Modernism
Robin
Hello, Agnes.
Agnes:
Hi, Robin.
Robin
Welcome back to the country.
Agnes:
Thank you. It's nice to be back.
Robin
And we are going to talk about modernism or something like modernism. We'll
decide what it is exactly.
Agnes:
I am going to talk about the ethos common to Brach, Musil, Joyce, Pessoa,
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Proust, that set of people. And then Robin's gonna
talk about another thing, and somehow that's gonna turn into a conversation, I
think is your theory. So let's go.
Robin
I am motivated by the question of how culture has changed over the last few
centuries. And you provocatively suggested that if, as I've postulated,
culture has started to drift, that maybe artists and fine artists will have
noticed that and had a reaction to it, and that maybe something near modernism
can be understood as a intelligible reaction of artists to a perception about
how the modern world had changed, and that it's a big clue to the nature of
the change in the modern world is the ways in which artists framed and reacted
to what they saw as the change.
Agnes:
Right, so the thing that inspired me to tell you that there was, that there
seemed to be this moment where humanity cottoned on to cultural drift
basically was that I was reading Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I was
rereading it. My last read was a long time ago. And it seemed to me that
that's what the novel was about. It was about finding yourself in a place
where you could no longer quite inherit culture. You had to take this critical
distance from it. And you saw it as a thing that is itself you saw yourself,
right, be somewhat alienated from it. It's a kind of a, there's a kind of
downer mood to most of this literature. There's something depressive about it.
The heroes are sort of anti-heroes or they're in most ways not very heroic.
And they're just kind of trying to deal with or react to or respond to this
feeling of being lost and of not knowing Like not knowing what to care about
Virginia Woolf has like a famous line. In December of, it's something like
this, I'm not quoting it perfectly. In December of 1910, human nature changed.
Robin
And I think it's- I just now read that quote actually in an essay a few
minutes ago.
Agnes:
Okay, yes, yes, you read the essay, yes. I think that that, there's another
essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, which I would recommend as the better text
actually of hers to discuss this predicament. But in any case, So yes, I think
that's what's happening in this period. And it's a whole bunch of different
people from a whole bunch of different parts of Europe who are having the same
revelation right around the same time. And they're expressing it in these kind
of half philosophical, half literary ways.
Robin
So in some way, Musel is later, because this book is 1955, so by some marks
past the end of modernism.
Agnes:
So it takes place in 1913, and the first volume, which I don't think you've
read beyond the first volume, am I correct? Correct. So that was published in
1930, and the first volume is the Yeah, the first one was published, I think,
in 1930. And then the second volume was published with much less fanfare,
because we're heading into the Nazi period. Nazis were not a big fan of him. I
mean, in the Nazi period. I don't know exactly what year. And so I would say,
Musel's dates, that is, if you're born around 1880, which is roughly, I can't
remember exactly his year of birth, then your coming of age in this time
period.
Robin
So we have this huge range of the world and art, some of which has the label
modernism, but I guess Musel is particularly interesting because he's not just
expressing modernism, he is trying to describe the world of modernism as it
changed and the characters in it as prototypical modern characters going
through prototypical modern experiences, right?
Agnes:
Right, but I actually think that's kind of, I mean, I think we still is the is
the best exemplar, I haven't read all of these authors I've read most right.
But I think Moussa is the best exemplar because he, but all of them do both of
that. All of them give you, in effect, something like their own reflections or
thought about modernism, and then also show you the world. And I think Moussa
tries to show you sort of from a lot of different angles, from the point of
view of servants, of aristocratic women, of lower class women, of crazy,
murderer. He's trying to integrate all of these points of view and I think all
of them are supposed to be inflected by this modernist condition but none of
them so much as the protagonist Ulrich who is the man without qualities and
that's the very, that very condition. It's almost like all these other
characters are potential versions of, they haven't quite come to Ulrich's
realization yet. They're in this modern condition but they don't see that
they're in it. and he sees that he's in it. And so he's just not attached to
anything about, it's not just that he's not attached to any set of values,
he's not attached to anything about himself. He doesn't, he might have anger
or whatever, it sort of wells up in him, but he's not identified with it. He
almost doesn't have a self, the German version, Eigenschaft, and it's like, he
doesn't have what is his own or what is himself. He's a man without a self.
Robin
I'm interested in maybe this particular character and this book again as a
representative example of this larger trend, that is to the extent they
deviate, they're less interesting. So I'm interested in what can we summarize
as the overall correlates of this key change in era, and you've named some of
them, but we want to maybe say what are the strongest correlates. Certainly
one, as you mentioned, was a degree of lack of inspiration or motivation, some
degree of things are broken, fragmented, alienated, some degree of dislike,
perhaps, of their world. Another was the breaking with the past That is, some
way in which these characters feel they can no longer inherit or embrace what
were recently available. well-structured cultures, values, norms, et cetera.
And for some reason, they feel that even though they don't like what new thing
they have that much, they definitely don't want to go back. Somehow they're
definite about wanting to embrace this new thing compared to- Can I interrupt
you on that point?
Agnes:
Sure. So right now, I've moved on from Moussa and I'm reading Hermann Bruch.
He's also an Austrian of the same time period, and he has this trio of novels
called the Sleepwalkers. And in the first of the three, there's this character
whose brother dies in a duel over honor. And you can sort of see that the
character, not only the character, but kind of the character's father, right?
