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“ T he vaudeville theatre,” Edward Royle oberved in 1899, “belongs to the era of the department store and the short story. It may be a kind of lunch-counter art, but then the art is so vague and the lunch is so real.”1 With the department store and the short story, vaudeville was perhaps the most eloquent expression of the complexities of turnof -the-nineteenth-century American metropolitan culture.Vaudeville’s roots in urban life were reflected in the term “vaudeville,” which originally derived from the French expression voix de ville, or voice of the city, the term for urban folk songs.2 But city culture also structured vaudeville’s morphology and aesthetic. The consensus of contemporary writers who studied the impact of the experience of the modern, industrial metropolis on the mental and social organization of the city dweller was that it produced a profound disturbance in the individual’s nervous system and energy level. Writing about the transformation of Berlin from big city to world city, Georg Simmel, in his famous lecture “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) pointed to the urban “intensification of nervous life, which proceeds from the rapid and uninterrupted fluctuation of external and internal impressions”as the source of a profound alteration in“the psychological foundation”of the self in the city. The sensory barrage that accompanied “every walk across the street,” combined “with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, professional and social life,”caused human nervousness to respond so violently and brutally that nervous exhaustion, a jaded reaction to any impulse, and a need for ever-more extreme excitement were the net results. Consumption and amusements such as variety, that“growing concatenation of heterogeneous impressions”and“increasingly hasty and motley fluctuation of stimulations,” 125 Chapter 6 My Other/My Self Impersonation and the Rehearsal of Otherness catered to nerves that were overstimulated but underfed by an increasing monotony in the realm of labor.3 In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin wrote of modern (metropolitan) man as a“man cheated out of his experience.”Here too, shock, the norm of everyday life in the city, is the culprit, and the mechanical conditioning of man is its correlate.Taking his cues from Marxist and psychoanalytic theory,Benjamin argued that human consciousness, like a bumper, parries the shocks experienced by the walker in the crowd and the assembly-line worker, and gradually becomes desensitized. It engages impressions and sensations that are experienced as shocking on the level of reflex, rather than letting them penetrate into conscious experience as a traumatic effect.4 Modern technology continues to recapture the moment of shock. Technological innovations are at the same time new“innervations”that respond to the city-rooted need for strong stimulation. Where photography “delivers a posthumous shock to the moment,” film “makes shock the formal principle of perception.”5 Although these new technologies participate in the ongoing training and inoculation of the human sensorium, Benjamin detected in the new media a utopian potential. In film, photography, and recording, technological reproduction reverses the contraction of time and the fragmentation of space brought about by technological production.6 Writes Benjamin:“Our taverns and our metropolitan streets,our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its fur-flung ruins and debris,we calmly and adventurously go traveling.”7 Innovations such as photography, film, and impressionist painting re- flect the degree of sophistication of the urban eye, trained for decades on the “daily sight of a moving crowd.” They are a testament to the power of mimicry as “cognitive apparatus.” Benjamin specifically attributed an educational if not revolutionary potential to film’s capacity for constructing a new “time-space” through the process of montage, which at once mimics the fragmentation of experience and redeems it.8 It is not surprising that many modernists saw in vaudeville an intense expression of modernity’s fragmented consciousness,and celebrated its vitality . While in eighteenth-century France, “vaudeville” signified a combination of comedy and music, by the turn of the nineteenth century it had evolved into a form of entertainment that in its rhythm, polyphony, heterogeneity and its reliance on quickness, gags, and punch lines dramatized the diversity, tempo, and intensity of modern urban life.9 Structured as the 126...

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