Imaginative beholding: Physiological psychology and the discourse on representation in fin-de-siecle Germany

From classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century a representation in art was judged successful based on it's broadly mimetic fidelity to Nature. The changing sense of reality at the turn of the century brought to the fore a new paradigm of representation seemingly as a clean rupture with the past in that a celebration of abstraction, illusion and distortion of the natural became the norm. The subject of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the modernist understanding of representation was not solely a rupture with the past but emerged from a productive exchange of concepts between the arts and sciences in the late nineteenth century from the discipline of psychology. I will contend that without the new models of mind emerging in German physiological psychology in the thirty year period 1860s--1890s the concept of representation in aesthetics would not have escaped the boundaries of classical mimesis and fostered the necessary conditions for the production and reception of modernity in aesthetics and by extension, art. The exchange between aesthetics and science of new knowledge produced by instruments and empirical methodologies of calibrating psychological responses to visual and sensual stimuli leads to an ontological shift in the concept of representation. This physiological aesthetics not only provided the terms for new formalist languages of art and criticism it also instigated a reconsideration of the limitation of the classical definition of representation in art. The emergence of early modernism depends on the new psychologism not only to explain the effects of a work of art and the new role of the observer, but also suggests that a new mechanics of thought is necessary to rationalize the reality of modernism through representation.