So this is the son. There's a kind of incredulity, like he died for honor. The
father keeps saying it, he died for honor. And it's not that the brother
thinks how, you know, How stupid or how foolish or I don't want to live like
that. It's like it's, it's another world like he can't quite imagine it. It's,
it's already it's his brother, but it's already like some distant past that
you could die in a duel over honor. And so somehow it's something Brock
represented as something that it's only happened very quickly right his
brother can die.
Robin
That's the December 2010 line, i.e. a sudden change. So maybe, you know, it
changed for different times for different people, but there's a perception for
each person of a break, a break in values.
Agnes:
Right, and I mean, in particular, the younger, sorry, the main character,
whose name I'm just not remembering at the moment, He goes off to the military
and goes and lives in the city. And the brother is like at home on the more
rural estate, right? So it's the, he becomes modern first.
Robin
Right, so there's some idea that the switch here is correlated with urbanity,
industry, international connections, those sorts of things. So many of the key
trends of the era are thought to be not unrelated to this break, but still
there's the question, what is the essence of this break? So we have these two
correlates, I guess, so far. There's a break, perception of a break. and some
reluctance or just distance from the past culture that people had embraced up
until then.
Agnes:
I think cities and internationalism is another one. That is, it's very
striking that this set of novelists are geographically so widespread. A lot of
them met each other, though, and people just traveled a lot in this time
period. In these novels, you see a lot of traveling. People constantly getting
on and off trains.
Robin
Although I'm expecting most of the poorest people were into it. These are
elites, I expect.
Agnes:
This is a phenomenon of elites. We're just not talking about it. Though the
novelists are interested in some of the poor people, and the poor people
figure, it's not that they don't figure in the novels, but there's a kind of
the privileged point of view, not necessarily elites, but
Robin
But not... Immersed into the new wealthier economy, even if they're at the
poor end of it. Like they're in cities, they're in industry, right? They might
be servants even, but they're still immersed in this new world.
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin
Okay, so the first correlate was this break connected to modernity in some
way, correlated with immersion in the modern world. There's this perception of
a break, a sharp break, and secondly, as we talked about, there's some degree
of malaise, whereas previous culture and art had been pretty confident of its
values and the things it celebrated and that it was motivated by them, this is
less surely motivated and confident and more seeing fragmentation, alienation,
et cetera, and just experiencing it as at least mild negative. That's a second
correlate here.
Agnes:
Another one is that it's just this literature is much more intellectual. So,
yes, I'll do different ways. There's a lot of radio senation just a lot of
like stream of consciousness where you inhabit someone's point of view and
you're getting the workings of their mind but more specifically the workings
of their mind or theorizing. A lot of these things are kind of filled with
essays. In Musul, there's an essay on essays somewhere in there.
Robin
I haven't gotten to that one yet.
Agnes:
And just like the fact that the main character in Musul is an intellectual.
Robin
Right, so we have three correlates now. I guess I want to list as many
correlates as we can before we try to put them together to make sense of them.
But yes, it's intellectual and abstract. That is, abstraction is a relatively
prominent feature of modernism, certainly in structure and architecture and
the visual arts, but in literature too, to some degree, that it goes along
with intellectualism. That is, intellectuals are abstractly intellectualizing.
Agnes:
in their discussion. Right, but it's unusual for novels. That's not the way
most novels have worked. So here's another thing, though, that goes along with
the intellectual, is that kind of aphoristic quality. Like, Musel is filled
with just great one-liners. There'll just be a line that will kind of resonate
with you so that you get the feeling that he's like, I don't know,
sociologist, or giving you a theory, like giving you a take, giving you a hot
take on what women want. Right.
Robin
I mean, that's the thing I liked most about Tolstoy. In my mind, Tolstoy was
the king of that for me.
Agnes:
I think Musel does way more of that than Tolstoy does.
Robin
But what I like most about Tolstoy is that he has a theory of his characters
that he'll explain to you, and then you can watch the characters play out the
theory. But he's not.
Agnes:
you know just showing not telling he's definitely telling you uh then that i
like that then you can evaluate his theory that way but they are somewhat you
know right so i think it's quite different what musul is doing for it's
usually musul is giving you an aphorism from the mind of ulrich that is it's
always who has the aphorism right so he has this character who's very
insightful and his it's not that he's insightful like about his himself or
other people, I mean, or other characters. It's about like the human
predicament. It's supposed to transfer directly, I think, to the life of the
reader. Like, it's almost like you read this as a kind of a instruction manual
for life, and it's going to contain It's going to contain little insights or
ideas.
Robin
So the fourth correlate stands out to me as almost the strongest, which is
just the experimentation and variety that is compared to previous artistic
errors. It seems like people are just going in many different directions here,
trying out many different ways to be different. And in Musel, there's the
parallel campaign on almost sarcastic description of the strong urge these
people, they're not just wallowing in alienation. They believe that they could
make things better if only they could innovate properly. And they're really
obsessed with creating social groups together, all celebrating the very idea
of innovation without actually having much of an idea what to do, which is
kind of the satire. But still, you see the strong urge for you know, being
part of a process that made a new version and had hope for it in some degree.
