MACHINE

By the end of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Industrial Revolution had turned the machine from a means of production into a sociocultural icon. To the modernist artists the machine offers itself as an IMPERSONAL model and an alternative to aesthetic convention, if also viewed with certain distrust. T. E. Hulme, for example, hailed the advent of ABSTRACT aesthetics, yet feared that machines would take too much credit for it. The machine is most explicitly embraced by the avant-garde, epitomised by FUTURISM in Italy and VORTICISM in England, as a radical commitment to the future opened by TECHNOLOGY. WAR did much to reinvest the perception of the machine with suspicion, turning its potential for impersonality into dehumanisation and death, both literal and cultural, but also political because complicit with the oppressive management of the human mode of production by the forces of consumer capitalism. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) is a poignant parody of such mechanical dehumanisation. It did not deter Ezra Pound, however, who continued to idealise machine parts in his pamphlet ‘Machine Art’ (1930) as the very natural poetic object that had eluded his IMAGIST project.

READING

Hulme, T. E. (1998) ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ [1914], in Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuiness. Manchester: Carcanet Press.

Lewis, Wyndham et al. (1998) ‘Long Live the Vortex’ [1918], in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Olga Taxidou and Jane Goldman (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Pound, Ezra (1996) Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

MADELEINE

In Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) the first volume of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), the narrator recalls the experience of drinking a tisane to alleviate the winter cold, at the urging of his mother; with it is served a small scalloped cake or petite madeleine, untasted since childhood. Soaked in the tea, the taste of this morsel unlocks a fleeting sensation that is the involuntary MEMORY of his past in Combray and from that ‘madeleine’ Proust's epic of modernism proceeds. Involuntary memory is distinct from voluntary memory in that it arises unbidden and provides access to a different order of time in which the past can be recovered in the present.