Carnival Bodies, the Grotesque, and Becoming Animal

Abstract

In this exploration of different articulations in and of modernism, it has become clear that a rationalised logic of a (singular) modernist enterprise, characterised by stylistic complexity and aesthetic self-sufficiency, can only be supported at the expense of an active engagement with the complex forces and flows of early twentieth-century culture. However, what has also been exposed is the erroneous assumption of an ‘other’ modernism (opposed to the hegemonic modernist narrative) that expresses and represents those experiences and voices that are repressed and denied in hegemonic (high) cultural forms. As the explorations of the First World War, New York Dada and 1920s Paris have demonstrated there are no unified discourses of modernism, only specific and localised points of intersection and negotiation. My articulations of these points of effect and investment seek inevitably to expose the real in its action in these points or moments. In other words, the effects I have identified so far do not produce a finalised map of the modernism that Barnes, Loy and Stein participate in and create, but indicate how, at specific junctures, modernist texts are manufactured out of the different flows of determination (from the material and libidinal vectors of Paris, to the semantic and somatic indices of technologised war) of which their contexts consist.