Agnes:
Right, so we should say that the parallel campaign is a, so in Germany, the
emperor or whatever has been reigning for 30 years, but in Austria, he's been
reigning for, and they're gonna have a celebration of the 30th year thing, but
in Austria, the guy's been around for 70 years, and so they wanna have a
parallel campaign, i.e. not really parallel, but saying we're better than you,
you know, Prussians. uh uh and uh and so they're gonna have like throw an even
bigger party than the uh the Germans are throwing and um and they just have to
find an idea like what is the campaign going to be about and so the the the
novel is structured around trying to find this idea and then at one point I
think still in the first novel, Count Leinsdorf, this sort of royal eminence
who's the highest status person in the group, decides it's going to be action.
The theme is going to be action, but they don't know what kind of action,
right? Somewhere in the second volume, they move towards the idea of peace,
and then the general gets nervous, right? But then he decides, well, war is
for the sake of peace. So still, for the sake of peace, we could be promoting
this increased size of the military, because war is for the sake of peace,
too. So there's this sense of like, we want to find something good. We want to
find some new big idea to unify around. And I think it is, you're right that
it's satire, but it's also the whole idea of the novel is of being at this
time where you feel like you have all these resources and all this
intellectual power and all of these possibilities. Ulrich is a man of
possibilities. He prefers possibilities to actualities. That's sort of how the
novel starts. and but kind of not knowing what to do with any of it because
the goals or ends in the service of which people have acted until now seem
they're like honor they're just off the table and so the parallel campaign
isn't just a joke it's also the kind of serious project of the novel to be
like let's find something that all of this can be for it can be used for and
the novel is famously unfinished unfinished in a really deep way there's like
thousands of pages that he wrote he kind of kept right he kept at one point he
sent out a bunch of pages to be published and then withdrew them at the last
minute so like i've read about 1700 pages of it but that's just all that's
been uh put out in an english edition there's like a lot more pages that one
could read um right and he he develops in a bunch of different directions um
so he really couldn't decide what basically he couldn't decide on this idea,
on the good that it was going to go in the service.
Robin
Right. And most other authors do manage to have a center of their book and
finish them, but he can serve as a representative of the larger structure,
which is typically all these different artists or authors, et cetera, go in
pretty different directions with their new innovative approaches. And there
isn't that much consensus really on what the best direction is. A
distinguishing feature of this era is in fact just this divergence.
Agnes:
That's not how I would put it, because that suggests that there's some clear
way that Joyce went, and some clear different way that Bruch went, and some
clear third way that Proust went. And we could name all those ways, and then
we could say, OK, they all went in different directions. But I'd be like, tell
me. Tell me the answer. What did Joyce go for? What did Proust go for? It's
just not clear to me. In most of these cases, you can't even tell in one
person what direction they went.
Robin
Well, you can't tell of a unifying concept that organizes what they did. But
you can certainly just see that they have a different style, that each of
these books is a different.
Agnes:
Sure, they have different styles. But that's not the same thing as saying they
each found some big idea.
Robin
Well, I'm not saying they found a big idea, but they were each motivated by
this passion to try something different. I mean, they certainly weren't
copying older styles, right? This is an era of people innovating and creating
new styles. That's the most distinctive aspect of this era, really, is the
number of different styles being created and explored. And in part, through
the same sort of energy of the parallel campaign, a lot of celebration and
hope was put into this. Basically, we're going to find a new way to get
unified and have value and have hope and inspiration, and we need to go look
for it. And then at some point people said, that's not going to be possible.
And they just said, we're going to give up on it. But there certainly is a
sense of an ancient culture is just this integrated thing that knows what it
wants and knows what it values and has all the parts working together. And
it's sort of constant, consistent across time. And then a break with, no,
we're not going to be trying to do that anymore. We're going to be trying now
to be looking for a whole bunch of different things. we feel a loss a bit from
this change, and it does seem that a lot of it is motivated by a perception of
art as reflecting larger society. In fact, there were lots of social changes
happening, and those social changes were also undermining people's previous
expectations about the world, and you know, the world before this modern break
was a world of relatively stable cultures, which had a relatively stable
concept of what they valued and people's relations to each other and things
like that. And culture, high culture was part of that, tended to uphold the
highest ideals and to inspire people. And then this new world is a break. One
of the most striking features is that people are looking now for something
consciously, feeling that there's a lack of something and trying to replace it
by a search, as in the parallel campaign, I guess. And then these are the two
of the distinctive features here. One is a sense of loss of coherence and
value and an unwillingness to go back, but still a sense of needing something
like that. But now more appropriately for this new world, and feeling like the
arts were going to take the lead, perhaps in helping us go search for such
things. And that a lot of prestige and hope was put into the arts for this
identity. It wasn't just a, you know, relaxing thing to do or a, you know,
pretty things to put in pretty places sort of thing. There was a sense of this
mattered.
Agnes:
Right, I think that that's right. I mean, I think, you know, the idea there's
this idealization of the artist as a kind of genius goes back a lot further,
it goes back to, you know, this is an explorer, inventor, artist as explorer,
inventor, not just a genius. Right, right. That's, I think, maybe it is
distinctive of this time that the artist is somehow tasked with the cultural
problem. There's a cultural problem we need to solve, and we hand that problem
over to Well, maybe partly to artists and maybe partly to philosophers. So
people like, you know, Nietzsche and, I mean, Nietzsche's before this period,
but Wittgenstein is right during this period, and Heidegger's a little bit
later.
