1. reading response HUMN3013 MODERNITIES: Critical Perspectives
humanities writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.
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deep pond - fragments of foreign ships, because the pond is ‘a ventilator of the ocean’. The
earth is one with them and they are one with the earth, indistin-guishable from it. It seems
now and then that the hill is animate, and the tree is animate, and the church is animate, as
the peasant himself is animate. Only, everything in this plain still sleeps but, when it stirs -
everything as it stands will go: the peasants will go, the groves and the churches will go, and
the incarnate Mothers of God will go forth from the hills, and the lakes will overflow the
banks, and the rivers will flow backwards, and the whole earth will go.* * *[. . . ] Between the
two fires of infuriated vengeance, between two camps, we are living. Therefore it is so
frightful. What kind of fire is it which breaks out into the light from under the ‘crusted lava’?
Is it such as devastated Calabria, or is this - a purifying fire?Whichever it is, we are living
through a terrible crisis. We still do not know exactly what , events await us, but, in our
hearts, the needle of the seismograph is already deflected. Already we see ourselves, as if
against the background of a glow, flying in a light, rickety aeroplane, high above the earth;
but beneath us is a rumbling and fire-spitting mountain, and down its sides, behind clouds
of ashes, roll streams of red-hot lava.6 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) ‘The
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’Marinetti was an established Symbolist poet,
founder and editor of the journal Poesia (1905), before rejecting Symbolism in favour of
new ideas about the defining charac-teristics of modern life: simultaneity, dynamism and
speed. These became the stylistic preoccupations of a Futurist movement. Futurism also
represented a conscious attempt to place Italian art in the forefront of the European avant-
garde. Politically Marinetti’s nationalism led him into a lifelong relationship with
Mussolini’s Fascism. The 'Founding Manifesto’ was first published in the newspaper Le
Figaro in Paris on 20 February 1909. It received its first English translation in 1912 in
conjunction with the Futurist exhibition at the Sackville Gallery, London. The present
translation, by R. W. Flint, is taken from his Marinetti's Selected Writings, London, 1971.
(The ellipses are integral.)We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging
mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like
them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic
2. ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many
reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.An immense pride was buoying us up, because
we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or
forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial
encamp-ments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the
black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched down their crazy
courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.IIa Modernity
145
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that
rumbled by outside, ablaze with coloured lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and
uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gorges to the sea.Then the
silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the
creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the w indows we
suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!
Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth
and, soon after, the first flight of Angels! . . . We must shake the gates of life, test the bolts
and hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There’s nothing to match
the splendour of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the first time through our millennial
gloom!’We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid
breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the
steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.The raging broom of madness
swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of
torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the
deceitful mathematics of our perishing eyes.I cried, ‘The scent, the scent alone is enough for
our beasts.’And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses
as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.But we had no ideal Mistress
raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to whom to offer our bodies,
twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish
to be free at last from the weight of our courage!And on we raced, hurling watchdogs
against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tyres like collars under a flatiron. Death,
domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while
hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.‘Let’s break out of
the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide,
contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in
desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!’The words were scarcely
out of my mouth when I spun my car around w ith the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail,
and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like
two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma
was blocking my way - Damn! Ouch! ... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a
ditch with my wheels in the air. . . .O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory
drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of
my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I came up - torn, filthy, and stinking - from under146 The Idea
of the Modern World
3. the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!A crowd
of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the
prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish
out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the
bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of
comfort.They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to
revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!And so, faces smeared
with good factory muck - plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial
soot - we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the
living of the earth:Manifesto of Futurism1 We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of
energy and fearlessness.2 Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our
poetry.3 Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We
intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the
punch and the slap.4 We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like
serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.5 We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who
hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.6 The poet must
spend himself with ardour, splendour, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervour of
the primordial elements.7 Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an
aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on
unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.8 We stand on the last
promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look back, when what we want is to break
down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already
live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.9 We will glorify
war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-
bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.10 We will destroy the
museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every
opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.11 We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by
pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the
modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards
blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed
serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride
the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing inIIa Modernity 147
the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested
locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled
by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners
and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.It is from Italy that we launch through the
world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish
Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors,
archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-
hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so
many graveyards.Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of
4. so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies
forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and
sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length
of the fought-over walls!That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the
graveyard on All Souls’ Day - that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute
beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that. . . . But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile
courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily- conducted tour through the
museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?And what is there to see in an old picture except
the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his
desire to express his dream completely? . . . Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring
our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurling it far off, in violent spasms of action
and creation.Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile
worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?In
truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty
exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as
damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their
talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may
be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner. . . . But we want no part of it,
the past, we the young and strong FuturistsSo let them come, the gay incendiaries with
charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! . . . Come on! set fire to the library shelves!
Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old
canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded! . . . Take up your
pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!The
oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty,
other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless
manuscripts - we want it to happen!148 The Idea of the Modern World
They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter,
dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators,
sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odour of our decaying minds, which will
already have been promised to the literary catacombs.But we won’t be there. ... At last
they’ll find us - one winter’s night - in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a
monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of
warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they
take fire from the flight of our images.They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and
anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a
hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration
for us.Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.Art, in fact, can be
nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have
already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and
raw will-power; have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly,
breathless, and unresting. . . . Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness
because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed! . . . Does that amaze you? It should,
because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once
5. again we hurl our defiance at the stars!You have objections? - Enough! Enough! We know
them. . . . We’ve understood! . . . Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the
revival and extension of our ancestors - Perhaps! ... If only it were so! - But who cares? We
don’t want to understand! . . . Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us
again!Lift up your heads!Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to
the stars!IIa Modernity 1497 Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) et al. ‘Futurist Painting:
Technical Manifesto’The leader of the group of young artists collected around Marinetti, the
painter/sculptor Boccioni was primarily responsible for this attempt to apply Marinetti's
example to the visual arts. Influenced by Bergson, the Manifesto also betrays an
involvement with Divisionism preceding the Futurist's encounter with Parisian Cubism.
Originally published as a leaflet by Poesia in Milan, 11 April 1910 and also signed by Carlo
Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balia and Gino Severini. The present translation is taken from
the Sackville Gallery catalogue of 1912.On the 18th of March, 1910, in the limelight of the
Chiarella Theatre of Turin, we launched our first manifesto to a public of three thousand
people - artists, men of letters, students and others; it was a violent and cynical cry which
The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois AestheticsIf we are to attempt a serious
examination of the question indicated in our title, we cannot direct our attention to the
theory and practice of those who make “an art of living” in the contemporary stage of
imperialism. The aspiration towards harmony of man’s accomplishments as against his
potential is never quite extinguished. The bleaker and emptier life be-comes under
capitalism, the more intense is the yearning after beauty. But this yearning for harmony
under imperialism too often takes the form of a craven retreat or a faint-hearted
withdrawal before the contradictory problems thrown up by life. By seeking inner harmony
men cut themselves off from society’s struggles. Such “harmony” is illusory and superficial;
it vanishes at any serious contact with reality.The great thinkers and artists who have
championed this aspiration for harmony have always recognized that harmony for the
individual presupposes his harmonious integration into his environment, into his society.
The philosophical advocates of the integrated man from the Renaissance through
Winckel-mann to Hegel not only admired the Greeks for realizing this ideal but also
recognized that the basis for the harmonious development of the individual in Classical
Greece lay in the social and political structure of ancient democracy. That they more or less
ignored the fact that this democracy was based on slavery is another matter.Hegel has this
to say about Greek harmony: “The Greeks, as far as their immediate reality was concerned,
lived happily in the midst of a self-conscious subjective freedom and a self- conscious moral
order.” And expatiating upon this thought, Hegel contrasted Greek democracy both with
oriental89
despotism, under which the individual had no rights, and with modern society with its fully
fledged social division of labour. “In Greek moral life, the individual enjoyed independence
and freedom without being isolated from the interests of the state. In accordance with the
basic principle of Greek life, the universal morality existed in an undisturbed harmony with
the abstract subjective and objective freedom of the individual, and . . . there never was a
question of a dichotomy between political principles and personal morality. The rare
sensitivity, intellectuality and spirituality in this felicitous harmony permeates all the works
6. in which the Greeks expressed their freedom and in which the essence of their freedom is
exposed.”It was left to Marx to disclose the economic and social basis of that unique
flourishing of human culture, of the harmonious fulfilment of the individual personality
among the free citizens of the Greek democracies. He also explained the rational core to the
unappeasable longing of mankind’s finest spirits for this harmony, which has never been
regained. Because of Marx we understand why this period of the “normal childhood” in
man’s development can never return.But the longing to recapture this harmony has
persisted since the Renaissance among the most progressive intellectuals. The revival of
Classical thought, poetry and art during the Renaissance has admittedly visible causes in the
class struggles of the time. Unquestionably, too, the study of Classical consti-tutions and of
the civil wars from the Renaissance to Robes-pierre provided all bourgeois and democratic
revolutionaries with powerful weapons in their struggle against feudalism and absolute
monarchy. Whatever illusions accompanied these struggles were heroic illusions which
sought to restore Classical democracy on the basis of a capitalist economy. And there is no
doubt that it was precisely these heroic illusions which were necessary to sweep away the
rubble of the Middle Ages.But beyond all this, the revival of antiquity both during and after
the Renaissance is distinguished by a (self-contradictory) tendency which points,
sometimes more and sometimes less,90 WRITER AND CRITIC
beyond the bourgeois horizon. With turbulent enthusiasm and brilliant versatility of talent,
scarcely imaginable today, the great men of the Renaissance strove to develop all the
pro-ductive forces of society. Their lofty aim was to shatter the narrow localized restrictions
of medieval social life and to create a social order in which all human capacities and
poten-tialities would be liberated for an understanding of nature for the benefit of mankind.
