Introduction

As the Machine Age accelerated on both sides of the Atlantic, modernists grappled with the languages that might properly describe it. The sprawling proliferation of new socio-technical assemblages seemed to lack a coherent focal point, but as I argued in the Introduction to this book, they had inherited a coherent system for thinking about them. The metaphysics of the ‘American technological sublime’ supplied a cultural narrative that emerged coevally with transatlantic discourse networks addressing technology and modernity. By the early twentieth century, the Naturalists and Pictorialists had articulated the central tropes of that quasi-mystical language, evoking the ‘awe’, ‘wonder’ and ‘terror’ associated with railways, electricity, megastructures, automotive power, automated production and various technical objects in their writing and art. However, for many avant-garde figures, particularly those who came to be associated with Dada, the monumental technical objects of the Machine Age were not as important as the assemblages and ensembles that they emerged from, and the tense negotiations involved in their transduction in culture. This insight enabled avant-garde figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (aka the Baroness), Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, William Carlos Williams and others to produce innovative prototypes, and even new technical objects, as well as visionary creative responses to these systems. Experimentalists who converged in New York in the early decades of the twentieth century had a uniquely intimate encounter with technology, and in particular with the mundane technicities of quotidian life. Fully aware that the technological sublime dominated most discourse networks in the Machine Age, their technicities charted an alternative route: an aesthetic counter-narrative that I call the techno-bathetic, which interlaces bathetic strategies and technical processes and subjects. Techno-bathetic cultural productions tend to critique servile relationships with technology, while proposing new, more energetic ones.

The previous chapter explored the ways in which avant-gardes harnessed processes of transduction and technicity for alternative ends. Counter-surveillance technologies like dazzle camouflage elegantly demonstrated the interdependence of socio-technical ensembles, or infrastructures, by disrupting them for defensive purposes. Like the Futurist poets I discussed in Chapter 1, the proto-Dada artists of New York City began to propose new ways of reading Machine Age America. One of the figures who stimulated that process was the Swiss experimental writer Arthur Cravan.