Robin
We've always deferred to elites and prestigious people about culture, but in a
world of stable culture, then we learn the best of culture from prestigious
people and then let them, you know, recommend specific things like going to
war or things like that on the basis of their better understanding of our
shared culture. But when you decide that culture's broken or lost, now their
task is more important. No longer are they just the interpreters and
communicators of our shared culture. They have to go find a new one.
Agnes:
Right, but also it also in a way demotes them because they have to find it,
but at what point do we decide that they did a good job or not? And if they're
not just handing down a received culture, then they can be critiqued. And so
there is a lot of critiquing of it. Like in Mosul, what you have are these
gatherings of elites. in these salons and kind of them not getting anywhere.
They're being put in a way, it's almost like the elite is finally put to the
test. Okay, if there isn't meaning, are you able to find it? And they're not,
they fail the test. And so it's almost like we're sort of seeing the, the
downfall of the elite itself. It's not clear that the elite is up to the task
of finding new values. They were maybe just barely up to the task of handing
down the set of received values.
Robin
So there's this concept of modernism. And then strikingly, of course, we live
in a modern world, but we are no longer in the modern era. We're in the
postmodern era. And if you ask, well, what's the difference exactly? Some of
the things people say are about post-modernism is giving up on some of the
hopes and ideals and grand self-concepts of the moderns. In some sense,
accepting more, well, I guess we can't do that. We're not going to find it for
you.
Agnes:
I think that depending on what we call modern, if you take someone like Zola,
who is one generation before all these people, he has a kind of a bit of
optimism about the power of technology and new forms of social organization.
And like, especially in the novel that we talked about, the one about the
department store. But there's this kind of early period let's say, you know,
the late 19th century, but we're not yet over to just pre-World War I, where
we're going to have this new world and everything's going to be amazing. The
dreams of the Enlightenment are going to be fulfilled. And the authors that
I'm talking about are already postmodern in that sense. The most striking
property of all of these novels is that they're all downers. That is, there
are no heroes. There's nothing like, there's no sense of like some great good
that can show up and be achieved. Okay, maybe a little bit.
Robin
I mean, that's what they say about themselves. But then these postponers go
out of their way to say, no, you guys were too hopeful. Really, we mean it.
We're more down than you.
Agnes:
Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. I'm just not sure that that is right. That
is, I guess, like when time goes on, you have to say you're a new era at some
point, but it's not obvious to me.
Robin
They may not have actually been farther down, but it is more striking that
maybe in some sense, they decide we now need to admit more that we're down.
Maybe people were more having the hope that it's a mix of up and down, and now
we're going to say, no, it's down.
Agnes:
I don't know. I think that these people are more down than we are in a lot of
ways. None of that seems compelling to me. you know, there's a kind of very,
very deep skepticism about convention and morality. And Joyce is just, with
the way that he gravitates towards showing what is disgusting, what his
audience is gonna find disgusting, the way that Musil's novel, it's veering
towards incest. I mean, that's the direction that it's heading. He doesn't
ever quite, that part doesn't get published, but these people are kind of more
counter-cultural than we are, and I think maybe more pessimistic.
Robin
So a hypothesis that you mentioned to me recently is the idea that during this
modern era, we were looking to these high cultural prestigious people,
including philosophers and fine artists and others, to find us a new sort of
set of anchors. Another way that these characters are thought called described
as lost at sea in some sense they've lost an anchor. And we were looking to
them that and then World War One and World War Two and the counterculture
revolution of the 60s just offered us new cultural anchors. And we didn't need
to look to modern art so much anymore for them, even though they aren't the
sort of anchors maybe the modern artists were looking for but they did for the
rest of us we found them acceptable and we now are less feeling lost at sea
and less looking for new.
Agnes:
I do think that the kind of, we kind of had, we had like a refresh or
something like, like after World War II, the idea, it's impossible to decide
what's right and wrong was hard. It was like, we know what's wrong. Nazis,
Nazis are what's wrong. So the, the kind of very deep skepticism and
relativism of this, like, you know, pre-World War I, but also also post-World
War I period became unfashionable.
Robin
um in the face of the fact that the nazis are evil we all know that so we all
have like moral bedrock to build on um i think that's not just the nazis that
is i think the cultural revolution of the 1960s or so was also a big way that
people created new positive anchors that is they saw themselves as rebelling
against things they didn't like even from the post-world war ii culture and we
have accepted in many ways the new cultural anchors and ideals of the 60s.
Agnes:
Right. But so it's really interesting to compare the 1960s rebellion with the
kind of rebellion going on in Mosul, where these characters are very much
questioning conventional wisdom, like Ulrich thinking of marrying, basically,
his sister, not in accord with social mores at all. Just for one example,
there are lots of other examples. And, but I think that the difference is that
in these novels, the characters are not imagining that they've now found the
moral truth and it's just This is it. Now, they were wrong before, but now
we've got it. They were much more able to be meta and to be like, well,
probably this thing is the thing that the next generation rebels against. And
so we can't even have, we can't even firmly insist on this. Whereas the
Cultural Revolution was more like, okay, now we got it. It's the way like
every generation is like, well, my parents were wrong, but this time, this
time, this is for sure. And so that's part of why I'm saying this period has a
much deeper skepticism, much more of a downer, much more pessimistic. And it
may be that right now we're coming back to that mood, to the mood of we're
just really at sea and we don't know what we should be aiming for.
Robin
I mean, we're a mix of people who do think they have the answer to our lost
anchors for us to choose and others who feel more lost in a sea.
