Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrisson

Author:Mark S. Morrisson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474233439
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Figure 3.1 Fernand Léger, Nudes in the Forest, 1910-1911. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.

While Papapetros’s study sees in Haeckel, Worringer, Hulme, Read, and others a destruction of the boundaries between organic and inorganic and a concern with the animation of the inorganic, another strong but very different engagement on this terrain is Jessica Burstein’s innovative study Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (2012), which highlights a current of modernism engaged not with the psychology of mind and its libidinous embodiment, but rather with a cold exteriority of the body, of the world of matter. Burstein’s “cold modernism” is not so much concerned with the mechanist/vitalist paradigm that was ceasing to suffice in biology of the period. Turning to the literature of Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, the art of Hans Bellmer and of Balthus, and even to the fashion of Coco Chanel, Burstein’s cold modernism does not attempt to animate the inorganic or seek the distinctive nature of humanity but rather to emphasize cold, inhuman, mechanical exteriority for its own sake:

By saying that cold modernism valorizes exteriority, I mean that the body is taken as the start and finish of all explanation. What precisely cold modernism explains, however, is not the question of what it is to be human, but what it is simply or merely to be; the status of the human has no especial purchase, and thus the human form is on par with seemingly dissimilar entities in the world: clothing, cars, and curtains, for example. . . . The body is a machine to be toyed with, one that toys or ticks, or tics. In its most extreme form, cold modernism offers an account of the human form in which the mind plays no role; or, in a slightly less extreme form, in which the mind is so physicalized as to have no more or less purchase than pure anatomy. (13; emphasis in the original)

Early-twentieth-century proponents of biological organicism focused their research on areas that have become key to recent scholarship on modernism and biology. Embryology was among the subfields that captivated these researchers. Ross Harrison, for example, turned to the development of the nervous system to explore issues of form, complex relationships, and integration, and, as Haraway notes, he fused an aesthetic appreciation of organic form with an insistence upon the dynamic developments of matter: “Organic form is the product of protoplasmic activity and must, therefore, find its explanation in the dynamics of living matter, but it is the mystery and beauty of organic form that sets the problem for us. Structure is a product of function, and yet at the same time, is the basis of function. The activities of an organism may be nothing more than the continuance of those changes that produce development” (qtd in Haraway 43–44). As Harrison emphasizes in this 1913 paper, “Organic form must find its explanation in the dynamics of matter, and the distinction between living and non-living must fade” (qtd in Haraway 44).

The neuron doctrine and nonvitalist organicism

Laura

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