This dissertation brings together a range of manifestos, novels, memoirs, and artworks from the first half of the 20th century to trace the emergence of what I call modernism’s “aesthetics of obsolescence.” I use this term to refer to an evolving set of representational strategies that modernists developed to encode obsolescence into aesthetic form and, in so doing, mediate the increasingly obsolescent character of the work of art itself. In order to map out the precise contours of this undercurrent of modernist aesthetics, I introduce new archival sources surrounding the phenomenon of obsolescence to recent thing-theoretical and infrastructural conversations about capitalist institutions of waste to argue for a more historically grounded understanding of how corporate capitalism reshaped artistic production in the first few decades of the twentieth century. By reading works from Wyndham Lewis, Joseph Conrad, and George Lamming alongside various treatises and theories of obsolescence from fields like accounting, economics, and marketing, I show that that the modernists were not only keenly aware of the corporate overhaul of the commodity life-cycle, but actively imagined their works as participating in a broader material and ideological struggle against the ephemeralization of everything existing. Though each of these canonical modernist figures held to vastly different political and artistic programs, I argue that when read together their works render the historical legibility of obsolescence anew, allowing us to examine how obsolescence’s transformation from a disparate array of localized practices to a universal principle of commodity production subjected ever greater zones of social life to its reifying logic.