Agnes:
Well, so I think that's right. And there's a lot of people who think they have
the answer. So what we have is like a situation with like very blaming culture
wars with people who feel extremely sure about a variety of different answers.
But that's like, it's a little bit like the each generation being like, no,
now we've got it, except all happening at the same time. One group of people
is like, we've got it, and then they've got, we've got it. But that, in a way,
it's just a less self-conscious and less sophisticated version of this
predicament. And I guess, you know, the Mussels of today are not the people
who are stomping their feet. And there were probably people stomping their
feet in Mussel's time as well. In fact, we know there were, because that's how
the Nazis came to be. So, right.
Robin
So I guess if we're painting, there's a particular part of the world that's
especially intellectual and reflective. And this part of the world knows that
they are at sea and haven't found a new anchor. And they intellectually
described this fact and reflected on it. And then perhaps modern artists
today, those kinds of artists aren't the most prestigious artists of our era,
but at one point they happened to be the most prestigious artists. You might
say, well, it's noble or virtuous to be such a reflective intellectual, but we
might ask the standard, okay, but what good came exactly of there for a time
being the most prestigious, being able to push on the rest of the world this
reflective intellectual perspective, what good came of that? That is, was
somehow, I mean, I guess, you know, it happened just before World War I or
World War II, so did they somehow put off the war a bit, make us better handle
the war? I mean, or other, were we better able to handle modernity as things
were changing with this reflective intellectual stance?
Agnes:
I mean, one thing is quite a lot of people would say these are just the
greatest works of art human beings have ever made. Or certainly there's an
incredible density in an incredibly short period of time. And so that's one
thing they did.
Robin
These are probably people who especially appreciate intellectual art.
Agnes:
Because this was a peak period of intellectual art, right? I think people,
critics today do appreciate intellectual art. Why? Because they've been shaped
by this art. That is, this art made people appreciators of intellectual art.
Robin
Except, not enough to appreciate it today.
Agnes:
I'm sorry?
Robin
not enough to appreciate it today, that is.
Agnes:
Well, that's the, I mean, I think that there's a weird thing about art, which
is like, it doesn't, even if we really, really appreciate art deco, that
doesn't mean we produce art deco. And I don't know why that's the case, but it
doesn't seem like you can simply go back and just do, you know, the kind of
art in the past, even if you like it. It sort of dies and then it's not a
thing. I don't have an explanation for that, but that's just a very general
fact and it's not particular about this. There's something I want to say, hold
on, hold on. Oh, so a striking feature, which we didn't mention, a correlate,
is that This kind of art is very challenging for the consumer of the art. It's
hard to understand. It's hard to read. These novels are really hard to read.
It's elitist. Sometimes you need to read them like with James Joyce, with like
a guide or something. And if we think of art from the past, a lot of it is
hard for us now, but it wasn't hard for its contemporary audience. Even
Shakespeare was an artist for the people. And so that's a new, seems to me to
be something new about this kind of art is that it challenged its contemporary
audience in a distinctive way. I'm not sure that's good or bad, but it's
something that it did.
Robin
I want to go back to this idea of innovation and this idea of not being
willing but go back to old styles because there's really sort of two very
different causes of change that look pretty similar from a distance. One cause
of change is a search for the new. where you're basically paying a cost
initially. You're going to be rougher and less elegant and less
well-understand it, but the payoff will be that when you finally find
something, then you'll be able to build on it and use it for things. That's a
search for innovation. But another similar thing is fashion. which is often
seen as a rather different process and of course had gone way back for several
centuries before this time in clothing and other sorts of things, which is
just the idea that it has to be new to be popular. And there's this urge to
figure out what new thing will be popular, but you're not going to save it up
and build on it. going to have a new thing and have it be popular and toss it
away and go to the next new thing. So we have this initial puzzle of why when
you had a very established civilization for a long time with a lot of people
agreeing on its values, all of a sudden you have this break. And one of the
key distinguishing features of the break is people don't know what to do with
it. They know they don't want to do the past thing. Somehow they feel really
confident of that. And that looks a lot like fashion. Looks like maybe there
was a fashion element that could push this forward of whatever we do, it must
not be what we've been doing because that would be unfashionable.
Agnes:
I think it's the other way around. So it's that this predicament where the one
thing you know you can't do is just keep going with honor. makes you, well,
you see yourself as the man without qualities, that is the civilization
without qualities where there's nothing that's essential to you. There's
nothing that's written into who you are. And the way you might express that is
as soon as you've done something for a little while, you have to start doing
another thing because you wouldn't want to be giving the impression that you
were tied to that first thing because the one insight you've got is that you
are without qualities. So the fashion would be the product, the quick
switching of fashions would be the product of this insight. There's a great,
speaking literally of fashion, there's a great discussion in The Man Without
Qualities where Ulrich has many mistresses, women, but one of them finds out
that he's interested in another woman and she starts So Bonadea is his
mistress, who he ditches. And he's interested in Diatima, who's also his
cousin, more incest. And Bonadea starts looking like Diatima, dressing like
her and doing her hair, almost as though she could maybe transform herself
into this other woman. And then when she despairs of that project, she then
changes back and starts to look different again.
Robin
So we can set aside maybe deciding what the ultimate cause of the changes, but
I was just highlighting, there's a difference in the fashion style change that
in the innovation style change and innovation style change, you look at
different new things but when you find a new thing that works, you stop
looking. You don't just throw it away because it's no longer new. You keep it.
