149: Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears

In Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America, Cecelia Tichi traces the change in metaphors, images, and methods of composition used by American writers from the 1890s to the 1920s as evidence of a change in worldview, a "shifting of gears" from a romantic view of the world to a mechanical one.  Incorporating a wide variety of texts, including popular journalism, ads, kids' books, westerns, medical textbooks, government publications, modernist poetry, novels, and books on technology, not to mention toys, movies, and buildings, Tichi argues that the new "gear and girder" technology altered the ways writers used language - and that by adopting the tools, logic, and aesthetic of their surroundings, Machine Age writers made technology legible.

147: Terry Smith's Making the Modern

Terry Smith is an art historian, and Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America is a study of the relationship between the visual imagery of the 1920s and 1930s and the era's cultural, economic, and industrial configurations.  Far from focusing on high modern art and design, Smith studies modern architecture, painting, photography, design, advertising as gleaned from sources as varied as Ford Motor Company photos of plants and work processes, architectural plans for office buildings, and documentation of the 1939 World's Fair in New York.  Methodologically, Smith deconstructs each work or artifact via a rigorous investigation of its historical setting for signs that the work documents conflict or social change.  Working across disciplinary boundaries, the book draws together a "visual regime" or "ensemble of processes of visualization and representation" of modernity, where visual representation and sociocultural processes work together to create a uniquely modern worldview called the "iconology of modernity."

146: John Kouwenhoven's Made in America

In Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization, John Kouwenhoven links an emergent American aesthetic to our unique status as a "technological civilization," the "only major world power to have taken form as a cultural unit in the period when technological civilization was spreading throughout the world."  Enterprising Americans have shaped this aesthetic by combining vernacular culture, derived from the democratic people, technology, and the American wilderness, with high culture brought back from Europe by elites; when vernacular and high culture compete, the vernacular usually wins.  And as far as Kouwenhoven can tell, that vernacular considers beauty to take the form of useful objects.

To get at this technology-based American vernacular culture, Kouwenhoven reads a wide variety of American authors, including John Hersey, Jonathan Edwards, Poe, Whitman, Horatio Greenough, Harriet Monroe, Melville, Twain, Anderson, Dos Passos,Hunter, and Emerson.  Through these writers, he finds American art in long-barrelled frontier rifles used in the American Revolution, the 'hot jazz in stone and steel' of skyscrapers, steel (instead of iron) farming tools, the Colt revolver, the Corliss engine, clipper ships, steamboats, locomotives, and even Whitney's invention of mass production.  He finds American art in fine art, too, like Gershwin's music and Sheeler's paintings, but even these are uniquely American blends of high and low culture.  And American artists for Kouwenhoven are the people who make industrialism run: engineers, mechanics, farmers, carpenters - as well as writers, painters, and musicians.

Although ascribing a uniform aesthetic to any group of people as large as the United States doesn't make much sense, nor does seeking that culture solely in the work of American writers, Kouwenhoven does make some hugely wonderful contributions to the study of technology and culture.  He erases the divide between high and low art and at the same time between commodity production and artistic production, so that the economic base and cultural superstructure - and thus, with a little elision, technology and culture - are one and the same.  And hey, I totally get what he's saying about the Corliss engine.

132: Don Mitchell's The Lie of the Land

In The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Don Mitchell uses labor history, critical social theory, and cultural landscape studies to reveal the "connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination' that makes work and its products knowable" in the construction of California's agricultural landscape.  In doing so, he argues that the "struggles over the form that the reproduction of labor power in industrial agriculture would take" ultimately shaped the landscape.  However, landscape is ideological in that it tends to "erase the politics and actuality of work from the view" (Cosgrove) and naturalize capitalist concepts like property and land ownership.  Therefore, the critical project of The Lie of the Land, to "understand the interplay between production and representation of landscapes, while at the same time restoring an ontology of labor to the center of landscape geography and history," is a political project.

124: Duncan & Duncan: Landscapes of Privilege

In Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb, James Duncan and Nancy Duncan examine the landscape of Bedford, a wealthy community in Westchester County, to understand the relationship between aesthetics and the production of place and identities, and to think through the "wider social consequences of such an aestheticized view of the world."  Via interviews and first-hand landscape observation, they explore several interrelated issues:

• "the ways people produce their identities in and through places, especially homeplaces, such as houses, gardens, and home communities," particularly some of the more “conservative, defensive attempts at using one’s surroundings to establish individual, family, and community identities…. against and in contrast to an outside world” or ‘constitutive outside.’
• the effects, intended and unintended, of a virulent, reactionary politics of anti-development in Bedford in response to all the stars moving in and buying up properties
• the role of Bedford landscapes as symbolic resources used in the quest for social distinction: how residents are invested in Bedford socially, psychologically, economically