And these great men recognized that the development of the productive forces meant
simultaneously the development of man’s own productive capacities. The mastery of nature
by free men in a free society—such was the Renaissance ideal of the harmonious man.
Engels said of this great progressive human revolution: “The men who established the
modern hegemony of the bourgeoisie were anything but narrow bourgeois.” Engels
perceived, however, that such an impressive, many-sided development of individual
capaci-ties, of even the most outstanding men, was possible only while capitalism was still
undeveloped: “The heroes of that time had not yet been enslaved in the specialized division
of labour whose crippling one-sidedness we so often encounter in their successors.”With
the development of the productive forces of capitalism, the subjugation inherent in the
capitalist division of labour became more pronounced. By the manufacturing stage, the
worker had already become a narrow specialist in a single operation, and the state appartus
had already begun to transform its civil servants into mindless and soulless bureaucrats.The
leading thinkers of the Enlightenment fought against the vestiges of the Middle Ages with
even greater passion than the men of the Renaissance; as honest thinkers who hid nothing
from themselves they saw symptoms of the contradic-tions within the emerging forces of
production, within the very progress for which they were vanguard fighters. Thus Ferguson
“denounced” (as Marx noted) the capitalist division of labour which grew before his eyes:
“Many occupations demand in fact no intellectual capacity. They succeed best when there is
complete suppression of feeling and thought;THE IDEAL OF THE HARMONIOUS MAN 91
7. and ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition.” He predicted
pessimistically that if the trend continued “we will create a nation of helots and have no free
citizens any more”.With Ferguson as with all the important men of the Enlight-enment, this
harsh criticism of the capitalist division of labour accompanies (though is not directly
related to) a keen cham-pioning of the development of productive forces and the
elimination of all social obstacles to continued progress. Thus these men exhibit the
dichotomy, basic to our discussion, that continues in modern bourgeois thought regarding
society, a dichotomy in all significant modern aesthetics and in all serious thought about
harmony in life and art. It is a road full of contradictions which the leading eighteenth and
nineteenth century thinkers seek between two equally false yet socially necessary
extremes.The one extreme is the glorification of the capitalist mode of developing the
means of production—for a long time, indeed, the only possible mode—and concomitantly
an apologetic evasion of the enslavement and fragmentation of the individual and of the
horrifying ugliness of life which inevitably and increasingly accompanies this development.
