Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect

Vico.

MODERNISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

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This chapter highlights some key aspects of the framework within which art and experience were understood in the early twentieth century. I believe it essential to have the ideas I present here in our intellectual kitbag if we are to understand the program of the Cubist and Futurist artists. Some parts of this investigation will be a bit difficult, because some topics that must be addressed are now unfamiliar—they have long been relegated to the storehouse of history. But we cannot gauge the radicality of these two movements without them.

Film had its origins partly in scientific experiment, partly in popular forms of entertainment, and partly in the idealistic dream of creating the total work of art—that is, a representation that depicts with complete fidelity every feature of its model. Among the popular forms with which the cinema was associated were vaudeville, the sentimental novel, and the peep show—and of these, the last was the most important. Among the earliest films was Edison’s The Kiss, and this was soon followed by Annabelle Butterfly Dance (Edison: William K.L. Dickson, 1894) and Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895); and several boxing films were evidently intended to provide the pleasure of watching stripped-down males pummelling each other with their fists.¹

Its association with popular forms of entertainment brought the cinema into disrepute among most people who had an interest in the arts—in music, dance, literature, theatre, painting, and sculpture.² Within a few years of its invention, however, a few thinkers were beginning to see a great potential in film. By 1907, some were declaring that films were being made that realized the artistic promise of the medium.³ By the late 1910s and early 1920s, at least a few artists and intellectuals—people like the pioneering applied psychologist Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) and the French art historian Élie Faure (1873–1937) and, somewhat later, the poet and aesthete Béla Balázs (1884–1949), and the filmmakers and film theorists Sergei Eisenstein (Сергей Эйзенштейн, Sergej Jejzenshtejn, 1898–1948) and Dziga Vertov (Дзига Вертов, pseud. for Давид Абелевич Кауфман, David Abelevich Kaufman, 1896–1954)—were issuing tracts that argued for the aesthetic potential of the new medium.⁴

These tracts had a polemic purpose: to prove that film could be (or had already become) an art like the other great, high arts. According to modernists, the defining feature of a work of art was its ability to bring about a particular type of experience, which they termed an aesthetic experience. As Clive Bell put it in the The Aesthetic Hypothesis, which became modernism’s most famous creedal declaration,

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recognisably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art [the subject of Bell’s book], and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., etc., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects.⁵

Whenever the modernists explained the nature of aesthetic experience, they pointed out that it arises when people set aside their quotidian way of relating to objects.⁶ Ordinarily we treat the objects lying about us as though they were simply things to use. We respond to them less than intensely because we respond to them in routinized ways that are based on the use we make of them. We need to know no more about them than is required by the ways we employ them, so our perceptions of them are less than vivid.

But sometimes an object—even a familiar object—arrests us and seizes our attentions. Our perception becomes vivified as we notice that parts seem suitably adapted to one another. I might notice, for example, that the texture of the cup from which I drink my morning coffee is singularly well adapted to its colour, that its colour fits its overall shape, that the slight flare of the opening accords with the proportions of its base. I have become aware that the parts of the object are suited to one another and to the whole that they constitute.

I have become aware of its form. The transformation of my experience of the cup from its usual character correlates with a change in the experienced object: I no longer view the cup as I routinely do but instead respond to its form. This change in what I experience (the difference in the noematic object, to express the idea in the lexicon of the phenomenologists) has effected a change in how I experience, for my interest in the cup is no longer determined by its use; rather, I am giving my full attention to the experience of the relations among its features.

This is a simple, workaday example, but this experience, and experiences like it, are part of a continuum of experiences towards one end of which are increasingly complex and increasingly compelling forms. All of these experiences share recognizable qualities with experiences prompted when one turns one’s attention over to a work of art and opens oneself to it. Aesthetic experience depends on apprehending form and requires a sense of the mutual adaption of the features of the experienced object to one another and to the whole that they constitute. The experience is compelling, and it demands that we set aside our utilitarian concerns and our quotidian manner of relating to objects. Clive Bell writes that

art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, in-human or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognized intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance.⁷

The consequence of this, Bell (like most of the modernists) concluded, is that art has nothing to do with life—not even with the emotions of life: to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.⁸

But if a work of art succeeds or fails because of a particular emotion that contemplation of its form engenders, then the relation between the work of art and reality counts for little, if anything. It is the relations intrinsic to the artwork (the relation of one element or one feature of the artwork to other elements and features and, ultimately, to the whole) that are significant; whatever extrinsic relations (relations between the forms internal to the work and the world) the art object may possess are irrelevant. Extrinsic relations, which modernists asserted to be aesthetically immaterial, generally have to do with representation. Of course, there are many works that offer accurate representations and, nonetheless, are formally compelling. So modernists could not assert that concern with the representational dimension of an artwork so interferes with our contemplation of that work’s form as to make aesthetic emotion impossible. But modernists like Bell claimed that the representational element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant.⁹

MODERNISM AND ABSTRACTION

Though no rigorous argument for the complete repudiation of representational practices issued from any strong modernist theorist, there was nonetheless an anti-representational tendency implicit in the modernist’s basic position. This is evident in remarks that Clive Bell offers about representation in The Aesthetic Hypothesis:

Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the emotions that they can feel—the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, instinctively they refer back its forms to the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as though it were a photograph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred.¹⁰

The psychologist-aesthetician Edward Bullough’s ideas on under-distancing buttressed these claims (Bullough always hyphenated underdistancing, though I shall not). In a series of lectures he delivered at Cambridge University in 1907 (and subsequently distilled into one of the most important essays on aesthetics ever published), Bullough laid the foundations of the modernist theory of aesthetic experience. Bullough considered that a particularly important quality of such an experience was a feature he called Distance (Bullough consistently used an upper-case first letter, though, again, I shall not). He pointed out its nature by contrasting two experiences of fog that we can have, one non-aesthetic and the other aesthetic in nature:

Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness…direct the attention to the features objectively constituting the phenomenon—the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things…observe the carrying power of the air…note the curious creamy smoothness of the water…and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects. This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like a momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary and familiar objects—an impression which we experience sometimes in instants of direst extremity, when our practical interest snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some impending catastrophe with the marvelling unconcern of a mere spectator.¹¹

The difference between our experience of fog as something terrifying and our experience of it as something beautiful is that the latter is characterized by what Bullough calls distance—a separation between oneself and the sources of one’s affects, and between the experience of fog we have at the particular moment and the experience we would have if we responded in our usual ways. When our experience of the fog is distanced, we respond reflectively, recognizing that fog has the power to impel fear (we may even feel terror), but at the same time we uncouple from our usual experience of fog—to rise above it and thematize.

Bullough implied that adopting a distanced response is, at least in some measure, subject to volition. One can sit down in a movie theatre to watch Alain Renais’s Hiroshima, mon amour and tell oneself that one should not simply succumb to the emotions provoked by the film’s images and plot—to the pity and terror the film’s Japanese footage induces, to the erotic feelings aroused by the film’s images of bodies, or to sentimental feelings the love story elicits—and should instead thematize any such feelings. We can, at least to some extent, instruct ourselves to distance ourselves from those affects, and experience the work chiefly through the beauty of its language, the intricacy of its cutting, and so on.

But perhaps there are factors that impede my ability to get a distance on the work. These factors can be internal: perhaps I am preoccupied by a nasty workplace episode of a sort that arises periodically, seemingly as a dismaying aspect of a human’s lot in life, and am unable to put aside those cares; or I am so fatigued at the end of the workday because of the tension-filled environment that I am unable to concentrate (and the capacity to concentrate seems requisite to achieving distance). Or these factors can be external, having to do with my circumstances: suppose I am reading a novel that concerns the loss of a family member, and I have just experienced such a loss—in this case, I may not be able to get any significant distance on the feelings of bereavement the novel elicits, and so may not be able to experience the novel as an aesthetic construction.

Or, to use Bullough’s example, a man who is deeply jealous in his relationship with his wife may experience what Bullough called a too profound concordance between a performance of Othello and one’s life—that is, too much similarly between what one sees on stage and what one imagines happening in one’s own life. Bullough remarked about this person, He will probably do anything but appreciate the play…The concordance will merely render him acutely conscious of his own jealousy; by a sudden reversal of perspective he will no longer see Othello apparently betrayed by Desdemona, but himself in an analogous situation with his own wife.¹²

Artists cannot do much about factors having to do with one’s internal condition: no matter how great a work, there will be times when the demands involved in giving over all our attention to a work are simply too great, times when our fatigue is simply too deep, or our workaday conditions too troubling, or a problem too nagging, for us to frame the necessary distance. However, modernists argued, there are features of the work of art that may encourage (or, conversely, discourage) our efforts to develop the needed distance. Qualities of a work that discourage such efforts Bullough described as promoting under-distancing. In the example given above, of a novel about the loss of a family member, the reader failed to develop the necessary distance partly because of the concordance between the events the novel depicts and events that had just occurred in his own life. Psychic underdistancing occurred partly because the novel’s representations too closely resembled the events of his life.

Nevertheless, the bald assertion that too great a closeness between the depictions a work of art offers and the world of our ordinary acquaintance can encourage underdistancing is not one that all modernists underwrote. In fact, Bullough, for example, believed that an artwork’s concordance with reality could intensify aesthetic experience, by evoking sympathies that allow us to apprehend it more fully. Accordingly, he argued that concordance should be as complete as it can be without eliminating distance—that there should be "the utmost decrease of distance without its disappearance."¹³ Bullough’s views notwithstanding, some modernists did conclude that too great representational fidelity ran the risk of promoting underdistancing. And since, like Clive Bell, modernists argued that the representational dimension of a work of art is always irrelevant, they saw no reason why artists should assume the risk of creating accurate depictions—or, for that matter, depictions of any sort whatsoever. Since the representational element threatens to encourage underdistancing, and since it is aesthetically irrelevant, it might just as well be abandoned.