But you might have to look through a lot of things before you found something
new to keep. But then once you found something, you'd keep it. Whereas the
fashion change, you won't. You'll just keep it for a certain time and then
switch it regardless of how promising it's been. And we could ask, which of
these two kinds of changes best characterizes the modernist change pattern?
Because then we could dig into deeper theories underneath either one of them.
You could say the essential change was to realize that there was nothing
stable about you, but that still seems unexplained to me. Like, okay, but why
would that happen? At least I can understand fashion as a thing that sometimes
spread. That is, we have norms at different times about which things fashion
applies to and which things they don't. And maybe fashion moved over to art,
and suddenly fashion applied to art, whereas it hadn't before.
Agnes:
That doesn't make sense to me. That is, fashion is not some independent power
that can spread like that. I think that if you think about Ulrich and how
he'll unaccountably, like one day he just leaves town, his father dies, and he
just leaves town and moves to his father's house and forgets about all his
past. commitments to the parallel campaign, all of that, right? And then he's
just hanging out with his sister in his father's house for like a while. And
then that's the moment in the story when you learn he has a sister, because he
didn't mention her at all in the whole first part of the novel. So it's like
there are these things that show up for Ulrich. Suddenly, his life suddenly is
susceptible to sudden, the whole novel starts because he takes a year off from
life. He was like a mathematician, and he's just like, I'm going to take a
year off to explore myself. He's in his 30s. So the person who isn't connected
to his qualities is going to be subjected to his moods or his whims or
something like that. So Ulrich is a man of fashion. And that's not because
he's somehow become infected with fashion. It's because the other thing isn't
there, the thing that would ground him or tie him. And he's surrounded by
people who are like, no, I'm very tied to a very particular kind of lifestyle.
This is what I have to do. And he is the one who sees, well, that's just a
thing you kind of made up for yourself. You wouldn't need to be. And so the
fashion comes in to fill a certain kind of void. But I agree that it's fashion
and not innovation. I think a deeper question about like, does this
distinction ultimately hold up? That is, whenever there's any innovation, you
keep it, but you keep it for a little while until you find something better
yet, right?
Robin
But you'd be using that better standard as opposed to the old standard.
Fashion, you more use the standard of you get rid of it when it's old, whereas
for innovation, you get rid of it when you find something better.
Agnes:
Right. I think many, many people in fashion will have no trouble seeing the
new thing as better.
Robin
It's easy to rationalize, but when Ulrich stops his job, is because he
realized the year off was better? Did he go home because he realized it was
better? He didn't actually have evidence that any of those things were better.
He just was getting tired of something and wanted to switch.
Agnes:
Well, I think he does rationalize it to himself. And if you think, that a lot
of our received values are just kind of illusions that we're holding on to,
then the person who is saying, no, it's better when we switch to the kinds of
luggage that has wheels because we can move through the airport faster, they
will say that just became a fashionable thing to want to move to the airport
faster. Earlier, it was more fashionable to want to move to the airport
stylishly, which our old luggages were much more stylish, which they were. And
the new luggages are just lighter weight. And so I guess I think the mindset
of Ulrich and Musil is precisely a mindset that doesn't feel like it can help
itself to the idea of better than. That's the whole problem. We don't know
what's good.
Robin
So one key puzzle in this phenomena is what could have caused this sudden
change, and why was it a sudden break as opposed to a gradual change? That's a
key thing to explain in this world. So we want to remember what things were
like before this break, and then compare that to how things are different
after the break.
Agnes:
I mean, it's not obvious to me that it was a sudden break.
Robin
but many people describe it as such.
Agnes:
It's used that way a little bit by some of these artists, but I'm not- Right.
Robin
Okay, but there's still, looking farther back, you definitely see for many
centuries before, there was a different pattern. And then within a relatively
short time, say a century or so, we got to this new pattern. So something
changed and we want to know what caused this change. And a candidate that's,
you know, fits with the cultural drift idea and some of what people say is
that world became less coherent. That is, as technology and society changed in
huge ways, like we talked previously about peasants and the Frenchmen, only
one of many huge changes in this period, people now saw this new world as less
coherent, as making less sense. That is, previously there was a world that had
a bunch of parts that all fit together, including high culture, And they had a
self-concept of their culture and what it was and what they value that people
accepted. And then a whole bunch of things changed. And then people had the
sense that it was hard to fit. It's hard to pick a new or to know what the new
artistic style that would fit rightly with this new world would be and what
motives that art should have and what values it should project. They felt that
the world had fragmented and become less coherent and less compelling. And
then they were lost at sea, and that would compel a search for something
better, or at least as an excuse for now following a fashion.
Agnes:
I mean, I guess from the point of view of, let's say, somebody who lives in a
small village in France in 1850, before the change, where all of your
ancestors have lived in that village and where you pretty much never leave the
village, you might have a very sort of unified world, it would be a small
world, and there would be other worlds that were quite different from it. They
might not even be that far away from you geographically. They might speak a
different language in one village over. And so, I mean, in one way, there was
way more fragmentation in 1850, but not experienced as such.
Robin
There were many worlds, but each world was coherent.
Agnes:
Right. And part of what's going on in this change is actually a homogenization
so that all these worlds are actually becoming much more similar to one
another.
