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Journal ArticleDOI

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. By Stephen Kern (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983. 372 pp. $25.00)

01 Jul 1985-Journal of Social History (Oxford University Press)-Vol. 18, Iss: 4, pp 635-641
About: This article is published in Journal of Social History.The article was published on 1985-07-01. It has received 121 citations till now.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors deal with the idea of glocalisation as a refinement of the concept of globalisation, which is widely thought of as involving cultural homogenisation; even more specif...
Abstract: This paper deals with the idea of glocalisation as a refinement of the concept of globalisation. Globalisation is apparently widely thought of as involving cultural homogenisation; even more specif...

513 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...Second*and, regardless of the issue of the periodisation of globalisation (Robertson 1992b, 57 60), much more important*Kern (1983) has drawn attention to the crucial period of 1880 1918, in a way that is particularly relevant to the present set of issues....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In Kano, the economic center of northern Nigeria, media piracy is part of the "organizational architecture" of globalization (Sassen 2002), providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In Kano, the economic center of northern Nigeria, media piracy is part of the “organizational architecture” of globalization (Sassen 2002), providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate. Infrastructures organize the construction of buildings, the training of personnel, the building of railway lines, and the elaboration of juridicolegal frameworks without which the movement of goods and people cannot occur. But once in place, infrastructures generate possibilities for their own corruption and parasitism. Media piracy is one

250 citations


Cites background from "The Culture of Time and Space, 1880..."

  • ...Speed here is the crucial dimension (see also Kern 1983)....

    [...]

  • ...The rise of new electronic communication has intensified these processes, in turn instituting their own effects on people’s sense of time and distance and on their conceptions of the present and simultaneity (Kern 1983; Mattelart 1996; Schivelbusch 1986; Virilio 1997)....

    [...]

  • ...Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou (1999) have argued that illegal activities in Nigeria (such as fraud, corruption, and the import and export of illegal oil, drugs, and videos) have grown to such a degree that they now form part of the routine operations of the state rather than a pathology outside of it....

    [...]

  • ...As Stephen Kern (1983) has written, different societies can feel cut off from history or excessively attached to the past—without a future or rushing toward one....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the possibilities and hazards of a critical perspective on the history of geographical knowledge are considered and the focus is on the relations between modern geography and European co-existence.
Abstract: In this paper the possibilities and hazards of a critical perspective on the history of geographical knowledge are considered. The focus is on the relations between modern geography and European co...

199 citations

Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: The question of whether the power and purpose of maps are inherently political is addressed by as discussed by the authors, who argues that the apparent "objectivity" of the map-making and map-using process cannot be divorced from aspects of the politics of representation.
Abstract: The question of whether the power and purpose of maps are inherently political is addressed by this book, which seeks to emphasize that the apparent "objectivity" of the map-making and map-using process cannot be divorced from aspects of the politics of representation. Maps have played, and continue to play, a major role in both international and domestic politics; they show how visual geographical representations can be made to reflect and progress political agendas in powerful ways. The major developments in this field over the last century are responses both to cartographic advances and to a greater emphasis on graphic imagery in societies affected by politicization, democratization, and consumer and cultural shifts. The author argues that maps are not straightforward visual texts, but contain political and politicizing subtexts that need to be read with care. He examines various issues such as ethnicity, the role of socio-economic forces, the influence of mapping on elections, the mapping of frontiers, and the place of maps in warfare, to show to maps and politics overlap.

161 citations

Book
01 Jan 2003
TL;DR: The Posthuman Condition as discussed by the authors argues that such questions are difficult to tackle given the concepts of human existence that we have inherited from humanism, many of which can no longer be sustained.
Abstract: "Where humanists saw themselves as distinct beings in an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings, posthumans regard their own being as embodied in an extended technological world."Synthetic creativity, organic computers, genetic modification, intelligent machines--such ideas are deeply challenging to many of our traditional assumptions about human uniqueness and superiority. But, ironically, it is our very capacity for technological invention that has secured us so dominant a position in the world which may lead ultimately to (as some have put it) 'The End of Man'. If we are really capable of creating entities that exceed our own skills and intellect then the consequences for humanity are almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, we must now face up to the possibility that attributes like intelligence and consciousness may be synthesised in non-human entities--perhaps within our lifetime. Would such entities have human-like emotions; would they have a sense of their own being?The Posthuman Condition argues that such questions are difficult to tackle given the concepts of human existence that we have inherited from humanism, many of which can no longer be sustained. New theories about nature and the operation of the universe arising from sophisticated computer modelling are starting to demonstrate the profound interconnections between all things in reality where previously we had seen only separations. This has implications for traditional views of the human condition, consciousness, the way we look at art, and for some of the oldest problems in philosophy.First published in the 1990s, this important text has been completely revised by the author with the addition of new sections and illustrations.For further information see: www.post-human.net