There were other arguments against allowing concerns with representational fidelity to take precedence over considerations of formal and conceptual unity (though they did not always call on artists to eschew representation altogether). Roger Fry, an influential British defender of Impressionism, pointed out regarding Raphael’s (1483–1520) La trasfigurazione (Transfiguration, 1516–20) that a Christian spectator with a reasonable understanding of human nature might well find the story of the transfiguration to be improbably presented: the people whom Raphael depicts as surrounding Christ are out of accord with the Biblical report (instead of the poor and humble whom the Bible reports were Christ’s followers, the painting presents grandees in implausibly decorated gowns, posed in impressive, but unnatural, theatrical poses). But this need not trouble a spectator who is highly endowed with the special sensibility to form, who feels the intervals and relations of forms as a musical person feels the intervals and relations of tones…Such a spectator will be likely to be immensely excited by the extraordinary power of co-ordination of many complex masses in a single inevitable whole, by the delicate equilibrium of many directions of line.¹⁴ Fry continues by listing the variety of responses such a spectator (whom he refers to as our pagan spectator because of his lack of concern about fidelity to the biblical account) may have, and enucleating the aesthetic kernel of the complex of sensations he would likely feel:¹⁵

We may imagine, for instance, that our pagan spectator, though entirely unaffected by the story, is yet conscious that the figures represent men, and that their gestures are indicative of certain states of mind and, in consequence, we may suppose that according to an internal bias his emotion is either heightened or hindered by the recognition of their rhetorical insincerity. Or we may suppose him to be so absorbed in purely formal relations as to be indifferent even to this aspect of the design as representation. We may suppose him to be moved by the pure contemplation of the spatial relations of plastic volumes. It is when we have got to this point that we seem to have isolated this extremely elusive aesthetic quality which is the one constant quality of all works of art, and which seems to be independent of all the prepossessions and associations which the spectator brings with him from his past life.

A person so entirely pre-occupied with the purely formal meaning of a work of art, so entirely blind to all the overtones and associations of a picture like the Transfiguration is extremely rare. Nearly everyone, even if highly sensitive to purely plastic and spatial appearances, will inevitably entertain some of those thoughts and feelings which are conveyed by implication and by reference back to life…

It is evident also that owing to our difficulty in recognising the nature of our own feelings we are liable to have our aesthetic reaction interfered with by our reaction to the dramatic overtones and implications.¹⁶

Fry wrote these passages later in his career, as he looked over his critical commentary to select those parts he wanted to pull together into a book. This selection draws him nearer to the position that representational considerations may interfere with that pure, intense absorption in form that is the heart of aesthetic experience. He confesses slightly later, in Retrospect, that he has doubts that the fusion of the emotions elicited by a representation and by form is really possible (as his earlier writings had supposed).¹⁷

Harold Osborne developed Fry’s later position in Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art, but he considered the question less as Fry did—that is, from the vantage point of the spectator—and more from the vantage point of the creator. Osborne argues against the claim (which he wrongly identifies as Bell’s) that the representational structures of a work can be successfully detached from its formal construction and exemplificatory properties:

The fact that any form in a picture is seen as representational alters its prominence, insistence, impact in the structure of the picture, and the nature of the semantic reference also has a bearing. This is a psychological fact of which artists must perforce take account. They therefore modify and abstract from the semantic content in order to bring it into line with the compositional structure which is the central idea of the work. The deliberate suppression of natural features in the interests of aesthetic structure has been a particular feature of twentieth-century art.¹⁸

The attempt to introduce representational considerations into the effort to construct an intricately developed pleasing whole may distort the form. Osborne makes a strong point here. The artist Pissarro is said to have remarked that the big problem to resolve is how to pull back everything, even the smallest details of a picture, into the harmony of the ensemble, into full agreement.¹⁹ The primary demand on making any work, including an abstract work, is to create a unity among all the elements within it. Suppose the artist creates a form in which hues across the surface articulate a rhythm: this rhythm might demand that a certain area be coloured orange. However, the representational demands may determine that the colour in this area should be something other than orange—the blue of a lake, perhaps. Then the artist is faced with irreconcilable demands. The formal system requires one hue, the representational imperatives suggest another. Which colour should the artist use? It is not clear how these conflicting demands might be reconciled.

Critics of this position might point out that artists have always had to balance representational and formal systems and use this fact as the basis for asserting that the ability to balance these competing demands makes for artistic greatness. And one must admit that certain painters’ stature (Paul Cézanne [1839–1906] would be an obvious example) depends on their power to reconcile these competing impulses—on their being able to find forms in which the representational requirements are brought into accord exactly with the demands imposed by the formal system (or, more likely, the hierarchy of formal systems), with the representational system tolerating the distortions the formal system imposes while the hierarchy of formal systems preserves its integrity despite accommodating the demands of the representational system.

Though reason may require us to admit this much, we might nonetheless claim that what we admire in representational works, finally, is their formal integration. That was exactly the claim that Clive Bell (and other modernists) staked: that the representational dimension is significant only for the manner in which it is adapted to the formal system. But introducing representational concerns runs the risk of distorting the work’s form, of pulling it away from the form determined by the hierarchy of formal systems—and this risk is assumed despite there being no aesthetic advantage whatsoever in incorporating a representational dimension.