The other false extreme is to ignore the progressive character of this develop-ment because
of its shocking human consequences—to escape from the present into the past, from the
present of meaningless work in which a man has become a mere appendage to the machine
back to the Middle Ages, when the varied labour of the craftsman could “reach a certain
limited artistic awareness” (Marx), when a man still enjoyed a “comfortable bondage
relationship” (Marx) to his work. These extremes are apologetics, on the one hand, and
romantic reaction, on the other.The great poets and aestheticians of the Enlightenment and
of the first half of the nineteenth century did not succumb to this dilemma. But neither were
they capable of resolving the contradictions in capitalist society. Undaunted by the
conditions that confined them, they exhibited greatness and brilliance in maintaining an
unrelenting critique of bourgeois society with-92 WRITER AND CRITIC
out abandoning their affirmation of progress. As a result, these antithetical attitudes are to
be found side-by-side in the works of the men of the Enlightenment.The poets and thinkers
of German Classicism, whose major activity followed the French Revolution, seek various
utopian solutions. Their criticism of the capitalist division of labour is no less incisive than
that of the men of the Enlightenment. They, too, stress ever more sharply the fragmentation
of the individual. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister poses these questions: “What use is it to
manufacture good iron when inside I am full of slag? What good is it to put an estate in
order if I am never at one with myself?” And he perceives that this disharmony is a product
of bourgeois society. He says: “A bourgeois can make profit and with some difficulty even
develop his mind; but he will lose his individuality, do what he will. He may not ask: “What
are you? but only what do you have? what ability, what understanding, what knowledge,
how great a fortune? He has to exploit individual aptitudes in order to put them to use, and
it is taken for granted that he may not enjoy an inner harmonious development, for he must
neglect everything that cannot be put to use.”The great poets and thinkers of German
Classicism sought in art for the harmonious integration of the individual and the beauty
accompanying it. Active after the French Revolution, they had lost the heroic illusions of the
Enlightenment. They did not, however, give up the struggle for harmony in the individual
and for its artistic expression. As a result, they assigned to questions of aesthetic practice an
8. excessive and often an exaggeratedly idealistic significance. They saw artistic harmony not
only as a reflection and expression of the harmonious individual but also as the chief means
of over-coming subjectively the fragmentation and distortion resulting from the capitalist
division of labour. This approach resulted in their abandoning all practical attempts at
overcoming in life itself the absence of harmony under capitalism. Their con-cepts of
harmony in man and of beauty are divorced and alienated from life. Schiller sings of beauty
with such a view:THE IDEAL OF THE HARMONIOUS MAN 93
Piercing even unto Beauty’s sphere,In the dust still lingers here Gravitation, with the world
it sways,Not from out the mass, with labour wrung,Light and graceful, as from nothing
sprung,Stands the image to the ravish’d gaze.Mute is ev’ry struggle, ev’ry doubt,In the
uncertain glow of victory;While each witness hence is driven out Of frail man’s
necessity.1Here the idealistic side of classical philosophy and poetry is clearly exemplified.
There is idealism, too, in the rigid opposi-tion which Schiller makes between aesthetic
activity and ordinary work. With astute historical insight, he finds the origin of man’s
aesthetic activity in his surplus energy. His resultant “play” theory is directed toward the
elimination of the division within man under the capitalist division of labour. With this
theory he campaigns for the total, many-sided and developed human personality, yet only
sees this development as happen-ing outside the labour process of his time: “For . . . man
plays only when he is human in the fullest sense of the word, and he is only fully human
when he plays.”The idealism in such theories is clear. It is necessary, however, to recognize
that the idealism of these great German classicists was the inevitable product of their social
situation. It is precisely because they neither wish to disguise the inhumanity of capitalism
nor make concessions to the reactionary and1 Aber dringt bis in der Schӧnheit Sphäre Und
im Staube bleibt die Schwere Mit dem Stoff, den sie beherrscht, zurück.Nicht der Masse
qualvoll abgerungen,Schlank und leicht, wie aus dem Nichts, gesprungen,Steht das Bild vor
dem entzückten Blick,Alle Zweifel, all Kämpfe schweigen In des Sieges hoher
Sicherheit;Ausgestossen hat es jeden Zeugen Menschlicher Bedürftigkeit.From “The Ideal
and Life”, translated by Edgar A. Bowring, The Poems of Schiller, London, 1910, p. 189.94
WRITER AND CRITIC
romantic critique, being in no way able to foresee the displace-ment of capitalism by
socialism, that they are forced to seek these solutions in order to preserve the ideal of the
integrated man.This aesthetic utopia does not merely avoid dealing with actual labour as it
exists but also seeks utopian solutions in a general social sense. Goethe and Schiller believed
that small groups could achieve the ideal of the integrated individual among themselves and
provide nuclei for a general diffusion of this ideal—rather after the model of Fourier, who
hoped that from the establishment of a phalanstery a gradual trans-formation of all society
to socialism, as he understood it, might be achieved. The educational philosophy in Wilhelm
Meister is based on a theory of this kind; similar utopianism is echoed in Schiller’s “On the
Aesthetic Education of Man”.Insofar as fragmentation and its cure were sought primarily
within the individual, the problem of the fragmentation of sensibility and intellect was
emphasized. Clearly, once again, the importance of this position is closely related to
philosophic idealism. It is also clear, however, that there did exist, objec-tively, a
fundamental problem in the fragmentation of the individual through the capitalist division
9. of labour. The specialized, forced cultivation of certain individual capacities under this
division of labour set the remaining qualities and passions “free” to atrophy or to run riot. In
tackling this aspect of the question, Goethe and Schiller were raising the important question
of whether it is possible to bring the human passions into harmony.Some decades later this
question was to become crucial to Fourier’s utopian socialism. Fourier started with the
premise that there is no human emotion that is intrinsically evil. An emotion becomes evil
only as a consequence of the anarchy and inhumanity of the capitalist division of labour.
