For this the Baroness had adorned herself in a bright blue-green dress
It fetishizes abstraction and imposes it as the norm. It detaches the pure form from its impure content-from lived time, everyday time, and from bodies with their opacity
deeply human and inexorably embodied level of urban life, thus pointing to the profound psychological costs of urbanism as well as exposing and celebrating its euphoria-inducing, creative bene?ts. Practicing space, de Certeau notes, is quintessentially immersive; it involves “falling from the heights to inside the crowd.”70 Extending his model, we could say that the Baroness perfected a rhetoric of walking, moving immersively throughout the city to produce an alternative “space of enunciation,” dramatically other to modernity’s spatial politics and cultural as well as artistic versions of rationalism. According to de Certeau’s model, the Baroness’s urban rhetoric is triply articulated, involving: (1) a process of appropriation of a topographical system (the increasingly vertical spaces of New York City, nonetheless traversed through the horizontal trajectories of ambulatory exploration, especially in the labyrinthine premodern streets of Greenwich Village, where the Baroness lived off and on); (2) a spatial acting-out of New York as comprised of otherness; (3) an implicit foregrounding of the relations among differentiated positions (rather than, as was far more common at the time, the production of absolute difference [woman vs. man; heterosexual vs. homosexual, German enemy vs. French/English/American hero, etc.] such that wartime logic could complete its dichotomizing work).71 This model of embodied materialization, whereby the urban wanderer performs the city in such a way as to expose the boundaries of “proper” modern subjectivity (and, I am insisting, performs the spaces of the historical avant-garde to point to its limits), is linked in interesting ways to Lefebvre’s model of spatial politics elaborated in his 1974 book The Production of Space. Continue reading “Wherever there is illusion, the optical and visual world plays an integral and integrative, active and passive, part in it”