3 - Generation

Summary

“Portraits and Repetition” can be considered a sequel to Stein's attempt at a manifesto, “Composition as Explanation.” That text, as I have pointed out in the Introduction, is largely concerned with the question of how to make sense of Stein's (artistic) generation. That is not a surprising concern for Stein. The idea of experience as a network or a nexus in relation to history had occupied her since the early 1900s. Yet where, in line with Dilthey's project, her early work had considered such a nexus to provide access to human nature, the work she engages in around 1909 is acutely concerned with the composition of the nexus she feels part of. Composition is one of Stein's central ideas and she uses it to refer both to the constellations in which we live (like that of a generation or a city) and to the way in which we frame knowledge about our shared lives (for instance, by means of a typology or a complete history). “Portraits and Repetition” starts with a reference to “Composition as Explanation,” spotlighting the problem of change across generations. “In Composition as Explanation,” Stein writes, “I said nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear.” Generation is a key problem in both texts. Tracing the ways in which Stein approaches it enables us to understand how her project intersects with a wider early twentiethcentury conversation on the structures and forms we use to make sense of time. I start by focusing on “Composition as Explanation” and work my way towards Stein's claim that her period is “of the cinema” in “Portraits and Repetition.”

The first lines of “Composition as Explanation” read as the response to a set of unformulated questions. Stein appears to ask what makes time move and what makes generations different from each other, and then responds:

There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking.