Modernism beyond the subject: Literature, spontaneity and the social body

Wyndham Lewis' idea that the masses embody nothing more than a "passive ... rhythmic, mechanical life" reflects one of modernism's most familiar political attitudes. But what of the Lewis who writes in 1932 that "such artists as Shakespeare or Dickens are very little individuals at all---they are, as a matter of fact, a very great and numerous crowd"? In my dissertation, I explore this alternative conception of modernism, in which the multitude represents a source of social and aesthetic regeneration. William Carlos Williams' "contact," Laura Riding's "instantaneous sympathy of communication," Wallace Stevens' "vulgate of experience," and Wyndham Lewis' "wild body," are all ways to imagine the artist's immersion in popular realities. This idea of the artist resulted in a dual-attitude toward the masses: they came to represent both a regenerative life force, and a threatening, suffocating deluge. These fantasies about mass existence, I argue, are the matrix out of which many modernists' ideas of artistic and political "spontaneity" are born.; For example, works such as Williams' Paterson, Riding's The World and Ourselves, Stevens' Owl's Clover, and Lewis' Enemy of the Stars all depict the author as a promiscuous force, merging with popular spectacles, demonstrations, musical performances, and workplaces, in order to embed himself or herself in everyday patterns of interpersonal contact. Within these patterns is supposed to lie the logic of what Antonio Negri calls "constituent power": the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel which continually constitutes and re-constitutes established political regimes. In my dissertation, I show how modernists both hoped and feared that this spontaneous popular dynamic could dissolve the class- and gender-binaries that stabilized social existence. From Stevens' nervous attempts to "adapt" his old-world poetic persona to a symphonic, leaderless political process, to Riding's imagination of a spontaneously self-governing utopia, modernist figurations of spontaneity express the desire to intertwine the artist with emerging patterns of social affect and exchange. In my dissertation, I recover this lost, anxiously utopian modernism, and analyze the social futures modernists hope to discover in their fantasies of a pre-reflective, spontaneous social body.