ABSTRACT
Acrid and sulfurous with the stench of the shocktroops of battle: World War I is often invoked as the crucible of modern sensibility. An urtext of shock, its neural distortions and arrested visuality had been triggered by mustard gas, the first nerve agent of chemical warfare. Consider Assia Djebar’s notes on Eugène Delacroix’s reminiscences of Algeria in 1832 following the French invasion in 1830: On June 25, 1832, Delacroix disembarked at Algiers for a short stopover. The fundamental assumption behind the various movements of the avant-garde in the arts was that relations between art and society had fundamentally changed; old ways of looking at the world were inadequate and new ways must be found. This assumption was correct. By the early 1900s, the Futurists programmatically laid out this sense of the relationship between the body, technology, speed, the fascination with the other and that of perceptual shock within the urban.
