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The University of Chicago Spiritual Automata

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SPIRITUAL AUTOMATA: CRAFT, REPRODUCTION, AND VIOLENCE, 1850-1930 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY JOSEPH LUIS MOCTEZUMA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Luis Moctezuma All Rights Reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………….………….……………………….…………iv ABSTRACT ………………….……………….…….……………………………………vi INTRODUCTION …………………………….………………………..............………...1 1.WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE AUTOMATISMS OF CRAFT….…………….........25 2. MINA LOY AND THE AUTOMATISMS OF REPRODUCTION …………....……83 3. WYNDHAM LEWIS AND THE AUTOMATISMS OF VIOLENCE ……….….…122 CODA ….…..…..…..…..….…..……..….…..….....…….…….…..….….….….…..….170 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………..………………………….172 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is the result of the tremendous help and support I received from my peers and faculty at the University of Chicago. I want to first thank my dissertation committee: Maud Ellmann, Bill Brown, and Benjamin Morgan. As the chair of my dissertation committee, Maud Ellmann provided invaluable direction for the course of the project. It was Maud’s suggestion to research the work of Mina Loy that really brought this project into a conceptual groove that fit the rhythm of my thought. Maud’s supervision was crucial in fleshing out all the nuances of my ideas and making sure that my claims never got lost in the mire of abstraction. Bill Brown was equally pivotal as an engaged and committed reader who offered not only critical insight into the quality of the ideas in the dissertation, but also stylistic feedback on best writing practices that have resulted in making me a better writer overall. I was enriched continuously by Bill’s feedback, and I can only hope to reach the level of intellectual clarity enshrined in his work. Finally, I want to thank Benjamin Morgan, who was a major support on the earliest drafts of the dissertation, and whose advice and feedback brought me to understand the significance of engaged scholarship. Benjamin showed me how to think through different fields of discourse, and I am a better scholar for it. I also want to thank specific faculty members in the Department of English Language and Literature who were responsible for not just bringing this project into fruition, but also for believing in my value as a graduate student in the department and offering advice and guidance during the long road to the completion of my degree. Elizabeth Helsinger was a major force in bringing me to the University of Chicago, and her brilliance and expertise during my first years at the university offered a way of rethinking my forms of reading. Her feedback on the first chapter was immensely valuable. I want to thank Srikanth Reddy for his warm encouragement iv throughout my journey at the university. I want to thank James Chandler, Timothy Campbell, and Jennifer Scappettone for guiding me in the development of dynamic reading lists that eventually prepared me for the dissertation proposal. I want to thank Elaine Hadley and Julie Orlemanski for their valuable feedback on my teaching practice. I want to thank John Wilkinson for his generosity and for the inspiring example he set for me in his pedagogy and creative work. I want to thank Rachel Galvin for believing in my work and for her confidence and support during the last stages of my graduate career. I want to give special thanks for Edgar Garcia, who read nearly all my drafts of the dissertation and was profoundly insightful and encouraging about where I could strengthen the stakes of my project. Without the help of all these faculty members, I would not have arrived at this moment. I wish to thank all my closest friends at the University of Chicago who supported me through the tough times and made me feel part of the community. My colleagues at the Poetry and Poetics Workshop and at Chicago Review were instrumental for helping me to reframe and actualize my ideas not just in this dissertation but in my other critical and creative work as well. I dedicate this dissertation to my partner, Mary Lou Villanueva, whose love and emotional support helped me see this dissertation to its completion. I also dedicate it to my family in California: my father, Jose Moctezuma, my mother, Nellie Moctezuma, and my siblings, Daniel, Steven, and Chelsea. Without the sacrifices my parents made for me, I would never have reached this far. Without the love and trust of my siblings, I would not have believed in myself. v ABSTRACT This dissertation is about the significance of automatism as a theory and mode of aesthetic production in the British avant-garde. It proposes that the British avant-garde begins with the founding