This book opens with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, one of the most prodigious disruptive forces of the modernist avant-garde:
I went to the consulate with a largeâsugarcoated birthday cake upon my head with 50 flaming candles litâI felt just so spunky and affluentâ! In my ears I wore sugar plumes[sic] or matchboxesâI forget wich [sic]. Also I had put on several stamps as beauty spots on my emerald painted cheeks and my eyelashes were made of gilded porcupine quillsârustling coquettishlyâat the consulâwith several ropes of dried figs dangling [sic]around my neck to give him suck once and againâto entrance him. I should have liked to wear gaudy rubber boots up to my hips with a ballet skirt of genuine goldpaper white lacepaper covering it {to match the cake} but I couldnât afford thatâ! I guessâthat my inconsistency in my costume is to blame for my failure to please the officials? âŚ. (in Hajartarson and Spettigue 1992, 127)
Writing here to Djuna Barnes in 1927, the Baroness offers her particular perspective on the performative embodiments of gender. Her staging of a seductive, âsugarcoatedâ femininity aiming to âgive [âŚ] suckâ to a patriarchal officialdom, grafts onto her body the parodic prostheses that exteriorize her as woman. The failure in the Baronessâs ability to âentranceâ the consulate, which doubles as her failure to gain entrance to institutional legality, she attributes to the âinconsistency of my costumeâ, the failure of her technological exteriorization of woman-as-sexual-object. The Baroness experiences herself as âspunky and affluentâ, her deliberate refashioning of her actual position (which was at the time financially destitute and psychologically desperate) articulated through the crafting of her body in/with objects.
As rehearsed in contemporary accounts of the Baroness during her time in New York (when Jane Heap described her as âthe only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dadaâ) (Heap 1922, 46). her art-life praxis bodily integrated technology and the detritus of the modern techno-city. Thus accounts tell us that âshe wore a bustle and on the bustle at the base of her spine she had a taillight and at night sheâd turn on the taillightâ (BouchĂŠ 1963), or offer us the Baroness wearing âhigh white spats with a band of decorative furniture braid around the top. Hanging from her bust were two tea-balls [âŚ] On her head was a black velvet tam oâ shanter with a feather and several spoonsâlong ice-cream-soda spoonsâ (Anderson 1969, 179), or describe how âover the nipples of her breast were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string around her back [âŚ] One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which she later admitted to having pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamakerâsâ (Biddle 1939, 140). Wearing, writing and assembling a bricolage of found and stolen things, the Baroness utilized the machined objects and spaces of New York to project on to her bodily surfaces the processes of this gendered body and its incorporation into the actions of the modern consumer city . The Baronessâs externality travesties the working machines of American modernity, while also embracing individuation and creativity as itself a form of technics . In her poem â[Machine Teaches] â the Baroness imagines the artist as a posthuman, cyborg hybrid of âprecisionâ and âimaginationâ, articulating a sense of creative genius as a machinic becoming:
Monstrosities of unconstruction is todayâs
Precision
Decision of God machine.
The Baronessâ âmonstrosities of unconstructionâ and her remorseless, performative attacks on the âRelentlessness of | Purposeâ that characterized the technologically ascendant New York of the early twentieth century exemplify the powerful challenge posed by the women writers in this book; this is a challenge to unconstruct hegemonic accounts of gender, technology, modernity and the human. In the following pages I argue that the poetry of the American modernist women I consider, many of whom were directly connected with the spaces and machines of New York, engages with the âPrecision | Decision[s]â of modern machines in a unique mode. Instead of rejecting the implications of the technological turn in culture and thought, they uncover and express the disruptive potentials of leisure technologies. In the course of my analysis of modernist womenâs poetry in the following pages I deploy the critical perspectives generated by posthumanist feminisms and by the philosophical concept of âtechnicityâ that, in the words of Bernard Stiegler, identifies the âoriginary prosthesticityâ of the human (Stiegler 1998, 96). These critical perspectives and ideas galvanize the readings in this book and my attempts to reconfigure prevailing accounts of gender, leisure technologies and modernist poetry.
