Modernity

What is meant by Modernity?

Transportation is Civilisation
Frank Budgen's book James Joyce and the making of 'Ulysses', and other writings, explains how Joyce was greatly interested "in time: that is the time of day," and he quotes one of the two main characters, Leopold Bloom:

As Bloom says, "Time is the time the movement takes." And then, he says, that all the characters in Ulysses have just that social time sense that is part of the general social mentality of the period and no more. And the particular time frame for Ulysses is 17 hours in Dublin from the morning of 16 June and the early hours of 17 June 1904.



A more recent version of this idea is behind Night on Earth, a 1991 film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch.

Wikipedia says: The film is composed out of a collection of five vignettes that take place during the same evening, each concerning the temporary bond formed between taxi driver and passenger in five different cities around the world. The movie begins with the a story taking place in Los Angeles and moves from city to city as the clock turns during the late hours of the night, withe episodes taking place in New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. Jarmusch wrote the screenplay for Night on Earth in about eight days, and the decision to film in certain cities was largely based on the actors with whom he wanted to work with at the time.

Frank Budgen further explains that the general social mentality of the specific period of Dublin in 1904 that James Joyce mirrors;

"arises out of the necessity for co-ordinating their (Joyce's characters) daily social movements."

He carries on by saying; "It is a purely technical thing, born of mechanical development."

James Watt invented the steam engine, and the steam engine begat the locomotive, and the locomotive begat the timetable, forcing people to grapple with its complexities and think in minutes where their great-grandfathers thought in hours. All their yesterdays, that in an earlier age would have been quietly buried in the hope of a glorious resurrection as myth, lie embalmed in files of newspapers and snapshot albums. They have suffered the influence of the penny post, telegraph and telephone - all social institutions working to a close timetable. But the principal element in forming that social time sense is the means of locomotion. The discoveries of the astronomer and the mathematician have less immediate effect on this sense than the electrification of the suburban lines. Light and the heavenly bodies are doing what they always did, but the wheels of mechanical civilisation are ever accelerating.

As Kipling says, transportation is civilisation.

It may be coincidence, but spacetime came in with the taximeter, which is by petrol engine out of clockwork.

This is what is meant by modernity?

Wikipedia says: The term is related to the modern era and modernism but forms a distinct concept. In different contexts, the term may refer to a condition associated with cultural and intellectual movements of a period beginning anywhere from 1436 to NOW!

Already with its earliest use, however, modernity was associated with the renunciation of the recent past, in favour of new beginnings and a reinterpretation of historical origins.

The distinction between "modernity" and "modern" did not arise until the nineteenth century.

Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century, replaced by post-modernity, while others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by post-modernity.

In our contemporary multi-polar global cultural and historical context modernity as a term has the capacity, or, is a way of, connecting aspects of everyday differences lived and experienced as multiple realities by people everywhere.

In sociology, a discipline which arose largely as a reaction to the social problems associated with "modernity" (Harriss 2000, 325), the term does not refer to a historical era as such, but rather to particular processes and discourses which followed the Enlightenment, defined especially by 'rationalization':

"The term refers to processual aspects, especially tensions and dynamics.

Modernity is thus a particular kind of time consciousness which defines the present in its relation to the past, which must be continuously recreated; it is not a historical epoch that can be periodized" (Delanty 2007).

At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization.

Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with
(1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention;
(2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy;
(3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past. (Giddens 1998, 94)

Wikipedia says: Modernity can be described as "the loss of certainty and the realization that certainty can never be established once and for all. It is a term that also can simply refer to reflection on the age and in particular to movements within modern society that lead to the emergence of new modes of thought and consciousness" (Delanty 2007). In sociological terms, modernity aimed toward "a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from ignorance and irrationality" (Rosenau 1992, 5). In the work of theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman, however, modernity commonly represents a move away from the central tenets of enlightenment and toward nefarious processes of alienation, such as in commodity fetishism and the events of the Holocaust (Adorno 1973; Bauman 1989).

As a result of recent debate on globalization, comparative civilizational analysis, and the postcolonial concern with “alternative modernities”, the conception of multiple modernities was introduced by Eisenstadt (2003; see also Delanty 2007) A conceptualization of modernity as plural condition is central to this approach, and a gradual movement away from the exclusive concern with western modernity to a more cosmopolitan perspective is associated with this turn in theory. "Modernity is not westernization and its key processes and dynamics can be found in all societies" (Delanty 2007).

