Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
MPARIS
ONS IN
WORLD L
IT ERATUR
E
Edited by
SHARAE DECKARD
STEPHEN SHAPIRO
World
Literature,
Neoliberalism,
and the Culture
of Discontent
New Comparisons in World Literature
Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Neil Lazarus
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of
the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world
literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular
kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that
registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical
experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up
the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global
extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new
modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our
particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this deci-
sive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.
Editorial board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA; Dr. Bo G. Ekelund,
University of Stockholm, Sweden; Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw
University, Poland; Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick,
UK; Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK; Professor Imre
Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada; Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch
College, USA; Dr Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, USA; Dr Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada;
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India; Professor
Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK.
World Literature,
Neoliberalism, and the
Culture of Discontent
Editors
Sharae Deckard Stephen Shapiro
Dublin, Republic of Ireland Coventry, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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Acknowledgements
As editors of a collection, our thanks are due first to this volume’s con-
tributors. Pablo Mukherjee and Neil Lazarus, as series editors, were the
first to open doors and ensure that we made it down the various hallways
towards publication. In a broader sense, we thank WReC (Warwick
Research Collective) and the emerging community of world-literature
scholars, including the World Literature Network and World-Ecology
Research Network, for their collective intellectual and political support.
We are likewise grateful for support from our colleagues in the School
of English, Drama, and Film Studies at University College Dublin. Finally,
Tomas René, Vicky Bates, and the staff at Palgrave have been generous
with their help and attention to the preparation and design of the
volume.
We dedicate this to Benita Parry, our teacher, and Phillip Baldwin, of
Brooklyn.
v
Contents
vii
viii CONTENTS
Index263
Notes on Contributors
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro
S. Deckard (*)
Dublin, Republic of Ireland
e-mail: sharae.deckard@ucd.ie
S. Shapiro (*)
Coventry, UK
e-mail: s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk
subsequently reined in by the early 1970s (1984: 208). Writing from the
vantage point of 1984, Jameson predicted that “the 80s will be character-
ized by an effort on a world scale to proletarianize all those unbound
social forces which gave the 60s their energy, by an extension of the class
struggle, into the furthest reaches of the globe as well as the most minute
configurations of local institutions (such as the university system)” (208).
Jameson is of course one of the foremost theorists of “postmodernism” as
the cultural logic of “late capitalism,” but the passages here seem pre-
sciently indicative of the onset of what we now call “neoliberalism,” at a
time when that terminology was not readily available.
For whatever objections about the specificity of the term neoliberalism
can be raised, it seems clear that in many ways the current phase of capital-
ism is different in noteworthy ways from the prior Fordist and Keynesian
phase. Surely, some terminology must exist to register the differences if any
activist response is to be successfully mounted. The challenge then is to
forge a better framework of terms to help convey what is both distinctive
and familiar about the last few decades up to and including the contempo-
rary period. There remains a pressing need to underscore the continuities
of capitalist predicates, while also discerning its historical formations and
reformations.
A major motive for this collection, therefore, is to prevent “neoliberal-
ism” from becoming a “quicksand term” that indiscriminately sucks all
commentary into its maw without regard to temporal or spatial particular-
ity; that acts as a vacuous counterpart to “post-postmodern,” or even
“late-late capitalism.” In our estimation, the way forward is to think
through issues of historical alteration through a greater horizon of the
capitalist world-system. Hence, this volume mobilizes a collection of
essays that seek to periodize the different phases of neoliberal accumula-
tion leading up to the current moment, restoring the horizon of capitalism
as the primary object of their critique, while at the same time exploring
how neoliberalization is differently experienced and mediated in cores,
semiperipheries, and peripheries of the world-system. As Matthew Eatough
writes in his contribution to this volume, any account of the culture of
neoliberalism requires us to formulate a working definition of what neo-
liberalism is in its local expression and “what distinguishes it from the
normative Euro-American model of neoliberalism.”
Most collections on neoliberalism and literature published thus far have
had an exclusively North American or British focus, which we seek to chal-
lenge in this volume through a comparative approach that juxtaposes
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 5
scholars from American and British studies with those from postcolonial
and world-literary studies and area studies. Thus, our contributions con-
centrate on a wide range of literary and cultural production from global
settings in both cores and semiperipheries, and frequently make compari-
sons between them, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Brazil, the
United States, Canada, Italy, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Senegal, and India.
In this volume’s conceptual endeavour to redefine neoliberalism, our
main aims are threefold. Firstly, we seek to rehistorize neoliberal move-
ments within a world-systems perspective that may better link together,
rather than split apart, the insights of Foucauldian accounts of govern-
mentality and Marx’s critique of the dynamics of capitalist exploitation.
Such a world-systems perspective enables a more comprehensive under-
standing of the ways in which capitalism requires structural inequalities
that are produced through the constellation of a core-zone, semiperipher-
ies, and peripheries. This perspective requires an attentiveness to the
ongoing and interwoven role of regions beyond the “white” Euro-
American nation-states that have not only often been treated in isolation
from one another (as if their dynamics are not shaped by inter-core com-
petition) but also disconnected from other regions, which are often con-
sidered as instances of note only to the degree they develop in ways that
emulates or reproduces the logistics of the core nations (often frequently
those of their former colonial occupiers).
Secondly, we seek not only to differentiate a neoliberal period from
prior periods in capitalism’s history but also to grasp the temporal shifts
and differentials within this phase. The enactments during the 1980s are
different from recent ones, even while both are best grouped within a
larger context. To foreshadow our argument, we contend that one source
of confusion in scholarly discussions of neoliberalism has been the lack of
consideration for the nested, rather than linear and sequential, quality of
the roughly post-1970s period. Just as there are mini-cycles or conjunc-
tures within this phase, this phase is a segment within other longer cycles.
While what has been called neoliberalism deserves to be analysed as differ-
ent from and in opposition to the mid-twentieth century formations that
we will broadly call Keynesian and Fordist, it also exists as a cadenza within
a greater phase that arose in the late nineteenth century in the period after
Marx’s analysis of capital as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century.
As Kennedy and Shapiro argue, neoliberalism ought to be seen as con-
taining 40–50-year cycles that are stitched together by an overlapping
6 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
Using Davis’s ideal types of the North Atlantic core, East Asian semiper-
iphery, and West African periphery, we want to insist that core-
semiperiphery-periphery be understood as relational zones that operate
on multiple scales, rather than strictly national spheres. The movements of
goods, peoples, and environmental resources mean that the peripheries
exist both outside and within cores. Each spatial level (whether the house-
hold, city, region, nation, or macro-area) contains its own internal core-
periphery differences (Shapiro 2008: 33).
As Neil Smith puts it, uneven development as both “social inequality
blazoned” onto the landscape and as the exploitation of “geographical
unevenness for certain socially determined ends” is “highly visible in land-
scapes as the difference between developed and underdeveloped spaces at
different scales: the developed and the underdeveloped world, developed
10 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
regions and declining regions, suburbs and the inner city” (2010: 206).
Urban settings have their own class-differentiated regions, from the
peripheral slums inhabited by manual labour forces and reserve armies of
the unemployed, to the core sectors where elite classes live and work. At a
higher level, individual nation-states are divided between internal periph-
eral and core-like zones, such as north/south and urban/agrarian divi-
sions. The urban cores of these different zones are often organized within
a ‘city-system’, where some cities are more dominant than others, and rise
and fade in prominence; at the global level, core cities in the world city
system exercise more power than others, whether in finance, industry, and
international politics or in the dissemination, translation, and consecration
of cultural capital.
However, because the social action of cores is too incommensurate
with that of the peripheries, the world-system requires a third calibrating
zone, the semiperiphery, in order to “translate” the culture and commodi-
ties of each sphere to another:
Hegemony is a rare condition; to date only Holland, Great Britain, and the
United States have been hegemonic powers in the capitalist world-economy,
and each held the position for a relatively brief period […] The problem
with hegemony […] is that it is passing […] superiorities are successive, but
they overlap in time. Similarly, the loss of advantage [is] also largely succes-
sive. It follows that there is probably only a short moment in time […of]
hegemony. (Wallerstein 2011a: 38–9)
Neoliberalism and Neoliberalization
A second major claim of this book is that much of the lack of conceptual
clarity surrounding critique of neoliberal culture has been due to a lack
of consideration about the difference between neoliberalism and neolib-
eralization. Here, we propose that the triptych of modernization/
modernity/modernism could be usefully reconfigured to distinguish
between neoliberalization, neoliberal modernity, and neoliberalism.
Thus, “neoliberal modernity” might specifically name the particular
world-historical moment of the neoliberal world-system, encompassing
the experience-systems, socio-ecological formations, and sensoriums that
exist within it.
Following on, “neoliberalization” would refer to the material processes
and technologies of capitalist penetration and development, including
financialization, privatization, structural adjustment, outsourcing, enclo-
sure, flexibilization and dematerialization of labour, precarization, new
regimes of algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy 2013), and novel tech-
nics of enclosure and appropriation of nature (Moore 2015) enabled by
revolutions in bioinformatics and genomics and so forth, all of which gen-
erate the new lifeworlds of neoliberal modernity.
Finally, “neoliberalism,” or “neoliberal world-culture,” would name
the particular market ideologies, economic policies, development models,
and academic paradigms associated with the global “neoliberal thought
collective” (Plehwe 2009a: 4), indicating those forms of neoliberal
thought that occupy the cultural dominant but are nonetheless striated by
internal conflicts and inter-capitalist competition and unevenly imple-
mented across the world-system, as well as the broader cultural forms
through which the neoliberal world-system is constituted and represented
as a lived reality. At the same time, neoliberal world-culture would also
encompass those emergent forms of cultural mediation of neoliberal
modernity that are counter-hegemonic in their critique of the processes of
neoliberalization and the dominance of neoliberal ideology of competi-
tion and calculation, registering the culture of discontent against the
abstraction of financialization and the scarring violence of seizure capital-
ism’s accumulation via dispossession.
16 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
repeated within the United Kingdom and the United States, a group of
economists became highly successful in having their claims institutional-
ized within formal state policies in the post-war period. When Friedrich
Hayek moved to the University of Freiburg in the 1960s to take up a
professorship after a long spell at the University of Chicago, he returned
to a Germany that was organized by the so-called Erhard-Röpke Plan,
thanks to Ludwig Erhard’s role as West Germany’s Minister of Economic
Affairs since 1949. Despite the conventional tale that sees ordoliberalism
as mainly an academic exercise, post-war German policy was, in fact, orga-
nized through ordo/neoliberal policies (Kennedy and Shapiro 2019).
While Erhard held to strict anti-inflationary controls of the money supply,
he also removed in 1948 “the entire structure of Nazi-era price and wage
controls, while slashing taxes on incomes and capital, establishing what
has since been celebrated as a deregulatory tabular rasa” (Peck 2010: 56).
Yet, this move was not without consequences, since, “Three days later, the
Russians established the Berlin blockade, in order to contain the effects of
currency reform, triggering the beginning of the Cold War” (Peck 2010:
56). While Erhard’s policies might have still catapulted him to the German
Chancellorship in 1963, a changing world-system may have resulted as
well in his fall. From here, “Ordo histories recount that his exit from
office, in 1966, coincided with the country’s surrender to the evils of
bureaucratic intervention, welfarism, overregulation, and ‘penal’ levels of
taxation” (Peck 2010: 57), even though ordoliberal policies arguably per-
sisted in lower-key modulations through social market claims. One result
of Erhard’s sparking of the Cold War would be increasing opposition
throughout the world to being forced into spheres of influence, as seen
with the formation of the non-aligned Group of 77 in 1964.
While most histories of neoliberal practices recount the work of ordo-
liberal theory, few consider its political rise and fall. The standard narra-
tives typically skip ahead to monetarist success within the United States in
the atmosphere of the Nixon administration’s 1971 abandonment of the
gold standard and the ensuing 1973 oil crisis. While this is not the place
for a detailed investigation into 1960s political economy, we want to high-
light this seeming “pause” that occurs from the mid-1960s to the early/
mid-1970s between two longer phases of neoliberalism to make a few
points that will characterize and exemplify this collection’s approach to
neoliberalization as a dynamic process.
Firstly, and most obviously, it challenges conventional narratives of the
uncontestable rise of neoliberalism by indicating the historic existence of a
18 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
[T]he approach used by Tarshis would not have paved the way for the rise
and ultimate implementation of Monetarist policies within the Federal
Reserve in the late 1970s, as did the approach of Samuelson’s text. While
there were many factors at work in that development, one of them was the
inability of the Keynesianism envisioned by Samuelson (as expressed, for
example, in his famous 45-degree diagram) to explain the phenomenon of
rising inflation occurring simultaneously with high unemployment (so-
called stagflation.) This became a powerful factor discrediting what had
been the dominant (if bastardized or, at least, stylized) Keynesian paradigm.
Yet a variety of alternative explanations […] had been inspired by Keynes’s
General Theory. (Lawson 2015: 4)
The various forces that delimited the range of liberal thought also
spurred the creation of new intellectual warriors in the fight against
Keynesianism. For instance, Harold Luhnow gained control of his
deceased uncle’s William Volker Charities Fund and redirected its activity
towards conservative ends (Van Horn and Philip Mirowski 2009: 141).
Luhnow’s fund financed the academic posts of Ludwig von Mises at
New York University and Friedrich Hayek at the University of Chicago, to
the extent that Hayek’s “entire ten years at Chicago were financed exclu-
sively by Luhnow’s ample resources” (Lawson 2015: 8). Luhnow “also
underwrote the project that would ultimately result in the publication of
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom” after he had unsuccessfully
tried to persuade Hayek to write a more reader friendly version of The
Road to Serfdom (9).2 Other mass, popular culture interventions that
sought to advance Hayek’s ideas within the United States include an
abbreviated version of The Road to Serfdom that appeared in a 1945 issue
of Reader’s Digest and also, in the same year, a brief graphic version in Look
magazine (The Institute of Economic Affairs 1999).
This truncated history demonstrates how neoliberal forces powerfully
contested American liberalism, shaping its eventual failure by ensuring a
weaker version of Keynesianism would be instantiated. The history of neo-
liberalism needs to account not only for the complex of cultural and finan-
cial interests antecedent to economic knowledge formation, but for its
ability to define the terms of its antagonists in the first instance.
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 21
It also has parallels with our own twenty-first century moment of the
global reorganization of higher education to produce what is now being
widely called “the neoliberal university,” a process which can be under-
stood as bound up not only with the vicious asset-stripping of education
and other public sector goods but as part of the cultural fix necessary to
stabilize and reconstitute neoliberalism after the 2008 crisis, by disciplin-
ing and reshaping the intellectuals active in knowledge production. In this
we contend that while world-literature in our understanding is always the
literature created within the conditions of the capitalist world-system, it is
significant that “world literature” as a category of critical analysis within
academia reemerged in 2000 with Franco Moretti’s essay “Conjectures on
World Literature,” and gained momentum in the period when capital reas-
sembled itself after the 2008 crisis.
In the terrain of this discipline, we can see a war of position being con-
ducted between those desirous of a more totalizing, politicized under-
standing of capitalism’s systemic crises and interested in the capacity of
world-cultural forms to critique or inflect capitalism’s development, while
critical of the increasing commodification and alienation of all forms of
knowledge and cultural production, and those for whom world literature
is more purely a matter of formalist analysis, humanist appreciation or
taste, or datafied analysis, and whose criticism presents no threat to neo-
liberal consensus as such.
Thirdly, while neoliberal policies may have been endogenously devel-
oped within the lineaments of a particular nation-state (and language ter-
ritory), the room for the operation of political elites was shaped by the
world-systemic environment characterized by the encounter between a
rising American hegemon in the post-war period in the face of the USSR
and their mutual construction of the Cold War. Cold War tactics and
decolonial forces shaped the development of neoliberal claims even in its
earliest formations.
Thanks to Naomi Klein, the story of the Chicago School neoliberals’
involvement with the Pinochet military dictatorship has become a power-
ful narrative for how capitalism uses the peripheries of the world-system as
a laboratory to perfect “shock doctrine” techniques before implementing
them in core nations (Klein 2007), not least since peripheral peoples often
have less institutional capacity to resist the predations of neoliberal capital-
ism because their own local governmental and social elites are complicit in
its deployment. Yet offering Pinochet’s 1973 coup as the crucial moment
22 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
argued, it has been central to the making and uneven development of capi-
talist modernity, providing the material culture in which the built environ-
ments that support the world-economy are founded, from vehicles, to
food-packaging, to electricity lines in long-distance power-grids, to hydro-
electric power projects, to powders in cosmetics, foods, paints, vaccines,
bombs, missile fuels, and nano-technologies (Sheller 2014: 2).
Bauxite’s political ecology is inextricably bound up with the rise of
resource imperialism conducted by multinational corporations and with
the dispossession of native indigenous peoples from the sites around the
world where it is extracted. Aluminium was inseparable from the entrench-
ment of US world economic and military power during the Cold War
period, central to the technologies of warfare and air power and to the
political ecology of military Keynesianism (Sheller 2014: 5). Supplies of
bauxite ore are not widely distributed across the planet, and North
American aluminium companies thronged to Jamaica in the 1950s, both
because of its rich deposits and because of the guarantee of cheap labour
and political stability.
These corporations paid little to no tax and did not invest in other sec-
tors of the economy, even insisting on importing mining equipment, while
pursuing land grabs that displaced half a million rural Jamaicans over the
decades from 1943 to 1970, leading to mass urbanization and mass unem-
ployment. In the 1976 election, the leftist People’s National Party
(PNP) led by Michael Manley and supported by a coalition of the urban
poor, blue-collar workers, youth, farmers and domestics, and unemployed,
campaigned intensively for resource sovereignty and the dismantling of
neo-colonial trade relations. Under Manley, many of Jamaica’s industries
were nationalized, and he proposed a bauxite levy on the mining corpora-
tions. Subsequently, the United States, frightened by the prospect of the
nationalization of the bauxite industry and the loss of the “cheap” alu-
minium vital to the Cold War, as well as the political spectre of a red wave
of socialism cascading across the Caribbean archipelago, sent CIA opera-
tives to destabilize the PNP and back the conservative Jamaica Labour
Party led by Edward Seaga, known popularly as “CIA-ga.” The proven
model of destabilization combining political violence with the Friedmanite
measures of the Chicago School deployed in Chile after President Nixon
ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in order to oust Salvador
Allende was subsequently repeated in Jamaica to force Manley to capitu-
late to loan conditions, creating artificial food shortages and using ‘shock
and awe’ tactics of terror.
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 25
Periodicity and Periodization
This question of periodic recurrence leads to our third main aim in this
volume, which is to complicate the question of neoliberalism’s periodiza-
tion by exploring its periodicity. The “pause” of neoliberalization between
1966 and 1971/73 is once more helpful in illustrating the pitfalls of peri-
odization. The “problem” of periodization is far more commonly
understood than periodicity, especially since the former has been taken as
the dominant question for post-1800 historiography.
Periodization involves the task of differentiating and separating socio-
temporal phases, often through according to forms of cultural expression,
patterns of social subordination, technology, or mode of production.
Whether the units of time handled are short and spasmodic or temporali-
ties so long in duration as to be nearly indiscernible to human observation,
a periodizing study defines searches for representative fractures to locate
ruptures in sequential time-space. Consequently, periodization studies
often lend themselves to highlighting “Great Men” and dates of signal
events, and are thus vulnerable to overestimating the performative power
of bravura declarations.
Rather than seeking differences, the search for periodicity looks to
ascertain the nature of recurring familiarities across historical cycles of
capital’s expanded reproduction. The value of periodicity in opening up a
new perspective of historical study can be understood with reference to
chemistry’s periodic table of elements. For instance, all the elements lack-
ing an electron are presented vertically as halogens, so that viewers can
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 27
understand that all the elements in that column operate similarly, even if
they are non-contiguous, and that the operation of one analogous element
(i.e. fluorine) can be surmised from another (i.e. chlorine). Yet while all
halogens function analogously, they also have unique features based on
their horizontal location due to increasing weight, what we might call
their periodizing features.
We can begin contouring this different approach by recuperating the
intimations of Marx’s conception of capital’s periodicity. While Capital
Volume I does not fully flesh out a theory of periodicity, perhaps because
Marx imagined that it would belong more properly to his long-planned
but never-delivered analysis of the world market, he does telegraph his
concerns in ways that will matter for our understanding of neoliberalism.
As Marx is wont to do in Volume I, he grounds a conceptual question
about capital’s logistics on concrete labour practices. In his extensive
descriptions about the horrific living and work conditions for (often female
and child) textile workers, Marx writes that “alongside the general and
periodic changes in the industrial cycle, and special fluctuations in the
markets to which industry is subject, we may also reckon what is called
‘the season’, dependent either on the periodicity of favourable seasons of
the year for navigation, or on fashion,” that requires work to be “executed
in the shortest possible time” (1977: 608). The prior naturalness of the
year’s ebbs and flows become changed and become “more frequent with
the extension of railways and telegraphs” (608). Marx argues thus that the
collision of seasonal time and human consumption is transformed by the
factor of the world market in two fundamental ways that initially seem
incompatible with another.
On one hand, Marx suggests that capital’s periodicity only emerges
fully with more developed capitalism, and is not as easily identified in its
earlier centuries: “the peculiar cyclical path of modern industry” of “aver-
age activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation” is one that
“occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also impossible when
capitalist production was in its infancy,” primarily because of the absence
of a large population of “unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’” (1977:
785). As conceived here, periodicity is a feature of modernity, but is
dependent on the expansion of capitalism beyond its European perime-
ters, not least as it requires the incorporation of peoples in non- or weakly-
capitalist regions and their transformation into subjects of capitalist
peripheries with high degrees of unwaged labour. It arises only after capi-
talism has had a profound influence on “the whole of national produc-
28 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
course, but not in their fundamentals” (Shapiro 2008: 31) can be usefully
conceived as a three-dimensional “long spiral” (Shapiro 2016: 16; Deckard
2017: 90) that repeats earlier processes but in newly expanded and inno-
vative forms.
The search for periodicity identifies analogical similarities in chronically
contiguous moments within capitalism’s long spiral, when writers might
seek to reactivate older literary forms that mediate similar processes and
refashion them to provide a new conceptual and aesthetic model for the
present, while accepting that these recurrences have their own anagram-
matic particularity. This identification of contiguities should be predicated
as analytical, rather than simply predicative, enabling the explication of
recurrences, rather than deterministic, assuming that similarities will
always appear. World-literary critics must therefore read the idiographic
particularities of cultural registrations at different historical points in ten-
sion with the nomothetic tendencies of capitalism’s long spiral. Applying
this to the problem of neoliberal world-culture, instead of treating the
aesthetics of literary representations in the neoliberal period as exceptional
or unprecedented, we might periodize them in relation to texts from ear-
lier historical moments when hegemonic regimes were in their contraction
and decline.
As Eli Jelly-Schapiro notes, the features of “late” neoliberal capitalism
have a genealogical preformation in earlier forms of primitive accumula-
tion. Furthermore, he argues that neoliberalism is not composed of one
“unitary neoliberal rationality,” but rather of three different temporal
“moments” of primitive accumulation, expanded reproduction, and accu-
mulation by fabrication that are articulated within the “complex unity” of
the neoliberal world-system, wherein each constitutive element maintains
its particularity:
ject’s psychology and the narrative form that seeks to convey these
alterations.
