UC Santa Cruz

Abstract

Machinic Embodiment and the Cult of Destruction

Michael M. Moeller

This work is an examination of the literary production of avant-garde and modernist writers who ardently delved into the disorienting effects of technologically induced disaster and industrial warfare in the early twentieth century. The reactionary modernist response to the disenchantment of the world and the technological reconfiguration of metropolitan life was manifest in a militant aesthetic praxis, a technological romanticism, and a predilection for destruction. This study argues, first, that the impulse behind the literary imagination of figures like the Italian Futurists and Ernst Jünger, culminated in the attempt to re-enchant the emerging machinic world in terms of an irrational philosophy of vitality, which was often associated with the fascist fantasy structure with which some would come to identify. A psychoanalytic engagement with these texts and aesthetic practices is instructive for an assessment of how reenchantment would emanate from the surface of technology itself, even while this compulsion was part of the reaction against progressive rationalization that established the conditions in which such technologies were conceivable. Second, this project will demonstrate how these literary endeavors, distinguished by the reification of the machine and the euphoria of violence, were forerunners to the cultural disaster novels of J. G. Ballard who exploited the libidinal investments in the technologization of culture as a means of puncturing the narrative of capitalist spectacle. Problems of machinic embodiment, psychic armoring, and the paradoxical oscillation between the technological prosthesis as a benign extension of instrumentality and its pernicious dismemberment, constitute features of a historical legacy that informs the transformative grammar of Ballard’s perverse dystopias. Tracking this trajectory of technophilia and the scopophilic consumption of disaster into the twenty-first century is essential in terms of historicizing an era of spectacular media saturation, violence, and post-rational politics.