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Empathy and Anaesthesia: On the Origins of a French Machine Aesthetic
Author(s): Nina Rosenblatt
Source: Grey Room, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 78-97
Published by: MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262543
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and

Empathy
On
the
French

Anaesthesia:

Origins
Machine

of

Aesthetic

NINA ROSENBLATT

The lesson of the machine lies in the pure relationship of cause and effect. Purity,
economy, the reach for wisdom. A new desire: an aesthetic of purity, of exactitude ...
The machine is certainly a marvelous field for experiment in the physiology of
the senses.
-Le Corbusier, "The Lesson of the Machine"
The starting point for this essay is a question about the nature of the subject as it
emerged in formulations of the French machine aesthetic in the 1920s. For it seems
clear that, while most accounts of French machine-age modernism focus on the
object and its relationship to an industrial culture, there was, in fact, a fairly consistent concept of modern subjectivity in the work and writings of Le Corbusier,
Am6d6e Ozenfant, Fernand L6ger, and modernist filmmakers and theorists.' What
is more, this notion of subjectivity appears oddly static and outdated for a set of
artistic practices that sought to align themselves with the very dynamic forces of
industrial modernity itself. When one considers the extent to which the very concept
of a "self" was being interrogated and redefined according to various discursive and
institutional agenda in the interwar period, the recourse among certain modernist
thinkers to the scientific principles of the nineteenth century-for instance, Charles
Henry's work on sensations and the physiological effects of form-is, to say the
least, puzzling.
Interestingly, some of these same observations about the desuetude of the subjective models in the French machine aesthetic were noted by Reyner Banham in
his now-classic history of modern architecture, Theory and Design in the Machine
Age. Banham, in tracing the codification of a characteristic "style" in Le Corbusier's
projects from the mid-1920s, cites a relatively obscure article by the architect that
Grey Room 02, Winter2001, pp. 78-97.
:C

2001 Grey Room, Inc.and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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79

IfI

1
Fig.

3.

LeCorbusier.Diagramfrom
Journalde Psychologienormale
etpathologique23, 1926.Shapes
and lines indicatethe physiologicaleffects of variousforms.
78

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appeared in a 1926 issue of La Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique.2

Specifically, Banham is looking to that document for a coherent theory to corroborate Le Corbusier's practice, an "explanation of his intentions in the employment of
this particular style." But he is clearly troubled by Le Corbusier's persistent appeals
to a monolithic aesthetic subject-that is, by the apparently immobilizing claim,
quoted by Banham, that "past, present, and future, it is plainly the same reactions
of the same man to the same agents of stimulation . . . our sensations are types."
And Banham's response is to immobilize this aspect of Le Corbusier's argument in
turn, to freeze it within an irresolvable dualism. He writes, "we are faced, once
again ... with an ambiguity, this time amounting to a contradiction ... between
two concepts of order, between the supposedly progressive and changeable nature
of technology and the supposedly eternal and immutable nature of aesthetics."3
Banham, as we know, was one of the most incisive and diligent critics of technological determinism among the Modern Movement's practitioners and historians (including his own thesis advisor, Niklaus Pevsner). His analyses of the French
machine or Purist aesthetic, in particular, remain among the most insightful written: a 1955 article outlining what he called the "Purist mirage" of production, the
false claim that "objects of maximum utility and lowest prices have simple geometrical shapes," still stands as the most suggestive dismantling of the French
industrial aesthetic from the point of view of a modern mass market.4 From that
perspective, I think we can understand Banham's inclination, with respect to Le
Corbusier's polemics, to bracket off those ideas that seem to have little bearing on
the technically progressive aspects of modernist form. As evidence toward a theory
of architectural practice, the Journal de psychologie article reveals the kind of
short-circuiting of connective logic that leads Banham to conclude that "the real
revolution" in Le Corbusier's work "lay in his finished buildings." Moreover,
placed against the villas and other projects from the 1920s, the scribbled lines and
Cezannian cylinders, pyramids, and cubes that illustrate Le Corbusier's quasiscientific rationales seem drawn from the pages of a school textbook-"academic"
not only in origin, but in their apparent disconnect from the practical considerations
of material or techniques.
I would like to suggest here, however, that this very opposition, which sets the
forward movement of formal innovations against the backward pull of an older
conceptual apparatus, needs to be reexamined. Isn't it possible, for instance, that in
bringing the terms of an earlier discourse to bear again and again on his formulations of an objective visual practice, Le Corbusier is providing us with vital clues
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LeCorbusier.Axonometric
drawingfor MaisonCook,1926.
a4-

i;s

8::
::
i

iiiN
::

E~~t~~

441

~IN

about his own ambitions for that practice? Isn't it possible, too, that the very
"oldness" of an academic aesthetics
was the condition for, rather than an
obstacle to, the materialization of a style based on construction and industrial techniques? And while these questions point to a revised understanding of Le
Corbusier's relationship to the texts and ideas upon which he drew, couldn't we
also consider that material as having its own modern valence? In other words, isn't
it possible that this slightly earlier body of knowledge might disclose its own connections to modernity, connections which only become visible when measured by
criteria other than those of the modernist canon? In any event, this is what I want
to propose here. And while I expect that the material I present will raise as many
questions as it answers about the sources of a Corbusian machine aesthetic, my
hope is that it will also shed light on a little-known aspect of French modernism.
Perhaps most importantly, it will reveal some of the complexities of the engagement between aesthetic practice in the 1920s and the heterogeneous, explicitly
non-visual processes of French social modernization.

