Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality

The Modern and its hidden predecessor, the Neoclassical

Modern

One of the conclusions of this book is that there was a time known as the Neoclassical that was between the Romantic and the Modern. One looks for the pattern one sees immediately the difference between the Romantic and the Neoclassical: the Romantic was overloaded with expression, and this not only took in art but politics, and even science.

The Neoclassical and the Modern

On the evening of the 12^th Of September in 1910, Mahler raised his baton and began to conduct his 8^th Symphony. It was preceded by a written article by Richard Specht which was a tribute to the line of Richard Wagner’s summary of a “musical drama” taking the neoclassic as its baseline:

Shortly before the Munich premiere of the Eighth Symphony, the indefatigable Mahler disciple Richard Specht published an article designed to show that the gigantic work was a musical and spiritual culmination of all the composer's previous symphonies. “Mahler's path resembles one of those dizzyingly high tower staircases whose spiral turns always lead the climber to view earth from the same point, except that having clambered another hundred steps up, he always looks down from an ever-higher level.” For Specht, the panorama was personal and religious: looking back over the periods of Mahler's life and achievement, he beheld the composer's initial struggle with “the world and the ego, God and Nature,” his transcendence of the everyday world, his ascent into the realm of spirit, and his sovereign mastery of polyphony beyond “mere” harmony, “until the mighty dome of the 'Eighth' vaults over the entire structure.”ⁱ

The massive quote is needed because in a few pages, the author realizes that the Modern is present in such objects as Cubism. That is we have a Neoclassical symphonist operating one of the pinnacle works of his era, at the same time that others are rejecting the very tenants of that movement in favor of alternative ways of judging what is an aesthetic in Art. We have already seen that art is one of the first tremors of a new movement the other one being industry which has individual entrepreneurs taking a different approach. We can say that artistic freedom and money start the process of differentiating the new way of thinking.

It is important to realize that the automobile in the hands of Henry Ford was as revolutionary as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Both changed the matter of organization of the creator and the viewer. The viewer of the automobile is the driver. Henry Ford did not invent the first automobile but he made the first practical inexpensive automobile that took over the roads and changed the laws. In the end, Chagall paint the ceiling of Palais Garnier in 1963 and revealed it in 1964.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 1906

Earlier on I stated that the end of the battle of the Marne was the turning point for the Modern. This is because one of the keys to the Neoclassical order was the dictum of the short war. The coming era did not have that problem because it took the inventions to sustain grueling warfare through years and would then search for the means to control them. The idea of statistics, in the mathematical and through the hole punch system which revolutionized taking of a census was the gateway to such information and the internal police became the gateway to control. And this would be combined with an unwavering loyalty to the state. This was true not only in dictatorships but in states which held enormous power over their people which included the United Kingdom, the Republic of France, and the United States. This has been noted, for example:

Almost all commentators, no matter how critically they have viewed home-front repressions of the World War I period, have suggested no more than an accidental coincidence between popular excesses and national policy. Instances of brutal vigilantism derived, in such analyses, not from the intent of legislators but from the intensity of public zeal.ⁱⁱ

Which made Pres. Wilson succumbed to the degrees of the constitutional order and submitted to Congress:

Under these pressures, Wilson approved a draft sedition bill prepared by Justice Department officials, which Congress enacted into law in May 1918. Taken together, the Espionage Act and its 1918 amendment, known popularly as the Sedition Act, provided more latitude to federal suppression of dissent than America had known in its history.ⁱⁱⁱ

Even the libertarian Wilson realized that speech during the war was problematic and that the test was with the state. In times of war, individuals wanted the state to provide protection and give them the duty to ferret out “the other” however it was defined. What this new system did was take advantage of this fact and organize citizens into units. That means it takes advantage of the security dilemma to reinforce its own legitimacy. It is even argued by some that the road to war comes from internal divisions expressed in outward forms.^iv

There had been Modern movements before, but they all had one thing in common with each other: the person had to want to participate. But a war forces everyone to participate in its struggles whether or not they want to. The line then is the moment that the new system of logic forces people to comply. With them, it is a telegraph message, the defeat of an army, the explosion of a strong force, or the introduction of color and television. This line is not that the old system is completely destroyed, in fact, many people who cling to the old system will still make decisions that are important, but it is the point where the new system gathers together people who do not willingly want a new system but are forced by circumstance.

However, a mathematical version is needed to fill out the entire structure in a sigmoidal curve. What was it about the first battle of the Martin which sets off the destruction of neoclassical command and the gradual introduction of a modern command?

It must be first shown that it was after the first battle of the Marne that the break from neoclassical is first seen. Then it must be shown that after the First Battle of the Marne, a series of events are triggered which makes it impossible to return to the neoclassical order. Remember that the battle was already marked as important in the history of the war. The introduction of The Battle of the Marne: Myths and Reality of Germany's "Fateful Battle" begins this way:

The Battle of the Marne (6-10 September 1914) has acquired an almost mythical status in Germany's history of the First World War. While by no means the most traumatic event in terms of German casualties or territorial losses (the Battles of Langemarck, Verdun, and the Somme must surely rank more highly in these regards), it has been seen as the key event that stopped the German deployment plan in its tracks. It meant the end of Germany's chances of a quick victory in the West. Success against France, within forty days of mobilization, was the main requirement of Germany's only deployment plan (usually called the "Schlief fen Plan"2), and it was the only hope for Germany to be victorious against her numerically superior enemies on two fronts. Such a quick victory became impos sible following the Battle of the Marne.^v

