are constantly incredulous, who ask (themselves) questions, rather than simply believing any given (meta)narratives. Modernity, then, right from the start (whenever that was) has a very significant tendency to dissolve (meta)narratives, any kind of linear narrative, plotting human history along a timeline supposedly making sense of it all—as the story of a journey towards salvation, progress, emancipation. However, perhaps there is still a difference though between what one is calling “modern incredulity” and “postmodern incredulity”: modernity may have involved incredulity towards inherited “metanarratives”, but also a belief in the possibility of coming up with better “metanarratives”, whereas postmodernity may still be distinguished by a general “incredulity toward metanarratives”, prospective future ones as well as those of the past. That too is, of course, also an incredulity that has a long history, stretching back not just to “the end of the nineteenth century”.

 See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

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Pilgrim Time, Capitalist Time and the Time of the Tourist Zygmunt Bauman at one point sought to illustrate the difference between the modern and the postmodern by contrasting a supposedly modern attitude to life as a kind of pilgrimage, as a long (linear) journey towards some distant goal, with postmodern ways of life aiming only at much more short-term goals and immediate pleasures. The difference between the supposedly modern “pilgrim” and the supposedly postmodern tourist (as well as Bauman’s other postmodern archetypes: the player, the stroller and the vagabond) could be readily apprehended. The obvious difficulty here is that pilgrimage actually seems a very un-modern way of “passing the time” and passing through space. It is the kind of journey one might more readily associate with the middle ages, with pre-modern times, than with modernity. Bauman in fact briefly sketches out the very, very long Judeo-­ Christian tradition of asceticism involving a constant focus on the “other world”, rather than on this place, that lay behind the attitude to life as a kind of pilgrimage. He even quotes St. Augustine referring to Christians wandering “as on pilgrimage through time, looking for the Kingdom of eternity”.40 How, one might wonder, is that to be considered modern? Bauman’s narrative traces through time the idea of pilgrimage referring to Max Weber’s narrative tracing the emergence of modern capitalism from the Protestant ethic and the ascetic tradition: “The Protestants, as Weber told us, accomplished a feat unthinkable for the lonely hermits of yore: they became inner-worldly pilgrims.” This ultimately led to a translation of one narrative—the narrative of the pilgrimage through time to the Kingdom of Heaven—into another—the narrative of “saving for the future”, investing in the future, focusing always on future gain, rather than present enjoyment. This was the capitalist narrative, where “Time was money”—not to be spent (and certainly not to be wasted), but saved and invested in the future. It was a narrative that borrowed heavily from the Christian ascetic tradition, according to Weber, and what was borrowed in particular was a certain attitude to Time. So in this sense it may be true that modern life was being conceived of as a kind of pilgrimage—in (Weber’s) capitalist translation. While Bauman here suggests modern life was seen as a kind of pilgrimage, for Weber it was really the strange shift from Christian asceticism to Capitalist asceticism that made modernity “tick”, not the pilgrimage itself.  Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 83.

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If it is true that what capitalism borrowed from Christian asceticism was particularly a certain attitude to time, a focus on future reward rather than present enjoyment, it tended to leave behind another aspect of the Christian/religious timeframe—the reverence for the past, for the origins of the created world, depicted in the Book of Genesis as well as centuries of religious tradition—which gave the Christian focus on the future its meaning. Capitalist Time is time lived with both eyes focused on the future, on plans for the future accumulation of wealth; the past no longer matters. The “spirit of capitalism” was documented for Weber in a few paragraphs written by Benjamin Franklin, beginning with the line, “Remember, that time is money”,41 and advising the reader that the “sound of [his] hammer at five in the morning” will do wonders for his ability to borrow money into the future. For Weber, it was evident that there had been a transition from the Christian ascetic attitude of John Bunyan’s pilgrim “hurrying through the market-place of Vanity” on his lonely spiritual search to that of Robinson Crusoe, “the isolated economic man who carries on missionary activities on the side” (p. 119). The point was that religious zeal, demanding unstinting concentration—the cause of Bunyan’s pilgrim’s haste—had become supplanted by capitalist zeal. The latest sequels of these foundational narratives feature traders in financial “futures” hurrying through city streets (the market-place), issuing rushed instructions on mobile phones on the way to the office or those fighting the so-called war for milliseconds to gain advantage in the placing of bets on the stock markets.42 Modernity has involved a great deal of “hurrying”, possibly ever since around the time Marlowe’s Dr Faustus saw the words “Homo, fuge!” tattooed on his arm, asked himself, “Whither should I fly?”, and rushed out of his study on the coat-tails of Mephistopheles. Not long afterwards, of course, Faustus was imploring: Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease and midnight never come!43

41  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2001, p. 14. 42  See Rory Mulholland, “Flashboys return: the transatlantic war for milliseconds”, The Irish Times, October 3, 2015. 43  Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, London: Nick Hern Books, 1996, Act V, Scene 2, Lines 68–74.

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It was the “construction of vehicles which could move faster than the legs of humans or horses could ever do” that really shaped the modern sense of time, Bauman suggests.44 “Modernity”, he writes, “was born under the stars of acceleration and land conquest” (112). Talk of postmodernity (or “second modernity” or even “surmodernity”), Bauman claims here, is inspired by “the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its ‘natural limit’”. “Power”, he continues, “can move with the speed of the electronic signal—and so the time required for the movement of its essential ingredients has been reduced to instantaneity” (10f.). The contemporary “acceleration of reality itself” is turning the experience of time and space completely on its head according to Paul Virilio, bringing about the “end of geography”. From the transport revolution of the nineteenth century to the current “transmission revolution” there has, according to Virilio, been a development leading up to the “new-found importance of world time, a time whose instantaneity definitively cancels out the reality of distances”—and of time intervals.45 One might, of course, point out there is nothing new—or even modern—about this: human beings have been “cancelling the reality of distances and time intervals” and accelerating into the sunset since the invention of the wheel. Like Bauman, Virilio is very concerned that the current version of acceleration is the galloping progress of power—of the powerful over the ­dominated, as he writes: “alongside wealth and its accumulation, there is speed and its concentration, without which the centralization of the powers that have succeeded each other throughout history would quite simply not have taken place.”(11) The instantaneity of the “transmission revolution”, cancelling out the “reality of distances” and of time intervals is, according to Virilio, inevitably leading to disaster, as uncontrolled speed leads to serious accidents, and enabling a new kind of totalitarianism he calls “globalitarianism” (15). Responding to the brutal totalitarianism of the 1930s, Walter Benjamin took Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus” as a symbol of the times he was living through. In the painting, according to Benjamin, the angel’s eyes “are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread”. The face of this “Angel of History” is “turned toward the past”. As Benjamin writes: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 111.  Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (trans. by C. Turner), London: Verso, 2005, p. 8.

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wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” However much the angel wants to stay to help, he is being swept into the future by a powerful storm, while he looks back helplessly watching “the pile of debris” grow “skyward”. The storm, Benjamin comments, is “what we call progress”.46 Those with their eyes focused solely on the future are apt to miss the wreckage behind. Henry Giroux has drawn attention to the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s image, powerfully portraying contemporary times as indeed reminiscent of Benjamin’s day: As history is erased and economics becomes the driving force for all aspects of political, cultural and social life, those institutional and political forces that hold the reins of power now become the purveyors of social death, comfortably ensconced in a political imaginary that wreaks human misery on the planet as the rich and powerful reap huge financial gains for themselves. The principal players of casino capitalism live in the highly circumscribed time of short-term investments and financial gains and are more than willing to close their eyes to the carnage and suffering all around them, while they are sucked into the black hole of the future.47

That does sound rather like “globalitarianism”. According to Bauman: “Velocity of movement and access to faster means of mobility steadily rose in modern times to the position of the principal tool of power and domination.”48 The advent of the kind of “instantaneity” that he sees as associated with a relatively recent shift from “solid” to “fluid” modernity and “from heavy to light capitalism” (a form of capitalism not interested in becoming encumbered with heavy, material goods or factories), “ushers human culture and ethics into unmapped and unexplored territory, where most of the learned habits of coping with the business of life have lost their utility or sense” (p. 128). To return, however to Bauman’s pilgrim, who did not, one presumes, progress at very great speed: while, for Bauman, modern time was pilgrim 46  Walter Benjamin, “Thesis IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 249. 47  Henry A. Giroux, “In the Twilight of the Social State: Re-thinking Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History”, Truthout, 4.1.2011, https://truthout.org/articles/in-the-twilight-ofthe-social-state-rethinking-walter-benjamins-angel-of-history/ (accessed 13.8.2019). See also Christian Beck, “The Storm, Benjamin and Neoliberal Progress”, in Beck, Spatial Resistance: Literary and Digital Challenges to Neoliberalism, London: Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 30–34. 48  Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 9.

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time (and, for Weber, capitalist time), time lived towards some distant future goal, postmodern time is the time of the tourist. If modernity meant the lifelong pursuit of a distant goal or even a headlong rush into the future, postmodernity could be seen as involving a lot of rushing around in different directions on the part of tourists with short-term goals and interests in immediate, more or less instantaneous pleasures. The postmodern attitude to time, according to Bauman, is “to cut the present off at both ends, to sever the present from history. To abolish time in any other form but a collection or an arbitrary sequence of present moments; to flatten the flow of time into a continuous present.”49 This may be related to that “incredulity toward metanarratives” Lyotard referred to, a supposedly postmodern lack of belief in any great narrative leading to some great, distant future conclusion. Just as that incredulity could be traced back a long way, so also could that sense of time as “an arbitrary sequence of present moments”, a “continuous present”, be seen as essentially modern, however apparently contradicting the ascetic aspect of the spirit of modern capitalism that denied present pleasure for future gain. Just as modern science, according to Lyotard, has always been “in conflict with narratives”, inclined to question and subvert any kind of (narrative) belief system pointing to a meaningful endpoint of human history, so also has modern capitalism swept away belief systems/grand narratives, including the religious one that, according to Weber, gave birth to it. Marx and Engels saw that the dynamism of modern (bourgeois) capitalism meant that “all that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned”.50 Weber quotes John Wesley’s concerns about what was happening way back in the eighteenth century: I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things for any revival of true religion to survive long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. (p. 118)

Having eaten up the grand narrative that gave birth to it and gave it meaning, and attempting to establish itself as the only grand narrative around, capitalism was in turn doomed to eat itself up, as a belief system pre-­destined  Bauman, Life in Fragments, p. 89.  Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 248. 49

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to “profane” all belief systems—including itself (just it was inclined, as Marx noted, to consume its own devotees/captains of industry). If it was true that, as Weber argued, the spirit of capitalism fed on the ascetic energies of the Protestant ethic, it was bound to run into difficulties as soon as it had fully consumed its host. It was inevitable then that the confident rush into the future of modern capitalism was constantly accompanied by (postmodern) incredulity/crises of belief in the future, as much as it was concerned to leave behind the past, leading to a less linear sense of time, resembling perhaps the “continuous present”, the “arbitrary sequence of present moments” Bauman sees as typifying the postmodern, or indeed the “liquid modern”. The very word “modern” is derived from the Latin modo, meaning “just now”. Modernity is, fundamentally, understood as a time focused on NOW rather than the past, rather than inherited tradition. In 1863 Baudelaire famously defined modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”,51 a view which supposedly made a lasting impression on many a modern impressionist painter. The “definition” seems to fit postmodernity just as well; those aspects of modern city life are perhaps only more exaggerated in the postmodern city, where Virilio provocatively claims, “here no longer exists; everything is now”.52 The cultural imperative of modernity (extending into postmodernity/“the contemporary”), one might say, has long been not just the modernist “make it new!”, but “make it now!” One can relate such an imperative and sense of the times to the cultural impressions and expressions of circularity and simultaneity around 1900 mentioned earlier. This was seen there as related to a new sense of time as well as space arising in the modern city (of “the electric age”) in constant contact with other parts of the globe in other time zones, through modern forms of transport and communication. One can add the arrival of Lyotard’s (postmodern) incredulity towards metanarratives (evident in Buddenbrooks, The Secret Agent and other pessimistic, modernist works expressing a crisis of belief in bourgeois, capitalist culture), the tendency of capitalist culture to dismiss the past and, consequently, lose its pilgrims’ path towards the future, and the very concept of modernity implying a focus on the “now”, rather than the long line of tradition. Several examples of contemporary fiction, particularly since the turn of the millennium, according to Peter Boxall, seem to demonstrate a striking 51  Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (trans. by Charvet), London: Penguin, 2010, p. 17. 52  Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 116.

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kind of disorientation in relation to time. While, for example, time in DeLillo’s late-twentieth-century novels tended to have a direction— towards some apocalypse anticipated around the end of the century, his work after 2000, including Cosmopolis (2003), suggests, Boxall writes, “a new technological-economic complex that produces a different kind of time, a thin, simultaneous time in which it is hard to gain a narrative purchase”. Boxall specifically relates this “thin, simultaneous time” to Bauman’s description of the “insubstantial, instantaneous time of the software world” as well as to Virilio’s reference to the “intensive present”, that “succeeds the classic time of succession”.53 However apparently new, extreme and exaggerated, of course, one can trace a long line behind that. Nothing succeeds, one might say, like “succession”. The modern (… postmodern … contemporary) sense of the “now”, the present “cut off at both ends”, of simultaneity and circularity could all be contrasted with the future-oriented, linear sense of time more characteristic of the modern “pilgrim-capitalist”. Modern time, one realizes, is experienced in both linear and circular ways—the capitalist confidently striding into the City and into the future is no less “modern” than the author of The Secret Agent or of Ulysses dwelling on circularity. A book such as Buddenbrooks shows the capitalist confidence in pursuing a linear path into the future of one family business shading into artistic pessimism with no such confident sense of direction—or the direction of time. Around the same time, Weber depicted the confident march of capitalism ending in an iron cage. Different Times In attempting to distinguish the postmodern from the modern, Lyotard and Bauman—and Jameson—suggested the difference had a lot to do with time. Both Lyotard’s and Bauman’s diagnoses of the “postmodern condition”—Lyotard’s concept of “incredulity towards metanarratives” and Bauman’s transition from the pilgrim’s progress to the tourist’s trips— highlight the symptom of the lack of a pursuit (over an extended period of time) of a distant goal, seen as something more characteristic of modernity. Jameson noted the “waning” of “the great high-modernist thematics 53  Peter Boxall, “Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century”, Contemporary Literature, 53(4), 2012, pp.  681–712, p.  690. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819533 (accessed 1. 8.2019).

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of time and temporality”, how it seemed that “our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space, rather than by categories of time”,54 and that this was making it difficult to see things historically, as well as to orient ourselves in “the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (p. 83). The danger is that while those “caught as individual subjects” wander lost and powerless in postmodern hyperspace, with no sense of direction (perhaps like tourists in the Bonaventura hotel), global capitalism surges on in the speeding, single–minded, linear pursuit of more profit for those already profiting most, thriving on the disorientation of the postmodern populace. These diagnoses of the postmodern condition all seem persuasive, yet at the same time one can trace the genealogical roots of these trends very far back into “modernity” itself. Incredulity is a significant aspect of the modern condition, going back centuries; the expansion of the spatial sense to include the whole globe (consequently transforming notions of time) is another feature of modern-ity; the emphasis on “now” rather than history and tradition is also part of what is meant by the word “modern”. Perhaps, rather than using the word “postmodern”, it makes more sense to refer to the current “condition” as “radicalised modernity”, as Anthony Giddens suggests, or “liquid modernity”, as Bauman came to call it, or even, to coin a slightly facetious phrase, most-modernity. The contemporary condition may be better understood as an exaggerated development of trends going back centuries, rather than as something radically new and different (and therefore not to be understood historically). Still, it must be said that many descriptions of the “postmodern” are persuasive in characterizing the present. The “legacy” of modernity in relation to time—a legacy that still endures—could perhaps be described as a large collection of clocks and various time machines all showing slightly different times—and the development of a consciousness which has become accustomed to keeping an eye on them all.55 The clock-face itself is a great symbol of modernity, a time focused so much on “now”—always capable of being defined in terms of hours and minutes and visibly “fleeting”. The expansion of horizons and the concentration of the population in vast cities have led to a constant 54  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, p. 72f. 55  See Charles M. Tung, “Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarization of Time”, Configurations, 23, 2015, pp. 93–121.

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awareness of many different things going on simultaneously in different places (and different time zones). While the modern individual is constantly reminded of “public time”, he or she may be conscious of a gap between this time and his or her “private time”. In modern times one has perhaps also become conscious of a distinction between conscious time and unconscious time. In the meantime, one may be keeping an eye on both city time and country time. One may or may not be convinced that teleological, theological time has fed into Capitalist time, but the legacy of modernity has surely involved the rise to global supremacy of the latter. The sense of time as linear may predominate (and may have to do with domination), while at the same time circular notions of time still circulate. The collection of clocks and time machines is still being added to. But perhaps what characterizes modern and most-modern times most is the focus on the present, the “now” of the “transient, the fleeting and the contingent”, and, in the case of Capitalist time, on the future—rather than the past. Finally … Late-nineteenth-century Western culture shows an increasing awareness not just of the time of the clock, of “capitalist time”, of simultaneity, of “public time” and “private time”, but also of the time of the planet, as the theory of evolution as well as fears of degeneration and “entropy” took hold. It was, perhaps, not just the line of the Buddenbrooks that was coming to an end. In 1895 H.G. Wells gave his Time Traveller a chilling glimpse of the future of the planet. The doughty traveller tells us he watched with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. […] The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east […]. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.56

 H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Chapter 11.