Any attempt at periodizing the unfolding temporalities of neoliberal-
ization across the last four decades must also develop a more complex
understanding of nested cycles. Economists have as analytical tools a range
of cyclical categories including the Kitchin (3–4 years); Juglar (6–8 years);
Labrousse (10–12 years); Kuznets (20 years); Kondratieff (roughly 50
years); and a secular trend described by Braudel as roughly 250 years and
reimagined in Arrighi’s notion of the “long century” (Braudel 1983:
77–80; Arrighi 2002: 1). To these latter conceptions of long cycles, we
might add the world-ecological temporalities of “ecological regimes” and
“ecological revolutions” based on Jason W. Moore’s insight that Arrighi’s
systemic cycles of accumulation should be understood as founded in orga-
nizational revolutions not only of social relations but also of socio-ecological
bundles of human and biophysical natures (Moore 2015).
These ecological regimes are dependent on the unpaid appropriation of
nature’s “free” gifts and the transmutation of these ecological surpluses
into value through human waged labour. When each successive ecological
regime is exhausted and no longer able to produce surpluses, then the
conditions of profit accumulation falter, and ecological revolutions occur.
These creative revolutions produce new technologies to rekindle labour
productivity and locate new frontiers for appropriation. However, each
revolution only resolves the exhaustion of the previous regime by recon-
figuring its contradictions on a larger scale.
Indeed, Moore suggests that the neoliberal ecological regime which
began in the 1970s now faces an epochal crisis of productivity, as the
financialization of nature produces diminishing returns. Within these lon-
ger waves of accumulation and exhaustion, Moore locates a shorter-term
cycle, the boom-bust temporality of frontierization or recursive capture, in
which the rapid appropriation of commodity regimes organized around
plantation cash-crops such as sugar, or extraction monocultures of raw
materials such as rubber, tends to undermine the socio-ecological condi-
tions of profitability typically within 50–75 years in any given region, lead-
ing to the successive relocation of commodity regimes to new locations in
the world-ecological, or the transition to the enclosure of new
commodities.
Such a panoply of cycles suggests that neoliberal activity has numerous
moments of inflection nested at different scales, each of which could be
compared to similar moments in prior cycles. Any attempt to periodize
32 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
Derivatives and World-Culture
The conventional introductory textbook definition is both nominalist and
consequently obfuscatory. When a derivative is explained as a financial
transaction based on but separated from the exchange of an underlying
commodity, derivatives can be treated as if they are a form of commod-
itized insurance, like a futures or option trade, which might “hedge” or
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 35
trade secret, but gave them freely away in The J.P. Morgan Guide to Credit
Derivatives (1999). Early adopters of derivatives ran informal training ses-
sions for their putative competitors (Mackenzie 2006: 143–177). Morgan
and other investment banks knew that they had to catalyse a new group
awareness of derivatives, otherwise there would be no “market” to trade.
The development of this social formation in turn required new sensibilities
and affects: a generation of bankers shaped by the post-war baby and eco-
nomic boom, who were more willing to break with the past reservations
about speculation and more comfortable with risk than their slightly older
colleagues, who had been shaped by the catastrophic economic events of
the mid-twentieth century. If trade in derivatives and their imbrication in
the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008 are key features of the neoliberal
era, their origins have to be understood as a complex intertwining together
of world-systemic history, changing culture, and technologized knowl-
edge in ways that have remained too little recognized.
To suggest the similarity of these conjunctures from the 1970s onwards,
a similar story could be told about the rise of hip-hop. As a group of DJs
learned a new technique in the early 1970s for rationalizing what was pre-
viously a fiendishly difficult to manage operation within a mercilessly fast
dynamic setting—the location of the break or cut of percussion in a play-
ing LP—this knowledge was facilitated by the new availability of cheaper
and more mobile (Japanese) sound systems and turn tables, like Technics
SL-1200, first released in 1972. One of the central environments for the
emergence of hip-hop was the open-air settings of the urban landscape of
New York City, which was shaped by the burnouts left in the wake of col-
lapsed support for New Deal social housing and federal support for the
city’s metropolitan budget.
The rise of a generation of hip-hop artists was not only influenced by
economic peripheralization of African-American neighbourhoods such as
the Bronx within the core city. Rather, it also required a new cultural sen-
sibility: a willingness to risk artistic humiliation or social disapproval as
they placed their hands on the vinyl record’s horizontal surface in order to
scratch it, rather than taking care to handle only the edges of the platter.
Similar disregard for past proprieties—the habitus informing public behav-
iour and performance—could be seen in the post-disco breakdancers will-
ing to soil their clothing by spinning on the ground, or the graffiti taggers,
who were enabled both by the withdrawal of urban policing and by the
democratization and newly cheap availability of aerosol-spray technology.
At the same time, the evolution of MCing—the chanting vocal style super-
38 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
of structural adjustment and the debt trap. In the United States, it fed into
the development of hip-hop, as mentioned above, particularly in the
Bronx. As in Jamaica, the music culture that emerged was at first under-
ground, distinct from the mainstream population who consumed music
from the radio. Instead of being played for individuals in a sphere of pas-
sive consumerism, this was a culture of collective consumption and of col-
laborative production, not subsumed within a professional music industry,
a means of “active cultural production, a means by which black lower-class
youth articulate and project a distinct identity in local, national and global
contexts; through dancehall, ghetto youth also attempt to deal with the
endemic problems of poverty, racism, and violence” (Stolzoff 2000: 1).
From the 1980s onwards, as Jamaica’s state entered its 30-year crisis of
hegemony, and public infrastructure continued to decay, while
unemployment and organized crime rose, dancehall music became ascen-
dant, embodying the contradictions of neoliberalism. As Denise Noble
argues, dancehall music embraces hyperconsumerism and expresses desires
for inclusion in the illusory benefits of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, as
“signalled by the recommodification of the ‘monetized’ hetererotic Black
body,” but at the same time also acts as a space of “maroonage from the
biopolitical governance of Jamaica bourgeois liberal nationalism and white
governmentality” (Noble 2016: 338).
In Kingston’s semiperiphery, thus, we can see how imported materials
of US black vernacular culture, together with local oral traditions with
deep roots in African tradition such as griots chanting over drum beats or
the creolized patois of everyday speech, were calibrated into new art forms
with both local and transnational resonance, connecting two different
contexts of neoliberal depredation and peripheralization, shaped by the
movement of populations and musical forms between cores and peripher-
ies. Jamaican dancehall and US hip-hop are, as Toynbee puts, the “prod-
uct of a much larger contrastrive demi-reg: the historical-geographical
division of world capitalism in terms of core and periphery” (Toynbee
2007: 22).
Our juxtaposition of emergent popular music cultures and derivative
trading is not meant to glamorize one as a work of art or condemn
another as complicit with neoliberalism. Instead we want to suggest how
a process of conjunctural convergence of several elements of world-sys-
temic transformations within capital, culture, and ecology are not easily
isolated as a sequential chain and are in fact constitutive of each other.
World-systemic alterations, transformations of the state’s relation to the
40 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
Conclusion
We would like to conclude by gesturing towards our own alternative peri-
odization of neoliberalism’s advance. In searching for a methodology that
can account for nested units and the differing lengths of periodization and
periodicity, we find useful Michael Denning’s approach to the periodiza-
tion of the 1930s Cultural Front (Denning 2011). Denning initially
sketches a series of short conjunctures that capture the flow of events and
the importance of particular points or events in forming the tactical field.
He then considers a longer generational period involving the overlap
when a new generation consciously sees itself as a replacement, in this case,
the rise of the 1960s New Left, and the eventual death of the Depression
cohort in the last decades of the twentieth century. Finally, Denning con-
textualizes his discussion within a long duration from the 1890s through
the late 40s and 50s that were marked by changing “gender and house-
hold formations,” a racial revolution involving international decolonial
energies as well as domestic shifts in American racial relations including
the “largest internal migration” as “black and white southerners” moved
North in ways that fundamentally remade the industrial working class, and
the “emergence of a post-Fordist economy” alongside “the third techno-
logical revolution” (Denning 2011: 26–27).
In this way, we likewise see the rise of the neoliberal world-system as
characterized by a cluster of different, sequential conjunctural moments,
a longer generational shift, and a longer duration of more expansive
economic changes and processes. Rather than making an exposition of
the longest units, we will briefly sketch our touchstone conjunctures. In
The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Duménil and Lévy argue that recurring pat-
terns of alternating crises have shaped the capitalist economy from the
late nineteenth century onwards, identifying four major structural crises
(2011: 2). Amongst these, they identify two different types, distinguish-
ing between the crises of falling profitability in the 1890s and 1930s,
and the crises of financial hegemony in 1930s and 2000s–2010s, where
they argue the middle class begins to lose their leadership to financial
elites.
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 41
Within the 1930s and 2008/11, we further divide the period between
two 40–50-year phases that are sutured together by an overlapping period
of about ten years. To this analysis of four major conjunctural crises, and
our own internal division, we add the fact that these smaller cycles are now
aligning within larger nested ones, so that the particularity of our current
moment is its combination of an emerging crisis of profitability and of the
accumulation of negative value in the realm of nature, signalled by what
Patel and Moore call the end of the “cheaps” (2017), as well as a time of
disintegrating class alignments and loss of trust in managerial and financial
elites, as famously captured in Occupy’s slogans of the 99% versus the 1%.
Thus, the current crisis of neoliberalism has analogies within the longer
period from the nineteenth century as well as within earlier ones; in par-
ticular, we can see the return of both the conditions of late nineteenth-
century imperialist monopoly capital and the derangement and
reorganization of class relations.
For these reasons, we also want to emphasize Duménil and Lévy’s anal-
ysis of often overlooked inflections based on “neoliberalism as class hege-
mony” (7). Following Duménil and Lévy, we see the period from 1968 to
1973 until 1979/80 as the phase of the incipient attack on the working-
class and other group recipients of welfare securities within capitalist cores.
They argue that class alignments fractured and realigned after the 1930s
crisis of financial hegemony, contributing to a new sympathy between the
professional and working classes that helped to usher in the Keynesian era,
before dissolving in the wake of the structural crisis of the 1970s, when the
capitalist classes entered a new “alliance with upper management, specifi-
cally financial managers, intending to strength their hegemony and to
expand it globally” (1). While 1979/80 represents an amplification of this
process as it becomes energetically pursued by the state, these changes are
consequential more than innovative.
From 1980 until the mid-1990s, these policies were remarkably suc-
cessful in stripping away working-class protections within capitalist cores,
though to a lesser extent in the social democracies of Europe, in conjunc-
ture with the intensification of new modalities of extraction in the periph-
eries and the outsourcing of production to semiperipheries across the
Global South, where labour was rendered “cheap” by new policies of
structural adjustment, as in the quintessential example of the North
American Free Trade Agreement. The late 1990s, as presided over by the
Clinton administration in the United States, represents a new threshold
that begins when neoliberal strategies are in need of overcoming their own
42 S. DECKARD AND S. SHAPIRO
achieved limit and move from hollowing out the labouring class to begin
cannibalizing the middle-class through increasing resort to personal debt
and credit. From this point until the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008,
with an important amplification around 11 September 2001, and the sub-
sequent surge of new strategies of energy imperialism and creative destruc-
tion in the “war on terror,” middle classes in capitalist cores experience
their own version of working-class depredations. The global financial crisis
of 2008/11 stands as yet another marker of an internal horizon for neo-
liberalism, when the “neoliberal revolution” in class relations “ultimately
unsettled” the “secure base of the upper classes” and succumbed to the
contradictions of its own “class and imperial strategy” (2).
Accordingly, Duménil and Lévy predict that our twenty-first century
conjuncture will require a new class adjustment, whether “in the context
of a social arrangement to the Right or the Left,” with much depending
on “the pressure exerted by the popular classes and the peoples of the
world” (2). This is, as such, a moment of bifurcation, still unsettled, in
which right forces are in vociferous confrontation with the loose coalition
of anti-systemic forces, which, we have suggested, constitutes the poten-
tial emergence of a new cultural front. Rather than falling away, neoliberal
factors have not only survived the financial meltdown but have reorga-
nized with zombie-like persistence (Mirowski 1), aided in no small part by
a resurgent political right under the banner of the “national factor”
whether in Trump’s America or Modi’s India. In the realm of culture, this
reorganization has been further enabled by the rise of algorithms shaping
new experiments in the logistics of commodity circulation, as exemplified
by Amazon, and new forms of data behaviourism and algorithmic govern-
mentality, as exemplified by social media networks and the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. It is this more recent phase of late or renewed neoliber-
alism, rather than a comprehensive survey of the historical record from the
1970s onwards, towards which this collection primarily orients itself,
exploring the world-culture emerging from a period that combines the
uneven development of new forms of cultural discontent and
revanchism.
One final point about the periodization of neoliberalism offered by
Huehls and Greenwald-Smith, which captures a larger critical tendency
that we wish to refuse, is the lack of clarity as to whether their use of the
word ontological operates as a category description for how a cluster of
(American) writers self-understand their project, or whether it should be
taken as an analytical explanation for the historical moment’s features.
WORLD-CULTURE AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD-SYSTEM… 43
state from the Red Square Quebec occupations to the USS pension strikes
in the United Kingdom to the Ayotzinapa 43 protests and ongoing move-
ment of zapatismo in Mexico. There seems to be an incipient formation
threading together the minoritized populations within the core nations,
those falling from security under conditions of relentless precarity, and
those beyond the boundaries of the capitalist cores’ supposed comfort.
This is not simply a culture of discontent, but a loosely constellated emer-
gent form of new political experience, even despite the deepening pres-
ence and renewal of neoliberal policies.
The discussion of neoliberalism now is more pertinent than ever. Such
an analysis requires a better sense of capitalist temporality as shaped by the
cyclicality of its search for profitability, of capitalist geography as shaped by
a world-system of dynamic, but intrinsic inequality, and of capitalist
culture, as shaped by the struggles over lived experience and social repro-
duction. This collection seeks to begin this renewed conversation.
Notes
1. Wilder Lane is the daughter of The Little House on the Prairie author and
was editor of the Review of Books between 1945 and 1950, then published
by Hart’s National Economic Council.
2. A lineage of these attacks lingers into the present, as the Freedom School,
saved from closure by donations from Rose Wilder Lane, later produced
Charles Koch as an alumnus.
3. The following discussion of the invention of derivatives largely draws on
Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2006); John Lanchester (2010); Edward
LiPuma (2017); Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee (2004); Donald
Mackenzie (2006); and Gillian Tett (2009).
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CHAPTER 2
Michael Niblett
Writing during his stay in the USA between 1938 and 1953, C.L.R. James
noted a turn to sadism and cruelty in the popular arts “immediately after
the consciousness of the Depression had seized hold of the country”
(1993: 122). He was particularly struck by the tremendous popularity of
a new form of violent gangster-detective fiction, which, he argued, was an
“expression of mass response” to the turmoil unleashed by the financial
crisis of 1929 (122). In a society where “there is no certainty of employ-
ment, far less of being able to rise by energy or ability,” the “individual
demands an aesthetic compensation in the contemplation of free individu-
als who go out into the world and settle their problems by free activity and
individualistic methods” (127). Gangster stories, continued James, have
given to “millions a sense of active living, and in the bloodshed, the vio-
lence, the freedom from restraint to allow pent-up feelings free play, they
have released the bitterness, hate, fear and sadism which simmer just below
the surface” (127). The popular demand for narratives of this sort was
M. Niblett (*)
Coventry, UK
e-mail: M.Niblett@warwick.ac.uk
sadistic individualism of the new gangster fiction, what was in fact fostered
was “the psychological preparation on a vast social scale of the most strik-
ing social and political actuality of our time – the emergence of the totali-
tarian state” (148). City of God and A Brief History must negotiate a
similar ambivalence, each rehearsing the possibilities for both reactionary
and progressive class realignments in the wake of hegemonic dissolution.
The precise nature of these possibilities, however, is differentiated in the
two novels by the specific social contexts and historical moments to which
they respond.
* * *
City of God and A Brief History help to periodize the messy historical pro-
cesses through which the neoliberal regime of accumulation unfolded.
Three of the five sections that comprise James’ novel are set amidst the
upheavals of what might be termed the ‘long’ 1970s in the Anglophone
Caribbean. This period runs from the “Rodney Affair” in Jamaica in 1968,
when the government’s refusal to allow the radical historian Walter
Rodney to re-enter the country triggered widespread protests, to the col-
lapse of the Grenada Revolution in 1983. During these years, the
Caribbean was a crucible of revolt and reaction. Across the region, increas-
ing dissatisfaction with the lack of progress made since independence in
eliminating the colonial legacies of “racial, economic, and class oppres-
sion” led to the emergence of new social and political movements (Lewis
2013: 448). These were “to the left of the political establishments that
had been erected in the wake of the constitutional changes following
World War II and which gave the West Indian middle class a hold on
political power” (Lewis 2013: 448). Challenging the limited constitu-
tional decolonization achieved by bourgeois nationalist regimes, uprisings
such as the Black Power Revolution in Trinidad in 1970, the Union Island
revolt in 1979, and the Grenada Revolution of the same year demanded
not just political sovereignty, but full economic and cultural sovereignty.
The rise in radical activity in the region prompted fresh rounds of inter-
vention by the USA, concerned lest another Caribbean island go the way
of Cuba. These interventions formed part of the global reassertion of US
imperial dominance in the 1970s in response to the downturn in the
world-economy. They frequently involved efforts to force countries to
implement the set of economic and political policies that would eventually
become known as the “Washington Consensus.” The Anglophone
Caribbean’s ‘long’ 1970s, then, marks the moment when, with the
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 53
ost-
p war social democratic settlement and its corollary, constitutional
decolonization, having reached an impasse, the region was confronted
with the alternative pathways of socialism or neoliberal barbarism.
Ultimately, the weight of imperialist pressure would ensure the latter won
out: the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, along with the initiation of the
free-trade Caribbean Basin Initiative in the same year, signalled the
region’s full integration into the neoliberal regime of accumulation and, in
Rupert Lewis’ words, “brought the curtain down on Anglophone-
Caribbean radicalism for the rest of [the] century” (2013: 455).
In its evocation of the politically charged gang violence of 1970s
Jamaica, A Brief History captures a key turning-point in this history. In the
1940s, Jamaica’s two nationalist parties began to recruit “social outlaws
from among the militant Kingston poor” as their “shock troops” in the
battle for office (Gray 2004: 28). The development of these political gangs
was tied to the emergence of distinct urban enclaves in Kingston—garri-
son communities—in which “support for one party was or became over-
whelming” (Meeks 2014: 171). Following the electoral victory of Michael
Manley’s left-wing People’s National Party (PNP) in 1972, the struggle
between the gangs assumed a more ideological stamp. Hoping to destabi-
lize the PNP government, the USA began supplying arms to those groups
affiliated to the right-wing opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). The
violence escalated and the island descended into a state of near civil war.
James’ novel not only makes explicit reference to these events, but also
stresses their wider geopolitical significance—not least by having one of its
narrators, a CIA operative, compare his agency’s destabilization of Jamaica
to its role in the 1973 coup in Chile, generally regarded as the proving
ground for neoliberal economic shock therapy.
Although such direct political references are absent from City of God,
Lins’ novel nonetheless registers the specific Brazilian instantiation of the
general crisis into which the world-economy stumbled after the post-war
boom years. Broadly speaking, the post-war regime of accumulation had
been characterized by social democratic (“welfarist”) class compromise in
the core capitalist countries and by “developmentalism” in the global
South (Amin 1997: 94, 17). By the early 1970s, the fundamental incom-
patibility between capitalist class relations and social democracy, mani-
fested in a falling rate of profit, saw the “logic of unilateral capital” strive
to reassert itself (Amin 1997: 95). In Brazil, the local articulation of this
history unfolded with a certain precocity. The country’s post-war political
order had been dominated by a form of nationalist populism, which saw
“the left [opt] for an alliance with sectors of the national business elite in
54 M. NIBLETT
like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack
by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner”—may
have been facile, but it did capture James’ admixture of high modernist
stylings with generic narrative forms and “B-movie” contents.
In the context of the contemporary hegemonic crisis, this instance of
aesthetic uneven and combined development might be read in analogy to
the cultural work performed by those earlier yard novels: as projecting the
possibility of a new alliance between middle- and working-class groups.
On this view, the consecration of James’ novel by middle-class elites in the
USA and UK—its winning of the Booker Prize in 2015, for example—
represents a response by those elites to the potential for such an alliance.1
The reception of A Brief History parallels the recent rise in popularity of
culturally prestigious, long-form television shows that draw on “low-
brow,” highly generic narrative forms. “The return to generic narratives
by middle-class audiences,” writes Stephen Shapiro, is “an indicative fea-
ture of the ongoing rearrangement of the composition of class alliances”
consequent on the unravelling of neoliberalism’s hegemonic order (2014:
223). The latter, as Shapiro argues (following the work of economists
Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy), was characterized by an alliance
between high capitalist business interests and the professional-managerial
(more broadly middle) classes. Any “social divorce” between these groups
and the establishment of a new class compact between the professional-
managerial and working classes “is not an easy or smooth cultural transi-
tion” (222). Rather, it requires a “complicated set of cultural rehearsals [.
. .] for surely the middle class needs practice in making so different a social
linkage” (222–223). The consumption of A Brief History by middle-class
elites could be said to enable just such a cultural rehearsal.2 Not only do
the novel’s first-person gangster narrators immerse the reader in the
impoverished world of Kingston’s urban masses; in addition, the presenta-
tion of these narrators complicates any straightforward moralizing per-
spective on their actions, creating an ambivalence in point of view that
allows for at least partial identification with otherwise unacceptable social
identities. Take Josey Wales: his extreme violence is anathema; yet James
endows him with such intelligence and acumen—as well as various liberal
attitudes (e.g. he has a tolerance for homosexuality unusual amongst his
fellow gangsters)—that many critics have echoed Jeff Vasishta in finding
Josey “charismatic and compelling” and “completely absorbing” (2014).
As James himself has observed: “You can’t dismiss Josey Wales’ quite lib-
eral worldview. […] The thing about Josey is – yes, he’s a psychotic mur-
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 57
derer who will kill pregnant women – but at the same time, he has such a
fantastic worldview. He has a chill worldview” (Vasishta 2014). The forms
of partial identification enabled by this “chill worldview” permit the reader
to rehearse a change in cultural perspective away from existing norms of
social authority and status towards hitherto marginalized or subaltern
identities.
As I have suggested, however, Josey’s own trajectory is towards an
increasingly competitive entrepreneurialism. Hence, one might under-
stand reader responses to this “compelling” gangster in a less progressive
way also, one that recalls the more troubling tendencies observed by
C.L.R. James in his analysis of the popularity of gangster fiction during the
Depression. Such fiction allowed the “pent-up feelings” of its audience
free-play, releasing the “bitterness, hate, fear and sadism” provoked by a
world in which existing forms of social advancement had been eroded and
“aesthetic compensation” was sought in “the contemplation of free indi-
viduals who go out into the world and settle their problems by free activity
and individualistic methods” (1993: 127). Figures such as Josey may well
be so compelling to a certain (ideal type) middle-class audience—now fac-
ing the kind of social precarity previously experienced by the working
classes—not only because they represent a rejection of the now crisis-
stricken institutionalized modes of social authority, but also because they
reproduce in their behaviour the competitive economic logic upon which
that audience’s status and self-identity had been predicated.