So it is no great stretch to say that the battle was known as an important feature. The question is whether it has a larger significance than merely the halt of a rapid victory. In the immediate aftermath of the battle there was a somber mood on the German’s part, the words of one Karl von Wenning, who was at the time the Bavarian military plenipotentiary, head this to say:

It is as quiet as a mortuary in the school building in Luxembourg—one tip-toes around, the General Staff officers rush past me with their eyes down-cast—best not to address them, not to ask.^vi

So at least the idea that this was an important battle that failed was the way that the German high command saw the state of affairs. Later, in the 2000’s it was called the “most important land battle of the 20th century.”^vii But it was not the enormous setback that would later be placed on it at the time: it was clearly a setback but there seemed that were options. This is part of the point of a Cultural System: it seemed in the Cultural System at the time that this was only a setback, and the old cultural system decided to put aside the concept of a limited war and double down.

However, what became important was that it sat off of kilter the idea of a short victory as would be the case in the Franco-Prussian War. But remember, in the neoclassical era short victories were basically the only kind of victories because of the lightning strike and small armies that were deployed. This is the first clue that a marker had been created: on one hand they needed a short sharp victory and on the other hand, the loss to the Germans of Marne required that they commit for the long term if they wanted to achieve a victory. In other words, while the German high command did not realize it they were caught in a bind in that the only way to win a victory in neoclassical terms was to have a short war. This meant that there was a new era even if the German high command did not realize it.

But it was the response from the French and English which shows that there was not only a change in direction from the German side but from the English and French. This change was because while the German forces were defeated they were still on French soil and could not drive a hard organ to get all of the German armed forces out of France. This meant that both the German and French high commands executed a “Race to the Sea” which meant that the trenches were formed all along the French/German front. In other words, the defeat at the Marne was simply the first step to making the Great War into the Great War: because the Franco-Prussian war was a war based on maneuvering and speed of armies that led to a short war but in the “Race to the Sea” the Great War was instead a myre of trenches which made rapid maneuvering almost impossible.

So it is not merely the response of the German high command but all parties to the results that changed the war from an event to a change in Cultural Systems. But again they did not know this at the time because reasoning backwards as to the fundamental assumptions of statecraft was simply not possible in the space of the time allotted.

The retreat by the two armies seems to have been ordered by Colonel Richard Hentsch, seemingly without getting his superior’s permission. But it should be noted that the internal chaos of the German high command was palpable even to the field officers.

To turn this into a mathematic we need to realize that the “Race to the Sea” is the Hopf Bifurcation because each side must counter the other. This means that there must be a third point where the vectors must pass. This means that the imbalance is caused by a third point, and we must simply find that third point and flatten the spectrum. At this point, it is obvious that the defeat in the first battle of the Marne is at that point. Before the first title of the Marne, there is very little trench warfare and afterwards, on the France/Germany front, the race to the seat creates the trench network.

The orders to create trenches immediately followed the realization of the German high command that rapid war was not possible and this comes from the German high command realizing that the First Battle of the Marne as been a failure. The only necessity then is to create the original order that sets off the Race to the Sea. The quotes that are available that this is exactly what happened:

German troops, who had dug in following their retreat from the First Battle of the Marne, decimated British troops attacking across open ground. Lacking any cover, the order was given to dig in and the ‘Race to the Sea began’. Within a month, trenches snaked all the way to the Belgian coast at Nieuport, while to the east, the trenches were continued in 1915 down to the Swiss border. This deadlock, which was effectively to last until 1918, led o a range of attempts to break through the enemy lines.^viii

The neoclassical was an era where the limited war was the key to gaining and maintaining territory, which means that they could beat the beginnings of: the Neoclassical to the two wars which were not limited: the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Both of these conclusively demonstrated to diplomats, statesmen, and politicians as well as the generals under their command that an unlimited war spelled disaster for both of the sides that engaged in it. it meant that all of the wars of the neoclassical were limited because of to examples that began the period.

This means that we have the pair of unstable/stable Hopf and the ρ that generates them. The orders to dig trenches are the factors with the resulting trench as the first derivative. The end of race to the sea ends at the unstable point but continues as a stable point until hostilities are ended. The exercise of do how to do this is left as an exercise for the reader.

i Painter, Karen, ed. Mahler and His World. Vol. 49. Princeton University Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14163ng. 127.

ii Hyman, Harold M. 1959. “Amateur Spycatchers of World War I.” In To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History, 1st ed., 267–97. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.8306230.15. Called Hyman. 267.

iii Hyman, 268.

iv For eample, Holsti, K. J. “War, Peace, and the State of the State.” International Political Science Review / Revue Internationale de Science Politique 16, no. 4 (1995): 319–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1601353.

v Mombauer, Annika. “The Battle of the Marne: Myths and Reality of Germany’s ‘Fateful Battle’1.” The Historian 68, no. 4 (2006): 747–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24453745. Called Mombauer, 747.

vi Mombauer, 758.

vii Herwig 2009, xi-xii.

viii Banks, Iain. 2014. “Digging in the Dark: The Underground War on the Western Front in World War I.” Journal of Conflict Archaeology 9, no. 3: 156–76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48601759. 161.