The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe by Robert Michael Brain (review)

The Pulse of Modernism enters a growing corpus of studies that take a holistic approach to fin-de-siècle science and the arts, emphasizing the exchange between these not-so-separate worlds, and in doing so, broadening historical understanding of both. Robert Brain builds on recent works by Veit Erlmann, Benjamin Steege, Naamah Akavia, Robin Veder, and others that uncover networks of social interaction, intellectual exchange, and practices shared among music, art, and dance. Indeed, The Pulse of Modernism convinces that this holistic approach is not simply a viable means of analysis but the only means of understanding this period.

The book examines the exchange between experimental physiology and the arts. Brain argues that the transfer of experimental systems—configurations of measuring instruments, material techniques, and living substances of science—into the visual arts and poetry had lasting aesthetic, social, and even political effects. This is an origin story of modernism that pushes its birth back to the mid-nineteenth-century physiology laboratories of Paris and Berlin. The technologies of inscription, devices that graphically represented the pulses of life with a curving line, were mobilized by artists toward such aesthetic goals as collapsing the subjective and objective experience, liberating and abstracting poetic verse, fusing the senses, and promoting kinesthetic expression. In tracing the curved line from the physiology laboratory through the scientific aesthetics of Charles Henry to Filippo Marinetti’s doctrine of onomatopoeia, some elements of the art world are necessarily left out — most notably tone, or rather, music. While Brain contributes much to, and indeed forces us to reconceptualize, our understanding of European modernism and its origins, his is not a complete picture.

The Pulse of Modernism remains, however, an exceedingly important work. The first part presents the science, carefully explaining the graphic method of physiology research and its role in the development of the new concepts of protoplasm, experimental phonetics, and the physiology of vocalization. This frontloading of scientific practices, ideas, and objects reinforces a narrative of unidirectional flow of ideas from science to art. In the pivot chapter, Brain argues that the curious polymath Charles Henry, via his theories and devices (an aesthetic protractor!), translated the expertise of experimental physiology into something “ready-made” for artists. In the subsequent chapters, Brain follows various artists’ applications of Henry’s black-boxed science to their own work. The artists see their empirically based creations as capable of social reform and so the curved line gained political value. The implication is that the graphic method could only gain political meaning by leaving the laboratory.

One of the book’s greatest contributions to the field is a renewed attention to several seemingly peripheral communities and cultural products. Brain integrates intellectual and cultural trends previously neglected by scholars of the period and convincingly argues that such phenomena, as varied as protoplasmania, studies of a synesthetic mollusk, redemptive anarchism, and ectoplasmic photography, were centrally important to the origins of modernism.

Much of the support for this text comes from Brain’s careful analyses of publications and artworks. This allows him to line up chronologies, ideas, and objects. With the exception of Henry, however, it is unclear how information actually moved from one individual to the next. Further evidence of connections between the constellation of ideas and individuals would have strengthened the book. One other small critique: In focusing on how the experimental systems of physiology prompted artists’ interest in psychophysical aesthetics, Brain devotes little attention to the massive shifts in the fin-de-siècle sensory world. Certainly the new rhythms of industry, the arc lights of Paris, for example, also contributed to the modernist aesthetic.

To sum up: The Pulse of Modernism is thoughtfully argued and brimming with rich and delightful details. It is like the shimmering, optimistic, vibrating world of the fin-de-siècle that Brain presents; it is lovely.