So what was so special about 1436?
Wikipedia says:

• April – Paris is recaptured by the French.
• 25 June – The Incorporated Guild of Smiths is founded in Newcastle upon Tyne.
• July 5 – The Hussite Wars effectively end in Bohemia. Sigismund is accepted as King.
• Alexandru I Aldea is replaced as ruler of Wallachia by Vlad II Dracul.
• The Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence is consecrated.
• The Bosnian language is first mentioned in a document.
• Date of the Visokom papers (on Visoki), the last direct sources of the old town of Visoki.
• In the Ming Empire of China, the inauguration of the Zhengtong Emperor takes place.
• In Ming Dynasty China, a significant portion of the southern grain tax is commuted to payments in silver, known as the Gold Floral Silver (jinhuayin). This comes about due to officials' and military generals' increasing demands to be paid in silver instead of grain, as commercial transactions draw more silver into nationwide circulation. Some counties have trouble transporting all the required grain to meet their tax quotas, so it makes sense to pay the government in silver, a medium of exchange that is already abundant amongst landowners through their own private commercial affairs.
• The Florentine polymath Leon Battista Alberti begins writing the treatise On Painting, in which he argues for the importance of mathematical perspective in the creation of three-dimensional vision on a two-dimensional plane. This follows the ideas of Massacio and his concepts of linear perspective and vanishing point in artwork.

This blogger would pick another date as well, which is, admittedly, the rather fuzzy time of "around 1450".

This is the time period of the invention of a process of printing using movable type by Johannes Gutenberg.

Wikipedia says:
Around 1439, Gutenberg was involved in a financial misadventure making polished metal mirrors (which were believed to capture holy light from religious relics) for sale to pilgrims to Aachen: in 1439 the city was planning to exhibit its collection of relics from Emperor Charlemagne but the event was delayed by one year and the capital already spent could not be repaid. When the question of satisfying the investors came up, Gutenberg is said to have promised to share a "secret". It has been widely speculated that this secret may have been the idea of printing with movable type. Legend has it that the idea came to him "like a ray of light".

By 1450, the press was in operation, and a German poem had been printed, possibly the first item to be printed there. Gutenberg was able to convince the wealthy moneylender Johann Fust for a loan of 800 guilders. Peter Schöffer, who became Fust's son-in-law, also joined the enterprise. Schöffer had worked as a scribe in Paris and designed some of the first typefaces.
Gutenberg's workshop was set up at Hof Humbrecht, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there may have been two presses, one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454–55.
In 1455 Gutenberg published his 42-line Bible, commonly known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 were printed, most on paper and some on vellum.

Marshall McLuhan points to this printing technology as being the first form of the industrial assembly line production process, a process that fragments the elements of making and skill into a set of mechanical and repeatable operations.
Wikipedia says:

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (written in 1961, first published in Canada by University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology.
Throughout the book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.

His episodic and often rambling history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)

Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks:

In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. [...] The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Message) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame or Notre-Dame de Paris, "Our Lady of Paris" as it is known in French, is a novel by Victor Hugo published in 1831. The title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, upon which the story is centered.

Wikipedia says: Architecture is a major concern of Hugo's in Notre-Dame de Paris, not just as embodied in the cathedral itself, but as representing throughout Paris and the rest of Europe an artistic genre which, Hugo argued, was about to disappear with the arrival of the printing press. Claude Frollo's portentous phrase, ‘Ceci tuera cela’ ("This will kill that", as he looks from a printed book to the cathedral building), sums up this thesis, which is expounded on in Book V, chapter 2. Hugo writes that ‘quiconque naissait poète se faisit architecte’ ("he who was born a poet became an architect"), arguing that while the written word was heavily censored and difficult to reproduce, architecture was extremely prominent and enjoyed considerable freedom.

There exists in this era, for thoughts written in stone, a privilege absolutely comparable to our current freedom of the press. It is the freedom of architecture.

—Book V, Chapter 2

With the recent introduction of the printing press, it became possible to reproduce one's ideas much more easily on paper, and Hugo considered this period to represent the last flowering of architecture as a great artistic form.

