Automatism is modern

In the q&a after Sianne Ngai's recent talk here on zaniness (which was fantastic), I pulled a classic if annoying move and asked about one of my own research interests. One of the articles I've currently got in the hopper is about affective and domestic labor and states of automatism in women in the early twentieth century. According to Ngai, the zany mode originates in the commedia dell'arte character of the zanni, a personal servant whose job it is to manage social ties. Since Ngai had remarked on the almost compulsive quality of the zany, I asked her to expand on the connection between zaniness and automatism.

Ngai's response was to distinguish between the zany and "animatedness" (from her first book), animatedness being mechanical and evidence of a loss of subjectivity, whereas the zany is an excess of subjectivity, of constantly performing affective labor of various sorts in a manner that models the labor structure of late capitalism.

The follow-up question, had I wished to pull another classic yet annoying move, would have been this:

Isn't automatism sometimes precisely an excess of subjectivity?--subjectivity bubbling up through the body whether you will it or no? I think of psychoanalysis, of automatic writing, etc.

Zaniness, as Ngai so convincingly characterizes it, is automatic in the sense that it is compulsive; it can't be stopped. But I'm also backhandedly persuaded that automatism isn't quite the right word to describe that loss of will, at least in the postmodern context that interests Ngai. It seems to me that the main problem with thinking about zaniness as, on one hand, the form of labor in late capitalism, and on the other hand, as automatic, is actually a historical problem. There's something modern, and not postmodern, about automatism. The machine is only an interestingly strong point of comparison for a human being without will when machines are understood as meaningfully different from people to begin with. That notion starts to break down somewhere midcentury. To insist that machines don't have subjectivity--or rather, to make subjectivity the question to begin with--is a modern gesture. T. S. Eliot may be horrified by the typist's "automatic hand," but, typists all, we're not disturbed in the slightest. Click. Click. A general agnosticism about subjectivity characterizes postmodernism.

The zany may have a long history, but if late capitalism is where it truly comes into its own, then the question of automatism is moot.

More MSA

My partner in crime Jill and I were both pumped about the same panel this morning, the "Trans-Temporality" panel with Claire Colebrook, Rita Felski, Wai-Chee Dimock (she was unable to attend, but the panel moderator, Sara Blair, read the paper), and Jennifer Fleissner. I've long been a huge fan of Felski's and Fleissner's work in particular, so I was eager to go, and was not disappointed. Interestingly, Felski took the opportunity to talk mainly about Actor-Network Theory. I'd have liked to hear a little more about how ANT might alter or intersect with her previous work.

I also went to a roundtable on modernism and digital humanities that was very interesting. Jon Orwant from Google provoked a heated question about the proper treatment of books, one with which I was wholly sympathetic. (I mean, something terrible happened to a book. I would have been ticked myself.) I know it wouldn't have been appropriate to start airing my grievances about Google Books, but do they know that their scan of Geography and Plays is missing most of "Susie Asado"? (SKG, who is eerily omniscient, found me a better scan at archive.org.) Shana Kimball from the University of Michigan Library gave an interesting talk about collaboration between the university library and the Press, which is moving entirely to e-book/POD format. Mark Wollaeger's talk did not move me to want to use wikis in my classroom (why is it that I still mostly hate wikis?), but it did make me reconsider some of my strategies for next semester. I wonder how legal it would be to have my students put their critical editions of texts online. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's talk was mostly drawn from her book, which I've plugged before on this blog. I was able to meet her at the end of the panel, and amazingly, she recognized me from my tiny thumbnail Twitter photo.

At the panel I asked a question that I think was never fully answered, in part because I didn't really articulate the whole of my concern. It seems to me that online projects and/or infrastructures are often seen as a cheap (or even free) alternative to analog apparatuses, because the labor, because it is often diffused across a community, is rendered invisible (and unpaid). I wonder to what extent that impulse can be resisted by digital initiatives at university presses and online peer review projects, which actually do require a huge amount of labor (intellectual labor, I should say) both in starting up and in maintaining them. It seems to me that the conversion to online modes of communication obviously requires a re-valuing of that kind of work for tenure, etc. But it also requires valuing it, maybe for the first time for some people, in economic terms -- with the understanding that truly useful, coherent, and durable online projects and infrastructures require levels of funding that are perhaps not significantly lower than those of traditional formats. The real cost of publishing a book, that is, was never in the paper it's made of.

Relatedly, I spoke with Sam Alexander and Pericles Lewis about the Yale Modernism Lab, also recently plugged on this blog. Seriously, it is a cracking good idea. I think there must be some way that it could get hooked up to Zotero that would be useful, although I don't yet know enough about it to know how that would work exactly.


All in all, it was a productive conference (even if I was stuck in the ugly section of Montréal the entire time). I leave for home tomorrow. Once more into the breach -- I get a new stack of papers to grade on Monday.