Modern Elements Research Articles

The 1950s were a pivotal decade in the history of Hollywood music. The great movie studios had dominated the early days of sound film production and distribution but were battered in 1948 by the Supreme Court’s antitrust Paramount Case, which forced them to divest from the theatres they had previously controlled and through which they had exerted an effective monopoly on the distribution of their product. As a result of the ruling, studio profits cratered over the next decade, leading to a crisis within the film industry. This crisis was compounded by the traumatic experience of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which devastated Hollywood in the late 1940s and early 1950s as writers, directors, actors, and composers were forced to testify and inform on one another regarding any political activity deemed to be subversive. But the worst shock to Hollywood’s old order came from the advent of television. As the baby boom generation emerged in the wake of Second World War, TV presented a stay-at-home alternative that caused attendance at cinemas to drop precipitously. To lure viewers back to the cinema, Hollywood rolled out a succession of enticing attractions in the 1950s: spectacular new Widescreen formats such as Cinemascope or Cinerama that provided opportunities for sweeping vistas in historical epics like Ben Hur and thrilling genres such as science fiction and horror, which presented astonishing monsters and flying saucers. At the same time, a relaxing of the strict censorship code that Hollywood, fearing boycotts from the religious right, had imposed on itself since the early 1930s, led to increasingly frank depictions of sex and violence on the screen that reached a culmination with Hitchcock’s boundary-pushing Psycho in 1960. All of this provided new opportunities for musical expression: science fiction and horror films, with their emphasis on the strange and unfamiliar, inspired composers to experiment with modernist techniques such as atonality and electronic music, while movies dealing with contemporary topics such as addiction and teenage crime invited the dangerous and thrilling sounds of jazz and rock’n’roll into the heretofore rather sheltered late-Romantic musical universe of Hollywood film. A new generation of American composers, including Alex North, Leonard Rosenman, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini, entered the film-scoring scene during this period and proceeded to expand the stylistic palette available to film composers with elements of jazz and modernism. It is not surprising, then, that the 1950s has provided a particularly rich terrain for film-music scholars. An important early contribution to the analysis of pivotal scores by North and Rosenman, among others, was George Burt’s monograph The Art of Film Music (Boston, 1994). In recent years, a number of books, chapters, and articles have explored this turbulent and fascinating decade, including ‘Scoring East of Eden: The Division of the “One”: Leonard Rosenman and the Score for East of Eden’, in Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.), Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (New York, 2009); Stanley C. Pelkey II and Anthony Bushard (eds.), Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Age (New York, 2015); and James Wierzbicki, Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties (Chicago and Springfield, IL, 2016).

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Reviewed by: Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture by Andreas Gailus Johannes Türk Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture. By Andreas Gailus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 383. Paper $29.95. ISBN 978-1501749810. During the last years of his life, Michel Foucault, the central figure to whom we are indebted in our approach to the question of life, moved away from the concept of biopolitics he had developed over the preceding decade and toward questions of the subject. Whereas his previous work had concerned the history of modernity, his lectures, devoted to the hermeneutics of the subject, to the care of the self, and finally to parrhesia, now focused on sources from Greek and Roman Antiquity. Andreas Gailus’s pathbreaking study of what the subtitle of his book calls “aesthetics and biopolitics in German culture” now offers the groundwork for an account of modernity that includes the dimension of the subject Foucault discovered at that point. The grids of biopolitical conceptualizations from Foucault to Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, Gailus claims in his preface and introduction, are not merely too abstract and deterministic but also too coarse. This comes at a considerable cost: through the marginalization of subjective life, the “violence of biopolitical determination” is elided, while “the intrinsic value and force” of life is precluded from coming into view (x). By contrast, the stake of Gailus’s book lies in the claim that the literary archive—and in its wake, other artistic “media that are perceptually and conceptually self-reflective” (11)—offers accounts of the intersection of the elements of biopolitical modernity—technology, knowledge, and power—with what the book emphatically calls an experiential or “existential” (xii) dimension of an irreducibly composite vitality. This dimension of inner experience is not an interiority preceding the social but a “network of dissonant forces . . . shaped by third-person narratives, impersonal scripts, practices, and technologies that regulate social life and structure the self’s relation to itself and to others” (9). Gailus’s argument follows Thomas Khurana’s and Christoph Menke’s exploration of concepts such as force and development. They define a form in which life is the subject and object of a process of formation that overcomes the separation of the cultural and the symbolic. In a last step, Gailus assimilates this constellation to what Wittgenstein in his Philosophic Investigations calls “form of life” (and alongside it “aspect seeing”). “Form of life” emphasizes how language games, a practice that cannot be clearly delimited and that accounts for the groundlessness and openness of meaning, is embedded in the pragmatic dimension of life. With Stanley Cavell, the book points to “the mutual absorption of the natural and the social” (52) as a constitutive part of the concept. Gailus’s book derives its main title, Forms of Life, from this concept, emphasizing the ineluctable plurality inherent in the mutual imbrication of life, form, and signification. In the epilogue, Gailus sketches a political philosophy merging from this plurality. [End Page 331] The book is divided into three parts. Each of them is devoted to two authors and focuses on a configuration of life. The first part describes “Life as Formation” (Kant, Goethe), the second “The Conflict of Forms” (Kleist, Nietzsche), and the third part “Life as Deformation” (Benn, Musil). The book begins in part one to develop the arc of its historical argument in a detailed reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In the vitalist tradition from Herder to Blumenbach, in which Kant’s third critique is embedded, Gailus finds a theoretical lineage capable of laying the historical groundwork for his study. Recent scholarship has amply demonstrated the crucial role Kant’s theory of organism in the second half of the critique has played in the life sciences in general and for the emergence of the idea of self-organization in particular. Yet, at the heart of the book’s juxtaposition of the aesthetic judgment—the “life of cognition”—with the teleological judgment on organic form—the “cognition of life”—lies the “undercutting of the boundary between organic and biological life” (78). The vitality of life and the need for its aesthetic vitalization...

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Modern Elements Research Articles

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Articles published on Modern Elements

ОРГАНИЗАЦИОННО-ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИЙ И СОЦИАЛЬНО-ТРУДОВОЙ МЕХАНИЗМ АДАПТАЦИИ СЕЛЬСКОХОЗЯЙСТВЕННЫХ ТОВАРОПРОИЗВОДИТЕЛЕЙ К СТРУКТУРНОЙ ТРАНСФОРМАЦИИ ЭКОНОМИКИ

THE ERA OF MODERNISM AND JAMES JOYCE’S “A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN”

Virtual design of a measuring device integrated in electroacupuncture stimulator on Arduino

이상의 ｢날개｣와 최인호의 ｢타인의 방｣에 나타난 고립과 소외 고찰

Artistic Language Comparison between Ming Qing Freehand Flower and Bird Painting and Contemporary Freehand Flower and Bird Painting

IE System in Modern Japanese Society

When Tradition Meets Modernity: The Adaptation of Bajau Community in Malaysia Amidst Sociocultural Transformation

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