The cultural rehearsal of class realignment A Brief History makes pos-
sible for its readers, then, is an ambivalent one: on the one hand, renewed
sympathy with the poor and the powerless; on the other hand, the reassur-
ing affirmation of a neoliberal politics of life. In this, the novel encapsu-
lates the competing tendencies that have emerged with the contemporary
crisis in neoliberalism: on one side, efforts to build progressive, anti-
systemic alliances between the working and middle classes (e.g. Occupy)
and, on the other side, desperate attempts to refurbish the existing class
compact with high capitalist business interests (e.g. the far-right populism
of Trump in the USA, or the cosmopolitan liberalism of Macron in France
or Trudeau in Canada). The inclination of A Brief History at the level of
its social imaginary, I would suggest, is to affirm the possibility of a new,
progressive class alignment. At the level of form, however, despite regis-
tering the damage done to subjectivities and collective political agency by
the forces of neoliberalization, the novel seems to concede the continuity
of these forces (even as the hegemonic status of neoliberalism unravels).
58 M. NIBLETT
Thus, although A Brief History alludes to the yard novel tradition and
the types of social commitment such fictions encoded, the way this formal
model is incorporated in the text makes of it something different to what
it was in the hands of, say, Roger Mais. A work such as The Hills Were
Joyful Together, responding to the independence struggles of the post-war
era, sought to re-shape novelistic conventions in an effort to “represent a
collective subject” in a form built historically “around the interior life of
the individual” (Denning 2004: 59). As Gordon Rohlehr has suggested,
in Mais’ text “the fragments of communal experience knit into a single
tragedy, character flowing into character, as if the entire group were a
single person. […] Mais contrives to blend the disparate voices and modes
into a single weighty philosophising voice” (1992: 56). It is precisely this
collective narrative voice that is absent from A Brief History, in which each
chapter is narrated by a single character in such a way as to relocate social
experience in the consciousness of the individual. When something like
the blending of voices one finds in Mais does occur, it is marked off as a
moment of psychological breakdown. After being put in a cell by Papa-Lo,
for example, the ghetto youngster Leggo Beast begins to rave uncontrol-
lably. Moving between linguistic registers, he has Papa-Lo perplexed:
“Half of what come out of him mouth, not just what him say, but also how
him say it didn’t originate in Copenhagen City” (343). Leggo Beast’s
channelling of disparate, fragmented voices recalls the aesthetic strategies
of experimental yard fictions like The Hills Were Joyful Together, but it does
so only as an instance of isolated delirium.
James’ narrative, therefore, displays a re-individualizing tendency that
corresponds to the dog-eat-dog individualism—the social cannibalism—
that characterizes the actions of many of the novel’s leading figures.
Indeed, the formal logic of A Brief History might be re-cast in precisely
this light: as proceeding through a cannibalization of past forms and
genres, which in the case of yard fiction involves the evacuation of its for-
mal impetus towards narrative collectivism, an impetus grounded in the
historical situation of nationalist agitation and social democratic advance.
In this respect, the novel could be said to encode in a very specific sense
the trajectory of neoliberalism, which, in response to the long downturn
and absent a scientific-technological revolution capable of boosting labour
productivity, succeeded in reviving accumulation only by “cannibalizing
the accomplishments of the Fordist-Keynsian order” (Moore 2012: 231).
Faced with a decline in the growth of annual labour productivity in the
OECD from 4.6% in 1960–73 to 1.6% in 1979–97, neoliberalism
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 59
has said, emphasizing how the presentation of the realities of favela life in
a culturally prestigious, experimental narrative form might serve as a way
both to educate middle-class readers and to enable the cultural rehearsal
of a new social linkage to the subaltern classes (quoted in Lund 2006: 1).4
Certainly, the publication of the novel sparked “an intense debate in Brazil
about the relationship between violence, drug-dealing, social injustice,
political action and the role of civil society” (Lund 2006: 1). Lins has
claimed that “the research, book and [the subsequent film adaptation] are
all fated to continue to stir social mobilization” (Lins 2005: 127). The
cultural rehearsal of class realignment enabled by the novel seemed to tally
with the current of the times: only a few years after the publication of City
of God, the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of the Partido dos
Trabalhadores (PT), in the 2002 presidential elections signalled an impor-
tant leftwards shift in Brazilian politics. The PT came to power promising
“the priority of the social”—a policy programme aimed at responding to
the social needs of the masses (Sader 2005: 68). Lula’s record in office,
however, was mixed. His administration not only maintained but also in
many instances amplified the neoliberal economic policies of his predeces-
sor, Cardosa (Sader 2005: 71).
Even as it rehearses the possibility of a new linkage to the subaltern
classes, Lins’ novel illuminates the entrenched social forces that would
contribute decisively to the shortcomings of Lula’s administration. As
noted, the trajectory of City of God’s leading characters registers the colo-
nization of the lifeworld by the logic of neoliberalism; but the sheer per-
vasiveness of this logic is also emphasized by the formal rhythms of the
novel, through which the rhythms of social reality are reconstituted as an
object of critique. To understand this process, it is necessary to examine
City of God’s relationship to naturalism. With its element of social enquiry,
the book has affinities with the great naturalist novels of the nineteenth
century, specifically those that appeared in Brazil in the 1880s and 1890s.
An obvious precursor to Lins’ text is Aluísio Azevedo’s O Cortiço (The
Slum 1890), set in a tenement yard in Rio de Janeiro. In an important
essay on O Cortiço, António Cândido highlighted the contradictions of
Azevedo’s narrative, which depends upon a series of naturalist stereotypes
around race and environment that the unfolding of the plot will under-
mine. The plot is driven by the insatiable urge of its protagonist, João
Romão, to enrich himself. To this end, Romão mercilessly exploits all
those in his path, whether white or black, Brazilian or Portuguese. The
instrumental logic of capitalist accumulation thereby destabilizes the natu-
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 61
The sheer accumulation of grisly scenes […] unmoors the novel from its
literary project as exposé. The pileup of graphically violent episodes, in its
relentlessness, takes on the character of a phantasmagoria, where the narra-
tive voice itself is a further symptom of the social derangement. (2007: 173)
Peixoto’s judgement on the text is largely negative, viewing its serial vio-
lence and the hysteria of the narrator as in danger of reproducing the
sensationalism of mass media accounts of the favelas. But this is to miss the
significance of the novel’s narrative contradictions. What Peixoto describes
as the unmooring of the novel from its literary project as exposé is rather
an expression of its internalization of the contradictory dynamics of
Brazilian society as a formal problem. The reduction of the omniscient
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 63
* * *
City of God, then, keeps faith with the possibility of imagining a world
beyond the sway of a neoliberal politics of life. This move is emphasized
by the language of the novel. In an effort to capture the gangsters’ reified
64 M. NIBLETT
lifeworlds and the violent rhythms and immediacy of favela life, the narra-
tive deploys a “quick-fire language, of shortened words and phrases,” “cli-
chés,” and “pre-formed ideas” (Nagib 2005: 34–35). Yet it treats these as
building blocks to be reassembled into a representation of the world in
line with poetic technique. Indeed, the novel’s approach to its raw materi-
als is characterized throughout by what Schwarz calls Lins’ “insistence on
poetry” (2012: 232).5 There is a persistent strain of lyricism in the narra-
tive—as, for example, in the account of Hellraiser’s death, which paradoxi-
cally introduces a lyrical note even as it affirms that “all [Hellraiser] could
do was live the life he lived without any reason to be poetic in a world
written in such cursed lines” (200). Such lyricism serves as a self-conscious
marker of the distance between text and world. The assertion of this dis-
tance (however slight) does not signal a retreat into aestheticism or ideal-
ism; rather, it is an expression of the novel’s political commitment to
seeking out a perspective from which to critique the socially cannibalistic
logic of a reified reality.
An instructive comparison can be drawn here with A Brief History.
This, too, emphasizes the reification of its protagonists’ lifeworlds: the
thoughts and perceptions of Josey Wales and his fellow gunmen are thor-
oughly saturated by the clichés and readymade ideas of the mass cultural
narratives they consume (Wales’ own adopted name, of course, references
the 1976 western starring Clint Eastwood). The novel then replicates this
in terms of its own status as an art commodity destined for consumption
on the international market. For what James presents us with to some
extent in A Brief History is one variant of the export version of Jamaican
culture: gangs, drugs, reggae! In fact, the novel might be said to play up
to what Graham Huggan calls the “postcolonial exotic” (2001: vii), its
success at doing so then confirmed by its consecration by the global cul-
ture industry. James, I think, does this deliberately, invoking such exoti-
cism in order to interrogate the sociological position of his work. Thus,
for example, the novel thematizes its potentially problematic packaging of
Jamaican culture for an international audience via the character of Alex, a
US music journalist who is writing an account of Jamaica’s gangs that by
the end of A Brief History is being serialized in The New Yorker under the
title A Brief History of Seven Killings. Meanwhile, the novel’s stylistic
excesses, in particular the “cultivated exhibitionism” (to borrow Huggan’s
phrase [2001: xi]) of its graphic depictions of violence, stage a certain
irreducibility to exoticist norms and the commodification of cultural dif-
ference. Indeed, in its representation of violence A Brief History seems to
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 65
Notes
1. Following his Booker Prize win, James was the subject of numerous appro-
batory articles and interviews in broadsheet newspapers and periodicals on
both sides of the Atlantic. In October 2016, the BBC’s flagship arts show
Imagine dedicated a programme to his work.
2. In an indication of the continuities between the cultural work performed by
A Brief History and the high-status TV shows referenced by Shapiro, the
screen rights to the novel were optioned by HBO for a TV series.
3. Although there is not space to develop the point here, it is worth noting the
ambivalent trajectory of another central character in the novel, Nina Burgess.
She is a sympathetic figure who experiences social precarity and the eco-
nomic pressures of the neoliberal regime; yet in her constant self-reinven-
THE LONG 1970S: NEOLIBERALISM, NARRATIVE FORM, AND HEGEMONIC… 67
Works Cited
Amin, Samir. 1997. Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. London: Zed Books.
Brenner, Robert. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence. London: Verso.
Brown, Nicholas. 2005. Utopian Generations. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Cândido, António. 1991. De cortiço a cortiço. Novos Estudos-Cebrap (Sao Paulo) 30.
De Oliveira, Francisco. 2006. Lula in the Labyrinth. New Left Review 42: 3–22.
———. 2007. The Lenin Moment. Trans. Neil Larsen. Mediations 23.1: 83–123
Denning, Michael. 2004. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso.
Gray, Obika. 2004. Demeaned but Empowered. Jamaica: University of West Indies
Press.
Hart, Stephen M. 2007. A Companion to Latin American Literature. Woodbridge:
Tamesis.
Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic. London: Routledge.
Ianni, Octavio. 1970. Crisis in Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press.
James, C.L.R. 1993. American Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell.
James, Marlon. 2014. A Brief History of Seven Killings. London: Oneworld.
Jameson, Fredric. 2013. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso.
Lewis, Rupert. 2013. Learning to Blow the Abeng. In Caribbean Political Thought:
Theories of the Post-Colonial State, ed. Aaron Kamugisha, 448–459. Kingston:
Ian Randle.
Line, Juliet. 2005. Trajectories of Malandragem in City of God. In City of God in
Several Voices, ed. Else R.P. Vieira, 71–81. Nottingham: CCCP.
Lins, Paulo. 2005. Cities of God and Social Mobilization. In City of God in Several
Voices, ed. Else R.P. Vieira, 127–134. Nottingham: CCCP.
68 M. NIBLETT
Kerstin Oloff
K. Oloff (*)
Durham, UK
e-mail: k.d.oloff@durham.ac.uk
revolution” capable of restoring growth has not materialized for all the
experimentation in genetic engineering (Moore 2010: 229), it has overall
been characterized by socio-ecological asset-stripping, renewed primitive
accumulation and plunder through finance capital.
The crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the global economic
boom period. Offering “one of the highest standards of living in Latin
America and the Caribbean” (Benson 2007: 29), Puerto Rico had par-
taken in some of its benefits—albeit at a high social, economic, environ-
mental and political cost. The post-WWII economic expansion had
proceeded in the island through rapid industrialization, urbanization, and
the fostering of consumerism, transforming it from “a largely agricultural
district into an export oriented manufacturing platform with decaying
agricultural activity […] [and] bypass[ing] the possibility of a more bal-
anced and complimentary relation between industry and agriculture”
(Ayala and Bernabe 2009: 180). In the process, the problems inherent in
its colonial status—including high unemployment rates, significantly lower
living standards as compared to mainland United States, the dependence
on US capital and governmental funds and the predominance of foreign
ownership of productive wealth—were further entrenched (ibid: 182;
199). Further, as many energy critics have pointed out, a key aspect of the
post-WWII global ecological regime was the centrality of cheap oil. Oil
fuelled the cars that mobilized an increasingly suburban society; oil under-
wrote the intensifying global division of the workforce and oil shaped
people’s diets, increasingly consisting of imported foods, grown with the
help of pesticides and fertilizers. Indeed, beginning in the late nineteenth
century and increasingly after WWII, the entire world-system has been
reorganized by oil—and thus to “think oil is to think the world-system”
(Niblett 2015: 275).
But what does it mean to think oil from an island in which infrastructure
and industry are based heavily on imported oil? In Puerto Rico, 98% of
electricity is derived from imported fossil fuels. This energy system is both
very expensive (resulting in almost double the US average of electricity
prices) and very vulnerable to climate change and disaster, due to the cen-
tralized reliance on very few power plants, as well as on extensive transporta-
tion networks (Klein 2018). As Catalina de Onís outlines, “energy
colonialism” has long played a significant role in shaping the relations of
exploitation and domination between the United States and Puerto Rico, as
indeed epitomized in the Jones Act (which requires all goods to be imported
on US ships) and Operation Bootstrap (2018: 1–2). It has also significantly
FROM “SECTION 936” TO “JUNK”: NEOLIBERALISM, ECOLOGY… 73
Benny devotes himself to an invocative delirium, the hand reaches the auto-
mobile velocity negated to the Ferrari: chromed Ferrari […] Ferrari pene-
trated by Benny’s desire, the gasoline tank torn off by Benny’s desire, by
Benny’s celebrant, Ferrari full of Benny’s semen. (258–9)
She didn’t know that there were millionaires like this in the Dominican
Republic. […] She didn’t know of the acres and acres of sugar that had paid
for the humble estate of her host […], nor of the succulent cocolos [black
Caribbean migrant workers] who always served as appetizer for the hungry
boys of the Graubel family. […] Selena was unaware of all of this. She only
knew that glamour had always suited her well. The precious floor tiles of
pink marble accentuated the red-ish glimmer of her skin; the boudoirs of
white Filipino wicker and the velvety light in the interior patios would high-
light her silhouette of a nymph in sorrow. (118)
Santos here emphasizes the difference in the reader’s and Sirena’s perspec-
tive, as Sirena—while aware of the exploitation that she seeks to turn to
her advantage—is unable to fully grasp her position within the social
whole. The cognitive mapping performed by the omniscient narrator for
the reader clearly situates the consumption of Sirena within the history of
the consumption of Caribbean bodies and landscapes, as well as within a
history of ongoing class struggles. “Globalization” is here presented as a
mountain of spoils, the “triumphant signs of the profits gained from the
violent legacy of slavery” (Russ 2009: 156).17
To put this differently, then, Sirena—the enterprising performer who
sells images and is the seemingly perfect neoliberal subject—occupies but
one of the possible subject-positions under neoliberalism. She contrasts
with Hugo, the workers on the fields and her former drug-addicted self.
While the dissolution of the hetero-normative tropes and their underpin-
ning gender regimes are thus celebrated and replaced by a liberatory mul-
tiplicity of sexualities and genders across the class spectrum, the text
simultaneously advances a strong critique of the new ecological regime
under neoliberalism, characterized not by increased mobility, but the wid-
ening of pre-existing social and global inequalities and socio-ecological
degradation which have long roots in colonialism.
FROM “SECTION 936” TO “JUNK”: NEOLIBERALISM, ECOLOGY… 79
Food-Horror and Cyberpunk
While in El killer, food is not central to the narrative, in Rafael Acevedo’s
dystopian Al otro lado del mundo hay carne fresca [On the other side of the
wall there is fresh meat/flesh] (2014), set in the 2040s, the uneven access
to healthy food becomes the dominant focus as indicated in the title. The
fictional world of Acevedo’s novel taps into an oneiric irrealism as well as
the conventions of cyberpunk, “that self-declared bastard child of science
fiction” (Williams 2011: 17; see also Acevedo 2014a). The former was so
aptly theorized by Sylvia Wynter as a feeling of unreality produced by the
domination of the logic of the market over the political, economic and
cultural aspects of everyday life (1971); here, events seem to shape them-
selves in accordance with the wishes of the socially alienated narrator, as a
woman who he mentally designates a “cow” turns out to be named
“Holstein” with a daughter called “Milka,” as he becomes increasingly
drawn into a plot revolving around access to healthy food (with an empha-
sis on meat and milk). This “unreality” is inscribed within a cyberpunk
vision of a “system let loose upon itself” (Williams 2011: 18), marked by
rampant inequality, militarization and dissolved states.
84 K. OLOFF
Puerto Rico, these global trends are experienced and exposed with par-
ticular acuity. Within the context of Maria’s aftermath, some of the apoca-
lyptic and dystopian scenarios imagined by the writers become tragically
and disturbingly prophetic, as humans and their homes are treated as
expendable by those with economic and political might.
Notes
1. The extent of the tragedy was downplayed by the government of right-
wing Ricardo Roselló, who gave an official death count of 64. A new
Harvard study places the death toll at more than 70 times this estimate,
namely 4645, which is “likely to be an underestimate due to survivor bias”
(Kishore et al. 2018: 1).
2. Thanks to Dr Yarí Pérez Marín for her helpful comments on an earlier draft
of this article.
3. See Ayala and Bernabe (2009) and Bernabe (2017).
4. A longer history of Puerto Rican aesthetics of environmental degradation
is offered by Acosta Cruz.
5. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
6. See Frances R. Aparicio’s discussion of the role of music in the novel
(1993).
7. As Graeme McDonald has suggested, the putative absence of great cultural
works engaging with oil is overstated. “[G]iven the global cultural reach of
an oil and gas dominated world energy system, all fiction is petro-fiction to
various removes” (2013: 19).
8. In the 1960s, there was an attempt to sift towards petrochemical industri-
alization but this was brought to an end by the Oil Crisis (Ayala and
Bernabe 2009: 192–3).
9. In the story’s apocalyptic ending the island is engulfed by the sea, cars are
swallowed up by the ground, and an oil fountain breaks forth. This is
ironic, Rodríguez Marín suggests, since oil wealth “could have changed
the history – economic, social and colonial – of Puerto Rico” (2004–5:
29). Yet the irony might also be said to turn on oil’s veiled omnipresence
preceding the apocalypse—something that Vega highlights through the
insistent emphasis on processed American foods, omnipresent cars, con-
sumer goods and the TV screens.
10. On the allegorical dimension of his death, see Pérez Montijo.
11. See also Luis Felipe Díaz’s seminal De charcas, espejos, infantes y velorios en
la literatura puertorriqueña (2013). Díaz traces a longer history of the
national child from the nineteenth century to the present day.
12. Díaz reads the scene of the deliberate exposure of the child to the sun as
staging a regressive desire to reintegrate into Nature and to leave behind
88 K. OLOFF
the “empire of the artifice of signs” (143). I would here add that instead of
opposing late modernity to “Nature,” it is here useful to understand late
capitalism as a way of organizing nature in such a way that increasing
financialization, globalization, and mass mediatization produce the appear-
ance of the domination of signs while creating increasingly hostile socio-
ecological environments for the majority.
13. See also Huard’s analysis of convenience foods and the critique of the “ali-
mentary American Dream” (245).
14. Hernández’s analysis of increasing food dependence in the Dominican
Republic and the increasing redundancy of low-skilled workers within a
world-systemic context here provides an excellent comparison (2002: 58; 4).
15. Sirena’s gender fluidity is highlighted in the novel through changing pro-
nouns. I here follow the novel’s employment of feminine and masculine
pronouns.
16. In early twentieth century Caribbean literature, cars tended to be associ-
ated with the plantation overseers.
17. See Mimi Sheller (2003).
18. Acosta Cruz offers an insightful longer history of the aesthetics of environ-
mental degradation (2014).
19. Davies dates “punitive neoliberalism” from 2008, which in the Puerto
Rican context may be modified to 2006, the year that marks the beginning
of the recession.
20. For a perceptive commentary on El killer as a fiction critical of neoliberal-
ism in Puerto Rico, see Casanova-Vizcaíno (2015).
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Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
I. M. Sánchez Prado (*)
St. Louis, MO, USA
e-mail: isanchez@wustl.edu
moment). Second, the 2008 crisis—just like the Mexican crisis of 1994,
the 1997 financial crisis of the Asian tigers or the 2001 collapse of
Argentina among many others—has raised important caveats to the notion
of neoliberalism as a technocratic political economy of development by the
transference of economic resources from the social to the one percent, as
they render visible what Robert Brenner (2006) calls the “economics of
global turbulence,” that must be narrated beyond the terms Klein’s idea
of the “shock doctrine” (2007). The long historical arch of neoliberalism
also raises the importance of understanding that the term has morphed
from the description of a political economy (the realm in which Harvey’s
work generally keeps the term) to a lived experience that operates in affec-
tive, ideological, and material terms not accountable by mere economicist
approaches. In the English-language academy in particular, the belated
arrival of literary and cultural studies to the discussion of neoliberalism as
such has had resulted in a pernicious lag in the discussion of this dimen-
sion—although recent contributions, such as the collective book
Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (2017) and the excel-
lent monographs by its editors Mitchum Huehls (2016) and Rachel
Greenwald Smith (2015), have made significant strides in breaking this
impasse in American literary studies. Yet, these works read neoliberalism
from idea of the contemporary and with a strong focus on 9/11 as a tem-
poral reference point, even though the relevance of this landmark date
varies significantly across geographies as nodal site for the history of neo-
liberalism proper.
Within this landscape, I think that scholars like myself, who do not
participate in the field of American studies and who hail from other
regions, must confront the task to develop fuller understandings of neo-
liberalism as experienced outside of the United States and Western Europe,
in order to see the ways in which other experiences allow us to read neo-
liberalism not only as imperial irradiations but also as political economies
and lived experiences tied to the long durée experience of individual coun-
tries and regions in national and global configurations of capitalist devel-
opment. In this spirit, what I propose here is an approach to the
periodization of neoliberalism, based on the concrete experience of Mexico
as a privileged site in the historical arch of neoliberalism. The importance
of Mexico to the history of neoliberalism has to do with various factors.
