Modernism

Modernism (pronounced mod-er-niz-uhm)

(1) A modern usage or characteristic; modern character, tendencies, or values; adherence to or sympathy with what is modern.

(2) In theology, a movement in Roman Catholic thought that sought to interpret the teachings of the Church in the light of philosophic and scientific conceptions prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (always with initial capital).  The movement was in 1907 condemned by Pope Pius X (1835–1914; pope 1903-1914).

(3) In theology, the liberal theological tendency in Protestantism which emerged in the twentieth century and became the intellectual core of the moderate wings in many denominations, most obviously displayed in the interplay between the liberal and evangelical factions at recent Lambeth Conferences.

(4) A deliberate philosophical and practical estrangement or divergence from the techniques and practices of the past in the arts and literature, occurring from late in the nineteenth century and (a little arbitrarily), thought to have concluded in the post-war years.  Taking the form in any of various innovative movements and styles, it was an aesthetic descriptor used in mostly in architecture, literature and art to label work thought modern in character, quality of thought, expression or technique (sometimes with initial capital).

1730-1740: The construct was modern + ism.  Modern was from the Middle French moderne, from the Late Latin modernus (modern), from the Classical Latin modo (just now; in a (certain) manner)), from the adverb modo (to the measure) originally ablative of modus (manner; measure) and hence, by measure, "just now".  Root was the primitive Indo-European med- (take appropriate measures).  The adjective modern entered English circa 1500 in the sense of "now existing", the meaning "of or pertaining to present or recent times" attested from the 1580s.  The verb modernize (give a modern character or appearance to, cause to conform to modern ideas, adapt to modern persons) has existed since the 1680s, thought probably a borrowing from the French modernizer rather than a native coining.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & -isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).

In the narrow, technical sense, modern began in English enjoying a broad meaning, simply a description of that which was not ancient and medieval, but it quickly gained niches, Shakespeare using it to indicate something "every-day, ordinary, commonplace" and the meaning "not antiquated or obsolete, in harmony with present ways" was formalized by the early nineteenth century.  Formerly, the scientific linguistic division of historical languages into old, middle, and modern began only in the nineteenth century, the first university department of modern (ie those still living (unlike Latin and Ancient Greek) and of some literary or historical importance) was created in 1821 although the use of Modern English can be traced from at least circa 1607 when jurist John Cowell (1554–1611) published The Interpreter, a dictionary of law which, inter alia, examined and explained the words of Old and Middle English.  The extended form modern-day was noted from 1872; Modern dance is attested by 1912; modern conveniences (increasingly electrically-powered labour-saving devices) dates from 1926; modern jazz was used in 1954 and the slang abbreviation mod (tidy, sophisticated teen-ager (and one contrasted usually with a disreputable rocker or some other delinquent)) dates from a surprisingly early 1960.

There have been references to modern art since 1807 but it then was simply a chronological acknowledgement in the sense of something being recent rather than a recognizable style or school, that sense, “work representing a departure from or repudiation of traditional or accepted styles”, not attested until 1895, the idea by 1897 extended to the individual, a modern person one thought “thoroughly up to date”.  Although it would take decades to assume its (now) modern meaning, as an adjective, post–modern appears first to have been use in 1919 and by the late 1940s had become common in the language of architects (presumably the first among the modernists to feel no longer modern) and use extended to the arts in the 1960s, infecting politics, literature and just about every form of criticism and critical theory.  The "moment" of post-modernism has passed but but some of its strands have become orthodoxies and so profound were the influences it will for at least decades remain a reference point. 

Tatra T77, Czechoslovakia 1934.

Confusion is sometimes attached to the words “modernity” and “modernism”.  The noun modernity, dating from the 1620s, meant simply the "quality or state of being modern", an elaborated way of saying “recent”, the sense "something that is modern" noted since 1733.  As a word to describe specifically the epoch which began in the early twentieth century, it was in use before World War I (1914-1918).  The sense of that modernity was the particular combination of circumstances and forces which had coalesced to produce in Europe and North America a society which had in technical and other ways progressed with greater rapidity than any in history: (1) A long period of general peace, (2) a level of prosperity, which although uneven and often erratic, was unprecedented, (3) an array of technical innovations (electricity, radio, flight, telegraphs, internal combustion engines etc), (4) increasing literacy and a proliferation of mass-media, (4) an on-rush of new and transformative theories in psychology, philosophy & science (Freud, Darwin, Einstein et al), and (5) a relaxation of historically censorious attitudes which allowed innovations in art and literature to flourish.

Woman with a Hat (1905) by Henri Matisse (1869-1954).

Modernism, a word Dr Johnson (1709-1784) claimed was invented by the novelist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) to suggest any "deviation from the ancient and classical manner" had by 1830 come to refer to generally to "modern ways and styles" but since the mid-1920s, it’s been used exclusively to describe the movements in art, music, architecture and literature which depart in some radical way from classical and other traditional antecedents.  By 1925, the noun modernist was applied to a producer or follower of the work of the movement.  In the 1580s it had meant "one who admires or prefers the modern"; something similar but without the political and other connotations modernity imposed.

Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party (Buzludzha Monument), Buzludzha Peak, Bulgaria (1974-1981).  Now a very modern ruin.

Modernism, even if considered separately within the genres where the label was adopted had no coherence of style, intent or result, the significance being what it was not in that it deliberately aimed to depart from classical and traditional forms.  Although it’s contested still, much of what began as modernist art is attributed to the modernist’s growing alienation from the strictures and conventions which had characterized their formative years during the Victorian age.  It defined an epoch and, somewhere in the post-war period, became part of the history of art or architecture and for those for whom modernism is now just another product, such as art dealers, there’s really no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, both grouped under the rubric of Modern Art.

Rendered with Vondy's AI engine: A proto-cubist Lindsay Lohan as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) might have painted her had his experiments with cubism begun during his “blue period” (1901-1904).

Proto-Cubism (which some prefer as Pre-Cubism because they detect a distinct break rather than an evolution) was a term coined by art historians to describe the works produced in the last years of the twentieth century’s first decade.  However expressed, what was being described was the early framework of cubism, characterized by artists reducing images to component parts and rendering them in geometric forms, soon distorting things further by arranging the constructs roughly in place but viewed from different perspectives, the various cones, cubes, cylinders and polygons inherently were simplified forms yet when re-assembled yielding something complex which delighted some and appalled others.  The unhappy critics had to prepare themselves because worse was to come for while the Proto-Cubist works were at least vaguely recognizable representations of someone or something, as the movement unfolded, there was the feeling the technique was being exploited to produce material weird beyond immediate understanding: newness for the sake of newness.

Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) (1910) by Pablo Picasso, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City.

It was what came to be called Analytical Cubism (circa 1908–1912) which took the deconstruction and re-assembly of Proto-Cubism down its logical path, the fragments viewed from multiple viewpoints and abandoning the tradition of lineal perspective which had developed from Antiquity, through the Primitives and the Renaissance to the modern era.  The palettes tended to be monochromatic or at least muted (shades of brown & gray predominate) and, by the standards of the time, many paintings were jarringly abstract and sometimes described as “wrongly assemble jigsaw puzzles” with pieces dissected into overlapping planes, three dimensional depth and volume flattened to be twisted back to the two dimensions of a flat surface.  Something of an arms race developed between artists as they vied to see who would conjure something which demanded of the viewer even more work to interpret.  As an intellectual exercise in perception and structural analysis, it must have been great fun for those in the studios and for the avant-garde who “got it” but many would have agreed with comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) who later would condemn such exercises of technical ecstasy as “formalism”.

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) by Pablo Picasso, oil on oil-cloth over canvas edged with rope, Musée Picasso, Paris.

As a technique, Analytical Cubism could go only so far because ultimately, it remained tied to something which began as representational and had to get back there, albeit in distorted form.  What came next, from 1912-1923, came to be known as Synthetic Cubism which took everyday, real-world objects from kitchens, factories and the streetscape, reducing them to their simplest form to become building blocks to be synthesized into a new whole.  With this came brighter and more varied colors which seemed to imply something more traditional decorative than the often drab geometrical exercises of the analytic works but not all were convinced.  At the time, the general audience seems to have found cubism in any flavour no fun at all: collages with no unifying structure.  That would be the theme of public scepticism about modern art for the next century-odd but there was in places a recognition the cubists were sometimes being playful in their “construction without prior deconstruction”.  As has long happened in the art market, there were those for whom the notion of comparing (1) the analytic dissecting of reality with (2) assembling previously unconnected parts of it to create a synthetic “new” was intriguing but most stuck to the Old Masters.

Analytical Cubism: The Castle of La Roche-Guyon (1909), oil on canvas by Georges Braque (1882-1963), The Met, New York City.