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In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century the global population has acquired its own sense of the (limited) time of the planet as dire warnings about pollution, global warming and climate change have filtered through. As one critic suggests, perhaps “the most comprehensive frame for reflection on ‘our’ time—the time of those alive on earth today” is “a recognition that the most accelerated terrestrial warming in the past sixty-five million years is underway”.57 An associated air of apocalypse, of “living in the end times”,58 surrounds the coining of the term “the anthropocene”, a term that suggests the time of this species can be thought of in terms of geological time—and is already almost geological history.59 Such a sense of time, one might say, is apparent in many of the works of the artist, Anselm Kiefer, that evoke the passage of great swathes of the time of the species in terms of historical, mythical, geological time. In the “Vitrinen”, displayed in the Centre Pompidou retrospective in early 2016, broken fragments of twentieth-century civilization—yellowing strips of film, rusting bits of machinery—were presented in glass exhibition cases, almost, one might say, as artefacts of the anthropocene for some archaeological museum of the future. All the contents looked as if they had been found on some wasteland—and the exhibits were reminiscent of the “heap of broken images” of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. One of the vitrines, “Welt-­Zeit—Lebenszeit” (World time—Life time) (2015)— with materials consisting of “glass, metal, lead, photographs, tar and ink”—contained two hanging, crumpled, crinkled strips of film and metal, one on the left and one on the right, and two disintegrating metal boxes, apparently once, but no longer, connected, one on the left and one on the right, as well as fragments of stone or metal lying around the base. Neither world time, nor lifetime, to say the very least, seems to be in a very good state of repair. 57  Douglas Mao, “Our Last September: Climate Change in Modernist Time”, in D’Arcy and Nilges (eds.), The Contemporaneity of Modernism, New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2016, pp. 31–48, p. 31. Mao draws some parallels between the “portents of decline and apocalypse” of early-twentieth-century literature and the contemporary situation. Interestingly, he compares the common contemporary reaction to climate change to the life strategy of deliberate “not noticing” adopted by the aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in the midst of the Irish War of Independence depicted in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September (1929). 58  To quote the title of a book by Slavoj Žižek—Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2011. 59  Simon L. Lewis, Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, 519, 2015, pp. 171–180. Bibcode:2015Natur.519..171L. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258.

CHAPTER 5

The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

I. The Age of Mechanical Reproduction Bombshell One of the most striking distinguishing features of contemporary life and culture is the all-pervasiveness, the ubiquity, of the media, the “ineluctable modality”, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus might have said, of the tele-visible. Modernity, as Anthony Giddens points out, is “inseparable from its ‘own’ media: the printed text and, subsequently, the electronic signal” and the “tremendous increase in the mediation of experience which these communication forms brought in their train”.1 Twentieth-century life became particularly inseparable from that “tremendous increase in the mediation of experience” through the use of the “electronic signal” and this has become one of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary culture. It is worth returning to the passage from an essay by Paul Valéry quoted by Walter Benjamin at the beginning of his famous essay on “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”—“The Work of Art in the Age of its technical Reproducibility”, usually translated as the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: 1

 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity, 1991, p. 24.

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Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, […]. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. […] For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, “La Conquète de l’ubiquité”2

Benjamin proceeds then to discuss these “profound changes […] impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful” and this “amazing change in our very notion of art” as resulting from the development of new technologies enabling the reproduction of images (as well as sound and text), particularly photography and film. The suggestion of the lines Benjamin chose for his opening is clearly that, as early-twentieth-century science had revolutionized humanity’s notions of such fundamental concepts as matter, space and time, so the new technologies and media were utterly transforming how one might think of art and all matters cultural. Such a transformation could also have consequences for how one might think of space and time and attempt to orient oneself within it. The question, in short, was whether one conceived of “the time and space of the work of art” (and all matters cultural) as belonging to some “autonomous” “separate sphere” or not. Any change in this spatial conception— or geography—of the arts had the potential to transform the very notion of space and time generally. That is, one might argue, indeed what has happened, to the extent that the contemporary senses of space and time are inextricable from a media-saturated environment in the age of digital reproduction. In the late nineteenth century Oscar Wilde provocatively argued that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”3; by the early twenty-first century it has become almost impossible to tease them apart—as a result of the spread of media technologies Benjamin began to discuss in the 1930s.

2  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 211. 3  Wilde’s character Vivian argues this in “The Decay of Lying”, in Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, London and Glasgow: Collins, 1966, p. 985.

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More recently the geographer Nigel Thrift has written of a new sense of space, or what he terms “awhereness”, where “increasingly human originary spatiality has become not just accompanied but suffused by a metrical space made up of an army of things which provide new perceptual capacities” and in which “what was called ‘technology’ has moved […] decisively into the interstices of the active percipience of everyday life”.4 In an article on the subject of artistic reactions to a world where everything is mapped by GPS, David Pinder writes: “Questions about what it means to locate and to be located are being significantly reconfigured through the digitalization of urban life and space, and as computer processing becomes embedded or ‘pervasive’ in urban environments.”5 Valéry’s “great innovations” have surely brought about an “amazing change” in our very notion of space as well as of art. In terms of the place and space of art and culture, it is surely also true that some profound and irreversible revolutionary change was taking place in the early twentieth century in “our very notion of art”, even as the fascists were, Benjamin reminds us, hijacking some more traditional ideas of culture—associating art with cult, ritual, mysterious, supernatural powers—discovering their authoritarian, proto-fascist potential, aligning them with the vision of the thousand-year Reich and redirecting them towards the Reichshauptstadt. In seeking to rescue the sphere of art and culture from a Nazi takeover, Benjamin focuses on the anti-fascist implications of the new “material conditions of production”, the new technologies of reproduction. Works of art had always been copied, but for Benjamin what was radically new about photography and film was that the reproduction of images 4  Nigel Thrift, “From born to made: technology, biology and space”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS30 (2006), pp. 463–476, p. 472. https://nigelthrift.files. wordpress.com/2008/02/tran_570.pdf (accessed 28.8.2018). 5  David Pinder, “Dis-locative arts: mobile media and the politics of global positioning”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27(4), 2013, pp.  523–541, p.  523. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.803303 (accessed 29.08.2018). One might say the “cartographers of the empire” referred to by Jean Baudrillard (after Borges) in that famous characterization of the postmodern “Age of Simulacra and Simulations” and its subjects now use GPS—all of the time. In Baudrillard’s allegory the “empire” merges with and becomes its own representation; life becomes art(ifice)/simulation; the line between the two is erased. Pinder in the line quoted above mentions the “digitalization of […] life” itself as well as of space; he also writes that it is necessary “to consider how new forms of location awareness or ‘awhereness’ are bound up with transformations of capitalism, and with geopolitical and military concerns” (526).

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was an inherent part of the process. It was not a matter of producing a one-off original image/work of art, but photographs and films were made to be reproduced and disseminated—rather as books have been since the invention of the “mechanical reproduction of writing”. Just as the printing press brought about “enormous changes”, so also would the new media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photographs and films were made to be seen by large numbers rather than kept as the preserve of the select few. People could view films much as they watched sport—with the critical eye of everyday, amateur experts. A Chaplin film, for example, engages the public at large in ways that a Picasso painting could not. That is what would bring about “profound changes […] in the ancient craft of the Beautiful” and an “amazing change in our very notion of art”. If the mechanical reproduction of images by means of photography and film was leading to the decline of the “aura” associated with a unique, original (painted) image and “emancipat[ing] the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual”, bringing art down to earth and into the sphere of politics, out of the rarefied atmosphere of the cult, one might well suspect that the electronic transmission of images by means of the just then—in Benjamin’s day—rapidly developing technology of television could only accelerate the process. That is, if Benjamin described the process accurately. Benjamin quotes a line from Valéry apparently anticipating in 1928 the age of the couch potato’s zapper: “Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses […], so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand” (p. 213). Benjamin certainly spotted a hugely significant trend in the early twentieth century and speculated as to its likely effects. The “technische Reproduzierbarkeit”—technical reproducibility—of images has of course grown astronomically since 1936 and, as Virilio writes: “What was still only on the drawing board with the industrial reproduction of images analysed by Walter Benjamin, literally explodes with the ‘Large-Scale Optics’ of cameras on the Internet.”6 Benjamin himself used the metaphor of an explosion to describe the effect of film and saw it as a liberating, even revolutionary big bang, as he suggested when he wrote:  Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See (trans. by Julie Rose), Oxford: Berg, 2007, p. 14.

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Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. (p. 229)

The world—and the work of art—would never be the same.7 The invention of film and photography may have brought art into the everyday, but that has involved a transformation of the “everyday” as well as of art itself. What has happened is therefore not just the “amazing change in our very notion of art” and “profound changes […] in the ancient craft of the Beautiful” that Benjamin quotes Valéry as predicting— but “profound changes” in everyday life and “an amazing change in our very notion” of reality as well. Benjamin welcomes the “emancipation” of art from its “parasitical dependence on ritual”, the fact that, “instead of being based on ritual [art] begins to be based on another practice—politics” (p. 218) and points out the revolutionary potential of the new media of photography and film in the sense that they promote a “revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (p. 224). But he is also aware of how the new relationship between art and life in film is being manipulated in the most un-revolutionary ways in a world in which “the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion” (224) and promotes a new kind of cult—the “cult of the movie star”. A further consequence of the new close relationship between art and life is the possibility of its manipulation for more extreme purposes. He warns that the “logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life”. Benjamin famously concludes the essay with the lapidary statement that “Communism responds by politicizing art”. It seems as if the developments Benjamin describes could really go either way, even if he sees both the capitalist and fascist use of film for the “production of ritual values” as a perverse “violation” of an “apparatus” and going against the revolutionary grain of the new technology and the 7  One might say that while the plot of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent centres around a botched terrorist attack on the Greenwich Observatory—a supposed attack on science itself—it was perhaps the scientists and the artists of the day who were the more effective bombers with greater long-term effects. The inventors of new media as well as new concepts and technologies and radical avant-garde artists impatient with bourgeois stuffiness and intent on bringing art into everyday life could be said to have been setting off bombs in the institutions of high culture and traditional authority.

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“revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” that it enabled. After all, one might say, while the invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy did bring about enormous changes in terms of people’s access to and attitudes to texts and ideas in general, it did not make them all revolutionary Communists overnight. The political effect of the “age of mechanical writing” might not be so straightforward. One begins to wonder whether the age of mechanical reproduction had really “emancipated” the work of art from its “parasitic dependence on ritual” at all—or whether in fact the explosion Benjamin referred to just promoted a greater (and more confusing) mixing of images, ritual, cult, commerce, capitalism, politics, propaganda and everyday life. No Business Like … A Gesamtkunstwerk Benjamin acknowledged that “So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, […] no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” while tending to foreground the latter. The question of who owned, controlled and profited from the means of “mechanical reproduction” was pushed back into the foreground by Adorno and Horkheimer early on in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception”, when they wrote: “the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest.”8 Benjamin had suggested that the age of mechanical reproduction meant that “instead of being based on ritual [art] begins to be based on another practice—politics”, but for Adorno and Horkheimer that other practice was not politics, but more obviously business: Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their director’s incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed. (p. 121)

Far from promoting any kind of progressive, revolutionary change, the age of mechanical reproduction had led to the rise of the show business of the culture industry serving the interests of big business, effectively ­distracting workers with flashy entertainment while stealing the shirts off 8

 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, 1997, p. 121.

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their backs. The effect of the new media was not to make for a more critical and less reverential public, as Benjamin suggested, but to prevent the development of any kind of critical consciousness whatsoever and to enforce conformity to late capitalist society. The sound film “leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience”: “sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts” (p. 126f.). The lack of individual thought and the conformism of late capitalist society were all too typical of a fascist society. As Adorno and Horkheimer described it, the movie theatre, that “bloated pleasure apparatus” (139) was an almost perfect school for fascism, only to be surpassed by the coming Gesamtkunstwerk of television, “derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream” of “the fusion of all the arts in one work”. The perfect “alliance of word, image and music” in film and TV is “the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep in the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line” (124). Gesamtkunstwerk—total work of art—is perhaps a good term for how the world is experienced in the age of electronic and digital reproduction, when the “sound film” has left the “movie theatre”, and even the TV, and come to search us out wherever we are, transforming us into minor characters in a baffling and seemingly endless, if awe-inspiring Wagnerian opera—or should that be a soap-opera? The title of one of Virilio’s books— Art As Far As the Eye Can See—captures well this experience of being in the middle of a global Gesamtkunstwerk. For Adorno and Horkheimer the “amazing” and “profound” change that has come about with the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has been a “change in the character of the art commodity itself”: “What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty” (157). As just another commodity in a world of consumer goods, the only kind of value art can retain is a commercial value. Adorno and Horkheimer are aware that even when art was seen as a separate sphere in the bourgeois era, “pure works of art which deny the commodity society by the very fact that they obey their own law were always wares all the same” (157). However, art once stood for something else—“liberation from the principle of utility”—which the contemporary work of art “deceitfully deprives men of” (158). With the rise of the culture industry, it seems, art had given up any claim to stand for (or suggest the existence of) anything other than ­commercial value. While for Benjamin the decline of the “aura” could

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have progressive consequences, for Adorno and Horkheimer the age of “mechanical reproduction” meant the end of the notion of art as belonging to a more or less “separate sphere”, or different space, the end of the autonomy of the work of art and that spelled the end of the critical and liberating role of art. The Birth of … the Department Store One might say that it is this assimilation of art and commerce that already dazzles the young heroine of Zola’s novel, Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), Denise Baudu, newly arrived in Paris on the train from Cherbourg in the early 1860s, as she gazes at the beautiful colours of fabrics in the shop windows of the new grand magasin, the great department store whose name is also the title the novel: the last window especially attracted their attention. It was an exhibition of silks, satins, and velvets, arranged so as to produce, by a skilful artistic arrangement of colours, the most delicious shades imaginable. At the top were the velvets, from a deep black to a milky white: lower down, the satins—pink, blue, fading away into shades of a wondrous delicacy; still lower down were the silks, of all the colours of the rainbow.9

The shop displays of this rapidly expanding department store involve increasingly artful arrangements of colours like paintings to attract the eye, deliberately composed to “seduce” the “Dames” of Paris and to sell as much merchandise as possible. Zola’s novel allows the reader to witness the birth of the department store—and of advertising, marketing, of the consumer society and bouncing ever bigger business—as the offspring of the coupling of art and commerce. Nietzsche should maybe have been writing about the death of tragedy (and of such high art) with the irresistible rise of that new-born little monster. Destroying the Destroyer One might, of course, argue that the close relationship of art and commerce is really nothing new—that one need only think of all those portraits 9  Émile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames translated as The Ladies’ Delight by E.A.  Vizetelly (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1400561h.html), Chapter 1, paragraph beginning “Uncle Baudu was forgotten.”

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of wealthy Renaissance merchants or remember the simple fact that artists have always needed to sell their work to live after all. Adorno is, of course, aware of the fact that works of art “were always wares all the same”, however they still stood for something else. A novel such as Au Bonheur des Dames, as well as itself being a commodity, made the reader think—in ways that the typical product of the “culture industry”, of “show business” did not. At the end of his essay, Benjamin signalled that the way to go was to follow the Communists (and Brecht) in “politicising art”; Adorno, of course, completely disagreed: the only thing to do, in the interest of true liberation, was to hold on to the notion of the “autonomous work of art”, however hostile an environment the twentieth-century culture industry was to such a notion. He gave some indications of what he meant by the “autonomous work of art”, writing that “the uncalculating autonomy of works which avoid popularization and adaptation to the market involuntarily becomes an attack on them”.10 Autonomous works of art, like Picasso’s Guernica, “firmly negate empirical reality, destroy the destroyer”(190); they are “works which swear allegiance to no political slogans, but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system of rigid coordinates that governs authoritarian personalities”(179). Adorno declares in this essay that he has no intention of retracting his famous comment that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, but at the same time endorses the view that “literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism” (188). It is the truly rare autonomous work of art or literature that avoids such a “surrender to cynicism”, and the examples he gives immediately after this discussion are Picasso’s Guernica and the writings of Kafka and Beckett. “No one can persuade himself”, according to Adorno, that these eccentric plays and novels are not about what everyone knows but no one will admit. […] [T]hey deal with a highly concrete historical reality: the abdication of the subject. Beckett’s Ecce Homo is what human beings have become. As though with eyes drained of tears, they stare silently out of his sentences. (190)

10  Adorno, “Commitment”, in Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht and Lukacs, Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 1980, p. 190.