As with many of his books, Hugo was interested in a time which seemed to him to be on the cusp between two types of society.

A dislocation of spaces!
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch is painted in this time of Hugo's "cusp".
A "modern" painting that reflects this age of uncertainties, ambiguities and a desperate searching for recovery from the a broken universe. His painting is a mystery but a sense of this disruption of the connectedness in meaning seems to be present in this vision of the world turned on its head.

Wikipedia says:
The Garden of Earthly Delights (or The Millennium) is a triptych painted by the early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1939. Dating between 1503 and 1504, when Bosch was about 50 years old, it is his best-known and most ambitious work. The masterpiece reveals the artist at the height of his powers; in no other painting does he achieve such complexity of meaning or such vivid imagery. The triptych depicts several Biblical scenes on a grand scale and as a "true triptych", as defined by Hans Belting, was probably intended to illustrate the history of mankind according to medieval Christian doctrine.

The telegraph and the abolition of space!
Frank Budgen mentions the telegraph along with the penny post and the telephone as aspects of modernity, but, in truth, the telegraph is the forerunner of all electric media, and the transformer of all!

Wikipedia says:
Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the most influential mathematicians of the early 19th century, developed a new theory of the Earth's magnetism in 1831, together with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber in Göttingen. Among the most important inventions of the time was the unifilar and bifilar magnetometer, enabling them to measure even the smallest deflections of the needle. They installed a 1200 m long wire above the town's roofs, which they were given permission for on 6 May 1833.

The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke. Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented it in May 1837 as an alarm system. It was first successfully demonstrated by Cooke and Wheatstone on 25 July 1837 between Euston and Camden Town in London. It entered commercial use on the Great Western Railway over the 13 miles (21 km) from Paddington station to West Drayton on 9 April 1839.

In the United States, the telegraph was developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. Samuel F. B. Morse independently developed an electrical telegraph in 1837, an alternative design that was capable of transmitting over long distances using poor quality wire. His assistant, Alfred Vail developed the Morse code signalling alphabet with Morse. The Morse code alphabet commonly used on the device was also named after Morse.
On 6 January 1838 Morse first successfully tested the device at the Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, and on 8 February he publicly demonstrated it to a scientific committee at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1843 the U.S. Congress appropriated $30,000 to fund an experimental telegraph line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. By May 1, 1844 the line had been completed from the U.S. Capitol to Annapolis Junction in Maryland. On 24 May 1844, after the line was completed, Morse made the first public demonstration of his telegraph by sending a message from the Supreme Court Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to the B&O Railroad "outer depot" (now the B&O Railroad Museum) in Baltimore. The famous message was: What hath God wrought (from the Biblical book of Numbers 23:23: )

Distance disappears! Space collapses! We receive intelligence here and now from places far distant. A new species of consciousness comes into existence.

Metropolis

Wikipedia says: Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of a science-fiction context to explore a political theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism.

The New Babylon is a film about class war, and the Department Store!

Wikipedia says: (Russian: Новый Вавилон, translit. Novyy Vavilon; alt. title: Штурм неба, translit. Shturm neba) Made in 1929 it is a silent film written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. The film deals with the 1871 Paris Commune and the events leading to it and follows the encounter and tragic fate of two lovers separated by the barricades of the Paris Commune. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first film score for this movie. Footage from the film was included in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (film).

The Paris Commune (French: La Commune de Paris) was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 (more formally, from March 28) to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and socialists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class. Debates over the policies and outcome of the Commune contributed to the break between those two political groups.

In a formal sense, the Paris Commune was simply the local authority, the city council (in French, the "commune"), which exercised power in Paris for two months in the spring of 1871. However, the conditions in which it was formed, its controversial decrees, and its ignominious end makes its tenure one of the more important political episodes of the time.

Old Paris and Notre Dame!
New Paris and Le Bon Marché! The new Babylon!
In the middle of 19th Century, and in the middle of Paris, there arose a new type of cathedral, one of consumption and display in "the good market", or "the good deal".



Richard Sennett in his "you must read" Fall of Public Man, says of this phenomenon:

The rise of the department store, mundane a subject as it may seem, is in fact in capsule form the very paradigm of how the public realm as an active interchange gave way in people's lives to an experience of publicness more intense and less sociable.

