Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics / Edition 1

by Alan Ramon Clinton

Overview

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums to the psychiatrists who studied them, from the Fordist assembly line to the Hollywood studios that adopted its practices, from Surrealism on the left to Futurism and Vorticism on the right, the unpredictable paths of automatic practice and ideology present a means by which to explore both the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technological and cultural innovation. Focusing on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, Alan Ramon Clinton argues that, given the wide-reaching influence of automatism, as much can be learned from these writers' means of production as from their finished products. At a time when criticism has grown polarized between political and aesthetic approaches to high modernism, this book provocatively develops its own automatic procedures to explore the works of these writers as fields rich in potential choices, some more spectral than others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820469430
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	03/31/2004
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Alan Ramon Clinton received his PhD. in English from the University of Florida, and he has published articles on technology, spirituality, and twentieth-century literature. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
1	Conservative Modernism and the Automatic Response	1
	Introduction	1
	Flournoy and Smith	9
	Automatism as Automation	12
	Uses of Automatism	16
	Conductivity	16
	Power	17
	Artificial Talent	22
	The Beyond of Automatism	33
	Work	35
	Speed	38
	Disruptive Potential	39
2	The Mechanical Occult	43
	Oriental Specters	43
	The Rhetoric of Occultism	48
	The Case Against	55
	Occult Following	57
	Rogues Gallery: Marilyn Manson and Aleister Crowley	61
	What Now?	70
3	High Modernism and Hollywood in Deep Focus	75
	Introduction	75
	Ezra Pound: Cinematic Matching and Economic Coverage	84
	Zero Point of Cinematic Style: Yeats' Spectatorship	98
	How Eliot Forze the Dialectics of Chance and Control	105
	Conclusion	111
4	Two Cages: Second Thoughts at Pisa	113
	Introduction	113
	Canto LXXIV, I-Ching Toss: The Well	116
	From Precision to Mathematics	119
	Two Terms Equal a Third Meaning	120
	Canto LXXVI, I-Ching Toss: Army	123
	Canto LXXVII, I-Ching Toss: View	125
	Canto LXXVIII, I-Ching Toss: Gentle Wind	126
	Canto LXXIX, I-Ching Toss: Modesty	128
	Canto LXXX, I-Ching Toss: Obstruction	131
	Canto LXXXI, I-Ching Toss: Repairing Decay	132
	Canto LXXXII, I-Ching Toss: Revolution	134
	Canto LXXXIII, I-Ching Toss: Provision	135
5	Shuffling Eliot's Cards	139
	Introduction	139
	Eliot's Reading	141
	Basis of the Question	141
	The Center Cards	150
	The Action Cards	154
6	Revision the Rough Beast	161
	Introduction	161
	The Devil	166
	Queen of Cups	168
	Ace of Disks	171
	Ace of Wands	172
	Two of Wands	173
	Michael Robartes and the Dancer	176
	The Universe	180
	The Magus	181
	Four of Swords	183
	Six of Wands	185
	Princess of Wands	187
	The Hanged Man	189
7	A Posthuman Seance	191
Appendix	The Rules and Functions of Divination Techniques	199
	Notes	201
	Bibliography	213
	Index	221

Editorial Reviews

«In ‘Mechanical Occult’ Alan Ramon Clinton succeeds in aligning the hitherto problematic tensions in modernism between science and spiritualism through the use of ‘switch words‘, vocabulary used equally smoothly in either discourse.» (Elisabeth Joyce, Author of ‘Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde’)
«Automatic writing, the use of coincidence, rigorous games – these activities, despite their apparent extravagance, derive from more established sources: Freud’s psychoanalysis, Taylorism‘s routinization of industrial production, and Hollywood‘s industrialization of commercial filmmaking. While the Surrealists used these procedures for specific purposes (literature, painting, the re-enchantment of ‘everyday life‘), this book extends their project into literary criticism. Andre Breton‘s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ had tantalizingly proposed that move; Alan Clinton has taken Breton at his word.» (Robert B. Ray, Author of ‘How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies’)

From the Publisher