There is a final line of reasoning that explains modernism’s favouring abstraction. Modernism turned art towards self-reflexivity. It was noted that art is a strictly tautological enterprise: if a work of art is about anything at all, it is about the relations that constitute it. What is more, these relations determine it to be a unique object, whose form of unity is incommensurate with that of any other work of art. When we contemplate a work of art, we consider it simply for its intrinsic properties, and not in relation to any other object. Its stylistic likeness with other works or its place within the artist’s oeuvre, or its similarity with any other object, are strictly irrelevant. All that matters is the work in itself. The object of aesthetic experience is the form of the artwork in its absolute uniqueness. Artists should do what they can to focus experience on the unique form of the work. One way to do that is to create completely abstract works—then there will be no confusion about what the work concerns: it will be evident that it is about the relations that constitute it, and not about the world it depicts.

As we will see, this tension between an impulse towards representation—to understand and to be engaged with a world that by the early twentieth century seemed to be moving away beyond one’s grasp—and an aesthetic impulse towards transcendence and the wholeness suggested in the integration of pure forms, is a topic to which we will return repeatedly. Cubism and Futurism earned the right to be taken seriously as movements committed to a Constructivist conception of the work of art. This commitment led to Cubists’ and Futurists’ separating the appearance of the work of art from the surfaces of reality. This distancing encouraged the viewer/reader/spectator to experience the force of the object’s material. In what follows, I endeavour to honour the Cubists’ and Futurists’ commitment to a work’s construction as well as the era’s interest in truth to the material—to recognize that artists (in this period, to an unusual extent) were interested in creating constructions that built upon the material nature of the medium in which they were realized. But, to acknowledge the great paradox that lies at the heart of these art movements, I also attempt to honour their efforts to elevate aesthetic experience a higher, non-material realm.

THE ATTRIBUTES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

The key characteristics of the aesthetic experience outlined by the modernists are the following. First, the aesthetic object absorbs our attention: we withdraw our attention from the environment around the aesthetic object and concentrate exclusively on the object’s form. The aesthetic object is said to be framed apart from the environment. Second, our experience of the object is not of any cognitive variety; accordingly, our relation to the work is not discursive. As Kant pointed out, out experience of the object does not involve subsuming it under categories. The art historian’s concern with the circumstances of the work’s production or its relation to stylistic movements is strictly ancillary: it may have value in directing our attention towards features of the work that may then seize hold of our attention and engender an aesthetic experience, but such concerns are not in and of themselves aesthetically relevant. Not even theoretically informed efforts to parse the work into syntagmatically related components have aesthetic relevance (though, of course, they may serve as a propaedeutic to the immediate and non-conceptual experience of the work as a complex of interrelations). Third, aesthetic experience is both immediate and engrossing: we ordinarily live life anticipating the outcomes of what we do, and expecting (or at least hoping for) some profit from our efforts. We experience almost every moment of ordinary life in the mode of anticipation, and we try to arrange for it to have a desirable outcome or, at least, to prepare ourselves for whatever outcome arrives. The matter is quite different when we engage aesthetically with a work of art: the immediate moment absorbs us totally. Our past knowledge of how things should be becomes irrelevant. The unexpected does not disturb us, for when we surrender ourselves to the aesthetic mode of experience, we do not import expectations of the way things should evolve, or anticipate what result events should have.²⁰

Finally, the aesthetic experience is completely engrossing and all-consuming. We live much of our lives split between percipience and reverie. We pay enough attention to our environment, our duties, and our associates to enable us to negotiate the demands that routinely are placed on us. But we give over a part of our awareness to imagining a world other than the one we are occupying at the moment—to imagining what we might do when we return home, or what we might say when we meet a friend, or to conjecturing about what has led to some calamity (or good fortune) that befell us. Our engagement with a work of art is of a more consuming, more involving sort. When I go to a concert to listen to, say, J.S. Bach’s Messe in H-moll (BWV 232, 1749), I cannot allow myself to be distracted by such flights of reverie. I must be completely absorbed in my percipient acts. I cannot even allow myself to be distracted by feelings arising from a bitter misunderstanding with a colleague or by my exhilaration over some success. I turn myself over to the work of art as though through an act of self-transcendence.

