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The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918

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The book is a superb general cultural history of the turn of the century period that relates developments in culture and society to new technologies of transportation and communication. He divides the period into subtopics of time and space, as the major chapters focus on changing ways people experienced past, present, future, speed, form, distance, and direction. Two concluding chapters examine how the changing experiences and ideas about time and space in the prewar period shaped World War I--first a chapter on "The Temporality of the July Crisis" and a final chapter, "The Cubist War." The overall aregument is that these new technologies forced a new set of values on the Western world, one which Kern calls a rehierarchization of earlier cultural forms. Kern sees these new technologies as moving society in the direction of greater democracy, a leveling of older aristocratic hegemony, and a secularization of life and thought.

Stephen Kern conducts an innovative examination of the way in which new perceptions of time and space influenced ideas, philosophies, art forms, behavior, politics, and foreign relations. Kern is able to connect such seemingly unrelated topics as the sinking of the RMS Titanic and Friedrich Nietzche's evaluation of the present (an approach he calls "conceptual distance") to create a better understanding of the changing attitudes concerning time and space at the turn of the twentieth century. As Kern points out, the study of such an array of diverse cultural elements in terms of temporal and spatial experiences is essential because time and space are universal. All peoples experience time and space. Ultimately, he explains how the changing notions of time and space culminated in the diplomatic breakdown which led to the First World War.

This study is very intriguing, but there are weaknesses in his many conclusions. On the cinema, for example, certainly, it was exciting for viewers to see, for the first time, a man running backwards on the screen; however, it is difficult to take from such experiences the assertion that viewers changed their attitudes regarding time outside the theatre. Although some memebers of the audience indeed ducked at the sight of an oncoming locomotive on the screen, one must assume that viewers were able to distinguish between what they saw in the theatres and their experiences in real life. More convincing is Kern's argument that the cinema promoted a sense of temporal world unity (displaying a global sense of time through newsreels, etc.).

His main argument regarding the July crisis is also a little weak. Briefly, Kerns maintains that the preoccupation with speed (especially with the fast, impersonal telegraph) caused diplomacy to fail due to rapid, ill-considered responses to events (the assassiantion of Archduke Ferdinand) and the short time limit given to the Serbian government to respond to Austria's ultimatum. Certainly there were failures in diplomacy before the telegraph. Moreover, it could be argued that the telegraph had the potential of making accidental conflicts less likely than before because it allowed for immediate decisions to be made by governments at home rather than by military officers and soldiers abroad (i.e. the Cuban Missile Crisis, although this was--of course--outside of Kern's period of study). It is also a little hard to swallow that the wonderful technological, philosophical, cultural advances and changes of this period were steering the world to an irreversible path of destruction.

Despite these weaknesses, this work is a must have for students of this period because it covers such a broad range of topics and links them into an intriguing and ambitious theory. It really prompted me to think about this period (my favorite period of history) with a very broad brush.

The Culture of Time and Space was a pioneering book when it first came out and it is wonderful to see how elegantly it has aged. These connections among the sciences and the arts, and among the arts themselves, were mostly new when Kern first published this essay, and are still too rarely made, even those between literature and painting that we find discreetly suggested by the cover of almost every serious book these days. Best of all, those relationships really exist. The connection between Picasso's cubist representation of space (beginning in 1907) and Einstein's four-dimensional representation of space-time (which depends on the Relativity paper of 1905 and an insight about gravity Einstein had in 1907) is entirely real. This is history, not an "alternative reading," and it is intellectual/cultural history at its best. For me it was the inspiration to finish writing a book of my own, and it's a pleasure to welcome it back to print.

Interdisciplinary, or more often cross-disciplinary, studies of culture are always facinating examinations of zeitgeists even if conclusions are stretched and the approach is highly selective. The influence of science on art, and the use of art in science; the experiments in literature; and the changes in public perception with advances in medicine and technology have been behaviors and traits for the crucible by such authors as Leonard Shlain [Art & Physics; Paralllel visions in space, time, and light] and Afred Appel, Jr. [Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce]. Focusing on the very rich 40-year period at the turn of the 19th century, Stephen Kern presents the revolution in communication and transportion that transformed people's lives and altered perspectives and perceptions. As in our time the internet and mobile telephone have been an immensely powerful social force, allowing us to observe and participate in distant events as they occur, so too was the development and spread of the telephone and wireless telegraph (radio), medical X-rays, cinema, the phonograph, and the bicycle, automobile, and airplane between 1880 and 1918 (the end of World War I). Kern largely restricts his theme to time and space and offers examples of repercussions in the visual and musical arts and in literature and philosophy.

This scholarly book is for the academic and educated general reader and makes reference to classical and refined cultural media [Proust, Kafka, William James, Henri Bergson, Cezanne, et al.) rather than the popular, with the exception of cinema and phonograph. Nevertheless, it is a stimulating intellectual history whose lessons are easily applied in contemporary society. Kern provides myriad amazing facts, much like the brushed dabs of paint by Monet in an Impressionist painting, of how standards and institutions that we take for granted actually came into being. That period certainly was exciting and highly creative in all realms of endeavor from the arts and sciences to business and medicine, from entertainment to philosophy. It is a shame that Kern does not convey the joy, with perhaps the exception of his review on speed affecting everyone's life, but I still found his book to be a very worthwhile, indeed important, read. (As a published historian of microbiology, which developed during this period, I found Kern's discussion of adjacent cultural fields particularly helpful.)

kern has great insights about a fascinating chunk of history. if social history or turn of the century inventions sound at all interesting, this book is extremely thought provoking.

he analysis the social effects of the industrial revolution. his thesis that we are psychologically jarred by the new inventions (such as the fact the ringing of the phone interrupts our trains of thought), comes off as a bit old fashioned. but the idea is one we should keep in mind as the future unfolds.

and anyway, the bulk of the book talks about such interesting ideas that it's a fantastic synthesizing backdrop of the era. as technology progresses, it may seem out-of-date, but this is a classic to understanding why that period is so unique.

Stephen Kern read a lot, writing his book. His study is a conglomerate of the most important authors, sociologists and philosophers focusing on the shift of time and space concepts in modern Europe. The broadness of his knowledge is the lack of his book, because it is nothing else than a masterwork of the superficial. Combine a little bit of time-philosophy in the novels of Proust, a little bit of brainstorming (Molly Bloom) in Joyce, combined with Einstein, James, Husserl (!), Bergson, Ibsen, etc. and you have a good pseudo-cultural-philosophic consommé. The book is mixture of articles you find in encyclopedias. I am very disappointed, especially with Harvard University Press.