Reath, James; (2022) Anexact Cultures. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Anexact Cultures_James Reath_UCL_2018-2022.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 November 2025. Download (81MB)

Abstract

Modernism—to borrow a line from 'Finnegans Wake' (1939)—is a “riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed”. A good deal of it, we might suppose, is “anexact” or as Edmund Husserl says in 'Ideas I' (1913), “essentially and not accidentally inexact”. Drawing on a wide-range of archival, genetic and theoretical research, 'Anexact Cultures' conducts the first genealogy of the concept of the anexact, charting its rise from late-Victorian topology and Husserlian phenomenology, through the postwar philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, and Deleuze-Guattari, and on to the contemporary thought of Jane Bennett and Manuel DeLanda. From here, the thesis recapitulates the anexact as a polythetic means of organising the plurality of “weak modernisms” that have come to the fore in the wake of “new modernist studies”. Across five chapters—on doodles and inkblots; iridescent colours and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the avant-garde aesthetics of synthetic gunk—'Anexact Cultures' analyses modernism’s constellation of minor aesthetic categories, weak feelings, and essentially inexact formalisms that reflect the vague yet rigorous categorical promiscuity at the heart of modernism itself. In between, new theories of the “groovy”, the “icky,” the “plasmodial” and more emerge as the sovereign formalisms maintaining the “specifically Western heaven” of “noble exactitude” that Wyndham Lewis proselytises positively dissolves. Expanding the temporal and conceptual core of modernism to include the long mid-century (c.1922-1972), 'Anexact Cultures' brings a range of understudied post-war artists and writers—like Cy Twombly, Christine Brooke-Rose, Harry Mathews, Ann Quin, and Marguerite Young—into dialogue with more established modernists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Throughout, 'Anexact Cultures' tends to Paul Valéry’s diagnosis of modernism’s “acute ailment called precision” and rudely maps some of the novel ways modernist artists and writers reimagine what exactly it means to be exact in an age of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and cosmic noise.

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