Throbbing human engines

mechanical vibration, entropy and death in Marinetti, Joyce, Ehrenburg and Eliot

Matthew Wraith

pp. 96-114

in: Anthony Enns, Shelley Trower (eds), Vibratory modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The British biologist and popular science writer Julian Huxley had little time for the vitalistic philosophy that was gaining currency in artistic and intellectual circles in his day. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had sought to explain life, change and motion through the notion of an élan vital (sometimes translated as vital urge or vital impetus), an incalculable driving force that lay behind or within the living organism forcing its transformation at every scale of observation. This principle eluded any kind of mechanistic understanding; life and vitality were defined specifically in contrast to the rigid predictability of the machine.¹ But for Huxley, Bergson's terminology did not explain life and motion so much as state the fact of life and motion in rather more obtuse language. It made no more sense, Huxley said, to ascribe life and motion to an élan vital than it did to ascribe the motion of a steam train to an "élan locomotif".²

Cited authors

Ehrenburg Ilja Grigorevič

Bergson Henri

Eliot T S

Joyce James

Marinetti Filippo Tommaso