Thus Fourier carries his criticism far beyond that of the Enlighteners or the German
Classicists, making it a critique of the basic objective problems of the social division of
labour; for example, the separation of town and country. The socialism of his utopian
dream, with all its social constructs, aimed prim-THE IDEAL OF THE HARMONIOUS MAN 95
arily at developing the abilities and sensibilities latent in every man and at promoting
within the harmonious co-operative effort of varied personalities under socialism the
integration of the capacities within each individual as well.Fourier’s great contemporaries,
Hegel and Balzac, experi-enced the contradictions emerging from the capitalist division of
labour at a more advanced stage than Goethe and Schiller during the period of their
collaboration. The note of elegiac resignation which echoed through all the utopian dreams
of Goethe and Schiller now predominates. Both the great thinker and the great realist see
the inhumanity of capitalist society, that all the harmony within man, his every creative
expression, is being ruthlessly crushed. For Hegel the aesthetic harmony in Greek life and
after has been irretrievably lost: the “World Spirit” has moved beyond the sphere of the
aesthetic and hastens to other goals. The dominion of prose has been estab-lished over
mankind. And Balzac portrays with what cruel relentlessness capitalist society generates
discord and ugliness in every manifestation of human existence, how all human aspiration
toward a beautiful and harmonious existence are inexorably crushed by society. Balzac does
include episodes in which “islands” of harmonious personalities appear; these are, however,
no longer nuclei for a utopian renewal of the world but just exceptional instances of
fortunate individuals rescued by chance from under the iron heel of capitalism.Thus the
heroic struggle for the integrated man of the bourgeois revolutionary period terminates in
elegiac mourning; for the conditions for developing man’s capacities into a harmonious
integration have been irretrievably lost. Only where the critique of capitalism evolves into a
prescience of socialism does this atmosphere of elegiac mourning, char-acteristic of the
utopian dreamers who founded socialism, disappear.With the destruction of the heroic
illusions of the revolu-tionary period and the illusions of a possible revival of ancient
democracy, there is an accompanying loss of appreciation of the classical experience in
bourgeois art and aesthetics. The purely formal “harmony” that takes the place of the
classical96 WRITER AND CRITIC
conception bears little relationship to life, whether of the past or the present; it is
“academic”, without content, an expression of a smug and complacent evasion of the
ugliness of life.The leading artists and thinkers of the period of bourgeois decline became
increasingly dissatisfied with this banal academicism. There are fundamental social and
artistic grounds for their renunciation of the ideals of classical harmony. The serious realists
seek to depict the social life of their day with uncompromising verisimilitude and thus reject
10. any pretence of harmony in life and of beauty in human personality.But what lies behind
this rejection and how does it manifest itself? Academicism can indeed reduce beauty and
harmony to matters of no importance or treat them as mere questions of form, but by their
very nature beauty and harmony cannot be matters of indifference to mankind. Concepts of
beauty and harmony seem empty only because capitalist society denies them any
realization in life. The dream of harmony can be realized and be effective in art only when
occasioned by genuinely serious, progressive tendencies in actual life.Such a dream of
human harmony is diametrically opposed to that envisaged by the academician, who,
though supposedly the perpetuator of the classics, actually proposes a fraudulent
substitute, a false and empty pseudo-harmony. His flight from the ugliness and inhumanity
of capitalist life is nothing but a capitulation without struggle.This is not the only form of
artistic capitulation before the fundamental hostility towards art and before the growing
barbarism. Leading artists, dedicated fighters against their times, passionate defenders of
progress also capitulate—without wishing to, indeed without knowing it—and do so as
artists in face of the philistinism of their time.In this situation the social and humanist
content of the “old-fashioned” concepts of beauty and harmony continue to exert a powerful
influence extending far beyond literature and art. In their dedication to truth great realists
of the period of mature capitalism like Balzac had to reject any representation of beauty in
life or of the integrated personality. To be faithfulTHE IDEAL OF THE HARMONIOUS MAN
97
realists they could only depict disharmonious, shattered lives, lives in which the beautiful
and noble in man is inexorably crushed, worse, lives inwardly warped, corrupted and
bruta-lized. The conclusion at which they must arrive is that capitalist society is a vast
cemetery for integrity and human capacity, that under capitalism, as Balzac notes with
pungent irony, men become either bank clerks or swindlers, that is, either exploited dupes
or scoundrels.This courageous condemnation is what distinguishes genuine realism from
apologetic academicism, which seeks escape from life’s discord. The creative artist may
follow one of two courses in his denunciation of capitalist society. Either he can depict the
mere result of this human disintegration or he can, in addition, portray the fine and noble
human energies destroyed in the struggle to resist. Superficially, the distinction seems to be
of a purely literary artistic kind. And indeed the analogy with the political and the social
opposition to capitalist and imperialist barbarism does not hold mechanically. There is a
whole group of seemingly left-wing writers who accept the degradation and destruction of
the individual under capitalism as fact; they are indignant and express their indignation in
their art; they expose the horror, but they do not depict the human nobility in the resistance
to this horror. There are others who do not proclaim their political and social convic-tions
so obviously in their own rebellion but who nevertheless describe with passionate
vividness the daily, even hourly, re-sistance which mankind maintains against the crippling
capitalist environment in defence of human integrity. In this uneven battle the individual is
doomed if he relies solely on his own powers; he can maintain resistance only as a
participant in the opposition movement destined to secure the final victory of humanism in
society, economically, politically, socially and culturally.In this regard Maxim Gorki is the
foremost figure in con-temporary world literature since his works depict with superb
11. artistry this association of the individual and the popular movements. The horror of life
under capitalism has probably never been so accurately exposed or painted in such bleak98
WRITER AND CRITIC
colours; yet the result is quite different from that in the works of most of his
contemporaries, including leading writers of our time, for Gorki never presents the
destruction under capitalism as an accomplished fact. He shows what is being destroyed
and how, in what kind of struggle, the destruction is taking place. He reveals the beauty, the
innate drive to harmony and to the unfolding of the varied but repressed, distorted and
misdirected potentialities even in the worst of humanity. The fact that the vital aspiration
toward beauty and harmony is crushed before our eyes is what makes his condemnation so
resounding, what gives it an echo that can be heard everywhere.Furthermore, Gorki points
to a concrete solution in his work, that is, he shows how the revolutionary labour
move-ment, the popular revolt, awakens an individual, matures him, encourages his inner
life to bloom and imbues him with aware-ness, power and sensitivity. Gorki does not
counterpose one social system to another or one ideology to another, but pre-sents the
emergent new kind of human being through whom the reader can experience directly and
concretely the content of the new life.Thus a principle of artistic representation turns into a
political and social principle. None of Gorki’s contemporaries reveals either the revulsion
against the old or enthusiasm for the new with as much passion as Gorki. This revulsion and
enthusiasm and certainty of victory—embodied in living people—exemplifies what has just
been discussed: no artistic capitulation to capitalism! Gorki achieves a coincidence of the
artistic and the political, a unity that is neither automatic nor mechanical. A writer only a
trifle less consequent ideologically and artistically in his radicalism might attempt swifter,
more direct effects and fall into lifeless propaganda and provide a dead, fetishized picture of
life.Capitalist antipathy to art is not one-dimensional; every dedicated artist must—
consciously or not—end up as an enemy of capitalism in his attempt to create richly
investigated characters. He may consider himself “uncommitted”, he may seek refuge in
scepticism, he may even claim to be conservative. But unless, profoundly confused about
social and intellectualTHE IDEAL OF THE HARMONIOUS MAN 99
issues, he embraces a romantic reaction against progress, his revolt will emerge clearly in
his work.In the defence of repressed human values and of frustrated humanity, Anatole
France is more radical and decisive than Emile Zola, the early Sinclair Lewis than Upton
Sinclair, Thomas Mann than Dos Passos. It is no accident that the leading realists of our time
have succeeded in obtaining a popular audience because their revolt is profound, for they
really detest the destruction they see about them and do not merely dress up slogans in a
formalist literature. Romain Rolland pursued this course most resolutely. Progressive
writers must give careful consideration to the approaches followed by Heinrich and Thomas
Mann and many others, too, in this regard. The revolt of the leading realists is the most
significant development in the art of the bourgeois world today. This revolt has produced
important art in a period most un-favourable to art, a period of a general decline in
bourgeois culture. How aware each of the outstanding exponents of this genuine realism is
in his association with the great humanist tradition is not decisive. With Romain Rolland or
Thomas Mann the association is conscious and of importance. What is decisive is the
12. objective relationship to, the objective continu-ation of, the fundamental humanist view, a
continuation adapted, of course, to the special conditions of the day, in opposition to
capitalist culture, a culture which every artist of integrity must reject.There is another road,
however, one which many writers, by no means insignificant in literature or in the general
cultural life, have taken. They reject without compromise all ideals of beauty and harmony
as “out-of-date”; they take people and society “as they are”, or rather as they usually appear
in ordinary life under capitalism. And in a depiction of such a given world, the categories of
the old aesthetics do indeed lose meaning. Not because they are out-of-date! (We have seen
how pertinent and valid they are when adapted to changed conditions by the leading realist
of our time.) But they have lost all meaning since capitalism is destroying their social and
individual base day by day; and these writers set out to repre-100 WRITER AND CRITIC
sent a world destroyed and not the battle against the destruction, not a dynamic process but
a lifeless result. The consequence is that they reject beauty and harmony and pro-duce a
mere chronicle of the “iron age”.Such has been the general course in this development.
