| My dissertation analyzes the cultural identity of modernity, attempting to find its definition in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. The study presents a narrative which (following in the footsteps of Foucault's historical archaeology) identifies a range of cultural artefacts that serve as documents which give us access to a nascent and more visible state of a cultural lexicon that is still active today. In this sense, the thesis addresses three key questions: (1) what is the character-type or grammar of 'our' modernity, how does it operate and according to which definitions? (2) what type of social/cultural individuality does it create/enable? And (3) what kind of functionality does it proclaim as its operative logic?;Investigating these issues, the study arrives at focal point which juxtaposes two exemplary personalities of the time, Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg. The cultural/historical data thus gathered, paints a picture of a modernity which experiences a type of physical de-materialization, evident in the musical 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg. The subject and his ego are enclosed in the field of aesthetics of disappearance, thus bringing the social self and its psychology (especially in the psychoanalytic guise of Freud's theory) much closer to the structure of sound and its naturally-occurring plasticity. Such framing of the argument exposes a unique psychology of distances at work in the operative logic of modernity in practice. I try to understand this practical logic through Georg Simmel's concept of the ruin, which constitutes a structure of mediation between far and near, par excellence. All this leads to a paradigm of culture and psyche which works on the basis of aesthetic expectations and subjective plasticity, respectively---a cultural psychology which liberates forms, as it also fragments and throws into decay. |
