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Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism and the Fiction of Social Form

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Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism and the Fiction of Social Form University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism And The Fiction Of Social Form Natalie Amleshi University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Modern Literature Commons, and the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Amleshi, Natalie, "Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism And The Fiction Of Social Form" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3442. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3442 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3442 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism And The Fiction Of Social Form Abstract E.M. Forster’s imperative to “only connect” has long been read as modernist slogan for the rarefied depth of authentic interpersonal intimacy. Reframing the historical co-emergence of literary modernism and modern social science, this project tells a different story—not of connections between exceptional humans, but of connections between persons and environments. The prevailing canons of modernism have not yet grasped the internal complexity of early-twentieth-century debates regarding the interdependence of human and nonhuman agency. Early-twentieth-century sociologists like Émile Durkheim grounded both the autonomy of human culture and the disciplinary authority of sociology on the premise of species exceptionalism—the independence of human relations from nature and technology. “Inhuman Power” uncovers how the latent epistemological assumptions of Durkheimian social theory continue to structure contemporary aesthetic value judgments and literary-historical paradigms. The dominant structuring prism of nineteenth-century social theory has led critics to understand modernist art as a form of human aesthetic agency responsive to the reifying degradations of machines, masses, and media—a symbolic consolation for human alienation from nature (both the natural world and the “second nature” of administered society). This model casts modernism within a protracted philosophical stalemate between the human and nonhuman that obscures the mixing of natural and social agencies. Challenging the presumed dominance of this position, “Inhuman Power” assembles a set of core texts that comprise a significant counter-aesthetic ot the dualism of nature and society. Examining texts by E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, Gabriel Tarde, Joseph Conrad, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles Chesnutt, this project recasts modernism not in terms of subjects alienated from nature, but subjectivities co-constituted with environments. A shared formal question animates all of the texts that I examine: by what aesthetic concept or literary feature can texts reimagine the conceptual relationship between character and environment, nature and society? Excavating aesthetic strategies developed across sociology and literary art to represent the intensifying entanglement of natural, social, and technological agencies in the first decade of the twentieth century, “Inhuman Power” reanimates these writers’ ambition to imaginatively transform the concepts through which human beings render the material world thinkable and thus how human beings interact with that world. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Jed Esty Subject Categories History | Modern Literature | Other History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3442 INHUMAN POWER: INFRASTRUCTURAL MODERNISM AND THE FICTION OF SOCIAL FORM Natalie Amleshi A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Supervisor of Dissertation ____________________________ Jed Esty, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English Graduate Group Chairperson _____________________________ Nancy Bentley, Donald T. Regan Professor of English Dissertation Committee Josephine Park, Professor of English Paul Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The funny thing about finishing a dissertation about the power of the nonhuman is to step back and feel more powerfully than ever the transformative, bolstering influence of so many teachers, colleagues, friends, and family—of the very human agency that empowered me and sustained this project from the ground up. I am grateful to the many remarkable teachers who both modeled and instilled the value of careful reading; critical self-reflection; animated intellectual exchange; and the kind of adventurous, imaginative thinking at the limits of the rigorous and true that brought me to literary study in the first place. MattheW Cooper brought an intellectual energy to Lindbergh High School in St. Louis, Missouri, that opened my eyes to the particular kinds of knowledge that literary texts (and their readers) can produce. Joe LoeWenstein and Vincent Sherry were both mentors before I realized that I needed them. Their investment in my undergraduate education is a boost that has pushed me through grad school and beyond. This dissertation owes most to my committee of advisors. Jed Esty patiently held faith in this project when I found it hard to—challenging me to make connections both Within my own thinking and across modes of thought that initially seemed out of reach. More than anything, his instinct to get to heart of things, fast—to conjure the big picture and to keep the big questions ever-present—made it easy to pursue this work as a kind of Worthy vocation and not the uncertain, slightly drearier sWath of time that it could have been. His intellectual generosity and belief in the kinds of work that we do will stay with me far beyond my time at Penn. Paul Saint-Amour has reliably pushed me both to bring my arguments into tighter analytic focus and to nudge them outside the limits of my scholarly comfort zone. His willingness to entertain my arguments to their furthest reaches modeled for me an alchemic mix of rigor and play that I hope to emulate. Since my first week of grad school, Jo Park has guided how I frame my interests and enthusiasms through the discourses, animating questions, and professional performances that render them legible and socially meaningful. She is the teacher that I self-consciously imitate in the classroom. Individually, each has encouraged, challenged, taken seriously, and advanced my thinking. Collectively, they model the real power of shared intellectual hospitality and generous co-investigation. I cannot imagine a more energetic, challenging, collegial, and (honestly) fun set of interlocutors and mentors with whom to think hard about what it means to teach and Write about modernism in 2019. The English Department at the University of Pennsylvania has been my intellectual home for the past six years, and I am grateful to have been a part of a memorable cohort of fellow students that taught me so much. Both for providing a collegial home within this home and for comments on earlier drafts of my work, I am especially grateful to the Mods group here at Penn, especially Micah Del Rosario, Sam Waterman, Devorah Fischler, Devin Daniels, Alex Millen, and J.S. Wu. Many other scholars, teachers, and interlocutors provided invaluable feedback at key moments: Jim English, Nancy Bentley, Leo Bersani, Emily Steinlight, Rahul Mukherjee, J.C. Cloutier, ii Pearl Brilmyer, Joseph Valente, Jonathan Grossman, Kate Marshall, Avery Slater, and Janet Lyon. Finally, I have to acknowledge the unyielding love of my parents, grandparents, and brother that has alWays provided the sturdy ground that allows me to stay absorbed in this work without anxiety, insecurity, and self-doubt. It is a tremendous gift that I hope this work honors. This project is dedicated to my mother, Janice Amleshi. Whatever this is, I Wouldn’t have been able to do it without her, who has been a kind of co-conspirator in every phase of my education since she first tricked me into learning how to read. iii ABSTRACT INHUMAN POWER: INFRASTRUCTURAL MODERNISM AND THE FICTION OF SOCIAL FORM Natalie Amleshi Jed Esty E.M. Forster’s imperative to “only connect” has long been read as modernist slogan for the rarefied depth of authentic interpersonal intimacy. Reframing the historical co-emergence of literary modernism and modern social science, this project tells a different story—not of connections betWeen exceptional humans, but of connections betWeen persons and environments. The prevailing canons of modernism have not yet grasped the internal complexity of early-tWentieth-century debates regarding the interdependence of human and nonhuman agency. Early-tWentieth-century sociologists like Émile Durkheim grounded both the autonomy of human culture and the disciplinary authority of sociology on the premise of species exceptionalism—the independence of human relations from nature and technology. “Inhuman Power” uncovers how the latent epistemological assumptions of Durkheimian social theory continue to structure contemporary aesthetic value judgments and literary-historical paradigms. The dominant structuring prism of nineteenth-century social theory has led critics to understand modernist art as a form of human aesthetic agency responsive to the reifying degradations of machines, masses, and media—a symbolic consolation for human alienation from nature
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