Reviewed by:

• Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex by Timothy Wientzen
• Mark Paterson (bio)

Central to Timothy Wientzen's fascinating, lively, and flawed book is the split he identifies in modernist literature and art between, on the one hand, the discoveries of patterns, grooves, and the habits of organisms observed in John B. Watson's laboratory in the United States and Ivan Pavlov's laboratory in Russia, and, on the other hand, the drive to overcome any such programmatic physiological base within an organism through the artistic drive for creativity and experimentation with form. This split is characteristic in itself of modernity, of course, a dichotomy Wientzen identifies at one point as being between the "radical newness in art and culture" and "an era dominated by robots, hollow men, and automata incapable of escaping the grooves of thought and action patterned by society" (p. 170). In lesser hands, perhaps, the split identified here would be characterized in cruder and more predictable terms as the opposition between the new sciences of human behavior and a concomitant plea by artists and writers, with comparatively little scientific background or knowledge, for escape from their confines through the pure freedom of art for art's sake, or a form of production that escapes the hyper-rationalized bureaucracy of industrial modernity. Yet, through careful reading of representative literary oeuvres, along with sections that join some of the dots in the history of the science of reflexes and the social implications of the concepts of habit and automaticity, the result is a more edifying and less predictable study of the interactions between the arts and the sciences in modernism. Among the four writers who feature in the four substantive chapters of this book, part of the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series, Wientzen finds ample evidence of reflexivity concerning their historical and scientific moment. In the examination of passages from D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, Wientzen finds to varying degrees their awareness of, and response to, the troubling of human subjectivity, agency, and social control in the wake of the widening impact of the scientific and social scientific findings of human behavior and its potential for manipulation.

There are four chapters sandwiched between a succinct introductory overview and a concluding chapter that assesses the implications of early-twentieth-century studies on twenty-first-century politics and media. For each of the chapters the structure remains largely consistent, starting with a contemporary set of related intellectual or scientific discoveries in the first half, followed by a sustained examination of [End Page 185] the authorial response in the second half, in private correspondence, diaries, and published work. The pairings involve the scientific discoveries of the mechanisms of "reflex" within organisms by John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov for Rebecca West (chapter 4), debates about vitalism in Henri Bergson for D. H. Lawrence (chapter 2), the distinctly sociological formulation of habitus in Marcel Mauss and Norbert Elias for Beckett (chapter 5), and the birth of public relations as a distinctive form of mass manipulation through the media by way of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman for Wyndham Lewis (chapter 3). This pattern and its pairing are more effective in some cases than others. The choice of intellectual current or framework seems rather arbitrary at times, and the impact on the shaping of their published work is uneven. For example, Wyndham Lewis explicitly addresses problems for democracy in the treatment of mass populations as bundles of reflexes, and is perhaps closest in spirit to what Wientzen calls the "politics of reflex," leading to Lewis's nonfiction manifesto and an artistic call to arms for his Vorticism movement. On the other hand, Beckett responds not so much in terms of a politics of reflex as an existential aesthetics of reflex, which found expression in the empty habits and mindful repetition of his onstage characters Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot (1951). These were the scientific-literary connections that stood out the most for me, although other readers more acquainted with the oeuvre of Rebecca West or D. H. Lawrence...

审核人：

• 自动： Timothy Wientzen 的文学现代主义与反射政治
• 马克·帕特森（生平）

蒂莫西·温岑 (Timothy Wientzen) 这本引人入胜、生动但有缺陷的书的核心是他在现代主义文学和艺术中发现的分裂，一方面是模式、凹槽的发现，以及在美国约翰·B·沃森 (John B. Watson) 的实验室中观察到的生物习性。 States 和伊万·巴甫洛夫 (Ivan Pavlov) 在俄罗斯的实验室，另一方面，通过创造性的艺术驱动力和对形式的实验，克服有机体内任何此类程序性生理基础的驱动力。这种分裂本身就是现代性的特征，当然，Wientzen 曾将这种二分法确定为介于“艺术和文化的激进新事物”和“一个由机器人、空心人和无法逃脱社会模式化的思想和行动”（第 170 页）。在较小的手中，或许，这里所确定的分裂可以用更粗略和更可预测的术语来描述，即人类行为的新科学与伴随而来的艺术家和作家之间的对立，这些艺术家和作家具有相对较少的科学背景或知识，希望通过纯粹的为艺术而艺术的自由，或者一种摆脱工业现代性过度理性化官僚主义的生产形式。然而，通过仔细阅读具有代表性的文学作品，以及连接反射科学历史上的一些点以及习惯和自动性概念的社会影响的部分，结果是一个更具启发性和更难以预测的研究现代主义中艺术与科学的相互作用。在本书四个实质性章节中的四位作家中，作为霍普金斯现代主义研究系列的一部分，Wientzen 发现了关于他们的历史和科学时刻的反身性的充分证据。在审视 DH Lawrence、Wyndham Lewis、Rebecca West 和 Samuel Beckett 的文章时，Wientzen 发现他们在不同程度上意识到和回应了随着影响的扩大而带来的人类主观性、能动性和社会控制的困扰。人类行为及其操纵潜力的科学和社会科学研究结果。

有四章夹在简洁的介绍性概述和评估 20 世纪早期研究对 21 世纪政治和媒体影响的结论章节之间。对于每一章，结构在很大程度上保持一致，从前半部分的一组当代相关知识或科学发现开始，然后是对[End Page 185]的持续检查下半部分的作者回应，包括私人信件、日记和发表的作品。这些配对涉及 John B. Watson 和 Ivan Pavlov 为 Rebecca West（第 4 章）提出的生物体内“反射”机制的科学发现，Henri Bergson 为 DH Lawrence 提出的活力论辩论（第 2 章），独特的社会学表述马塞尔·莫斯 (Marcel Mauss) 和诺伯特·埃利亚斯 (Norbert Elias) 对贝克特的惯习 (第 5 章)，以及公共关系作为一种独特的大众操纵形式的诞生 (爱德华·伯内斯 (Edward Bernays) 和沃尔特·李普曼 (Walter Lippman) 对温德姆·刘易斯 (Wyndham Lewis) (第 3 章))。这种模式及其配对在某些情况下比其他情况更有效。知识流或框架的选择有时显得相当随意，对他们出版作品的塑造影响参差不齐。例如，温德姆·刘易斯明确解决了将大众视为反射束的民主问题，也许在精神上最接近温岑所谓的“反射政治”，导致刘易斯的非虚构宣言和他的涡流主义运动的艺术号召. 另一方面，贝克特的反应与其说是反射政治，不如说是反射的存在主义美学，这体现在他的舞台角色弗拉基米尔和爱斯特拉冈的空虚习惯和有意识的重复中。等待戈多(1951)。这些是对我来说最突出的科学文学联系，尽管其他读者更熟悉 Rebecca West 或 DH Lawrence 的作品......