Modernist literature was influenced by the bleak surroundings created by urbanization and industrialization but it was the blast of the Great War which left writers grasping to find a response to what was a much-changed world.  The roots of modernist literature can be found in pre-war works but the war had so undermined faith in the foundations of Western society and culture which early in the century had been viewed with an optimism it’s hard now to convey.  An inescapable element in modernism was a rejection of beauty as if humanity had proved itself somehow unworthy of loveliness and modernist literature reflected disillusionment and betrayal, TS Eliot’s (1888-1965) epic-length poem The Waste Land (1922) is emblematic, reflecting the search for redemption in a spiritually empty landscape and technically, its discordant images and deliberate obscurity typify Modernism and preview the techniques developed in post-modernism which demand the reader be involved in interpreting and deconstructing the text.

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) reading Ulysses, 1955.

Modernist fiction however, in content or technique, wasn’t monolithic and even to label it a genre does require that word to adopt a nuance of meaning, the works could explore the life of one, of a group or all of humanity and ranged from the nihilistic to the utopian.  The great landmark was James Joyce’s (1882-1941) Ulysses (1922), a work of such sometimes impenetrable density which adopted the even then known device of a stream of consciousness to document the events of one day in the lives of three Dubliners, the idea being the abandonment of any structural order, conventional sentence construction sacrificed in an attempt to capture the nature of human fragmentary thought.  Not all readers were seduced by the approach but Ulysses picked up a cult following which endures to this day, some of the adherents compelled even to praise Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), a work which in which a few find rare genius while others conclude it's merely modernism pursued to its inevitable unintelligible conclusion.  Reading Joyce can be hard work although Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), a fair critic of modernism, literary and otherwise, claimed to find a laugh of every page of Finnegans Wake.  For most, it's no fun at all.

Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques (Colored Landscape with Aquatic Birds, circa 1907) by Jean Metzinger (1883-1956).

In painting, the roots really lie in mannerism although elements can be traced through thousands of years of what is, strictly speaking, non-representational art, exemplified in many aspects by the sometimes (and not deliberately) almost abstract Italian primitives created between the late eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries.  However, historians regard the first of the modernists as Édouard Manet (1832-1883) who, from his early thirties began to distort perspective and devalue representation, using techniques of brushstroke to emphasize the very nature of the flat canvas on which he worked, something artists had for centuries crafted to disguise.  In his wake came the rush of -isms that would characterize modernism: Impressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism & Expressionism, an array of visions which would see the techniques and physical construction of the works vie for attention (at least among fellow artists and critics) with what was once thought the art itself.

TWA Flight Center (1959-1962) by Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) and Associates, John F Kennedy International Airport, New York City.

In architecture, while not literally technologically deterministic, the advances in the technologies available made possible the abandonment of earlier necessities.  However, while  the existence of steel frames and increasingly complex shapes rendered in reinforced concrete may have allowed what came to be known as the “new international style”, neither precluded the ongoing use of decoration and embellishment, the discarding of which was a hallmark of modernist architecture.  It was the choice of the architects to draw simple geometric shapes with unadorned facades, a starkness associated especially with the mid-to-late twentieth century steel and glass skyscrapers.  Architects are less keen to be associated with some other high-rise buildings of the era, especially the grim housing projects which blighted so much of the urban redevelopment of the post-war years; there was none of the awful grandeur of the best neo-brutalism to many of these.

Futurism

Futurism (pronounced fyoo-chuh-riz-uhm)

(1) A movement in avant-garde art, developed originally by a group of Italian artists in 1909 in which forms (derived often from the then novel cubism) were used to represent rapid movement and dynamic motion  (sometimes with initial capital letter)

(2) A style of art, literature, music, etc and a theory of art and life in which violence, power, speed, mechanization or machines, and hostility to the past or to traditional forms of expression were advocated or portrayed (often with initial capital letter).

(3) As futurology, a quasi-discipline practiced by (often self-described) futurologists who attempt to predict future events, movements, technologies etc.

(4) In the theology of Judaism, the Jewish expectation of the messiah in the future rather than recognizing him in the presence of Christ.

(5) In the theology of Christianity, eschatological interpretations associating some Biblical prophecies with future events yet to be fulfilled, including the Second Coming.

1909: From the Italian futurismo (literally "futurism" and dating from circa 1909), the construct being futur(e) + -ism.  Future was from the Middle English future & futur, from the Old French futur, (that which is to come; the time ahead) from the Latin futūrus, (going to be; yet to be) which (as a noun) was the irregular suppletive future participle of esse (to be) from the primitive Indo-European bheue (to be, exist; grow).  It was cognate with the Old English bēo (I become, I will be, I am) and displaced the native Old English tōweard and the Middle English afterhede (future (literally “afterhood”) in the given sense.  The technical use in grammar (of tense) dates from the 1520s.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Futurism, futurology, & futurology are nouns, futurist is a noun & adjective and futuristic is an adjective; the noun plural is futurisms.

Lindsay Lohan in Maison Martin Margiela (b 1957) Futuristic Eyewear.

As a descriptor of the movement in art and literature, futurism (as the Italian futurismo) was adopted in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) and the first reference to futurist (a practitioner in the field of futurism) dates from 1911 although the word had been used as early as 1842 in Protestant theology in the sense of “one who holds that nearly the whole of the Book of Revelations refers principally to events yet to come”.  The secular world did being to use futurist to describe "one who has (positive) feelings about the future" in 1846 but for the remainder of the century, use was apparently rare.  The (now probably extinct) noun futurity was from the early seventeenth century.  The noun futurology was introduced by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in his book Science, Liberty and Peace (1946) and has (for better or worse), created a minor industry of (often self-described) futurologists.  In theology, the adjective futuristic came into use in 1856 with reference to prophecy but use soon faded.  In concert with futurism, by 1915 it referred in art to “avant-garde; ultra-modern” while by 1921 it was separated from the exclusive attachment to art and meant also “pertaining to the future, predicted to be in the future”, the use in this context spiking rapidly after World War II (1939-1945) when technological developments in fields such as ballistics, jet aircraft, space exploration, electronics, nuclear physics etc stimulated interest in such progress.

Untouched: Crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) & Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) with cattle, 92^nd Annual Hopkinton State Fair, Contoocook, New Hampshire, September 2007.

Futures, a financial instrument used in the trade of currencies and commodities appeared first in 1880; they allow (1) speculators to bet on price movements and (2) producers and sellers to hedge against price movements and in both cases profits (and losses) can be booked against movement up or down.  Futures trading can be lucrative but is also risky, those who win gaining from those who lose and those in the markets are usually professionals.  The story behind crooked Hillary Clinton's extraordinary profits in cattle futures (not a field in which she’d previously (or has subsequently) displayed interest or expertise) while “serving” as First Lady of Arkansas ((1979–1981 & 1983–1992) remains murky but it can certainly be said that for an apparently “amateur” dabbling in a market played usually by experienced professionals, she was remarkably successful and while perhaps there was some luck involved, her trading record was such it’s a wonder she didn’t take it up as a career.  While many analysts have, based on what documents are available, commented on crooked Hillary’s somewhat improbable (and apparently sometime “irregular”) foray into cattle futures, there was never an “official governmental investigation” by an independent authority and no thus adverse findings have ever been published.  

The Arrival (1913), oil on canvas by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946), Tate Gallery.

Given what would unfold over during the twentieth century, it’s probably difficult to appreciate quite how optimistic was the Western world in the years leading up to the World War I (1914-1918).  Such had been the rapidity of the discovery of novelties and of progress in so many fields that expectations of the future were high and, beginning in Italy, futurism was a movement devoted to displaying the energy, dynamism and power of machines and the vitality and change they were bringing to society.  It’s also often forgotten that when the first futurist exhibition was staged in Paris in 1912, the critical establishment was unimpressed, the elaborate imagery with its opulence of color offending their sense of refinement, now so attuned to the sparseness of the cubists.

The Hospital Train (1915), oil on canvas by Gino Severini (1883-1966), Stedelijk Museum.

Futurism had debuted with some impact, the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1909 publishing the manifesto by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti which dismissed all that was old and celebrated change, originality, and innovation in culture and society, something which should be depicted in art, music and literature. Marinetti exalted in the speed, power of new technologies which were disrupting society, automobiles, aeroplanes and other clattering machines.  Whether he found beauty in the machines or the violence and conflict they delivered was something he left his readers to decide and there were those seduced by both but his stated goal was the repudiation of traditional values and the destruction of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries.  Whether this was intended as a revolutionary roadmap or just a provocation to inspire anger and controversy is something historians have debated.  Assessment of Marinetti as a poet has always been colored by his reputation as a proto-fascist and some treat as "fake mysticism" his claim his "visions" of the future and the path to follow to get there came to him in the moment of a violent car crash. 

Futurismo: Uomo Nuovo (New Man, 1918), drawing by Mario Sironi (1885-1961).

As a technique, the futurist artists borrowed much from the cubists, deploying the same fragmented and intersecting plane surfaces and outlines to render a number of simultaneous, overlaid views of an object but whereas the cubists tended to still life, portraiture and other, usually static, studies of the human form, the futurists worshiped movement, their overlays a device to depict rhythmic spatial repetitions of an object’s outlines during movement.  People did appear in futurist works but usually they weren’t the focal point, instead appearing only in relation to some speeding or noisy machine.  Some of the most prolific of the futurist artists were killed in World War I and as a political movement it didn’t survive the conflict, the industrial war dulling the public appetite for the cult of the machine.  However, the influence of the compositional techniques continued in the 1920s and contributed to art deco which, in more elegant form, would integrate the new world of machines and mass-production into motifs still in use today.