In 1852, Aristide Boucicault opened a small retail store in Paris called Bon Marche. The store was based on three novel ideas. The mark up on each irem would be small, but the volume of goods sold large. The prices of goods would be fixed, and plainly marked. Anyone could enter his shop and browse around, without feeling an obligation to buy.

The principle of a fixed price for retail goods was not entirely original with him. But Boucicault was the first to apply the idea to a full range of retail goods. In a market where retail prices float, sellers and buyers go through all kinds of theatrics to up or lower the price.

Haggling and its attendant rituals are the most ordinary instances of everyday theatre in a a city, and of the public man as actor. (pp 141, 142)

In this new phenomenon public (and economic) man as actor was to be supplanted by the new modern individual - the first of our modern ancestors - a bourgeois female, mistress of the domestic sphere and therefore mistress too of domestic consumption across the new industrial economy.

The end of the line of production and distribution in society without fixed prices is posturing, jockeying for position, the ability to notice chinks in an opponents armour. The stylized interplay weaves the buyer and the seller together socially; not to participate actively is to risk losing money.

Boucicault's fixed-price system lowered the risk of not playing a role. His notion of free entrance made passivity into a norm. (p. 142)

The department store is a response to the factory!

In the latter decades of the 19th Century, department-store owners began to work on the spectacle character of their enterprises in quite deliberate ways. Plate-glass windows were inserted on the ground floors of the stores and the arrangement of goods in them was made on the basis of what was most unusual in the store, not what was most common. The window decorations themselves became more and more fantastic and elaborate.

By stimulating the buyer to invest objects with personal meaning, above and beyond their utility, there arose a code of belief which made mass retail commerce profitable. the new code of belief in trade was a sign of a larger change in the sense of the public realm: the investment of personal feeling and passive observation were being joined; to be out in public was at once a personal and a passive experience.

Karl Marx had an apt phrase for the psychology of consumption itself: he called it "commodity fetishism." In Capital he wrote that every manufactured object under modern capitalism becomes a "social hieroglyphic"; by that he meant that inequities in the relations of owner and worker producing this object could be disguised. Attention could be diverted from the social conditions under which the objects were made to the objects themselves, if the goods could acquire a mystery, a meaning, a set of associations which had nothing to do with their use.

Boucicault and other store owners were creating that meaning. By mystifying the use of items in their stores, giving a dress "status" by showing a picture of the Duchesse de X wearing it, or making a pot "attractive" by placing it in a replica of a moorish harem in the store window, these retailers diverted buyers, first, from thinking about how or even how well the objects were made, and second, about their own role as buyers. The goods were all. (p. 145)

This was a form of juxtaposition that in the 20th Century would be interrogated by the Surrealists.

Wikipedia says:
Walter Benjamin once described Paris as the capital of the 19th Century, and the poet of Paris in this century he admired was Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's collection of poems originally title as Les Limbes and then re-named Les Fleurs du Mal (The flowers of evil), reflects the way the modern metropolis amplifies the fantasies and desires embedded in a whole new set of urban identities for a new set of urban inhabitants.

Inspired by the Paris of Baudelaire Walter Benjamin's greatest work is the Arcades Project.

The Passagenwerk was Walter Benjamin's unfinished lifelong project, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron and glass covered "arcades" (known in French as Passages couverts de Paris). These arcades came into being as a result of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire which fostered the city's emerging and distinctive street life and provided a backdrop for the emergence of the Flâneur. Benjamin's Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. Wikipedia

Today we can have the shopping mall experience as a set of arcades in Paris, Liverpool, Basingstoke and Shanghai.

This is one way of arriving in Shanghai from Pu Dong International Airport.





This is one of the ways you can cross the city centre in Shanghai.



This is one of the shopping malls in Shanghai.



This is another.



Modernity is good term to help revise cultural prejudices based on a lack of historical contextual information, especially in relation to the distorted perspectives handed down to us from the age of empires and the neo-colonialism of today.

I would argue that whilst I would tend to agree with Benjamin that Paris can be described as the Capital of the 19th century, but I would challenge the place that New York gained in the late 20th century, and suggest that recent histories of Shanghai and Berlin are two cities that in the 21st century can help us understand the twentieth century much more.

