Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914 (1983/2003) is an enormously rewarding book. A few highlights.

In his introduction, Kern carefully examines how technological and cultural developments interacted during his time period. He eschews “technological determinism in cultural history” in favor of a nuanced spectrum of interactions. At times, technical developments directly affected culture: “James Joyce was fascinated by the cinema, and in Ulysses he attempted to recreate in words the montage techniques used by early film makers.” In other cases, technology provide “metaphors and analogies for changing structures of life and thought,” as, for example, in the use of x-ray technology as a metaphor for “a general reappraisal of what is properly inside and what is outside in the body.”

In his research, Kern discovered that some analogies were more than analogies. Seeing camouflaged trucks, Picasso commented to Gertrude Stein that Cubism invented camouflage. Picasso didn’t know it, but “the man who invented camouflage was inspired by the Cubists and explicitly acknowledged that debt.”

Kern’s first chapter examines the artistic, philosophical, and sometimes scientific protest against uniform “public time,” regulated by clocks and schedules. In reaction to the Newtonian idea that “conceived of time as a sum of infinitesimally small but discrete units,” a conception reinforced by the clock’s “audible reminders of the atomistic nature of time,” painters played with depicting clocks with effaced numbers, depicting a fragmented rather than a uniform iron-cage time.

Or, painters depicted clocks in ways that contested the dominant conception of time. Kern’s summary of Dali’s Persistence of Memory is superb: “One [clock] is hanging from a tree in a reminder that the duration of an event may be stretched in memory. Another with a fly on it suggests that the object of memory is some kind of carrion that decays as well as melts. The third deformed watch curls over a hybrid embryonic form - symbol of the way life distorts the geometrical shape and mathematical exactness of mechanical time. The one unmelted watch is covered with ants that seem to be devouring it as it devours the time of our lives.”

Another form of protest came from philosophers (like Bergson) who represented time as a flux, or writers (like Edouard Dujardin and Joyce) who represented an alternative “private time” of consciousness that refused to submit to the uniformity of clock time.

Technological developments - the electric light and cinematic technologies - challenged the commonsense assumption that time was irreversible, and artists exploited the potentials of these technologies: “One day in 1896 [French cinema pioneer George Melies] was filming a street scene at the Place de l’Opera and his camera jammed. After a few moments he got it going and continued filming, and when he projected the entire sequence it created the illusion that an omnibus had suddenly changed into a hearse.” He began using the technique consciously, and in The Vanishing Lady (1896) “a skeleton suddenly becomes a living woman, implying both a jump in time and its reversal.” Film editors began to cut, backtrack, and move forward to show earlier time later in the film, or simultaneous action. They ran films backwards, leading a critic to marvel at the effects: “boys fly out of water feet first and land on the diving board, firemen carry their victims back into a burning building, and eggs unscramble.”

Writers adopted these filmic techniques. Virginian Woolf said that writers should resist “the formal railway line of the sentence.” And so much for Aristotle: Thomas Hardy commented on the new uses of time in literature, “They’ve changed everything no. We used to think there was a beginning and a middle and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory.”