"Oh! Oh! Oh! I Shall Never Eat Rarebit Again!": Intoxication, Genre, Affect, Governmentality

This paper considers toxicity, intoxication, and sobriety as affective forms historically tied to biochemically lively materials such as fermented foods, alcohol, narcotics, medicine, and poison. Taking the turn of the... [ view full abstract ]

This paper considers toxicity, intoxication, and sobriety as affective forms historically tied to biochemically lively materials such as fermented foods, alcohol, narcotics, medicine, and poison. Taking the turn of the twentieth century as my historical focus, in this paper I look at the archive of Winsor McCay’s cartoon strip, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which repetitively pictures intoxicated dreams and sudden returns to sobriety. Placing the cartoon strips in the larger context of the daily New York Herald, in which they were published from 1906 on, I ask about intoxicated affect, toxic materiality, aesthetics, and genre in the context of a rapidly growing federal administrative structure, which at the time of the publication of Rarebit sought to instantiate sobriety, realism, and scientism as dominant politico-aesthetic forms via such regulatory legislation as the Food and Drug Act (1906). What is an affect, what is an aesthetic, and how might a historically grounded new materialism link such categories as intoxication, sobriety, and civility to political ordering. At the heart of my paper are methodological questions about scale, genre, and the challenge of bringing aesthetic analysis to the political and legislative.