Lecture 3: A hotchpotch of Modernism

In this lecture, Chris was talking about all the important people, ideas and events of the Modernist era which, I have to say, is very confusing. I don’t know if it was the nature of the content or the way that we jumped from one thing to another, but I was lost. However, on hearing from Chris after the lecture that “It is okay to be confused”, I am now much more relaxed about having no clue what is going on.

I will try to organise my notes into the key people of the Modernist era before going on to the key factors.

To start, I will outline what Modernism is:

Modernism is important in the history of culture, as set up by Thomas Kuhn in his structure of history. It was a reaction against Romanticism and the Enlightenment, in which the arts, maths and architecture all reflect the idea of the de-centred universe in which there is no central point and everything is in relation to another point rather than to the universe as a whole. In this way, it was thought that nothing is more important than anything else. The science behind the Modernist movement focused on particle physics and the fact that as you continue to spit objects into atoms, sub-atoms etc., it becomes more and more clear that everything is made of nothing, and as the universe continues to expand, there is less and less in it. This was reflected in the fact that Europe was no longer the centre of the world, with America emerging in the 19th century and then Asia shortly after that, creating a globalised world in which Europe is eclipsed and Eastern religions gain importance. Being the opposite of the Enlightenment, modernism was very individualist, rejecting Christianity for being “sheep” and democracy because it was seen as idiots running the world. Modernists were more likely to support an “aristocratic super-scientist”. Examples of these ideas can be found in Nietzsche’s work where Zarathustra is the “over-man”, using super-hero qualities to overcome hurdles in life, and in Schopenhauer’s music which was seen as a “supernatural force”. Another key idea in Modernism was that because of medicinal advancements, the human race has stopped evolving, one example that Chris gave was that of appendicitis; if those that have it do not die, it will continue to be passed on in the gene pool. This has forced two different views; the far right-wings say that we need forced eugenics, such as the Nazi’s idea, in order to stamp out these biological faults, however this is ridiculous and the far left-wing would argue that we need to build a communist super-utopia and evolve socially instead. Many key thinkers would blame Christianity for the advancements in science and welfare that have caused us to stop evolving and it is often seen as the “religion of the weak”. Ideas often associated with Modernism are; war, fire, power, destruction, Freudian sexual theories.

Wagner was very important in Modernism, especially as it is thought that the first moment of modernism in music was his opening of the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde in which he breaks the structural rules for composition by not resolving the piece in the “home key”. Wagner’s operas were always on a huge scale, never seen before, and were seen as a cosmic drama of the universe told through mythology. He was a conservative nationalist and common themes in his work were; burning, sex, anti-Semitism and cannibalism.

Nietzsche was also key, with his style being very important for journalists and many of his most famous quotations now being used in pop culture and journalism. His translator, an American journalist and stylist called H.L. Mencken, was also very important in the advertising industry, pop music’s hook lines and many of the traditions in headline-writing. Both of these men wrote in outbursts, which helps to make their work very quotable, hence the many aphorisms such as “God is Dead”, “Mankind is a thing that must be overcome” and “Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual”. In Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morals” he reflects modernist ideas of; relativity, that the universe has not fixed centre or fixed points which means we cannot have change, the redundancy of the concepts of good and evil, that everything about science is to do with change (which reflects many other philosophers such as Hegel). He did not think there should be racialism or nationalism because of his ideas of individualism. He was a devotee and friend of Wagner and they would often go to orgies at “mad” King Ludwig’s castle.

Freud’s psychoanalysis proved to be a big player in this era mainly because he was saying that you do not really possess your own consciousness and that your subconscious is outside of your control. His ideas of wish-based fulfilment were also seen to be of significance.

James Joyce’s de-centred narrative in Ulysses can be seen as embodying Modernist ideas in that it had no set beginning, middle or end, or set characters. It was seen as an “honest portrayal of real life” and due to its sexual explicitness and radical ideas was banned from the pope-ruled world.

Dorothy Parker was another writer/poet/journalist whose lack of sentimentality has been seen as directly based on Schopenhauer.

Feminism and women came into this era only because of the references in many works to sex, but after they were introduced, they had a large impact, although I am not sure what this impact was. Chris suggested that because women are the givers of life, they are therefore the cause of all of humanity’s problems, because if we did not live we would not worry about life.
Some key events in Modernism were:

The Great War, which brought about a moral, political and economic dissolution of the European order, causing all aspects of culture (books, poems, music etc) to be haunted by the events and consequences of this horrific period. Even the Russian revolutions and the rise of the Nazis can be put down as a direct consequence. It caused huge shock because of the scale of its destructiveness.

The Jazz age; America had the Harlem Renaissance in the 1860s which meant that slavery was officially abolished and The Migration began. Arguably the most important intellectual music of the 20th Century; Jazz and Blues, came out of this as a combination of Jewish, African and American and who knows what else. This created the first world music which then became blues, then rock and roll, then pop music.

Communism, both with Lenin in Russia and with Rosa Luxembourg in Germany, was very important in the Modernist era.

Futurism emerged as part of modernism, characterised by Russian constructivist design such as photo montage and mass production which essentially was the start of magazine journalism. Futurism was against Kantean ideas of works of individual genius.

The architecture in the modernist age reflected the way that people were losing the aesthetic ideas of platonic forms and instead were focused on functional, scientific design based on ergonomics, measurement, etc. Pretty terraced housing was out and functional tower blocks were in. Along with this went the idea of central planning which underpinned fascism as highly rational and functional parts of society.

The Holocaust (organised, industrial mass murder) is thought of as the end of the Modernism era.

And there you go; a hotchpotch of notes that I don’t even understand! Enjoy…