This way of defining the realm of art belonged to a sequence whose overall trajectory we can plot in three historical moments. Its point of departure was the pre-modern assumption that art was to be judged by extra-aesthetic – ordained or teleocratic – standards, religious, moral, or social, shifting then to the successive forms of autonomy represented first by the notion of “art as such,” where independent but shared and in principle objective aesthetic standards were employed to judge and place works, to end in the more radical Duchampian claim that art was whatever those individuals able to achieve recognition as artists declared it to be. Of these three moments, the second corresponded to the early extension and thickening of networks of means characteristic of the period before the middle of the nineteenth century; it brought the heightened public presence of culture represented by the rise of museums and public concerts and the networks of newspapers and periodicals that linked them to each other and to audiences, but in conjunction with the persistence of official salons and the hierarchy of genres that privileged “history painting,” along with “benefit concerts” and traditional forms of musical patronage, all testimony to the long survival of old relations and assumptions. The third moment arrived in the railroad age, alongside the spread of modern industry and new-style political parties, whose more formal and articulated modes of organization found their artistic counterparts in Durand-Ruel’s innovations and the Secession movements. All along this path the potential redefinition of the artist in modernity as living a certain kind of life rather than producing a distinct class of things was kept alive in bohemia, home to the kinship between artistic innovation and bourgeois life’s inherent potential for fluid self-transcendence Murger evoked in his formula: “their everyday life is a work of genius.” It was this potential that Duchamp realized by redefining the artist not as a maker of objects but as a happy inhabitant of the mobile modern world that Aragon equally embraced for its unstable, shifting connections and chance encounters. Putting the history of the avant-garde in this perspective locates it properly within the history of bourgeois life, and is a reminder that neither was able to bring about the utopian transformation its radical fluidity seemed to promise.
15 Conclusion
Spontaneity and structure
Marx and the avant-garde figures we have just considered were not wrong to see radical fluidity as a distinguishing feature of modernity. The dizzying pace of change that confronts twenty-first century people in so many realms fits the formula “all that is solid melts into air” very well. But what fuels the accelerating speed with which even newly created practices and expectations are left behind or cast aside is not any overall weakening in the structures within which individuals and groups act – markets, states, webs of communication – but on the contrary their increasing strength and power.1 We might expect that larger and denser structures would impose a slower rhythm and inhibit the spontaneous actions of the individuals who act within them, and so they do sometimes. But structure and spontaneity may also coexist in a more positive relationship, each feeding off the other. The accounts I have given at various earlier moments point to some reasons why this is so, by providing particular instances of a phenomenon that it is now time to describe in general terms, since it helps to clarify and highlight some central elements of the picture I have been seeking to elaborate here.
As networks of means expand and thicken, they furnish those who have access to them with new resources, opening up opportunities to pursue individual goals and aims for which only various kinds of inherited assets provided sufficient support before. One reason these possibilities can arise is that the networks through which they develop are networks of means, that they link people together by way of tools and implements which are themselves vehicles of action. Their thickening extends opportunities to act in ways that have an impact beyond some immediate context to people from a wider range of geographical and social locations. The replacement of inherited resources with ones to which people gain access through distant and mediated connections has taken place in many regions of modern existence, stretching from the economy and politics to culture and morality. Recalling some of the specific instances of this general phenomenon now will allow us both to bring together and flesh out some central points of this book, and to suggest ways in which the lines of historical evolution we have sought to trace have continued into the present.