Robin
They're sharing a bigger world, which itself is less coherent. That is, this
bigger world makes less sense to people.
Agnes:
Right. Though there's a question, why doesn't it make sense? And so like one,
I don't know, one very, one story that I feel like is the default story that
is told by philosophers is that the promise of the enlightenment somehow was
broken. That we had this idea of, you know, there was a kind of rigid
religious slash Aristotelian scholastic order. And that order started to be
dismantled by people like Descartes and Galileo Descartes. And there was this
idea of the new scientific order that was going to come into existence and it
was going to sort of free us. It was going to be an order of freedom. And the
line of philosophers that comes out of, you know, from Descartes, you get to
Kant, for whom the fundamental idea is a certain kind of freedom and
self-constitution. But then the people who are receiving Kant are, and this
is, you know, we both read Robert Pippin's book, Modernism is a Philosophical
Problem. This is how, our viewers, even our viewers won't be able to see that
because I was talking. So say something and then show the book.
Robin
Here's the book by Pippin.
Agnes:
So this sort of Kantian notion of freedom, which is itself a variant and comes
from a critique of Descartes, this Kantian notion of freedom gets critiqued by
Fichte, by Hegel, as what is it to give yourself laws or be autonomous? this
modern period is the period where that critique kind of just falls apart in
the sense of maybe this whole idea of freedom or self-constitution just
doesn't work because it doesn't have any matter or anything to grip. So that
if I'm totally free, I just don't know what to do. And that's what you see in
these characters is that they're very free, but they're lost. So that like the
idea of the enlightenment was everyone's going to be free and that's going to
be awesome. And then here we are, people are free and it's not awesome.
Robin
So we're seeing two different transitions at two different points in time.
First, there's a transition from a previous dogmatics, very structured world
to a world of the promise of freedom. And in that world of the promise of
freedom, I still think you have a pretty integrated culture and fine arts. And
then you have this breaking up of the fine arts culture where it fragments and
becomes more alienated and more fashion oriented, and you're trying to explain
that second change in terms of the first.
Agnes:
Yes, because the story that Pippin wants to tell, I think, is just that the
first change wasn't complete. That is, we held on to little vestiges of
dogmatism, like honor, that didn't really make sense with the concept of
freedom. And once we'd cleansed the last relics of dogmatism, that's when we
realized we were lost.
Robin
But as he says, we did not cleanse the last relics of dogma. That is we failed
to achieve this freedom. So we, in fact, realized that we had dogmatism. So
why couldn't we just go back to the old dogmatism? Why did we have to move in
this other direction to be lost so that we could have decided that, no, it's
impossible to sort of escape your past and the dogmatic inheritance that you
get from tradition. So let's just go back to tradition, but they didn't.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's not quite right to say that they failed. In most
ways, they succeeded. That is, people genuinely didn't care about honor, and
there genuinely wasn't anything that took its place. And maybe the point is
that this process was only a negative process. That is, you could get rid of
the bits of dogmatism one by one until there weren't very many left, but you
weren't at the same time adding new ones. And it's not very easy to add a
dogmatism, to be like, now let's dogmatically adhere to this. That's just a
move we don't find very easy.
Robin
And certainly many ancient civilizations and periods have been able to add
dogmatism.
Agnes:
Increasing dogmatism has definitely been a thing. Not transparently, not by
like being explicit about it.
Robin
No, but it just happens indirectly.
Agnes:
Maybe, but the point is that like, that maybe one, I can't, I mean, certainly
these cultures did, right? So you had Nazism, they added a dogmatism, it just
didn't last very long. That is, the dogmatisms we try to add are not very
stable, because partly they're constantly being subjected to critique. To
people being like, well, is this really the ultimate good? Every value we are
considering is bathed in the acid water of critique and skepticism.
Robin
Well, this is a somewhat different theory of basically saying there's a slow
effect of criticism and maybe sort of making criticism the most prestigious
thing that at least in the most prestigious world, nothing would stand up to
criticism. So they lost more and more shared values as they subjected
everything to criticism.
Agnes:
I don't think it's different because I think that what the criticism is, what
the criticism is supposed to be is it's supposed to be a, So Descartes had
this idea, let me examine my beliefs from the found, let me start from zero
and try to build up, you know, once in my, he's like once in your life you
should do this, you should throw away all of your preconceptions and just try
to build your knowledge up out of nothing. Kant is like, well, you know, the
core move that you use there, the, I think, therefore I am, you have this I am
that looks like you posited some metaphysical substance, like you're a thing,
but you didn't subject that to your critique. That is, and basically that same
move is going to be the move that Fichte makes in relation to Kant. So it's
like the, this push towards autonomy and freedom is the same thing as the move
of critique.
Robin
Well, except the autonomy and freedom is apparently not subject to the
critique, because you could.
Agnes:
No, it is. That's fundamentally what's getting the critique. No, but in the
end, you're- Philosophical texts, that's what the critique is a critique of,
and that's why like Kant's theory of autonomy is seen, I mean, Hegel says his-
Okay, but what you end up with was a bunch of people who say, I refuse to
accept dogma and tradition, and I'm going to just act on my freedom and
autonomy.
Robin
And that's the same world.
Agnes:
I think that's my point.
Robin
Those are not the freedom of autonomy is a dogma. That is the dogma that you
should be acting on freedom. That's another dogma. Apparently they just
weren't questioning that one so much.