Writers have produced intellectual quintessences, local colour studies—presenting the
primary material with which a dynamic re-creation of the world should start. They sketch
characters and lives, arranged as in a chronicle, and expose the most obvious aspects of the
destruction of the individual in capitalist society. The readers feel no impelling compassion
for the characters or their experiences since the authors have presented only the
consequences or nearly completed results of the destructive process. The readers cannot
experience what was destroyed in this process nor appreciate at all the conse-quences of a
continuation of such a process in the view of the author, for the author provides them with
nothing but an abstract ideological programme.Needless to add, this is not the only current
in literature, nor is it ever to be found in absolute purity, for there is scarcely a true writer—
no matter what his political philosophy—who rejects beauty altogether. Beauty, however,
becomes some-thing extraneous, something essentially alien to their subject matter and
even antithetical to it. Flaubert turns beauty into a mere formal quality in rhetoric or
picturesque diction; beauty is a quality to be imposed artificially on subject matter that is
inherently unbeautiful. Baudelaire carries this aliena-tion of beauty from life and the
antipathy of life to beauty to the point of transforming beauty into a thing in itself—exotic,
demonic, and vampire-like.In the profound pessimism of their art and ideologies, lead-ing
writers reflect capitalism’s hostility to art and the general ugliness of life under capitalism.
Artists and thinkers become increasingly overwhelmed by the bleakness of life in the age of
imperialism. Though they represent the inhumanity of capitalism with ever-greater
intensity, they no longer manifest a rebellious fury but exhibit a conscious or unconscious
respect for its “monumentality”. The Greek ideal of beauty disappearsTHE IDEAL OF THE
HARMONIOUS MAN 101
and is replaced by a modern orientalism or a modernized glorification of the Gothic or the
baroque. Nietzsche completes the ideological transformation by pronouncing the
harmonious man of Greece a myth and by transfiguring Greece and the Renaissance
“realistically” into civilizations of “monumental inhumanity and bestiality”. Fascism
inherits these decadent tendencies of bourgeois development and adapts them to its own
demogogic purposes, using them to provide an ideological rationale for its prisons and
14. mythology could never be the soil or womb which would give birth to Greek art. But in any
event there had to be a mythology. In no event could Greek art originate in a society which
excludes any mythological ex-planation of nature, any mythological attitude towards it and
which requires from the artist an imagination free from mythology. Looking at it from
another side: Is Achilles possible side by side with powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at all
compatible with the printing press and steam press? Do not singing and reciting and the
Muses necessarily go out of existence with the appearance of the printer's bar, and do not,
therefore, disappear, the prerequisites of epic poetry? But the difficulty is not in grasping
the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It
rather lies in understanding why they still constitute with us a source of aesthetic
enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment. A
man cannot become a child again unless he becomes childish. But does he not enjoy the
artless ways of the child and must he not strive to reproduce its truth on a higher plane? Is
not the character of every epoch revived perfectly true to nature in child nature? Why
should the social childhood of mankind, where it had obtained its most beautiful
development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return? There are ill-bred
children and precocious children. Many of the ancient nations belong to the latter class. The
Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the
primitive character of the social order from which it had sprung. It is rather the product of
the latter, and is rather due to the fact that the unripe social conditions under which the art
arose and under which alone it could appear could never return. In the social production
which men carry on they
634 KARL MARX enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of
their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of
their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society-the real foundation, on which rises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production in material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life
processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on
the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the
existing relations of production, or-what is but a legal expression for the same thing-with
the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of
development of the forces of produc-tion these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins
an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense super-structure is more or less rapidly transformed. In con-sidering such
transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation
of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of
natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philo-sophic-in short,
ideological-forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our
opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of
such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary this
consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the
15. existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No
social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it
have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the
material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the
matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material
conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad out-lines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern
bourgeois modes of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic
formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of
the social process of production-antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but
of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the
productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material
conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore,
the closing chapter of the pre-historic stage of human society.
