The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

278 The experience of space and timemoving world of time and motion' (Schorske, 1981, 85). That uncertaintycould be overcome only by a clean break with the past,taking to the image of the machine as the ultimate form of efficientrationality, and exploring every nook and cranny of modern techniquesand materials. Wagner was, in short, a late nineteenth-centurypioneer of the 'heroic' forms of modernism that became fashionablein the 1920s with Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, andthe like.These two lines - internationalist and localized - of coping withthe phenomena of time-space compression collided violently in theglobal war of 1914-18. How that war was actually triggered ratherthan contained is of interest precisely because it illustrates howconditions of time-space compression, in the absence of a propermeans for their representation, make national lines of conduct impossibleto determine, let alone follow. The new systems of transportationand communication, Kern (1983, 260-1 r notes, 'tightened the skeinof internationalism and facilitated international co-operation' at thesame time as they 'divided nations as they all grabbed for empire andclashed in a series of crises.' It is, he suggests, 'one of the greatironies of the period that a world war became possible only after theworld had become so highly united.' Even more disturbing is hisaccount of the July crisis that led into war. In the summer of 1914,'the men in power lost their bearings in the hectic rush paced byflurries of telegrams, telephone conversations, memos, and pressreleases; hard-boiled politicians broke down and seasoned negotiatorscracked under the pressure of tense confrontations and sleeplessnights, agonizing over the probable disastrous consequence of theirsnap judgements and hasty actions.' Newspapers fed popular anger,swift military mobilizations were set in motion, thus contributing tothe frenzy of diplomatic activity that broke down simply becauseenough decisions could not be made fast enough in enough locationsto bring the warlike stresses under collective control. Global war wasthe result. It seemed, to both Gertrude Stein and Picasso, a cubistwar and was fought on so many fronts and in so many spaces thatthe denotation appears reasonable even on a global scale.It is hard, even in retrospect, to assess the impact of that event onthinking about space and time (see above, pp. 30-1). Some credencemust be given to Kern's judgement that 'in four years the belief inevolution, progress, and history itself was wiped out' as the war'ripped up the historical fabric and cut everyone off from the pastsuddenly and irretrievably.' The breakdown echoed the stresses of1848 almost exactly and shook up perceptions of space and time.The rise of modernism as a cultural force 279Taylor's (1987, 126) account of what happened to the German artistBeckmann is instructive here:Before the war Beckmann had defended a sensuous, painterlystyle of rounded volumes and rich gradations of space ....!heṇ, in the war itself, his style changed completely. BeckmannIS bIlleted near the .front line in some of the fiercest fighting ofthe war, but COnt1 . lU es to draw and paint the harrowing expenencesaround hIm WIth almost compulsive interest . . .. His.all gorical style falls away ... to be replaced by a more shallow,splmtered and crowded manner. He writes late in 1914 of thefas inated horror he was developing for 'space, distance, infinIty.'By 1915 he speaks of ' ... this infinite space, the foregroundof which one must even fill again with some sort ofrubbish, so that one will not see its terrible depth ... thus tocover up to some extent that dark black hole ....' Beckmannthen suffered a breakdown after which his art soon took on analmost unimaginably strange dimension '" quasi-mysticalworks of transcendent generality which responded to no actualevents.But there was also something quite consistent with the modernistimpulse in creating and exploring such a radical break with the past.The advent of the Russian Revolution allowed some, at least, to seerupture as an opportunity for progression and new creation. Unfortunately,the socialist movement itself divided, internalizing the tensionbetween international and national aims (as evidenced by thefamous debates of the period between Lenin, Luxemburg, and manyothers on the national question and the prospects for socialism inone country). The very advent of revolution, however, allowed theoverwhelmingly nationalist strains of the Second International to bechallenged by a new sense of connection between the aims of modernismand those of socialist revolution and internationalism.'Heroic' modernism after 1920 can then be interpreted as a doggedfight of the universalist against localist sensibility within the arena ofcultural production. The 'heroism' derived from the extraordinaryintellectual and artistic attempt to come to terms with and dominatethe crisis in the experience of space and time that had built up beforethe First World War, and to fight off the nationalist and geopoliticalsentiments the war expressed. The heroic modernists sought to showhow the accelerations, fragmentations, and imploding centralization(particularly in urban life) could be represented and thereby contained