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II. One-Dimensional and Monosyllabic Ping Adorno’s phrases ring true especially when reading some of Beckett’s most minimalistic prose pieces of the mid 1960s, such as “Ping”, which opens with the line: All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn.11

The immobilized, nameless, sexless, almost featureless and almost lifeless figure in an almost featureless landscape almost evokes an image of the crucifixion and the piece could possibly indeed have been called “Ecce Homo” rather than “Ping”, though that would have been to supply the strange text with a more definitive “meaning” than the onomatopoeic and enigmatic “ping” suggests. The “bare white body” described in the piece is, in its very lack of distinguishing features, presented as a kind of everyman/everywoman/every-body: we are given to understand that this figure is a human being, but one stripped of the usual trappings of human being—not just clothes, but facial features, movement, a voice, thought, any historical, cultural or geographical context. The “bare white body” appears to have been rendered immobile in a white space—its legs are “joined like sewn”. There is mention of the eyes “light blue almost white” and of murmurs emitted “only just”, but it appears even these are fading into the whiteness and the silence at the end. What is most striking about “Ping”, however, is the material of the prose itself, consisting of a series of lines—one cannot call them sentences—involving the repetition of a very limited number of mostly monosyllabic words. Not only is this fiction emptied of almost anything that could constitute a narrative—character, plot, dialogue, even narrator—but it is prose stripped of verbs, articles, subjects, conjunctions—the normal features of sentences that enable the making of sense. But the linguistic strangeness also gives the piece a different kind of sense; it gives the reader a greater sense of the almost lifeless, motionless—and almost senseless—state described. It seems that this text evokes an almost complete lack of “meaning”—with the repeated use of the phrase “no meaning” in lines such as “Traces blurs signs  Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, S. Gontarski (ed.), New York: Grove Press, 1995, p. 193. 11

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no meaning light grey almost white” (193). However, “almost” is also a word that is repeated throughout “Ping” and along with “perhaps” suggests a very tentative grasp of something—even of a “meaning” in the line: “Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a meaning that much memory almost never” (194). The lack of (almost) any sense of a human narrative voice behind the strings of repeated monosyllabic words makes the prose sound almost like a piece of impersonal technical writing— or even a computer-generated text. The insertion of the word “ping” itself at apparently random intervals of course adds to this. “Ping” is a particularly non-human, unnatural sound, a noise only made by machines—the kind of noise we are surrounded by all the more these days from the supermarket scanner to our everyday household appliances. The repetition of the impersonal “ping” as well as the repetition of the sounds of other words and phrases gives the piece the hypnotic effect of a strange staccato rhythm. This is language composed as experimental music—perhaps comparable to something like Cage’s music for a “prepared piano”—language “made strange” and estranging, so alienating that it might possibly—but “only just”?— remind the reader of something. It is quite likely, however, that the general public would react with complete bafflement to a piece like “Ping” and simply reject it out of hand as “nonsense”. In his essay on the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin contrasted what he saw as the “reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting” with what he called the “progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie”, writing: the progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. […] The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. (p. 223)

“Ping”, like Picasso, might be just too strange to be of “great social significance”, as Benjamin terms it here. But then one remembers the anecdote about Picasso recounted by Adorno: “An officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited the painter in his studio and, pointing to Guernica, asked: ‘Did you do that?’ Picasso reputedly answered, ‘No, you did.’” The Nazi’s aggression toward the painter here is, for Adorno, typical of those who “fulminate […] against artistic distortion, deformation and perversion of life, as though authors, by faithfully reflecting

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atrocity, were responsible for what they revolt against”.12 The “bare white body” in “Ping” might really be then a realistic portrayal of what Adorno might call “the human being in the age of mechanical reproduction”, the responsibility not of Beckett, but a nightmare produced by twentieth-­ century history. In an essay entitled “Trying to Understand Endgame” Adorno memorably refers to Beckett’s figures as “flies that twitch after the swatter has half smashed them”.13 While the time in Endgame is given with extraordinary precision as “zero”, the “historical moment” of both the flies and the swatter in question is clear for Adorno: After the Second War, everything is destroyed, even resurrected culture, without knowing it; humanity vegetates along, crawling, after events which even the survivors cannot really survive, on a pile of ruins which even renders futile self-reflection of one’s own battered state. (323)

The “catastrophe” he refers to repeatedly is, it seems, not “just” the Second World War, and not “just” the historical Auschwitz, but “permanent catastrophe”, “the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans” (p. 324). Beckett shows “as humanly typical only those deformations inflicted on humans by the form of their society”. If Adorno hailed Beckett’s writing as some of the all too rare “autonomous works of art”, avoiding “popularization and adaptation to the market”, negating “empirical reality” and “destroy[ing] the destroyer”, Herbert Marcuse saw Beckett as an again all too rare exponent of the almost extinct tradition of art as the Great Refusal, “the protest against that which is”.14 According to Marcuse, “the real face of our time shows in Samuel Beckett’s novels” (p. 251). For Marcuse, of course, that is a one-dimensional face, a face that has been reduced to one dimension by the “society of total administration”, the “new forms of control”, the “closing of the political universe”, the “Hell of the affluent society” and the “conquest of the unhappy consciousness”—to cite just a few of the memorable chapter headings and phrases of One-Dimensional Man.  Adorno, “Commitment”, p. 189.  Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame”, in O’Connor (ed.), The Adorno Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 329. 14  Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 66. 12 13

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Marcuse here expresses similar concerns to those of Adorno and Horkheimer in “The Culture Industry”: If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and politics with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. (p. 60f.)

In such a world, the role of art and literature as expressions of the Great Refusal, “the protest against that which is”, has almost completely disappeared, as art and literature have simply been absorbed into the mass communications/commercial mix of Benjamin’s “age of mechanical reproduction”. Perhaps the only sound to be heard in such a “one-­ dimensional” world of “total administration” during what Adorno called “the phase of completed reification”—once “the flies” had stopped “twitching”—was a thoroughly dehumanized “ping”. The notion of “autonomous art”, of art functioning as some kind of “other dimension”, as a “Great Refusal” of that which is, may indeed seem obsolete in the one-dimensional times Marcuse describes. Beckett may be seen as portraying the process of such notions of what Marcuse understood as transcendence becoming obsolete—in works such as “Ping” and “Imagination Dead Imagine”. One might even view these works as deliberately performing the self-deconstruction of the all too socially convenient institution of Literature—and all traditional/conventional modes of transcendence—and reawakening on a more fundamental (what one of Beckett’s characters would no doubt term “arse-aching”) level a desire for some kind of transcendence, for something better than “that which is”. In their refusal to conform and fit in, Beckett’s characters and works may be the last “twitching flies” of the “Great Refusal”. They and he almost seem to stand (or stagger) apart—in ways that might seem impossible (or even suspiciously pretentious or elitist) today. The figure of Beckett seems to continue to haunt some almost autonomous sphere—just about maintaining the pose of the modernist artist who could and did still claim to stand apart from both the world and his work. Soup of the Day … is One-Dimensional But has the demise of the most austere “last great modernist” meant the demise of the “autonomous work of art”, of the “Great Refusal” and the end altogether of the ability of artists and art to reflect and comment on

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society in a world that has become simply one-dimensional and has extinguished any critical dimension? Is “one-dimensionality” not what much postmodern art constantly reflects (on)? One might think here of Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) as both an example of and comment on postmodern one-dimensionality. One might think also of Fredric Jameson’s observation: Andy Warhol’s work […] turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell’s Soup Can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more precisely about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.15

Warhol seems to confront the spectator with the commodity itself—or rather with the commodity reduced to two-dimensional, mechanically reproduced images, themselves images of mechanically reproduced advertising images16— but without saying anything, literally without adopting any perspective. The sheer flatness of the two-dimensional image, the lack of perspective, the deliberate depthlessness Jameson sees as so typical of postmodern art, seem to imply a kind of blankness, that there is nothing to be said, critical or otherwise—a state all too typical of Marcuse’s one-­ dimensional world. Is this “Ping” after the “bare white body” has spontaneously, but silently, combusted into whiteness, leaving nothing but an occasional “ping”? Not even a fly left twitching here, Adorno might comment. “There is only one dimension”, Marcuse wrote, “and it is ­everywhere and in all forms.”17 Art, reality, life, commerce are all on the same (depthless) plane. Jean Baudrillard’s characterization of the late twentieth century as the age of “Simulacra and Simulations” could be said to be in some way a further development (or re-phrasing) of Benjamin’s idea that the status of 15  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 68. 16  Jameson writes of a return to figurative art, “but this time to a figurative art—so-called hyperrealism or photorealism—which turns out to be the representation, not of things themselves, but of the latter’s photographs: a representational art which is really ‘about’ art itself!” Jameson, “Conclusion” in Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch etc., Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 1980. 17  Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 13.

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images in the eyes of the public and the relation between images/art and “reality” had been fundamentally altered in the “age of mechanical reproduction”—as well as of Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensionality. Indeed Baudrillard, describing the process of consumption as a “process of absorption of signs and absorption by signs” in The Consumer Society, had referred to Marcuse writing of “the end of transcendence”.18 However, if Walter Benjamin pointed out that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (p. 215)—enabling a “revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art”—Baudrillard suggested that what was really withering in the age of simulacra, reality TV and virtual reality was the notion of reality itself. Referring to a tale by Borges relating how a group of cartographers had created a map of an empire so detailed it ended up covering the empire itself, but that had eventually disintegrated with the decline of the empire, exposing the landscape once again, Baudrillard famously argued that what was now the case was that it was the territory “whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map”. The ground seems to have disappeared beneath people’s feet and maps, representations, images are what they are surrounded by in the age of simulacra—not “reality”, but “hyper-reality”, a one-dimensional Disneyland, where everything is obviously artificial—fake, but there is no longer anything real to contrast it with. Roy Lichtenstein’s comic strip figures in large format comic strip scenes—again images of images—might come to mind here. And one might be tempted to make a connection between Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963) and Beckett’s equally monosyllabic and onomatopoeic “Ping” (1966). For all its in-your-face, comic strip, two-dimensional simplicity and exaggerated childishness, there is an air of parody about Whaam! that implies there is more to it than the blank, uncritical pastiche Jameson finds so typical of postmodern imitation. Perhaps Whaam! like “Ping” has the (“alienation”) effect of making the spectator/reader stand back and think: “is this what life is becoming?” However, perhaps the first thoughts that struck the 1960s’ audience were more to do with what it meant for traditional notions of art. Maybe one could say that there is a fundamental ambiguity about works such as those of Warhol and Lichtenstein as to whether they simply add to a culture of one/two-dimensionality or whether they reflect on it critically—and this very ambiguity gives them a kind of depth.  Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage Publications, 1998, p. 191.

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In distinguishing between two forms of imitation—parody and pastiche—the one implying some kind of critical point and the other not implying anything at all—and in seeing a prevalence of the latter in postmodern art, Jameson was commenting on what he calls the “abolition of critical distance” so typical of postmodern times, very much as Marcuse had deplored the loss of a critical dimension in one-dimensional times. For Jameson, the “omnipresence of pastiche” is part of the “culture of the simulacrum”, or even of Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”, in keeping with the “flatness or depthlessness” he sees not just in Warhol, but as “perhaps the supreme formal feature” (p.  68) of postmodernism. “Flatness” is evoked too when he suggests Postmodernism has involved the “effacement […] of the older (essentially high modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture” (p. 63) and “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (p. 65). Further, what he calls “depth models” (70) have been repudiated in poststructuralist theory and even the notion of individual, personal depth—of a deep self needing to be expressed, in art for example—appears to be obsolete in a society where people do not develop a sense of “alienation”, a sense of being alienated by and from capitalist society, but merely “fragmentation”: “Alienation of the subject”, he says, “is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject” (71). Marcuse had also pointed out the perhaps declining relevance of the concept of alienation in a consumer culture that demands that people buy into and identify with “the system”, where people “find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment”.19 Addiction The invention of photography, for Walter Benjamin, was what really launched the “age of mechanical reproduction” and “transformed the entire nature of art”, promoting a “revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art”.20 In the late twentieth century Jameson observes a “remarkable current intensification of an addiction to the photographic image”, linking this with the “society of the spectacle” where, as he quotes Debord as writing, “the image has become the final form of com Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 11.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art…”, p. 220, p. 224.

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modity reification”.21 Jameson refers again later to the current “cultural form of image addiction” and argues that, far from promoting anything remotely revolutionary, “no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it” (p. 85). Benjamin suggested that something fundamental had changed with the invention of photography and other technologies of mechanical reproduction. Jameson sees Postmodernism as “inseparable from […] some fundamental mutation in the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism” and that seems to be that the “‘semi-autonomy’ of the cultural sphere […] has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism” (p.  86). This was, of course, what had greatly concerned Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. What has happened, though, is not that the “cultural sphere” has been extinguished, according to Jameson, but the “dissolution of an autonomous sphere is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion”, so that now “everything in our social life […] can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and as yet untheorized sense” (p. 86f.). This is not quite the liberating explosion Benjamin had associated with the invention of film, bursting our “prison world asunder” and allowing us to “go calmly and adventurously travelling”. For Jameson, the escaped prisoners of postmodernity are rather more like the tired tourists wandering around with their luggage, unable to find the reception in what Jameson describes as the classic example of postmodern “hyperspace”— the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. The disorientation experienced by visitors to a hotel with three different entrances, none of which leads directly to the reception, is for Jameson the typical feeling induced by postmodern “hyperspace” where we are unable “to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (p. 83). It seems that the “explosion” of the cultural sphere has not only made everything in some way “cultural”, but confusing and disorientating as well. Culture, according to Jameson and Marcuse, no longer occupies a semi-autonomous position from which it might offer critical comment on a reality outside itself. The task for a “new political art” will be to discover  Jameson, “Postmodernism…”, in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, p. 74f.

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some new way of standing back and “mapping” “the world space of multinational capital”—in which we seem to be just immersed and lost—so that “we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle” (p. 91). A few points could be made here. First: one might well question whether culture had ever really occupied any such “semi-autonomous” position. Second: if culture had once held such a position and subsequently lost it, one could relate this to the course of capitalism as described by Marx and Engels—“all that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned”. Culture may have temporarily acquired a quasisacred role during the nineteenth century as capitalism etherized—or swallowed up—the power of religion, but by the twentieth century it was the turn of culture. Next? Third: Jameson gives the experience of being “immersed” in the volumes of a postmodern building as an illustration of the new feeling of being “submerged” in “postmodern hyperspace” (where everything is cultural). But one might say that the experience of architecture (rather than of a painting) always lends itself to such language of immersion. Towards the end of “The Work of Art…” Benjamin wrote (approvingly): “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction” (p. 232). (Sure, the age of mechanical and digital reproduction may have led to a greater sense of being surrounded by images, but people have always been “immersed” in culture, rather than simply gazing at it.) Fourth: it might not be the duty of artists and writers to become like those cartographers of the empire and map out the whole thing. Artists and writers can surely be valued for giving insight into individual perspectives and experiences— among many other things. Critics and theorists may be more inclined to cartography on a global scale—if they haven’t succumbed to the “postmodern condition”, of course. The images of images one could see in so many of Warhol’s artworks, in Lichtenstein’s Whaam!, as well as in “hyperrealism and photorealism”22 were perhaps already “mapping” a media-saturated world with its “image addiction”, even leaving landmarks critics such as Jameson and others could seek to orient themselves by.  Mentioned by Jameson in his “Conclusion” to Aesthetics and Politics, p. 211.

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III. The Age of “Electrickery” The Noise Maybe one could say that even the title of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1984) effectively evokes the sense of “one-dimensionality”, of the “depthlessness” of the “simulacrum” or even of complete “immersion” in hyperspace mentioned above. The “white noise” of the title of this hilarious comic novel, set in a small university town in the U.S., seems to be an all-pervasive, “dull and unlocatable roar”23 not just in the supermarket, where several scenes of the novel take place, but everywhere—coming from the traffic on the freeway 24 hours a day, from the TV, always chattering away. Human beings and machines seem to merge in this undifferentiated “white noise”. The TV is like an extra character in the novel: the reader is abruptly told what “The TV said”, apropos of nothing. Equally abruptly and apropos of nothing, the narrator relates that: “A woman passing on the street said, ‘A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.’” She sounds like a walking TV ad for cough syrup, though this is perhaps just her shopping list for the day. There is much talk in the novel of the fear of death, but the real fear appears to be that it may have already occurred. “What if death is nothing but sound?” one of the characters asks. “Electrical noise. […] Uniform, white” (228). As they push their shopping trolleys around the aisles in the white light and “timeless” atmosphere of their local supermarket, one academic (the would-be specialist in Elvis Presley studies) provides an anthropological commentary on the scene for the benefit of the wife of the Professor of “Hitler Studies”, observing at one point: “Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think” (45). In some ways DeLillo’s novel might be compared to Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames: the supermarket is almost as central in White Noise as the department store in Zola’s novel. Rather as Zola provided exhaustive and exhausting accounts of the textiles on display in the nineteenth-century department store, DeLillo lists the items on the supermarket shelves—from the “white cartons and jars” in the “generic food area” to the six types of apples and “the paperback books in spindly racks, the books with shiny metallic print, raised letters, vivid illustrations of cult violence and windswept romance” (44). (There were, no doubt, more than 32 Campbell’s Soup cans there too.)  Don DeLillo, White Noise, London: Picador, 2011, p. 43.

