Queer Theory & Futurism

[Richard Fiero]

alice wellintown wrote:
>Note:
>
>Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man is
>a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. His
>interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by
>the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys
>Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece
>by the Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp.
>
>To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points,
>which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit
>rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip
>. . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her
>legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique
>self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are
>date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience.
. . .
Duchamp's work was "The Bride Stripped Bare by 
Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)." Perhaps 
McLuhan make the remark that "The Mechanical 
Bride" was in his head connected but there is no 
commentary by Duchamp that can lead to the idea floated here. Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etant_donn%C3%A9s
Étant donnés "It is composed of an old wooden 
door, bricks, velvet, twigs, a female form made 
of leather, glass, linoleum, an assortment of 
lights, a landscape composed of hand-painted and 
photographed elements, and an electric motor 
housed in a biscuit tin which rotates a perforated disc."

Both Duchamp and McLuhan are getting short shrift 
in this ongoing Grand Unified Theory of Everything.
The actors mentioned so far are Hegelians and Sauserreans, not Marxians.