In presenting the modernists’ ideas on the experience, I am emphasizing one side of their beliefs. I am aware there are other sides—in fact, highlighting the importance of frequently unacknowledged aspects of the modernist beliefs propounded by Cubist and Futurist artists figures among my purposes for writing this volume. But I also set out to show how uneasily Cubism—to say nothing of Futurism—fits within the modernist rubric. That said, I realize that advancing on too many fronts at once is likely to produce confusion, and it is a more prudent approach to start by laying out more well-established views and to delay expounding my own convictions (which are likely to be controversial) until after I have provided the groundwork for them. For the time being, I simply point out that the idea of apprehending pure form through a contemplative, non-discursive experience has similarities to the idea that one grasps a reality higher than that of the everyday world through a noetic experience that is likewise contemplative and non-discursive. In an earlier book, Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (2008), I undertook a wide-ranging discussion that opened up some broad topics concerning modernity’s cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to showing that a crisis within that regime engendered several strange (and highly questionable) epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. There, I proposed that a crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity produced, by reaction, a peculiar pneumatic epistemology. I showed that this pneumatic epistemology influenced people’s conception of the cinema. I also showed that this pneumatic conception of cinema explains the medium’s pivotal role in shaping two key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a pure, objectless (non-representational) art, and Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism. In the succeeding volume, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (2012), I proposed that developments in philosophy, science, and mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced what literary historians have sometimes characterized as a fin-de-siècle mood (needless to say, I think the issues involved go much deeper than is suggested by that term), which held that reason no longer could furnish insight into reality’s fundamental nature. These developments produced an epistemological crisis, as reason seemed to have become untethered from the world. The idea the mind has no access to truth is one many find unendurable. People longed to believe that humans have at their disposal another means—an irrational or super-rational means—for apprehending a higher reality, a surréalité. The noesis (higher intuition) celebrated in many spiritual, esoteric, and occult traditions fit the bill—the occult traditions seemed to many to offer an alternative means of apprehending higher truths. The widespread (and often forgotten) interest in esoteric and occult topics influenced DADA and Surrealism in important ways.

The idea that the age demanded an alternative noesis that would overcome the deficits of the rational-scientific understanding of the world became so widespread as to constitute the basis for a discursive regime (authorizing, inter alia, how one is to conceive of and speak of the mind, knowledge, art, and the cinema). It even sanctioned an extravagant syllogism that many thinkers in the early twentieth century embraced: the value of art forms depends on their ability to produce powerful pneumatic effects, and the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device, so the cinema is the top art, at least for modern times. This book has a related bone structure, though one that cannot be so neatly summarized in syllogistic form. The basic argument of this volume and its analysis of films, paintings, and poems is undergirded by a gnosiological proposition.²¹ Reality is process; however, the human mind does not ordinarily understand reality as process and instead sees it as composed of static objects. It follows that the mind has lost its grip on reality. (This proposition can be subdivided as follows: the mind can know reality in two ways, direct acquaintance or inference; however, the senses have turned out to be deceivers, and calculative reason assumes that reality is populated by static objects, so neither can it grasp reality). History and scientific developments (for what they are worth) have shown us that a higher vantage point would be required to attain knowledge of reality—and perhaps that higher vantage point does not exist.

OPTICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE HIGHER NOESIS

Discussions around the arts, and visual art in particular, accorded importance to the idea that when we engage aesthetically with a work of art, the immediate moment absorbs us totally. The primary reason this idea assumed special importance in the visual arts is that around the mid-nineteenth century, a strain of thinkers appeared who maintained that visual experience, especially when it detaches itself from language, offers a loftier, more noble, more pure mode of cognition than that afforded by other sensory modalities: it is loftier, purer, more noble because its transactions are less with the material world and more with light. Out of this emerged such claims as Clement Greenberg’s: To render substance entirely optical…and form as an integral part of ambient space—this brings anti-illusionism full circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of modalities: namely, that matter is incorporeal, weightless and exists only optically like a mirage.²² Though the conviction was not universally accepted by modernists and is not one of the core tenets of modernism in the visual arts, many visual art theorists who embraced modernist ideas maintained that there is an optical form of awareness that opens us towards higher truths than those which verbal thinking can impart. Optical awareness differs from verbal thinking partly in its instantaneity: whereas verbal thinking proceeds developmentally, moving from one thought to the next, and seeks to consolidate its certainty in each step along the way, optical awareness presents itself with dazzling celerity, as though vouchsafing its revelations in a thrice.

Since optical awareness comes as though in a flash, and since it opens us towards higher truths, these truths must belong to the realm of pure simultaneity. The idea that the domain of truth is a timeless realm of simple simultaneity is a venerable metaphysical proposition. Plato (ca. 427–ca. 347 BCE) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), among others, expounded it, and generally it was associated with the idea that the highest ways of knowing resemble seeing—that the higher noesis is a relative of vision. These ideas were accepted by a surprising number of modernists (whose ideas, after all, reiterated the metaphysical basis of Christian philosophy). Consequently, many art theorists, including many modernists—in fact, most of them—made the issue of a fundamental, indivisible moment of seeing, a punctate moment completely lacking in extension, fundamental to their doctrines of aesthetic experience. Many Romantics had expounded similar ideas, but the modernists radicalized the conception of the timeless now of aesthetic experience to insist that our apprehension of a work of art occurs within a moment of uncontaminated brevity—within the compass of a moment of complete simultaneity and absolute instantaneity. Modernist art celebrated perceptual intensity—the immediate sensation of pure colour, of the tug of colours pushing towards and pulling away from the picture plane, engendering the sense of the whole as composed of an immediately apprehensible, all-over pattern; or the immediate sensation of sound organized not consecutively (meaning was no longer thought to emerge as we assemble and relate forms through time), but in the immediacy of its sensuousness (for example, in the tone colours, chromoharmonies, and non-retrogradable rhythms of Olivier Messiaen’s [1908–1992] compositions). In Messiaen’s works—or for that matter in Gertrude Stein’s (1874–1946) poetry and prose—patterns emerge through time, and their force, accumulating over time, carries us to the point where time passes away and we arrive at the experience of pure simultaneity. Modernists employed these forms to consolidate the apprehension of the work of art into the utterly punctate immediacy of the moment of total presence.