Modernity and modernization mean something particular and special in Shanghai as it is a place where there are many stories about many layers of conflicting realities.



A recent book by Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) traces the fate of New Culture ideals through the 20th century. This includes the New Culture Movement of the mid 1910s and 1920s that sprang from the disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture following the failure of the Chinese Republic founded in 1912 to address China’s problems. Scholars like Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, and Hu Shi, had classical educations but began to lead a revolt against Confucian culture.

Wikipedia says:

They called for the creation of a new Chinese culture based on global and western standards, especially democracy and science. Younger followers took up their call for:

• Vernacular literature
• An end to the patriarchal family in favor of individual freedom and women's liberation
• An acceptance of China’s place as a nation among nations, rather than the assertion of superiority of Confucian culture
• The re-examination of Confucian texts and ancient classics using modern textual and critical methods, known as the Doubting Antiquity School
• Democratic and egalitarian values
• An orientation to the future rather than the past

On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing protested the Paris Peace Conference giving German rights over Shandong to Imperial Japan, turning this cultural movement into a political one in what became known as the May Fourth Movement.
The May Fourth Movement was very important in cultural terms as way to re-define modernity, and arising out political and cultural activism.

On the morning of May 4, 1919, student representatives from thirteen different local universities met in Peking and drafted five resolutions.

1. Opposed the granting of Shandong to the Japanese under former German concessions.
2. Draw awareness of China's precarious position to the masses in China.
3. Recommend a large-scale gathering in Peking.
4. Promote the creation of a Peking student union.
5. Hold a demonstration that afternoon in protest to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

On the afternoon of May 4th over 3000 students of Peking University and other schools gathered together in front of Tiananmen and held a demonstration. The general opinion was that the Chinese government was "spineless". They voiced their anger at the Allied betrayal of China and the government's inability to secure Chinese interests in the conference. A boycott of Japanese products during this period was advocated, which boosted the domestic Chinese industry slightly. Throughout the streets of China, students packed the streets to protest China’s concession to Japanese demands. During these demonstrations, students also insisted on the resignation of three Chinese officials involved in these proceedings. After burning the residence of one of the three despised officials, student protesters were arrested and severely assaulted.^[2]
They shouted out such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'", "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty".
The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike, and students in other parts of the country responded one after another. From early June, in order to support the students' struggle, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on strike. The center of the movement moved from Beijing to Shanghai. In addition to students, a wide array of different groups also publicly displayed disagreement with the Chinese government. The lower class was also very angry at the current state of affairs, such as mistreatment of workers and perpetual poverty of small peasants. Chancellors from thirteen of China's tertiary institutions initiated the rescue of student prisoners. Congregations such as media outlets, citizen societies, and chambers of commerce offered their support for these students. Merchants further illustrated support for the students by resisting tax payments if China's government remained obstinate. In Shanghai, these May Fourth events culminated into general strikes by merchants and workers that nearly devastated the entire Chinese economy. Under intense public outcry, the Beiyang government had to release the arrested students and dismiss Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu from their posts. Also, the Chinese representatives in Paris refused to sign on the peace treaty: the May Fourth Movement won the initial victory. However, this move was more symbolic than anything else. Japan still retained control of the Shandong Peninsula and the islands in the Pacific it had obtained during World War I. Even though these protests and marches did not manage to achieve all their objectives, the partial success of the movement exhibited the ability of China's various social classes to successfully collaborate, an ideal that would be admired by both Nationalists and Communists.
In terms of industrial and urban culture, many entirely new cultural forms emerged in literature and cinema as a result of this cultural and revolutionary context. Lu Xun for instance. In May 1918, Lu Xun used this pen name for the first time and published the first major baihua short story, Kuangren Riji (狂人日記, "A Madman's Diary"). Partly inspired by the Gogol short story, it was a scathing criticism of outdated Chinese traditions and feudalism which was metaphorically 'gnawing' at the Chinese like cannibalism. It immediately established him as one of the most influential writers of his day.
The work of Lu Xun has also received attention outside of China. In 1986, Fredric Jameson, a prominent American Marxist, cited "A Madman's Diary" as the "supreme example" of the "national allegory" form that all Third World literature takes. Gloria Davies compares Lu Xun to Nietzsche, saying that both were "trapped in the construction of a modernity which is fundamentally problematic". Wikipedia

"First we take Manhatten, then we take Berlin" Leonard Cohen.