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DeLillo, however, also particularly delights in itemizing the contents of waste containers, such as the bag of trash the Professor of Hitler Studies pulls apart, looking for his wife’s tablets, feeling “like an archaeologist about to sift through a finding of tool fragments and assorted cave trash” (297). He compares the “compressed bulk” of oozing, compacted rubbish to an “ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking”. Among the many other unsavoury things he picks out of this particular “work of art” is “a banana skin with a tampon inside” and he asks the deadpan rhetorical question “Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness?” (298) The novel ends with another supermarket scene, seemingly echoing the pronouncement of the professor earlier that “Here we do not die, we shop”: The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly coloured goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. (375)

Ping? White Noise does seem to very effectively reflect the “depthlessness”, the “one-dimensionality”, the superficiality of the “society of the spectacle” and the “simulacrum”, of total “immersion” in “hyperspace” and so on—but the thing is: DeLillo doesn’t just add another reflection to a hall of mirrors, he manages to take some critical distance from it, and encourages the reader to do the same, through the satirical humour. Perhaps then critical distance has not quite been abolished by the “logic of late capitalism”, as Jameson feared. One might even say that the title itself—White Noise—establishes a kind of critical distance from and offers a comment on the society depicted in the novel. Magma Paul Virilio could perhaps have used the same title as a heading for part of his essay “Art As Far As the Eye Can See”, where he writes: […] with the audiovisible and especially the turning into music of the image, of all images, sonorous and visual sensations, far from completing each other, are confused in a sort of MAGMA where rhythms hold sway over forms and their limits, swept away as they are in the illusionism of an ART

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WITHOUT END, without head or tail, where you literally no longer distinguish anything apart from the rhythmological rapture. […] everything dissolves into the indistinction, followed shortly by the indifference, then by the passivity, of a befuddled subject.24

The “audiovisible”, the “turning into music of the image” (or should that be the other way around?), “where you literally no longer distinguish anything”—all sound rather reminiscent of the image/sound of “White Noise”. For Virilio this is all part of the disorientating “acceleration of reality” resulting from the all-pervasiveness of technologies involving the instant transmission of images and information, the “coming of the ‘live’, of ‘direct transmission’”.25 The communications revolution has transformed notions of time and space. The sense of time traditionally measured in terms of the duration of the limited hours of daylight has been replaced with the “false day” of screens, a world with the lights on all the time, the world of “real time” and world-time “whose instantaneity definitively cancels the reality of distances” (8). Location in bounded space has been replaced with a sense of being everywhere at once; the individual city has merged into a “world meta-city” whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. The world is “constantly ‘tele-present’ twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week” (13). TV, the internet, live-cams—all the technologies of the age of digital reproduction—contribute to what Virilio might well have termed “white noise”, this “art as far as the eye can see”. He writes of a “‘cinematic’ and shortly ‘digital perception’” changing the rhythms of history and replacing the “pace of the long time span” with the “ultra-short time span of this televisual instantaneity that is revolutionizing our vision of the world”: “history as a whole takes its cue from filmic acceleration, from this cinematic and televisual crush!”26 Virilio is really taking up once more the questions brought up by Benjamin in the early twentieth century as to the “profound changes” resulting from the “age of technological reproducibility” and is aware that “what was still only on the drawing board with the industrial reproduction of images analysed by Walter Benjamin, literally explodes with the ­‘Large-­Scale Optics’ of cameras on the Internet”.27 Virilio’s perspective is,  Virilio, Art As Far As the Eye Can See, p. 118.  Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 12. 26  Virilio, The Original Accident, Cambridge: Polity, 2007, p. 25f. 27  Virilio, Art…, p. 14. 24 25

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however, closer to that of Adorno and Horkheimer than to Benjamin. Cinema, according to Virilio, has had none of the liberating effects Benjamin attributed to it: In cinema, not only does nothing stop, but, most important, nothing necessarily has any direction or sense, since on the screens physical laws are reversed. The end can become the beginning, the past can be transformed into the future […]. In a few decades, with the lightning progress made by industrial cinema, humanity has unwittingly passed into an era of directionlessness, of nonsense.28

As a result, the twentieth century has been the century not of the image, he claims, but of the “optical illusion”.29 Much as Jameson described the effects of postmodern “hyperspace”, Virilio suggests that all this disruption of our sense of time and space is supremely disorientating, leading, as he puts it, to the “indifference” and “passivity” of a “befuddled subject”.30 One might think of the state Michael Caine’s character is (almost) reduced to by being subjected to prolonged periods of something like “white noise” and sleep deprivation under the constant glare of bright lights in the film The Ipcress File (1965). Virilio may not mention the brainwashing box/machine in The Ipcress File, but he does come up with a surprisingly similar image to describe “where we are at”—the image of the “centrifuge”, “so useful in training the astronaut to leave the ground. By dint of copping the ‘Gs’ of the merry go round’s acceleration, the fatal moment comes when that human guinea pig suffers what is known as a ‘blackout’ in which he loses sight and faints.”31 Beckett was perhaps giving a less hysterical, quieter, but starker image in “Ping”, also ending in a kind of “blackout”—“ping silence ping over”. According to Virilio, motion sickness has been superseded by “instant transmission sickness”, the common ailment of “‘Net junkies’, ‘Webaholics’ and other forms of cyberpunk struck down with IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder), their memories turned into junkshops”.32 The problem again  Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 84f.  Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 29. 30  Virilio, Art…, p. 118. 31  Virilio, Art…, p. 125. 32  Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 38. 28 29

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and again for Virilio is the instantaneity of global communication cancelling out the sense of distance and of time and leading to a “fundamental loss of orientation”.33 Electrickery Instantaneity is also precisely what Marshall McLuhan saw was the effect of what he called “the electric age”. “The greatest of all reversals”, he writes, “happened with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant.”34 McLuhan and Virilio are remarkably similar in their descriptions of a very fundamental change in Western culture—if McLuhan is more concerned with “understanding our predicament, our electrically-­ configured whirl” rather than simply railing against it. Like Virilio, McLuhan points out that this fundamental change has affected the sense of direction, and sequence, as well as ideas of time and space. Virilio is concerned that in the age of cinema “nothing necessarily has any direction or sense”; McLuhan writes that in the electric age “sequence yields to the simultaneous” (13). “Electric light and power”, according to McLuhan “eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as radio, telegraph, telephone and TV” (9). We live “in a brand new world of allatonceness”.35 This is a radical departure for a culture built so much upon “sequential” ways of thinking, the “message” of the medium of written language, where letters are “strung” together, “bead-like”, in a line to form words and words strung together in a line to form sentences. The effect of the use of the alphabet, according to McLuhan, was that, “the line, the continuum […] became the organizing principle of life. ‘Rationality’ and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.”36 The instantaneity of electricity—and the “new” media of “radio, telegraph, telephone and TV”—inevitably comes as quite a shock to a culture of sequences, and McLuhan sees that it will take some time to appreciate the full significance of the revolution involved and to readjust. 33  Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!”, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72. 34  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London: Routledge Classics, 2001, p. 12. 35  Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, London: Penguin, 1967, p. 63. 36  McLuhan, The Medium…, p. 45.

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Benjamin could have given his essay the title “The Work of Art in the Age of Electricity”, though of course his focus was rather on reproduction than instantaneity. The shift from “sequence” to the “simultaneous” was evident in the early twentieth century art of cubism, which “drops the illusion of perspective in favour of instant sensory awareness of the whole”.37 McLuhan associates the use of perspective in art with the position of a detached observer, a position that is no longer tenable: “The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. […] The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.”38 It seems the “abolition of critical distance” Jameson (and the Frankfurt School critics) complained of might have been the effect of electricity as well as the logic of Late Capitalism. Simultaneity is also the name of the game—or one of them—in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which McLuhan cites a number of times. Having just quoted John Cage writing about his music, McLuhan writes: “Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.”39 Finnegans Wake is full of wordplay, of puns, words that suggest several different meanings simultaneously. The pun, McLuhan writes, “derails us from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order”.40 Finnegans Wake frustrates the traditional reader’s expectations of sequence and narrative continuity, giving us instead non-linear simultaneity, and is for McLuhan a great example of those same features of the “electric age”. As strange in its own way as Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s “Ping” could also be said to present the reader with “non-linear simultaneity” and derail the reader “from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order”. The repetition of a limited number of mostly monosyllabic words, the lack of verbs and of linking words and so on have an effect like a “flash” of an instant captured on a photograph, an image of an instant when all movement is frozen like the immobile “bare white body” itself. The title could be read as perfectly encapsulating the instantaneity of the  McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 13.  McLuhan, The Medium…, p. 53. 39  McLuhan, The Medium…, p. 120. 40  McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 35. 37 38

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“electric age” of McLuhan. However, this is simultaneity as complete immobility, clearly contrasting with the extreme mobility of meanings and sounds in Finnegans Wake, where nothing remains still, no meanings fixed in place, for even an instant. That might be increasingly true of the age of what is called at one point in Finnegans Wake “electrickery” (579), but it should also be said that Joyce and Beckett were not simply, in their treatment of instantaneity and simultaneity, at one with their time, reflecting the Zeitgeist. Non-linear or circular models of time in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, for example, appear to break very deliberately with an oppressively linear mainstream. The simultaneous meanings and associations of the puns and malapropisms on every line of Finnegans Wake evoke the time and language of dreams, of art, of myth, an alternative reality to the ruthless instrumental rationalism of empire, capital and totalitarian regimes. The Dadaists had, in their time, similarly responded to the thoroughgoing instrumentalization of language during the First World War with the “Simultangedicht” and multilingual linguistic play, such as in the multilingual, polyphonic poem “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer”. However apparently different from and oppositional to the “mainstream” the linguistic play of Joyce (and the Dadaists) may have been, for McLuhan Joyce grasps the true nature of the “electric age” as a break with linear, sequential ways of thinking, bringing us into a “brand new world of allatonceness”. This, one might say, is the world not just of Joyce’s simultaneous meanings but also of instant digital photography, instant transmission of images as well as what Jameson referred to as a generalized “image addiction”.

IV. Art Works in Shared Spaces? The Practice of Parataxis “Allatonceness”, simultaneity and instantaneity involve lots of different things and images being available at the same time and juxtaposed with each other. Simply placing words or clauses beside each other without linking words can be described grammatically as “Parataxis”. Jacques Rancière writes of “the great Parataxis” and refers to examples ranging from the “piles of vegetables, charcuterie, fish and cheeses” in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris to the juxtaposition between incongruous words and things (such as the Surrealist combination of umbrella and sewing-­

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machine) in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and Godard’s use of montage. Rancière mentions a problem here, pointing out that Godard’s practice of montage was formed in the Pop era, at a time when the blurring of boundaries between high and low, the serious and the mocking, and the practice of jumping from one subject to the other seemed to counter-pose their critical power to the reign of commodities. Since then, however, commodities have teamed up with the age of mockery and subject-hopping. Linking anything with anything whatsoever, which yesterday passed for subversive, is today increasingly homogeneous with the reign of journalistic anything contains everything and the subject-hopping of advertising.41

While Rancière goes on to show the difference between Godard’s montage—in Histoire(s) du Cinéma—and the “subject-hopping of advertising” and to discuss forms of montage (dialectical and symbolic) that are still useful and cannot be reduced to the “subject-hopping of advertising”, it is of course a serious issue if, for artists, what “yesterday passed for subversive, is today increasingly homogeneous with the reign of […] advertising”. What are artists to do when the advertisers have stolen their best techniques?42 One might well wonder whether it could be said of Joyce’s playful techniques as well as of many of the shocking, disruptive and revolutionary techniques of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde that what was once subversive has now become mainstream—even if Finnegans Wake has not quite been sucked into that “riverrun”. Art of the Impossible While the “work of art”—particularly “realist” art—faced one death trap in the form of complete integration into the commercial world as mere commodity of the powerful “culture industry” and even avant-garde tech41  Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (trans. by Gregory Elliott), London: Verso, 2007, p. 51. 42  It might in passing be suggested that the avant-garde “practice of montage”, “blurring of boundaries” etc. may not always have been so much a way of counter-posing themselves to the “reign of commodities” so much as to the linear continuity of bourgeois tradition and order (which of course included the reign of commodities). One way or another—either through artistic subversion or through the progress of capitalism (or indeed as a result of the “electric age”)—the continuities of that old order have passed away. The reign of commodities and of capitalism clearly hasn’t.

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niques could be assimilated into advertising campaigns, Zygmunt Bauman brings up other reasons for the “impossibility of the avant-garde”, reasons that make it very difficult to see the “distinctiveness” of the arts in postmodern times. For Zygmunt Bauman, “it does not make much sense to speak of the avant-garde in the postmodern world”.43 The main reason he gives for this is that the concept of the avant-garde is based on a spatial and in particular linear notion of time: avant-garde artists could consider themselves at the forefront of cultural progress, being ahead of their time, leading the way into the future and so on, so long as one could conceive of time as linear and having a particular direction. Bauman suggests that a “momentous change in life circumstances” of recent occurrence has involved the “detemporalization of social space” (86): “The projection of spatial, contemporaneous difference upon the continuum of time, re-presentation of heterogeneity as ascending series of time stages, was perhaps the most salient, and possibly the most seminal, feature of the modern mind” (86). “Modern time”, he writes, “had direction”. He mentions characters in novels such as David Copperfield and Buddenbrooks as embodying the modern sense of direction—though one might point out that it is precisely this that Thomas Mann shows in the latter novel coming adrift in the modern artistic temperament! Writers of the great era of the Bildungsroman clearly aligned the individual lives of characters with a linear, directional notion of time as well as with the linear form of the written narrative. That is a concept of time that no longer seems available in a world where everything “is on the move, but the moves seem random, dispersed and devoid of clear-cut direction”, where “we do not know for sure […] where is ‘forward’ and where ‘backward’” and “the past coordination between spatial and temporal dimensions has all but fallen apart” (p. 95). This, according to McLuhan, was the effect of the “electric age”, where “sequence yields to the simultaneous”—and writers and artists were among the first to spot this. One of the paradoxes, one might say, of the “avant-garde” is that revelling in “simultaneity” could only be considered as avant-garde on the basis of a generally held linear conception of time. Once “simultaneity” becomes established as the order of the day, it can no longer seem either avant-garde or subversive. If the simultaneous vision of the avant-garde becomes mainstream, the avant-garde itself becomes redundant.  Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity, 1997, p. 95.

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That might lead one to wonder whether what is perhaps most interesting, “subversive”, “avant-garde”, thought-provoking today, where the “instantaneous” and the “simultaneous” prevail everywhere in mainstream culture, might be artistic work that goes against this grain, work that evokes slow development, long duration and reminds us of continuities. One might think of the German TV series Heimat (1984) or of Michael Haneke’s films Das weisse Band (2009) and Caché (2005). Bauman explores the other paradoxes that spelled the end of the avant-­ garde. The modernists were, according to Bauman, “plus moderne que la modernité elle-même”, whole-heartedly adopting the modern attitude to time as directional and wishing to “spur trotting modernity into a gallop”. Constantly striving to be “ahead of the posse”, and, according to Bauman, “goaded by the horror of popular approval”, the avant-garde “sought feverishly ever more difficult […] artistic forms” (98). This was to be the “seed of perdition”—for two reasons. Firstly, distance from popular taste and understanding came to be recognized as a very convenient and often purchasable badge of social distinction by the upper classes, whose motives were in fact deeply conservative and thus rather undid any revolutionary potential of the avant-garde (99). Secondly, there was a kind of natural limit to avant-garde transgression and provocation, “reached in the blank or charred canvas, the erased Rauschenberg drawings, the empty New York gallery at Yves Klein’s private viewing” and so on. “A moment arrived when there was nowhere to go” (100). As Terry Eagleton wrote: “To place a pile of bricks in the Tate gallery once might be considered ironic; to repeat the gesture endlessly is sheer carelessness of any such ironic intention, as its shock value is inexorably drained away to leave nothing beyond brute fact.”44 Faced with the impossibility of surging “forward” in a time/space lacking a sense of direction, facing annihilation in the form of appropriation by the (elite section of the) culture industry, and/or engaging in performances of self-annihilation ending up nowhere—it is for these reasons that, for Bauman, the “phrase ‘postmodern avant-garde’ is a contradiction in terms” (100). Bauman wonders then where one might look for “the distinctiveness of arts in the postmodern, post-avant-garde universe”, if one doesn’t simply succumb to the “stratifying power” of the “site in which they are viewed or purchased and the price they command” (101). 44  Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism”, in Lodge and Wood (eds.), Modern Criticism and Theory, Second Edition, Pearson Education, 2000, p. 362.

