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Through an examination of the performative work of illusionists, artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the latter half of nineteenth century France, including Robert-Houdin, the Davenport Brothers, Edgar Degas, Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Georges Méliès, I argue for the existence of a negative-space performance that is created solely within the mind of the spectator. Negative-space performance involves the spectators attempting to coalesce all of the various components of a performance, i.e. what they perceive to be taking place on stage, their own previous knowledge about the material, their own belief systems, etc. into a unique form of reality in an effort to subsequently delineate their own identity. Within this model, there can be no singular reality, but there instead exists a complex multiverse, where new realities are consistently generated as the boundaries between spectator/performer are blurred and as the previous framework of the static and passive photograph is replaced with one of the active construction of reality. Even when perceptions of reality are challenged, as the performers I am examining routinely did, and when a spectator can no longer differentiate between what they perceive to be as “real” and as “illusion,” the subsequent fracturing that occurs is what becomes the catalyst for new forms of reality to emerge. Reality, I assert, can only exist within the two-dimensional space of the text, the photograph, or the film. I argue that the three-dimensional world is falsely considered to be the actual whereas it is in instead a simulacrum; it is a projection of two-dimensional reality. Within my dissertation, I also attempt to counter scholarship that positions films by the Lumière brothers or by Méliès as a form of “proto-cinema” and claim that these films need to be examined outside of an encompassing film theory and instead be viewed as theatrical performances designed specifically to break down pre-conceived notions of a linear temporal

Through an examination of the performative work of illusionists, artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the latter half of nineteenth century France, including Robert-Houdin, the Davenport Brothers, Edgar Degas, Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Georges Méliès, I argue for the existence of a negative-space performance that is created solely within the mind of the spectator. Negative-space performance involves the spectators attempting to coalesce all of the various components of a performance, i.e. what they perceive to be taking place on stage, their own previous knowledge about the material, their own belief systems, etc. into a unique form of reality in an effort to subsequently delineate their own identity. Within this model, there can be no singular reality, but there instead exists a complex multiverse, where new realities are consistently generated as the boundaries between spectator/performer are blurred and as the previous framework of the static and passive photograph is replaced with one of the active construction of reality. Even when perceptions of reality are challenged, as the performers I am examining routinely did, and when a spectator can no longer differentiate between what they perceive to be as “real” and as “illusion,” the subsequent fracturing that occurs is what becomes the catalyst for new forms of reality to emerge. Reality, I assert, can only exist within the two-dimensional space of the text, the photograph, or the film. I argue that the three-dimensional world is falsely considered to be the actual whereas it is in instead a simulacrum; it is a projection of two-dimensional reality. Within my dissertation, I also attempt to counter scholarship that positions films by the Lumière brothers or by Méliès as a form of “proto-cinema” and claim that these films need to be examined outside of an encompassing film theory and instead be viewed as theatrical performances designed specifically to break down pre-conceived notions of a linear temporal

