UC Irvine

This dissertation explores the literary and intellectual history of “spontaneity” in twentieth-century art and social theory. It argues that there is an underappreciated formal “kinship” between the ideal of freedom embodied by avant-garde artistic experiments in spontaneous self-creation and the neoliberal intellectual project that simultaneously grew up in response to the rationalized structures of the “organized society.” Each chapter draws out this underlying kinship by reading the artistic valorization of spontaneous freedom in cultural works from the late 1960s and 1970s across different media forms alongside the elevation of kosmos or “spontaneous order” in the writings of F. A. Hayek, the leading theorist of the neoliberal intellectual project. Chapter 1, “Neo-HooDoo Economicus: A Genealogy of Jes Grew,” turns to fiction, exploring the valorization of spontaneous order in Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Chapter 2, “The Sound and the Theory: Jacques Attali and the Cunning of Spontaneous Aesthetics,” turns to music by reexamining Jacques Attali’s poststructuralist work of musicology, Noise (1977), in light of its author’s political involvement in the neoliberal policy shift in the early 1980s. Chapter 3, “‘Aesthetic of Chance’: Easy Rider and the Road to Neoliberal Order,” turns to New Hollywood cinema, exploring the spontaneous vision of freedom embodied by Easy Rider (1969; dir. Dennis Hopper), the film that signaled the death of the Hollywood studio system. Together, these chapters suggest the (often unwitting) role played by artists across different mediums in modeling the kind of open-ended freedom that would come to characterize social life in the neoliberal age, where the purposively constructed structures of the postwar order give way to the spontaneous order of the market.