Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Dazzling Technologies: Avant-Gardes and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War
- 2 Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes
- 3 Excavating the ‘Readies’: The Revolution of the Word, Revised
- 4 Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change
- 5 ‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing
- 6 Afterword: The Robot Does (Not) Exist
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Dazzling Technologies: Avant-Gardes and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War
- 2 Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes
- 3 Excavating the ‘Readies’: The Revolution of the Word, Revised
- 4 Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change
- 5 ‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing
- 6 Afterword: The Robot Does (Not) Exist
- Index
Summary
Trudging through a fierce winter evening in Paris with Alice B. Toklas, Pablo Picasso and Eva (‘Eve’) Gouel, Gertrude Stein witnessed an uncanny encounter between avant-garde aesthetics and military hardware in the darkened streets of Montparnasse. Recounted from Toklas's perspective, Stein illustrated how avant-gardes perceived themselves in relation to technology at the dawn of mechanised total war:
The first year of the war, Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening. There is nothing in the world colder than the Raspail on a cold winter evening, we used to call it the retreat from Moscow. All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified.
In this famous anecdote, Stein renders Picasso's moment of ‘foresight’ self-consciously in hindsight. In doing so, she establishes artistic vanguards as cultural prophets, on the one hand, but, on the other, also passive bystanders who are overwhelmed by the scale and ferocity of global events along with everyone else. However, the role of technology here is ambiguous: Stein simultaneously includes and excludes its avant-garde witnesses from its systems of production. Technology emerges yet is also defamiliarised by their work. On a proverbial dark and stormy night, technology becomes a cipher for the avant-gardes’ encounter with modernity – a monumental ‘black box’ that mediates and instantiates the potent forces converging in the First World War.
Nevertheless, Stein's carefully staged scene is itself a work of camouflage, remarkable as much for what it conceals as for what it reveals. The ‘big cannon’ arrive suddenly, like infernal apparitions of war, but the setting creates a deeper chronological frame for the encounter. Her reference to ‘the retreat from Moscow’ alludes to the Napoleonic Wars, while the Boulevard Raspail, previously known as the Boulevard D’Enfer [Boulevard of Hell], skirts Cimetière du Montparnasse.
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- Information
- Reading Machines in the Modernist TransatlanticAvant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday, pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020