RewritingEmpathy:Sympathyas Mass Form

To repeat: there is a notion of the human subject that emerges somewhat tendentiously through the dominant polemics of L'Espritnouveau and related modernist
writings from the 1920s-a subject that shadows every effort to define the objective or "pure" qualities of form in an industrial era. Few critical discussions of
Purism-Le Corbusier's and Ozenfant's most systematic effort to develop a postCubist language of forms-fail to register its dependence upon the physiological
principles of sensation and perception, the adaptation of vision to a technologically-saturated urban milieu, which the authors of Purism explicitly referred to as
the "formation of a modern optic."5 But what seems not to have been considered,
much less examined in any depth, is the way in which these concepts are being
extracted from a much denser intellectual field that began to take shape in the last
decades of the nineteenth century.
When the inaugural issue of L'Esprit nouveau appeared in 1920, prominent
place was given to the work of Victor Basch, whose two-part article, "The New
Aesthetics of the Science of Art" opened numbers 1 and 2.6 Hardly a well-known
name in accounts of modernism today, Basch was the first chaired professor in the
newly-created field of Science and Aesthetics at the Sorbonne-a position duly
Rosenb att

Empathy and Anaesthesia

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81

Coverof the debut issue of

L'Espritnouveau,1920.The work
of VictorBasch is featured.

L'EESPRIT
NOUVEAU
REVUE INTERNATIONALED'ESTHETIQUE

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noted in the editorial introduction to his

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ideas an aura of hard-edged objectivity.
But Basch's work in philosophy and aesthetics beginning in the late nineteenth
century was directed toward an intrinsiA
45
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beings and objects, a phenomenon which
Basch, in line with contemporary French
thought, understood through the category
of aesthetic "sympathy." In his massive
doctoral dissertation on Kantianaesthetics,
completed in 1896, Basch presented a taxonomy of sympathetic response. In an
ascending scale that mirrored the developmental stages from infancy to adulthood,
he detailed the movement from rudimentary synchrony, a reflexive, indiscriminate
response to external movement, to what he called "sympathy properly speaking":
the "intense and intimate participation of the Self with the life that exists or which
we lend to other Selves."'7
This concern to distinguish the symbolically potent forms of psychological projection from a merely instinctive and mechanical imitation lies behind the claim,
often made about Basch, that he introduced the German concept of Einfiihlung, or
"empathy,"into French aesthetic thought-a claim that stands, perhaps, in need of
qualification.8 There can be little doubt that Basch, as a scholar of German philosophy, was aware of developments in German aesthetics and familiar with the way
the concept of Einfihlung, which referred to the psychological projection of the self
into the objects of perception, was becoming consolidated into a theory of visual form
by his German colleagues-among them, Theodor Lipps, Karl Groos, and Heinrich
Wdlfflin. But it seems significant to me that nowhere in the more than seven hundred
pages of his essay on Kant (nor anywhere else in his prodigious output) does Basch
undertake the ultimate task of assimilating Einfiihlung to French thought; that
is to say, nowhere does he actually translate the term, a late-nineteenth-century
neologism to begin with, into French. He offers, at one point, a rough equivalent
in the formulation "sympathie symbolique," but the distinction, and the desire to
anchor the newly formulated analogical confusion of subject and object to an older
psychological model of "sympathy,"is consequential. Both the term and the concept
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82

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remain fundamentally foreign within French aesthetics. As late as 1925, the French
aesthetician and L'Esprit nouveau contributor Charles Lalo, in seeking to describe
the psychic dissolution of boundaries that occurs at the moment of empathy, could
write only that "it is the identification of the thinking subject with the object thought,
the untranslatable Einftihlung."'
The temptation to read Basch through a German concept of aesthetic form is further frustrated by Basch's art-historical writings. His 1919 monograph on the
Renaissance painter Titian bears no traces of his earlier psychological insights. A
fundamental caesura seems to mark the route between theory and practice when
it comes to the interpretation of works of art, all the more significant given the
prominent, if controversial, role that Einflihlung played in the search for a psychology of artistic form within German art history several years earlier.10There are
probably any number of ways to pursue the failure of a theory of empathy to gain
ground in French aesthetics. In the present discussion, however, the significance
is to be drawn from the fact of that failure itself. For I would suggest simply this:
that Basch was clearly less interested in developing connections with a German
notion of form than he was in allowing his work to resonate with a French concept
of sympathy as a social norm, i.e. as a term that both described and proscribed the
relationship between the individual and a social whole. Indeed, it was precisely
in this sense that the term had already been developed in France, in the writings
of Basch's thesis juror, Gabriel S6ailles, for example, and, especially, in the work
of the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, whose L'Art au point de vue sociologique
(1889) marked the first effort to address directly the connections between art and
the objectives of modern sociology.11
It comes as some surprise, perhaps, to find Guyau's name invoked by the
philosopher Jos6 Ortega y Gasset in 1925 as the origin behind a yet-to-be-fulfilled
sociology of art.12But Ortega was only one of many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century thinkers-including Friedrich Nietzche, Max Horkheimer, and Georg
Luk~cs-for whom Guyau indicated a specifically modern intersection between
aesthetic and social form. The "modernity" of his ideas, in particular as they came
together in L'Art sociologique, lies less, as might first appear, in his far-reaching
appropriation of psychological and physiological discoveries than in the way he
directed these borrowings toward determining the scientific basis of an intrinsically mass reception. What distinguishes his text from any number of apparently
similar approaches to art as a social phenomenon is his insistence on an absolute
homology between aesthetic response and the experience of being part of a social
Rosenblatt I Empathyand Anaesthesia

