The uses of obsolescence: Historical change and the politics of the outmoded in American postmodernity

This dissertation traces a genealogy of obsolescence and outmodedness in American postmodernity, moving through fiction and film from World War II to the present. It analyzes what I call figurations of the outmoded, a symbolic form through which the process of obsolescence is tangibly enfigured in both postmodern fiction and film. At its most abstract, this process refers to the world-historical succession of modes of production from the Greek polis to medieval feudalism to capitalist modernity; at its most concrete, it refers to goods and technologies that have fallen into disuse or been marked as unfashionable due to innovative advances and new trends. Figurations of the outmoded show that, over and against periodizations of postmodernity as the end of temporality and the disappearance of history in a total market culture such as the one we arguably inhabit today, historical change remains an imaginative and representational possibility in contemporary life. To develop this claim, the dissertation begins with a close look at Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (1951) and "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1929) respectively turn to the obsolete as a site that is richly symbolic of an outside to capitalist modernity, a site that enfigures an alternative---and sometimes more emancipated---order of things than the one that confronts them in the present. The problem for this modernist politics of the outmoded is the rise of planned obsolescence, a postmodern industrial practice and business philosophy which in the 1950s and 1960s engineers the point of obsolescence in the cycle of production and consumption such that it is drawn back inside of the marketplace. The rest of the dissertation uncovers what the advent of planned obsolescence means for Adorno and Benjamin's vision by looking at postmodern forms of culture in which figurations of the outmoded play a prominent role in the second half of the twentieth century. Texts and films analyzed include Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows (1955), Eric Segal's Love Story (1970) and John Barth's LETTERS (1979), and Don Delillo's Cosmopolis and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (both 2003).