4 The result of these developments is the “split personality” of the modern mind, which separates thinking and feeling. Important achievements had no bearing on inner life, and mechanization took command. For Giedion, the divorce of thinking and feeling is rooted in the unevenness of scientific and artistic progress in the early nineteenth century, when feeling could not compete with the pace of thinking, which was advancing rapidly, and scientific achievements were regarded as neutral in terms of their emotional meaning. Today’s painter does not understand contemporary architecture, and the poet ignores the music of his day. Giedion claims that a great physicist will not be able to understand a painting that equals his own ideas within a different form. It is a time in which a physical theory does not have an artistic equivalent, in which scientists and artists have finally lost touch with each other-though they may share a contemporary language in their works, they cannot recognize it in a field other than their own. It is a time in which thinking and feeling oppose each other, a time in which scientific discovery is of no significance.
Giedion’s theoretical work began with an observation of his time as being schizoid, divorcing technology and culture, or, more precisely, science and art. Above: Responses of the frog's leg to stimulation by an electric current. Below: Coagulation of the muscle and gradual loss of function as the effect of rising temperature. 3 And it actually is.Įtiennes-Jules Marey, Record of the Movement of a Muscle, as found in Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command. In general, his work might be offensive to contemporary professors. Hans Magnus Enzensberger described his career as “extraordinary”-instead of giving lectures, he visited the Surrealists’ ateliers he was at once a researcher, entrepreneur, technician, journalist, organizer, historian, reporter, and archeologist.
He wanted to be part of it: interpreting the developments in architecture in his own terms, Giedion became an ally-the spokesman and the historian of the modern movement, and even the first secretary-general of the famous Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). When he traveled to Paris in 1925, he was drawn to modern culture as it was reflected in the artistic and architectural avant-gardes. 2 He became familiar with the Weimar Bauhaus in 1923 and read Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, published that year. Born in Bohemia in 1888, Giedion recognized modern architecture as the perfect field to start with as a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin, he immediately recognized that this work would revolutionize the visual culture of the industrial age. For Giedion, who trained as an engineer and an art historian, this was a life’s work. 1] Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).] Naturally, reunion attempts have been brought forward most seriously in the field of architecture. Or, as the Swiss historian Siegfried Giedion put it, the split between feeling and thinking in modernity. For some, this meant the antagonism of German culture and French civilization. The latest attempts to reconcile culture and technology had been preceded-over the last 250 years-by antagonist attempts at playing them off: on the one hand, there was the pessimistic tragedy of culture in a technical world, and, on the other, the optimism of continuous scientific and technological progress. Rather, it is sharp but unstable-it is mobile, flashing here and there between form and function, between architecture and building.
The separation has nothing to do with objects or disciplines, with established criteria or genera, with groups or institutions. This interrelation of culture and technology, however, is actually based on their separation, a border that is-insofar as we can perceive it-fundamental to modernity. Of course, there is an obvious interrelation between culture and technology in terms of method, media, and material, and it is not difficult to identify the technical aspects of texts, or the cultural implications of communication technologies, and so forth.
It is common to describe technology as a cultural practice, or culture as a fabric of interwoven material, intellectual, and social techniques. Today, common sense tells us that the border between technology (formerly known as nature) and culture is a fluid one.
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