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83

whole. That is, for Guyau, both experiences are grounded in the "already social"
nature or coanaesthesia of consciousness itself; art implies the intensification and
focusing of a sympathetic reflex that one feels naturally, as a living being in
response to other living beings. Whereas Charles Henry, among others, had demonstrated the repeatability of response to color, line, and rhythm from one individual
to another, Guyau was especially concerned to show that aesthetic phenomena were
irreducibly collective and, hence, essentially social in their effects.13In that sense,
in its attempt to identify an objective basis for unity among members of a given
social milieu, Guyau's aesthetic theory must be seen in relation both to the broadbased French strategy of "solidarism" in the 1880s and 1890s and to its powerful
crystallization as a science of society within the "objective" sociology of Emile
Durkheim and his colleagues, which was institutionalized as an academic discipline in France in the very years that Guyau was writing.14
On one level, Guyau's analysis suggests a profound recognition of the highly
mediated, intrinsically dynamic nature of modern social ties. His description of
the contemporary consumer of art as "a wire that must be magnetized without
direct contact, in which vibrations must be made to run, from afar, in a predetermined direction" is a prophetic gloss on the Baudelairean crowd, whose dense
interminglings here take on the quality of a frictionless energy that interacts "without direct contact."15On another level, though, Guyau's failure to see social cohesion in terms of an enduring struggle between a driving egoism and the necessarily
disciplinary aspects of collective life places him distinctly out of sync with the
dominant narrative of social modernity as a perpetual playing out of what
Durkheim himself termed the "dualism of human nature." Nietzsche, for instance,
criticized Guyau for not acknowledging the will to power as the supreme binding
force in contemporary society.16 And among the scattered aphorisms that make up
Nietzsche's Will to Power itself we find the following appraisal of Guyau's con9
ception of the modern subject: "The insipid and cowardly concept 'man' la
Comte and Stuart Mill ... It is still the cult of Christianity under a new name.""7
I would venture to propose that Le Corbusier and Ozenfant shared something of
this sentiment, a sense of Guyau's retreat from the regulatory effects of the aesthetic
principles he was proposing when they wrote in L'Esprit nouveau that, "there is
nothing here of the views of Guyau, who claimed a thing beautiful when it is useful
... but only this: that the lesson of the machine is a lesson of discipline."'8
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What I have wanted to suggest in this brief outline is that the terms of aesthetic
thought in late-nineteenth-century France were bound up in a largerset of reflections
about the nature of mass society. More precisely, they addressed what had become
the sociopolitical crisis in the French fin-de-sihcle: the progressive weakening,
especially in the modern metropolis, of social bonds grounded in the shared values
and beliefs of a community, a development which, for many, augured the era of the
crowd and of a protean mob rule.19Significantly, the consolidation of intellectual
discourse around this problem coincided with the reorganization of higher education under the Third Republic. The sweeping reforms of the 1870s and 1880s had, as
one consequence, the establishment of scientific method as a common ground for
a range of disciplinary fields, including sociology, psychology, and philosophical
aesthetics.20 Significantly, too, the coordinates of this discourse were markedly different from those that defined the German discussions of aesthetics under capitalism
and which have come to dominate our retrospective understandings of mass culture,
in particular through the speculations of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor
Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer.What I do not mean to do here is to trace aesthetic
developments in France according to any definitive "national" model. Instead,
I want to frame the issue of national difference in terms of a more specific problem,
one that gets to the heart of the way in which ideas moved from one sphere to
another, from social analysis to modernist visual practice, in the decades surrounding the turn of the century: that is, how were the hegemonic processes associated
with the rise of mass modernity articulated, assimilated, and brought into the
purview of aesthetic practice within late-nineteenth-century France?

CultureClash in Berlin
The striking persistence of a positivist spirit in French modernism, the emphasis
on the scientific nature of investigation into various phenomena, might be reformulated more meaningfully with this problem in mind. In the absence of a working concept of cultural totality, such as the one that dominated German thinking
at the time, the normative individual served as a unifying conceptual plane, an
effective basis for thinking about an aesthetic sphere responsive to the effects and
exigencies of modern existence.21 The very mutability of subjectivity, as it was
revealed by the contemporary sciences, made it appear highly adaptable to a range
of events and milieus. Guyau's understanding of the individual as "essentially penetrable to the influences of others" is a case in point.22 At the same time, these facts
of bodily existence gave rise to a particularly useful-indeed, an instrumentalRosenblatt