First, it is a country that was, from very early on, a fertile ground for the
introduction of neoliberal ideas, given that the national right-wing and the
business and financial sectors fostered critiques for Keynesian paradigms of
MONT NEOLIBERAL PERIODIZATION: THE MEXICAN “DEMOCRATIC… 95
“social imaginary” that accounts for the totality of social life. Paradoxically
though, following his own argument although Escalante Gonzalbo does
not quite enunciate it this way, the consolidation of neoliberalism happens
when its intellectual roots are derivative and its creative moment is
exhausted. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand that contemporary
realism is defined by a process (that Escalante Gonzalbo actually calls the
“opium of the intellectuals” following Raymond Aron’s critique of
Marxism) in which the way neoliberalism totalizes knowledge allows for
the creation of intellectual practices that spread the neoliberal credo
(2015: 300). Although Escalante Gonzalbo is thinking these matters from
a liberal perspective that is as much distant from Marxism as it is from
neoliberalism—and although he argues we should still consider contribu-
tions of thinkers like Hayek and Gary Becker, freed from the chains of
their mediocre followers—his point is important precisely because it is an
outgrowth of the ideas of liberalism and democracy that were central to
Mexico’s neoliberalism. It is an instructive book because it seeks to account
for the failure of neoliberalism without undoing the gains of the demo-
cratic transition, a point to which I will return at the end of this chapter.
For the time being, a key idea to return here is the role that Mont
Pèlerin and other precursor scenes to contemporary neoliberalism have in
the imagination of neoliberal periodization in Mexico. In a recent book,
María Eugenia Romero Sotelo traces the origins of neoliberalism in
Mexico not to what Sarah Babb calls the “crisis of Mexican developmen-
talism” and the ulterior rise of a technocratic, US-educated economist
class (2001: 108–98) but, rather, to the early impact of the Mont Pèlerin
society in Mexico and the way in which Austrian economic theory inter-
acted with the desire of the national business class to question the post-
revolutionary regime’s interventionist economic policy. Romero Sotelo
notes that the visit of Ludwig von Mises and other Mont Pelerin figures to
Mexico in 1958 did not have great impact because the booming economy
of the “Mexican miracle” (the period of vertiginous economic growth due
to nationalist economic policy in the 1940s and 1950s) had given cre-
dence to the government’s Keynesian policies, grouped under the formula
of “stabilizing development” (2016: 216–17). Nonetheless, as Romero
Sotelo discusses, the idea of “liberalism” and freedom that the business
class and its organic intellectuals have, originated in the works of econo-
mists such as Luis Montes de Oca, a scholar of economics and politics who
played a crucial role in the early history of Mexico’s central bank and who
was an early admirer of Walter Lippman’s liberalism before becoming
98 I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO
Althusserianism and then under the influx of Michel Foucault and Cornelius
Castoriadis, highly influential critiques of what he called “despotic power”
and the “imaginary networks of political power,” which are terms to
describe, respectively, the material and symbolic tools of State domination
(Sánchez Prado 2014). The corollary that emerges out of these examples is
not so much to label them as “neoliberal” proper. All of them depart sig-
nificantly even from the brand of Austrian-informed liberalism of Montes
de Oca and Velasco and some of these figures, like Bartra, openly critique
neoliberal economic programs. Rather, the point is that the true history of
neoliberalism in Mexico emerges from the encounter between radically dis-
parate intellectual figures with avant-la-lettre forms of the neoliberal pro-
gram: freedom from the State; the emancipatory role of free markets (in the
right) or of autonomic forms of pre-capitalist organization (which would
result into what Verónica Gago provocatively calls “neoliberalism from
below” [2014: 12]); a culture of individual freedom that brands collective
forms of engagement and State-centered forms of citizenship as oppressive
tools of material and symbolic coercion. In the mid-1980s, as these ideas
were fiercely debated, the first neoliberal economic reforms came to be as a
consequence of the 1982 debt default, which directly resulted from the
Volcker Shock in the United States and which coincided with the purge of
Keynesianism and the emergence of “structural adjustment” in the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Harvey 2005:
29). It is precisely because of the coincidence of structural-adjustment eco-
nomics with the language of the democratic transition that opened the
space for neoliberalism to have a deep political and social influence in
Mexico. The ground opened by the followers of the Austrian school in
policy and by the near-universal consensus of anti-State theories across the
ideological spectrum was essential in Mexico becoming one of the first
major sites of neoliberalization proper.
Shock-doctrine theories of neoliberalism generally focus on the
moments in which Cold-War ideologues negotiate with right-wing
regimes to shove structural reforms through dictatorial repression, or in
which neo-imperial financial institutions like the IMF or the World Bank
impose structural adjustment and draconian reductions of public spending
in exchange for funding required to navigate a financial crisis or fund
development projects. Yet, these histories miss what scholars working in
national contexts have discussed for years: the long-term construction of
social and cultural consensus, and of new structures of state hegemony, to
foster neoliberalization from within. What Romero Sotelo illuminates is
MONT NEOLIBERAL PERIODIZATION: THE MEXICAN “DEMOCRATIC… 101
that the key ideological tenets of the neoliberal program were already
present in seminal forms in the political and intellectual discourse of the
financial sectors in Mexico. Although the Volcker Shock was essential to
introduce structural adjustment in the country, this notion misses the
popularity enjoyed by protoneoliberalism among financial circles, or the
growing pervasiveness of its values across different forms of cultural repre-
sentation. In my book Screening Neoliberalism (Sánchez Prado 2014) I
sought to argue that cinema embodied neoliberalization in the whole
chain that runs from production to consumption. The privatization of
structures of cinema exhibition—which went from publicly owned, price-
controlled screen to multiplexes that priced out the lower classes—was
accompanied by the emergence of films that had significant allegorical or
literal manifestations of support for different aspects of neoliberalization.
One can recall here Alfonso Arau’s film Como agua para chocolate (Like
Water for Chocolate 1992), where the marriage between a Mexican and an
American character signals Americanization as a path forward, Sabina
Berman and Isabel Tardan’s Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda
(Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman, 1995), in which the protago-
nist who is seeking to liberate herself from the allure of machismo happens
to be the owner of a manufacturing sweatshop in the border, or Fernando
Sariñana’s comedy Todo el poder (Gimme the power 1999) that represents
the State as corrupt and complicit with crime, and raises individual citizens
as heroes who can individually fight crime with no government aid.
Further, cinema of the period frequently elevated creative-class characters
(graphic designers, publicists, documentarians, and the like) as protago-
nists and social models. It is telling that, a decade and a half later, the film
that would shatter all historical records of the Mexican box office, Gaz
Alazraki’s Nosotros los nobles (We the Noble, 2013) is basically a comedy of
the inherent goodness of a plutocratic family, which manifests itself when
the patriarch pretends to have lost his fortune to force his grown children
into work. The film—directed by the scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest
families, whose business, incidentally, is marketing—was astonishingly
successful as audiences in Mexico, a proverbially unequal country,
embraced the movie’s characters to the point that young upper-class men
and women began mimicking their appearance and behavior.
My point with the example of cinema is that neoliberalization does not
only entail the forced realignment of countries like Mexico to global
reconfigurations of capital. It also requires the capture of both State insti-
tutions and the structures of symbolic representation by the economic and
102 I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO
argued that the Drug War is a construct by cultural discourses, which echo
the accounts of violence by Mexican intelligence agencies without chal-
lenging them, thusly obscuring the economic and political dynamics and
the role of the State in the current Mexican situation. Similarly, Dawn
Paley (2014) has shown compellingly that “Drug War” is more properly
understood as “Drug War Capitalism” and is related in Mexico in particu-
lar and in the Americas in general to forms of policy reform related to the
precarization of educational structures and the distribution of natural
resources among other things. Drug War capitalism fostered a paradig-
matic change in Mexico’s neoliberal model from the negotiation of struc-
tural reform with the ideologies of democratic transition toward a State
model based on the chilling coexistence between the killing and disappear-
ance of over 100,000 people in a decade and a functional model of capital-
ist development in which the structures of speculation and finance remain
more or less intact.
A problem of the thinkability of this kind of neoliberalism, one that
does not rest on the technocratic narratives of the economist class but in a
naked war on resources and bodies that no longer needs to be rationalized
through the knowledge of the managing class, derives from the fact that
the brutality of its material conditions and the urgency in the visibilization
of its violences postpones the full consideration of the social totality.
Indeed, if Zavala and Paley’s analysis has something in common is that
they both proceed through the suspension of immediate and palpable vio-
lence to account for the underlying projects that sustain them. In a way,
late neoliberalism puts forward the need of following Slavoj Žižek’s
injunction, in his book on violence (2008), to move the analysis from
“subjective” or visible violence, to “objective” violence, the one that is
inherent in the state of things. During the process of neoliberalization in
the 1980s and the 1990s, Mexican culture was generally blind to objective
violence because in many cases its critical lens was pointed to the legacies
of the twentieth-century regime, the critique of what Roger Bartra (2012)
called the “imaginary networks of political power,” which described the
rule by consensus and soft forms of authoritarianism established by the
one-party regime. Thus, works of literature, cinema and the visual arts
were engaged in projects, such as the critique of Mexicanness, the open or
veiled critique of twentieth-century political legacies and the opening of
society to new regions (such as the Mexican North, generally marginalized
by the political and cultural centralism of the PRI regime) or identities
(including the rise of indigeneity and the LGBTQ spectrum as key sites of
104 I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO
agency). This is not to say, of course, that this culture lacked merit. On the
contrary, they signified in some cases major instances of democratization,
most notably enacted by the Zapatista influence on indigenous rights and
autonomy politics and the great strides that feminism and gender critique
performed in the 1990s.
However, the notion of living a societal opening, the idea of a civil
society self-organizing (prevalent in many writings across the political
spectrum) and the decline of the State relegated properly neoliberal pro-
cesses of deregulation, financialization, and expulsion into blind spots for
a significant number of cultural texts. To avoid delving into an excess of
examples, it is possible to bring forward two of the most significant cul-
tural phenomena of the 1990s, the literature of the Crack group and the
rise of transnational Mexican cinema, as examples of this. The Crack
movement was a group of five writers (Pedro Ángel Palou, Jorge Volpi,
Ignacio Padilla, Eloy Urroz, and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda) who released
in 1996 a manifesto (Jaimes 2017) in which they defended the right of the
Latin American writer to not just engage with his (because they were all
men) immediate reality, pushing back against the commoditization of
magical realism in commercial literary circuits of the time. The Crack
group’s gesture very much aligned with the terms of the democratic tran-
sition. They understood literary freedom to be based in three key princi-
ples: dislodging from the imperative to write based on organic relationship
to national literature, insofar as such a construct was related to PRI cul-
tural politics; the resistance to pigeonholing of Latin America into magical
realism (which can be translated as a resistance to the right of producing
cosmopolitanism and not just being a repository of authenticity, breaking
away from Mexico’s location in a combined and uneven world literature);
the defense of the individual writer as a figure that does not have a neces-
sary relationship to the social or the political. Although this position
caused great debate in Mexico at the time and in various junctures of the
Mexican literary field, the point is that the Crack movement—a literary
movement iconic of the transition—is able to redefine literary practice
through values aligned with democratic transition ideologies and with no
bearing of the financial and economic processes underlying that transition.
It would not be until more than a decade later that some Crack writers
would engage those issues in their fictions: Volpi did so in a novel about
the financial crisis, while Palou’s turn into a historical fiction writer led
him to reassess the legacies of the Mexican revolution.
MONT NEOLIBERAL PERIODIZATION: THE MEXICAN “DEMOCRATIC… 105
see that both cases very much represent values tied to democratic-transition
neoliberalism. On the one hand, Cuarón saw in Americanization a
necessary remedy to official nationalism, just like intellectuals such as
Roger Bartra did. On the other hand, González Iñárritu found artistic
freedom and the ability to create a successful film by embracing the priva-
tization of industry structures, as well as his own particular construction of
synergy between advertising and cinema.
The point in both examples is that we cannot understand the relation-
ship between neoliberalism and culture in Mexico without understanding
two interrelated processes. First, narratives of resistance gradually align
with the cultural forms and values of neoliberalism due to the role that
Statism and national identity had in constructing the one-party, soft
authoritarian regime. Second, the relationship between the infrastructural
and material workings of cultural production are rendered invisible when
ideologies of neoliberal freedom dominate cultural discourse which in
turn accounts for the ideological blind spots in cultural objects and in
critique. This is the reason why the critique of the networks of imaginary
power laid out by intellectuals like Roger Bartra (2002), key to under-
stand the political frameworks for the Mexican transition, could accurately
identify identitarian and symbolic processes tied to national identity and
State domination, but did not have real ways to account for the infrastruc-
tural economic processes, even if, as is Bartra’s case, many of these cri-
tiques were card-carrying Marxists back in the 1970s. Bartra was himself
the authors of important books on primitive accumulation and Leninist
accounts of State power before turning to the critique of ideological struc-
tures in the 1980s (Sánchez Prado 2014). Neoliberal reforms were the
condition of possibility for dislodging the centralized power of the PRI
and the State it ruled for decades, insofar as the processes of privatization
of sectors like telecommunications and banking allowed for the autonomy
of crucial sectors of the “democratic transition” and led to the decentral-
ization and outsourcing of significant parts of the State. The unintended
consequences of this, based in part due to the loosening of State infra-
structure, led to some of the central events of Mexican late neoliberalism,
the “War on Drugs” period, including the voids on the Rule of Law and
the outsourcing of resources to both private actors and criminal organiza-
tions (which, of course, are another form of private actor).
The current late neoliberal period is still unfolding, and as we saw
before the idea of the “War on Drugs” has eroded, leading to the emer-
gence of new forms of thinking in the neoliberal moment. I want to con-
MONT NEOLIBERAL PERIODIZATION: THE MEXICAN “DEMOCRATIC… 107
Works Cited
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of Narconarratives. Comparative Literature 66 (3): 340–360.
CHAPTER 5
Claire Westall
The premise of this collection is that the neoliberal is the latest, and poten-
tially last, phase of the capitalist world-system and, consequently, is best
read through capitalism’s violent contradictions, periodic cyclicality and
multi-scalar world-ecological webs of extraction, exploitation and uneven-
ness. According to Jason W. Moore, the neoliberal is the “accumulation
regime that emerged in the 1970s,” saw its “signal crisis” in the 2003–2011
commodity boom and related 2007–2008 financial crash, and stands as
the transitional close of US hegemony (Moore 2012: 225). Building on
David Harvey’s understanding of a “crisis of accumulation” and his dis-
tinction between “the theory of neoliberalism and the actual pragmatics of
neoliberalization” (Harvey 2005: 2), Moore sees neoliberalization, that is
“practices and thought-structures” (227) supporting only ever-diminishing
returns, as having enabled a globally expansive acceleration and tightening
of short-term surplus value creation that has destroyed capitalism’s facility
for cyclical renewal. Why then, one might ask, should we attend—as I do
C. Westall (*)
York, UK
e-mail: claire.westall@york.ac.uk
“ice and waste” that is “Floyd Bennett Field” (76) into a “bright green”
cricket field set for “Bald Eagle” success (141). Chuck, Hans and the
groundskeeper cultivate the land, disciplining the pitch into a less uncer-
tain (i.e. flatter) form. Chuck knows about and wants to mobilize: rising
numbers of immigrants from the Asian subcontinent; the growing force of
India within world cricket and the world economy; and, the TV income
games like India versus Pakistan in New York would bring. Yet Chuck is
always-already dead; his dream is always-already a failure. He cannot build
a permanent cricket structure because he doesn’t have permission and he
is eventually ejected. His murdered body—referencing the migratory
world networks of colonialism, slavery and indentureship linking India
(Madras), the Caribbean (Trinidad), and America (New York)—washes up
on the shore of the Hudson. The material importance of such destruction
and erasure is played out with world-systemic ramifications in the text’s
other references to “Indians”: “Indian Point,” named for the alleged first
meeting between natives and Europeans; allusions to India’s nuclear
weapons; and the “thin and poor and dark-skinned” labourers in India
that make Hans remember Chuck even as he tries to resist conflation
(222). In addition, it’s the news of Chuck’s murder that prompts Hans’s
retrospective narration. As Snyder suggests, Hans’s story “depends upon,
even requires,” Chuck’s death (2013: 473).
With Chuck and other immigrants pegged to physical violence and
eventual eradication, Hans’s white-collar relation to the brutality of the
markets and the oil-face of finance capital is repeatedly overshadowed.
This is initially seen when a black player from St. Kitts brings a gun onto
the cricket field and then later when Hans vomits at the realization that
Chuck and his Jewish business associate assaulted one of their clients
(O’Neill 2009: 208). Consistently the interpersonal violence associated
with Chuck’s illegal imported lottery, “weh weh” (164), is set against the
absent–presence of institutional prestige and systemic violence carried by
Hans’s banking employment where he acts as a successful “equities analyst
[…] analysing large cap-oil and gas stock” (23). When depicting his work,
Hans identifies “corporations […] as vulnerable, needy creatures entitled
to their displays of vigour” (19) but fails to see himself as complicit in any
danger this brings, attempting to minimize his own position as “an ana-
lyst – a bystander” lacking “entrepreneurial wistfulness” (99). His effort
to excuse himself as a “political-ethical idiot” in the face of the Iraq War,
Rachel’s new anti-American politicization, and the high-profile US oil
interests in the Middle East is reliant upon an exaggerated undercutting of
118 C. WESTALL
Google Earth to visit a “distorted” London while separated from his son
(2014: 264). For Wasserman, this denouement is not a “return to a domi-
nant normative position” for Hans because his gaze is “the messy reality
of an altered view,” indicating that “[a]scending to such heights […] does
not itself secure power” (264–5). However, Hans’s position “above” is
possible regardless of any claim to knowledge, or ability to describe
London, and is premised on the very wealth-based security and power that
is conveyed and reinforced by his elevated position.
Crucially, this closing image insists on an elongation of a “zenith”
achieved at the top of a cycle, and this is extended by Hans’s memory of
the earlier vantage point in New York. In both images the journey will
end—the wheel will come back down and the ferry will arrive—but Hans,
and the novel generally, resist the consequences of such cyclicality (despite
Google Earth bringing him down to earth). We never see them descend,
arrive, or face an endpoint that is not simply a perpetuation. For Rachel,
their reunion is a “continuation” and for Hans it is a new beginning that
“fortuitously” results in the same outcome as before (222). The van der
Broeks are allowed to describe new beginnings as continuities, even as the
reality of life after the summit faces them and the novel posits that, accord-
ing to Faruk Patel (the rich Indian businessman drawn into Chuck’s
plans), it was wrong to concentrate on cricket in America because America
is “[n]ot relevant” given its economic decline and the rising power of Asia
(243). Fear of declinism is held at bay, then, by the novel’s insistence on
secure continuation, of life at the top for those like the van der Broeks,
who have themselves emerged as they began—happy, wealthy, and united
in London, having survived both 9/11 and 7/7 unharmed and without a
sense of socio-political or economic upheaval. Hence, the world-system is
clearly mediated in Netherland, aesthetically and through the aesthetics of
cricketing ambition and style, but the consequences of systemic cyclicality
are denied through perpetually deferment.1
is only mentioned three times. The first comes with India’s historic 2001
victory described above. The second and third occasions come as England
is being routed by India in a day–night match and, simultaneously, as
Govind and Vidya consummate their relationship on Vidya’s 18th birth-
day. Happy to relinquish her virginity, Govind explains that Vidya can now
“officially make her own decisions” but has been doing so “Unofficially …
since birth” (113) in a kind of woman-as-the-independent-nation cliché
(64) that reinforces India’s separation from England. And it’s Australia
that actually stands as India’s closest rival, here and in The Zoya Factor,
which is perhaps unsurprising given the strength of the Aussie team in the
early 2000s and the money-making clout of India–Australia games. When
Ishaan helps Ali gain access to Australia—as the land of sporting scholar-
ships, training programmes and avenues into a national side (i.e. without
India’s nepotism)—the young batsman declines this route to Australian
citizenship, tying his own future success to India’s and thereby resisting
the first-world/core’s effort to buy up exceptional talent still-in-
development. Thus, the novel insists on the loyalty of India’s Muslim
citizen(s) and the binding force of talent, cricket, and future Indian tri-
umph. In addition, it does so by closing with an all-Indian frame of
reference.
In fact, Australia is erased entirely in the Hindi film adaptation of the
text, Kei Po Che (2013), extending the self-referentiality of the novel’s
negotiation with communal violence and casting of cricketing recovery.
Where Ishaan had used a cricket bat to attack a would-be suitor for his
sister, Ali uses his to kill Bitton Mama, his attacker during the riots. The
battle lines drawn are between the religious excesses of the rioters, and the
anti-religious, or cricketing-religious, young men, with Ali’s lack of
(Islamic) extremism (akin to his father’s pacifism) making him ripe for
heroic cricketing action. Although the film’s notable plot rewrite priori-
tizes punishment and redemption (with Omi becoming Ishaan’s riotous
killer but ultimately regaining Govind’s friendship), both film and novel
emphasize national consolidation and recovery as achieved through Ali’s
batting, the third critical prompt worth noting. In Three Mistakes, Ali’s
recovery from the wrist injury caused by Bitton Mama’s assault is con-
firmed when he hits a six for the first time post-surgery. This maximum,
though, is set within the context of his earlier stamina training and also the
steady profits made by both Ishaan and Govind in their subdivisions of the
old shop. The film develops this idea of sustained accumulation with Ali
scoring a double century for India on debut. Across film and novel, then,
124 C. WESTALL
Note
1. This section is indebted to an earlier publication and fuller working through
of this argument (see Westall 2016).
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130 C. WESTALL
Daniel Hartley
D. Hartley (*)
Durham, UK
e-mail: daniel.j.hartley@durham.ac.uk
forces: a “longing … for some new existence outside the self, in a world
radically transformed and worthy of ecstasy” (2002: 136). This would
suggest that depersonalization is a more politically ambiguous phenome-
non than its habitually negative connotation might imply.
Differently from both Jameson and Friedrich, however, I understand
depersonalization as part of a broader phenomenon of “impersonality”
inherent in the capitalist world-system as such. That is, I take modernist
depersonalization to be but one variation of a larger socio-cultural process
of impersonality that unfolds across the longue durée of capitalist moder-
nity, and whose forms and valences mutate depending upon the historical
and geopolitical context. Such impersonality has many modalities—for
example, real abstraction (Toscano 2008; Finelli 1987; Sohn-Rethel
1978), reification (Lukács 1971; Chanson et al. 2014), alienation
(Fischbach 2016)—but fundamentally it consists in the fact that capitalism
effects a systematic rupture with all traditional figures of the social bond
(cf. Badiou 1999: 55), replacing them with the “cash nexus” or what
Marx calls the “silent compulsion of economic relations” (Marx 1976:
899). In certain strands of the secondary literature this “silent compul-
sion” has become known as “impersonal domination” (e.g., Postone
1993; Heinrich 2012). Compared to previous modes of production, capi-
tal’s mode of domination is said to be impersonal rather than personal; as
Ellen Meiksins Wood has written, “it is the ‘autonomous’ laws of the
economy and capital ‘in the abstract’ that exercise power, not the capitalist
wilfully imposing his personal authority upon labour” (1995: 41). Wood
thus argues that there exists a “structural indifference of capitalism to
extra-economic identities” (ibid.: 267).