Motociclista (Motorcyclist, circa 1924), oil on canvas by Mario Sironi.

By the early twentieth century when the Futurism movement emerged, machines and mechanism were already hundreds of years old (indeed the precursor devices pre-date Christ) but what changed was the new generations of machines had become sexy (at least in the eyes of men), associated as they were with something beyond mere functionalism: speed and style.  While planes, trains & automobiles all attracted the futurists, the motorcycle was a much-favored motif because it possessed an intimacy beyond other forms of transportation in that, literally it was more an extension of the human body, the rider at speed conforming to the shape of the structure fashioned for aerodynamic efficiency with hands and feet all directly attached to the vital controls: machine as extension of man.

The Modern Boy No. 100, Vol 4, Week Ending 4 January, 1930.

The Modern Boy (1928-1939) was, as the name implies, a British magazine targeted at males aged 12-18 and the content reflected the state of mind in the society of the inter-war years, the 1930s a curious decade of progress, regression, hope and despair.  Although what filled much of the pages (guns, military conquest and other exploits, fast cars and motorcycles, stuff the British were doing in other peoples’ countries) would today see the editors cancelled or visited by one of the many organs of the British state concerned with the suppression of such things), it was what readers (presumably with the acquiescence of their parents) wanted.  Best remembered of the authors whose works appeared in The Modern Boy was Captain W.E. Johns (1893–1968), a World War I RFC (Royal Flying Corps) pilot who created the fictional air-adventurer Biggles.  The first Biggles tale appeared in 1928 in Popular Flying magazine (released also as Popular Aviation and still in publication as Flying) and his stories are still sometimes re-printed (although with the blatant racism edited out).  The first Biggles story had a very modern-sounding title: The White Fokker.  The Modern Boy was a successful weekly which in 1988 was re-launched as Modern Boy, the reason for the change not known although dropping superfluous words (and much else) was a feature of modernism.  In October 1939, a few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, publication ceased, Modern Boy like many titles a victim of restrictions by the Board of Trade on the supply of paper for civilian use.

Jockey Club Innovation Tower, Hong Kong (2013) by Zaha Hadid (1950-2016).

If the characteristics of futurism in art were identifiable (though not always admired), in architecture, it can be hard to tell where modernism ends and futurism begins.  Aesthetics aside, the core purpose of modernism was of course its utilitarian value and that did tend to dictate the austerity, straight lines and crisp geometry that evolved into mid-century minimalism so modernism, in its pure form, should probably be thought of as a style without an ulterior motive.  Futurist architecture however carried the agenda which in its earliest days borrowed from the futurist artists in that it was an assault on the past but later moved on and in the twenty-first century, the futurist architects seem now to be interested above all in the possibilities offered by advances in structural engineering, functionality sacrificed if need be just to demonstrate that something new can be done.  That's doubtless of great interest at awards dinners where architects give prizes to each other for this and that but has produced an international consensus that it's better to draw something new than something elegant.  The critique is that while modernism once offered “less is more”, with neo-futurist architecture it's now “less is bore”.  Art deco and mid-century modernism have aged well and it will be interesting to see how history judges the neo-futurists.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia (pronounced skit-suh-free-nee-uh or skit-suh-freen-yuh)

(1) In psychiatry (and once called dementia praecox), a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and varying degrees of other emotional, behavioral, or in emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.

(2) A state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements; informal behavior that appears to be motivated by contradictory or conflicting principles.

(3) In informal use, used to suggest a split personality, identity or other specific forms of dualism.  In popular usage, the term is often confused with dissociative identity disorder (also known as multiple personality disorder).

1908: From the German Schizophrenie, (split mind), coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) as an umbrella term covering a range of more or less severe mental disorders involving a breakdown of the relation between thought, emotion, and action and literally "a splitting of the mind", the construct being the Ancient Greek σχίζω (skhizein or skhízō) (to split), from the primitive Indo-European root skei (to cut, split apart), + φρήν (phrḗn) (genitive phrenos) (mind, heart, diaphragm) + -ia (the suffix from the Latin -ia and Ancient Greek -ία (-ía) & -εια (-eia), which forms abstract nouns of feminine gender).  It's from phrḗn that English gained phrenes (wits, sanity) and hence phreno-.