131 citations

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors deal with the idea of glocalisation as a refinement of the concept of globalisation, which is widely thought of as involving cultural homogenisation; even more specif...
Abstract: This paper deals with the idea of glocalisation as a refinement of the concept of globalisation. Globalisation is apparently widely thought of as involving cultural homogenisation; even more specif...

513 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In Kano, the economic center of northern Nigeria, media piracy is part of the "organizational architecture" of globalization (Sassen 2002), providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In Kano, the economic center of northern Nigeria, media piracy is part of the “organizational architecture” of globalization (Sassen 2002), providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate. Infrastructures organize the construction of buildings, the training of personnel, the building of railway lines, and the elaboration of juridicolegal frameworks without which the movement of goods and people cannot occur. But once in place, infrastructures generate possibilities for their own corruption and parasitism. Media piracy is one

250 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the possibilities and hazards of a critical perspective on the history of geographical knowledge are considered and the focus is on the relations between modern geography and European co-existence.
Abstract: In this paper the possibilities and hazards of a critical perspective on the history of geographical knowledge are considered. The focus is on the relations between modern geography and European co...

199 citations

Book
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: Goebbels was one of the first Nazis to attend a jazz concert at the Scala Theatre, Berlin, in 1938 as discussed by the authors with Hermann Goering and Goering, where Hylton performed a Shirley Temple routine.
Abstract: design; and Goebbels even pressed him to design the ‘Deutsches Volk, Deutsche Arbeit’ exhibition. Things were on the up.35 The image of the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, encouraging Mies van der Rohe to tender for prestigious regime projects encourages us to ‘revisit’ the whole subject of Nazism’s famed jihad against modernism. An even more striking example of the recurring incongruities in Nazism’s interactions with Western modernity is Joseph Goebbels’ weakness for Jazz, offi cially lambasted as the epitome of ‘degenerate music’. This foible accounts for a remarkable moment on the evening of 15 February 1938 when he went backstage with Hermann Goering at the Scala Theatre, Berlin, to congratulate the internationally acclaimed English band-leader, Jack Hylton, whose tour was breaking all Germany’s box-offi ce records that spring. (Apparently Hitler had attended the concert but gone straight home.) This was no lapsus on Figure 7 Walter Gropius’ uncompromisingly modernist competition entry for the Reichsbank in Berlin, 1933. © President and Fellows of Harvard University. Reproduced here with the kind permission of the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM), Cambridge, MA 14039_8784X_03_chap01 29 2/5/07 07:47:46 30 Modernism and Fascism Goebbels’ part, for the event had been ‘cleansed’ in advance. His own censors had axed a Shirley Temple routine by Maureen Potter as ‘too American’ and ensured there were no Jews playing in the orchestra.36 Moreover, Goebbels’ patronage was offi cially portrayed as showing his support not for Jazz (which was classifi ed ‘decadent’) but Swing (which was ‘life-asserting’): more on this anon. Nevertheless, whatever the offi cial gloss put on the occasion, the brief encounter at the Scala fl ew ideologically in the face of the adulation that Jack Hylton had previously enjoyed in modernist circles located far beyond the Nazi pale, one example of which was Igor Stravinsky’s invitation to collaborate with him on the comic opera Mavra in 1931. Goebbels’ almost surreal presence in Hylton’s dressing room can be seen in a fresh light after reading his semi-autobiographical diary novel, Michael: A German Destiny (1926), a work bearing the unmistakable stamp of Expressionism in both style and structure. One passage recounts a visit to an exhibition of modern painting in which a solitary ‘star’ shone out amidst all the trash on display: Vincent van Gogh. His canvases prompt Goebbels’ alter ego to refl ect on the nature of modernity, which he describes as ‘a new way of experiencing the world’: Modern man is necessarily a seeker after God, perhaps a Christ-Man. Van Gogh’s life tells us more than his work. He combines the most important elements in himself: he is teacher, preacher, fanatic, prophet – he is mad. When it comes down to it, we are all mad when we have an idea. [...] What makes up the modern German is not so much cleverness and intellect as the new spirit, the willingness to become one with the people, to devote oneself and sacrifi ce oneself to it unstintingly.37 Such a declaration calls into question the deeply entrenched preconceptions about Nazism’s hostility to modernity which make it ‘self-evident’ that the austere rectilinear geometry and stripped neo-classicism of Paul Troost’s Haus der deutschen Kunst in Munich symbolize the Nazis’ urge to take refuge in an idealized past. This assumption seems corroborated by the building’s declared purpose, namely to display the ‘organic’ artistic products of the nation’s ongoing social and political renaissance. The new collection would showcase the steady stream of ‘healthy’ paintings and sculptures spontaneously fi lling the yawning gaps in the national heritage resulting from the ruthless slash and burn tactics that the Nazis applied to the self-appointed mission to purge Germany of cultural decadence. Yet the extended cohabitation of Gottfried Benn, Emil Nolde, and van der Rohe with the regime, not to mention Goebbels’ enthusiasm for Van Gogh, suggest that even such apparently irrefutable semiotic demonstrations of the regime’s visceral anti-modernism as Troost’s German art gallery may warrant reappraisal. 