2025 Theses Doctoral

Anonymous Subjects: Performing Anonymity Across Media 1890-1948

Guo-Silver, Adrian Alexander

This dissertation introduces “anonymity” as a critical concept that reshapes how we understand modernist performance, subject formation, and political agency. Challenging the enduring association between naming and power, this dissertation shows how anonymity operates as a performative structure across dance, theatre, and cinema to unfix identity and enable alternative forms of individual and collective action. Each chapter analyzes a central aesthetic object through archival research, inductive formal analysis, and critical theory.

Chapter 1 reads Les Noces (1923) by Bronislava Nijinska and Igor Stravinsky as a critique of J.L. Austin's theory of the performative, staging non-sovereign collective agency through the ballet's anonymous peasant chorus. Chapter 2 examines interpellation in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind (1890) and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), arguing that anonymity structures the formation of subject positions. Chapter 3 turns from the anonymity of the interpellated individual to that of the collective, focusing on the figure of the proletariat in Bicycle Thieves (1948), and showing how the film mobilizes choral anonymity to untether class from fixed identity and open the possibility of an anonymous revolutionary subject.

Across these case studies, the dissertation reframes anonymity as a performative mode of appearance that unsettles dominant theories of action, collectivity, and representation. In this account, anonymity displaces the centrality of named identity in theories of agency and appearance, revealing how political subjectivation emerges through structurally anonymous, non-sovereign acts. By reading modernist performance as a site in which anonymity materializes subjectivity and agency, the dissertation reframes anonymity as a critical resource for aesthetic form and political theory alike.