In Mark Amerikaâs âGertrude Stein Remixâ he riffs on the contemporary valencies of âtechnicityâ a term derived in English from the obsolete word âtechnicsâ and used to translate a French term. âTechnicityâ can simultaneously designate technology and technological techniques, and technical entities and objects. Influenced by Jacques Derridaâs concept of the originary technicity of life and Stieglerâs argument that our human individuation occurs at the site of our externalization by technical objects, technicity plays a central role in current explorations of our technological ecosphere; it is a term that seeks to describe our technological condition. Amerikaâs âGertrude Stein Remixâ avers that
In the world there is technology, in technology there is language, in language there is meaning, in meaning there is feeling. In meaning there is feeling. In feeling anything is playing, in feeling, anything is enframing, in feeling there is autonomy, in feeling there is epistemology, in feeling there is harmony and entirely situated there is unfolding. All the beings have heartbeats and all the writers have knowing and all the structure has partitioning and all the machines have machining. This makes technicity. (Amerika 2006, 370)
For contemporary commentators technicity offers a framework through which to think the medical, digital, spatial and media revolutions that have transformed the world that humans inhabit and that have their roots in the early twentieth century. It also offers, I contend, a way to engage with the field of posthuman enquiry and its critique of the humanist ideal of âManâ, and to break the fixed, hierarchical categories that separate nature and culture. The possibility of a posthumanist feminist analysis of the technologies and technicities of modernism, inspired by the work of key contemporary theorists such as Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Donna Haraway, impels the work in this book and informs both the analyses I undertake of the writing of modernist women and the conclusions I reach. In Amerikaâs text, channeled through a Steinian play with repetition and the present participle, âlanguageâ, âmeaningâ, âfeelingâ and âplayingâ are bound up together in a productive technicity that fuses âheartbeatsâ, âknowingâ and âmachiningâ. Amerikaâs remix betokens what I go on to activate and explore in my book, that is, the dynamic and transformative field of intersections between technology and embodied human knowledge that modernist women write. My book is intended to be a playing, it is written with feeling, and it is supposed to be fun.
Amerikaâs interpolation of Stein is not coincidental; her own sense of the mechanics of modernity, the bodying of knowledge and the machines of language resonates with Amerikaâs foregrounding of feeling, knowing and playing. And, as the following pages establish, she shares with a range of other modernist women writers an interest in the productive play of and with technicity and in moving beyond the fixities of the humanist subject. Thus, by focusing on the âplayingâ with âmachiningâ and looping in and around the work of Stein, the Baroness and their contemporaries (including Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, H. D., Helene Johnson, Ruth Lechlitner, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker, Lola Ridge, Juliette Roche, Muriel Rukeyser, Kathleen Tankersley Young), I want to enable readings of modernist poetry that focus on womenâs account of individuation beyond a traditional dichotomy of nature versus culture or natural versus artificial, and acknowledge their alternative ways of conceptualizing human selfhood. Many of these women knew or lived proximate to each other, were published in the same magazines, or belonged to the same urban artistic communities; some of them collaborated with, edited or otherwise supported the work of their women peers. But, rather than trace out a physical cartography of connections, this book essays to plot out the virtual, textual terrain wherein modernist women poets wrote out their responses to the leisure technologies of the modern American city and to identify a transformative posthumanism in these poetries.
The Technological EntrepĂ´t
I begin, in this introduction, with New York as the geographical node of connection between the poets I go on to analyze. New York was proclaimed as the preeminent technological city of the early twentieth-century by a gamut of modernists, avant-gardists and revolutionary thinkers. For Leon Trotsky it was a âcity of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubismâ (2007, 270); for Fritz Lang âThe buildings [of New York] seemed to be a vertical veil, very light and scintillating, a luxurious backdrop suspended from the gray sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotizeâ (quoted in McGilligan 1997, 104); for Francis Picabia âNew York is the cubist city, the futurist city. It expresses modern thought in its architecture, its life, its spiritâ (1913, 1). These responses to the built environmentâthe space people inhabited, worked in and traveled acrossâfrom Trotsky, Lang and Picabia are indicative in that they attribute a specific set of meanings to the organization and manufacture of the externality of New York and the technological ascendancy of this city. The buildings, transportation and utility systems of New York were designed and built using the most modern developments and, as a turn-of-the-century entrepĂ´t city, like Chicago, with a congested and geographically constrained center, many developments were focused on making the most efficient use of a concentrated space. The contingencies of New Yorkâs built environment and its crucial role as a profitable marketplace impacted on the technological innovations that characterized the unique urban environment in the early twentieth-century. The resulting city was one in which technology was utilized to produce a profitable flow (of goods, traffic, people, money) and thus defined both urban space and urban inhabitants and workers. For Rem Koolhas this meant that Manhattan was a âlaboratoryâ where âthe invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory o...