In English, the adjective schizophrenic (characteristic of or suffering from schizophrenia) dates in the medical literature from 1911 (in translations of Dr Bleuler's publications) and was immediately adopted also as a noun (schizophrenic patient).  That survived but another noun formation in English was schizophrene which emerged in 1925, the construct presumably a tribute to Dr Bleuler's original work having been written in German.  As such things became more publicized during the post-war years (and picked up in popular culture including film and novels), the transferred adjectival sense of "contradictory, inconsistent" emerged in the mid 1950s, applied to anything from the behavior of race horses and motor-cycles to the nature of musical composition.  The jargon of psychology also produced schizophrenogenic (tending to spark or inspire schizophrenia).  The adjective schizoid (resembling schizophrenia; tending sometimes to less severe forms of schizophrenia) dates from 1925, from the 1921 German coining schizoid (1921), the construct being schiz(ophrenia) + -oid.  The suffix -oid was from a Latinized form of the the Ancient Greek -ειδής (-eidḗs) & -οειδής (-oeidḗs) (the “ο” being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached); from εἶδος (eîdos) (form, shape, likeness).  It was used (1) to demote resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counter-examples exist), (2) to mean of, pertaining to, or related to and (3) when added to nouns to create derogatory terms, typically referring to a particular ideology or group of people (by means of analogy to psychological classifications such as schizoid).  Before Dr Bleuler's term became standardized, the condition had been known as dementia praecox (from the Latin dēmentia (madness; insanity) +‎ praecox (premature; untimely), thus the sense “untimely madness” or “premature dementia”).  Schizophrenia is a noun, schizophrenic & schizoids are nouns & adjectives and schizophrenically is an adverb; the noun plural is schizophrenics.

The term “psychiatry” seems to have been coined by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) and while doubtlessly he wasn’t the first clinician to notice some people were “odd”, he was a pioneer in attempting to a novel approach to their treatment; his idea was as well as their skills and knowledge, doctors should use their “psyche” (a learned borrowing from Latin psychē, from the Ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ) (soul) as a therapeutic agent.  In summoning their souls for this good work, there may been an element of German romanticism but “psychiatry” caught on in a way the English term for such things never did; being English, they called it “moral treatment” which to patients and physicians alike must have sounded ominously censorious.  Coming into a post-Enlightenment world, the discipline of psychiatry was from the beginning scientific in a way older forms of medicine originally were not; right for the start it was concerned with classification, something in the last seventy odd years refined and greatly expanded by the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

One early example was to divide mental illness into a binary: there were neurotics (those with a capacity to harm themselves) and there were psychotics (those with a capacity to harm others) but the “crown jewels” of psychiatry was schizophrenia.  Whatever the debates about the increased prevalence of the condition induced by “modern life” (however and whenever defined) the medical literature makes clear it’s not a recent addition to the human condition, being recognized as a clinical entity in the Hindu Ayur Veda (an ancient, holistic Indian system of medicine) and there are detailed descriptions in the surviving notes of Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a celebrated physician of Ancient Greece who practiced late in the second century AD; doctors have long been dealing with madmen.  By the end of the eighteenth century, based on the literature, some consensus seems to have been reached regarding schizophrenia’s symptoms but the first recognized “codified” description of the condition is thought to have appeared in the fifth edition (1898) of Ein Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (A Textbook: Foundations of Psychiatry and Neuroscience) by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926); it was a seminal work in modern scientific psychiatry.  In 1911 Dr Bleuler coined “schizophrenia” (split mind) and the rest is history.

Madness

Within the profession of psychiatry, schizophrenia has a long (and technical) definitional history although, in essence, it’s always been thought a severe and chronic mental disorder characterized by disturbances in thought, perception and behavior.  Lacking any physical or laboratory test, it can be difficult to diagnose as schizophrenia involves a range of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional symptoms.  In the fifth edition of the DSM ((DSM-5 (2013)), the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia is noted as 0.3%-0.7%, the psychotic manifestations typically emerging between the mid-teens and mid-thirties, with the peak age of onset of the first psychotic episode in the early to mid-twenties for males and late twenties for females.  The DSM-5 editors also made changes to the criteria to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the most significant amendments since DSM-III (1980).

Madness and Modernism.

Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (1992), by US clinical psychologist Louis A Sass (b 1949), was an exploration of why mystery continues to shroud schizophrenia, which, despite advances in biological psychiatry and neuroscience, appears little changed in almost a century  Sass quoted approvingly a description of schizophrenia as "a condition of obscure origins and no established etiology, pathogenesis and pathology…" without "…even any clear disease marker or laboratory test by which it can readily be identified."  That "threshold" problem is not unique to schizophrenia (it was much debated when the controversy about Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was at its height in the 1990s) but it remains of great interest to the profession.  