The problem with this position is that it tends to downplay the extent
to which “impersonal domination” is simultaneously impersonal and per-
sonalizing.4 This chapter argues that the impersonality of historical
capitalism is best conceived as an uneven, often violent, combination of
socio-cultural processes of depersonalization and (re-)personalization. It is
within this purview of the longue durée that I shall locate the specific con-
figuration of impersonal and personal forces in the period known as ‘neo-
liberalism’. I shall argue that, from the perspective of the person,
neoliberalism constitutes a combined and uneven world-systemic project
operating through multiple socio-cultural “personae” (from homo œco-
nomicus to “wageless life” (Denning 2010)), unified by a counter-
revolutionary project of Restoration whose aim was to negate the “passion
for the real” [la passion du réel] that characterized much of the twentieth
KEEPING IT REAL: LITERARY IMPERSONALITY UNDER NEOLIBERALISM 133
century (Badiou 2007). I shall then use these extended sociological and
philosophical elaborations as a framework within which to read two key
contemporary works of world-literature: S. J. Naudé’s The Alphabet of
Birds (2015) and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013). I interpret
these works as attempts to inherit the “passion for the real” under condi-
tions of neoliberalism; more precisely, I read them as literary rearticula-
tions of the “passion for the real” that aim to identify and orient the
contemporary reader towards points of the historical Real that resist the
“organized disorientation” (Badiou 2008b: 18) of neoliberalism. Both
writers employ techniques of impersonality and depersonalization to carve
out a fragile space of resistance and formalize hope in an ethico-political
absolute. In doing so, they not only extend Badiou’s own reflections on
the intrinsic limitations of the “passion for the real” (not least its intimate
bond with violence and destruction (cf. Badiou 2007: 48–57)) but also
indicate potential blind spots in Badiou’s philosophical project itself.
Capital Personified
Much recent work in the Marxist tradition has argued that we should
understand capitalism as a social institution or civilization (e.g., Fraser
2013; Arruzza 2014; Moore 2015), a contradictory amalgam of wars,
money, and the state (Alliez and Lazzarato 2016), or as a “totality in
process” (Monferrand 2017) rather than a purely economic system. It is
with this body of work in mind that I shall argue that capitalist “imper-
sonal domination” is best conceived as a dual process of depersonalization
and (re)personalization. This can be seen in three ways. First, in Capital,
Marx constantly stresses the way in which impersonal domination operates
through structural processes of personification. In the famous preface to
the first edition of Capital, he states that “individuals are dealt with here
only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the
bearers [Träger] of particular class-relations and interests” (Marx 1976:
92). Capital’s impersonal domination thus works through a system of cat-
egorial personifications or “masks” [Charaktermasken]. Whilst these per-
sonifications appear, in their logical immediacy, to be indifferent to the
faces and bodies they force into relation, they are in fact mediated histori-
cal and political results: they are “fields of forces” (Basso 2015: 46) that
condense both longue-durée structural tendencies and conjunctural over-
determinations. Likewise, page after page of Capital attests to the struc-
tural connection between the sphere of circulation and juridical
134 D. HARTLEY
we may (and neoliberalism interpellates us as subjects who do) think and act
like contemporary market subjects where monetary wealth generation is not
the immediate issue, for example, in approaching one’s education, health,
fitness, family life, or neighbourhood … Thus, one might approach one’s
dating life in the mode of an entrepreneur or investor … A student might
undertake charitable service to enrich her college application profile. (2015:
31)
more, much more!’ We can find the divine fibres in our weak flesh, the undis-
covered grace in our entrails!” (70; emphasis in original). These “divine
fibres” and “undiscovered grace” are figures of that impersonal potential-
ity that is so violently extinguished by the neoliberal reactive subject.
Sandrien engages in a “passion for the real” worthy of the twentieth cen-
tury: her resolve is absolute and her indifference to her own well-being is
borderline maniacal, her body gradually wasting away and dehydrating
into dust. Yet her fidelity to an ethico-political absolute is intrinsically
marred because her project is internally structured by a misguided saviour
fantasy: “she will be able to keep everyone safe. Soon she will be able to
carry all the dying. She will hold them in the palm of her hand” (72). This
narcissism is connected to Sandrien’s inability to read her situation: “All
these connections make me dizzy … I don’t know what my involvement
is supposed to be” (79). The story is thus tragic, in the precise sense that
tragedy entails “the recognition of a strain of insouciant refractoriness to
human agency that is woven into the very fabric of action itself” (Aryeh
Kosman, cited in Eagleton 2003: 78). Yet here the “insouciant refractori-
ness” is not some transhistorical “all-too-human” flaw, but that point at
which the Real of the self meets the Real of Capital to undermine indi-
vidual life-projects.
Sandrien constantly attempts—unsuccessfully—to access antiretroviral
drugs for her patients from (corrupt) state-run provincial health services
and a US NGO named “Widereach,” loosely modelled on the “US
President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” (PEPFAR). At one point,
she is told that she will not receive antiretrovirals because Widereach’s
“emphasis will be on abstinence campaigns, rather than condom use …
These are the values of Middle America: we’re talking faith-based organi-
zations. Those are the ones now holding the money” (73). Indeed, when
PEPFAR was introduced in 2003, current Vice President of the United
States, Mike Pence, told congress: “Abstinence and marital faithfulness
before condom distribution are the cure for what ails the families of Africa
… It is important that we not just send them money, but that we send
them values that work” (cited in Frankel 2017). Yet even those PEPFAR
schemes that do not promote the Orwellian-sounding “A-B-C strategy
(Abstinence – Be Faithful – Condom Use)” have still tended to promote
its politico-economic counterpart, neoliberalism, by “systematically
ignor[ing] the role of structural inequality and the differential political
economy of risk, while focusing entirely on ‘high-risk’ individual behav-
iors” (Sastry and Dutta 2013: 25). PEPFAR measures the effects of HIV/
KEEPING IT REAL: LITERARY IMPERSONALITY UNDER NEOLIBERALISM 145
Valera, whose minimalist art plays on the shift that is underway in New York
from Fordism to post-Fordism, and whose father was initially an Italian
futurist (modelled on Marinetti) who later became a motorcycle and rub-
ber tyre magnate (modelled on Henry Ford). Towards the end of the
novel, the protagonist visits the now deceased magnate’s automobile fac-
tories in Milan, at the height of the anni di piombo and the ferment of
insurrection. The Flamethrowers is one of the most profound contempo-
rary experiments in literary impersonality precisely because it is so alert to
the manner in which what begins as an emancipatory depersonalization—
such as the futurist desire for an impersonal speed that can break with all
oppressive bonds of the past—can swiftly become incorporated into new,
more powerful capitalist processes of personification. As Eli Jelly-Schapiro
(2019) has observed, it also maps and connects the “three temporalities of
contemporary capital” and their specific modes of resistance.
Impersonality is integral to Kushner’s stylistic project. Consciously
opposed to the personal, self-expressive tendency of much contemporary
fiction, Kushner “wanted a narrator who could convey a tone that was like
thought and wasn’t at all like a spoken account or historical testimony or
a confession or a performance of any kind” (Hart and Rocca 2015: 201).
Inspired by the narratorial voice of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives,
which she describes as being “like water” (Barron 2013), the voice of the
first-person narrator in The Flamethrowers is, relatively speaking, “neu-
tral.” Kushner achieves this effect by associating the voice with the passive,
self-withdrawing nature of the nameless protagonist herself: just as “Reno”
is dominated by the speech of others, a speech on which she thrives, from
which she learns, so the guiding narratorial idiom subordinates itself to
multiple character idioms for long stretches, or—during passages of inte-
rior monologue—assumes a casual yet essay-like impersonality whose
complexity is at odds with the protagonist’s supposed naivety.17 This sty-
listic and characterological passivity becomes integral to one of the recur-
ring themes of the novel: the idea of waiting. Contrary to the patriarchal
men—whether avant-gardists, artists, or business men—who act accord-
ing to rigidly designed plans, “Reno” waits: “I, too, had it in me to wait.
To expect change to come from the outside, to concentrate on the task of
meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it”
(Kushner 2013: 88). There is a paradoxical proactivity at work in this wait-
ing; it is a “task” that requires what Alberto Toscano has called, in a dif-
ferent context, “non-dogmatic anticipation” (2010: 197; emphasis in
original). Thus, the impersonal style becomes integral to a larger project
148 D. HARTLEY
Notes
1. I am grateful to Stephen Shapiro for his comments on a previous version of
this article. All remaining errors are my own.
2. The translation is taken from Friedrich (1974: 8–9).
3. Jameson mistakenly transcribes Friedrich’s term as “Entpersonalisierung”
(2002: 131).
4. Cinzia Arruzza (2014) has put this point differently, criticising Wood’s
too-sharp distinction between the “logic” and “history” of capitalism: “as
soon as we accept [Wood’s] distinction between the logical structure of
capital and its historical dimensions, we can then accept the idea that the
extraction of surplus-value takes place within the framework of relations
between formally free and equal individuals without presupposing differ-
ences in juridical and political status. But we can do this only at a very high
level of abstraction—that is to say, at the level of the logical structure.
From the point of view of concrete history, things change radically.”
5. On the person as dispositif, see Esposito (2012).
6. I am here condensing ideas found, among others, in Jodi Dean’s (2016)
theory of interpellation as enclosure; James Scott’s (1998) work on the
state construction of “legibility and simplification;” and Jason W. Moore’s
(2015) notion of “abstract social nature.” It is also inspired by Marx’s writ-
ings on wood theft, on which see Hartley (2017).
7. For a clear historical example, see Chakrabarty (1989) on the jute mill
workers of Calcutta.
8. This argument is challenged by Dardot and Laval (2013: 262).
KEEPING IT REAL: LITERARY IMPERSONALITY UNDER NEOLIBERALISM 151
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CHAPTER 7
Mathias Nilges
M. Nilges (*)
Antigonish, NS, Canada
e-mail: mnilges@stfx.ca
still differ over the entry points they adopt to establish its essential quali-
ties—referring variously to a particular genealogy, a particular time period, a
particular case or set of cases or a particular policy field. Others deny that
neoliberalism has a quintessential form, insisting on its diverse origins, con-
tinuous reinvention, diverse local instantiations or variegated nature. (65)
The question with which this chapter begins therefore is from the outset
complicated by the first of the two terms, by the fact that neoliberalism
itself is by no means a stable concept. But, of course, concepts are never
entirely stable, and in particular for those with an investment in dialectics
this is a good thing, too. In a sense, this is what we may gain from Jessop’s
suggestion that the term neoliberalism might be best regarded as a
Kampfbegriff while maintaining a commitment to using the term neolib-
eralism in the context of cultural critique: like all concepts, the term neo-
liberalism moves through time, and it is defined not by a set of universal
principles but rather by its implication in a general historical process that
fuses economic, epistemological, social, and cultural form, and that
bestows upon neoliberalism a rich external and immanent history.
Consequently, what appears as a problem for those who wish to define the
concept universally, to make it measurable by bestowing upon the term a
fixity that stands opposed to the investment in historical mobility, geo-
graphical specificity, and conceptual polysemy that defines cultural cri-
tique, becomes in many ways a virtue for those who seek to understand
the relation between culture and neoliberalism in more detail. The term
neoliberalism, particularly inasmuch as it becomes of interest for cultural
critics when attached to the term culture, expresses a relation that we can
only conceive as a process, as fluid and historically changing, because we
are confronted from the outset with a relation—that between neoliberal-
ism and culture—that is grounded on a constitutive dynamism that stands
in relation to external, objective history and through which this history
can become legible.
Still, in spite of the fact that what appears elsewhere as a frustrating
problem can be turned into a productive contradiction and motor of his-
toricism with which cultural critique is not only able to deal but to which
it is particularly suited to speak as a discipline—and, one might add, this is
also one clear way in which cultural critique can make an important con-
tribution to the general discussion and analysis of neoliberalism—, the
particular ways in which we might bring together neoliberalism and cul-
ture for analytical and critical purposes are by no means plainly evident.
THE CULTURAL REGULATION OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM 159
Entire special issues of leading journals in the field have been dedicated to
this question. Recently, new formations has assembled an impressive lineup
of essays in a special double issue that develops the notion of “neoliberal
culture.” Yet, while the issue collects important essays that study the work
of particular authors, the effect of particular sets of policies and sociopo-
litical developments, and important paths in the history of the philosophi-
cal foundation of neoliberalism alongside the connection between
neoliberalism and feminism or neoliberalism and technological develop-
ments, there remains the sense that cultural critics, however brilliant their
ultimate contribution to a particular field or discussion may be, often seem
to be able to get away with skipping an analytical step. If there is a relation
between neoliberalism and culture, what exactly is it? How might we
understand the ways in which the two sides of the equation relate to each
other? Does neoliberalism change what culture is and does? Does culture
have anything to do with the development and functioning of neoliberal-
ism itself? How does one term influence or maybe even determine the
other? To what end? What are the basal connections that we assume when
we read the relation between a particular cultural artifact and neoliberal-
ism, what is their logic, what are they aimed at, and what are the particular
points of tension and the crises that trouble this relation? Of course, one
might object, these questions are at the same time impossibly broad and
reductively narrow. But, as with the term neoliberalism itself, this should
not be regarded as grounds for avoiding the questions but as the basis for
a methodology that does not aim to generate universal definitions but that
instead aims to understand how particular studies of the relation between
cultural objects and neoliberalism might be articulated in relation to a
larger totality that defines the link between neoliberalism and culture.
Such a framework, then, aims to make a contribution to the general map-
ping of a totality while conceiving of this totality as a process in itself that
must be concretely understood through the particular. To do so, this
chapter will focus on the connecting space in between the two concepts—
culture and neoliberalism—and understand it, in Adornian terms, as the
restless connection that generates the history of the process that elsewhere
emerges as the problem of the seemingly unreconcilable split between
chaos and catholicon. After all, as Adorno reminds us, “totality produces
and reproduces itself precisely from the interconnection of the antagonis-
tic interests of its members” (Minima Moralia 17).
Much work has been done to show how cultural artifacts make legible
central aspects and logical as well as structural principles of neoliberalism.
160 M. NILGES
Yet, while undoubtedly important, such work does not provide us with a
differentiated account of what culture is and does in neoliberalism. Aside
from scholarship that examines how culture may aid us in the process of
better understanding neoliberalism, allowing us to see both its structural
intricacies and its contradictions, work that does engage with the question
of the ontology and function of culture under neoliberalism ordinarily
focuses on the ways in which culture has become instrumentalized by or
fully subsumed under neoliberalism. We encounter such notions of cul-
ture’s instrumental role in neoliberalism in two main versions: positive
instrumentalization (from the perspective of neoliberalism) and negative
instrumentalization (from the perspective of cultural criticism that stands
opposed to neoliberalism). Over the course of the past 10–15 years, a new
field of heterodox economics has emerged that focuses on the cultural
economy. Gilberto Gil’s introductory essay to one of the key textbooks in
this new field, Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar’s The Cultural
Economy, can help illustrate the first of these two positions on culture’s
instrumentalization in neoliberalism. The book gathers a wide range of
essays and statistical information in order to illustrate the clear links
between culture and the economy in ways that are absolutely central to the
spread of neoliberalism and its associated politics and ideology. Of course,
since the term neoliberalism is largely only popular with those who oppose
or wish to critique it, it never finds its way into the book. Culture, Gil
writes in his introduction, assumes a key role in the contemporary moment,
“both as a symbolic system and as an economic activity” (x). In fact, he
argues, “the role of culture at the center of our development strategies”
ought to be considered “one of the most captivating debates of our time”
(x). The debate about culture is so important, he explains, because, as the
information collected in the book illustrates, “culture produces wealth like
never before. We have celebrated and pragmatically used such information
to broaden the space for culture in our development models” (x). As a
consequence, Gil argues that it is of central importance to use the data and
information gathered in the book to ensure that “governments and societ-
ies…believe that their economies depend on a policy for cultural diversity”
(x). Of course, as is well known by now, the political gesture toward diver-
sity clearly stands in the service of diversifying a given market’s cultural
portfolio, as becomes evident when Gil proceeds to address inequities:
“the same figures show that we are producing not just considerable wealth
but considerable inequities as well. They show how poorly this cultural
wealth is distributed” (x). But such inequality is in Gil’s estimation neither
THE CULTURAL REGULATION OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM 161
a result of nor endemic to the system itself. Rather, it is evidence of the fact
that the system has not yet been fully implemented and become fully
hegemonic in all spaces. The answer—and it is in this context that culture
once again assumes an important role—is additional development, which
must to no small part be understood as cultural development. “Perhaps
because twentieth century attitudes die hard,” Gil reasons,
the contours of ‘society’ blur, its organic solidarity disperses. Out of its shad-
ows emerges a more radically individuated sense of personhood, of a subject
built up of traits set against a universal backdrop of likeness and difference.
In its place, to subvert the old Durkheimean telos, arise collectivities erected
on a form of mechanical solidarity in which me is generalized into we. (15)
Gil’s outline of the relation between culture and the economy is, in other
words, a fully neoliberal account of culture in which culture is fully reduced
to economic concerns and market relations—culture becomes a set of eco-
nomic assets as much as it provides an infrastructure through which eco-
nomic development is able to work. But as we can already at this point
begin to see, while the overall picture of the relation between culture and
the economy that Gil aims to present in positive terms is one of full instru-
mentalization and integration into the economy, some rifts and contradic-
tions in this relation between culture and the economy become visible.
But before turning to the contradictions that characterize this relation, it
is necessary to examine the ways in which the notion of culture’s instru-
mental role in neoliberalism emerges out of critiques of neoliberalism,
providing us with a productive counterpoint to cultural economy as out-
lined by Gil.
One of the most widely accepted characteristics of neoliberalism is the
dramatic increase in economic inequality that, as a number of critics have
shown, is a fundamental component of the spread of neoliberal capitalism.
In his foreword to the expanded and updated 2006 edition of his book
The Limits to Capital, David Harvey advances one version of this
argument:
Power is one of the key aspects of the cultural economy approach. However,
in contemporary literature, the understanding of power is increasingly asso-
ciated with discursive approaches and especially the work of Michel Foucault
and followers such as [Niklas] Rose. Such work tends to stress two particular
aspects of economic formations. One aspect is the narration of the economy
as found in features of diverse as stories of corporate power and advertising
scripts, where the narration works as a cultural template of what it takes to
become powerful, and, in turn, is an act of enrolment of allies and warning
to competitors…The other is the formation of ‘economic subjects’ who
have been configured to perform in, and understand, particular modes of
discipline, subjects that are both subjects to particular discourses and cre-
ators of them…The final mode of contemporary cultural thinking on the
economy consists of symptomatic readings of the overall economic trajecto-
ries of Western societies. (xxi)
THE CULTURAL REGULATION OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM 167
But the problem with such an account of culture is not only that it limits
our understanding of what culture is and does. It also at times comes dan-
gerously close to replicating central aspects of the neoliberal turn. For
instance, the focus on discourse and narration as well as the focus on the
linguistic structure of the economy that has become characteristic of
recent Italian theory (including the work of Franco Berardi, Paulo Virno,
and Maurizio Lazzarato), in spite of its very commitments, runs the risk of
failing to historicize and foreground the connection between neoliberal-
ism and postmodernism and post-structuralism. Roswitha Scholz exam-
ines this link in some detail in her analysis of neoliberalism as centrally
defined by what she calls “actually existing deconstruction.”2
What is important for our purposes here, however, is that the
Foucauldian tradition itself contains a line of argumentation that can pro-
vide us with a different pathway for analyzing neoliberalism and its rela-
tion to culture. One of the key assertions regarding neoliberalism that
Foucault unfolds in his now famous examination of German Ordoliberalism
is that neoliberalism is not based on a notion of the free market that defines
freedom as the complete absence of and freedom from regulation. Gilbert
addresses precisely this point in his essay, emphasizing that, on the
Foucauldian account, “neoliberalism, from the moment of its inception,
advocates a programme of deliberate intervention by government in order
to encourage particular types of entrepreneurial, competitive and com-
mercial behavior in its citizens” (9). “This,” Gilbert continues, “is the key
difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism: the former pre-
sumes that, left to their own devices, humans will naturally tend to behave
in the desired fashion” (9). In the essays by Comaroff and Comaroff and
Harvey referenced above we find a similar conviction that the analysis of
neoliberalism must involve an analysis of its structures of regulation. This
regulation, therefore, requires not a general analysis of discursive struc-
tures but rather more precise attention to the ways in which the neoliberal
economy is dialectically linked to a multi-faceted process of social
regulation that can neither, as is often done in discussions of regulation
and discipline, be fully explained by a focus on the state, nor can it neglect
the vital work of culture that is one of the central mediating planes via
which society and the economy are related. The tendency to construe
neoliberal failures as cultural failures is furthermore an index of the fact
that neoliberalism does not merely instrumentalize and fully subsume cul-
ture. Neoliberalism cannot simply take hold of culture and wield it as a
tool in the context of neoliberal development. So-called cultural failures
168 M. NILGES
point as much to the despicable attempt to reduce the violence and ineq-
uities of neoliberalism to matters of culture and individual responsibility as
to the fact that neoliberalism’s reliance upon culture is rife with contradic-
tions that are a part of neoliberal culture just like instances in which cul-
ture appears fully congruent with neoliberalism. Maurizio Lazzarato, for
instance, suggests with regard to the process of individualization upon
which neoliberalism relies that it
now involves “morality” by mobilizing the “self,” since the debtor’s future
actions must be molded, his uncertain future established in advance. Future
behaviors and conduct must be structured and controlled. Within neoliber-
alism, what the institution judges, appraises, and measures is, in the end, the
style of life of individuals, who must be made to conform to the conception
of the “good life” of the economy. (132)
In this context, recent works such as Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism are
particularly important as they provide us with an account of neoliberal-
ism’s cultural regulation, of the ways, that is, in which culture assumes an
important role in creating those forms of thought and morality via which
neoliberalism aims to regulate itself as well as of some of neoliberalism’s
central contradictions, which include importantly instances in which cul-
tural regulation fails and generates epistemological and cultural crises.