Agnes:
I don't think that's right. So like, I think if you, if you look at how Ulrich
acts, it's not as though there's anything where he's completely like, this is
what I have to act in the service of. It's all just negative. He's being
driven by, by negative stuff.
Robin
But he's consciously rejected tradition, but he's not consciously rejected
following his own inclinations.
Agnes:
He does reject following his own inclinations. That's the whole point of being
a man without qualities, is that none of his impulses are his own, and he
rejects them.
Robin
But he follows them. No, almost all the time. He is not taking outside
direction.
Agnes:
He sort of follows them whimsically, and then he'll follow another one. He
won't follow it through.
Robin
But all of them are things coming from within him. He's just not following
outside orders at all.
Agnes:
He follows outside orders, too. For instance, when other people are like,
you've got to be part of the parallel campaign. And he doesn't see any reason
to be part of the parallel campaign, but he goes along with it.
Robin
But compared to somebody several centuries ago, whose life would be much more
determined by tradition and their place in society, et cetera, his life is
much less determined by those things, right?
Agnes:
Well, it's very sporadically. It's determined by a lot of different things.
He's buffeted around. He's a bit of a hostage to both his moods and the world
around him, because all he has is this negative critique, I think. I don't, I
mean, occasionally he's dogmatic. It's not like he's not capable of dogmatism.
Like there's a, there's a part in the, in the second, or is it in the third
novel where his sister wants to fake their dad's will to change a line in the
will. And all of a sudden Ulrich becomes a moralist and he's like, no, we
can't do that.
Robin
But say moving away from this one character, if we just ask what is common
among people in this modern world, They are less following tradition, they are
less accepting their role in the world as specified by the town they grew up
in and their parents and etc. Right. They are in fact exercising a lot more
freedom and autonomy in their lives. and enjoying that, but they less feel a
guiding star or anchor morally, value-wise, and they are feeling somewhat at
lost at sea for not having that thing, in part because they have, as a matter
of practice, filled their lives with lots of freedom and autonomy.
Agnes:
So here's just two thoughts I wanted to throw in from stuff I happen to be
reading today, not from this period, but I happened to be reading Foucault's
history of sexuality today, and he makes a really interesting observation
about power, that we have this idea of power as only operating to restrict or
to prevent. And he's like, like say with sexuality, right? It tells you like
what you're not allowed to do, but not like what you have to do. And his sort
of hypothesis is that there is the positive kind of power too, but it hides
its, marks a bit, like that is when it's a bit hard to be like, care about
this, pursue this, want this. And maybe over time, the kind of negative sort
of power, that's what we're seeing is like, it's almost like only the negative
kind of power is left over. And the positive power, the power that is, the
power to make you want something or pursue it or go after it or care about it,
that that power has a hard time hiding its footsteps.
Robin
So we don't know why we're running out of time, but I guess we should
summarize. But there is this interest. So we're seeing something interesting.
That is that modernism was a change in some things relative to others. There
was more of a loss of sort of positive vision and sort of positive
obligations. and inspiration that would, you know, attach you to something and
move you forward together with your society. And criticism helped, I guess,
destroy those things. But somehow criticism didn't so much destroy all the
other things that kept people moving and acting, because they continued to
move and act. They weren't just, you know, unable to make choices. They did
make choices. And so.
Agnes:
But perhaps they were very hostage to fashion in those respects.
Robin
then we could say like keep them from sticking to anything right wait and then
we say well why is it that criticism didn't destroy fashions as easily as it
destroyed everything else right somehow criticism we did but then a new
fashion would come that is it's not going to destroy the meta idea of fashion
why not it can destroy the meta idea of religion or the meta idea of
patriotism or all sorts of meta ideas but why not that one
Agnes:
I guess the change, it seems to me, is something that happens of its own
accord, unless we resist it. The world is a world of change. what criticism
did was take away the things that we have that stand as like bulwarks, as like
supports against change. And so then we're just subjected, just like your
moods are things you're subjected to unless you have a kind of principle of
how you're gonna act or what you're gonna do. And so the only way to destroy
fashion is to have a principle and the criticism destroyed the principle.
Robin
So we don't have time to explore, but I'll just leave a mark that the
hypothesis that you know, I'm thinking in terms of is that there's some sort
of more natural human nature that we were drifting towards. And we be, we were
prevented from drifting that in the previous civilizations, which had strong
roles and norms for us. But once we were unmoored, we then drifted toward
basically a forager style of human nature, which tended to be more promiscuous
and self indulgent in many ways. And Criticism can be more easily embraced
when it's against something you kind of don't want anyway. And when you want
something, you aren't as eager to look for criticisms of it or to embrace it.
Agnes:
So that would predict that we would sort of converge somewhere. And that
prediction doesn't seem to have been borne out. That is, for example, people
are not more promiscuous these days than they were, like, 15 years ago, as far
as I know.
Robin
Well, we're looking at centuries-long trends here, but I would say definitely
over centuries we are now more promiscuous.
Agnes:
But we're talking about from 1910 to now. We don't have so many centuries.
Robin
OK, even from 1910 to now, the world is definitely more promiscuous. Maybe the
elites haven't changed, but certainly.
Agnes:
That's just the spread of this culture. It's not the development of it. So
well, anyway, we should stop.
Robin
Anyway, thanks for talking.
Agnes:
Yeah.