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85

RhythmicDancers,Geneva,
1913.Publicityphotographfrom
the InstitutJaques-Dalcroze.
Eurythmicsas collectiveform.
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model of the aesthetic subject as a social being,

immersed through the physiological facts of life
itself within the shifting unities that comprise
collective experience.
Hence in the writings of the philosopher and
Lille professor Paul Souriau we find the most
sustained attempt to consider aesthetic phenomena according to a dynamic notion of
perceptual norms. L'Esth6tique du mouvement, published in 1889, the same year
as Guyau's Art Sociologique, detailed the physiological and psychological states
produced by various types of movement. 23 In that work, Souriau aligned a disinterested pleasure with the perception of efficient movement, shifting the criteria
of functionalism from the object and the utilitarian adaptation of form to function
to the perceiving subject. His analysis of the expressive qualities of movement, it
should be noted, is explicitly based on the assumption of a corresponding movement
within the spectator, a sympathetic projection that links subject and object. He writes,
for instance, of the sinuous movements of an Algerian viper that "this mode of locomotion, necessarily very slow, is painful to watch." In two subsequent books, both
indebted to contemporary work on suggestion and part of a broad popularization of
that concept which includes Gustave Le Bon's crowd theory, Souriau further
explored the mobile continuum between fascination and indifference along which
a normal sympathy between subject and object could be located. His 1904 Beauth
rationelle, which presents geometric form as an ideal synthesis of subjective and
objective judgment, serves as a kind of rejoinder to the hypnotic dissolution of ego
before the aesthetic object outlined eight years earlier in La Suggestion dans l'art.24
But Souriau's work was also part of a growing interest in the 1880s and 1890s in
movement as a social phenomenon, a mechanism of social cohesion. L'Esthetique
du mouvement relies heavily on the work of Fernand Lagrange,the figure behind the
overhaul of physical education in France in the late nineteenth century.25Lagrange
was also a primarysource for Emile Jaques-Dalcroze'sEurythmic method, the program
of harmonic exercise that Le Corbusier practiced and publicized in L'Espritnouveau.
What is important to point out here is that these physical reform movements
addressed not only the health of the individual body, but the integrity and well being
of the social body as well. They aimed, through a repetition leading to complete
automatism, at a self-regulation that would, to paraphrase Jaques-Dalcroze, permit
the adaptation of individual forces to the "necessities of collective existence."26
Far from representing isolated examples, Basch, Guyau, and Souriau provide
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insight into the connections that were regularly drawn between science, aesthetics,
and social form. That these connections were made outside of the terrain familiar to
art history-art and architectural institutions, criticism, and other more familiar practices-has
something to do with their relative invisibility today. We
for
might wonder,
example, at the absence in this work of any reference to neowhich
also drew upon scientific psychology. But such an omission,
Impressionism,
whatever else it implies, also emphasizes the fact that the object of such reflections
was the aesthetic subject. And to the extent they acknowledged contemporary
artistic trends, the energies of these thinkers were, for the most part, directed more
generally against a diffused fin-de-siecle decadence, for them the most visible cultural manifestation of pathological individualism and threatening anomie.
Nevertheless, there is an incident that helps to bring the French position to bear
on concrete objects, an encounter that reveals the incommensurability of German
paradigms to French thought and brings into some relief the consistency of the latter.
The event in question is the first Congress on Aesthetics and a General Science of
Art in Berlin in 1913, where the architect Peter Behrens (Le Corbusier's one-time
employer) gave a lecture rehearsing the themes of "objectivity," "technics," and the
establishment of standardized "types" that would come to the fore in the famous
Werkbund debates the following year.27Although the conference was attended by
some of the most prominent German sociologists, historians, and art historians of
the time, including Wdrringer, Georg Simmel, Aby Warburg, and a twenty-oneyear-old Erwin Panofsky, it was Basch who offered the most incisive critique of the
ideas presented there. To Behrens's call for a modern style based upon immutable
principles and a radically simplified set of design options, Basch responded,
When we race through the streets of our metropolis at high speed, we can no
longer see the details of buildings. Thus it seems to me that the most modern
architecture should be adapted to the cinematographic character of our age.
Now I ask Professor Behrens how it follows that the most modern architecture
in Germany should scorn this desire? . .. in Cologne I was truly dismayed
when I saw department stores in the somber style of Egyptian mausoleums....
Department stores which should embody the speed of commerce and exchange
... and above all the rapid changes of fashion.
Basch concludes with a direct challenge, offering the extraordinaryand thoroughly
contemporary Art Nouveau department stores of Paris as a counter to Behrens's
sober modernism:
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87

