Check out my article in the newest collection of essays on Faulkner published by the University Press of Mississippi. “Faulkner’s Cool Choreographies: Rural Taylorism and the Economy of Bodily Motion” describes how Faulkner’s fiction plays out an unconscious bodily knowledge that results in automatic or mechanized movement; an external temperature incongruous with emotional labor; energy directed toward rigor, deliberation, or accuracy rather than efficiency; an integration with land and materials rather than an attention to the body in isolated time and space; a cool, automatic, and sometimes mechanical detachment between consciousness and the task; and a lack of awareness or nonparticipation in abstract capitalist-driven concepts of time through labor. Faulkner’s account of working time parallels his larger concept of time. His bodies work outside of a homogenous, linear time in which workers imagine themselves simultaneously at work; rather, his working time is directed by the forces of slavery on the land both retroactively and proactively. Rural working bodies are trained not by the environments of industry and “knowledge work,” but rather by the organic and instrumental. In contrast with industrial modernism, a system by which the few shape the many and the producing body is the desired outcome, Faulkner offers a radical representation of the body absorbing and articulating the land back to itself. In this sense, Faulkner produces his own coolness toward a capitalist economy of motion.