14039_8784X_03_chap01 30 2/5/07 07:47:46 The Paradoxes of ‘Fascist Modernism’ 31 Re-evaluating modernism’s relationship to fascism means more than just acknowledging how aesthetic modernism fl ourished under Mussolini or retained some enthusiastic proselytes under Hitler. It means creating an entirely different ‘lens’ through which to observe Fascist and Nazi culture than that offered by Norberto Bobbio or Peter Adam, one that at least makes it possible to contemplate the possibility that there was more than ‘totalitarian propaganda’ involved in the regime’s cultural production. Take, for example the speech which Hitler made on 17 July 1937 at the opening ceremony for the House of German Art. In it he claimed that Troost’s building was ‘to be the turning point, putting an end to the chaotic and botched architecture of the past’, the symbol of the State’s effort to lay ‘the basis for a new and mighty fl owering of German art’.38 The address leaves no doubt that the new art gallery’s purpose was to display art that rejected the experimentalism of modernist aesthetics in order to celebrate instead ‘eternal values’. Yet once we entertain the possibility that the building genuinely represented for Hitler a ‘new beginning’, an Aufbruch into a new era, certain passages in the catalogue published to commemorate the occasion assume fresh signifi cance, such as the boast that the structure incorporated the latest gas-fi red central heating, an air-conditioning system, and a modern air-raid shelter. Thinking in the old groove leads us to dismiss the modern elements in buildings such as the House of German Art, the Casa del Fascio in Como, or the construction of entire new towns such as Sabaudia in areas of the Pontine Marshes that had once bred malaria, simply as symptoms of fascism’s cynicism in the manipulation of culture. Any unmistakable elements of modernization appropriated are dismissed as serving solely to realize its fundamentally reactionary, regressive vision of the future, its ‘utopian anti-modernism’.39 But approaching the issue from the perspective which is beginning to open up here invites us at least to entertain the possibility that in strikingly different ways both the Fascists and Nazis were not rejecting modernity, but using the built environment to lay the cultural foundations of an alternative modernity. They were thus seeking to realize an alternative modernism. This at least is the perspective offered by Hitler himself in the closing passage of his speech, even if he naturally avoids referring to ‘modernity’ or ‘modernism’, both terms replete with decadent connotations for Nazis. He tells his audience that, though great new tasks had been assigned to art – an assertion that would have been enthusiastically endorsed by many early twentieth-century modernists – ‘it is not art that creates new ages’. These only come about when the life of entire peoples assumes new forms and searches for new expression.40 In such a speech the Nazi rejection of artistic modernism is clearly bound up with what Frank Kermode calls the ‘creation of fi ctions’ needed to ‘make new’. It also chimes in with what Hayden White calls the 14039_8784X_03_chap01 31 2/5/07 07:47:47 32 Modernism and Fascism ‘anticipation of a new form of historical reality’, and announces a variant of modernism in a totalizing sense that transcends the realm of ‘pure’ art. A ‘SYNOPTIC INTERPRETATION’ OF FASCIST MODERNISM? Hitler’s speech in July 1938 announced the task he had set German art, to both manifest and inspire the process of national rebirth, its triumphal recovery from the Weimar years of decadence that preceded the Third Reich. The task I have set myself in this book is fortunately considerably less epoch-making. It is to establish a new conceptual framework within which to investigate modernism’s relationship to fascism, one that may prove useful to historians in numerous specialisms which impinge on the dynamics of modern history, especially in its more extreme, uncompromisingly irrational or destructive manifestations. It aims to resolve not only the tensions and ambivalence constantly encountered in the history of fascist culture, but the blatant paradoxes persistently generated by so much scholarship on the topic, such as Henry Turner’s insistence on fascism’s ‘anti-modern utopianism’ and Jeffrey Herf’s investigation of the ‘reactionary modernism’ which allegedly resulted when hardcore Nazi conservatives wholeheartedly embraced the modern technocracy. The need for greater conceptual clarity and rigour in this area is underlined by a scintillating collection of scholarly essays written for the catalogue of the ‘Modernism – Designing a New World 1914–1939’ exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006. As the subtitle suggests, it marks a radical break with much earlier work in the way the eleven essays cumulatively build up a powerful picture of aesthetic modernism’s thrust towards historical Aufbruch, its aspiration to harness the power of art and design to supply a new vision to a modern world urgently in need of social and metapolitical renewal. Yet at the same time they perpetuate the taxonomic confusions that led Dan Cruickshank to see Malaparte’s Capri house as profoundly un-Fascist in spirit, rather than made conceivable precisely by the caesura Fascism had brought about with Italy’s history under liberalism in the mind of genuine converts to the new era. Thus, while Christina Lodder’s essay ‘Searching for Utopia’ highlights the central role played by modernism in the pioneering days of the Russian Revolution, it passes over in silence Le Corbusier’s close association with French fascism.41 Similarly, David Crowley’s chapter on ‘national modernisms’ makes only the briefest of allusions to the