of the Pre-Raphaelites in 1848 and concludes with the multiple interwar movements (vorticism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism) that climaxed and dissipated in the 1930s. The dissertation narrows its focus to the figures of William Morris, Mina Loy, and Wyndham Lewis, whose work across mediums and genres provide a schema for redefining the distinction and qualities of the avant-garde. The stakes of the dissertation lie in proposing a solution to the riddle of a British avant- garde that alternated between a conservative aesthetics and a radical politics (as in Morris), between a reactionary sexual politics and a radicalized poetic style (as in Loy), and between a radical aesthetics and a conservative politics (as in Lewis). I propose that the alternation between conservatism and radicalism in these three authors can be explained through the lens of automatism, which changes shape, purpose, and import in the work of each author. More than other British authors of this time, Morris, Loy, and Lewis embody the contradictory features of British avant-gardism and automatism. Automatism is a conceptual term that I develop throughout the dissertation. It will come to signify three different forms of aesthetic performance: an automatism of craft, an automatism of reproduction, and an automatism of violence, which find their correlates, respectively, in the work of Morris, Loy, and Lewis. By automatism, I refer to what Morris calls the “unconscious intelligence” of the skilled artisan who works with great facility in a given medium. In a broader sense, automatism simply refers to moments and patterns of skilled performativity (or “mastery”) vi standardized by a nearly automatic engrossment in a material situation. In Morris’s case, automatic intelligence extends across a range of mediums and forms of craft. For Mina Loy, automatism came to signify unconscious forms of gender bias, sexism, and racialization that were uncritically accepted and standardized by male-centric avant-garde circles. Despite the negative connotations that these behavioral and gendered automatisms acquired for Loy as she negotiated her involvement in the futurist and surrealist scene, she reversed these cultural habits into counter-techniques of visualization that exposed the gendered rhetoric of the historical avant-garde. If Loy felt herself marginalized as a female poet first and racialized as an “anglo-mongrel” second, she reworked these aspersions into qualities of experimental virtue. Hence, Loy’s perspective on masculinist automatisms (in which male perspectives tended to supplant female agency) was inverted into a “spiritual” theory of reproduction, both in the sense of motherhood and in the sense of feminist self-production. Her work as a result utilized automatism as a form of diagnosing and picturing conservative trends in avant-garde biases and radicalizing them within her experimental lyric. For Wyndham Lewis, automatism constitutes a theory of automated group-thinking and mass-formation that ultimately leads toward fascistic ritualized violence and what Walter Benjamin signaled as the “aestheticization of politics.” Lewis co-founded vorticism as a response to continental avant-garde groups like the futurists, but in mimicking the futurist aesthetic of violence, vorticism succeeded in exposing the mimetic qualities of avant-garde group-formations whose doxa more closely resembled the implicit mainstream against which they formulated their positions of exceptionality. Lewis conceived of the human organism as a time-based automaton wound up by political vanguards to strut and posture on the stage of history. Refuting what he calls the “time-cult” of such vanguards that tacitly promised historical or metaphysical liberation, vii Lewis proposed an enemy-politics whose “philosophy of the eye” based itself on a materialist theory of visible oppositions rather than on romantic myths of organic solidity. Hence, Lewis came to repurpose automatism as a combative and cynical style of depersonalization, one which exposed the integrity of human thoughtfulness into mechanical fragments and animalized actions. Lewis’s sense of impersonality allowed for a paradoxical freedom in “being ruled” by one’s own automatisms (accepting that one is an organic machine) rather than by a false belief in Bergsonian ideas of vitalism or romantic individualism. The dissertation chapters are organized as follows. Chapter One examines the transmedial work of William Morris and its relation to labor, craft, and industrial automatism. The first section looks at Morris’s epic poem, Sigurd the Volsung (1876), which allegorizes Morris’s hostile attitude toward industrial automatism and the hope he placed in the revival of handicrafts. I argue that Morris conceptualizes handicraft
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