| The dissertation seeks to develop the relation between certain vitalist or immanentist models and the specific philosophical, scientific and aesthetic Modernisms that emerged in the early 20th century. It deals principally with Einsteinian relativity (1907), the technical writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1910-14), the townplan schema of the architect Antonio Sant'Elia (1913-14), the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1896-1922), and the writings of Franz Kafka (1904-1924). In physics, the demise of absolute time is shown to give way to a theory of the "field" which supersedes the classical notion of space as a substratum against which things occur, and gives rise to a physics of the "event.";Nowhere were these concepts of field and event so profoundly, and so early, deployed as in the theoretical writings of Boccioni and, in the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia. Sant'Elia's massively complex scheme is the first to give concrete expression--aesthetic or otherwise--to the new notions of time and space developed by 19th and early 20th century science. It is also the first schema within aesthetic Modernism to have elaborated a theory of nature in which the ground or first principle is seen to reside at the level of its effects, that is, it was the first to have embodied the principle of an immanent cause.;The second part of the dissertation develops these same themes though moves away from the thermodynamic model to adopt the closely related one of Bergsonian duree or virtuality. The objects analysed in this section are the works of Franz Kafka. Kafka's works, despite appearances, manifest a quite coherent cosmology, yet this cosmology can be understood only in relation to a certain type of movement that underlies it. This movement belongs to the realm of what Bergson called the intensive; here movement is caught up in qualitative changes of state, differentiations, and especially individuations. Only this type of movement can account for the appearance or creation of the "new," even if this novelty is of the most troubling, unforeseen kind. Kafka's world is one in constant (qualitative) temporal flux, even if its appearance is one of (quantitative) spatial stasis--in fact, it is literally defined in terms of metamorphosis, singularity and flight. It is this peculiar (Kafkaesque) instability of Being that I to identify as the positive, even affirmative principle throughout the works. |