Does not Herr Behrens think that our department stores-the new Printemps,
the Galeries Lafayette ... held together through only a few iron ribs, which
look as if they could be taken down every day like houses of cards and erected
elsewhere-[does he not think] that they better express the spirit of the time?28
Of course, Basch could not have chosen better than Ferdinand Chanut's Galeries
Lafayette, built just a year earlier in 1912, to illustrate his point about the cinematographic possibilities of contemporary architecture. Exploiting the new, soaring
possibilities of reinforced concrete construction, Chanut's department store was a
light-infused, kinetic display, organized around the patterns of movement generated by the Op6ra-like stairway at its center.29
But the fact remains that the confrontation in Berlin represented a culture
clash-or, more precisely, it seems to have revealed Basch's implicit rejection of
the German notion of culture upon which Behrens's formulations drew. For it
seems safe to say that Basch is not advocating the sinuous lines and obsessive
organic patterning of Art Nouveau over the rectilinear geometry of German architecture per se. Nowhere else in his writings does he even address the question of
architectural form, and it seems unlikely that he is making claims about the superiority of a specific style here. Rather, he is challenging the way in which a notion
of culture is being called in to mediate between the dislocating effects of metropolitan life on the one hand and a transcendent concept of style on the other.
If Basch responded to Behrens, most likely in an ad hoc fashion, by reference to
the sensations of speed, flux, and desire mobilized by the city street and the new
spaces of mass commerce, it is because, I would suggest, his own notion of
aesthetic subjectivity left him nowhere else to look for the defining terms of an
architectural style.

A Ghost inthe Machine

With the debate in Berlin over the definition of a modern architecture, we seem to
return full-circle to Le Corbusier and his machine-age style, albeit through a
markedly decentered and defamiliarized route. For the story of a French modern
style changes dramatically when we trace its emergence not only through Behrens
and the Werkbund, as is routinely done, but through the figure of Basch as well.
Admittedly, this is a less straightforward path; the absence of a coherent or consistent theory of visual form in the work of academic aesthetics makes the problem
of mediation, of establishing a general identity between that work and the visual
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FerdinandChanut.Les Galeries
Lafayettedepartmentstore in
Paris,1912.The departmentstore
as a cinematographicexperience.

4i

practices of the 1920s, a more

slippery enterprise. But perhaps
.........."
for that very reason, because it
forces us to think through the
loom..BI~;i-:I-::
issues of mediation and historical
method, to consider more carefully
than usual the nuances and permutations of thought that link
.Ck
and differentiate different levels
of practice, it is worth pursuing.
The question is, then, how are
we to understand the relationship
between a visual agenda from the
1920s and an academic discourse
.......
that emerged several decades
earlier? One possibility is to see a
continuity between the intellectual response to the atomizing effects of modernization and Le Corbusier's response
to a social field even more dramatically fragmented by war and economic instability.
By this reckoning, we could open up a whole new genealogy for the figure of the
machine in Le Corbusier's thought, tracing it not only to various formal practices or
social strategies that operate independently of the individual subject, but also to the
very processes through which individual subjects are made: the machine aesthetic,
in other words, as a proposition that depends as much on the subjectifying effects
of the great industrial machines as on their streamlined products and silhouettes.
This is one vantage point, a long view which links Le Corbusier's aesthetic
thought substantively to developments such as the scientific management of labor
known as Taylorism or to Durkheim's analysis of the division of labor as the basis
for social unity under modern capitalism. But it may be less satisfying at closer
range, particularly as a way of understanding the specific practices of an architect
whose approach to history and to ideas was, notoriously, that of a bricoleur.
In a letter written to Paul Derm6e, one-time co-editor of L'Espritnouveau, Basch
expressed his dissatisfaction with the treatment of his article by what he called a
group of "amateurs" in the field of aesthetics. That his appeals to depth and expertise seem naive today, almost poignantly so, is a measure of just how misplaced
those concepts were in this context:
I

-R I

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89

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I had nothing to gain from publishing in a review put out by young men, none
of whom have yet any name or authority ... And it seemed strange, certainly,
to many of my colleagues, that I would consent to contribute to a journal of
aesthetics of which I am not the director, and among young men, most of whom
are-in aesthetics-amateurs!30
We might take this comment with the grain of salt always necessary in assessing editorial disputes. But for Basch, whose thinking about aesthetics had unfolded
according to the comparatively rigid rules and constraints of academic discourse,
the polemical strategies of L'Esprit nouveau, its attempt to produce new aesthetic
concepts through the sheer power of juxtaposition, must surely have appeared, as
he indicated, to lack authority. Furthermore, Basch was certainly well aware that
his ideas were being used to speak to and for a set of practices very different from
those within which they were conceived.
Most importantly, they were being applied to the delineation of a visual styleto objects, not subjects. Here, in the attempt to link the normative principles of
human response to an objective source in the machine, lies a crucial discontinuity
between the modernist axioms of the 1920s and their prefiguration in what might
be called the "first" industrial aesthetic originating in the 1880s and 1890s. In Le
Corbusier and Ozenfant's celebrated formulations, the products of machine manufacture themselves take on the aspects of neutrality and restraint that an earlier
set of arguments had attributed to human beings. The self-sufficiency of these
mass-produced objects is reinforced by the images selected to accompany the
very arguments that assert their quasi-evolutionary adaptation to human usephotographs of glassware, office furniture, and dental equipment in which the
human presence hovers, ghostlike, but is almost never seen.
The evolving taste for simplified forms has its parallel, Le Corbusier wrote,
in the post-war appetite for cocaine; both are born of a desire for narcotic effects,
the hungering after objects and experiences that cool our "feverish pulses" and
"keep us at a distance."31This dream of a salubrious distance lies at the core of the
machine aesthetic and its insistence on smooth, functional surfaces that resist any
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Photographof dental equipde

mentfrom"Formation
I'optiquemoderne,"L'Esprit
nouveau21, 1924.A testament
to the anaesthetic natureof
the machineaesthetic.

concentrated physical or psychological engagement. But the full significance of

this anaesthetic mode to the ambitions of French modernism becomes apparent
only in relation to the history that we have been looking at here: that is, only when
we recognize the machine aesthetic as a theory of mass form that relies as much
upon the specification of human norms, the "impersonal zones" of experience
implied in the concept of the sensation-type, as upon the type-object and the properties of machine production.

