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Hulme Speculations

Modern Art and Its Philosophy

A blatant rip-off and extension of Wilhelm Worringer’s dissertation, Abstraction and Empathy (1908)

• Compares impersonal Byzantine art to organic Renaissance art
• Finds out that art exists not for mimesis or representation, but to make people happy, based on the culture’s psychological attitude towards the outside world or Nature
  • Byzantine (and third-world art): agony of the third dimension
    • Distrust of the outside world, skeptical and fearful
    • Because world is unclear, you art must be very clear-cut and geometric
    • Style helps to make sense out of things
  • Renaissance
    • A culture that is happy in its life makes art that is organic
    • You see yourself in nature and celebrate Nature therefore
• Art history is a vacillation between these two modes, back and forth

Okay, now back to Hulme

• Introductory Remarks
  • We need to develop a literary criticism appropriate to this particular age (76)
  • We need to look beyond our own narrow idea of beauty: beyond classical European art
  • Changes in art are the first sign of a change in cultural world-view
  • New world view is pessimistic, antihuman, against progress (93)
• Thesis
  • Hulme adapts Worringer for England at his present time and accelerates what Worringer says lasts centuries to what only takes half a century (103): a tipping back of the scales to the other mode of art
  • Our old art:
    • Renaissance humanism
    • Vital, organic, satisfied with the world
  • Our new art:
    • Geometric, angular
    • Anti-humanist
    • Bleak
    • Expresses intensity
• Why Geometric Art?
  • A “refuge from flux and impermanence”
  • Escape the contingency of circumstance into the relaxation of necessity
• The New Artist
  • Loves the austere and mechanical
  • Addicted to the clear-cut
• Effects
  • Critique of modernity: “state of slush” as Renaissance philosophy decays

Romanticism and Classicism

• Romanticism is exhausted now, at the end of its life span
  • Too high-falutin and prone to excess and exaggeration
  • A revival of classicism will soon occur and is starting now
    • Why? World is hurly-burly, so we need some clarity and sincerity
• Decenters the human subject
  • Finding beauty in the “small, dry things”
    • Fancy superior to imagination
  • Leads him to anti-humanism: sovereignty of objects at least equal to that of human
• Takes spirituality out of art
  • Object equal to subject
• Political connections
  • Romanticism believes that man is by nature good, but then gets corrupted
  • Classicism that man is born fixed and finite and needs lots of help
• Goal for poetry
  • Accurate description, without vagueness
  • Without the infinite dragged in
  • Images are the essence of intuitive language
  • Cultivate detached interest

Bergson’s Theory of Art

• Bergson’s explanation of the mind makes it easier to talk about art without too much cumbersome philosophical baggage
  • Art as unforeseeable and spontaneous
  • Cf stuff about creation within time
• Concept of intuition breaks down barrier between artist and object
  • Intuition: metaphysics; a method of being inside the object, not outside of it analytically like science is
    • You become the object
  • Go past stock perceptions and fixed habits
  • Necessity and utility make you not see things clearly, but in terms of use
• Art: discovery and disentanglement of objects through clearer perception
  • Dive down into the flux to come up with a new shape
  • Bringing your new shape to the surface will tell the whole world about your new find
    • Thus, the artist’s individual vision becomes the vision for everybody to have
      • For artists reveal something about the way all our minds work
      • Even though superficially the artists look like exceptions and special
• Why should the artist do so?
  • The mind is so full of flux and continually waving about that we need some stability

Interesting Themes

• 84: problem with periodization
• 158: typology is the shallow shorthand of the intellect
• 254: hist mat – as Sorel’s method
• 96-7, 104, 106: mechanical art, artist versus engineer
  • Necessity seen as bad when it’s a political ideology
  • Yet it is great when necessity is revealed in art
• 98: history of art has dialectical movement
• 147: art frees you from use value
• 150, 162: Hulme’s medical procedure, for unlike Bergson, Hulme and Worringer suspicious of the flux and wants to rescue you from it
• 155: rarity and accident (the artist)
• 158: the enemy is Utilitarian Thinking
• 165: a big “screw you” to deconstruction: prose knows it works with only counters: there’s no agony over linguistic arbitrariness; only structuralism
• Intuition as the anti-mediation? (163: direct communication of art)
• At every turn he tries to separate himself from hist mat or just materialism

Quotes

• From “Modern Art and Its Philosophy”
  • “Before Copernicus, man was not the centre of the world; after Copernicus, he was.”
  • “that flat and insipid optimism which…has finally culminated in the state of slush in which we have the misfortune to live.”
• From “Bergson’s Theory of Art”
  • Which describes how the artist rescues the mind from its hazy state, its normal wave-filled muddle, and leads it into a clarity, even if temporary, by creating a fresh perception
  • “You could define art, then, as a passionate desire for accuracy”