Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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all European countries to establish a national repository of their own earliest songs and tales.
In all these narrative expressions—language, myth, song, fairy tale, ballad, dream—social scientists tried to reduce the great and wild variety of creative production into its elemental parts. This kind of early anthropological study acquired the name, quite appropriately, of structuralism, since it attempted to disclose the scaffolding of society, the armature on which every artistic pursuit rested. As its name implies, structuralism purported to uncover essentials or elementals—the defining units of human interaction, across various cultures. The idea spread. Emerging scientists of human behavior, soon to be called social scientists, sifted every human activity and enterprise for its constituent parts, in the desire to reveal the blueprint of the human psyche.
Taking structuralism as a model, for instance, technological advances made it possible to shatter the illusion of activity itself by breaking movement into a series of stills. And one remarkable piece of nineteenth-century technology, cinematography, perfected by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895, exemplified what virtually every scientific invention and innovation attempted to accomplish during the period: to arrest the rush of history and analyze it in a single, understandable unit. Likewise, as experience tried to run away, the camera continually froze it in place. The fin de siècle knew this technological marvel initially in a machine called a stroboscope, part of the burgeoning science of chronophotography. (The Lumières had borrowed from the technology developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1830s for photo reproduction.)
What is myth, after all, but a series of events retold in a fabulous way? What is speaking but the uttering of discrete sounds, which the linguists of this period called phones and later phonemes—sounds that, in the right combination, the mind perceives as words? What is motion but a series of still frames? The century had prepared for such ideas, and the motion picture camera caught on quickly. In less than a year after its introduction, a number of dealers in various European cities began selling the Lumières’ new invention. In Vienna, one of those dealers staged the first public performance of moving pictures on March 22, 1896. Writers began to refer to something called “the age of the cinema” and “the new cult of the cinema.” The world now had something startlingly different—mass entertainment. The novelty not only refused to die out or disappear as nothing more than a fad, it increased in popularity and continues to this day, of course, to grab the imaginations of audiences.
At the end of the century, as philosophers and scientists exhausted their attempts to seize on essential definitions for a world that seemed to be fast slipping away, technology came to the rescue. The camera stanched the hemorrhaging of humanity by making at least one instant of experience permanent. But that technology had another, opposite side, for the photograph left its trace in nothing more substantial than ghostly images—the very same state, ironically, as the disappearing fleshy existence it hoped to record. With motion picture technology, perceiver and perceived came eerily together.
This new technique of reproducing amazingly exact, moving images of objects and people, as one historian of nineteenth-century Vienna puts it, “went hand in hand with a loss of the material, haptic and vital existence.”15 The haptic life—that is, a touching and feeling, fully alive existence—presented itself to people, for the very first time in history, as a choice. In an astonishing historical moment, screen images, only slightly fresher, brighter, and glossier than the original, began to compete with reality for people’s attention. Marx adapted his writing style to counter this draining away of feeling. In 1856, he asks, “the atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?”16 Are we really expected to? Is it possible for us to feel it? With enough wakefulness and awareness, can we really feel it? We are supposed to answer yes, I believe, for one of Marx’s major concerns was to wake people up to their feelings. According to the scholar Marshall Berman, Marx even tailored his writing style to this goal, expressing his ideas “in such intense and extravagant images—abysses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, crushing gravitational force,”17 forcing people to read from their nerve endings out.
Over time, as their experience included less and less of the fleshy original, people would do more than just accommodate themselves to ghostly emanations. They pushed aside the real thing and went for the image. After all, the simulacrum was neater and less messy than the real thing. The U.S. Army made life-sized cardboard cutouts of soldiers serving in Iraq—made from photographs of the real person—to pass out to families, to keep them company while their sons or husbands did battle ten thousand miles away. The Marines could not fashion these so-called Flat Daddies fast enough to keep up with the demand. People in the nineteenth century, just like these contemporary families, were being asked, more and more, to situate themselves within the new world of flattened images, to place their faith in a technology that robbed them of their senses.
Indeed, faith—in its base, religious sense—became an issue, in some ways one of the grandest issues, in the nineteenth century. It started early in the century; we continue to debate its influence today. In the late summer of 1801, some twenty thousand people—young and old, men and women, overwhelmingly white but with a few blacks as well—gathered for what was billed as the largest revival meeting in all history, in Bourbon County, Kentucky. The event became known as the Cane Ridge Revival. Its interest and influence developed over the course of the century, emerging as a politically powerful evangelical wing of Protestantism. The publication of Darwin’s godless theories mid-century gave the movement just the boost it needed to ensure its success, causing it to spread throughout the South and West.
One can trace an almost uninterrupted history of religious fundamentalism from August 6, 1801, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, to the present day. A reemergence of Darwin as a scapegoat for the alleged moral lassitude of the majority of Americans has helped recharge fundamentalism today. We still live, in large part, in a context shaped by the nineteenth century. School boards and legislators and clergy argue the case for evolution or creationism with great, if not greater, conviction and rancor than in the nineteenth century. And, repeating conditions in the nineteenth century, technology directs a larger and larger share of our lives, serving to intensify the debate. Intelligent design, creationism soft-pedaled, vies now with evolutionary theory for space in school curricula—a continuation, in other words and terms, of the old nineteenth-century struggle to understand how the world exactly works.
The Indo-European family of languages, the structural components of myths, the phonetic patterns of speech; other innovations of the period such as the Braille reading system, the gestures of sign language, and the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet; and, perhaps most important, the fundament of God’s creation—all these undertakings and endeavors left their trace, a distinct and basic pattern that, like footprints in the sand, one could read. The family tree of languages also described a distinct outline, a particular shape of human communication. Architecture provided perhaps the clearest outline, the most salient blueprint of order and arrangement. It also provided something more, a bonus for this period.
In both England and America, architecture meant out and out solidity. The Victorian critic and man of letters John Ruskin reclaimed the Gothic as the arke techne—the highest artistic pursuit—of the nineteenth century. Architecture in general, Ruskin argued, was not about design but about something much more fundamental, pure, and basic. Buildings rose in the air through a strict adherence to mathematical relationships. Those relationships revealed God’s imprint, His divine plan for the order of things, from the golden mean to the magic square.
If one wants to study the subject of education in the nineteenth century, or even in the Middle Ages, for that matter—when architecture predominated—one must look it up in any encyclopedia under the heading “edification.” Germans called a nineteenth-century novel of a young man or woman moving toward maturity a bildungsroman—a foundation book in which a young person begins to construct his or her own life, hopefully on a solid foundation. Within this context, to raise a child is to build a building. To edify is to build buildings, but it also refers, in the nineteenth century, to moral education, to the building of character.
In Europe and in America, in the nineteenth century, schools for teaching teachers were called normal schools, named after the seventeenth-century