This is, perhaps, the place to revisit Banham's observation about the mirage of production that clouds the machine aesthetic's vision of a real mass market economy.
Let us amend that insight by noting that the normative subject invoked by Le
Corbusier in the 1920s was also, for all intents and purposes, a mirage. One might
argue, in fact, that therein lay its appeal as a rationale for a modern aesthetic: as
a rhetorical readymade, the mass subject of aesthetic speculation was a given, a
commonplace that needed no specific source or systematic explanation. Its very
banality provided suitable ballast for the loftier and more extravagant claims made
by Le Corbusier and others to have discovered a style that could encompass the
totality of modern life. Along with the myth of the machine, the mass individual
allowed Le Corbusier to insist that an essential human condition united the typeobject, the private villa, and the urban plan. In the final analysis, though, any stylistic
connections were made through an abstract and static conception of the aesthetic
subject, not through a sustained analysis of the conditions, subjective or objective,
of modern capitalism.
Consider, too, that in the end, despite all of the talk about the "natural" superiority of industrial design, the painting (and not the factory) became the preeminent
site for the manufacture of Purist objects.32As Banham quite rightly observed, the
laws of mechanical selection that supposedly lead to the type-object, the designated subject matter of the Purist paintings, bear little resemblance to the economic
considerations that govern the design of objects intended for a mass market. But
we should not conclude from this that the paintings represent a misunderstanding
of modern industrial production. The Purist painting was never intended as a diagram for a union between art and industry that was taking place beyond its edges.
On the contrary, it was the only site upon which aesthetic perception, the "modern
optic" as Le Corbusier and Ozenfant had defined it, could be reconciled with the
Rosenblatt I Empathyand Anaesthesia

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91

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Top:LeCorbusier.StillLifewith
WhitePitcherand Blue Ground,
1924.The socially-sanctioned
"mariagede contours."
Bottom:FernandL6ger.StillLife,
1924.

mass-produced object without passing through the subjective conditions of either

labor or consumption. The hermeticism of the Purist production cycle, which
rigorously excluded the realities of market competition and consumer desire, was
precisely what enabled Purism to hold on to a mass subject defined by an earlier
discourse-even as it shifted the terms of that discourse to the modern world of
industry and machines. And if the very banality of the type-object was intended to
curb the promiscuous projections of association, memory, and desire that attached
to traditional motifs, its integration into the tightly bound, insistently frontal compositions of the Purist painting further served to insure against "the dispersion,
the deviation of attention," that is, to avoid the extremes of distraction and fixation
by keeping perception itself held to the sealed, disinterested plane of the canvas.
The point becomes clearer when we compare a painting by Le Corbusier-say,
his 1920 Still Life with White Jug and Blue Ground-with a similar painting by his
contemporary and colleague, Fernand L6ger. Although such paintings as L6ger's
1924 Still Life are regularly associated with a Purist style, they nevertheless pose
a very different relationship between modern subjectivity and the work of art than
the one informing what might be called orthodox Purism. In L6ger's work, abrupt
juxtapositions of color and the thickening of line at the contours of forms read as
the visible armature that holds the centripetal energy of the composition in check.
Even here, in a painting resolutely purified of the mechanical elements, urban
architecture, and typographical fragments that appear in a number of L6ger's
canvases from this period, the reference point is the city street, or, more specifically, the irregular patterns of attention and distraction experienced in the contemporary street. What L6ger understood by "organized sensations"-a concept of
psychodynamics filtered through Futurism and the Orphism of Delaunay-was,
precisely, the registering of a temporary threshold, a moment of organized resolution within the incessant shock and dissipation of perception. It was not synonymous with the numbing, normative models understood by Le Corbusier and
Ozenfant.33 Rather, L6ger's ambition, expressed in his artwork and in his writings
on the modern spectacle, was to incorporate the "shock of the surprise effect"
experienced by the automobile driver, the urban pedestrian, or the consumer suddenly transfixed before the shop window into the formal features of his artwork.34
In this sense, the French filmmaker Jean Epstein's 1925 discussion of L6ger's compositions in terms of chronophotography, the unfused, sequential photographic
stills that are the basis for the moving image in cinema, is far more apt than recent
references to a general "cinematic vision" in L6ger's work.35
Rosenblatt

S Empathy

and Anaesthesia

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93

Jean Epstein.Filmstill of Gina

Mandsfrom Coeurfiddle,1923.