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This essay ends on a rather pessimistic note reflecting on the arts sharing the “plight of postmodern culture as a whole”, a culture of Baudrillard’s simulacrum rather than representation and where art has become a kind of “sui generis reality”, “one of many alternative realities”, where the “importance of the work of art today is measured by publicity and notoriety” and “greatness” is an effect of “reproductive and copying machines”. The phrase seems to deliberately evoke Benjamin’s “age of mechanical reproduction” and Bauman’s assessment of the “work of art in the age of postmodern reproduction” is rather critical here: “What counts, after all, is the number of copies sold, not what is copied” (102). In the following essay, however, Bauman takes a much more positive view, suggesting pithily that “the meaning of postmodern art is the deconstruction of meaning” (107): The work of a postmodern artist is a heroic effort to give voice to the ineffable, and a tangible shape to the invisible, but it is also (obliquely, through the refusal to reassert the socially legitimized canons of meanings and their expressions) a demonstration that more than one voice or shape is possible, and thus a standing invitation to join in the unending process of interpretation which is also the process of meaning-making. (105)

Picking up on Baudrillard’s idea of simulation having replaced representation, Bauman suggests contemporary art is no longer about “representing” or “reflecting” a “reality” outside itself (106). In a world where “art and non-artistic reality operate on the same footing, as meaning-creators and meaning-holders”, “instead of reflecting life, contemporary art adds to its contents”, adding meanings and interpretations, challenging “socially legitimized canons of meanings” and any form of consensus that might inhibit the ongoing process of meaning-making, deconstruction and interpretation. “Once freedom replaces order and consensus as the measure of life’s quality”, writes Bauman, “postmodern art scores very highly indeed” (107). One might wonder whether that judgement is to replace the suggestion at the end of the previous essay that it all came down to the “number of copies sold” or whether it is to be set (paratactically) alongside it. Time and Space In both these essays, Bauman brings up the ways in which art and culture have so often been thought of in terms of spatial metaphors and linked to notions of time and space. Whether the avant-garde is thought of as “surg-

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ing ahead”, or art is expected to reflect a non-artistic reality “outside” itself, or culture is assumed to be a separate sphere—separate from everyday reality—spatial metaphors have been invoked. The notion that culture constituted a separate sphere no doubt had to do with the long-standing association of art with cult, ritual and religious tradition Benjamin mentioned. The notion of art belonging to some separate sphere was even given new life in the more secular, nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, where art and culture could be viewed as some kind of substitute religion, representing—and allowing the bourgeois to pay lip service to—a different set of values than those actually prevailing, as long as they were kept separate and didn’t interfere with business. Thus the nineteenth century was the great era of the building of museums, concert halls and opera houses as well as of factories, department stores and railway stations. Such buildings could house “culture” in secular temples, give it clearly defined, separate spaces, where the rituals of the cult could be observed. This was a model that was perhaps indeed “exploded” by the age of technical reproducibility extending from the invention of photography to the ubiquity of YouTube. For McLuhan, a civilization/culture that had for centuries been based around ideas of sequence and linearity associated with the medium of writing—and also with perspective—was changed utterly by the new media of the electric age replacing sequence with simultaneity, linearity with instantaneity and distance with involvement. In several ways, it has been suggested that the “time and space of art and culture” has been transformed utterly in the twentieth century. It is still true that ideas of space are being invoked—if different models—if one believes this is the age of one-dimensional man, or of simulacra and simulations and of postmodern hyperspace or it is said that art and non-art are thought to be “on the same footing”. The introduction of new technologies and media has undoubtedly transformed our sense of time and space in general as well as of the time and space of the work of art. Shared Surfaces Jacques Rancière outlines the subject he explores in an essay entitled “The Surface of Design” as the question of “how […] the practice and idea of design, as they develop at the beginning of the twentieth century, redefine the place of artistic activities in the set of practices that configure the shared material world”. These practices notably include those “of creators of commodities, of those that arrange them in shop windows or put their

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images in catalogues; the practices of constructors of buildings or posters”.45 In fact, it might not be so easy to isolate the “place of artistic activities” from the rest of space at all. Rancière here compares the activity of the French poet Mallarmé with that of Peter Behrens, the German “architect, engineer and designer who […] was in charge of designing the products, adverts and even buildings of the electricity company AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft)”, an engineer “in the service of a major brand producing bulbs, kettles or heaters” (p. 96). While it might at first seem that poet and industrial designer had little in common (apart from the fact that they were both working around 1900), Rancière comes to see that “between the pure poet and the functionalist engineer” there is a “singular link: the same idea of streamlined forms and the same function attributed to these forms—to define a new texture of communal existence” (p. 97). He then suggests an “intermediate figure” between the poet and the engineer might help to think through the “proximity and the distance” between them and the “intermediate figure” is the dancer Loïe Fuller, whose “choreographic spectacles” were among those that inspired Mallarmé’s idea of a poetry “identical with the composition of motion in space” (94). Fuller’s unusual dancing apparently involved not the movement of her feet, but of her dress “which she folds and refolds, making herself a fountain, a flame or a butterfly” and spotlights were also used creatively to add to the spectacle. She was, Rancière suggests, “thus an emblematic figure of the age of electricity” (98). Not only that, her image was “endlessly reproduced in every form” and she even became an advertising icon, appearing, one might think incongruously, on advertising posters for Odol, a brand of German mouthwash. On the poster she appeared with the letters of the brand name—O–D–O–L—projected onto the folds of her dress. Rancière goes on to describe how in their posters the same brand combined a particularly simple, functional bottle design with romantic landscapes, including a painting by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin (98). “Utilitarian gargling” is associated with “dreamlike scenes”, as Rancière puts it (99). Rancière is not at all arguing that the “garglers” are having the wool pulled over their eyes by devious advertisers, but he is rather exploring the “equivalence between the forms of art and the forms of objects of everyday living” (99). The point he reaches through this exploration is that one  Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 91.

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might have to “reassess the dominant paradigms of the modernist autonomy of art and of the relationship between art forms and life forms” (103). He writes: there is not an autonomous art on the one hand and a heteronomous art on the other. […] This hypothesis of a lost purity [of a supposedly autonomous art] is best set aside. The shared surface on which forms of painting simultaneously become autonomous and blend with words and things is also a surface common to art and non-art. (106)

Having set out to see how the “practice of design” in the twentieth century may have redefined the “place of artistic activities” he comes to an idea of that place as a “shared” place, a “shared surface” “common to art and non-art” in a “shared world”. That is not, however, to say that art and non-art are “the same”. The place of art, it seems, can neither be thought of as a separate, autonomous sphere nor as completely merged with everyday life or even the status quo. Aesthetic experience involves a combination of separation and togetherness, as Rancière suggests in the essay “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community”. This has to do with his concept of “dissensus” and with what is particularly important about aesthetic experience—how it is related to the idea of emancipation. To illustrate the connection between the two he refers to the description of the working day of a nineteenth-century joiner, published in a French workers’ newspaper of 1848: Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of a room so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If a window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the [owners] of neighbouring residences.46

In his momentary enjoyment of this aesthetic experience the joiner stops being “just a joiner”, frees his body, eyes and mind momentarily from the work he has to do: “The divorce between the labouring arms and the distracted gaze introduces the body of a worker into a new configuration of the sensible; it overthrows the ‘right’ relationship between what a body ‘can’ do and what it cannot” (71). That, for Rancière, is how aesthetic experience is related to emancipation—emancipation from confined roles  Quoted by Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2011, p. 71.

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and spaces: “Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination it presupposes disrupts the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations” (72). No longer simply destined (by someone else) to follow instructions and do a particular job, a body may enjoy an (even brief) emancipating experience, as well as an aesthetic one—and that may be part of a (political) process of changing “the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (72). An Advertisement for Emancipation? Perhaps that is a good way to describe the “work of art”, understood not as the finished, framed Kunstwerk hanging in a gallery, but the Arbeit of art, how art works on the beholder—and the beholder works on it— changing “the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible”. Some examples of artists very literally “changing the cartography” are offered by the geographer David Pinder in an article highlighting what he calls “dis-locative” artistic practices that “engage, reframe and repurpose” contemporary mapping and positioning technologies that are based on GPS in ways that “interrupt and […] make strange ways of seeing that are becoming increasingly normalized and taken-for-granted, so as to render them perceptible and open to question”.47 One might put that beside Bauman’s suggestion that postmodern art involves the “deconstruction of meaning” and “a standing invitation to join in the unending process of interpretation which is also the process of meaning-making”. This is a process that involves everybody—Rancière’s “emancipated spectators” are not passive observers, but active participants: “Emancipation begins”, he writes, “when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting. […] The spectator also acts.”48 The involvement of everybody was also 47  David Pinder, “Dis-locative arts: mobile media and the politics of global positioning”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27(4), 2013, pp.  523–541, p.  524. One of the artists he mentions is Paula Levine who, in Shadows from another place, overlaid maps of San Francisco with maps of Baghdad after the aerial bombardment by US planes in 2003 and of the West Bank barrier built by Israel—to “translate and represent the impact of political or cultural traumas […] that take place in one location, upon another”, as she puts it on her website: http://paulalevine.net/portfolio_page/shadows_from_another_ place/ (accessed 31.8.2018). 48  Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 13. An example of this was to be experienced during the Tino Sehgal “Performance” at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2015: the spectators who entered the exhibition space literally became participants in the performance.

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precisely one of the most significant features of the “electric age” for McLuhan: “The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.”49 But does the lack of detachment mean a lack of critical thought and simple conformity with the status quo? Surely not, if everyone is simultaneously involved in the process of interpretation, deconstruction and “meaning-making”. Not if people are having the kind of emancipating aesthetic experience described by Rancière. The notional boundary or “frame” between a supposedly autonomous or semi-autonomous sphere of art and the rest of life may have been exploded by the combined forces of the arrival of the media of mechanical—and, more recently, digital— reproduction, the boundary-breaking collages of the revolutionary avant-­ garde, the artful work of advertisers and designers as well as the progress of “revolutionary” capitalism itself. But that may not necessarily mean the landscape has been reduced to one or even two dimensions, or left us with nothing but the flimsy, free-floating map of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. It is still possible to conceive of the “explosion” as Benjamin did—as having “burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling”. Stephen Dedalus thinks he hears “the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame” and asks “What’s left us then?”50 It is possible to think of the explosion of the boundary between the “sphere” of art and the “sphere” of everything else as not resulting in a razing to the ground, a flattening out into “one dimension” of art and life, but rather as breaking up a stifling dualistic opposition and opening up multidimensional spaces, a world—“whirled”—of Joycean plurality and play. Jacques Rancière explored the relationship between art, industrial design and advertising in the early twentieth century in “The Surface of Design” and discovered a surprising sharing of surfaces and even a thought-provoking as well as amusing proximity between art and mouthwash. There is something very Joycean about that juxtaposition. The everyday life of the human body, everyday commercial life and great art come together in Ulysses. Joyce’s colourful hero, Mr Leopold Bloom, having once been a “traveller for blotting paper”, is in June 1904 an advertis McLuhan, The Medium…, p. 53.  Joyce, Ulysses, p. 28.

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ing canvasser for The Freeman’s Journal, and advertisements for everyday goods—such as for Plumtree’s Potted Meat—flow along with many other things in the stream of his consciousness. Indeed Bloom’s “final meditations” were of “some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, […] not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life” (p. 848). Advertisements are clearly not just Bloom’s bread and butter, but part of the variety, the “velocity” and phantasmagoria of early-twentieth-­ century city life reflected in the novel; they add to and mingle with the liveliness, humour and colour of Bloom’s own imagination, rather than reducing him to some kind of automaton of consumer society. Bloom is perhaps a very good example of both Rancière’s “emancipated spectator” constantly re-configuring the space around him—and an early example of Bauman’s postmodern and even Pinder’s “dis-locative” artist—deconstructing, interpreting and making meanings—a walking example of the unending work of art, changing “the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible”.

CHAPTER 6

Travel: From Modernity to…?

I. From Pilgrim to Tourist… to the Airport… to the “Selfie” The Pilgrim’s Progress No less an authority than the Rough Guide to Spain informs us that “the great pilgrimage to Santiago [de Compostela] was the first exercise in mass tourism”1—an exercise that became popular among the Christian faithful of Europe in the eleventh century and has become ever-­increasingly popular among the not necessarily so faithful activity-holiday enthusiasts of the present day. There is of course an obvious historical connection between foreign travel and religion. From the medieval times even to the mid-1950s, many Europeans who travelled for a short spell abroad had some kind of religious pretext for doing so (apart from a small, privileged minority of eighteenth-century grand tourists, less-privileged armies of soldiers, not to mention much less-privileged armies of migrants and ­refugees, but these were departing for rather longer spells). For many, it

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the online journal Studies in Arts and Humanities sahjournal.com. 1  Ellingham, Fisher et  al., The Rough Guide to Spain, 10th Edition, London: Rough Guides, 2002, p. 590.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kane, Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_6

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was the only way of getting away, experiencing different cultures, feeling the excitement of great cities like Paris or Rome. For many, it was surely the experience of foreign travel to exotic places that was uppermost in their minds and not really the spiritual journey of devotion. It is probably fair to say that the Catholic Church was one of the first great tour operators. Richard Sennett suggests that “the people of the Old Testament thought of themselves as uprooted wanderers” and goes on to quote Saint Augustine writing of “wandering as on a pilgrimage through time looking for the Kingdom of eternity” before coming to the conclusion that “Judaeo-Christian culture is, at its very roots, about spiritual dislocation and homelessness”.2 Sennett’s point is that this deep-seated notion that the only really important place is an invisible one in the sky has led to the development of particularly inhuman cities where the speed of movement of motorized traffic to somewhere else is prioritized over any appreciation of the place itself. That suggests there is a very intimate connection between the cultural influence of a religious outlook emphasizing the superiority of the spiritual over the bodily and a need to be constantly on the move, even a possibly unhealthy and dangerous obsession with speeding through city and country alike. Perhaps the rise of the tourist industry all goes back to the birth of religious/philosophical dualism and whoever first divided the soul (or the mind) from the body, and it is this that has led to our sense of being perpetually at odds with ourselves, “spiritually dislocated and homeless” indeed, and constantly seeking that perfect place somewhere else. One might then suggest that, while for centuries religious faith has both exaggerated the soul/body divide and the sense of dislocation and supposedly offered a way of overcoming that dislocation and a path leading home, the demise of religion and the rise of a more secular society has unleashed the dynamic energy of that same soul/body divide and consequent desire for a perfect place of reconciliation on the unsuspecting beauty spots of the globe. One might further suggest that, just like the religious institution, the tourist industry (and consumer culture generally) thrives by exaggerating the soul/body or mind/body divide while supposedly, tantalizingly offering (and at the same time withholding) the answer/resolution. This may be related to what Guy Debord calls “spectacular separation” in The Society of the Spectacle. One of the effects of tourism is to destroy that experience of being in a different place that the tourist may be seeking, or as Debord 2

 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, New York: Norton, 1992, p. 6.

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writes pithily: “basically, tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite. The economic management of travel to different places suffices in itself to ensure those places’ interchangeability”. Yet as places become more interchangeable and distances diminished, the aforementioned divide and sense of spiritual dislocation and homelessness are further exaggerated. This is, I think, what Debord is suggesting when he writes: “This society eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular separation” (my italics).3 Not only is tourism “the chance to go and see what has been made trite”, according to Debord: an alternative definition of the popular activity is “Human circulation considered as something to be consumed”, “a by-product of the circulation of commodities”. Of course, it was Marx who pointed out that the commodity was “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”.4 He might have said the same of the tourist. Zygmunt Bauman writes about how the Christian notion of pilgrimage left a lasting legacy to and was gradually absorbed by a more secular culture of modern times, mentioning in passing Max Weber’s description of how the Protestants became “inner-worldly pilgrims” thus leading, according to Weber, to the birth of modern capitalism out of the spirit of the Protestant Ethic and a long tradition of Christian asceticism. Max Weber himself noted how the “intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic virtue … as in Robinson Crusoe, the isolated economic man who carries on missionary activities on the side takes the place of the lonely search for the Kingdom of Heaven in Bunyan’s pilgrim, hurrying through the market-place of Vanity.”5 The extended title of Bunyan’s famous work, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678), may then be seen a few hundred years later to have been uncannily prophetic. For Bauman, modern life was generally thought of as a kind of life-long pilgrimage, even if that came to mean, in secular translation, just “saving for the future” and the construction of a life, an identity, a career through the constant pursuit of some distant goal in the future. Something changed fundamentally with the arrival of postmodern times, however: the world 3  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (trans. by Nicholson-Smith), New York: Zone Books, 1995, sections 167–168. 4  Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, in McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 472. 5  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. by T.  Parsons), Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2001, p. 119.

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became “inhospitable to pilgrims”, to the very notion of life as one long pilgrimage. According to Bauman the pilgrim has been superseded by what he suggested might be the four archetypes of postmodernity—the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist and the player. What these character-­ types have in common with each other as well as with the pilgrim, of course, is the fact that they are constantly on the move. What sets them apart from the pilgrim is the fact that they are not constantly, slowly, collectively moving towards a single place, some great goal of special significance for them. The postmodern characters are, rather, darting all over the place—perhaps just a result of a more exaggerated version of the restlessness, that “spiritual dislocation and homelessness” at the heart of Judaeo-­ Christian culture mentioned by Richard Sennett. The tourist (as distinct from the pilgrim) does seem to be a species that thrives particularly well in postmodern times. Mass international tourism (of the non-religious variety) only really “took off” in the latter half of the twentieth century along with its “fellow travellers”, the mass media, the consumer society, celebrity culture. As with Bauman’s other archetypal characters of postmodernity, the tourist is not a complete newcomer; what is new is that what was once a marginal activity is now mainstream. The problem, as Bauman sees it, is that “as life itself turns into an extended tourist escapade, as the tourist’s conduct becomes the mode of life and the tourist’s stance becomes the character—it is less and less clear which one of the visiting places is the home, and which but a tourist haunt”.6 In fact the “life strategies” of Bauman’s postmodern “tourists, strollers, vagabonds and players” all have the effect of “render[ing] human relations fragmentary […] and discontinuous […] and militate against the construction of lasting networks of mutual duties and obligations” (p. 100). One can see how darting all over the place all the time and never staying long in any one place might have such consequences—and in a world where it has been estimated that at any one time around half a million people are literally “up in the air” (to use the title of a recent film) and tourism is very big business indeed, one might suspect that this is actually what is happening. In the age of the horse-drawn carriage, Charles Baudelaire famously defined modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”. postmodernity seems to be “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” a million times over, propelled by thousands of powerful jet engines. 6

 Bauman, Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 97.

