Die Krise der Moderne und der auf sie antwortende Modernismus markieren den Übergang vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert. Im Ersten Weltkrieg und den sich an ihn anschließenden Revolutionen manifestierten sie sich auf dramatische Weise. Dieses Buch geht den Beziehungen zwischen den neuen sozialen und politischen Entwürfen dieser Zeit - Planungsdenken, Neuer Mensch, totaler Staat - und den künstlerisch-intellektuellen Avantgarden nach, vom italienischen Futurismus über das Bauhaus bis hin zu deren sowjetischen Pendants. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Maschine, die zum Schlüsselbegriff des Modernismus wurde.

Hersteller:
Campus Verlag GmbH
info@campus.de
Werderstr. 10
DE 69469 Weinheim

Monica Cioli war Fellow des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom und hat an der Universität Trient gelehrt. Maurizio Ricciardi ist Professor an der Universität Bologna. Pierangelo Schiera ist Emeritus an der Universität Trient.

The Individual and the New Man. An Introduction Monica Cioli, Maurizio Ricciardi, Pierangelo Schiera The traces of modernism that we will discuss here are not limited to the artistic, literary, or philosophical movements that developed from the end of the 1800s to the Second World War. Although these too are significant and worthy of consideration, we believe that the category of modernism can also be used in a more general sense, above all to designate a new cultural climate that, while finding particular expression in the above-mentioned movements, also had a political sphere of reference, in both an ideological and an institutional sense. Thus our discourse regards the uses that the concept of the modern had in the turbulent passage from modernity to modernization, which saw major changes in the West in the fields of economy, society and politicsduring and after the age of transition that Reinhart Koselleck had called the Sattelzeit. Everything was then translated into the full-blown superiority of the culture and civilization attained and produced by cultured and civilized stateswhich Karl Lamprecht and others, recording the künstlerischer Charakter der Zeit, called Kulturstaaten. This historical-universal vision would be counterbalanced by Oswald Spenglers formidable proposal of the decline of the West. Our aim when talking of traces of modernism is not to propose a new and different periodization through which to read the motives and the structures of political modernity or of art at the time. We are not talking about modernism as an epoch that was different to or succeeded the modern age (Neuzeit) or the modern. Likewise, Christof Dipper, using the category of the modern to describe the dominant models of order that started to take root in the second half of the 1800s, claims that he is not proposing a new name for what is otherwise called contemporary history. We argue that modernism doesnt simply emerge through the ways in which consolidated traditionsusually described as pre-modernare called into question, but also as a constant redefinition of modern tradition. The term modernism encompasses a wide range of things that are all closely connected to the semantics of the term crisis. The traces of modernism show the intensification and modification of processes that were already present in the classic age of modernity, but which are now exposed to the persistent rhythm of modernization. We arent aiming to present a complete picture of these processes, but rather to identify some important traces of our present within them. First, the traces that we are trying to show are not limited to the European experience and are not confined within national borders but express a definitive connection between Europe and the United States on the one hand and Europe and Russia on the other. Unlike the modern they are not therefore the expression of a European self-observation, but rather the increasingly evident signs of a destructuring of the European framework. Some of these traces were already present at the beginning of the modern age, therefore just after the epochal shift between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that had redefined the political, institutional, and cultural order of Europe. The affirmation of the individual, but also the social necessity of disciplining individuals, was a process that coincided with the birth of modernity. The period we cover in this book saw an acceleration of these processes of individualization and at the same time their more or less radical critique, to the point of searching for a new man. On a similar macro level, alongside efforts to reorganize the major powers at playfrom the economic powers of a new capitalism based on interests, to the political powers of the bureaucracy of the administrative mega-statesthere arose the partly late-romantic, partly neo-scientific idea of a new conception of the world. This conception was released from the overly ideological dualism between individual and society and was instead inspired by the figure of the new man, able to live in a future that was already present in the democratic dimension, but which would soon take on a totalitarian hue. Thus concepts such as modernism and modernity are useful, considering the latter as the figure that for centuries has characterized the pre-history and history of man as individual, liberal and then constitutional, free but with class belonging. Modernism would instead cover the attempt to overcomeif not overturnall of this in a totalizing vision, based on solid technological premises and promises, which were relatively indifferent to the beliefsor mythsof the individualistic Prometheism of the liberal-constitutional era or of the dialectic of enlightenment. The totalitarian political discourse was encouraged, in a triangulation whose aims were already set: from the arrival of the masses on the political scene; the organization of the old civil society into elites; and the projection of elitist criteria onto the masses; to the search for the new man. Once the liberal individual, and their rights were in crisis, it became fundamental to create the unknown subject, the new man. Perhaps it is too simple to say that the avant-garde period coincides with the end of the individual epoch (that started with the French Revolution) and the beginning of the epoch of sociality, but there was certainly a common movement which dragged the old idea of modernity towards a freer and more reductive modernism. The potential connection between sociology and the artistic avant-garde has perhaps never been on the agenda, but it is one of the issues we raise here. The problem that unites classical sociology is precisely this redefinition of the individual in the face of the radical transformations brought on by capitalism. The individual is clearly the controversial and constant centre of French sociology: from the socially disciplined individual of Emile Durkheim to the Homme total of Marcel Mauss. Classic German sociology has been rightly said to remain vehemently faithful to the individual, with this tension embodied in a particularly characteristic and interesting way in the work of Georg Simmel, who makes an intriguing analogy with geometry to account for the interactions or reciprocal actions of individuals. This geometry of individuals finds another analogy in the Kunstaustellung, which Simmel considers to be Miniaturbild unserer Geistesströmungen and the symbol of our transitional epoch. At the base of Simmelian sociological aesthetics is a constant attempt to resolve the problem of the multiplicity of forms of modern culture as expressions of individuality that cannot ever claim absolute legitimacy. In 1901, Georg Simmel noted that the concept of the individual was in crisis due to the presence of two individualisms that were beginning to collide, having different conceptions of the relationship between freedom and equality. The historical concept of the individual was constituted just before the universal claims of these two principles. Freedom historically signified the unlimited deployment of ones own individual capacities, but this at the same time entailed the tendential and increasingly differentiated development of different personalities. It thus entered into an increasingly evident contradiction with equality. It is precisely this collision that resulted in the declaration of the principle of brotherhood, in order to recuperate, at least on an ethical plane, that which the conflict between individual affirmation and its own universalization had put into crisis on the political plane. In the course of the 1800s, however, this ethical moment assumed an organizational, if not administrative, form that aimed at the depersonalization of relations that could not be trusted simply to the division of labour. It showed the necessity of cooperation in pre-eminently organizational terms, in such a way as to leave individuality free of a...