A14

The mention of chronophotography and its development into cinema leads to

my final point. In conclusion, let me suggest that the distance that separated an
industrial style in the French machine aesthetic from the individual and collective
realities of industrial society may be the very source of its modernity, its adaptation
to a world in which labor itself was no longer understood uniquely through the
category of industrial production and in which social relations were increasingly
mediated through surfaces. For we should remember that in precisely the years in
which Le Corbusier was elaborating a machine-age style around the traditional
arts-painting, architecture, and design-the same reflections on human behavior,
technological form, and mass reception were being applied by French modernist
thinkers to a decisively "modern" visual medium. This time, however, the "object"
was the immaterial illusion of cinematic movement, and the "machine" was the
cinematograph, the consummate manufacturer of mesmerizing surfaces.36

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Notes
1. Of course,the literatureon Le Corbusierand
the machine-ageobjectis vast and farfrommonolithic in its approach.Themost compellingrecent
accounts of Le Corbusier have significantly
challengedconventionalconceptions of the relationship between his practiceand the culture of
modernity. In particular, Beatriz Colomina's
work on L'Espritnouveau has been importantin
shiftingthe coordinatesforsituatingLeCorbusier's
work from the realm of industry to that of mass
media. See her Privacy and Publicity: Modern
Architectureas Mass Media (Cambridge,Mass.:
MIT Press, 1994). In very different ways, both
MarkWigley and Mary McLeod have revealed
the impactof fashion and its role within cultural
modernity on Le Corbusier'swork and writings.
See Mary McLeod, "Undressing Architecture:
Fashion, Gender, and Modernity,"in Deborah
Fauschet al., Architecture:In Fashion(Princeton:
PrincetonArchitecturalPress,1994),38-123,and
MarkWigley,WhiteWalls,DesignerDresses:The
Fashioningof ModernArchitecture(Cambridge,
Mass.:MITPress, 1995).
2. Le Corbusier, "Architecture d'6poque
machiniste,"Journalde Psychologie normale et
pathologique23 (1926):325-350.
3. ReynerBanham,Theoryand Design in the
FirstMachineAge (Cambridge,Mass.:MITPress,
1980), 259.
4. Reyner Banham, "Machine Aesthetic,"
ArchitecturalReview 117, no. 700 (April 1955):
224-228.
5. Amed6e Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard
Jeanneret[LeCorbusier],"Formationde l'optique
moderne,"L'Espritnouveau21 (March1924):n.p.
6. VictorBasch, "L'tsthethiquenouvelle et la
science de l'art,"Espritnouveau1 (October1920);
2 (November1920).Baschis perhapsbetterknown
forhis involvementwith the humanistLiguedes

Droitsde l'Homme(he servedas presidentin the

1920s and 1930s). Basch and his wife were murderedby the Vichy militia in January1944.
7. VictorBasch,Essai critiquesurl'esthdtique
de Kant(Paris:Alcan, 1896), 297.
8. In Germany,we should recall, the concept
of "empathy" was developed in the work of
FriedrichTheodorFischerand his son Robertas
partof an attemptto salvagesymbolicprojection
from its irredeemably"primitive"associations
with the nontranscendentmaterialityof Hindu
and Egyptianart. Fora historical anthology and
discussion of "empathy"in Germanaesthetic
thought,see Empathy,Form,and Space:Problems
in GermanAesthetics (SantaMonica:The Getty
Center,1994).
9. Charles Lalo, Introduction a l'esth6tique
(Paris:Alcan, 1925), 71-72. As recently as 1987,
the French translation of Wilhelm W6rringer's
Abstraktionund Einfilhlung(1907)appearedas
Abstractionet "Einfuhlung."
10. Most notably, of course, as one side of a

dualist engine of formin Wbrringer's

book.Juliet
Koss offered a new reading of empathy and the
formationof the spectatorin Germanartand aesthetics in "EmbodiedVision: Empathy Theory
and the ModernistSpectator,"paperdeliveredat
the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, 24 February2000.
11.GabrielS6ailles,Essaisurle genie dansl'art
(Paris:Alcan, 1884);Jean-MarieGuyau,L'Artau
point de vue sociologique(Paris:Alcan, 1889).
12.Jos6Ortegay Gasset,"TheDehumanization
of Art"in TheDehumanizationof Art and Other
WritingsonArtand Culture(NewYork:Doubleday,
1956), 3.
13. I single out Henry's work because of its
familiarityto arthistorians,primarilyas a result
of Henry'swell-known impact on his friend, the
Seurat.ButHenrywas only one of a
artist-Georges
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95

numberof thinkers,many of them more original

than he, who were articulating dynamogenic
models of human response to visual and other
stimuli. For an enlightening discussion of this
workand a much-neededclarificationof Henry's
status in relation to it, see Jonathan Crary's
Suspensions of Perception:Attention,Spectacle,
and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1999).

14. VictorKaradyidentifies the years 1887 to

1898 as the period in which sociology was formalized as a discipline in France. That period
begins with Durkheim'sacademic appointment
to the faculty of letters at Bordeaux and ends
with the founding of L'Ann6esociologique. See
"TheDurkheimiansin Academe:A Reconsideration,"in Phillipe Bernard,ed., The Sociological
Domain:TheDurkheimiansand the Foundingof

(Paris: Flammarion, 1896).

20. See, for example, RobertFox and George

Weisz, eds., The Organization of Science and
Technology in France, 1808-1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University

Press, 1980); see also

Fox, "Science, the University, and the State in

Nineteenth-Century France" in Professions and

theFrenchState:1700-1900,ed. GeraldL. Geison

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1984), 66-145.

