Photogenic neurasthenia: Aesthetics, modernism and mass society in France, 1889-1929

This dissertation reconsiders the historical conditions underlying the developments of the 1920s that fall under the rubric of the French "machine" or "industrial" aesthetic. Looking at those developments in relation to earlier events within sociology, psychology, science, and philosophy, I argue that the convergence of technological and aesthetic form in French modernism was not simply an effort to ally art with the visible products of a technological, industrialized world. It was also part of a pervasive set of strategies for achieving social integration under modern capitalism--that is, the reification, standardization, and repression of individual experience that were considered crucial to the formation of a stable mass society.;Chapter one outlines what I have called the "first" French industrial aesthetic--a range of related attempts around the turn-of-the-century to align aesthetic principles with the rationalized, normative ideals of contemporary sociology and psychology. Chapter two discusses the formulation of a Purist aesthetic in the 1920s in light of this earlier thought. I argue that with the work of Le Corbusier, Amedee Ozenfant, and Fernand Leger, among others, what had been an academic problem was given symbolic figuration in the machine itself. The "machine" thus emerges not as the source of aesthetic notions of objectivity or rationalism, but as a particularly consequential contribution to an earlier problematic. Chapter three examines the breakdown of the paradigm of machine objectivity in the work of the French film avant-garde in the early 20s--in particular the search for the principles intrinsic to the new medium, the theory of "photogenie." For although film, at first, seemed to represent the fulfillment of the decades-long search for uniform modes of perception (the movie camera as "mechanical eye"), its intersection with new forms of mass fascination and identification, in fact, called into question the a priori category of the subject upon which the premise of a machine objectivity in the aesthetic sphere had been based.