The work of a school of heterodox economics that focuses on the his-
tory and forms of capitalist regulations is helpful here in order to further
develop the notion that neoliberalism requires particular social structures
in order to regulate its processes of production and accumulation for pur-
poses of cultural critique. A central text in what has come to be described
as the “regulation approach” is Michael Aglietta’s A Theory of Capitalist
Regulation. The advantage of the focus on regulation, according to
Aglietta, lies in the ability to
isolate the determinant relationships that are reproduced in and through the
social transformation, the changing forms in which they are reproduced,
and the reasons why this reproduction is accompanied by ruptures at differ-
ent points of the social system. To speak of the regulation of a mode of
production is to try to formulate in general laws the way in which the deter-
minant structure of society is reproduced. (13)
[S]igns fall under the domination of finance when the financial function (the
accumulation of value through semiotic circulation) cancels the instinctual
side of enunciation, so what is enunciated may be compatible with digital-
financial formats. The production of meaning and of value takes the form of
parthenogenesis: signs produce signs without any longer passing through
the flesh. Monetary value produces more monetary value without being first
realized through the material production of goods. (17–18)
In Volume II of his Aesthetics, Lukács sets out to map the basal relation-
ships between art and capitalism in a way that seeks to return to the start-
ing point of such an analysis to the fundamental structures of capitalism.3
What this means is that any discussion of the relation between capitalism,
society, and the artwork that begins its inquiry on the level of circulation,
production, distribution, and exchange includes at its heart an erroneous
operation insofar as it begins too late, at a point at which a profound act
of mystification has already occurred. By implicitly accepting this moment
of mystification—and this is the central concern that underwrites Lukács
inquiry—we lose sight of capitalism’s basal structures: the value form and
the fetishistic inversion underlying the commodity form and commodity
thought via which capital constitutively binds itself to society. In his
attempt to generate an analysis of the relation between art and capital that
begins at this fundamental level, Lukács trades in the notion of auton-
omy—for a term that is aimed at understanding and ultimately undoing
the very process of reification and returning it to its underlying relation-
ships: de-fetishization. For Lukács, de-fetishization describes the process
of returning reified thought to that which underlies it: forms of social
relationships. Such a focus on what Lukács calls “the de-fetishizing mis-
sion of the artwork” (234) aims to understand not the relationship
between art and capital’s secondary level (distribution, production, circu-
lation, etc.), but it instead focuses on art’s particular function in the devel-
opment of the relation between the value form and the historically specific
social forms via which it establishes itself (and which it in turn establishes).
What is at stake for Lukács in art’s de-fetishizing mission is nothing less
than the undoing of the forms of reification upon which capital and its
value form grounds itself, which in turn amounts to nothing less than the
“demand to reclaim the rights of man” (238).
In a historical period in which the relation between capital and its social
dimension, the relation to which Lukács seeks to return our attention,
takes concrete form to no small extent in the terrain of culture. The dis-
tinction Lukács draws is that between the plane of production, circulation,
and exchange on the one hand and the underlying level of the value form
and the fetish which establishes commodity thought at its very heart on
the other, which is to say that the latter level establishes the epistemologi-
cal foundations upon which capital mounts its structures only after it has
universalized commodity thought and naturalized its logic via an initial
process of fetishistic inversion. Such an approach understands the process
of cultural regulation as at every point bound up with the complex history
THE CULTURAL REGULATION OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM 173
Notes
1. See Adolph Reed Jr.’s “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural
Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, And Why,” nonsite 9, February
2013.
2. See Roswitha Scholz’s “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender Without
the Body” in Neil Larsen et al. (eds.) Marxism and the Critique of Value
(Chicago and Edmonton: MCM Prime, 2014). 123–142.
3. Note: the translations of the following sections of Lukács’s Aesthetics are my
own, since the work has as yet not been translated into English.
174 M. NILGES
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2006. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London/New
York: Verso.
Aglietta, Michael. 2001. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience.
London/New York: Verso.
Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift, eds. 2004. The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Anheier, Helmut, and Yudhishthir Raj Isar, eds. 2008. The Cultural Economy.
London: Sage.
Brenner, Robert, and Mark Glick. 1991. The Regulation Approach: Theory and
History. New Left Review 188: 45–119.
Duménil, Gérard, and Dominique Lévy. 2013. The Crisis of Neoliberalism.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2013. What Kind of Thing Is Neoliberalism? New Formations
80–81: 7–22.
Goldstein, Daniel M. 2012. Decolonising ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’. Social
Anthropology 20 (3): 304–309.
Harvey, David. 2006. Limits to Capital. London/New York: Verso.
Jean, Comaroff, and John L. Comaroff, eds. 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the
Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jessop, Bob. 2013. Putting Neoliberalism in Its Time and Place: A Response to
the Debate. Social Anthropology 21 (1): 65–74.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2011. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the
Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Lukács, Georg. 1972. Aesthetik II. Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. Model Minorities and the Minority Model—The
Neoliberal Novel. In The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed.
Leonardo Cassuto, 1016–1030. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CHAPTER 8
Richard Godden
I
Jayne Anne Phillips remains preoccupied with industrial accidents and the
damaged bodies that they produce. The return and reception of dead
workers, over the span of her writing, may be understood to index the
receding role of the factory and of productive labour within the US econ-
omy during the last third of the twentieth century and beyond, and
accordingly be read as expressive of what Robert Brenner casts as the
attendant stagnation of that economy. Two instances: in Machine Dreams
(1984), Billy Hampson (aged 19) dies problematically in Vietnam, prob-
lematically because, missing in action and the moment of his presumed
death unrecorded, his body does not come back. Rather, care of his sister
Danner’s oral history, Billy is retained, recast in gold. Drafted by lottery in
R. Godden (*)
Irvine, CA, USA
e-mail: rgodden@uci.edu
the December of 1969, Billy goes to Fort Knox in 1970 for training;
Danner notes, “Fort Knox is where they keep the gold and train the kids.”
She extends the proximity of the nation’s gold reserves and military prepa-
ration towards a symbiosis figured through the body of her brother:
[At] the entrance to Fort Knox… there is a tank on a broad stone platform
and a sign that says WELCOME TO THE HOME OF ARMOR. The
famous gold is kept in the Gold Vault, a bunker type building…. I think
about those gold bars sitting inside a well-fortified silence, row after row of
gold bars. Billy was golden in the Summer; he got that kind of tan. (Phillips
2009: 299)
he took to basic so hard the brass kept him on at Fort Knox for seven
months, assisting drill instructors. Fort Knox billed itself as the ‘Home of
Armor,’ but Leavitt found that he had no interest in driving tanks…. He’d
come in fit but trained compulsively… pushed himself to attain firsts in
every drill. He saw it as protection, survival, his own invulnerability: if he
attained perfect form, he increased his options. (8–9)
Elements from Billy’s experience remain, but their inflection differs: for
“gold” read “brass,” an inescapable play on debased metal in the context
of Knox and the missing gold; the “sign” (299) too has been recast,
“billed … as” infers money owed’, while Leavitt’s “perfect form,” though
falling short of “invulnerability,” substitutes for the precious the perfected
body of military labour. The substitution veils a further substitution, even
as Leavitt’s training by day veils an alternative training by night:
Nights he lay in an upper bunk, silently practicing fingerings, his trumpet fit
to his mouth, tonguing the familiar mouthpiece while men snored around
him. (9)
Perfection of “tongue,” “mouth” and agitated air enable him, during his
seven months at Fort Knox, to play trumpet at Onslow’s Club, while
Onslow, “coaxed an unbelievably fluid sound from the best tuned
Steineway grand in Louisville” (9). Mastery of vibration in the service of
musical fluidity ensures that, shipped to Japan and playing swing at the
Match Box Officers’ Club (Tokyo), his “tonal familiarity” and “auditory
sophistication” (20), catching the ear of the relevant officer, effect his
transfer to Language Immersion Seoul, a unit of sixty enlisted men tasked
with learning “phonetic Korean” (12). “Meaning” for the trainees “didn’t
matter; the real content of words was the sound itself” (13). His training
“only deepened Leavitt’s belief in language and sound as the only tincture
of reality” (13). “Tincture” joins “immersion” in linking auditory vibration
to a lexicon of liquidity: “tincture,” the ‘supposed[ly] essential principle
178 R. GODDEN
Witness his response to “skat” (“sound, not real words” [180]). Given a
radio to quieten him during preparations for the flood,
Termite turns the knobs loud, and louder to listen for the sounds behind.
Clicks and beeps are deep inside the wires, stops and ticks that snap. He
wants the hum of air between, the urgent pause and fall inside the trills and
crashing. (212)
(according to Tompkins, with him at No Gun Ri, “no Jew has hair like
that” [14]). I can find no reason for Leavitt’s Semitic designation, beyond
the name. Leavitt, of the tribe of Levi, whose members were guards and
musicians, with particular responsibility for the protection and mainte-
nance of the Temple. Further, to listen as Termite listens, hearing the
“wide sound” in the name, is to find “levy” in “Levi,” a word whose sev-
eral meanings ratify the Hebraic dimensions of “Leavitt.” ‘To levy’ may be
to enlist a body of men for war. The verb may also refer to the imposition
of a toll or tax, or to the collection of a debt. A combination of monetary
and military inflections within ‘levy’ speaks to similar links latent in “ter-
mite”: “term,” among its many versions of spatial and temporal limit, may
refer to “a set time for the payment of money due,” or to the “stipulations
and conditions” relating to that “charge or price.” “Mite,” a ‘wee thing’
(perhaps a ‘tiny child’) also amounts to the smallest of coins (in the Gospel
of Mark [xii, 43], two mites are said to make a farthing). But why enforce
harsh terms on the payment of a mite, and how might such a levy relate,
care of the sons of Levi, to the Temple, resting place of the ark of the cov-
enant? My questions verge on the silly, deriving as they do from puns
plumbed for etymology, a doubling of tricky grounds for any reading. In
my defence, I would point out that Nonie and Charlie think of Termite as
a “[h]igh interest loan… very high,” one by implication unlikely to be
repaid (153), while Leavitt’s training posits a twofold substitution for the
“famous gold” missing from US reserves (or Knox as Temple). In place of
the metallic standard, Leavitt, the guardian of that place, sets first the “pro-
tection” of his own “perfect form” as military labour; second, his manage-
ment of “sound” as “the only tincture of reality.” Since the novel renders
sound and vibration synonymous with liquidity (care of Leavitt’s extension
through Termite), I would argue that Leavitt’s second substitution encrypts
credit as the new precious and substitute for the gold-backed dollar.
The work of the economic historian Radhika Desai offers an account of
why Phillips might associate Leavitt’s long death in defence of credit with
Korea. Desai argues that “the increase in US military expenditure set the
post war pattern for liquidity provision through balance of payments defi-
cits” (Desai 2013: 95). Effectively since 1950 and Korea, the United
States has borrowed massively from the world’s credit nations, in order,
via a permanent militarization of its global policies, to protect the status of
the dollar as a reserve currency, and to foster accompanying levels of
dollar-denominated liquidity. For Desai, the US case for globalization,
and its own hegemonic status therein, turns on “liquidity provision
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, LARK AND TERMITE: MONETIZED WAR… 181
through deficits” (106): tracking “the crisis ridden career of the dollar as
the world’s money,” she notes that, particularly after the closing of the
gold window in 1971,
… [the dollar’s] ability to continue in this role was regularly cast into doubt.
As attempts to sustain the dollar’s world role, globalization and empire
rested on vast increases in dollar-denominated world financial flows. They
were the main element of what came to be known as financialization. It
enabled capital to flow into the United States. It flowed into the US stock
market under globalization as Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan led
illusions about the US’s ‘new economy’ and ‘hidden productive miracle.’
And it flowed into the swelling market for US mortgage backed securities as
Greenspan and his successor Ben Bernanke fed new illusions about the tra-
jectory of house prices, …. [it] justified capital flows into the United States
under Bush Jr’s empire. The financial crisis in which the latter culminated
leaves the US administration no viable option to stabilize the dollar’s world
money role…. While it is still difficult to tell how long the dollar’s role will
linger… its fate is now governed by forces its makers cannot control. (4)
II
Towards the close of Lark and Termite, Elise, friend to Noreen (Lark’s
stepmother), and Coffee-Stop owner in the small and shrinking West
Virginia town of Winfield, tells Lark, “People forget that a soldier’s death
goes on for years – a generation really” (Phillips 2009: 233). Given the
182 R. GODDEN
reach of Phillips’ novel from 1950 (the date of Leavitt’s death and
Termite’s birth) through 1959 (the date of Termite’s sections) to 2009
(the novel’s date of publication), Elise underestimates. Two of the text’s
epigraphs usefully annotate the bridge between 1950 and 1959: where
“victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools” (The Sound and the Fury),
“han’guk sarami which means ‘Korean,’” will readily transpose to “gook”
(Dvorchak 2003) even as Korea will give way to Vietnam. The year 1959
saw the first deaths among America’s military advisors, sent to aid the
French in their colonial war against Vietnam. As Vietnam extended to
Laos and Cambodia, in America’s thirty-year war against S.E. Asia, so US
indebtedness and consequent credit-need deepened; deepening yet fur-
ther care of the Iraq wars, Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’: hence
2009. Set on such a time-line, Leavitt dies for almost half a century, in the
cause of credit provision.
The suggestion that a dead GI carries a credit-rating may seem inap-
propriate in the context of wars fought for “Democracy,” “Freedom,” or
to expunge sources of global terror, but Randy Martin’s account of US
engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan provides terms that render such cost-
ings reasonable. Martin argues that, with the great and organizing antago-
nisms of the Cold War gone, the American state, subject to a financial
turn, designed and fought wars in keeping with that turn. For Desai the
turn proves immanent in America’s Korean adventure. Just as the deriva-
tive stands as the “apotheosis” of a new financial register, so “derivative
wars” grant risk, the derivative’s raw material, a global reach, doing so (in
the last instance) to ensure “the freedom of global capital to circulate in
financial markets” (Martin 2007: 97). Before engaging with Martin’s
argument, I had best establish the particular nature of that object—global
capital—for which new wars were fought.
Since 1971, world money as a circulating medium has been dollar
denominated. Severed from its golden standard, and therefore no longer
a “commodity money” (or money founded on a metallic “good”), the
dollar as the world’s currency amounts to “fiat money,” or more properly,
given America’s position as the world’s greatest debtor, to “credit money.”
Fiat money (from the Latin, “fiat:” “let it be done”) proves only as good
as the issuer’s promise to pay: Costas Lapavitsas notes, “a promise to pay
is capable of functioning as money ultimately because of trust in the ability
of the issuer to fulfil the promise made” (Lapavitsas 2003: 85). Under the
gold standard, and prior to 1971, fiat monies, typically issued as credit by
banks, in proportion to their holdings, were finally backed by a central
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, LARK AND TERMITE: MONETIZED WAR… 183
Yet whisper or no, it remained the case that “while soldiers fought,
people consumed” (Bacevich 1984: 62–63), and that accordingly the cost
of militarism and consequent deficits stayed off the political agenda, par-
ticularly since, house prices rose and capital-intensive warfare appeared to
return few American bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless,
whatever proves structurally sound, no matter how obscure—here, the
conjunction of the apparently separate financial and military sectors (given
that such a conjunction is neither momentary no accidental)—cannot
remain unsounded, albeit at “the very edge of semantic availability”
(Williams 1977: 35). Addressing the semantics of “vague and undevel-
oped experiences,” Volosinov suggests that such “ideological scraps,” or
“idle and accidental words that flash across our minds,” amount to “nov-
els without heroes, performances without audiences.” At a loss for text or
theatre, Volosinov’s “hero,” though “difficult to detect” (Volosinov 1973:
90), amounts to a figure for the unthinkable as it becomes the under-
thought or disavowed (that which is … and is not). Might not such a fig-
ure, or figurative amalgam—the G. I. in the financier’s throat, the financier
in the G. I.’s wound—be particularly attractive, wandering among whis-
pers, to a novelist attuned to where unreturned bodies lie?
With the unthinkable historically specified as a mode of disavowal capa-
ble of producing shared ambivalence and accompanying semantic division,
Phillips may be read as attending to what we all might hear, had we but
inclination and ear. I am reminded of what I take to be the fourth and
unused epigraph to Lark and Termite, a passage from Middlemarch, “If
we had a keen vision and feeling for ordinary human life, it would be like
hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of
that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (Eliot 1872: 351).
Termite, all but silent, hears the grass cut and listens to the low-slung-gut
of ginger cat (both, frequently and at improbable distance). His favoured
place of audition—a tunnel—grants him access to the “roar” of passing
freight trains, a “roar” through which he attends, as though sonically, to
the “roar” of friendly fire as it kills Leavitt, sheltering in the tunnel at No
Gun Ri among his South Korean charges. The vibration is, therefore,
complex: simultaneously, an index of military action (1950) and mercan-
tile transfer (1959), a “tunnel inside the tunnel” (111). But before pursu-
ing Termite’s ear for the layered “roar,” I had best return to the military,
and more particularly to the alliance between the military and financial
sectors.
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, LARK AND TERMITE: MONETIZED WAR… 187
III
Though size matters in military matters, it matters less than the manner in
which assets are deployed. For Martin, militarized liquidity—in a time of
deficit and its instruments—requires the derivative war. Let us suppose
that the Iraq wars were fought (and are being fought) not for oil or influ-
ence, but as investments in terror. Consider the suicide bomber, one for
whom, by way of leverage, minimum investment results in maximum yield
(Martin 2007: 61). US occupiers exist at risk of such terror; theirs is a
labour-intensive embrace of risk, one that effectively extends risk as a
“tradable entity” (Martin 2007: 60). By the deep logic of the derivative
war., US forces must hope never to find the weapon of mass destruction;
never to terminate the last terrorist; never to complete national recon-
structions, since any and all the above would curtail risk.
Fighting terror unleashes it elsewhere, just as a well-placed put or call
(to sell or buy) would send ripples of price volatility through the market.
Drops in price can be hedged against, turned into derivatives, and sold for
gain. The terror war converts both wins and losses into self-perpetuating
gain (Martin 2007: 98).
To extend Martin’s link between financial instrument and military prac-
tice: for Karen Ho, ethnographer of Wall Street, “investment banks’ par-
ticular approach to risk involves not so much ‘managing’ it, as leveraging
and spreading it in hopes of … heightening rewards” (Ho 2009: 259). In
banking, therefore, much as in military strategy, “risk rules… [and] risk
must not be allowed to slip away.” Ergo, “the war without end [or object]
is its own triumph” (Martin 2007: 98). Meanwhile and elsewhere, US
deficits during the 1980s and 1990s, translated into securitized debt-
packages, for sale and resale throughout the financial system, spread risk
globally. Risk fostered the rise and rise of derivative instruments, designed
to profit from uncertainty deemed calculable. Meanwhile, a glut in world
productive capacity, initiated during the 1970s, but resulting in long-term
stagnancy for the manufacturing sector, prompted state-aided capital flight
into finance. About 95% of all regulatory changes during the 1990s
(according to the UN World Investment Report) sought to liberalize capi-
tal controls thereby promoting transnational monetary flows; while a
threefold increase in American bilateral investment treaties, during the
first half of that decade, was driven by a determination to remove “barri-
ers” to US outward investment (the investment, I would stress, of deficit
funds) (Retort 2005: 72–73). Much capital fled into US Treasury Bonds,
188 R. GODDEN
Master of such sleights of mind over hand, high frequency traders use-
fully instance the atopic matter of which Marx speaks, and in which they
trade. Witness that trade: a broker reveals her customer’s desire to sell a
stock on the Chicago Exchange. Financial analysts, elsewhere, care of
automated access to that wish and its price, and using the same routers
(Security Information Processors [SIPs]) identify a buyer and make the
trade. The put and the call, as signals of interest, will cause shifts in the
price of that stock before the deal is done. And into the price differential,
the high-speed trader slips his smart order router, a technological fix faster
than a SIP, enabling him to recognize the seller, find the buyer, and pro-
pose the trade in nanoseconds. But the fast broker buys at the lower price
(the price first offered) and sells at the higher (the price raised by market
interest): the difference, invisible to SIP, is his. Michael Lewis published
his account of high frequency trading and the technologies that enabled it
in 2014. By 2009 faster, because straighter, cables were being quietly laid.
As early as 2008, Verizon was known (by some) to control the swiftest
electronic route between Chicago and New York—a “golden route” that
permitted exploitation of price discrepancies between those Exchanges.
Lewis notes, “given the speed of light in fibre, it should theoretically be
possible for a trader to be in two places at once” (Lewis 2015: 9). His
point catches the best hope of every merchant: what trader in titles (be
they attached to C or M) would not wish to emulate the faster trader—he
who has a buyer in hand, to whom, having bought cheap, he will sell dear,
and who goes nowhere to do so, and spends no time doing it. Such a one
holds time and space compacted in his hand: his medium—empty hypos-
tatized and atopic (or unable to extend itself through space and time)—
would be the purest liquidity; his means, apparent telepathy.
IV
“Telepathy,” from the Greek ‘tele’ (‘far off’) and ‘pathy’ (‘suffering; feel-
ing’): ‘felt communication across distance.’ The telepath knows what he
cannot know, in a manner that links places and times whose linkage appears
beyond reason: for him there becomes here, and then now. In 1959
Termite knows, or better senses Leavitt’s death in 1950, his sensitivity set-
ting Korea within West Virginia as “a tunnel inside the tunnel,” which
tunnel proves to be the site of his own birth through his father’s wound.
As Leavitt dies, so natal and fatal liquids, “the salt and the blood” (220),
190 R. GODDEN
yield Termite as their “tincture”: “It’s now, he can feel it. His baby is born,
deep inside him where the pain throbs. It’s all wrong and it’s true, his legs
are dead and his guts are torn apart but his spine opens up like a star. He
can feel Lola split apart, the baby fighting her, tearing his way” (220).
Prior to his complex death, and running with a disabled Korean child,
precursive of Termite, into the tunnel at No Gun Ri, Leavitt feels that
boy’s “small body go rigid, his apprehension heightened to a nearly audi-
ble pitch; Leavitt imagines the clear high tone of a tuning fork struck in
midair…. So sharply true that nothing else exists” (29). The Korean child
hears the planes whose fire will tear Leavitt’s body before the planes can be
heard, the manner of his audition vibrates with an earlier text: Gatsby’s
kiss, recalled by Carraway, involved the briefest of hesitations, “so he
waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been
struck upon a star” (Fitzgerald 2004: 73). Leavitt’s spine, ‘kissed’ by artil-
lery fire, will “open… like a star” (220), though Phillips’ “turning fork”
emits its “pitch” without the preposition “upon,” as though agitated air
alone were sufficient source for an air-strike, materializing “ton[ally]”
from between, without recourse to “struck.” Such air, holding “the roar
that lies on the other side of silence” and Termite’s birth cry, operates
obstetrically. Leavitt’s unit, young, confused, unaware of their officer’s
presence in the tunnel, but convinced as to the presence of North Korean
infiltrators among the refugees they have led south and who are sheltering
there, open fire, re-enacting the historical massacre at No Gun Ri (for
which no evidential bodies have been recovered). Search light and artillery
fire, the overt means to massacre and birth, impact acoustically. Leavitt,
who “can’t see but… can hear acutely” hears, “the click of the search
lights come on. Impossible, but he hears it” (219–20); he hears,
in slow deliberate measure, the sound of the machine guns turning on their
pivots. He hears, surrounding them on all sides, a deepening pressure an
approaching density, like the roar of a vast train so wide and heavy it can fall
forever, a barrage of fire to scream over and through them. (220)
(Termite in the flood [July 28, 1959]; Leavitt in the tunnel [July 28th,
1950]) reflects telepathic communication both at the level of episode
(1959 contains 1950, even as West Virginia contains Korea) and at a pho-
nemic level (‘r’ contains ‘t,’ even as “rain” contains “train,” allowing
“roar” to retain “pour”). An implicitly metaphoric relation between sound
and liquid, latent within such phonemic mobility, requires that phonemes,
as indices of their sources (sound and liquid) be seen relationally: we are
invited to see, the better to hear, the ‘r’ in the ‘t’ and the ‘t’ in the ‘r,’ an
impossibility that proposes a conceptual need (Ricoeur 1978: 148–149).
Strictly speaking, neither sound nor liquid results as a semantic outcome;
rather, we hear, in the tension of their relation, a “between” caught as
vibrancy by the phrases, “deepening pressure” and “approaching density.”