This is one basis for modernists’ doubts about the aesthetic viability of narrative. Narrative infuses the lived moment with retentions and protensions, and dilates into William James’s specious present:

The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three…nonentities—the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.²³

That specious present in turn grounds the ordinary, workaday experience of time as continuity (James himself stated that the specious present is the prototype of all conceived times…the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible).²⁴ Since the experience of time as a continuous, unfolding experience is narrative’s inevitable effect, narrative (or at the very least narratives of the conventional form) had to be jettisoned. Likewise, representations, which carry the now of immediate experience into the otherness of represented time, were deemed equally suspect.

The belief that truth reveals itself as an immediate presence is one that modernists shared with Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenology. This coincidence of ideas helps explain why many modernists found phenomenological ideas congenial and why so much modernist art criticism has a phenomenological tone. Husserl described the immediate present, revealed through lived intuition, as an indivisible moment. One need not offer a narrative account of consciousness: consciousness involves self-presence since its data are self-revealing. Consciousness need not be a consciousness of consciousness, nor need it be an analysis of consciousness, nor an account of consciousness, nor a history of consciousness (as implied by the Safer® Soap-using critics’ demand to explain consciousness/the growth of the self through narrative). We do not need such narratives of consciousness, Husserl implied, because mental acts are self-revealing, so they are always already meaningful. The punctate phase of the immediate now-apprehension is the nuclear core of all mental acts (even if most mental acts drag a comet’s tail of retentions along with them); and even the retentional train that immediate apprehensions drag along with themselves are really a kind of primary memory inherent in the primordial immediacy of this now-apprehension.²⁵

In the years when Cubism and Futurism flourished, this notion of the now-experience became connected to ideas about higher dimensions of space. Thinkers extravagantly proposed that the fourth and higher dimensions could be experienced. The apprehension of higher dimensions was often construed as an experience that lifted one out of the domain of illusion and into the elevated realm of truth. Albert Gleizes claimed that Cubism goes beyond externals in order to get a better hold on them. It no longer suffices to look at the model, the painter must re-conceive it. He will transport it into a Space which is at once spiritual and plastic in Nature—a Space in regard to which we may perhaps allow ourselves to speak of the Fourth Dimension.²⁶ Apollinaire, in a late addition to the manuscript of Les peintres cubistes, notes that the imaginative use of the term fourth dimension was just a way of expressing the aspirations and concerns of many young artists who were looking at sculptures from Egypt, Africa and the Pacific Islands, thinking about scientific works and seeking a sublime form of art.²⁷ And the art critic and propagandist for Cubism Maurice Raynal (1884–1954) similarly pointed out this regarding the Cubists’ interest in the sculpture of Egypt, Africa, and Oceania:

The Primitives…obeyed a very exalted need, that of the mysticism which illuminated their thinking…Instead of painting the objects as they saw them, they painted them as they thought them, and it is precisely this law that the cubists have readopted, amplified and codified under the name of The Fourth Dimension. The cubists, not having the mysticism of the Primitives as a motive for painting, took from their own age a kind of mysticism of logic, of science and reason, and this they have obeyed like the restless spirits and seekers after truth that they are.²⁸

Ideas about a transcendent fourth dimension circulated widely at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, even among scientists. The Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater identified intuition of the fourth dimension with astral vision. In The Astral Plane (1895), which was translated into French as Le plan astral (1899), Leadbeater asserts that astral vision is a faculty very different from and much more extended than physical vision. An object is seen, as it were, from all sides at once, the inside of a solid being as plainly open to the view as the outside.²⁹ Seen from the astral plane, even purely physical objects present a very different appearance, to the extent that even the most familiar objects may at first seem unrecognizable.³⁰ Nonetheless,

a moment’s consideration will show that such vision approximates much more closely to true perception than does physical sight. Looked at on the astral plane, for example, the sides of a glass cube would all appear equal, as they really are, while on the physical plane we see the further side in perspective—that is, it appears smaller than the nearer side, which is, of course, a mere illusion. It is this characteristic of astral vision which has led to its sometimes being spoken of as sight in the fourth dimension.³¹

The experience of one who possesses astral sight or four-dimensional vision is not bound by the illusions of time: from the transcendental viewpoint, one experiences an eternal and absolute reality beyond time—one experiences reality sub specie aeternitatis. Everyday phenomena are seen as they truly are—eternal and changeless.

