Browsing by Subject "Embodiment"

Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to shape and delimit thought and action. By the late 19th century, the hypothesis that humans were "automata," as Descartes had conjectured, began to seem much more than philosophical speculation, as statesmen and industrialists appropriated blueprints of the human machine originally mapped by the sciences. So dominant was the conjunction of politics and habit that, writing in 1890s, the American psychologist William James would call the automatic operations of body and mind the very engine of political life: "Habit," he declared, "is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor." But James was only anticipating the wide range of thinkers who would associate physiological automatism with politics in the coming years. By century's end, the belief that habit determined social action and circumscribed individual volition was to find wide currency in a variety of cultural fields, including literary modernism.

Situating literary modernism in relation to this emergent sense of political modernity, Automatic Modernism argues that modernists reconfigured the discourse of automatism for political and aesthetic ends. Wary of the new political environment in which government, political parties and industry exploited the science of conditioned reflex to ensure automatic responses from docile subjects, writers of this period turned to the resources of literature in order to both disrupt the clichés of thought and action enforced by environmental stimuli and to imagine forms of politics adapted to the physiologically automatic body. Looking in particular at the fiction and non-fiction work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, this dissertation attempts to understand the recurrent equation of automatic behavior and twentieth-century modernity. Even as modernists vigorously rejected habitual behavior as the very element of twentieth century life that imperiled authentic art and social belonging, they forged alternative notions of bodily being, investing in the potentialities of human automatism as the basis of aesthetic possibility and social coherence. The formal experiments of these modernists emerge, then, as efforts to foreground, manipulate, rupture, and mimic the political habits of readers.

Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Media of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, proposes an emerging aesthetic of spectrality in visual media about the U.S.-Mexico border that challenges the power of militarized and racialized visibility. The visual media projects I work with, including cinema, electronic performance art, site specific video installation, and photography generate an aesthetic of spectrality as they try to conjure and express the socially invisible through sensual elements like affect, sound, kinaesthetics, and full embodiment. This aesthetic elicits the perceptions of our other senses beyond only the visual and makes visible the social flesh of the movements and socialities of migration rather than racialized, migrant bodies. The border, I claim, is an important site for understanding the continued deployment of visibility in the neoliberal legacies of what Quijano and Wallerstein call, Americanity, a term denoting the development of the modern capitalist system in the Americas which relied upon the imbricate logics of colonialism, racism, and the deification the modern. Images of spectrality are intermediaries between what Diana Taylor calls, archive and repertoire, being both documents and sites of embodied engagement that produce both certain and uncertain knowledges of race and migration at the border. The visual media projects in my dissertation cultivate spectral aesthetics to theorize an alternative visibility and the changing production of public memory. By making visible the social flesh of heterogeneous encounters with media, spectral aesthetics reforms collective memory making it a process of democratic editorialization that privileges experience as the site of a multivocal history. This project reclaims the image as a terrain for the multitude's inquiry and imagination about the US-Mexico border, and puts the imaginaries generated by these images in dialog with activist projects happening in relation to immigration.

Recent focus on the police treatment of dark bodies has brought the visual perception of race to the forefront of national discourse. It has raised the question of why certain people are seen as a greater social threat than others. The current project engages this issue, offering a Christian theological reading of the problem of modern visuality in relation to race and gender as well as a constructive way forward.

Using Byzantine iconophile theology, namely, the concepts of iconic and anti-iconic, as the governing framework, this dissertation teases out the theologically charged nature of visuality deployed by the modern, western racial optic. Beginning with an exploration of the modern optic in the United States (chapter 1), this project applies the analytical framework of Byzantine iconophile visual theology (chapter 2) to the racial optic as it emerges in a modern form during the Colonial Period (chapter 3) and develops during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (chapter 4).

Through this theological study of the deployment of the racial optic upon bodies, it becomes clear that there are structural and procedural similarities that exist between the bodily evaluation, categorization, and conversion that take place within the liturgical practices surrounding the Christian icon of Jesus Christ and those belonging to the cultural liturgy of the racial optic, build around western modernity’s holy icon – the white male. In both cases, people are transformed by the practice of veneration. In both cases, the external body functions as an indication of internal character, revealing one’s state of fitness for inclusion within civilized society. Understanding the visual practice of the modern racial optic through Byzantine iconophile theology’s iconic and anti-iconic sheds light upon why the presence of those considered dark, deformed, and abnormal has been and continues to be treated as a threat to the order and wellbeing of the modern, western social body.