21. Norbert Elias draws the important distinction between a Germanconcept of Kulturas

the sum total of accomplishments through which

"the individuality of a people expresses itself,"
and the French notion of civilization as a process
that takes as its object the transformation of
human behavior. See The History of Manners,
vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund
French Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge UniJephcott (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978), 3-7.
22. Guyau, xlii.
versity Press, 1983), 71-89. On the social strategy
of "solidarism"see PaulRabinow,FrenchModern:
23. Paul Souriau, L'Esthdtique du mouvement
Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Paris: Alcan, 1889), 93.
24. Paul Souriau, La Suggestion dans l'art
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 184-195.
15. Guyau, 62.
(Paris: Alcan, 1892); La Beautd rationelle (Paris:
16. My understanding of Nietzsche's assessAlcan, 1904).
ment of Guyau is based on Geoffrey C. Fidler's
25. See, for example, Lagrange's widely influential Physiologie des exercices du corps (Paris:
essay "On Jean-Marie Guyau, Immoraliste,"
Journalof the Historyof ldeas 55, no. 1 (January Alcan, 1888, first American ed., 1898).
26. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Le Rythme, la
1994): 75-97.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,
musique, et l'education (1920). It strikes me that
trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale (New
Marcel Mauss's theory about the inherently
York: Random House, 1968), 86 (aphorism 340).
social nature of body techniques might be under18. Am6dde Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard
stood in this connection. Although his major
statement on the subject, "Les Techniques du
Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], "Les id6es d'Esprit Nouveau dans les livres et la presse," L'Espritnouveau
corps,"was first presented in a lecture in 1934,
15 (February 1922): 1703.
Mauss claimed that it was based on observations
19. The most famous expression of the anxihe began to make in the late 1890s. See Marcel
Mauss, "Les Techniques du corps," Journal de
ety related to the psychological features of these
new, historically ungrounded collectivities is, of psychologie 32, no. 3 (March 1936); no. 4 (April
course, Gustave Le Bon's Psychologie des foules
1936), 271-293.
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27. A growing disagreement among Werkbund

members over whether the group should institute standardized types or encourage individual
artisanship in its designed products reached
something of a breaking point in the heated
debates at the annual meeting in Cologne in 1914.
The "Type" faction was led by Werkbund cofounder Hermann Muthesius; Karl Ernst Osthaus
and Henry van de Velde led the "Individual"
opposition.
28. Victor Basch, response to Peter Behrens,
"Uber den Zusammenhang des baukiinstlerischen
Schaffens mit der Technik," in Kongress fiir
Asthetik und allgemeine Kilnstwissenschaft,
Berlin, 1913 (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1914).
My thanks to Frederic Schwartz for bringing
this conference, and the comments Basch made
there, to my attention. In his superb study of the
Werkbund and mass culture, Schwartz cites this
event as part of a discussion of the cultural subject addressed in the Werkbund's attempts to formulate a transcendent notion of "Style." See The
Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture
before the First World War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996), 207-208.
29. Not surprisingly, Chanut's previous work
included the literally phantasmagoric TransSiberian panorama at the 1900 Universal Exposition-a
kinetic illusion that simulated for
visitors the railway journey from Moscow to
Peking. See Stephen Oettermann, The Panorama:
History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone
Books, 1997), 179.
30. Victor Basch, letter to Paul
Derm6e,
Fondation Le Corbusier, box Al, folder 19.
31. Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today,
trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1987), 96. On anaesthesia as a motif in
French aesthetic thought around the turn of
the century see my "Photogenic Neurasthenia:

Aesthetics, Modernism, and Mass Society in

France, 1889-1929" (Ph.D., Columbia University,
1997). Susan Buck-Morss has also written about
anaesthetics and sensory alienation as developments underlying Walter Benjamin's thinking
on art and politics. See "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992): 3-42.
32. Although in his 1912 report on the Werkbund Le Corbusier professed great admiration
for that organization's "authoritarianintervention"
into the German marketplace, his own career as
a designer reveals no attempt to emulate the
Werkbund model in that respect. See CharlesEdouard Jeanneret, Etude sur le mouvement
d'art decoratif en Allemagne (1912; reprint, New
York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 43.
33. This distinction may be behind Christopher
Green's observation that "L6ger'smodern world,
like that of the Purists, was strictly censored.
Their common censor was the ideal of order. It
was applied by the Purists with heavy intellectual backing, and by L6ger without." See Leger
and Purist Paris, exhibition catalogue (London:
Tate Gallery, 1970), 71.
34. Fernand L6ger, Functions of Modern
Painting, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York:
Viking, 1973), 35.
35. Jean Epstein, "Fernand L6ger,"Les Feuilles
Libres 31 (March-April 1925): 26-31. For a discussion of L6ger's "cinematic vision," see Judi
Freeman, "L6gerand the People: The Figure-Object
Paintings and the Emergence of a Cinematic
Vision," in Fernand Lager: The Rhythm of Modern
Life, 1911-1924, exhibition catalogue (Munich
and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), 230-237.
36. See my "Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass
and Medium in the 1920s," October 86 (Fall 1998):
47-62.

Rosenblatt I Empathy and Anaesthesia

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