Manhattan Transfer, Spectacular Time, and the Outmoded

The only substitute for dependence on the past is dependence on the future.

John Dos Passos, "Against American Literature," 1916

Modern spectacle, like more traditional historical forms—in which repeated rituals enact shared community values—organizes a public collectivity around its visual centrality. But in following the temporal reproducibility of the commodity form, capitalist spectacle during the second technological revolution dramatizes the experience of the eternally new we customarily associate with modernity, and infuses American literary modernism with unprecedented energies, electric flows, and promiscuous, nervous desires. In its various guises—including advertising, photography, cinema, and the dissemination of spectacular events in the popular press—spectacle also performs and embodies the exponential reproduction of surplus for a presumably collective vision. And in the sprawling historical diorama of 1920s New York that is John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, a jittery fixation on spectacular pleasures of the now, strangely defined by their future outmoded or obsolete status, expresses an epistemology of public being and consumer citizenship that is central to the feeling of temporal and historical dislocation operative within much of American modernism.

In her study of cinematic time, Mary Anne Doane argues for two key modalities of modernity that might be useful here: "abstraction/rationalization and emphasis on the contingent" (10-11). The rapid technological advance and economic expansion marking the dawn of the twentieth century opens the way for both the boom of early cinema and contingency as a forcefully emergent cultural category, in which change and the experience of time itself "[become] synonymous with 'newness,' which, in its turn, is equated with difference and rupture—a cycle consistent with an intensifying commodification" (20). More specifically, Doane distinguishes between the event and spectacle by arguing for different relations to temporal contingency. Cinematic spectacle, at least in its modernist heyday, emerges as one "attempt to deal with the temporal instability of the image [which] involves not the taming of the contingent, but its denial," she argues. "Like the event, spectacle effects a coagulation of time . . . . The event bears a relation to time; spectacle does not. Spectacle is, as Laura Mulvey has pointed out, fundamentally atemporal, associated with stasis and the antilinear" (170). Further, "spectacle functions to localize desire, fantasy, and longing in a timeless time, outside contingency. In this respect, spectacle, in contrast to the event, is epistemologically reactionary, decidedly unmodern," whereas "the event comes to harbor contingency within its very structure" (170, 171).

The operative modality of spectacle is, in part, its seeming denial of contingency. But its apparent timelessness, its very "denial" of contingency, is a relation to time. First, effecting a "coagulation of time" presupposes a relation between the spectacle and its temporal status, even if only suggesting a false totality, an absolute present shaped around it. Second, spectacle's denial of its own contingency is part of its temporal structure when this admittedly "unmodern" structure is seen in its modernist, commodified form, as repetitively new image-clusters signifying an ongoing dream of capitalist growth. In its very "timeless time," capitalist spectacle, dependent upon twentieth-century visual technologies, stakes its thrill on the cusp of its own flickering out of public existence, its impending devaluation, or its future outmoded status. As such, spectacle marks a temporal rupture; posing synchronic time in its localized "timelessness," in its necessary newness it also contains a diachronic rupture within its structure. This internal rupture effect, or the radical simultaneity of temporal contingency and a timeless present, significantly informs the fascination and anxieties of modernism's immanent relation to market culture. By appearing as the radically new, the visual event marking the present, any particular spectacle necessarily anticipates its impending outmoded status. And John Dos Passos' New York scene imagines the subjects of American modernism—with all their typological nervous materialism—as suspended between those two moments.

Manhattan Transfer shows how collective and individual experiences of time coalesce around capital's systems of spectacular representation. The novel reshapes realist narrative around the temporal dream-world of spectacle as its own brand of modernism's ambivalent relation to mass culture. But, more to my point, Manhattan Transfer builds...