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Culture as Polyphony. An Essay of the Nature of Paradigms

1981; The MIT Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1574297

1530-9282

Nicholas Mann, James M. Curtis,

European Cultural and National Identity

The central problem facing the cultural historian, as E. H. Gombrich has remarked, is that 'no culture can be mapped out in its entirety, and yet no element of culture can be understood in isolation'. The solutions that have been proposed have almost inevitably been aprioristic ones: from Hegel's Volksgeist to Burkhardt's higher principle of generality soaring above multifarious problems or Huizinga's spirit of the age, it has been tacitly assumed that a synthesis must be present in the mind before any analysis can begin. In this, the paradigm that Curtis proposes, adapted from T. B. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, does not differ radically: It is the implicit prerequisite to perception that must itself be perceived by the historian before he can integrate the phenomena that he wishes to understand into the global vision that his paradigm permits. The culture of the 'post-modern' age has its own peculiar polyphony of disparate elements tracing their own melodic paths and yet somehow belonging together in harmony. Elvis Presley and Feodor Dostoyevsky, mediated (in one sense) by Marshal McLuhan, are the aspects of Curtis's personal cultural heritage that he seeks to integrate, with others, into an overall vision of 20th-century consciousness that starts, of necessity, from the premise that 'any contemporary paradigm that makes holistic claims must have the capacity to deal ... with popular culture as an aspect of social process.' He begins by exploring the characteristics of paradigms and, in particular, that of the non-linear paradigm imposed by the discoveries of Einsteinian physics, which, by breaking down the separation of space, time and matter, and fusing them into a single dynamic continuum, allows cultural historians of the 1950s and 1960s to see their material as a series of energy transformations. What were formerly seen (in Newtonian days) as linear dichotomies are now resolved into non-linear binary pairs forming (by analogy with electricity) a series of fields that are themselves structured totalities or wholes. Thus, the nonlinear paradigm is one that views the universe as a reflexive process of energy transformations, a total synthesis within which it is possible to detect a multiplicity of smaller but similar systems-including cultural ones-each of which can be investigated independently of others. But science does not suffice, for as Delong says, 'no non-poetic account of the totality of which we are a part can be adequate.' Curtis detects the first embryonic and unconscious manifestations of such a paradigm and of a holistic view of culture as a single organism in the German Romantics and explores Hegel's belief in art as a more complete revelation of truth than ordinary experience; he notes that, when Michelson disproved the aether hypothesis in 1881, he heralded the demise of absolute space. But it is above all Nietzsche and Bergson whom he sees as undermining the Kantian belief in the homogeneity of time and space, each in his own way aware of art and laughter as forces that can integrate the old linear dichotomy of Apollonian reason and Dionysian frenzy into a single binary continuum. The same continuum, expressed as a dynamic, non-linear and allembracing 'will to art' affecting and synthesizing culture at all levels, from the highest abstraction to the most primitive, marks Worringer's decisive abandonment, in Abstraction and Empathy (1908), of the old view of Renaissance culture as the peak of a linear progression. Art history too becomes holistic: For the 20th-century, art is non-propositional cognition, integrating the individual and his environment into a single synthetic vision that is neither discursive nor descriptive, so that in T. S. Eliot's words, 'the great poet, in writing himself, writes his time'. In polyphonic parallel with this artistic development is the belief that technology is an extension of humans. Hinted at by Hegel, it owes its origins more directly to Ernst Kapp, who in 1877 hypothesized that 'objects of consciousness return to man's interiority ... and become part ofinteriority', that perception is a circuit. For Bergson, the circuit embraces technology: Humans as homofaber, perceive flux, including technological advance, as the essence of experience in a world that is a single dynamic whole. Cassirer views technology as a form of spiritual creativity; Teilhard de Chardin asserts that the tool has become a mechanized envelope for all humanity; Lewis Mumford, too, studies the interplay between technology and its social context. But it is McLuhan's Understanding Media of 1964 that Curtis sees as synthesizing these previously disparate elements, presenting the media, as technologies, as extensions of our physical being, and the artist as a person of integral awareness for whom past and present are resolved into a single non-linear perception and the world into a global village. Finally, Curtis explores the implications of the non-linear paradigm (further sanctioned by Chomskian linguistics) as a tool for investigating the peculiar polyphony of late 20th-century U.S.A., a culture marked by the four 'hybrid' media of electric light, radio, cinema and automobile, and one which pop music brings one through the 'modernist' era into the 'post-modernist' age, from which Curtis can look forward, and back, with new paradigms. Process has replaced the 'modernist' antithesis between time and space; binarism now rules, and Pop culture celebrates the synthesis of literacy and the 'new orality'. The problem with paradigms is perception: Once consciously perceived, they are outworn. So that even such a determined 'post-modernist' thesis as this one is often based on prescriptive and linear elements, singling out 'the generation of 1875-85', or drawing the line that ends the 1960s precisely on 6 December 1969 at Altamont, or focusing on the contribution of central Europeans, or on images of the eye in Bunuel's 'Chien andalou' or Eisenstein's 'Potemkin', or on certain artists and their relations with the primitive. There is a danger that the whole will become an all-encompassing symbolic miscellany that will certainly whet readers' appetites but will take them no further. There is a certain lack of rigour too: A linear paradigm informs the 'three-generation hypothesis', which is used to explain Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini in terms of their grandfathers; the incompatibility of Marxism-Leninism and Einsteinian relativity is touched on in distinctly dualistic terms; the Ford Motor Company and its founder are compared with Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, and Nixon with Stalin, partly in terms of a structural analysis and partly through a simplistic fashionable psychological dichotomy ('I'm O.K.-you're not O.K.'). One might also remark that, if the net is to be cast so wide, there are other significant figures in Western culture who deserved some mention, such as the physicist Ernst Mach, whose psychophysical investigations in Die Analyse der Empfindungen of 1886 were certainly influential upon the writings and aesthetic ideas of the Young Vienna Movement. Or that the notions of flux and continuum are neither new in Occidental culture (being found at least as early as Heraclitus) nor foreign to other cultures: Taoist philosophy seems to have evolved a non-linear paradigm long before Einstein. This is not to wish that Curtis had written a different book, but rather to stress the wider implications of the phenomena that he discusses in relation to Pop culture: His contrapuntals are engaging and often arresting, but the full polyphony of our age still awaits its symphonist.