Through immersion-my immersion in her, her immersion in World War I-era New York (as imagined by me)-I have tried to begin to break
If the Baroness is like “death in reverse,” as Barnes so evocatively puts it, then retelling her story brings us back to a new beginning. As Benjamin realized, doing history can become a political act if it involves a critical reappropriation of the fragmentary elements of the past with an eye to refashioning our conception of the future; if it involves peeling away-?aying as it were-the ideological layers of the present, leaving behind the skeleton of the past (its contours in?ected, of course, by the ?ayed ?esh of the now).4 As his colleague Theodor Adorno argued, Benjamin bemoaned the kind of history that involved the extraction of “inmost soul” from the “alienated, rei?ed, dead world” of frozen aesthetic forms in order to make sense of the past.5 This dead-world kind of history precisely parallels Simmel’s sublimatory art practice, which, as I have argued here, is opposed to the kind of desublimatory, irrational, lived neurasthenic Dada of the Baroness. The dead-world kind of history, then, is the opposite of what I, loosely following Benjamin’s model, hope to have traced in this equally neurasthenic art history, leaving lots of shreds of ?esh visible on the bones of the past. This is an immersive mode of history that replaces a passive observing of the past with “a proactive interrogating through use and reuse.”6 Through a kind of historical ragpicking, Benjamin dragged the idea of history “out of in?nite distance into in?nite proximity.”7 I hope that I have in some measure begun, through this rather strange and deliberately uneven text (riddled through with bursts of irrationality), a similar gesture of hauling history out into the harsh light of postmodernity, as it were, to bring it closer. Continue reading “I have tried, then, to keep the contradictions and confusions of New York Dada on the surface of this study”