Please write two reading responses (one page for each, font size 12: 1.5 space),
Please see response example in attachment titled RR-Model-Week 3-Marx and Lukacs
Required text for response 1
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), from Hazard Adams
eds, Critical Theory Since Plato, Harcourt Brace,1971: 633-634
George Lukács,”The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics”(1938), from
George Lukács, Writer & Critic, and Other Essays, Grosset & Dunlap, 197: 89-102
Required text for response 2
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), from
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood eds, Art In Theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas,
Blackwell, 1992: 144-149
(A YouTube video on A.I.) “How Far is Too Far? | The Age of A.I.” (uploaded Dec 18, 2019),
35 min
Reading response requirements
1. Take original quotations from the assigned readings or clips/films that contain the key
ideas and arguments of the readings (i.e. thesis sentences) or the clips.
2. Then provide your focused unpacking/interpretation of a chosen quotation within the
context of the original text. The RR for this course is NOT a summary of the entire text. As
noted above, it is a focused unpacking/interpretation of a chosen quotation, which should
be the thesis sentence of the assigned text.
3. The chosen quotes thus will immediately demonstrate to the instructor if the student has
closely read the assigned texts and gained a good understanding of their key ideas and
arguments. If chosen a right thesis sentence, your “focused unpacking of the chosen
quotations” then naturally becomes a statement that echoes the key ideas/arguments of the
texts.
4. . RR completed in this manner must not be superficial responses that are completely
isolated from the context of the original texts.
![reading response HUMN3013 MODERNITIES: Critical Perspectives
humanities writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.
Please write a reading response for assigned readings, following instructions mentioned in
doc and following example in attachment.
Requirements: one page
deep pond - fragments of foreign ships, because the pond is ‘a ventilator of the ocean’. The
earth is one with them and they are one with the earth, indistin-guishable from it. It seems
now and then that the hill is animate, and the tree is animate, and the church is animate, as
the peasant himself is animate. Only, everything in this plain still sleeps but, when it stirs -
everything as it stands will go: the peasants will go, the groves and the churches will go, and
the incarnate Mothers of God will go forth from the hills, and the lakes will overflow the
banks, and the rivers will flow backwards, and the whole earth will go.* * *[. . . ] Between the
two fires of infuriated vengeance, between two camps, we are living. Therefore it is so
frightful. What kind of fire is it which breaks out into the light from under the ‘crusted lava’?
Is it such as devastated Calabria, or is this - a purifying fire?Whichever it is, we are living
through a terrible crisis. We still do not know exactly what , events await us, but, in our
hearts, the needle of the seismograph is already deflected. Already we see ourselves, as if
against the background of a glow, flying in a light, rickety aeroplane, high above the earth;
but beneath us is a rumbling and fire-spitting mountain, and down its sides, behind clouds
of ashes, roll streams of red-hot lava.6 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) ‘The
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’Marinetti was an established Symbolist poet,
founder and editor of the journal Poesia (1905), before rejecting Symbolism in favour of
new ideas about the defining charac-teristics of modern life: simultaneity, dynamism and
speed. These became the stylistic preoccupations of a Futurist movement. Futurism also
represented a conscious attempt to place Italian art in the forefront of the European avant-
garde. Politically Marinetti’s nationalism led him into a lifelong relationship with
Mussolini’s Fascism. The 'Founding Manifesto’ was first published in the newspaper Le
Figaro in Paris on 20 February 1909. It received its first English translation in 1912 in
conjunction with the Futurist exhibition at the Sackville Gallery, London. The present
translation, by R. W. Flint, is taken from his Marinetti's Selected Writings, London, 1971.
(The ellipses are integral.)We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging
mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like
them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/readingresponsehumn3013criticalperspectives-230314043602-94cb4945/85/reading-response-HUMN3013-Critical-Perspectives-pdf-1-320.jpg)