Leadbeater offered similar views in the later Clairvoyance (1899), which was published in French as De la clairvoyance in 1910: the tesseract or fourth-dimensional cube which [C. Howard Hinton] describes is a reality, for it is quite a familiar figure on the astral plane. (Hinton was a popularizer of the idea of a transcendental fourth dimension, who offered readers exercises that might help them develop the power of seeing this higher realm.) Leadbeater also noted that if you looked at a wooden cube with astral sight, you would see all the sides at once, and all the right way up, as though the whole cube had been flattened out before you, and you would see every particle of the inside as well—not through the others, but all flattened out. Leaderbeater also cites an article from the Theosophical periodical The Vahan that argues that astral sight…seems to correspond to the fourth dimension.³²

PRODUCING FACTS

In 1905, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) offered arguments about fundamental laws of physics that rocked the world. The laws of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1726) clockwork universe were suddenly brought into question and extravagant alternatives proposed: time and space are one; light waves curve; what two observers see cannot be identical. This new view offered so fundamental a challenge to the prevailing conception of reality that the faculty of understanding itself fell under scrutiny.

Challenges to the Newtonian conception of reality had been lodged even before Einstein—and the ideas involved in these attracted much attention. In 1902, Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) published La science et l’hypothèse (Science and Hypothesis), a book that became known outside the small group of professional mathematicians. In that book, Poincaré reviewed developments in geometry, including the work of Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) and Nikolai Lobachevski (1792–1856)—findings that challenged (or at least seemed to challenge) Euclidean geometry, which since the time of Plato had been accepted as describing space in a way that conforms to our intuitions of its nature. The Euclidean description of space was grounded in what had seemed unquestionable principles, and its propositions (theorems) were derived from strict rules of inference; this made it seem plausible that intuitions conformed to the way reality must be. Riemann and Lobachevski, each in his own way, challenged the claim that the axioms and postulates (founding principles) of Euclidean geometry were beyond doubt, given that they are intuitively obvious and, moreover, produce a description of space that shows it must necessarily be as we experience it as being. Thinkers realized that these developments put at stake our confidence that our intuitions (the basis of our understanding) of space are necessarily true. Poincaré considered these developments from a philosophical perspective. In La science et l’hypothèse he argued for what has become known as a conventionalist position: the axioms, postulates, and theorems of Euclidean geometry are not universally or absolutely true—Euclidean geometry, which had set the standard for mathematical rigour since ancient times, was only one of many possible systems of geometry. No geometric system actually concerns reality itself—the points, lines, and planes that geometers talk about are not objects in the world, but mathematical objects whose definition and existence are internal to the system itself. Poincaré also noted that there was no mathematical reason for limiting geometric systems to three dimensions—a consistent four-dimensional geometric system, and systems of higher dimensions, could be developed.

Poincaré’s ideas were taken up by the mathematician Maurice Princet (1875–1973). Princet was interested in nightlife and la vie bohème—André Salmon referred to him as le mathématicien du cubisme.³³ In Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, George I. Miller shows that Princet consorted with Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), Max Jacob (1876–1944), Jean Metzinger (1886–1956), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) in Montmartre cafés and introduced ideas on four-dimensional geometry to the Bateau-Lavoir painters.³⁴ Princet showed Picasso a book by the French artillery officer, insurance actuary, and amateur mathematician Esprit Jouffret (1837–1904), Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions et introduction à la géométrie à n dimensions (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions and an Introduction to N-Dimensional Geometry, 1903), and he helped him interpret its meanings. Jouffret’s treatise is partly a popularization of Poincaré’s La science et l’hypothèse, partly a compendium of marvellous facts about spaces of higher than three dimensions, and partly an exfoliation of some of its graphic implications (in it, Jouffret described hypercubes and other four-dimensional polyhedra and showed how the principles of projective geometry could be applied to create shadows of these figures on a two-dimensional surface).³⁵ Picasso’s sketchbooks for Les demoiselles d’Avignon give evidence of the great influence Jouffret’s graphic presentation of the projective geometry of complex polygons had on that work.³⁶

Leo Stein sets out Picasso’s response to Princet’s idea:

There was a friend of the Montmartre crowd, interested in mathematics, who talked about infinities and the fourth dimension. Picasso began to have opinions on what was and what was not real, though as he understood nothing of these matters the opinions were childishly silly. He would stand before a Cézanne or a Renoir picture and say contemptuously, Is that a nose? No, this is a nose, and he would draw a pyramidal diagram with two circles connected by crossed lines…He was bent now on doing something important—reality was important whatever else it might be, and so Picasso was off.³⁷

The impact that non-Euclidean and higher-dimensional geometries had on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thinkers needs to be understood in context. The seventeenth century saw a profound transformation in humans’ understanding of the cosmos. Among these changes, greater importance was attached to the material world.³⁸ There are many reasons for this change, but one of the most important arose from the discoveries of Isaac Newton. In the earlier models of the universe, a sharp distinction was made between the sublunary and superlunary realms—between the spiritual order of the heavens and the derived order of the here below. Newton’s physics challenged this conviction, which had founded the Classical and Christian-Medieval world views. Newton showed that the same laws of motion that govern the movement of bodies on earth also apply in the celestial realm. Thereafter, the sharp distinction between the terrestrial and celestial realms seemed untenable. Order could be discovered by paying heed to the material realm just as effectively as—indeed, much more easily than—it could be by deliberating on the patterns in the heavens that are beyond our grasp. Even before Newton, the independence of spirit fostered by the rise of the artisanal classes and the humanistic views that flowed from that development led to a questioning of all principles whose warrant lay in authority.³⁹ In the period from Bacon to Newton the idea that humans should search out the facts, unbridled by church teachings or the views of its philosophical Scholastic masters, was endorsed by wider and wider groups of people. The writings of Francis Bacon (1561–1626)—The Advancement and Proficience of Learning Divine and Human (1605), Instauratio Magna (Great Instauration, 1620), and Novum Organum Scientiarum (New Method, 1620) in particular—gave staggeringly elegant and forceful expression to those views (1561–1627), and Newton’s great discoveries confirmed the value of Bacon’s counsel.