In economic life the central role played in individual destinies by wealth and social ties passed down within families has contracted as public and private enterprises have come to rely on impersonal institutions for financing and on formal and advanced education to train the specialized personnel they require. The declining significance of family resources has been only relative to be sure, leaving in place many inequalities based on birth and inheritance. But it has gradually brought an end to the situation Sarah Hanley described for the early modern period, many features of which persisted well into the nineteenth century, whereby “membership in a family provided the only means of human survival through networks of influence (marriage alliances, inheritance practices, patronage, and apprentice systems),” and people’s “most pressing business” at various social levels “was the maintenance and extension of family networks, which were agencies of both social reproduction and economic production.”2 The lessening importance of family connections of these kinds made itself felt outside the economic sphere, providing an important basis for the developing shift toward a more liberal tone in the linked matters of gender relations and morality evident at the end of the nineteenth century. As people were able to draw more of the resources necessary for survival and advancement from participation in webs of relations that linked not families to other families but individuals to impersonal repositories of tangible and intangible assets, older restrictions that served to shield family continuity against the dangers posed by individuals acting on their own lost some of their rationale. They have continued to lose it since, partly through a gradual and continuous decline and partly through the impact of critical moments such as the 1920s and the 1960s, when particular circumstances weakened the still-considerable power of traditional forces and attitudes, adding impetus to the underlying tendencies toward individual emancipation.
A parallel diminution in the importance of personal resources took place in regard to politics, and in a similar rhythm. The decline of traditional modes of aristocratic dominance from late in the eighteenth century led not to specifically bourgeois forms of power but to the preeminence of what recent historians (following people in the time) have called notability. The grands notables of 1830s and 1840s France, the Honoratioren politics of mid nineteenth-century Germany, the liberal and conservative parties of early nineteenth-century Britain, were all examples of political situations that favored those who brought some set of personal, most often local, resources to them: wealth (often in land), connections, a longstanding family position in a town or region. Political parties in the mid century, even those of Gladstone and Disraeli, were, as Dieter Langewiesche says about Germany, aggregates of “influential persons, linked by a thick [but informal] network of acquaintanceship, associations, and committees of all kinds.” The assets such people possessed never wholly lost their value to be sure, but their relative weight diminished as politics became more and more a matter of national parties contending for success in elections; the political power once possessed by loose associations of noteworthy people passed to more tightly knit organizations of mostly anonymous individuals. Notability did not disappear from politics, but it came to depend less on personal position than on party activity; new careers opened up in party administration and political journalism, often to people of modest backgrounds. As in the economy, the extension and thickening of networks widened the scope of opportunities for people with limited resources of their own, reducing the importance of inherited positions.
To be sure these parallel developments did not lead only to individual empowerment or emancipation. The growth of l
arge-scale firms with complex organizations subjected their employees to elaborate, sometimes Byzantine rules that restricted action, and bureaucratized parties had similar effects in the political realm. Along with the pressures of everyday work, these structures contributed to the sense of enclosure Max Weber summarized in his powerful metaphor of the “iron cage,” built up out of the unintended consequences of earlier efforts to give free rein to individual effort. Weber’s famous figure conveys only part of the story, however; the overall picture in economic life, from the nineteenth century on into the twenty-first, is much better described by the pattern of alternating moments of stasis with ones of rapid movement and innovation analyzed by Charles Sabel and Maurice Zeitlin, and sometimes the latter persist for long stretches of time (think of Silicon Valley and its counterparts elsewhere). The grounds on which new enterprises can be founded and new ideas spring up are prepared by the widened availability of publicly available bank capital in the post-Rothschild age, and by the reduced “access costs” for information brought about by the expansion and thickening of communication networks, making possible the increase in simultaneous discoveries and innovations to which Joel Mokyr has called attention.3
A similar dialectic is evident in the political sphere. Weber himself noted the rising importance of what he famously called “charismatic leadership” as a response to the coming of bureaucratized politics, the heightened significance given to figures who possess some personal quality that legitimizes their power in the eyes of their followers, be it the sheer ability to accomplish what others are unable to, as in the case of Bismarck, or the capacity to embody some shared set of values, as with Gladstone or Gambetta. Such leaders impart new vitality, even a new mystique to the political sphere by restoring to it some of the personal energy and passion that large-scale party organization drains away. But Weber did not sufficiently emphasize how much modern charisma – already in the age of Gladstone, Disraeli, or Gambetta, but even more for later figures such as Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, and, alas, Mussolini and Hitler – relies for its power on modern networks of communication, first newspapers and railroads, then air travel, movies, radio, and for later figures television. The capacity of charismatic politicians to reinfuse politics with a sense of life and significance depends on the ability of these media to make such leaders’ words, deeds, and images directly present to followers over great distances, giving a personal tone to the vast and otherwise machine-like web of connections that draws them together. All these phenomena testify to the ways that structures which provide distant and abstract connections serve no less to foment spontaneity than to check it.
