UC San Diego

The thesis is a fictionalist thought-experiment that works with the new materialist concepts of cerebrality and destructive plasticity, in an integrative approach to art history, theory, criticism and practice. It reads the Album Primo-Avrilesque (1897) - a late nineteenth century portfolio of monochromes by Incoherent Arts humorist Alphonse Allais - through a dialogue between neurology and psychoanalysis proposed by philosopher Catherine Malabou in The New Wounded (2012). The new reading of the Album that results, comments on early twenty-first century neuro -determinist approaches to art history and esthetics. In response to the early twenty-first century mania for all things "brain", the thesis stages a conversation between what Malabou calls cerebrality and destructive plasticity, and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman's psychoanalytic approach to a critical archeology of neurology (Invention of Hysteria, 1982; 2003). At the time when Allais was creating the Album Primo-Avrilesque: neurologists promoted new-liberal "republicanization" while encouraging a popular fashion for hysteria, the first photographic brain atlases were produced in support of the neuron doctrine, reports of crises in the French colonies were a topic of debate in Montmartre cabarets, new techniques for chromolithographic printing were developed to lessen reliance on skilled workers, and an increasing number of individuals reported experiencing synesthesia. The thesis focuses on three plates from the Album Primo-Avrilesque as they relate to this constellation of socio-historical asterisms, and responds to present renewed prestige of synesthesia in the early twenty-first century neurosciences. In form, it follows the example of a performative slide-show lecture presented by art historian Aby Warburg at the sanatorium of existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger in 1924. Warburg referred to this performative lecture as, "the gruesome convulsions of a decapitated frog."