PARTISAN
REVIEW
cated but quite healthy "folk" stage almost directly over into kitsch.
Virtually every sphere of living tends to be debased by mechanization.
Dr. Giedion aptly distinguishes between true comfort and the conve–
niences provided by mechanical ingenuity. Convenience (kitsch is above
all a convenience) displaces comfort. Apartment-living is rarely com·
fortable, though mechanization is making it more convenient every day.
The act of eating is mechanically transformed to render it convenient
too; at the winding counters of such monstrosities as Chock Full 0' Nuts,
a mechanized consumption line is operated at furious speed, day in
and day out cramming the same soggy sandwiches and pie into the
"blind mouths" that offer themselves at five-minute intervals. In a
chapter on the bath-equivalent to a short universal history of that
institution-Dr. Giedion describes its transformation from a social cere–
mony of "regeneration'' into a private ablutionary convenience of today.
Our civilization elected to dispense with the social and "regenerative"
functions of the bath in the measure that the need for them increased;
for tedium, staleness, and hebetude have become the inevitable con–
comitants of metropolitan life.
One of the profoundest consequences of mechanization has been its
transformation of the whole world of objects within which we move.
Objects (taken in the broadest possible sense), possessions, in a primitive
or craft system of manufacture were also symbols embodying spiritual
values, and were cherished for this reason. Mass production stripped
the object of all save its use value. This disenchantment of the object
represented a great spiritual loss and is responsible for the bleakness of
much of modern life; nothing less, I think, than a complete transforma–
tion of society can invest the object with a new symbolism.
I therefore cannot quite share Dr. Giedion's optimism when he
concludes his pioneer study with the assertion that the nonmechanistic
Weltanschauung
of twentieth-century science and art heralds the end
of mechanization. Though Dr. Giedion is the first to attempt a detailed
consideration of mechanization on historical principles, he has a ten–
dency, throughout the book, to see his subject in history only in terms
of superficial
Weltanschauungen
(the eighteenth century represents "uni–
versalism," etc.). History is not only a matter of
Weltanschauungen
but
also of the clash of social forces; mechanization was and is deeply
involved in this clash and its future will be decided by it.
Martin Greenberg
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