First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art (...) above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Godsdoes not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the discourse and practice of the science of rehabilitation as it developed in France and Germany during the First World War and its aftermath; it is particularly concerned with the ways that rehabilitation wove together bodies, minds and machines, both conceptually and practically. I identify and examine at length three characteristics of rehabilitation: its widespread use as a means of technocratic nation-building; its tendency to incorporate human bodies into small and large-scale mechanical systems; and its function as (...) a discipline of both body and soul. As a whole, the dissertation shows how the discourses and practices of rehabilitation helped to create and stabilize a notion of the human subject based on the principle of the machine. ;The concerns of rehabilitation reflected, on a relatively small scale, some of the most important preoccupations of interwar European culture: the difficulties of moving from war to peace; the powerful, exciting, and troubling importance of machines to daily life; the struggle to define principles on which a society ought to be built. Through rehabilitation, we have a chance to see these questions work themselves out on a limited scale. (shrink)

"This outstanding book has retrieved all the luminous qualities of its subject matter to produce an astonishing revelation of gleaming appearances on splendid display. It is unrivalled by any previous study."--Marcus Bullock, coeditor of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-26 "Weimar Surfaces creates provocative new connections between the historical constellations that found a privileged expression in Weimar Berlin and the more contemporary debates on the legacies of modernism and modernity. A compelling study."--Sabine Hake, author of The Cinema's Third Machine "Janet Ward's (...) study of Weimar architecture and design is the most comprehensive and integrated study of the surface of Weimar experience yet written.... A first-rate and stimulating book."--Sander L. Gilman, coauthor of Hysteria Beyond Freud. (shrink)