A fascinating study of how behavioral science shaped twentieth-century
politics and the modernist literary period.
The advent of the twentieth century famously brought about new personal
and political freedoms, including radical changes in voting rights and
expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet writers and cultural critics
shared a sense that modern life reduced citizens to automatons capable
of interacting with the world in only the most reflexive ways. In
Automatic, Timothy Wientzen asks why modernists were deeply anxious
about the role of reflexive behaviors--and the susceptibility of bodies
to physical stimuli--in the new political structures of the twentieth
century.
Engaging with historical thinking about human behaviors that
fundamentally changed the nature of political and literary practice,
Wientzen demonstrates the ways in which a "politics of reflex" came to
shape the intellectual and cultural life of the modernist era.
Documenting some of the ways that modernist writers and their
contemporaries mapped, harnessed, and intervened in a political sphere
dominated by conditioned reflexes, Wientzen reads writers like D. H.
Lawrence, Rebecca West, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett in
conversation with fields that include public relations, physiology,
sociology, and vitalism. Ultimately, he justifies a reckoning with some
of the most enduring preoccupations of modernist studies.
Automatic further emphasizes the role of politics and science in the
aesthetic projects of modernist writers. At a moment when political
enfranchisement and the mass media promised new modes of freedom,
agency, and choice, Wientzen argues that the modernist era was beset by
apprehension about the conscription of liberty through the conditioning
force of everyday life. Analyzing such thinking through a neglected
archive about embodiment and reflex reveals modernists responding to the
historically novel conditions of political life in the twentieth
century--conditions that have become entrenched in the politics of our
own century.