Peu connus des chercheurs, les débats soulevés à la fin des années 1860 par les vains efforts d’un publiciste pour lancer un « parti de l’agriculture » sont pourtant riches d’enseignements. À un moment où les partis engagent un effort de structuration qui débouche, à la fin du XIXe siècle, sur la constitution de partis au sens moderne du terme, l’échec du « parti de l’agriculture » permet de mieux comprendre le paradoxe que constitue l’absence d’un parti agrarien ou paysan dans une France où les ruraux ont longtemps représenté une écrasante majorité électorale. La méfiance à l’égard des partis, souvent invoquée, ne suffit pas en effet à rendre compte de l’échec du parti de l’agriculture sous le Second Empire. Elle constitue surtout un argument efficace pour ses adversaires, dans un conflit que les électeurs ruraux finissent par trancher aux dépens de leurs porte-parole autoproclamés : réticente à confondre ses intérêts avec ceux des élites agricoles, la paysannerie s’est aussi montrée sensible aux discours de leurs adversaires, qui n’ont pas hésité à les dénoncer comme d’anciens notables soucieux de rétablir les relations féodales. Dans une France où les rapports de force sont puissamment déterminés par l’imaginaire social et politique légué par la Révolution, le « parti de l’agriculture » avait peu de chances de réussite, non pas en dépit mais en raison même de la prépondérance électorale des ruraux., The weakness of agrarian parties in France: The case of the “party of agriculture” under the Second EmpireLittle known to researchers, the debates raised in the late 1860s by the vain efforts of a publicist to launch a “party of agriculture” nevertheless provide many lessons. Whereas parties were being structured in a way that led them, at the end of the nineteenth century, to become parties in the modern sense of the word, this case enables us to better understand the paradox of the absence of a true agricultural or peasant party in France—a country where rural people have long constituted an overwhelming electoral majority. Distrust for parties, often invoked, is not sufficient to account for the failure of the “party of agriculture” under the Second Empire. It is, above all, an effective argument for its opponents, in a conflict that rural voters finally resolved against their self-proclaimed spokespersons. Reluctant to mistake their interests for those of the agricultural elites, the peasantry was also attracted by the arguments of their adversaries, who did not hesitate to denounce them as former notables eager to re-establish feudal relations. In a France where power relations are forcefully determined by the social and political imagination left behind by the Revolution, the “party of agriculture” was doomed to failure, not in spite of, but because of the electoral predominance of rural people.

Peu connus des chercheurs, les débats soulevés à la fin des années 1860 par les vains efforts d’un publiciste pour lancer un « parti de l’agriculture » sont pourtant riches d’enseignements. À un moment où les partis engagent un effort de structuration qui débouche, à la fin du XIXe siècle, sur la constitution de partis au sens moderne du terme, l’échec du « parti de l’agriculture » permet de mieux comprendre le paradoxe que constitue l’absence d’un parti agrarien ou paysan dans une France où les ruraux ont longtemps représenté une écrasante majorité électorale. La méfiance à l’égard des partis, souvent invoquée, ne suffit pas en effet à rendre compte de l’échec du parti de l’agriculture sous le Second Empire. Elle constitue surtout un argument efficace pour ses adversaires, dans un conflit que les électeurs ruraux finissent par trancher aux dépens de leurs porte-parole autoproclamés : réticente à confondre ses intérêts avec ceux des élites agricoles, la paysannerie s’est aussi montrée sensible aux discours de leurs adversaires, qui n’ont pas hésité à les dénoncer comme d’anciens notables soucieux de rétablir les relations féodales. Dans une France où les rapports de force sont puissamment déterminés par l’imaginaire social et politique légué par la Révolution, le « parti de l’agriculture » avait peu de chances de réussite, non pas en dépit mais en raison même de la prépondérance électorale des ruraux., The weakness of agrarian parties in France: The case of the “party of agriculture” under the Second EmpireLittle known to researchers, the debates raised in the late 1860s by the vain efforts of a publicist to launch a “party of agriculture” nevertheless provide many lessons. Whereas parties were being structured in a way that led them, at the end of the nineteenth century, to become parties in the modern sense of the word, this case enables us to better understand the paradox of the absence of a true agricultural or peasant party in France—a country where rural people have long constituted an overwhelming electoral majority. Distrust for parties, often invoked, is not sufficient to account for the failure of the “party of agriculture” under the Second Empire. It is, above all, an effective argument for its opponents, in a conflict that rural voters finally resolved against their self-proclaimed spokespersons. Reluctant to mistake their interests for those of the agricultural elites, the peasantry was also attracted by the arguments of their adversaries, who did not hesitate to denounce them as former notables eager to re-establish feudal relations. In a France where power relations are forcefully determined by the social and political imagination left behind by the Revolution, the “party of agriculture” was doomed to failure, not in spite of, but because of the electoral predominance of rural people.