The Baroness collapses the rationalizing conception of the body as a machine

The Baroness collapses the rationalizing conception of the body as a machine
As Marcel Mauss puts it in his important 1934 essay “Techniques of the Body,” the body is “man’s ?rst and most natural instrument
conscious or fully formed statements against these violent changes. Like all of the cultural effusions of this period of New York’s avant-gardes, they become complex-and to some extent not fully legible-maps of an ongoing process of negotiating, rather than making ?nal sense of, the radically new social and cultural terrain of machineage New York. If we understand the machine works to be open-ended in this way, our view of the history of New York Dada itself becomes more open. Signi?cantly, a gap appears that allows for the reemergence of some of the more irrational characters into the same historical ?eld. The common tendency to discuss the performative forays of, say, the Baroness or Arthur Cravan as anomalies, or as anecdotal amusements surrounding the “legitimate” New York Dada works, usually de?ned as the machinic works of Man Ray, Duchamp, and Picabia and the readymades, might partially begin to break down. I am proposing a continuum of irrationality from the machine works (with their failed attempts at sublimation) to the immersive, ?amboyantly desublimatory objects, poems, equestriansingles-coupons and promenades of the Baroness. And yet, one would not want to assert the possibility that a body during the World War I period could escape the machinic or technological. . . man’s ?rst and most natural technical object, and at the same time his ?rst technical means.”22 The Baroness’s body, and her own various machine-related objects, are clearly technological (or technologized) in this sense: they are conditioned in and through modern, urban, industrial culture (this is part of their power and poignancy). Continue Reading