So annotated the vibration projects from its immanent matter, Termite as
an apt register for that matter: a body born less to Lola and Leavitt—the
parents who are surrogates—and more properly speaking, of a contradic-
tion deep within the “roar.” Precisely to describe the generative contradic-
tion, I must return to earlier remarks about pain as that which lies
unacknowledged at the core of the financial turn, pain being the chief
constituent and product of the “roar” in question.
In her study of the body in pain, Elaine Scarry seeks to describe how
pain as “a structure of unmaking” may yet possess “a frightening capacity
of substantiation” (Scarry 20, 126). She observes that, “[w]hen an
American is blown apart in the field… the unmaking of an American sol-
dier has just occurred… as well as the unmaking of a civilization [or state]
as it resides in that body” (Scarry 1985: 122). Nonetheless, the hurt of the
wounded or dying GI serves to anchor the idea of the regime in the sub-
stance of the pain suffered on its behalf, thereby, in an act of transubstan-
tiation, giving body to the disembodied purposes of the state. It is my
contention that the wound, as detailed and transgenerationally extended
in Lark and Termite, substantiates not ‘a world made safe for democracy,’
but ‘a world made unsafe for derivatives wars,’ whose purpose, after
Clausewitz, is “neither to conquer the enemy country nor to destroy its
army, but simply to cause general damage” (Clausewitz 1974: 93): which
damage ensures maximization of risk and volatility, those mediums
through which financial instruments extract profit from price, thereby
granting credence to the deficit funded liquidities from which the New
American century took brief shape—and all latently readable in single
vibrant syllables.
192 R. GODDEN
Put abstractly, pain is both the labour power and the ontological sub-
stance of military work, a substance (or “precious”) necessary to the illu-
sory value of dollar-denominated global flows. Hence Leavitt’s long pain
generates as its correlative the waters surrounding Termite’s disabled sen-
sorium. It may be objected that I replace real bodies (albeit in a fiction)
with abstractions. However, I seek not to displace but to incorporate indi-
cating how abstract ideas (in the shape of an historical contradiction) con-
dition existential bodies, rendering those bodies concrete through the
lived abstractions in question. So, Leavitt’s valueless labour gives chimeri-
cal value to the dollar as world money whose flows, divorced from any-
thing but price (and so from that labour which generates surplus value),
represent “a form of appearance”4 figured by Termite’s hypostatized,
impaired, and seemingly empty head.
Notes
1. See Harvey, Companion to Marx’s Capital, Vol. 2, 212–215.
2. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, particularly Ch.9, “The Permanent
Arms Economy and Late Capitalism,” 274–309; Peter Custers, Questioning
Globalized Militarism particularly, Epilogue, Part 2, “The War of Aggression
in Iraq and The U. S. Business Cycle,” 285–305; Paul Koistinen, State of
War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1945–2011, particularly,
Ch.8, “National Security and the Economy,” 189–228. As Koistinen puts it,
“For decades, the armed services have drained America’s human and physi-
cal resources without any positive return and have had a destructive effect
on the nation’s economic, political and social system. Until DOD
[Department of Defence] spending is brought under control, the United
States has no prospect of regeneration and faces continuing economic
decline” (217).
3. Dsai argues that a Hegemonic Stability Thesis (HST) grew up in the US,
specifically to counter the declinism of the 70s, after the nominally golden
age of the 50s and 60s. HST was both prospective and performative, a veil
obscuring US attempts to undergird the dollar’s world role, attempts,
mainly “dangerous” and “malign,” to “postpone the inevitable” decline
(125). “[The] Hegemonic Stability Thesis could not obscure imperialism:
only [by] dignifying it as ‘hegemony,’ could it write combined development
out of the geopolitical economy’s script… [thereby] render[ing] other
states’ economic roles ineffective, unnecessary or undesirable” (123). For
the falling towers as felled by military counter-attack see Retort, 98–99, and
more generally, Ch.3, “Permanent War,” 78–107.
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, LARK AND TERMITE: MONETIZED WAR… 193
4. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 682. Marx notes that, “the general and neces-
sary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of appear-
ance” (433). Yet it remains the case that, for Marx, capital’s “general and
necessary tendencies” (or “inner nature”), though “not perceptible to the
senses,” remain immanent in its “forms of appearance.” The “form of
appearance” therefore contains what it veils, proving as double-bodied as its
very many manifestations —commodity, price, wage.
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194 R. GODDEN
Amy Rushton
A. Rushton (*)
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: amy.rushton@ntu.ac.uk
ual and the attainment of personal ‘success’ (what Oliver James refers to as
neoliberalism’s characteristic of “selfish capitalism”: 2007, 2008). Rather
than distressing, I read both ALL and AMPS as narratives that disconcert
neoliberal values and assert their discontent with unsustainable ideals.
Instead of being at the mercy of an inhumane world and unsupportive
institutions, these fictional narratives dramatize the productively disrup-
tive potential of depression.
It is my contention that fictional narratives of suicidal depression can
disrupt neoliberal approaches to wellbeing: whereas nonfictional narra-
tives of severe, chronic, and suicidal depression are structurally bound to
expectations of progress and recovery, fictional narratives are not bound to
such structural predictability—it is, to use Russian Formalist terms, a story
without a plot. Indeed, ALL and AMPS are disturbing narratives due to
their depiction of suicide as, ultimately, rational. It is entirely possible that
AMPS and ALL cannot allow for a ‘happy ending’ because such an out-
come seems impossible under current societal and institutional conditions.
Yet neither novel isolates the distressed individual at the heart of their nar-
ratives. In fact, both frame the suicidal individual through the perspective
of their familial community: AMPS is narrated entirely by Yoli and devel-
ops her empathy with her sister’s desire to die, whilst ALL frequently
views Jude through the perspectives of Willem (his closest friend) and
Harold (his mentor and later adoptive father). Inevitably, the emphasis on
community is at odds with the neoliberal fixation on individualism and
demands for self-responsibility: both novels make it clear that individual-
ism is a convenient yet morally bankrupt dumping ground for responsibil-
ity, instead offering community and radical empathy as strategies of
resistance to an inhumane and irresponsible neoliberal society.
When published in the United Kingdom, the United States, and
Canada, AMPS and ALL caught the attention of literary press and awards
panels. Both novels portray the agonized turmoil of central characters
who increasingly see continuing to live as unbearable and yet live in a
social milieu where suicide is unconscionable—both legally and within
their familial communities. Yanagihara’s second novel was much discussed
in literary conversation online and on podcasts, eventually ending up as a
shortlisted title on major literary prizes in the United States and Britain
(the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction and the Man Booker Prize for
fiction, respectively). ALL follows four friends in New York—Willem, JB,
Malcolm, and Jude—from their dorm-room days at university through to
their late-middle age. As the narrative proceeds, it increasingly focuses on
A BUBBLE IN THE VEIN: SUICIDE, COMMUNITY, AND THE REJECTION… 197
repeatedly attempt suicide, and knowing the outcome, was ‘too much’ to
contemplate. What changed my mind was also the quality that many critics
noticed about AMPS: its tragicomic and empathetic tone.
On its publication, Stevie Davis noted that the novel’s “compulsive
readability is all the more remarkable since the story issues from such a
dark place in the author’s heart. […] Starvation, pills, slitting her wrists,
drinking bleach: none of this is remotely funny. Nevertheless, as I read, I
laughed aloud even as tears rose in my eyes” (Davis 2014). Make no mis-
take, however: AMPS is not simply a touching comedy of mourning.
Reading AMPS, one is struck that the ‘dark place’ in Toews’s heart is not
simply a space of grief but of righteous anger at a system and society that
could not help her sister in any meaningful, long-lasting way. Undoubtedly,
these are novels that are difficult to read at times. However, I argue that
both are providing provocative contemporary narratives of mental health.
ALL and AMPS both question the ethics of survival at all costs and add an
empathetic viewpoint on debates about the right to die for those suffering
psychological distress. Specifically, I read these novels as contesting the
impact of neoliberal logic—ideological and economic logic—regarding
ideas of what constitutes “good” mental health and treatment.
Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has been the dominant economic view
of those nations which exert the greatest influence across the globe (Chang
2014: 69). As the character of capitalist accumulation significantly shifted
from the 1970s onwards—coinciding with the rise of neoliberal policy and
praxis—I view neoliberalism as the latest, possibly final, chapter in the
overarching, ongoing historical process of capitalism (Harvey 1989:
39–65, 170–72; Arrighi 1994: 1–6, 16–23). Currently the dominant
hegemonic force within the capitalist world-system, neoliberalism has
been the central ideology and economic justification for policies concern-
ing mental health in Europe and North America, policies that arguably are
not as interested in the wellbeing of a mass populace as they would like to
appear. Ultimately serving the interest of the globe’s wealthy elite, neolib-
eralism is no mere economic theory: neoliberalism is best understood as
hegemonic ideology, “an ongoing attempt to mobilize a particular set of
ideas and governmental practices […] in the pursuit of a particular set of
interests, neutralising and forestalling the emergence of political threats to
this endeavour”—the “particular set of interests” being the retrenchment
of elite power (Gilbert 2013: 18). To further protect and serve its interests
in fostering inequality, neoliberalism handily perpetuates a view of human
nature as atavistic. Such a view of humanity as utterly self-interested in
accumulating status and capital inevitably means that neoliberalism is
A BUBBLE IN THE VEIN: SUICIDE, COMMUNITY, AND THE REJECTION… 199
personal influence which has its origin entirely within the individual agent”
(Smail 2005: 75). Such an onus on responsibility lying entirely with the
individual benefits those in power (not necessarily politicians but those
they ultimately serve, the beneficiaries of the capitalist world-system), for
it “is the feeling of responsibility (conscience) that the powerful seek to
exploit in others in order to divert attention from the actual (distal) causes
of their discomfort” (Smail 2005: 77).
In the history of depression as an identifiable condition in Europe and
North America, Ann Cvetkovich notes that its construction as a “treat-
able disease” has largely disregarded any suggestion of social and cultural
readings, “especially in the context of the practical urgencies of treatment
and new pharmacological discoveries” (Cvetkovich 2012: 90). It is this
medical model that is commonly replicated in mainstream culture—not
just political but also in literary, cinematic, and televisual narratives
(Ibid). Cvetkovich notes that the pathologizing of depression has a twin
appeal: depression is framed as a manageable “disease that can be
detected, diagnosed, and treated,” yet such a “model based on biology
relieves people of individual blame or responsibility” (Cvetkovich 2012:
90–91). ALL and AMPS are exceptional, then, in their dramatization of
suicidal depression: whilst they depict the pathologization of depression
and the emphasis on self-responsibility for one’s life (or suffering), these
novels also critique the societal problems that deepen severe depression
as well as gesture to the absence of a meaningful way to live in a neolib-
eral world.
Before turning to how ALL and AMPS problematize neoliberalism via
the depressive perspective, it is important to understand how neoliberal
ideology also informs the character of mental health conditions, such as
depression—or at least how depression is read within a particular historical
moment. We can read states-of-mind like depression as an affective
response to the unsustainable logic of neoliberal capitalism; after all,
depression is a term applied to severe economic downturn. Less flippantly,
China Mills forcibly contends that neoliberal society has a very real, direct
impact on psychological wellbeing across the globe:
and their attendant wealth are not reason enough to keep their suicidal
feelings at bay, flying in the face of neoliberal logics of success. Instead,
AMPS and ALL show the tragic lack of a meaningful answer to the ques-
tion of why Elf and Jude need to stay alive.
Neither novel affirms that “it gets better”; it is clear that Elf and Jude
are always spiralling towards their next suicide attempt. For all the black
humour and sadness of AMPS and the graphic depiction of self-harm and
memories of relentless horror in ALL, it is the inevitability of their deaths
that is probably the most upsetting and discomforting element of both. At
the time of ALL’s publication, I read and heard readers expressing anger,
disgust even, that Yanagihara ends with Jude’s inability to ‘get over’ his
trauma and eventual suicide. This is why AMPS makes a useful companion
piece to ALL: whereas ALL concerns itself with suicidal depression as a
consequence of trauma and PTSD, AMPS recounts a similar, inevitable
decline towards a completed suicide with flashbacks to Elf’s early life and
young adulthood. Although frustrated by life in their somewhat isolated,
patriarchal, Mennonite community, Yoli’s memories show Elf as a capri-
cious teenager, spirited although prone to solemn reflection and sombre
moods. There is no triggering event in Elf’s life; Yoli, and thus the novel,
makes no attempt to offer an explanation for her suicidal depression. Elf is
a chronic depressive whose severe depression has plummeted to increasing
cycles of suicidal behaviour. From the novel’s beginning, Yoli knows that
there is more chance of Elf killing herself than of her recovering. Elf and
her family have no idea what form recovery could even take. The angry
heart of Toews’s novel is that the medical and legal worlds demand that
Elf remains alive but offer no narrative about how her life can be made
worthwhile.
Whereas ALL steers away from implicating institutions due to Jude’s
extreme privacy regarding his past and his health, AMPS directly tackles
the contradictory emphasis on self-responsibility for high-risk patients in
the Canadian mental health system. In an interview, Toews describes how
her family’s experience drove the representation of Elf’s hospitalization:
“I had so much anger towards the mental health system in Canada, the
cruelty of it, the way patients are treated, infantilized, it almost seems
criminalized. It was burning a hole in my heart and mind” (O’Keefe 2015:
n.p.). The anger in AMPS stems from frustration of institutions which
demand that Elf remains alive at any cost—as long as that cost falls under
that year’s budget for mental health care. AMPS lays bare the cyclical reali-
ties of psychiatric care: the always understaffed wards with their seemingly
204 A. RUSHTON
We were trying to assemble a team of caregivers who would work with Elf
when she was released from the hospital. […] What would this team do with
her? she asked. What would Elf do with the team? Make lists? Set goals?
Embrace life? Start a journal? Turn that frown upside down? She kept
unearthing huge fundamental problems with the whole concept. […] Elf
was up in arms, gnashing her teeth against the smarmy self-help racket that
existed only to sell books and anaesthetize the vulnerable and allow the so-
called “helping” profession to bask in self-congratulation for having done
what they could. They’d make lists! They’d set goals! They’d encourage
their patients to do one “fun” thing a day! (Oh you should have heard the
derision in Elf’s voice when she said the word fun like she’d just spit out the
word Eichmann or Mengele.) (Toews 2014: 49–50)
Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to
want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile,
every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and tri-
umph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and
oblivion? (Toews 2014: 90).
Elf asking Yoli to take her to Switzerland to die is the turning point for
Yoli: after years of tearfully, furiously, bullyingly imploring her elder sister
A BUBBLE IN THE VEIN: SUICIDE, COMMUNITY, AND THE REJECTION… 205
First you try logic (You have so much to live for), and then you try guilt (You
owe me), and then you try anger, and threats, and pleading (I’m old; don’t do
this to an old man). But then, once they agree, it is necessary that you, the
cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is
costing them, you can see how much they don’t want to be here, you can
see that the mere act of existing is depleting for them, and then you have to
tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing. (Yanagihara 2015:
709–710, 717; emphasis in original)
2014: 38–39). That is, suicide and self-harm may be entirely rational and
resistant reactions to an increasingly inhumane neoliberal social order. In
these novels, severe depression is a condition which responds to something
missing in society, not in the individuals. For Jude and Elf, the lack of a
meaningful narrative beyond their immediate experiences points to what
is lacking, what is absent.
An absence of a meaningful narrative for living is not inherently a nihil-
istic perspective; it is important to remember the role absence plays in
utopian thinking. This is not to suggest that suicide is a utopian act, at
least not in the abstract sense: in other words, utopia is not to be under-
stood as an imaginary dreamland in the realm of the “fantastic and com-
pensatory” but as something we know to be lacking, something that
indicates unrealized potential not yet available to us (Levitas 1990: 15).
According to Ernst Bloch, in order to be socially and politically useful, the
utopian function needs to be grounded in recognition of the possible
(concrete utopia), must exhibit “militant optimism” and educated hope
(docta spes), and, crucially, is anticipatory (“Not Yet”) (Bloch 1986: 137,
146–47). Crucial for Bloch’s understanding of utopian thinking is its
emphasis on possibility, thus confronting the reasons that make the pro-
duction of utopia so difficult. Bloch stresses that hope is vital in thinking
about utopia, not a passive strain of thinking positively:
Hope is critical and can be disappointed. […] Hope is not confidence. Hope
is surrounded by dangers, and is the consciousness of danger and at the
same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the
opposite of the hoped-for object possible’. (Bloch 1988: 17).
Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in
the world. […] He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being
awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of
reasons to get up and try again. (Yanagihara 2015: 143–144)
Of course, as his life goes on, it becomes increasingly harder for Jude to
justify continuing to live. Yet this moment in ALL flags up the simultane-
A BUBBLE IN THE VEIN: SUICIDE, COMMUNITY, AND THE REJECTION… 207
ous utopian impulse of the suicidal depressive: suicidal thoughts can con-
tain a wish for absence—to absent oneself from a life without a
meaning—and optimism for the future. The future will either fulfil the
desire for absence (completed suicide) or a renewed attempt to continue
living. Both acts can only be achieved by having faith in the future, that
the next moments in time will bring relief, rather than impasse. The
strangely utopian impulse of suicidal depression, then, is why the denial
of death is so damaging to Jude and Elf: both know that they can end
their suffering. The problem is that societal expectations will not allow
them to do so, yet offer no long-term alternative to their suffering. As
Cvetkovich observes, this short-sightedness creates a sense of impasse, of
feeling stuck, suggesting “that things will not move forward due to cir-
cumstance—not that they can’t, but that the world is not designed to
make it happen or there has been a failure of imagination” (Cvetkovich
2012: 20; my emphasis). Neoliberalism’s relentless presentism and rejec-
tion of collective responsibility is at odds with the need to imagine a bet-
ter future, an imaginative act that the suicidally depressive subject requires.
In other words, neoliberal ideology and praxis have no scope for utopian
thinking.
If neoliberal society offers no meaningful, imaginative narrative beyond
its narrow confines of personal attainment and self-responsibility, then it is
important to ask what does prevent Elf and Jude from delaying their inevi-
table acts of suicide. Of course, society demands that they stay alive but
their exhaustion and increasing withdrawal demonstrate that societal
demands are not justification enough. Something else is tethering them to
life: their feelings of responsibility to others, chiefly, their familial
communities. Towards the end of his life, Jude reflects that although he
has never believed his life to be meaningful, he recognizes that if his family
and friends “wanted him to stay alive, then he would”; “He hadn’t under-
stood why they wanted him to stay alive, only that they had, and so he had
done it” (Yanagihara 2015: 686–688). Although not immediately obvi-
ous, the very title of Toews’s novel is an acknowledgment of the important
role of familial bonds: AMPS is derived from an acronym that a teenage
Elf uses as a graffiti tag around Winnipeg:
She came up with a design that incorporated her initials E.V.R. (Elfrieda
Von Riesen) and below those the initials A.M.P. Then, like a coiled snake,
the letter S which covered, underlined and dissected the other letters […].
[T]he A.M.P. stands for All My Puny… then the big S stands for Sorrows
which encloses all the other letters[…]. (Toews 2014: 8, 10)
208 A. RUSHTON
[I]f he killed himself, if he took himself away from me, I knew I would sur-
vive, but I knew as well that survival would be a chore […]. And of course I
knew how badly I would miss him, because although there had been trial
runs for his eventual departure, I had never been able to get any better at
dealing with them, and I was never able to get used to them. (Yanagihara
2015: 708)
By the novel’s end, there is a horrible irony in the number of core familial
members who have died too young and before Jude, including Andy,
Jude’s doctor and confidante. Along with Harold, it is Andy who effec-
tively bullies Jude into a narrative of ‘wellness’ throughout the novel. And
yet Jude, suicidally depressed for most of his life, ends up outliving Andy.
Whereas the novel’s relentlessly grim and melodramatic tone has been a
chief criticism for ALL’s dissenters, I believe that is necessary in order to
empathize with Jude: the more over the top and tragic the narrative
becomes, the more it becomes impossible to ignore that wanting Jude to
continue living is not only wishful fantasy but cruel: “Sometimes he thinks:
I can do this. But more and more now, he knows: I can’t” (Yanagihara
2015: 664). The novel’s conclusion aims to provoke radical empathy in
the reader, simultaneously dreading but wishing for Jude’s end. After all,
Jude’s death not only releases him from the relentless narrative but also
the reader.
AMPS is more explicit in its radical empathy for the suicidal actor.
Towes’s narrative shows Yoli’s anger shifting focus from her sister’s wish
to die to the social and legal demands to stay alive. What is different to
210 A. RUSHTON
She told me that she’s been worrying about me so much, it must be awful,
everything I’ve been going through, and that in her opinion “to die by
one’s own hand” is always a sin. Always. Because of the suffering it causes
the survivors. […]
I said, selfish? How could it be selfish? Unless you’ve seen the agony first-
hand you can’t really pass judgment. […] [H]ow could you understand
what another person’s suicide means? […]
I quoted Goethe the way my mother did […] “suicide is an event of
human nature which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it,
demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed
anew”… (Toews 2014: 277–278)
In its portrayal of Yoli’s developing empathy for her sister’s wish to die,
AMPS is probably one of the most confrontational yet also nuanced con-
temporary representations of suicide. Rather than expecting Yoli—and, by
extension, the reader—to wholly understand and accept Elf’s need to end
her life, Toews’s choice to focus on a non-suicidal narrative perspective
allows the focus to shift from individual responsibility (you need to stay
alive for us) to the importance of community for the suicidal actor and
their loved ones. Yoli cannot prevent her sister from dying, but she can
lessen the pain by accepting her sister’s absence as desired and, in some
ways, necessary for her own life to continue. Rather than torn asunder by
grief, Elf’s death brings the remaining family closer together:
[Mom] had her arms around me. I pretended she was you [Elf] and dad and
[…] all the people I’ve lost along the way, and then she whispered things to
me, all about love, about kindness, and optimism and strength. And about
you. About our family.
How we can all fight really hard, but how we can also acknowledge
defeat and stop fighting and call a spade a spade. (Toews 2014: 313)
It may seem odd to suggest that suicide can be an act with positive effects,
one that strengthens communal feeling. Yet ALL shows how the lack of
A BUBBLE IN THE VEIN: SUICIDE, COMMUNITY, AND THE REJECTION… 211
In order to rehabilitate the world, human beings will need to structure their
ideals in accordance with the realities of their mutual interdependence. To
this end, magic is useless, but utopianism—forms of re-enchantment that
depend on human rather than divine effort—is not. (Smail 2005: 107–08;
my emphasis)
Notes
1. Although Canada largely escapes the international scrutiny of the UK and
the US, recent reports by research think-tanks have focused on the relation-
ship between mental health and employability: Conference Board of Canada
2017: “Improving Youth Mental Health a Priority for Society and the
Economy;” Cision Canada (28 November); Mental Health Commission of
Canada. 2017: “Commission of Canada Statement on Human Rights Day,”
212 A. RUSHTON
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Origin of Our Times. London/New York: Verso.
Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, 3 Vols. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen
Plaice, and Peter Knight. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
———. 1988. Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and
Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing. In The
Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, 1–17. Trans. Jack Zipes
and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge: MIT.
