Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics

by Alan Ramón Clinton

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.

Hardcover

First published March 31, 2004

Reviews

[NosNos · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I wrote this review as fast possible, trying to apply the wisdom within this book. I was doing a bit of automatic writing. So don't mind the inconsistent formatting and spelling. I was just trying to fly.)

This is the first time I have ever been the first person to review or rate a book on Goodreads! I found this book at my university's library because the title seemed alluring and totally out there. I started reading and found a very innovative and creative study that opened up connections and direcitons i have never thought were possible or meaningful. what is the relationship between modernist poets, tehcnology, the occult? what about surreailism, mediums, and seances? you would think there isn't! but there is! and it's captivating to read about. the author pickes up the barthesian all to have criticism be a creative work of its own and introduces a new method of criticism that involves the use of diviniation methods like the i-ching and tarot to come up with new readings for the 3 modernist giants (Pound, Yeats, Elliot). He contrasts the 'high control' style of these poets and their meitoculous insistence on perfect poem that take years to perfect and create with the Surrealist, 'atuomatic' style of writing where the unconscious is given total free reign to manifest itself on the page without inhibition or edititing, to create what andre breton called "a laudable contempt for what might result as literature". This book is a storehouse of ideas and concepts that I really enjoyed considering and processing and adding into my mental frame. I wrote everything I found interesting down into my tiny notebook, and here is some of it:

Automatic writing = unconscious + already accumulated talent + incorporated works of art that precede the individual (tradition basically). Author also brings up these kinds of equations often in the book. Benjamin's formulation is specially interesting:
Communism = aesthetics + politics; fascism = politics + aesthetics. (Which, as a sidenote, is very funny to me because this is the kind of math only literary critics can do. The operation of addition is assocciatve, meaning the order of addition does not matter and you get the same result regardless of which side the terms are on, but it's okay, I allow it)
— Combinatoric poetics: T.S. Elliot basically says in the Tradition and The Individual Talent that this is what creating innovative works amounts to: we combine and recombine he combinations in an alchemical way to produce the New (Deleuzian term) from the Known
— Expanding our unconscious by reading more and more things: we are increasing our plane of immanence with every novelty we encounter and incorporate
— The occult/mystery as shorthand for creativity and inifitnte possiblity
— Benjamin: "read history to look for weapons" (page 481, Arcades project)
— Tell the story in as many ways as possible: the virtues of fragemtnary writing as a detour (and the whole detourist movement) from the trajectory of writing about the subject
— Ginsberg: "one wants to have visions because one thinks that on'es ordinarty relaity, ordoinaary conscousness inot vvisonary enough"
— But also Rilke: "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."
— But also gnostic Jesus: "The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth but men do not recognize it"
— Oulipo movement of writing
—Approprating everything we read into life projects
—Now I really want a mechanical keyboard and to improve my typing speed so that I give my unconscious total freedom to spill itself all over the empty frame/[age (wchi Breton thinks are simlar)
—Spirituality + secret wisdom = solipsism
— " A stroke of chance obtained in the boldness of play": Ludic chance as the element that breaks the rigidieties of categories
— Somehow, a new school fo ltierary criticism: chaos theory school of criticism
— A "secret society of one": me and also Ezra Pound
— Fragmeneted =/ porgressive or avant-garde
— We all have a personal Babylon
— The right inference from the right 'clue' might open up new connections that would have been missed by a more monotnous and exhaustgive investiation.
—Cameras capture more than the human eye, the portray the optical unconscious
—Cameras open up visual fields that disrupt the usual way sof seeing
—"With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands"
—If you are too self-righteousos, self-critique feels as destructive as suicide. IE, EZRA POUND was not a true JUNZI because he could not criticize himself and see his own shortcomigns and limitations.
— "The Cantos are a textbook for change"
—EZRA POUND and the bachamel macaroni conscioussness, complex, prismatic, and contradicotry psychologie sna dpersonalites and my obession with such people. I love tension as a psychological state
— Surrealist games fo chance that produce talent-eschewing art as opposed to the studied and high-control poetics of modernists and romanticists.
— Harvey Teres and reading what is not there: "No text contains its own ideology but instead has inclinations, paths, possibilities, either developed or undeveloped by contingent readers"
— ELLIOT WAS GOTH: HE WORE MAKE UP TO MAKE HIMSELF LOOK MORE CADAVEROUS
— Thoth, egyptian god of writing, as described by derrida: a joker, a wildcard, a floating signifier, one who puts play into play
— Cultivating a Mercurial personality open to reivison and Crowley's great virtue: Netizschean infideilty to everything
— Infidel heteroglossia: the presence and play of oppostional meanings and their variety.