Psychomotor Aesthetics

Abstract

In the late 19th century, neurophysiology introduced techniques for detecting somatic signs of psychological processes. Scientific modes of recording, representing, and interpreting body movement as “expressive” soon found use in multiple cultural domains. Based on archival materials, this study charts the avenues by which physiological psychology reached the arts and evaluates institutional practices and political trends that promoted interdisciplinary engagements in the first quarter of the 20th century. In mapping the emergence of a paradigm it calls “psychomotor aesthetics,” this book uncovers little-known sources of Russian Futurism, Formalist poetics, avant-garde film theories of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and early Soviet programs for evaluating filmgoers’ reactions. Drawing attention to the intellectual exchange between Russian authors and their European and American counterparts, the book documents diverse cultural applications of laboratory methods for studying the psyche. Both a history and a critical project, the book attends to the ways in which artists and theorists dealt with the universalist fallacies inherited from biologically oriented psychology—at times, endorsing the positivist, deterministic outlook, and at times, resisting, reinterpreting, and defamiliarizing these scientific notions. In exposing the vastness of cross-disciplinary exchange at the juncture of neurophysiology and the arts at the turn of the 20th century, Psychomotor Aesthetics calls attention to the tremendous cultural resonance of theories foregrounding the somatic substrate of emotional and cognitive experience—theories, which anticipate the promises and limitations of today’s neuroaesthetics and neuromarketing.