‘Il corpo incantato’. Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of ‘unconscious cerebration’
Abstract
The essay explores the notion of ‘unconscious cerebration’ elaborated by British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in the first half of the nineteenth century, foregrounding its hybrid genealogy and its afterlife in both science and magic, as well as its transnational impact on the arts and psychology as an already available alternative to the Freudian unconscious. Carpenter’s idea of a corporeal unconscious is traced to the intersections of (occult) science, literature and visual culture, but also comparatively as it rippled off into European, American and Russian cultures, offering a shared notion of a bodily, physiological nonconscious that the Freudian tradition in psychoanalysis has long eclipsed and obscured. Italian Futurism is taken as a test case of the rich, and still underexplored, potentials of Carpenter’s intuition for an archeology both of ‘the unconscious’ and of contemporary returns in the humanities to materiality and embodiment.
Downloads
References
Austin, Linda, Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Battaglia Dictionary of Italian, http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/it/scaffali-digitali (last accessed august 10 2020).
Bennet, Jane, Vibrant Matter, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010.
Bourne Taylor, Jenny, “Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious”, Ed. J. B. Bullen, Writing and Victorianism, Routledge, 2014: 145-187.
Brain, Robert, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, University of Washington Press, 2015.
Brain, Robert, “Genealogy of Zang Tumb Tumb: Experimental Phonetics, Vers Libre, and Modernist Sound Art”, Grey Room, 43 (2011): 88-117.
Canguilhem, Georges, La formation du concept de réflexe au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1955.
Capuana, Luigi, Spiritismo (1884), Mondo Occulto, Ed. Simona Cigliana, Catania, Edizioni del Prisma, 1995.
Carpenter, William Benjamin, “On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying Muscular Movement, Without Volition”, Royal Institution of Great Britain, 10 (1852): 147-153.
Carpenter, William Benjamin, Principles of Mental Physiology, New York, Appleton & Company, 1875.
Chessa, Luciano, Luigi Russolo, Futurist, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012.
Collins, Wilkie, “Magnetic Evenings at Home. Letter II to G.H. Lewis”, The Leader 14, 99 (1852): 160-61.
Crary, Jonathan, Suspensions of Perception, Cambridge (Mass.), The MIT Press, 1999.
Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, The Gay Science, London, Chapman and Hall, 1866, 2 vols.
Danziger, “Mid Nineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology: a Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology”, Psychology in Nineteenth Century Thought: International Cross‑Disciplinary Perspectives, Eds. M. Ash - R. W. Woodward, New York, Praeger, 1982: 119-146.
Delorme, Shannon, “Physiology or Psychic Powers? William Carpenter and the Debate over Spiritualism in Britain”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 48 (2014): 57-66.
Eliot, George, Adam Bede (1859), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Enriquez, Romain, “La ‘cérébration inconsciente’. Imagerie et imaginaire du cerveau dans le récit de fiction”, Romantisme, 4, (2018), 182: 105-117.
Féré, Charles, Sensation et Mouvement, Paris, Alcan 1887.
Gauchet, Marcel, L’inconscient cérébral, Paris, Seuil, 1992.
Gordon, John, Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2004.
Grespi, Barbara, Figure del Corpo. Gesto e immagine in movimento, Milan, Meltemi, 2019.
Guyau, Jean-Marie, L’art au point de vue sociologique, Paris, Alcan, 1887.
Hall, “The Contribution of the Physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter (1813-1885) to the Development of the Principles of the Correlation of Forces and the Conservation of Energy”, Medical History, 23 (1979): 129-155.
Hayles, Katherine, Unthought. The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Henry, Charles, Rapporteur esthétique, Paris, Séguin, 1888.
Jacyna, L. S., “The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought”, The British Journal for the History of Science , 14, 2 (Jul., 1981): 109-132.
James, William, The Principles of Psychology (1890), London, Dover Publications, 2 vols, 1950.
Joyce, James, Stephen Hero, Eds. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, Herbert Cahoon, New York, New Directions Publishing, 1963
Joyce, James, "A Portrait of the Artist, (1904)," The Workshop of Daedalus. James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, Evanston (IL), Northwestern University Press, 1965.
Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (1939), London, Faber and Faber, 1975
Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Critical Writings, Ed. Günther Berghaus, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Matus, Jill, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Miller, Jonathan, “Going Unconscious”, Hidden Histories of Science, Ed. B. Silvers, London, Granta, 1997: 1-35.
Morselli, Enrico, Il Magnetismo animale. La Fascinazione e gli stati ipnotici, Torino, Roux e Favale, 1886.
Olenina, Ana Hedberg, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Plas, Régine, Naissance d'une science humaine, la psychologie: les psychologues et le "merveilleux psychique", Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.
Rabinbach, Anson, The Human Motor, Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.
Rainey, Lawrence, Futurism: an Anthology, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2009.
Riskin, Jessica, The Restless Clock: a History of the Centuries-long Argument over what Makes Living Things Tick, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Rochas, Albert de, Le sentiment, la musique et le geste, Grenoble, Librairie Dauphinoise, 1900.
Ryan, Vanessa, Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Rylance, Rick, Victorian Psychology and British culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Salisbury, Laura and Shail, Andrew (Eds.), Neurology and Modernity: a Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Stock, Armin and Stock, Claudia, “A Short History of Ideomotor Action”, Psychological Research, 68, (2004): 176–188.
Stoker, Bram, Dracula, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Wendell Holmes, Oliver, Mechanism in Thought and Morals, Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1871.
Watt-Smith, Tiffany, “Cardboard, Conjuring and ‘A Very Curious Experiment’”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 38,4, (2013): 306-320.
Weir, Lorraine. "The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and ‘Finnegans Wake’", James Joyce Quarterly 14. 3 (1977): 313-325.
Winter, Alison, Mesmerized, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Copyright (c) 2021 Alessandra Violi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright Notice
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
