Theory and Context Lecture 3

QUIZ

What significance do the following series of slides have to today’s theme – the Second World War and the

immediate post war period that followed?

Source: Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, 3. Auflage (Munich: Franz Eher, 1937

Image A: The ‘lebensborn’ programme Image B: Seventies supergroup ABBA

“An air raid is approaching Everytown, take cover, take cover…!”

Still from Things to Come (1936) – adapted from the book of the same name by H.G. Wells

Hue and Cry dir. Charles Crichton 1947

Theory and Context Term 2, Week 3

Plus ça change...part 2

Some key ideas, individuals, and events that shaped the 1940s and

beyond

Utopian Visions

Utopian visions…“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

But Nazi ideology

…founded in utopian ideals

"We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”

F.T. Marinetti The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909

George Orwell, 1984

HG Wells (1866 - 1946)

“T]he ethical system which will dominate the world-state will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity.... And for the rest - those swarms of black and brown and yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency? Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go.”

Sir Francis Galton and Eugenics

"It has now become a serious necessity to better the breed of the human race. The average citizen is too base for the everyday work of modern civilization."

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1921)

In We, human imagination - a threat because of its power to imagine alternatives is eradicated through ‘fantasioptomy’

George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”George Orwell 1984

"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1

The ambiguity of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1931) -

Utopia, dystopia or satire?

The philosophical current of existentialism…

Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,” “existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates—notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus—existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Jean-Paul Sartre

On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of

psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of

the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as

matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of

them. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Existential philosophy

Key themes:DreadBoredomAlienationThe AbsurdFreedom CommitmentNothingness

… Ultimately the search for a new categorical framework together with its governing norm

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Monuments to Freedom

Although the principles of Socialist Realism had been declared in the 1930s, Soviet architecture was not unchanged by war. In fact, a ‘new’ building type, the vysotnye zdaniia (tall building) was introduced in the 1940s an expression of the triumphalism of the late Stalin period. The Soviet Union had saved the world from Fascism, now its capital was to become the hub of a new Empire that would draw admiring visitors from across the globe. A set of eight buildings, ostensibly initiated to commemorate Moscow’s eighth centenary, was announced by a Council of Ministers’ proclamation in 1947. They were to be ‘in terms of size, technology and architecture, a new form of construction, seen for the first time in our country’.

Crowley, C. and Pavitt, J.(2008) Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970, V&A Publishing

K. Petrov Glory to the Great Stalin, the Architect of Communism

Le Corbusier Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles 1947 - 52

Tadeusz Trepkowski – poster promoting the World Congress of intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wroclaw, 1948