Modernist writers and artists modeled creative work on machine rationality.
Evidence
One wing of modernism ap pealed to. the image of rationality incorporated in the machine, the factory, the power of contemporary technology, or the city as a ‘living machine.’ Ezra Pound had already advanced the thesis that language should conform to machine efficiency and, as Tichi (1987) has observed, modernist writers as diverse as Dos Passos, Hemingway, and William Carlos Williams modelled their writing on exactly that proposition. Williams specifically held, for example, that a poem is nothing more or less than ’ a machine made of words.’ And this was the theme that Diego Rivera celebrated so vigorously in his extra ordinary Detroit murals and which became the leitmotif of many progressive mural painters in the United States during the depression (plate 1.5). — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 240
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 832; Function followed from experimental form, not the other way round, in modernism. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 93; Early modernists saw industrial city life as demanding a fundamentally new art — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 143 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows
#qualifies(0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 832 - Function followed from experimental form, not the other way round, in modernism.
#expands(0.72) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 93 - Early modernists saw industrial city life as demanding a fundamentally new art
#corroborates(0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 143 - Adequate modernist criticism must read the economy both in and from the artwork
#expands(0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 663