However, in a departure from most writings on mental illness, Sass explored the "striking similarities" between the seemingly bizarre universe of schizophrenic experiences and the sensibilities and structures of consciousness revealed in the works of modernist artists and writers such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Paul Valéry (1871–1945), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008), Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989).  Applying the techniques of psychology to modernism, he traced similar cognitive configurations reflected in schizophrenia and modern art & literature, finding both artist and schizophrenic characterized by a pronounced thrust to deconstruct the world and subjectively to reconstruct human experience without reference to objective reality.  Layers of reality, real and constructed, co-exist and interact, frequently fusing into each-other, producing an acute self-awareness Sass called "hyperreflexivity", as well as a profound sense of alienation from the empirical world.  Sass allowed his analysis to reach its logical conclusion, that there is a tenuous, though clearly discernible, connection between modern culture and madness, speculating that insanity might be “…a disease of certain highly advanced forms of cultural organization, perhaps a part of the price we pay for civilization?"  His thesis wasn’t without critics although most acknowledged Madness and Modernism was at least a minor literary classic.

Duncan's Ritual Of Freemasonry (2021 edition) by Malcolm A Duncan.  It was first publish in 1866.

As the DSM makes clear, not all schizophrenics are the same.  In 2011, Lindsay Lohan was granted a two-year restraining order against alleged stalker David Cocordan.  The order was issued some days after she filed complaint with police who, after investigation by their Threat Management Department, advised the court Mr Cocordan (who at the time had been using at least five aliases) “suffered from schizophrenia”, was “off his medication” and had a "significant psychiatric history of acting on his delusional beliefs.”  That was worrying enough but Ms Lohan may have revealed her real concerns in an earlier tweet on X (then known as Twitter) in which she included a picture of David Cocordan, claiming he was "the freemason stalker that has been threatening to kill me- while he is TRESPASSING!", adding "im actually scared now- the blood in the 'cults' book was too much.  All my fans, my supporters, please stand by me. (sic)".  Being stalked by a schizophrenic is bad enough but the thought of being hunted by a schizophrenic Freemason truly is frightening.  Apparently an unexplored matter in the annals of psychiatry, it seems the question of just how schizophrenia might particularly manifest in Freemasons awaits research so there may be a PhD there for someone, the obvious question to explore being (1) does Freemasonry tend to attract schizophrenics or (2) does Freemasonry tend to induce schizophrenia?  As far as is known, there have been no further reports of Ms Lohan being a victim of Masonic stalking but few doubt the Freemasons will have kept open their "Lindsay Lohan file".  

Terpsichore

Terpsichore (pronounced turp-sik-uh-ree)

(1) In Classical Mythology, the goddess of dancing and choral song and one of the nine Muses who were daughters of Zeus (god of sky and thunder) & Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory).

(2) In choreography; the art of dancing (should always be lowercase).

(3) In astronomy (as 81 Terpsichore), a main belt asteroid.

Circa 1760: From the Classical Latin Terpsichorē from the Ancient Greek Τερψιχόρη (Terpsikhórē) (literally “enjoyment of dance”), noun use of the feminine of terpsíchoros (delighting in the dance), the construct being τέρψις (térpsis; térpein) (to delight; enjoyment) + χορός (khorós) (dance; chorus); it’s from terpsíchoros that English gained chorus.  The Greek was térpein was from the primitive Indo-European root terp- (to satisfy) source also of Sanskrit trpyati (takes one's fill) and the Lithuanian tarpstu & tarpti (to thrive, prosper).

The adjective terpsichorean (pertaining to dancing (literally “of Terpsichore”)) dates from 1869, and was from the Latinized form of the Greek noun terpsikhore (Muse of dancing and dramatic chorus).  From this came the theatrical slang terp (stage dancer, chorus girl) noted since 1937.  The adjectival form terpsichorean often appears with an initial capital letter because of its etymology from a proper noun.  Either is acceptable but the conventions of Modern English tend eventually to prevail which suggests use of the capital T will reduce with time but, given the rarity of the word except in a few technical and historical disciplines, the classic form is likely to endure among those few who enjoy its use.

