Art historian Hal Foster points out that "Precarity has come to figure in sociological discourse, where it is used to describe the situation of a vast number of laborers in neo-liberal capitalism whose employment... is anything but guaranteed. This 'precariat' is seen as a product of the post-Fordist economy," historically rooting precarity in the emergence of late-stage capitalism's ever more unstable labor economy and the concomitant problems of poverty, displacement, and contingency. Yet Foster also admits, that despite our present sense of "emergency," "precarity might be more the rule" and stability the exception, acknowledging that Modernist art too was marked by an overriding sense of chaos. In doing so, he casts precarity not as a novel condition but as a continuing phenomenon whose traumatic consequences undeniably mark and shape twentieth-century literature and art. Following Foster's implications, this dissertation traces the emergence of precarity as an aesthetic sensibility that emerges with the earliest moments of consumer culture's entrenchment with urban life and sociability. Responding to capitalism's increasing ability to ratify the terms of personhood through regimes of bodily control, spatial regimentation, and visual policing, the artists examined in this project turn to precarity as an aesthetic rubric that resists these processes of reification. Pursuing methodologies of contingency, temporariness, and obsolescence, their projects-spanning from American Dada to post-war assemblage-thematically represent and formally recreate the instabilities of those who occupy subject positions made vulnerable by capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that a fuller aesthetic history of precarity enriches our understanding of modernism by seeking to understand formal innovation as an imperfect and compensatory struggle for representation against the overwhelming processes of deindividuation multiply reinforced by capitalism's entrenchment into American society. This aesthetic history too provides a series of models of resistance capable of enlivening our current conversations regarding art's ability to counterbalance the intersecting frameworks of dehumanization that characterize the present moment.
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