Sound and the Cultural Politics of Time in the Avant-garde: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Bergsonism

Mansell, James G.

Abstract

Writing on the eve of the First World War, the French philosopher Julien Benda concluded that music had become ‘a profound signature of the modern spirit’.1 According to Benda, this obsession was responsible for the anti-intellectual culture of modernity and, as Wyndham Lewis put it in Time and Western Man (1927), for the rise of a ‘Time-mind’.2 Set against the ‘spatializing’ effects of the ‘plastic or the visual intelligence’, the time-mind prefers the ‘flux’ of sensation to the clarity of the intellect (TWM xix). Lewis agreed with Benda that the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was responsible for a new obsession with time and temporality, and for a perverse re-ordering of the Western sensory hierarchy in which hearing came to be valued over seeing.3 Lewis suggested that, against the visual objectivity of science and the written word, Bergsonians privileged the imprecision of auditory experience. Those whom he counted as followers of Bergson – including the Impressionists, the Futurists and the Cubists – may not always have worked in aural mediums, but their guiding principle was fundamentally anti-visual. In addition, these movements were the product, according to Lewis, of a ‘musicalized’ society that was decadent and degenerate in equal measure (TWM 31).

Citation

Mansell, J. G. (2011). Sound and the Cultural Politics of Time in the Avant-garde: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Bergsonism. In A. Gasiorek, A. Reeve-Tucker, & N. Waddell (Eds.), Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (111-126). Routledge

• Online Publication Date: Feb 11, 2016
• Publication Date: 2011
• Deposit Date: Feb 26, 2020
• Journal: Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity
• Pages: 111-126
• Book Title: Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity
• Chapter Number: 6
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3184255