In the mythology of Ancient Greece, nine goddesses ruled over art and literature.  The Greeks called them Muses and the Muse of dance and choral music was Terpsichore.  Of late she’s been of interest to astronomers who adopted her as a metaphor for the rhythm and ordered movement in the universe, such as mechanical oscillations.  In Archaic Greece, there were but three Muses, all associated with song and dance; it was only in the classical period they became nine and assigned to distinct spheres: Calliope of epic poetry, Clio of history, Euterpe of lyric poetry, Erato of love poetry, Melpomene of tragedy, Polyhymnia of hymns, Thalia of comedy, Urania of astronomy, and Terpsichore of dance and choral music.  The daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, they dwelt in the land of Pieria in the foothills of Mount Olympus.  In later mythology, writers tended to compare the Muses to the sirens but while both were young nymphs famous for their beautiful songs, the Muses sang to enrich men’s souls while the sirens were chthonic and sang to lure them to their deaths.

The Greek historian Herodotus (circa 484-425 BC) wrote his Ἱστορίαι (historíai̯; in the West styled variously as The History or The Histories of Herodotus)) as an account of the Greco-Persian Wars (499-449 BC).  Although there was once some doubt about the veracity as a historical document (reflecting more the scepticism about medieval editors and translators than the original texts), modern research has concluded the work is one of the most reliable histories from antiquity.  Herodotus was called “The Father of History” by the Roman orator Cicero (103-46 BC) because of the quality of his writing but he's also now acknowledged as the father of historiography's modern structural form.  Written histories had existed prior to Herodotus but he was the first to adopt a recognizably modern thematic form.  At some unknown time, one or more editors reorganized The History into nine chapters, each name after a Muse, one of which was Terpsichore:  Book I (Clio), Book II (Euterpe), Book III (Thalia), Book IIII (Melpomene), Book V (Terpsichore), Book VI (Erato), Book VII (Polymnia), Book VIII (Urania) & Book IX (Calliope).

The Muse Terpsichore In Ancient & Modern Greece.  Allegory of the Muse Terpsichore playing a harp, from the Florentine School of the eighteenth century, oil on canvas by an unknown artist (left) and Lindsay Lohan dancing The Lilo, Lohan Beach House, Mykonos, Greece, 2018 (right).

Despite the similarity, there’s no verified connection between khorós (dance; chorus) and χώρᾱς (khṓrās), inflection of χώρᾱ (khṓrā) (location, place, spot; the proper place; one's place in life; piece of land: tract, land, field; country (as opposed to a city or town), countryside; country, nation.  The origin of khôra is unknown and it may be from a Pre-Greek substrate or other regional language although speculative links have been suggested including χᾰ́ος (kháos) (empty space, abyss, chasm) and χατέω (khatéō) (to lack, miss, need, desire) but few etymologists have supported either and the lack of cognates beyond the Greek rendered research a dead end.  Khōra had been adopted as the ancient name for the land lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers north of Babylon (modern-day Iraq), from the Greek mesopotamia (khōra (literally "a country between two rivers)), from the feminine of mesopotamos, the construct being mesos (middle), from the primitive Indo-European root medhyo- (middle") + potamos (river).  That use borrowed directly from the discussions from Antiquity.

However, khôra did attract the interest of those scourges of late twentieth century linguistics: the French deconstructionists.  Their attention seems to have been excited by the concept of khôra in the sense of “the territory of the Ancient Greek polis which lay beyond the city proper”.  The philosophers of Antiquity, noting the idea of khôra simultaneously as (1) the physical space between city & the wilderness, (2) the time it takes to transverse the space and (3) one’s state of mind while in the space.  It was very much a concept of the indeterminate, a triton genos (third kind), being neither civilization nor the state of nature and city nor wilderness and few things so appealed to the deconstructionists as the indeterminate.

Of course, one attraction of deconstruction was that it was in itself a layer of indeterminacy and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), post-modernism’s most famous explorer of khôra in the context of apophatism or negative theology, was interested not how the word had been understood in the traditions of metaphysics & metaphorics but what meaning could be constructed for something which is neither present or absent, passive or active.  The findings from khôra’s time on post-modernism’s autopsy table did illustrate why deconstruction gained a special role in language because there was surely no other way that Plato’s entirely cosmological concept could become psycho-linguistic and produce, in all seriousness, the idea of khôra as “container of the uncontainable”.  Plato (circa 425-circa 347 BC) had imagined khôra as that space through which something could pass but in which nothing could remain so thus to a French deconstructionist the very essence of tout autre (fully other) and from there it wasn’t very far to the idea of khôra also as time and space interacting.  At that point, in the tradition of post-modernism, khôra meant whatever the observer decided it meant.

The Terpsichore in Modern Greece: Lindsay Lohan dancing The Lilo, Lohan Beach House, Mykonos, Greece, 2018.