In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

UNCERTAINTY VS. REALITY 337
loss ("Uncertainty"), they insist on the practical necessity of using
knowledge to orient human life, however provisional this knowledge
may be ("Reality").
The perception of the present world as chaotic has become such a
widely-indeed internationally-accepted commonplace that it can be
invoked as a premise for more complex arguments without further comment.
[see Present vs. Past, Center vs. Periphery] What the young Brazilian
journalist Sergio Buarque de Holanda describes as "the general confusion
characterizing the first quarter of our century" (Buarque de
Holanda, 76), and refers to as a contrasting background for the "exceptional
personality" of Filippo Marinetti, becomes "a moment of chaos
from which life in the world is suffering on all possible levels" for the
Spanish art critic Antonio Mendez Casal, who tries to identify the place
of Catalan painting in an international context (Blanco y Negro, 53).
The same motif returns as "the confusion, absence, deformation of all
human values-this harrowing uncertainty into which we are plunged,"
in Antonin Artaud's prospectus for his Theatre Alfred Jarry (Artaud, 15).
These authors all attribute confusion and chaos to the contemporary
world itself (and not to the perspectives that they adopt as observers of
this world). And they all experience such disorder as a particularly
pressing problem of modern existence. In the first sentence of his presidential
address, delivered at the University of Berlin on Tuesday, August
3, Karl Holl contrasts "the glorious decade of a hundred years ago" with
the "urgent situation of our contemporary moment" (Holl, 1). On Tuesday,
November 2, during a public rally in support of Munich's role as a
"cultural center," Thomas Mann calls the present "a particularly demanding
time" (Kampf, 7).
Images of chaos show a kinship with the metaphors-especially popular
among German intellectuals-that depict the world as an unstable
ground. Although the difference in meaning between the chaos metaphor
and the instability metaphor is minimal, they facilitate associations that
go in opposite directions. Whereas in images of chaos and confusion the
loss of order is supposed to affect only the object world, one cannot
imagine an unstable ground-let alone a shaking ground-that would
not also have an impact on the observer's view. In Thomas Mann's story
"Unordnung und fruhes Leid," Professor Cornelius' wife refers to "the
rocking of the ground under my feet, the topsy-turvy nature of all
things" (494), as a way of describing the impact of postwar inflation on