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TECHNOLOGIES OF AROUSAL:
MASTURBATION, AESTHETIC EDUCATION, AND THE POST-KANTIAN AUTO-by
Christian Hite
————————————————————————————————————————
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Christian Hite
Object Description
| Title | Technologies of arousal: masturbation, aesthetic education, and the post-Kantian auto- |
| Author | Hite, Christian |
| Author email | chite@usc.edu; christianhite@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2009-05-13 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2009-06-16 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Modleski, Tania |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kamuf, Peggy Tiffany, Daniel |
| Abstract | This dissertation considers masturbation as a kind of reading practice in which the responsibility -- or response-ability -- of the reader becomes a concern. This concern of the masturbating reader, I argue, emerges in the eighteenth century with the post-Kantian notion of aesthetic education. The conceit of this project, then, is not only that "masturbation" and "aesthetics" emerge at the same time, but that these discourses -- and the practices they entail -- mutually (de)constitute each other. As structured around "perverse" moments in the history of media technics -- i.e., from the hands-on readers of books, to the embodied spectators of movies, to the digital manipulation of vibrator users -- this project thus attempts to defamiliarize (and queer) present notions of "interactivity" by focusing on the "masturbatory response" at the heart of "aesthetics." Unlike other accounts of the rise of aesthetics, however, this project tries not to be just another repression-sublimation narrative. Aesthetic education, I argue, does not repress masturbation. Rather than saying "No" ("You can't"), aesthetic education is post-Kantian (or post-Can't-ian) in its repeated attempts to normalize a self-legislating (auto-nomous) being through practices of response-ability in which readers are incited to "express themselves" and "their feelings." In my first section, therefore, I read Kant and Schiller through scenes of aroused book-reading dramatized in the texts of Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Jean Genet, where the (im)possibility of taking responsibility for "one's own" response-ability is played out between notions of auto-nomy and auto-maticity.; I then move to one of the first texts of film aesthetics, Hugo Münsterberg's The Photoplay (1916), where the mimetic response-ability of the masturbating hand deconstructs notions of autotelic cinema. In my final section, I consider the electromechanical vibrator as a vehicle of auto-nomous (female) auto-eroticism in the Women's Liberation Movement, where the question of auto-eroticism as a (political) "auto-motive" is raised only to be resignified in the work of David Cronenberg's Crash. In aesthetic education, as Schiller says, the question, indeed, is that of "man" (the human, the human hand, and the humanities) and its heteronomous other(s): "technicity" "writing" "addiction" "animality" "mimicry" "femininity" "prosthesis." These keywords, then, constitute the constellation of this dissertation and its reading of the bio-politics of "aesthetics." |
| Keyword | aesthetics; masturbation; reading; new media; technology; vibrators; Munsterberg; Cronenberg; Foucault; Derrida; auto-eroticism; autonomy; auto-affection |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2302 |
| Rights | Hite, Christian |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Hite-2956 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume55/etd-Hite-2956.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | TECHNOLOGIES OF AROUSAL: MASTURBATION, AESTHETIC EDUCATION, AND THE POST-KANTIAN AUTO-by Christian Hite ———————————————————————————————————————— A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Christian Hite |
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