Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1910. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983.
Kern proposes that the essence of the twentieth century is simultaneity
-- and then crosses that time period and that hypothesis in a variety of
ways. He groups fin de siecle scientists, artists and writers around the
questions of time, space, distance and war.
Kern describes the newly fragmented and layered nature of time (past,
present and future), citing Proust and Joyce as major artists who emphasize
or even create the notion of a personal experience of time. While this
personalization was being created, however, the standardization of time
zones was also taking effect, and soldiers and workers were being drilled
in a public time which governed their actions. Time became at once highly
individual and publicly regimented. The geologic past opened up; European
countries embarked on the effort to preserve their historic past; memory
became crucially important to individual identity; nevertheless, culture
became, by the turn of the century, wired and connected, present- and future-
oriented more than past-oriented. The public and lightning-swift reaction
to the sinking of the Titanic was a moment possible only in the twentieth
century.
The bicycle, the railroad and the cinema all contributed to the freeing,
frightening sensation of speed. Large ocean liners pursued record goals
for ocean crossings and trains ran faster each year. Small fragments of
time began to be significant -- minutes and seconds were possible to be
"used" as people passed on bicycles. Just as strategy consultants were
a logical investment for twenty-first century corporate behemoths, so too,
time and motion studies were financially logical to the immense factories
of the twentieth century; even the grammar of English was stripped down
so as to be transmitted speedily over the telegraph wire.
Space (understood as form, distance and direction) was intimate, immediate,
classless, uncertain. Einstein's theories unsettled the notion of space
as a single-perspective experience, and painters explored multiple views
and non-representational forms. For the person who could afford to travel,
railroads began to blur the distances and views that travelers had long
known at a steady 5 miles per hour. Even more than railroads, telephones
bridged formerly unsurpassable distances and fundamentally changed the
way business and war could be thought about and conducted. It was, however,
airplanes that permanently fractured the old vision of earth by adding
a third dimension to all landscapes, especially those spaces which could
not ever before have been seen from a height.
Kern finishes his challengingly comprehensive overview by weaving his
understandings of these categories into the key event of that time period,
wire-crossed, gruesomely fast, mud-mired World War I. He notes that the
diplomats of the period were unable to react in the time periods made possible
by telephone and wire; that generals were chosen rather for their ability
to orchestrate at a distance than for their inspiring courage on the front,
and that the soldier, carried by precisely timed trains, became a cog in
a war machine. He concludes that the telephone, as it criss-crossed Europe
and the Atlantic, represented simultaneity, and was the defining invention
of the twentieth century.