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Airport-ness “To be a modern human,” according to Christopher Schaberg, “means to be always somewhat preflight: waiting and ready for an airport trip to come [….] This is all part of airportness, or how the feel of air travel precedes and extends past the more obvious dimensions and boundaries of flight.”7 Airportness, he writes, “is about how air travel gets in our heads and bodies, how it becomes something natural” (p. 6). Rather as the late nineteenth century was the great age of the train station, the late twentieth century could be said to have witnessed not just the dawn of the postmodern, the “supermodern” (see below), or of the consumer society, or of the information age, but of the “age of the airport” too. One might add that just as the great nineteenth-century railway terminuses were so often built like grand opera houses—think of the Gare du Nord in Paris—the airport of our times usually bears an uncanny resemblance to the (sub)urban shopping mall. That is perhaps a comforting resemblance compared with the impression created by the photograph by Andreas Gursky of Frankfurt airport (2007). Here the apparently dark, cavernous space of the departures hall with dispersed clusters of trolley-pushing intending passengers is completely dominated by an enormous black display indicating imminently departing flights all around the globe. If this were a newspaper photograph, it might accompany a headline such as “Big data looms over helpless travellers”. Marc Augé opens his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity with a description of a man driving along the autoroute to Charles de Gaulle airport, checking in, wandering around the duty-free and boarding a long-distance flight. Airports—along with motorways, airplanes, aircraft-like high-speed trains, as well as supermarkets, large department stores, hotel chains and so on—are precisely the kind of non-lieux/ non-places Augé suggests are “the space of supermodernity”, “the real measure of our time”: a world where […] transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty towns […]); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates 7  Christopher Schaberg, Airportness: The Nature of Flight, New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, p. 3.

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wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral.8

The last phrase clearly echoes Baudelaire’s description of modernity. It also clearly suggests “supermodernity” involves the exaggerated development of trends noticeable in modernity. The same nineteenth-century poet’s famous flâneur may not have realized it at the time, but his wanderings would eventually lead him, not just, as Walter Benjamin suggested, to the department store, but to the (increasingly department-store-like) airport. Non-place “is a space devoid of the symbolic expressions of identity, relations and history: examples include airports, motorways, anonymous hotel rooms, public transport … Never before in the history of the world have non-places occupied so much space”.9 People are spending an ever-­ increasing proportion of their time in such anonymous non-places, following various written instructions on signs and screens—“No smoking”, “Insert card” …—“interacting” with machines, being fed “real-time” updates, and “everything proceeds […] as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news”, if even that (104). This is a feeling that appears to be shared by the narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platform: as he waited for his flight in Phuket airport, he “had an inkling that, more and more, the whole world would come to resemble an airport”.10 Since the late twentieth century it has been an increasingly widespread inkling: around that time in an essay under the title “Airports: The True Cities of the 21st Century”, J.G.  Ballard ­provocatively welcomed the development of an emotional landscape that some clever critic could no doubt coin as Heathrow-ness.11 That is an emo8  Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. by J. Howe), London: Verso, 1995, p. 78. 9  Augé quoted by Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 102. 10  Michel Houellebecq, Platform (trans. by F. Wynne), London: Vintage, 2003, p. 131. Emer O’Beirne relates the world of Platform and other novels of Houellebecq and contemporary French writers to Augé’s discussion of ‘non-lieux’ in O’Beirne, “Navigating NonLieux in Contemporary Fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz and Augé”, Modern Language Review, 101, 2006, pp. 388–401, p. 394. https://doi.org/10.2307/20466790 (accessed 26.8.2019). 11  J.G. Ballard, “Airports: The True Cities of the 21st Century”, Blueprint 1997, reprinted here: https://www.utne.com/politics/homeiswherethehangaris (accessed 23.3.2018). Ballard writes: “I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis […].”

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tional (or emotionless) landscape that is perhaps also evoked in the single word lines of Einstürzende Neubauten’s song “Perpetuum Mobile”: “escalator/baggage cart/limousine/elevator”. It is inevitable that airports tend to have a particularly weightless atmosphere; one feels one’s feet have almost left the ground—and any attachment to a particular planetary place—once one has entered the building. Airports tend also to look more or less the same everywhere—sleek, shiny, “supermodern” non-places with smooth surfaces designed for the friction-­ free rapid transit of huge numbers of strangers passing through, who generally expect to have, and indeed have, no contact with others apart from for commercial and functional transactions. Having “proceeded” to gate 45 when instructed by a message on a monitor, the tourist/passenger boarding the aircraft will probably expect that the airport at the far end of the flight will be much the same as the one s/he is leaving. The thing is, as more and more of the global environment comes to be constituted by airport-like non-places, it is more and more likely that quite a bit of the local environment at the destination will be similarly constituted. Our anonymous tourist will probably come to rest in an anonymous hotel room that will probably be decorated very much in accordance with the same global trends as one would have found in an anonymous hotel room at home. It may well be owned by the same company. How right was Debord when he wrote (in the 1960s!): “The economic management of travel to different places suffices in itself to ensure those places’ interchangeability.” The shopping streets of many a “foreign” city nowadays contain many of the same shops one would find at home, laid out in exactly the same way, displaying exactly the same products. The department stores may have different names, but look the same inside—sleek, airport-like non-places with the same global brands on display. A small section dedicated to local products and catering to tourists desperate to spend money on something different to bring back home may possibly be found on the ground floor. There is usually an air of fraud, of inauthenticity about these more or less tacky tokens of “place” in the midst of supermodern, globalized “non-place”, a performance of authenticity in a hyperreal theatre, of quaint, earth(l)y rootedness in an airport. Around the time when Augé was writing about the proliferation of “non-places” in “supermodernity”, Rem Koolhaas wrote an essay on the subject of “The Generic City”. This is, he says, “all that remains of what

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used to be the city”, “the city without history”, “what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace”. Koolhaas even suggested that airports are on the way to replacing the city. The in-transit condition is becoming universal. […] In the completeness of their facilities, they [airports] are like quarters of the Generic City, sometimes even its reason for being (its center?), with the added attraction of being hermetic systems from which there is no escape—except to another airport.12

With the rise of the “Generic City”, the city as airport, the tourist “abroad” may well feel he or she might as well be at home, or at least in his or her native airport/non-place—and recall the old joke told by Viktor Borge about the man who went to a ticket desk to ask for a return ticket and upon being asked “To where?” replied “To here, of course!” Here or There? But then, as Paul Virilio, pointed out: “Here no longer exists; everything is now.”13 If it is true that “here no longer exists”, the same can probably be said of “there” too. In fact, Virilio argues that we have witnessed the “end of geography”, brought about by the sinister combination of “globalitarian” globalization and the collapse of all sense both of distance and of time intervals with the “current transmission revolution”, the rise of the internet and our arrival in a world where everything is constantly “tele-­ present”, 24 hours a day. One might well wonder what the “end of geography” might mean for the average tourist’s plans for the summer—and for the future of the world’s largest service sector “industry”. Maybe as humanity experiences what Virilio calls “the end of geography”, a revolutionary transformation of our sense of physical space and distance as a result of the rise of the internet, this is balanced out in some way by the rise of cyberspace, and it is in this space that contemporary “cyber-tourists” “really” “travel” for pleasure. Cyberspace appears to offer unlimited— though, of course, extremely commercialized—space for twenty-first-century flâneurs/internauts to roam and explore (and browse advertisements on 12  Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City”, in Koolhaas and Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 1252. 13  Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (trans. by C. Turner), London: Verso, 2005, Chapter 2.

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what Virilio calls the “single world advertising market”) 24 hours a day. Just as Benjamin saw the nineteenth-century department store as where the flâneur’s stroll would take him, maybe one could say that the online megastore of Cyberspace is the real environment of the contemporary flâneur/tourist—the ultimate holiday destination, the “last resort”. But, of course, the beauty of the internet is that there is no end to it; one can roam and browse ad infinitum and 24 hours a day in this vast tourist trap. If the rise of the “Generic City” can clearly be related to Virilio’s diagnosis of the “end of geography”, it is worth also remembering that Koolhaas referred to this as “the city without history”. One might think that without either geography or history traditional tourism might be about to hang up its sandals for good, but fortunately, as Koolhaas points out, in the Generic City there is always a quarter called “Lipservice”, “where a minimum of the past is preserved”: In spite of its absence, history is the major preoccupation, even industry of the Generic City. On the liberated grounds, around the restored hovels, still more hotels are constructed to receive additional tourists in direct proportion to the erasure of the past. […] Tourism is now independent of destination… Instead of specific memories, the associations the Generic City mobilizes are general memories, memories of memories: if not all memories at the same time, then at least an abstract, token memory, a déjà vu that never ends, generic memory. (p. 1256f.)

Tourists here, according to Koolhaas, may, presumably in the spirit of that “generic memory”, “fondle” a “universal souvenir”, a “scientific cross between Eiffel Tower, Sacré Coeur and Statue of Liberty: a tall building (usually between 200 and 300 meters) drowned in a small ball of water with snow or, if close to the equator, gold flakes” (p. 1257). I Am a Camera Whether or not the tourist goes beyond “fondling” such items, no self-­ respecting tourist can refrain from taking a photographic souvenir or two of the place, or of having been in the place. It seems almost impossible to think of the tourist without some kind of camera, of tourism without thinking of the taking and circulation of some kind of photographic image. It has even been pointed out that the invention of photography in 1839 coincided very closely with the early days of modern mass tourism, as, for

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example, in 1841 Thomas Cook “organised the first-ever large-scale tour, taking four to five hundred temperance excursionists from Leicester to Loughborough and back again”.14 Picture postcards may have been superseded by digital images on smartphones, but the principle is surely the same (except that postcards were addressed to individual people). The tourist’s camera probably comes straight from the suitcase of one of Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumers”. What is prized in the quasi-­ feudal society Veblen describes is the “performance of conspicuous leisure”, the display of “tangible evidence of prowess”, of “booty” and “trophies” won at the expense of others through conquest. Perhaps the tourist photograph may be thought of as such a form of “booty” or “trophy”, intended to demonstrate to others one’s “prowess”, as a member of the leisure class.15 Everywhere at the height of the season, there are tourists taking photos of themselves and each other—beside a famous monument, in front of a beautiful view, “conspicuously consuming” an ice-cream. Tourists very conspicuously consume places/consume their own presence in places as images and appear to need to display the images conspicuously to others and to themselves to convince themselves that they are consuming/are there at all. The logic of this kind of tourist photo is perhaps: “If this is a ‘selfie’, there must be a ‘self’ in it.” “The very activity of taking pictures”, according to Susan Sontag, “is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.”16 (One might say the same of consumption generally: unsure of other responses, they (we) consume.) There is a scene in Mark Ravenhill’s play Faust is Dead where two characters drive out into the desert. Alain finds the place beautiful, but Pete declares: “I kind of prefer it on the TV. I prefer it with a frame around it, you know?”17 He can only relax when he takes out his camcorder and starts filming. Of course, it is not just in tourist haunts in high season that everyone seems to be either taking a photo, posing for one or dodging out of the frame of one— 14  Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye” in Chris Rojek and John Urry (eds.), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1997, p. 180. 15  See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New  York: Dover Publications Inc., 1994. 16  Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 9, cited by Crawshaw and Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye”, p. 183. 17  Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, scene ten, from Ravenhill, Plays I, London: Methuen Drama, 2001, p. 113.

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increasingly this seems to be the case everywhere all of the time as the population at large has mutated into Bauman’s postmodern tourists. It seems as if experience/life is not real at all unless it is captured as an image and broadcast on Facebook. We’re not really in a place, unless we take a photo of it, but then we’re not really there either, because we’re standing back taking a photo of it. And we want the place—and the photo—to look like the photo in the guidebook. The cynical narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platform at one point declares: “In the end, what all lovers of journeys of discovery seek is confirmation of what they’ve already read in the guidebooks”.18 In The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord defined what he meant by the “spectacle” as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”.19 Images are the true currency of the postmodern life-tourist. Debord also wrote: 17 An earlier stage in the economy’s domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having…. The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing….

What matters in the end are the tourist’s photos on Facebook or wherever, not the actual lived experience itself. If tourism is, in Debord’s words, “Human circulation considered as something to be consumed”, “a by-­ product of the circulation of commodities”, it is perhaps in the tourist photo that the circulation (and the human) is “consumed”. The development of photography has been described (in a phrase seemingly echoing Baudrillard) as “the most significant component of a new cultural economy of value and exchange in which visual images are given extraordinary mobility and exchangeability”.20 While the “taking” of a photograph is itself an act of consumption, the tourist photo is inevitably itself consumed—swallowed up—by/in a consumer society where, as Baudrillard wrote, “everything is spectacularized or, in other words, evoked, provoked and orchestrated into images, signs, consumable models. […] There is no longer anything but the transmission and reception of signs, and the individual being vanishes in this combinatory and calculus of signs.”21  Michel Houellebecq, Platform, p. 231.  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, paragraph 4. 20  Crawshaw and Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye”, p. 182. 21  Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage Publications, 1998, p. 191. 18 19

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II. From Faustus to Houellebecq’s Platform Noctis Equi Along with the circulation of commodities [and images], one might say that human circulation and the consumption thereof has for a very long time been a significant feature of Western modernity. Bauman refers to the particular relationship between modernity and the invention of ever-faster means of human circulation, the “construction of vehicles which would move faster than the legs of humans or horses could ever do”.22 It is no coincidence that when Marlowe’s Dr Faustus has signed his pact with the devil, declaring “Consummatum est”, he suddenly finds the words “Homo fuge!” inscribed on his arm and asks himself “Whither should I fly?”—rather as a modern-day office worker might ask as summer approaches. Mephistopheles then takes him on a whistle-stop tour of Europe, taking in Trier, Paris, Naples, Venice, Padua, Rome…. Of course, Faustus ends wishing the horses would slow down, exclaiming “O lente, lente currite noctis equi!”, before he himself is “consumed”. Modern Faustian man (and, of course, Faustus is a model modern man) is/has been a constant traveller, galloping at speed around Europe and the rest of the world, apparently unable to stand still for any length of time. Modernity, as Anthony Giddens pointed out, is a post-traditional order, and one might say Dr Faustus epitomizes this modern “post-traditional” outlook from the beginning in his impatience with traditional scholarly knowledge. Abandoning the slow, scholarly study of inherited tradition, Faustus focuses his mind on the future; what spurs him on his travels around Europe is the pursuit of knowledge as power, “command” over “all things that move between the quiet poles”. Zygmunt Bauman suggests that, above all, “modernity was born under the stars of acceleration and land conquest” (p.  112). Maybe one should add, given the opening of Dr Faustus, that modernity was also born under the star of “impatience”. A Novel Idea “Human circulation” was certainly considered “something to be consumed” not just for Dr Faustus and for the audience watching him, but very clearly also in the early days of the novelty literary genre of the novel over the course of the eighteenth century. The birth of the modern novel coincided, and  Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 2000, p. 110.

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perhaps not “coincidentally”, with the launch of the “thousand ships” of global travel and global trade. Rapidly growing numbers of readers consumed rapidly growing numbers of novels tracing the movements of characters rapidly circulating around the country—or the globe—from Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and Candide to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and his monstrous travelling companion. The “circulation” of the characters Crusoe and Frankenstein, as of Faustus, so avidly “consumed” as entertainment, involves, of course, no innocent, leisurely pleasure trips, but clearly significant stages of the secular “pilgrimage” of Western modernity towards the holy grail of power—to be achieved through the alliance of modern means of transport, bigger and better weapons, land conquest, imperialism, slavery, Capitalism, science and technology as well as more than a little dabbling in the black arts. Both Faustus and Frankenstein are also warnings of where this “grand tour” might really end—in darkness in both cases. However, it seems the narrative of Robinson Crusoe—the tale of transatlantic travel and travel disaster, of getting away from it all (and then reproducing it all using rudimentary DIY skills),—of rebellion and colonization, above all a tale of the business of survival and the survival of business—could go on and on forever. In the last pages Defoe—with an eye to the commercial viability of a sequel and the business of his own survival—significantly leaves the ending of this unending story of business (and) travel open. If tourism is, as Debord suggested, “human circulation considered as something to be consumed”, there is a close affinity between tourism and modernity itself: both are inspired by “circulation”, by something that feeds the dynamism of modernity—a constant, restless interest in the new, in novelty, in innovation and in escaping from the old, from tradition, from routine and the ever-same to the “transient, the fleeting and the contingent”. Yet at the same time, both tourism and modernity may be making it harder to discover anything new “under the sun” at all, as Debord pointed out. The “curse of the tourist” is described by the narrator of Houellebecq’s novel Platform as the plight of a man trying to escape his own shadow: “caught up in a frenetic search for places which are ‘not touristy’, which his very presence undermines, forever forced to move on”.23 All the dynamism and frenetic movement of modernity may be caught in the same situation. To refer back to Augé’s book on “non-­places”, Virilio’s talk of the “end of geography” and Koolhaas writing about the “Generic City”, one might well ask: when all the world’s an airport, where is there left to go?  Houellebecq, Platform, p. 311.

