| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines the discursive significance of violence in twentieth century
popular culture. It explains the desire and demand for representations of violence by
analyzing their dual role as a force of subjectivation and subjugation. I argue that
modern subjectivity is historically constituted and delimited by violence but that
recognition of this is prevented by an overly instrumental understanding of its role.
The reduction of violence to simple blunt force figures prominently within cultural
and social theory, leaving the armature of cultural analysis ill equipped to explain the
demand for violent representation. By providing a genealogy of the political violence
once expressed in examples of public torture and execution but transmuted into the
more minute expressions integrated within discursive regimes, this thesis argues that
State violence produces a Janus-faced consciousness; a subject split between its
performance of political Sovereignty and its political subjugation. The thesis
progresses through historical-textual analysis of four phenomenally popular films that
were, or continue to be, noted for their excess of violence [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919); The Sheik (1922), Once Upon a Time in The Kest (1969); and Deliverance (1972)].
While a subject divided by violence explains the dynamic of attraction and repulsion
characteristic to violent narratives, these films also comment directly on the
relationship between violence and subjectivity. Each film, in its own way-, is
concerned with subjectivity understood as a force of violence as well as an object of
violence. Their continuing significance suggests a more general practice of the
cultural exploration of violence; a desire to understand and know its elusive terms.
These narratives, and so popular representations of violence in general, can be
understood to provide a focus for audiences to imagine (however momentarily and
however questionably) a shared sense of subjectivity and cultural bearings. | en_US |