From poetry to film to Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (German: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt), alternatively translated as Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis.

Wikipedia says: this is a 1927 German silent film directed by Walter Ruttmann, and co-written by Carl Mayer and Karl Freund, is a prominent example of the city symphony genre. A musical score to accompany the film was written by Edmund Meisel. As a "city symphony" film, it portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of "narrative" of the city's daily life. Wikipedia

Other noted examples of the genre include Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's 1921 film Manhatta, Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, Andre Sauvage's 1928 film Etudes sur Paris, and the 1929 Dutch film Regen directed by Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens.





Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's mistress of propaganda in film, chooses another way of entering a city (Nuremburg), from the skies. Technology and the aesthetics of power do go hand in hand!

Wikipedia says: Triumph of the Will (German: Triumph des Willens) is a propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl. It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by various Nazi leaders at the Congress, including portions of speeches by Adolf Hitler, interspersed with footage of massed party members. Hitler commissioned the film and served as an unofficial executive producer; his name appears in the opening titles. The overriding theme of the film is the return of Germany as a great power, with Hitler as the True German Leader who will bring glory to the nation.
Triumph of the Will was released in 1935 and rapidly became one of the best-known examples of propaganda in film history. Riefenstahl's techniques, such as moving cameras, the use of telephoto lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography, have earned Triumph recognition as one of the greatest films in history. Riefenstahl won several awards, not only in Germany but also in the United States, France, Sweden, and other countries. The film was popular in the Third Reich and elsewhere, and has continued to influence movies, documentaries, and commercials to this day.
Wikipedia

Wikipedia says: In Walter Benjamin's famous text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction there is this important idea about art and politics: "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice – politics." For Benjamin, the politicization of art should be the goal of Communism; in contrast to Fascism which aestheticized politics for the purpose of social control.

Another contemporary film director, Wim Wenders, is probably quoting this "coming to the city from the skies" beginning of the Triumph of the Will in the opening shots of Wings of Desire. For him it is BERLIN!

Wikipedia says: Its original German title is Der Himmel über Berlin, which can be translated as The Sky (or Heaven) over Berlin. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry partially inspired the movie; Wenders claimed angels seemed to dwell in Rilke's poetry. The director also employed Peter Handke, who wrote much of the dialogue, the poetic narrations, and the film's recurring poem "Song of Childhood."

A subpart of the film follows Peter Falk, cast as himself, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's Nazi past. In the opening sequences, the rambling daydream thoughts of the actor are heard above the atmospheric sounds of the interior of the plane. In the sound sequence of his words and thoughts we are hear the names of cities, Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, London, Trieste, Berlin!

Trieste and Paris have an important meaning for this blogger and the connection is James Joyce.

Wikipedia says: Joyce began his great work of modernist literature Ulysses whilst teaching English at the Berlitz School in Trieste (then an Austrian maritime city), and the city close to where Rilke composed the Duino Elegies, the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade due to a long-lasting creativity crisis.
Joyce finished his work in Paris after WWI, having spent the war years in Zurich, the same city where Dada was born (Switzerland was a neutral refuge for the many intellectuals and revolutionaries that would later shape post war Europe). Whilst in Zurich the English painter Frank Budgen, who was working for the British Embassy, became acquainted with the author James Joyce. After the publication of Ulysses he asked Joyce if he would mind writing about how this great work was created. Joyce loved the idea, surprisingly, and spent many hours making suggestions as to how this work might progress.

So, if you pick up and read Budgen's James Joyce and the making of 'Ulysses', and other writings you are getting pretty close to Joyce's own sense of the what, how and why of the work is all about.

Budgen has a lively style in his explorations of the episodes in Ulysses. In his account of The Wandering Rocks he makes some beautiful observations and has some great insights, into how Joyce conjures up the essence of modern experience and modernity, which is not just mod cons, but layered with history, with the now and the then, conflicting, interrupting and flowing. LIFE!




For this blogger at least, the first 30 minutes of Wim Wenders Wings of Desire is like a palimpsest of Joyce's Wandering Rocks episode.
In the "library sequence" we meet the poet Homer on the staircase.
At the end of Ulysses we find the word "Yes."