‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.

Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.

Excavating the ‘Readies’: The Revolution of the Word, Revised

Bob Brown’s reading machine was a mechanised speed-reading system that scrolled micrographically-printed, highly visual texts called ‘readies’ under a magnifying screen. Although Brown’s work is now celebrated by critics, the current scholarly consensus is that the invention itself never worked. Drawing on previously-unknown archival evidence, this chapter presents a major revision of the reading machine’s foundation narrative, from its origins in WWI-era Greenwich Village, to its first working prototype built by the American artist-engineer Ross Saunders in France in 1931. The chapter focuses on three key cultural nodes that contributed to the evolution of Bob and Rose Brown’s reading machines: avant-garde writers of ‘The Revolution of the Word’, who fostered Brown’s project in transatlantic journals including transition, The Morada and The New Review; expatriate publishers such as the Black Sun and Hours Press (and trade journals including The Publishers’ Weekly); and American expatriate newspapers such as The Paris Tribune. In his cross-formational strategy he identified technology and technicity as points of convergence between these diverse groups. This chapter recontextualises Brown’s project by analysing the readies through these channels using a techno-bathetic framework. In doing so, it reveals both the complexities of that project, and its vast cultural reach and significance.

Dazzling Technologies: Avant-Gardes and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War

This Chapter identifies a new form of technicity that emerged in the First World War, in which enhancement and distortion effects generated by sensory augmentation technologies could be manipulated for strategic purposes by a variety of cultural agents. It argues that ‘dazzle camouflage’, a technology developed by the British Admiralty in 1917 to delay and confuse attacking U-boats, exemplifies this mediation of everyday life both on and off the battle fronts. Focusing on the Florentine journal Lacerba and the Vorticist magazine Blast, the first part of the chapter shows how the Futurists F. T. Marinetti, Armando Mazza, Alberto Viviani, Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrà, and the Vorticists Wyndham Lewis, Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders, developed their ‘dazzle poetics’ to analyse, critique and exploit the sensory overload of the Machine Age. The second part of the chapter explores ‘dazzle technologies’ produced by avant-gardes and the military. It identifies convergences between Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori noise machines and Alvin Langdon Coburn’s and Ezra Pound’s ‘Vortoscope’ camera apparatuses, offering new perspectives on their prescient manipulation of sensory augmentation ensembles. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Edward Wadsworth’s role in the development of dazzle technicity and the production of dazzle camouflage.

Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.

Afterword: The Robot Does (Not) Exist

The Afterword consolidates the book’s arguments about the spatial practices of the techno-bathetic avant-gardes, who harnessed the semantic power of technology to critique its broader cultural contexts. It extends Chapter 5’s discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man by exploring how the unnamed protagonist critiqued the technicities by which white hegemonies sustained cultural dominance, while simultaneously introducing alternative approaches. As in other chapters, the Afterword locates the technological sublime at the root of this dominance; Ellison not only exposes the potent grip that its servile dialectics exert on Western imaginations, but also the bathetic contexts of their articulation in culture, which are often repressed. For Ellison, as for Gilbert Simondon, this occlusion is exemplified by the ‘robot’, a cultural creation that fuses technical discourses in engineering with industrial alienation and narratives of the technological sublime. By exposing the means by which techno-servility entered culture, and yoking it to racial difference, Ellison ‘plung[es] outside history’ to engender new modes of technological agency, in the US and beyond. The Afterword argues that Ellison’s diachronic strategies exemplify the task of techno-bathetic avant-gardes: to perform an intermediary critique of the technological sublime before introducing alternative, emancipatory narratives, which can gain traction in the public sphere.

Introduction

The Introduction sets out how transatlantic avant-gardes probed the intricate relationships between socio-technical ensembles, the human body and the quotidian operations of urban living. In the early twentieth century, these bathetic processes had been camouflaged by sublime cultural narratives that magnified the presence of technology in the public sphere while shrouding key aspects of its operations and functions. Beginning with a famous anecdote by Gertrude Stein, in which she describes an encounter between Pablo Picasso and a camouflaged cannon, the Introduction explores how technology became a cipher for avant-gardes’ encounter with modernity in the First World War. Following a survey of its key subjects and chapter synopses, the first section engages with the work of Gilbert Simondon to triangulate key technological terms and concepts, before applying them to modernist and avant-garde studies. The subsequent section builds ‘techno-bathetic’ frameworks from those concepts to critique the means by which technology is transduced into culture. Finally, analyses of Marcel Duchamp’s Encore à cet astre [Once More to This Star] and the radical Harlem Renaissance journal Fire!! illustrate how vanguardists deployed technicity as a crucial creative practice for intervening in cultural narratives and promulgating social change.