Thesis advisor: Paul Breines / This dissertation attempts to problematize the question of agency in disciplinary societies by examining the symbolic importance in fin-de-siècle French culture of the abject deviants who were the target of medico-legal discourse in the Third Republic. In particular, I develop three main propositions. First, I am making a broad anthropological claim that the power implicitly given to deviants to establish boundaries between normality and abnormality paradoxically enabled them to shift borders of cleanliness and pollution in public discourse. Whereas others have argued that borderline deviants are powerless in their abjection, I propose the opposite: by giving deviants the power to shape the order of the Third Republic, medico-legal authorities unwittingly gave them precisely that -- enormous power. Second, I contend that this power largely took shape within the context of the rise of consumer society and urban spectacle. Spectacularization and widespread accessibility to information engendered a populace capable of suspicion, resistance, and resignification. Others have interpreted the spectacularization of narratives of deviance as being foisted upon passive consumers lacking intellectual agency and therefore accepting these narratives as the standards for bourgeois behavior. I suggest instead that spectacularization provided the precondition of possibility for the invention of a resistant and even potentially revolutionary populace. Third and finally, I make the claim that those who are seen are also capable of seeing, and hence, of questioning, negotiating, and redefining. Others, particularly those influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, have argued that "the public" was a docile, passive crowd, stripped of agency, helplessly accepting of ideas of republican virtue embodied by medico-legal discourses of deviance and the clinical gaze. In particular, the paradigm of the "panopticon" has perhaps overly influenced notions of bourgeois society. In the panoptic society, being self-conscious of always being (hypothetically) seen, actors police themselves to the point of inaction. I contend that this position assumes the desirability of a "correct" form of behavior to which all others must conform. Therefore, I argue for a very different conception of bourgeois society. If we look not to the panopticon, but rather to venues of spectacularization and consumer culture, we will see that, contrary to the marginalization implied by the panoptic model, deviance was celebrated as a symbol of freedom and release from the deterministic medico-legal gaze and helped to create multiple competing "scopic regimes." As a result, the consumer culture of the grands boulevards was not a sterile, depoliticized world of uncritical engagement defined by passive observation and consumption of spectacle and commodity, but rather a culture that celebrated spectacle as a venue for re-infusing the public sphere with social and political ambiguity against the rigid boundaries erected by the medico-legal discourses of the Third Republic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101514 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Cavallari, Jason Robert |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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