MAN AND MACHINE
a unity of culture allowing us to read its meaning as well in its parlor
furniture as in its parliaments. It is in this historical spirit, the spirit
of Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spengler, that the author has
undertaken his investigation of "anonymous history," of those prosaic
tools, ob>jects, and functions, so largely ignored, the mechanization of
which has altered the quality of our lives.
It
is no surprise that the author of this book, which has to do with
a development chiefly exemplified and farthest advanced in America,
should be a German-educated Swiss. From German thought Dr. Giedion
got his essential notion of the organic unity of culture, without which
his subject matter would remain a curiosity. A Swiss, native of a tech–
nologically advanced country where craft traditions nevertheless still
flourish and the horrors of industrialism have been wonderfully miti–
gated, Dr. Gieclion is able to look with a critical eye on things so
familiar to us that we hardly see them. Switzerland, moreover, birthplace
of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Arnold Rikli, and others, has a tradition of crit–
icism of the "unnaturalness" of civilization, and Dr. Giedion continues
it in his book.
It becomes very plain in its pages that our kind of mechanical age,
though it lacks a unifying style in the sense that there have been
Roma:>J., Gothic, or Baroque ages, nevertheless does have a common
quality. This quality, which has its material basis in mass production,
is kitsch. Thus, in a fascinating chapter on the mechanization of bread–
making, the author describes how the debasement of the bread product
and bread tastes went hand in hand with the rise of mass-production
methods, until we have the loaf of bread of today: soft, dazzlingly white,
saccharine, tasteless, absolutely uniform, brightly packaged, and in twen–
ty-four hours' time "outmoded" and unsalable. This debased taste in
bread is the
same
debased taste catered to by the mass-produced popular
arts; the contemporary loaf of bread has the
same
properties as the
contemporary best seller.
What Dr. Giedion calls the "devaluation of bread" is least ad–
vanced in those countries where bread-making was early transferred
from the home to local bakeries, encouraging the growth of a craft tra–
dition among the bakers and a taste in the public that could discriminate
among the products of the various bakeries. The devaluation of bread is
most advanced in this country and Canada, where bread-making per–
sisted longest in the home and then passed almost directly into the hands
of large producers. That is, the baking of bread-like the American
economy itself-passed from a primitive to an advanced stage, skipping
the craft; and bread tastes-like so much else-passed from the unedu-
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