Another aspect of Francis Bacon’s work that is less commonly noted must also be addressed, to emend an important omission in discussions of Renaissance science. Alexandre Koyré’s (1892–1964) historical analysis of the scientific study of the cosmos from the time of Nicolaus Cusanas (also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolas of Cusa, 1401–1464) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) led him to conclude that, despite the number of significant developments that took place in this interval, there was a continuous evolutionary thread. That thread was essentially Platonic (which is one reason for his having chosen to start with the Neo-Platonist Cusanas).⁴⁰ Koyré challenged scientists’ claims that they uncovered facts by operating on nature, using experimental methods. Science is not really a means of discovering objective facts and observing regularities in occurrences (which are laid out in scientific laws). Science at heart is theory. It relies on assumptions (some of which derive from religious assumptions about the origin and nature of the cosmos) concerning the fundamental processes underlying phenomena, and it seeks confirmation of those assumptions. His favourite example to use in making this point was Galileo Galilei. Galileo claimed to have discovered the principles of motion and gravity through experimentation. Koyré claimed he did not: he asserted that Galileo’s descriptions of weights moving down an inclined plane were in fact thought experiments. Galileo, Koyré asserted, worked out his ideas mathematically (using the method of indivisibles to develop techniques of calculation that were forerunners of infinitesimal calculus), and not through observation. That side of his work is what Galileo highlighted with his famous statement from Il Saggiatore about the book of nature being written in mathematical language. Stilman Drake, to the contrary, after carefully working through Galileo’s notes, was able to show that Galileo was a diligent experimentalist who assiduously recorded and painstakingly processed his observations. And this underestimation of the role of experiments in Galileo’s formulation of his scientific experiment is far from the only example of Koyré’s Platonist interpretation of sciences’ history.

The persuasive force of Koyré’s prose made this sort of interpretation of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution the standard view. But it is certainly not the view that Francis Bacon held. Bacon wrote that a human can only act and understand [nature] insofar as by working upon her he has come to perceive her order. Beyond this he has neither knowledge nor power. For there is no strength that can break the causal chain. Accordingly, these twin goals, human science and human power, come in the end to one. To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action.⁴¹ In fact, Bacon’s statement gives expression to an interpenetration of making and knowing that developed during the Renaissance and would find its most complete expression in the philosophy of Giambattista Vico. The real (and hardly noticed) turning that occurred in the Renaissance was a new conception of an inextricable interrelation of making and knowing.⁴² This notion found an exemplary advocate in the person of Leonardo da Vinci. The polymathic painter, inventor, sculptor, engineer was sometimes troubled by being looked down on with scorn by certain presumptuous persons (academics), who scorned him as a mere inventor. He wrote an angry retort to the puffed-up university scholars, You have set painting among the mechanical arts!…If you call it mechanical because it is by manual work that the hands represent what the imagination creates, your writers are setting down with the pen by manual work what originates in the mind.⁴³

The Renaissance, it has long been understood, produced a new conception of space as volume that could be sectioned again and again into smaller volumes on the model of three orthogonal real number lines. This belief was the founding notion of Marshall McLuhan’s conception of Newtonian science (whose replacement by a scientific system grounded in the ideas of Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and John Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) is a central topic of concern for the Toronto theorist of literature and communication). As have the vast majority of thinkers since Koyré’s time, McLuhan understood that the mathematization of nature (based as it was in mensuration and number) was the product of pure unadulterated thought.⁴⁴ What he and many historians of science have overlooked is the role of practical activities in generating this conception of space. The case of Galileo, who is generally considered to have been a pre-eminent force in the production of this abstract, mathematical conception of nature, is instructive. Edgar Zilsel’s (1891–1941) was a lonely voice challenging this Platonic account of the mathematization of nature. Zilsel’s pioneering efforts in the sociology of science (which blended Marxism with the positivism of the Wiener Kreis) led him to the assertion that the rise of capitalism resulted in the interaction of craftspeople with scholars and that the resulting exchanges laid the foundations of early modern science.⁴⁵ Earlier, before the rise of capitalism, craftspeople were usually looked down on by scholars, while scholars were gloriously ignorant of practical craft activity. The coming of capitalism gave impetus to the development of technical and computational processes, which were applied in navigation, cartography, and surveying and to the development of devices like the astrolabe. As a result of their involvement in these advanced technical fields, craftspeople started to develop theories about the crafts and their potential usefulness, and this theoretical engagement led them to apply craft knowledge in investigating nature. This application of craft and mercantile knowledge (which encouraged exactitude in mensuration) led to the development of experimental science and gave it its character as computation.