| A study of Modernism, this dissertation extrapolates from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, to performatively analyze questions of historicism, literary tradition, queer sexuality, and post-modern ethics. My praxis relies on close textual readings that represent modernism's concern for history. Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes provide inter-textual tools for my reading methodology.; 1922 begins with a reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that places his struggle with homosexuality in historical context. Robert Musil's Young Torless, Otto Weininger's Sex and Character, and the writings of Magnus Hirschfeld evoke a relationship between Wittgenstein's ethical, sexual, and identity problems and the "silence" to which the Tractatus tends.; A dance-theatre spectacle entitled "Chairs for Jacob" accomplishes, in dramatic form, the work of an academic paper, "On Woolf's Orientalism." Woolf's canny sense of literary tradition and the "oriental tale" gives an ironic force to her depiction of academic institutions in Jacob's Room. Considering how literary tradition participates in the colonialist subjugation of the "orient" described in Edward Said's Orientalism leverages my reading.; A production of "K.," a play by Greg Allen which I directed and choreographed is my third performance. My introduction theorizes The Trial in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's recognition of the relation between the law, subjectivity, and pornography.; "The Porno Boy Speaks" is the theoretical heart of this dissertation. It aims to give voice to two erotic dancers by theorizing their entrapment in a gay culture that represents the male body as an aesthetic ideal. By crossing their monologues against my fictions and poems, the piece develops a critique of Heideggerian aesthetics and an analysis of the complex of masculine identity configurations that come together in Deleuze and Guattari's term, "nomadic art."; The final performance treats Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. By focusing on the rhizomatic force of the word "queer" in his text, this piece aims to let Wittgenstein tell his own coming out story. Engaging Henry Staten and Stanley Cavell, as well as Ray Monk's The Duty of Genius, this piece aims to show how "outing" Wittgenstein stands to teach more about homosexuality than that label teaches about him or his philosophy. |
