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While the general public engages in varying levels of it, the models and modeling professionals I spoke to for this study claimed they felt as though they were never off duty and were always at work to produce the right “look” in person, in photographs, and online. Model agents made it clear that it matters where models live, where they eat and shop, and on which airline they travel. As this chapter explores, some respondents reported being told explicitly by their agents they had to put on the show all the time, even if they were just running around the corner to do an errand, mindful of the impression they might make as they are out and about, conscious of their online image created by the photos snapped of them in fashionable neighborhoods or at social events and posted to blogs or websites dedicated to documenting the modeling world. It seems like a lot of work, but models who really want to “make it” report trying to make it look fun to be exposed in this way, to be “on” all the time, to be out there in the spotlight, as often as humanly possible.

This chapter opens with a discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of control societies and its relation to concepts of post-Fordism, neoclassical economics, immaterial labor, and attention economies. Following this, the chapter traces the historical relationship between the conceptual structure of control and the fundamental logic of the capitalist mode of production. This historical examination passes through three major stages: an analysis of Marx’s work on capital, labor, and abstraction; a discussion of Charles Babbage’s work on computing machines, political economy, factories, and theology; and a close reading of the automation of essentialism that undergirds Herman Hollerith’s late-nineteenth century work on machine tabulation.

In contemporary fiction, the appearance of a physical brain leads swiftly to explicit focus on questions that proliferate from the explanatory gap. Writers don’t use the term, but they explore and contextualize its implications in considerable detail. In this chapter, Tougaw examine the portrayal of those three pounds of intricately designed flesh in five novels: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2009), John Wray’s Lowboy (2010), and Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2014). These novels are representative of a common literary phenomenon: the dramatization of a fantasy whereby touching brains may reveal the stuff of which self is made. In each of these novels, the representation of physical brains provokes questions about the relationship between physiology and the self that become central to narrative closure.

This chapter hinges on a comparison between George Brecht’s 1961 concept of a ‘borderline’ art ‘at the point of imperceptibility’ and the concerns with invisible forces and energies of an international group of kinetic artists, associated with the Signals Gallery in London between 1964 and 1966. While the evolution of Brecht’s work from 1957 to 1962 was shaped by a search for the concrete and the changeable in which other ‘junk’ artists, such as Allan Kaprow, were engaged at the time, the Signals Gallery artists were more closely linked to a trajectory of abstract and constructive art. Nevertheless, both the Signals Gallery artists and Brecht shared a similar desire to create experimental forms that would reflect a new vision of reality, inflected by both scientific discoveries and Zen Buddhism. In particular, the issue of perception was closely tied to the role of the spectator, whether in Brecht’s participatory ‘arrangements’ and ‘borderline’ event scores or Lygia Clark’s manipulable sculptures and her conception of an ‘art without art’. Brecht’s work is shown to have contributed to Allan Kaprow’s reflections on precarious ‘activities’, while both the artists’ work impacted Lawrence Alloway’s definition of an ’expanding and disappearing’ artwork in the late 1960s.

This chapter provides a reading of precarious practices developed in the 1990s by artists Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco, Thomas Hirschhorn and Martin Creed as both responses to forms of aggressive capitalism that had become widespread since the 1980s, and reactions to some of the more visible art practices that had emerged during that decade. Zygmunt Bauman’s 2000 analysis of the ‘liquid’ characteristics of contemporary capitalism is shown to extend Arendt’s earlier discussion of the modern human condition in its emphasis on ever-faster cycles of consumer gratification at the expense of durable products and stable social relations. This chapter demonstrates some of the ways in which 1990s practices extended the dematerialisation of 1960s assemblage and ‘borderline’ practices, through explorations of a ‘join’ between art and the world, as Martin Creed called it, through discreet interventions (Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco), or sprawling assemblages (Thomas Hirschhorn). Most importantly, this join may serve as a rub in the smooth global flows of capital.

This chapter locates Mark Akenside at a point where counter-materialist theology and poetic theory weirdly converge with speculative embryology. The poet and physician held that human beings break into a new category of existence as they advance to an immaterial state, but normal sexual reproduction extends material life as it is. According to Akenside’s MD dissertation, God and the mother do all the work in the latter process and sperm have no functional role to play. His poetry compensates for this picture of men alienated from reproductive futurity, the chapter argues, by assigning certain male poets a power that was often (and notoriously) seen as maternal: they can impress their imaginations on the bodies and minds of other people and so steer humanity toward a different kind of future. The chapter culminates in an extended comparison to Erasmus Darwin, another poet-physician trained in embryology and, as it happens, another rare theorist of the power of paternal impressions.