UC Berkeley

Early twentieth century Northern European cultures were fascinated with systems of energy and their breakdowns. During this time of intense electrical innovation and the development of psychophysiological sciences, energy was understood to pervade all of life – be that in electrical wiring, sound waves and light, or the nerves of the human body. In this conceptualization, observation of life and its processes could no longer be considered as separate from the energies it sought to examine; observation was embedded in an energetic fabric. Ultimately, observation from an inherently and perpetually fallible position found its expression in the category of the “breakdown”; the category expressed cultural and aesthetic concerns about the body’s embeddedness in a wider system of energy. Taking psychophysiology and emergent electrical networks as historical contexts, this dissertation examines how predominantly visual media in early twentieth century Modernist and Expressionist works in the German and Scandinavian contexts used the category of the “breakdown” to probe the intractability of the observer from larger energetic systems. My dissertation provides three reevaluations of canonical figures in the German and Scandinavian contexts: August Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Robert Reinert. In each, the breakdown of autonomy and critical distance became the a priori of expression, resulting in an exploration of cyclical narrative forms. In these looping structures, failures to critically distance one’s self from electrical infrastructures engendered their own production of nervous and electrical energy; the attempts to produce distance generated energetic excesses that were ultimately contested and/or refunctionalized by the system from which they arose. These works thereby present a critical theory of affect in the era of electric media – and its lasting relevance to today.