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Pleasure Class Perhaps a world where everybody is a tourist—or rather a world where a particular dominant culture is dominated by a kind of tourist mentality— might not be such a completely bad thing. Tourists are after all rather harmless creatures, at least they do not usually approach the “other” in a threatening manner (however much the “other” may still cower before their gaze/camera lens). The aesthetic pleasure-seeking of postmodern tourists, of “gatherers of sensations”, as Bauman suggests, may in some ways be preferable to the more aggressive, domineering attitude of the power-hungry, goal-directed, modern producer/soldier/imperialist, or the blinkered vision of the pilgrims. Tourists may be only interested in their own pleasure, but they recognize they need “others” to derive pleasures and new sensations from, whereas the power-hungry, goal-directed, modern mentality thought all too much of controlling, utilizing, exploiting, dominating and ultimately even annihilating the “other”. The superficiality of the postmodern tourist’s gaze may be preferable to the eagle eye of the power-hungry modern, but the problem, of course, is that the tourist is only interested in immediate sources of pleasure and will be inclined to simply avert his/her gaze from anything which is not “pleasurable”. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platform perhaps offers readers a somewhat extreme illustration of the mentality of Bauman’s postmodern tourists, those pleasure-seekers and “gatherers of sensations”, that have taken the place of the supposedly modern goal-oriented “pilgrims”. Houellebecq casts a wry, ironical glance at the experience of the long haul tourist as well as at the tourist industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century, reminding readers early on that: “In the year 2000, for the first time, the tourist industry became—in terms of turnover—the biggest economic activity in the world” (p. 29). The plot gradually leads up to an amusingly outrageous scenario involving a large, established travel operator rushing to cater to the Western tourist’s interest in immediate sources of pleasure, in fact, more or less explicitly operating sex tourism as a way of boosting its revenues. It seems for a time that a business plan bringing together droves of sexually inhibited, sex-starved, or jaded but rich Westerners and the exotic poor—naturally young and beautiful—willing prostitutes of the rest of the world, without all the sexual hang-ups of the West, could not fail to leverage a fortune for investors or to bring about the mother of all win-win situations. This is how the narrator puts the idea to the travel business executive:

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you have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don’t find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It’s simple, really simple to understand; it’s an ideal trading opportunity. The money you could make is almost unimaginable […]. (p. 242)

This seems to be a plan that is destined to give pleasure to all concerned. Love life in the West is, as Houellebecq portrays it, badly in need of some spice—and the rest of the world is full of spice in search of buyers. That is, of course, a story with a long history behind it. If one excludes, for a moment, the novel’s treatment of the topic of sex and the potential of the sex tourism industry, one might see Platform as in some way a sequel of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a novel which, at the very beginning of the English novelistic tradition, seems to overflow with excitement about the possibilities of global travel and the expansion of business. Robinson Crusoe is also a novel conspicuously lacking any sexual interest whatever, where the sexual seems to have been completely supplanted by excitement about the clever use of resources, their transformation into capital—and DIY. Crusoe, crucially, does not just survive; he builds his own personal empire with his own hands. Describing how Crusoe’s “deepest satisfactions come from surveying his stock of goods”, Ian Watt quotes Marx on the archetypal capitalist: “enjoyment is subordinated to capital, and the individual who enjoys to the individual who capitalizes.”24 In Platform, while there is an actual love affair, the passionate interest of some of the characters in business seems almost sexual—and it is ironic that the specific sector they focus on actually involves the transformation of sex into business. Houellebecq writes here almost as much about business as about sex; his characters’ lives, careers, business interests are placed in the context of global tourism and the expansion of the tourist industry around the year 2000 before the evolution of the particularly audacious, though in business terms simply logical, business plan. Meanwhile, the insertion of occasional academic quotations on business and on tourism could be read as akin to a Brechtian alienation tech24  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, London: Penguin, 1963, p. 78.

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nique, breaking the continuity of the “story” and causing readers to read and think along different, more critical lines, not just to follow the story. One chapter begins with a quotation attributed to Jean Louis Barma, What Companies Dream Of: “Being able to understand a customer’s behaviour in order to categorize him more effectively, offering him the right product at the right time, but above all persuading him that the product he is offered is adapted to his needs: that is what all companies dream of” (p. 148). Houellebecq’s narrator also quotes liberally from the tourist brochures, without critical comment. He finds himself hesitating, as he tells us early on, between “‘Rum and Salsa’ (ref. CUB CO 033, 16  days/14  nights, 11,250FF based on two sharing, single supplement 1350FF) and ‘Thai Tropic’ (ref. THA CA 006, 15  days/13  nights, 9950FF, based on two sharing, single supplement 1175FF)” (p.  28). While apparently showing how the narrator identifies, as a matter of course, with the language of marketing and consumption, and simply repeats it, the deadpan narrative, as Nurit Buchweitz and Elie Cohen-­ Gewerc point out, “emphasizes the commercial aspect of leisure, its conversion to a consumer product, catalogued and indexed, packaged and marketed”. “The multiplicity of prearranged, ready-packaged options,” they continue, “reveals subjectivity controlled by the many agents of consumer society that nurtures the hedonistic, dominant, and greedy ­ ‘I’.”25 The quotations included without comment in Platform add layers of unspoken commentary to the narrative; they insert much ironic distance from the story of the characters’ developing business project and suggest that this is a novel about the travel business and society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which does not just encourage readers to identify with the gathering enthusiasm of the characters for their business. Robinson Crusoe with a dash (or a dollop) of irony, perhaps?26

25  Nurit Buchweitz and Elie Cohen-Gewerc, 2015, “Leisure and Posthumanism in Houellebecq’s Platform and Lanzarote”, Comparative Literature and Culture, 17(4), 2015, p. 4. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2528 (accessed 26.8.2019). 26  In a review of Platform entitled “The Sexual Bomb Thrower” Charles Taylor writes: ‘“Platform” has been called the “A Modest Proposal” of sex tourism, and like Swift’s essay, the safest, shallowest way to dodge its implications and distance yourself from its logic to is to fall back on the safe position of appreciating it as a wicked satiric exercise. Reading “Platform,” the same as reading Swift, requires you to take the writer’s reasoning seriously, meet it head on and, if you find it repulsive, refute it.’ (Salon.com Review published 2.8.2003. http://www.salon.com/2003/08/02/platform_2/) (accessed 4.10.2019).

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If one does include the sex, one might be more inclined to compare Platform with Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders—on account of Moll’s frank approach to sex as well as to the possibilities of less or more legally and socially sanctioned mergers of sex and business. Prostitution and marriage are both seen by Moll as equally legitimate means of achieving her financial survival. The provocatively disturbing difference between Defoe’s novel and Houellebecq’s is, of course, the globalization of the sex business, the relocation of its “factories” to faraway places with an abundance of more easily exploitable cheap labour and a history of Western orientalism and exploitation. As Emer O’Beirne puts it: “One of the most disturbing aspects of Houellebecq’s novel is its suggestion that the sex trade could enable the exploited Third World to equalize the relationship [of an ‘aggressively one-sided economic globalization’], trading physical hunger against the sexual hunger of frustrated westerners.”27 That is indeed particularly controversial territory. How disturbing one finds the novel’s treatment of sex tourism and Asian sex workers depends on how seriously one takes the narrator or whether one reads the narrative as a kind of “Immodest Proposal” comparable to Swift’s Modest Proposal of 1729 ­concerning the financial viability of selling poor Irish children as meat.28 Houellebecq’s narrator’s business proposal seems entirely logical in business terms, and so also did Swift’s. The comparison of Platform with Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) serves perhaps just as a reminder of our long-standing tacit awareness of the proximity between a “respectable” economy based on exploitation and the prostitution business. In Moll Flanders as in Robinson Crusoe, the business of survival and the survival of business are closely intertwined. Everything comes down to money. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Moll’s transatlantic trip proves as immensely profitable as Crusoe’s in the end. In fact, both Defoe’s 27  Emer O’Beirne, 2006, “Navigating Non-Lieux in Contemporary Fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz and Augé”, Modern Language Review, 101, 2006, pp.  388–401, p. 394. https://doi.org/10.2307/20466790 (accessed 26.8.2019). 28  “An Immodest Proposal: The Sex Trade and Sex Tourism in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform” is the heading of a section of Marco Malvestio’s article “Trading Butterflies: The Representation of Asian Sex Workers in Vollmann and Houellebecq”, Enthymema, no. XXIII, 2019, pp. 57–72. https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/11921. Malvestio brings out how the novel strangely “oscillates” between satire (of Orientalist Western tourism, and even of the sex trade) and “complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West” as well as deliberate ignorance of the realities of prostitution.

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eighteenth-century entrepreneurs are rather more successful in their mergers of business and travel (and, in Moll’s case, sex) than Houellebecq’s twenty-first-century specialists in the sex-travel-business. Flight Zygmunt Bauman famously suggested the tourist as one of the four archetypal figures of postmodernity. The “postmodern condition” might involve not just “living with ambivalence” and greater tolerance of difference, as he had once proposed, but an extreme version of Baudelaire’s “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”, with everybody on the move all of the time. Bauman was also acutely aware, of course, that not everybody in the postmodern world is a tourist, and as the global gap between rich and poor widens, a world inhabited mainly by tourists is not a likely scenario any time soon; it just sometimes seems characteristic of a particular dominant culture—Western, middle class, comfortably off. In some ways a wide gap between the lifestyles and resources of the rich and the poor suits the tourist mentality (and indeed the [sex] tourist industry of Houellebecq’s novel), as tourists in search of the authentic, of the “other”, do not want everyone else to be (rich enough to be) a tourist. For the tourist mentality, authenticity is probably automatically linked with poverty. The problem, for the tourist, is when poverty ceases to be picturesque. Then the tourist’s only answer is to look away. Even if all the world is fast turning into one big airport—dissolving spatial differences in a globalized space after what Virilio termed “the end of geography”—not everyone in the airport is a tourist. Airports after all are full of low-paid workers who work unsociable hours in a dehumanized, “supermodern” environment; the slick, shiny surfaces of smooth international transit are polished by an almost invisible army of cleaners from before dawn to well after dusk. So shiny are the surfaces that almost everybody seemingly becomes etherized, including involuntary travellers— migrants, refugees, deportees. Augé describes a world where “transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity)”.29 There is an eerie parallel here between the world of tourists, full of “supermodern” “non-places” of transit, and a world where the  Augé, p. 78.

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poorest of the poor, the dispossessed, refugees from man-made or natural disasters are also permanently on the move, or being moved on from one temporary shelter to another. There is very grim irony in the fact that the same period that has seen an exponential increase in the significance of the global tourist “industry” has also witnessed a huge increase in the number of displaced persons across the globe.30 This is the involuntary kind of travel, the dark shadow of the voluntary kind, reminiscent of the desperate kind of journey undertaken by the famine-fleeing Irish woman in Eavan Boland’s poem “Mise Éire” (I am Ireland).31 This woman stands on the deck of a so-called coffin ship, in transit to the New World, clutching “her half-dead baby”, and clearly not having much hope for anything at her destination but “a passable imitation/of what went before”.

30  “The number of people displaced from their homes due to conflict and persecution last year [2015] exceeded 60  million for the first time in the United Nations’ history, a tally greater than the combined populations of the United Kingdom, or of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, says a new report released on World Refugee Day today. The Global Trends 2015 compiled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) notes that 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, an increase of more than 5 million from 59.5 million a year earlier. The tally comprises 21.3  million refugees, 3.2  million asylum seekers and 40.8  million people internally displaced within their own countries. Measured against the world’s population of 7.4 billion people, one in every 113 people globally is now either a refugee, an asylum-seeker or internally displaced—putting them at a level of risk for which UNHCR knows no precedent. http://refugeesmigrants.un.org/%E2 %80%98unprecedented%E2%80%99-65-million-people-displaced-war-and-persecution2015-%E2%80%93-un (accessed 21.3.2017). 31   Eavan Boland, “Mise Éire”, from The Journey, in Boland, New Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet, 2013, p. 59.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Modernization, always “another term for capitalist rationalization”, is, as David Lloyd writes, “a deeply contradictory process. It may lead, on the one hand, to the critique of established modes of domination and the shaping of emancipatory possibilities; on the other, to the concentration and consolidation of power in the increasingly alienated structures of the state and corporations.” Adorno and Horkheimer, Lloyd reminds us, had uncovered that “deeply contradictory process” as “the dialectic of enlightenment”, “the peculiar and baleful logic by which the critical dimension of enlightenment reason had as its corollary the extension of rationalization and domination over both nature and an increasingly ‘administered’ society”.1 In the foregoing that “extension of rationalization and domination over nature” and the squeezing out of the space of nature with all the consequences that has entailed were the subject of the first essay. It is what has happened in this space above all that has led to an increasingly widespread recognition in contemporary times that modernity has not been all about progress—probably because what is happening with this space now affects everybody, not just some exploitable and expendable others. Adorno’s comments on Beckett’s Endgame, referring to “the phase of completed reification of the world”, leaving “no remainder of what was not made by humans” and where “nature has been extinguished”, seemed to characterize all too neatly the effects of the Anthropocene, before that 1

 David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity, Dublin: Field Day, 2008, pp. 2–4.

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term (and possible synonym for modernity) had been coined. The chapter dwelt much on how the space of nature in modern times was so often conceived in purely anthropocentric—and contradictory—terms, that really left little space for nature itself. The sense of space and the space itself inevitably changed as a result. If the capitalist, “extractivist” attitude to the space of nature seems relatively straightforward, and straightforwardly destructive, it may have more complex philosophical, or even religious roots, as Lynn White, and indeed Max Weber, argued. The Romantic attitude to nature may function as a counterpart of the “extractivist” one, in more ways than one. If Darwin’s legacy could/should have persuaded humanity of its kinship with nature, it seems to have been transformed into an ideology of human nature used to justify all kinds of inhuman brutality, including the kind of contemporary, neoliberal “culture of cruelty” Henry A. Giroux describes. Meanwhile, if nature seemed to have been done away with entirely in a world of postmodern, human artifice, or even in the Anthropocene, it is still thought of as making a comeback in the form of climate change threatening human civilization. Both the actual space of nature and the cultural space of nature have undergone enormous transformations in modern and recent times. Contemporary attitudes to the space of nature, and where human beings stand in relation to that space, continue to be influenced by several different “residues” of the past. Applying Raymond Williams’s terminology further, one might express the hope that while the “dominant” attitude to the space of nature has been all too anthropocentric, exploitative, “extractivist”, perhaps the “emergent” conception of that space may be rather more ecological, however belatedly, and involve a different understanding of the space human beings inhabit. The space of nature has of course most obviously been squeezed out by the expansion of urban space, the subject of the next chapter. The development of large cities over the course of the nineteenth century is inextricable from the notion of modernity and has transformed mental life—including ways of thinking of space and time, as Simmel pointed out. Simmel also highlighted the seemingly contradictory consequences of city life—restricting, imposing conformity to routines, punctuality and so on, while, at the same time, allowing in some ways unprecedented personal freedom of expression. Reactions to city life have often tended to foreground one or the other aspect, but Simmel held both in the balance. Global urbanization continues apace: already over half the world’s population is living in urban areas

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and it is projected that nearly 70% of human beings will be urban dwellers by 2050.2 It is perhaps no great exaggeration to talk, as some have done, of the growth of one world mega-city (indeed “Cosmopolis”)—that may be an increasingly airport-like space, the kind of “non-place” Augé described as so characteristic of the “anthropology of supermodernity”. The transformation of mental life and of notions of space and time Simmel and others associated with urbanization at the beginning of the twentieth century will presumably only become more extreme in a totally urbanized world. Cities are not just places for commerce, but for other things too, such as for new forms of individual freedom and expression, communal life, chance meetings and organized gatherings, intellectual debate on political, legal and social issues, democratic government, administration, diplomacy, culture, leisure. These are, one might say, using Williams’s term again, some of the “residual” aspects of the historical development of cities that still, more or less, persist. The danger is, however that urban space—increasingly the space of the planet itself—becomes entirely commercialized and privatized space, realizing what has possibly been the second core tenet of capitalism, that “Space is money too!”. This has perhaps been the very worrying dominant trend in modern times, where there has been, as David Harvey pointed out, an “inner connection” between the “development of capitalism and urbanization” going back centuries and repeatedly depriving countless human beings of living space in order to extract for the benefit of others more and more profit out of space.3 The essay exploring the modern transformation of the sense of time dwelt much on the rationalization and standardization of time and time zones in the late nineteenth century, a consequence of urban development as well as the arrival of new modes of transport and communication. Modern time may have also become increasingly aligned with capitalist time—with a constant focus on the future and future gain—but, at the same time, the very standardization of time necessitated by and enabled by technologies of transport and communication heightened awareness of the simultaneity of events in different places, and this may have tended to undermine any general sense of linear progress towards the future. Modern 2  According to the United Nations, DESA, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects 2018, https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/ (accessed 10.9.2018). 3  David Harvey, “The Right to the City”, New Left Review, Issue 53, September/October 2008, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city. pdf (accessed 30.7.2019), pp. 23–40.