The Internet in the history of networks
No modern instance better shows the way involvement in distant ties and relationships provides resources for autonomous and innovative activity than the worldwide linkage of computers and their operators that make up the Internet. This is not the place for a comprehensive discussion of the World Wide Web and its history, but commentary about it, whether popular or scholarly, often passes over the many features it shares with earlier networks of means. Thinking for a moment about these features will provide a long-term historical context for the Internet, as well as underscore the centrality and persistence of the connection between modernity and involvement in relations at a distance that I have sought to highlight in this book.
The first of these shared features is simply the palpable increase of power such ties and linkages generate for both individuals and society as a whole, a consequence widely recognized from late in the eighteenth century. A classic instance was Adam Smith’s declaration that the level of productivity and thus the well-being of any given population depended on how far the division of labor had progressed, which in turn was determined by “the extent of the market,” which is to say the degree to which people enter into exchanges with others at a distance. Smith included intellectual capacities along with material ones as potentials to which such ties could give realization: a particularly important species of the division of labor was that between physical and mental work, which gave birth to what he called “philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade is not to do any thing, but to observe every thing.” Such people, he added, “are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.”4 In a similar spirit the Marquis de Condorcet described good roads as implements for making “something out of nothing,” since they allowed a surplus of some commodity for which there was no demand in the region where it was produced to be moved rapidly to another, where its ability to meet a need gave it value it lacked at home. An article in one of the popular Affiches that published notices and advertisements in the same years declared that, in the progress of sciences and the arts since the days of the Greeks and Romans, “communication has done everything,” adding that those regions of the world where lesser progress had been made owed their backwardness to “the small amount of communication they have with other peoples.”5 Other observers, however, thought that France suffered from such limitations itself; thus Arthur Young contrasted the energy generated in England by the rapidity with which information spread there with the more somnolent Bourbon kingdom, attributing this sleepiness to the isolation that kept some French regions from having regular contact with others. In 1832 a French writer warned that the country would not succeed in catching up with Britain simply by turning to more up-to-date machines: only better connections between people and regions would clear the ground for advancement. Putting forth a similar view a few years later, an observer in Bordeaux recommended measures that would “throw men, ideas, and capital into the whirlwind of rapid circulation. Put people’s minds [les intelligences] into continual relation with each other from one end of the country to the other,” and the whole of life would be transformed. His ideas were seconded by a lawyer in the same city early in the 1840s, who predicted that railroads would invigorate life much in the way the compass and printing press had, since the effect of such things was to “push people into contact with each other … expand a society’s sphere of activity … Thinking, instead of remaining scattered and recumbent wherever it finds itself, which is to say sterile and inactive, sees its power grow infinitely.”6 Similar testimony to the currents of energy people felt flowing to them from such distant connections was voiced by the French newspaper writer of 1893 who said that “to read one’s newspaper is to live the universal life, the life of the whole capital, of the entire city, of all France, of all the nations,” as well as by the German editor looking back from the 1920s who “felt that I was sitting right in the navel of the world, life streamed by in thousands of photos, hundreds of people, in the voices of the entire globe.”7
A second and much noted feature of the World Wide Web that was anticipated by earlier networks is its potential to introduce ungovernable and anarchic relations into what appear to be established institutions and practices. Among the phenomena of life on the Internet that exemplify this disruptive power have been musical file sharing, the emergence of free open-source software to rival products produced by traditional companies, the difficulty faced by journalistic sites in finding ways to profit from the valuable services they provide, and the meteoric rise (and fall) of such ventures as Friendster and Myspace. These and other anarchic challenges to position and authority have been met by worried and sometimes desperate attempts to create and impose new forms of stable organization.8 Although few Internet users are aware of it, this pattern was foreshadowed by earlier networks of communication, first of all by the ones that sprang up around printing.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 67