129 citations

BookDOI
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the role of history in modernity and history: the professional discipline, the turn towards science, and the need to defend the human factor and narrative.
Abstract: PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR KNOWLEDGE OF THE PAST - Nancy Partner Modernity and History: The Professional Discipline The Turn towards 'Science': Historians Delivering Untheorized Truth - Michael Bentley The Implications of Empiricism for History - Lutz Raphael The Case for Historical Imagination: Defending the Human Factor and Narrative - Jan van der Dussen The Annales School: Variations on Realism, Methods and Time - Joseph Tendler Intellectual History: From Ideas to Meanings - Donald R Kelley Social History: A New Kind of History - Brian Lewis Postmodernism: The Linguistic Turn and Historical Knowledge The Work of Hayden White I: Mimesis, Figuration, and the Writing of History - Robert Doran The Work of Hayden White II: Defamiliarizing Narrative - Kalle Pihlainen Derrida and Deconstruction: Challenges to the Transparency of Language - Robert M Stein The Return of Rhetoric - Hans Kellner Michel Foucault: The Unconscious of History and Culture - Clare O'Farrell History as Text: Narrative Theory and History - Ann Rigney The Boundaries of History and Fiction - Ann Curthoys and John Docker PART TWO: APPLICATIONS: THEORY-INTENSIVE AREAS OF HISTORY - Nancy Partner The Newest Social History: Crisis and Renewal - Brian Lewis Women's History/Feminist History - Judith P Zinsser Gender I: From Women's History to Gender History - Bonnie Smith Gender II: Masculinity Acquires a History - Karen Harvey Sexuality and History - Amy Richlin Psychoanalysis and the Making of History - Michael Roper New National Narratives - Kevin Foster Cultural Studies and History - Gilbert B Rodman Memory: Witness, Experience, Collective Meaning - Patrick H Hutton Postcolonial Theory and History - Benjamin Zachariah PART THREE: CODA. POST-POSTMODERNISM: DIRECTIONS AND INTERROGATIONS - Nancy Partner Post-Positivist Realism: Regrounding Representation - John H Zammito Historical Experience beyond the Linguistic Turn - Frank Ankersmit Photographs: Reading the Image for History - Judith Keilbach Digital Information: 'Let a hundred flowers bloom...' Is Digital a Cultural Revolution? - Valerie Johnson and David Thomas Recovering the Self: Agency after Deconstruction - David Gary Shaw The Fundamental Things Apply: Aristotle's Narrative Theory and the Classical Origins of Postmodern History - Nancy Partner

122 citations