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times brought other notions of time to the fore too, such as the time of the conscious (and indeed perhaps “alienated”) mind or “private time”, as Kern puts it (and so many modern novels show us), as well as the changing times (and spaces) of art and everyday life in the age of modern media. Postmodern, posthuman, postnatural or contemporary times may be characterized by a different senses of time than earlier times, by less confidence in marching towards a better (capitalist) future, by a lack of a sense of linear progress altogether, by feeling the present has been “cut off at both ends”, as Bauman put it. But of course, the very etymology of modernity, the modo of modern, declares the prime concern of those who understand themselves as modern (not to mention postmodern) is what is happening “just now”, in the present. Yet, alongside the modern fascination with the present, with Baudelaire’s “transient, fleeting and contingent”, the not insignificant trend of modern capitalism (as well as a few other teleologically minded ideologies) promoted an intense focus on the future. In relation to time, it is probably fair to say that the overall predominant trend of modernity has been to concentrate minds on the present and/or the future while underplaying the value or relevance of the past, of tradition and of history for understanding the present (and the future too). That may also be changing as emergent awareness of the effects of the Anthropocene as well as how human beings relate to that much larger kind of time span now increasingly also contribute to the contemporary sense(s) of time. How the “time and space of the work of art” has been re-conceived and perhaps transformed utterly from the dawn of the age of “technical reproducibility”, as Benjamin termed it, to the age of digital reproduction, and the consequences of this for the broader human sense of time and space was the subject of the next chapter. It becomes very difficult to consider art (and culture) as existing in some autonomous space, separate from the rest of life and “reality”—and indeed of life and “reality” as autonomous and separable from art—in the age of the smartphone and when the space and time we increasingly live in is the internet itself. One could hardly deny that, as human beings now live in a such a “media-saturated” environment, the human senses of space and time have been transformed. This development may be viewed as very worrying, even disastrous, if one agrees with Adorno’s and Marcuse’s assessment of the use of the new twentieth century media in the “culture industry”—that it served to produce an increasingly “one-dimensional” space of quasi-fascist conformity to the demands of big business. If the imagined and imaginative space of

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culture is completely assimilated with the space of commerce, culture loses any critical, intellectual and liberating role or content and simply becomes a collection of commercial spectacles and celebrities. However, perhaps Rancière’s discussion of the “shared surfaces” of art, design and commercial life, of a world where the notion of art existing in some “autonomous” space seems obsolete, provides a way of considering (in spatial terms) the continuing role of art in the work of liberation, in changing “the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible”.4 Nevertheless, one may still have lingering doubts about the effects of the dissolution of any notion of the autonomous space of the work of art, the almost complete merging of the time and space of the work of art with the time and space of commercial life. One way or the other, there is no doubt that the age of mechanical and of digital reproduction has thoroughly transformed the times and spaces of everyday life as well as of the work of art. The last chapter then investigated the close relationship between travel and modernity, postmodernity, contemporary “supermodernity” and how speedy travel alters the senses of space and time. “The modern individual”, Richard Sennett wrote, “is, above all else, a mobile human being.”5 The connection between modernity and mobility is very evident in the literature of modernity, particularly in the history of the novel. Whatever about whether the modern fascination with mobility was ultimately derived from a (pre-modern) religious focus on goals beyond this world (as Sennett suggested), constant mobility and what one might call “the will to travel” have certainly become dominant aspects of contemporary culture, so much so that Bauman named “the tourist” as one of his four archetypal figures of postmodernity. As mobility itself becomes the destination, contemporary spaces become increasingly spaces made for rapid transit, “non-places”, as Augé called them, in a “supermodern” world. Particularly since the end of the nineteenth century the transport and communications revolution has collapsed notions of distance and radically altered the sense (and the measurement) of time. Since around the end of the twentieth century several different commentators have expressed the feeling that, as Michel Houellebecq’s narrator in Platform put it, “more and more, the whole world would come to resemble an airport”.6  Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2011, p. 72.  Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York, London: Norton, 1996, p. 255. 6  Michel Houellebecq, Platform (trans. by Frank Wynne), London: Vintage, 2003, p. 131. 4 5

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In the second part of the chapter, Houellebecq’s novel is compared to some other examples of “travel literature”, retracing, in a sense, the journey to the airport. Perhaps the ultimate expression of mobility in “supermodern”, late-­ capitalist (“super-capitalist”?) society is really the “hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs” on the side of a building on Broadway in DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. After all, Baudrillard pointed out that in consumer society, where everything is “orchestrated into images, signs, consumable models”, there is “no longer anything but the transmission and reception of signs, and the individual being vanishes in this combinatory and calculus of signs”.7 To say “the individual being vanishes” is still perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, as human beings are still there, however dwarfed and alienated by the “supermodern” “non-places” they pass through or made dizzy by the speed of sprinting dollar signs above their heads. Bruno Latour describes the “project of modernization” as flight along a “vector going from the local to the global”. This gave modernity both a spatial and a temporal sense of direction: “the global” was to be the future; the “local”, and all those people associated with it—“the (neo-)natives, the antiquated, the vanquished, the colonized, the subaltern, the excluded”—belonged to the past. Modernity involved travelling in a particular direction. As people now witness climate change, along with “exploding inequalities” and the migration crisis, and, in the midst of “globalization”, more and more of us “feel the ground slip away beneath our feet”, human beings increasingly recognize that “the universal condition today entails living in the ruins of modernization”, and there is an emerging sense that it is time to come down from that flight, to come, to use the title of Latour’s book, “down to earth”.8 Perhaps there is indeed a shift happening, among some people at least, away from the modern and postmodern fascination with mobility, speed and flight and towards a recognition of the importance of the place human beings live in, of the earth itself as a place, rather than a non-place. If there is, this will involve re-configuring the sense of space too. Latour argues that in a time when we become aware that the “place ‘on’ or ‘in’ which we are located begins to react to our actions, turns against us, encloses us,  Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage Publications, 1998, p. 191.  Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (trans. by Catherine Porter), Cambridge: Polity, 2018, p. 26f., p. 5 and p. 106. 7 8

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dominates us, demands something of us […] space is no longer that of the cartographers with their latitudinal and longitudinal grids”. Space, he writes, “has become an agitated history in which we are participants among others, reacting to other reactions” (p. 41f.). The recognition that space is not just passively there, waiting to be mapped, mastered and exploited is perhaps gradually becoming more widespread—as is the awareness that global space has been radically altered by human history. It is not just recent technical innovations or the dynamic of late capitalism that have led to a contemporary mutation in how people consider time and space. From the time the clocks of modernity started ticking to contemporary times, notions of time and space have been subject to constant upheaval and transformation. This has happened as the space of nature has been re-conceived and almost squeezed out, enormous cities have spread out across the globe, modern technologies of transport, communication, information have revolutionized the ways people live and think about both time and space, as new media have merged what were often supposed to be separate spaces of art and life and the modern fascination with mobility has led to a shrinking of distances and a proliferation of “non-places”. The inextricability of modernity from modern capitalism has meant that notions of time and space have been deeply and predominantly affected by this modern belief system, evident in all the different areas mentioned above. As the legacy of modernity and modern capitalism is increasingly critically scrutinized, new ways of conceptualizing the times and spaces human beings live in will inevitably emerge. They will surely have to. If there is any time or space left.

Index1

A Adorno, Theodor, 7–9, 12, 15–17, 17n8, 32, 32n41, 34, 35, 41, 41n54, 42, 44, 104–112, 104n8, 107n10, 110n12, 110n13, 112n16, 115, 120, 155, 158 “The Culture Industry,” 99–106 Augé, Marc, 12, 12n20, 13, 139, 140n8–10, 141, 147, 151n27, 152, 152n29, 157, 159 B Bacon, Francis, 32, 35 Ballard, J.G., 140, 140n11 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 6n10, 10, 13, 47, 47n9, 48, 48n10, 48n11, 52, 93, 93n51, 138, 140, 152, 158

Baudrillard, Jean, 12, 41, 42n57, 101n5, 112, 113, 113n18, 127, 132, 145, 145n21, 160, 160n7 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 8, 8n15, 8n16, 12, 13, 27, 27n31, 29, 29n35–37, 30, 32, 46, 46n6, 49, 49n14, 63, 88, 88n40, 90–95, 90n44, 91n48, 92n49, 125–127, 125n43, 131, 133, 137, 138, 138n6, 140n9, 145, 146, 146n22, 148, 152, 158, 159 Beckett, Samuel, 9, 12, 15, 16, 16n2, 17n6, 42, 44, 107, 108, 108n11, 110, 111, 113, 120, 122, 123, 155 Endgame, 15, 16n2, 41n54, 42, 44 “Ping,” 108–113, 118, 120, 122 Behrens, Peter, 129

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kane, Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5

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INDEX

Benjamin, Walter, 10, 12, 46–51, 46n5, 47n7, 47n9, 48n12, 50n16, 55, 56n27, 59, 59n32, 67, 68, 81, 81n27, 90, 91, 91n46, 91n47, 99–105, 100n2, 107, 107n10, 109, 111–116, 112n16, 114n20, 119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 132, 140, 143, 158 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 99–104 Berman, Marshall, 8, 8n17, 9 Blake, William, 18 Böcklin, Arnold, 129 Boland, Eavan, 153, 153n31 Borge, Viktor, 142 Bunyan, John, 89, 137 Burke, Edmund, 23, 23n25 C Cage, John, 109, 122 Chaplin, Charlie, 78 Conrad, Joseph, 11, 56, 56n28, 72, 72n7, 74–77, 74n11, 81, 85 The Secret Agent, 11, 56, 56n28, 72–77, 72n7, 72n8, 73n9, 74n11, 85, 93, 94 D Dada, 81 Darré, R.W., 28, 29 Darwin, Charles, 10, 25, 26, 29, 31, 34, 40, 71, 156 Debord, Guy, 12, 13, 45, 46n4, 63n42, 114, 136, 137, 137n3, 141, 145, 145n19, 147 Defoe, Daniel, 10, 13, 36, 37n46, 37n47, 38, 39, 43n64, 65 Crusoe, 10, 13, 36–39, 37n46, 37n47, 43n64, 65, 89, 137, 147, 149–151 Moll Flanders, 151

Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 17n7 DeLillo, Don, 10, 12, 56, 57, 61n37, 62, 62n38, 62n39, 67, 67n50, 77n19, 94, 117, 117n23, 118, 160 Cosmopolis, 10, 56, 57, 61–63, 62n38, 62n39, 65, 67, 67n50, 77n19, 94, 157, 160 White Noise, 12, 117–119, 117n23 Descola, Philippe, 18n12, 20, 20n17 Dickens, Charles, 10, 49n13, 51, 51n18, 56 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 10, 54 du Maurier, Daphne, 43, 44, 44n67 “The Birds,” 43, 44, 44n67 E Eagleton, Terry, 37, 37n45, 38, 38n48, 49n13, 51, 51n19, 126, 126n44 Eco, Umberto, 84, 84n33 Einstürzende Neubauten, 141 Eliot, T.S., 16, 16n3, 43n61, 97 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18, 18n10, 19, 24 Engels, Friedrich, 8–10, 9n18, 50, 50n17, 51, 63, 92, 116 F Foucault, Michel, 10, 17, 31n39, 52, 52n20, 52n21 Franklin, Benjamin, 89 Fuller, Loie, 129 G Galton, Francis, 29 Giddens, Anthony, 3, 6, 6n11, 13, 87, 87n39, 95, 99, 99n1, 146 Gilbert, Sandra, 20, 20n16, 21n22 Giroux, Henry, 26, 26n30, 156 Gubar, Susan, 20, 20n16, 21n22 Gursky, Andreas, 139

 INDEX 

H Haneke, Michael, 126 Haraway, Donna, 40, 40n51 Harvey, David, 47n8, 68, 68n51, 76, 76n17, 80, 80n26, 157, 157n3 Höch, Hannah, 82 Horkheimer, Max, 7, 8, 12, 17, 17n8, 32, 32n41, 34, 35, 104–106, 104n8, 111, 115, 120 “The Culture Industry,” 99–106 Houellebecq, Michel, 13, 140, 140n10, 145–153, 145n18, 147n23, 150n25, 151n27, 151n28, 159, 159n6, 160 Platform, 13, 140, 140n10, 145–153, 145n18, 147n23, 150n25, 150n26, 151n28 Huxley, Aldous, 29 Huyssen, Andreas, 1, 1n1 J Jameson, Fredric, 3–5, 4n7, 9, 11, 12, 39, 61, 69, 69n1, 94, 95n54, 112–116, 112n15, 112n16, 115n21, 116n22, 118, 120, 122, 123 Joyce, James, 10–12, 57–59, 58n31, 59n33, 67, 77, 77n20, 82–85, 82n30, 83n32, 84n33, 84n35, 84n36, 85n37, 99, 122–124, 132, 132n50 “Araby,” 10, 57–59 Dubliners, 10 Finnegans Wake, 12, 83, 84n35, 85, 85n37, 122–124 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 83, 84, 84n33 Ulysses, 11, 12, 77, 79–85, 82n30, 82n31, 84n34–36, 94, 123, 132, 132n50

165

K Kafka, Franz, 10, 11, 53–57, 55n25, 56n27, 57n29, 57n30, 67, 78, 78n22, 107 Metamorphosis, 11 Keiller, Patrick, 39, 64, 64n43, 64n45, 65 Robinson in Ruins, 39 Kern, Stephen, 3, 4, 4n6, 11, 11n19, 71n3, 73, 74, 74n10, 74n13, 75n15, 76, 76n18, 78–80, 79n23, 79n24, 80n25, 82, 82n29, 83, 158 Kiefer, Anselm, 97 Klee, Paul, 90 Klein, Naomi, 10, 35, 35n43, 36 extractivism, 10, 35, 36, 38 Koolhaas, Rem, 10, 13, 45, 45n1, 60n34, 141–143, 142n12, 147 L Lang, Fritz, 78, 78n21 Latour, Bruno, 6n12, 10, 13, 13n21, 15n1, 22n24, 24, 24n26–28, 40–42, 40n53, 41n55, 42n58, 160, 160n8 Le Corbusier, 45, 45n3, 60n35 Lefebvre, Henri, 55n26, 68, 68n51 Lichtenstein, Roy, 113, 116 Lloyd, David, 155, 155n1 Lyotard, J.F., 86, 86n38, 87, 92–94 M Mallarmé, Stephane, 129 Mann, Thomas, 8, 11, 70, 71, 71n4, 71n5, 86 Buddenbrooks, 11, 70–72, 71n4, 85, 93, 94, 96, 125 Marcuse, Herbert, 17, 110–115, 110n14, 112n17, 114n19, 158

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INDEX

Marlowe, Christopher, 7, 7n13, 13, 72, 89, 89n43, 146 Faustus, 7, 13, 89, 89n43, 146–153 Marx, Karl, 8, 9, 9n18, 92, 92n50, 93, 116, 137, 137n4, 149 McCarthy, Cormac, 16, 42, 43n60, 43n62 The Road, 16, 42, 43n60, 43n62, 43n64 McLuhan, Marshall, 12, 83, 83n32, 121–123, 121n34–36, 122n37–40, 125, 128, 132, 132n49 N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 106 Nordau, Max, 71

Simmel, Georg, 10, 53, 53n22, 54, 57, 66, 75, 75n14, 75n16, 76, 156, 157 Sontag, Susan, 144, 144n16 Spencer, Herbert, 26, 27, 34 Stevenson, R.L., 71 Strauss, Johann, 77 Swift, Jonathan, 150n26, 151 Gulliver’s Travels, 147 Synge, J.M., 3, 4, 4n5 T Thomas, Edward, 28 Thompson, E.P., 70, 70n2 Thrift, Nigel, 5, 5n9, 66, 66n49, 101, 101n4 Tzara, Tristan, 81

R Rancière, Jacques, 3, 12, 123, 124, 124n41, 128–133, 129n45, 130n46, 131n48, 159, 159n4 Ravenhill, Mark, 144, 144n17 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 18, 18n11 Roy, Arundhati, 16, 17n5

V Varoufakis, Yanis, 21, 21n20, 25n29 Veblen, Thorstein, 144, 144n15 Virilio, Paul, 3, 5, 5n8, 7, 7n14, 9, 10, 12–14, 45, 45n2, 59–62, 60n34, 61n37, 62n40, 66, 66n49, 69, 90, 90n45, 93, 93n52, 94, 102, 102n6, 105, 118–121, 119n24–27, 120n28–32, 121n33, 142, 142n13, 143, 147, 152 Voltaire Candide, 147

S Schopenhauer, Arthur, 86 Sennett, Richard, 10, 13, 47n8, 60, 60n35, 61n36, 63, 136, 136n2, 138, 159, 159n5 Shelley, Mary, 10, 147 Frankenstein, 10, 20–25, 147

W Warhol, Andy, 112–114, 116 Watt, Ian, 36, 36n44, 37, 37n47, 149, 149n24 Weber, Max, 17, 38, 38n49, 39, 39n50, 88, 89, 89n41, 92–94, 137, 137n5, 156

P Pickett, Kate, 27, 27n32, 27n33 Poe, Edgar Allan, 10, 47, 48, 59, 65 Pope Francis, 33–35, 33n42

 INDEX 

Wells, H.G., 74, 74n11, 74n12, 96, 96n56 The Time Machine, 74, 74n12, 96n56 Wesley, John, 92 White, Lynn, 156 White, Lynn, Jr., 12, 13, 14n23, 31–35, 31n40 Wilde, Oscar, 71, 100, 100n3 Wilkinson, Richard, 27, 27n32, 27n33 Williams, Raymond, 3, 3n4, 156, 157

167

Woolf, Virginia, 77 Wordsworth, William, 18, 19, 19n13 Y Yeats, William Butler, 28, 43n61 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 43, 43n65 Zola, Émile, 12, 106, 106n9, 117, 123