Chang, Ha-Joon. 2014. Economics: The User’s Guide. London: Penguin.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham/London: Duke
University Press.
Davis, Stevie. 2014. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews Review–Darkly Fizzing
Tragicomedy. The Guardian, July 9. https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2014/jul/09/all-my-puny-sorrows-miriam-toews-review-darkly-
fizzing-tragicomedy. Date accessed 17 December 2017.
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2013. What Kind of Thing Is ‘Neoliberalism’? New Formations
80/81: 7–22.
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and Impairment: Challenging epistemologies’, Disability & Society, 16 (2):
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———. 2008. The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza. Reading: Vermilion.
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Levitas, Ruth. 1990. Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete
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Wrong with This Family?’. The Guardian, May 2. https://www.theguardian.
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Accessed 17 Dec 2017.
Raphelson, Samantha. 2017. How the Loss of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Led to a
Mental Health Crisis. NPR, November 30. https://www.npr.
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led-to-a-mental-health-crisis. Date Accessed 17 Dec 2017.
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Yanagihara, Hanya. 2015. A Little Life. London: Picador. Kindle Edition.
CHAPTER 10
Matthew Eatough
M. Eatough (*)
New York City, NY, USA
e-mail: matthew.eatough@baruch.cuny.edu
Some of these criteria fit South African quite well, but others are either
absent or barely recognizable in their present incarnation. For instance,
FUTURES, INC.: FICTION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE (SOUTH)… 217
the region” (Mbeki 1998: 247–8). Taken together, these projects would
“create the basis for further development and … a sustained improvement
in the standard of living of the people” (Mbeki 1998: 248).
Almost immediately, critics pounced on Mbeki’s use of Africanist rhet-
oric to dress up what was in reality a fairly standard call for business-
friendly economic policies. Writing in the African Security Review,
Howard Barrell described Mbeki’s African Renaissance as “a self-imposed
structural adjustment programme … fairly ruthlessly applied” (Barrell
2000). In spite of the laudable—if abstract—appeals to democracy and the
fight against government corruption, Mbeki’s concrete proposals boiled
down to little more than the same policies that the World Bank and the
IMF had been peddling for years: lower tariffs, less state intervention in
the economy, and freedom of movement for capital. If anything, Mbeki
seemed most interested in using these neoliberal measures to consolidate
South Africa’s regional dominance within a pan-African economy. He
assured his audience that the “economic integration” provided by a south-
ern African “free trade area” (modelled on NAFTA and similar trading
blocs) was necessary for “any significant and sustained economic growth
and development to take place”—a remark that stoked fears that the
African Renaissance was nothing more than “a Pax Pretoriana in disguise”
(Mbeki 1998: 247; Maloka 2001: 5). Such self-serving proposals were
supplemented by what appeared to be genuine gestures towards moral
leadership—among them, calls for the “emancipation of women” and
“protection of the environment” (Mbeki 1998: 249). But within the
larger structure of the speech, these social issues tend to be subordinated
to Mbeki’s economic vision for the continent, such that he ends his
address by stressing that “Africa reborn” will yield first and foremost new
“products of human economic activity”—with social changes apparently
following in the wakes of this more general economic transformation
(Mbeki 1998: 251).
Mbeki’s African Renaissance was about more, though, than just priva-
tization and austerity—even if these facets were more familiar (and there-
fore more easily identifiable) to most commentators. The entire ideology
of the African Renaissance, which Mbeki continued to promote into the
early 2000s, rested on a belief that social and economic “renewal” would
take place in an as-yet-undefined future (Mbeki 1999: xiii). Critics were
quick to dismiss this rhetoric as ideological obfuscation (see, e.g.,
Ferguson 2006: 113–118), but for the African Renaissance’s supporters,
this futural dimension was the single most indispensable plank of Mbeki’s
FUTURES, INC.: FICTION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE (SOUTH)… 221
This call to seize the future was more than just a metaphor. In the years
following the end of apartheid, what little economic growth South Africa
experienced was confined almost entirely to financial industries whose pri-
mary goal was to monetize and commodify various types of “futures.”
From 1994 to 2007, the financial sector almost doubled its share of South
Africa’s GDP (up from 6.5% in 1994 to 12% in 2007), and by 2009 that
number would soar to almost 20% (Marais 2011: 130). Unlike the post-
1970 US economy, which has relied heavily on stock-trading, hedge-
funds, and debt-financing for large purchases (home buying, college
education, and so forth), South Africa’s financial sector has been directed
towards much smaller ventures: microloan lenders, savings clubs, and
other similar enterprises. In one way or another, all of these industries ask
their customers to undertake financial transactions based on a belief that
their futures will be better than their present. Either borrowers will be
earning more money in the near future—in which case they will be able to
pay back their loans—or savings clubs will have helped investors to pur-
chase expensive items that will improve their daily lives (cars, refrigerators,
and so on). Such sentiments enable businesses to generate profits in a
country where capital is severely lacking, with an unemployment rate con-
stantly hovering around 22–25% and household incomes that are in
decline (Marais 2011: 179). Even though most South Africans do not
have the means to fund a robust consumer economy, or to invest in
high-risk speculations, financial industries make such transactions possible
by commodifying their customers’ future prospects. They seize on con-
sumers’ optimistic beliefs in upward mobility and route them into specula-
tive transactions, thereby transforming the future into a tangible object
with a precise economic value—one that can then be sold to financial-
services providers in the present.
The rise of speculative trading on “futures” also extended into other,
more abstract arenas. Following an intense US-led campaign to force
South Africa into adopting the US’s narrow interpretation of the
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
(TRIPS)—a campaign that was sparked by US pharmaceutical companies’
worries over clauses in South Africa’s 1997 Medicines and Related
Substances Control Amendment Act that allowed for parallel importing
and the licensing of generic alternatives7—South Africa set about consoli-
dating its own IP laws. Many of the laws and amendments that were passed
in the next 16 years were expressly designed to extend copyright protec-
tions to valuable pharmaceutical and tech patents. But the South African
FUTURES, INC.: FICTION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE (SOUTH)… 223
product that may or may not ever materialize (Cooper 2008: 28). In the
case of the Hoodia gordonii, for example, the idea to use the plant in a
weight-loss supplement was initially patented in 1963 by the South African
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a government
think-tank. The idea was then licensed to Phytopharm, whose stock price
soared as speculators rushed to invest in the up-and-coming new drug. As
is common practice with IP-based enterprises, these stock sales helped to
fund the research, testing, and production needed to bring the drug to
market. At the same time, though, the results of such drug trials are obvi-
ously not known beforehand, which means that investors are betting that
the “promise” represented by the patented idea—the future that will come
to be if the idea can be successfully realized—will in fact come to pass. In
other words, they were betting that the Hoodia gordonii plant could in fact
be used successfully in a new medical supplement.
What follows is a perfect illustration of what Jane Guyer calls the decline
of the “foreseeable future” in economic and public policy discourse (Guyer
2007: 410). Where the Keynesian economics of the post-WWII era tended
to stress “the short run and its intermediate forms of governance,” the
speculative industries that make use of IP protections are directed at
unknowable “long term” prospects (Guyer 2007: 412). Not surprisingly,
this focus on the long term resembles the logic at the heart of Mbeki’s
African Renaissance, which similarly locates the possibility of economic
fullness in a future that is cut off from the immediate prospects of the pres-
ent day. Just as Mbeki’s programme for an African Renaissance projects
“sustainable” economic growth into a distant future, so too do neoliberal
regimes of IP characterize the future as a site where intangible ideas can be
transformed into tangible rewards. After all, the San use of the Hoodia
gordonii does not possess economic value in and of itself. It is only when
this “indigenous knowledge” is patented and opened to speculative invest-
ment that it is transformed into a marketable product—based not on its
present use, but on its future prospects. Its status as IP is thus cemented
when it is translated into the language of neoliberal futurity—a process
that, as we will see, relies on the unique status of writing in Western law.
it exists only as an idea, and not as the sort of tangible object that it nor-
mally protected under Lockean property laws. Thus, in order to convert
such intangible ideas into a substantive legal form, patents must produce
a species of writing that we might call “plausible fictions.”10 By recording
their ideas in a proliferating series of documents—patent applications,
government-approved patent licences, trademark registrations, and so
on—IP holders endow their creations with a substance that they would
lack if they remained simply immaterial “ideas.” They acquire a value that
is on the one hand imaginary—as we would say that a novel or a film is
“imaginary”—but which is also real in the eyes of the law.
It is in this sense that the literary critic Ian Baucom can speak of a
speculative capital/fiction matrix. In Baucom’s account of the rise of the
novel, fiction’s staking out of an imaginary realm that is neither “referen-
tial truth telling” nor “lying” constitutes the necessary epistemological
foundation for any imaginary values to emerge in the first place (Baucom
2005: 68).11 By helping readers to conceive of imaginary persons and
events that are nevertheless “real,” fiction eased the transition to other
types of speculative objects: in the first place, to the eighteenth-century
financial revolution in credit, insurance, and finance capital that Baucom
traces in Specters of the Atlantic; and in the second place, we might add, to
the development of IP law that began in the eighteenth century and con-
tinued on into the early nineteenth century (Baucom 2005: 72). Readers
were trained to see value as a phenomenon that could be detached from
any stable referent and set adrift in a sea of representations, all of which
were only secured by a collective belief in their existence. Credit, for
instance, depends on “an economy of trust”: if a lender simply refuses his
or her obligation to pay back a debt, then its entire system of imaginary
value quickly collapses (Baucom 2005: 64). In the same way, IP law only
works if the rest of the public respects the patent holder’s monopoly on a
given product. If not, rampant piracy ensues—as was the case with pirated
American editions of British novels in the nineteenth century, or with the
more recent clashes over bootlegged films (see, e.g., Baldwin 2014:
82–125).
The connection between fiction and IP also indicates the extent to
which speculative values are dependent on longstanding beliefs about
writing and culture. The practice of recording IP rights in specialized
genres of writing goes back to the eighteenth century, when IP law was
largely concerned with protecting imaginative writing through new leg-
islation. As this copyright system continued to evolve during the
Romantic era, it came to stress writing as a medium in which the artistic
226 M. EATOUGH
rovided an ideal vehicle for thinking through the larger stakes involved in
p
IP—from its role in Mbeki’s African Renaissance project to the ethical
implications that it held for South Africa’s citizens. What did it mean, for
example, to say that a particular future could be “owned” by its patent
holders? Or that intangible “ideas” about future objects could take on a
substantive legal presence in the present? Or that one’s cultural “heritage”
could serve as the basis for a speculative investment in the future?
All of these were questions that were particularly well-suited to the
genre of magical realism. Although there is still wide debate about what
magical realism actually is, with some scholars seeing it as a specifically
“postcolonial” mode of storytelling with close ties to postmodernism, and
with others viewing it as little more than a “kitschy commodity” (Ilan
Stavans, quoted in Schonfeld), most agree that the genre’s distinctive fea-
ture is the way in which it “literalizes” certain intangible phenomena
(Quayson 2006: 741). In, say, a Gabriel García Márquez novel or a Miguel
Angel Asturias novel, cultural beliefs are treated as if they have a physical
existence on par with that of the more familiar empirical world: villagers
transform into ants and coyotes, as per Mayan legends; magicians success-
fully practise the art of alchemy; and angelic characters ascend directly to
heaven, as in the Bible and the Qur’an. Similarly, the past and the future
are granted a solidity in the present that contrasts with the more common
Newtonian understanding of absolute time: mystical prophecies pull the
future into the present and give it a physical shape, just as ghosts literalize
the well-known precept that the past is never really past, even when its
effects are no longer visible to the naked eye.
In each of these respects, magical realism seems to take up the project
initiated by fictional narrative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Just as the early novel helped readers to believe in the real value of imagi-
nary objects—up to and including the type of writing that we find in pat-
ents—so too does magical realism seek to describe a realm where intangible
phenomena possess substantive value. In the case of magical realism, how-
ever, the objects being invested with value are not simply “ideas” per se,
but entire systems of collective being which, in the past, had been defined
by their exclusion from capitalist modernity. We should therefore see magi-
cal realism as a sort of dialectical reversal of the early novel. Where the
early novel had trained readers in the reality of imaginary phenomena,
magical realism uses the resources of realist epistemology to code actually-
existing cultures in the language of patent law (as, e.g., immaterial beliefs
that can only be “literalized” in writing).
228 M. EATOUGH
and sewage services, up-to-date housing, and so forth—in the hopes that
these speculative expenditures would yield profits in the long term. Such
concrete investments were then supplemented by a more amorphous
commitment to marketing Makuleke culture, which continued to remain
the vital link connecting conservationism to neoliberal speculation. “Part
of any visit to Pafuri,” one exemplary advertisement for RETURNAfrica
reads, “is learning more about the rich traditions and culture of the
Makuleke people” who had occupied this land for hundreds of years
(https://www.returnafrica.com/pages/community). The larger message
here is that environmental conservation is coextensive with cultural con-
servation; the two operate in a feedback loop, with attention to Makuleke
“traditions” naturally leading to an eco-friendly economic policy.
Heart of Redness leans heavily on this ideological convergence of con-
servationist rhetoric and ethno-enterprise. At the same time, though, the
novel asks us to reflect on the ontology informing such notions of cul-
tural property. We see this especially clearly in the novel’s depiction of
cultural “heritage,” which Mda consistently figures as a speculative exten-
sion of past customs into the future. As Camagu and Qukezwa struggle
to formulate an alternative to the casino scheme, they regularly appeal to
the need to “work out a plan of how the community can benefit from
these things we want to preserve” (Mda 2000: 119). The echo of conser-
vationism’s custodial language that we glimpse in the verb “to preserve”
speaks not only to Mda’s desire to frame culture as a “heritage” in need
of similar protection but also to the presumed complementarity between
heritage preservation and environmentalism. Thus, when Camagu pitches
his tourism plan to the Qolora community, he emphasizes its roots in an
ecological attentiveness to the “unspoiled nature” of the “indigenous for-
ests” (Mda 2000: 201). By embracing the spirit of King Sarhili, “a very
strong conservationist” who in the nineteenth century “created Mayube,
a conservation area where people were not allowed to hunt or chop
tress,” Qolora, Camagu insists, can discover a model of economic devel-
opment that would work hand-in-hand with the natural world, treating it
as part of the community’s cultural heritage rather than as raw material
for capitalist resource-extraction. Indeed, in Camagu’s eyes a proposed
national heritage site is a direct descendent of Sarhili’s earlier conserva-
tion efforts, since it, too, would ensure that “no one will touch” the land
(Mda 2000: 201). This genealogy is absolutely essential to Camagu’s
project, as it is what allows him to characterize conservationism as an
inherent part of Xhosa cultural traditions, and not a Western import (as it
is often described) (see, e.g., Beinart 2003). Conservationism and
232 M. EATOUGH
what existed in the past will return at a later time to save the present—is
retained. Mda’s larger point here is that the language of prophecy better
describes this process than the rhetoric of classical modernization theory,
which can only understand history as the gradual unfolding of a single
linear process. The way in which ethno-enterprises speculate on cultural
customs by patenting them for future uses requires a form of historical
thinking that can draw the future back into the present, making that future
into a commodity in the present. And what does Nongqawuse do, if not
precisely that? Her prophecies produce an image of the future that her
followers invest their livelihoods in, in hopes of a return on their invest-
ment at a later time. In other words, the prophecies are promises that will
only be cashed in on after they, too, have been patented—in this case, as
an official part of South Africa’s “national heritage.”
And yet, this merging together of custom, IP, and the future only really
works within the generic confines of magical realism. Mda sidesteps the
question of whether Nongqawuse’s prophecies are factually true by
describing them as an expression of “the spiritual and material anguish of
the amaXhosa nation” (Mda 2000: 245). Rather than asking whether the
ancestors that Nongqawuse and her followers saw were really there, or if
there were simply delusions bred of mass starvation, Mda insists that the
prophecies are an authentic form of cultural property as long as the villag-
ers are “sincere in their belief” in them (Mda 2000: 240, 245).14 This
compromise depends on magical realism’s vaunted ability to erase any dis-
tinction between literary figures, cultural beliefs, and an empirically verifi-
able world. When Mda shows Nongqawuse’s followers listening to their
ancestors, he doesn’t need to specify whether this is fact or fiction. All such
encounters are confined to an anterior realm of value, where all that mat-
ters is whether they are part of Xhosa culture or not, and where culture is
treated as synonymous with intangible “beliefs.” On a formal level, this is
done by refusing to insert any authorial commentary on the status of these
beliefs: the narrator simply notes that “visitors … never heard the spirits,
for the spirits could be heard only by the chosen ones,” without specifying
whether this is free indirect discourse or an objective statement of fact
(Mda 2000: 80). This translation of Xhosa culture into fictional writing,
and the collapsing of fiction into magical realism, enables Mda to repre-
sent the prophecies as true-but-not-true (to borrow Salman Rushdie’s cul-
turalist reading of Islam in The Satanic Verses: “It was so … It was not”)
(Rushdie 1988: 558). The prophecies are “true” for those who believe in
them, but only for those people. Their status as an “intangible” form of
property depends on cordoning the prophecies off into a separate realm of
234 M. EATOUGH
beliefs and ideas—one that is defined by its distance from the physical
world of mechanical reproduction and consumer goods.
What we need to recognize is that this move mimics the internal work-
ings of IP. Just as Mda uses his magical realist frame to make culture into
a prophetic commodity, so too does IP rely on an anterior realm of ideas,
one whose objects could similarly be described as “true-but-not-true.”
The convergence of magical realism and IP fashions Heart of Redness into
a parable of the rise of IP in South Africa, as well as into a parable of the
African Renaissance more generally. The novel shows us how neoliberal-
ism has striven to actualize various “futures” in the present, which it can
then open to the processes of commodification and monetization. But it
also shows us how these economic processes are not separate from cultural
production, but instead adopt many of the same techniques common to
contemporary fiction: the use of writing to instantiate otherwise “intan-
gible” ideas; the marking out of culture as a realm of value anterior to the
empirical world; and the tracing of nonlinear temporalities. The IP-fiction
dynamic is thus a two-way process, with fiction serving as an essential
component of neoliberal future-making, but also as a vehicle that can per-
haps shape these neoliberal industries into new, and more utopian, forms.
Notes
1. See also African National Congress 1994.
2. For more on these laws, see James 2015, 60–91.
3. For a detailed account of capital flows in post-apartheid South Africa, see
Bond 2003.
4. The most extensive account of South Africa’s cash transfer programmes
can be found in Ferguson 2015. As Ferguson points out, cash transfers
programmes have proliferated across many African countries and are espe-
cially common in southern Africa.
5. Ferguson 2006, 15–19 surveys these studies.
6. Mbeki makes this connection clear after his first use of the phrase, when he
mentions the “disempowerment of the masses of our people” as that which
“we must make foreign” (Mbeki 1999, xiv).
7. “Parallel importing” describes the system whereby generic versions of
products are imported from countries where IP protections are not in
place. It is a relatively common practice when dealing with potentially life-
saving drugs.
8. These efforts have not been overly successful in breaking up the Western
monopoly on IP rights. As Joseph Slaughter notes, by 1999 “97 percent of
the world’s intellectual property [was] held by the industrialized countries
FUTURES, INC.: FICTION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE (SOUTH)… 235
in the North,” and “80 percent of the patents registered in the Global
South [were] held by alien residents of industrialized countries” (Slaughter
2011, 182). For more on recent efforts by indigenous peoples to reappro-
priate IP rights, see Geismar 2013.
9. See, for example, the essays collected in the section “Moral Renewal and
African Values” in Makgoba 1999, 137–169.
10. I adapt this term from Catherine Gallagher’s influential account of fiction
(see Gallagher 2006).
11. Baucom is quoting from Catherine Gallagher’s classic account of the rise
of the novel, Nobody’s Story (Gallagher 1994, xvi).
12. My reading of Heart of Redness will be focusing on the economic implica-
tions of Mda’s prophetic temporality. For more general accounts of Mda’s
use of prophecy, see Wenzel 2009, 173–194, and Still 2014, 154–185.
13. For a broader discussion of these concerns, see Ramutsindelda and
Shabangu 2013.
14. This also leads us to another point of intersection between Heart of Redness
and international IP rights. In 2008, the historian Andrew Offenburger
accused Mda of plagiarizing Jeff Peires’s historical account of the cattle-
killing movement, The Dead Will Arise (1989) (Offenburger 2008).
Subsequent defenses of Mda have stressed how his novel can be seen as an
“intertextual” appropriation similar in form to the borrowings common to
Xhosa oral traditions (see, e.g., Highman 2016). At the center of this
debate, I would argue, is a fundamental difference in how IP is defined—as
the property of a single individual, or as a type of collective property open
to all members of a society.
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Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barrell, Howard. 2000. Back to the Future: Renaissance and South African
Domestic Policy. African Security Review 9 (2): 82–91.
Baucom, Ian. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the
Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press.
Beinart, William. 2003. The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock,
and the Environment, 1770–1950. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Bank, IMF, and International Finance. 2nd ed. New York: Zed Books.
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Mbeki, Thabo. 1998. The African Renaissance, South Africa, and the World. In
Africa, the Time Has Come: Selected Speeches of Thabo Mbeki, 239–251. Cape
Town: Tafelberg.
———. 1999. Prologue. In African Renaissance: The New Struggle, ed.
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vol. 2, 76–81.
Mda, Zakes. 2000. Heart of Redness. New York: Picador.
Offenburger, Andrew. 2008. Duplicity and Plagiarism in Zakes Mda’s The Heart
of Redness. Research in African Literatures 39 (3, Fall): 164–199.
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Franco Moretti, 726–756. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ramutsindelda, Maano, and Medupi Shabangu. 2013. Conditioned by
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National Park. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 31 (3): 441–456.
Rushdie, Salman. 1988. The Satanic Verses. New York: Picador.
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177–240. Cambridge, MA: English Institute.
Still, Erica. 2014. Prophetic Remembrance: Black Subjectivity in African American
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Wenzel, Jennifer. 2009. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South
Africa and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
CHAPTER 11
Sharae Deckard
S. Deckard (*)
Dublin, Republic of Ireland
e-mail: sharae.deckard@ucd.ie
Neoliberal extractivism might be more aptly termed not the “new” but
the latest phase of the “enduring” scramble for African resources, land,
and labour, given the long durée of exploitation, extraction, and dispos-
session on the continent, of which the neoliberal regime is only the latest
phase, even if one with the potential for the epochal exhaustion of the
relations enabling “cheap” metals, minerals, and energy.
242 S. DECKARD
in the beginning was the stone, and the stone prompted ownership, and
ownership a rush, and the rush brought an influx of men of diverse
appearance who built railroads through the rock. (caps original, Mujila
2015: 1)
Here it is not logos which is the ontological basis of reality, but material,
the enclosure, and transformation of stone into private property, which
prompts the formation of new social relations, an ecological regime orga-
nized around the commodity frontiers of mineral and metal extraction
that transform inert material into exchange-value, enabled by the infra-
structure and technics of the railway, and articulated through violent com-
petition: “conflict minerals, this cow-dung elevated to a raw material,
in the beginning was the stone…” (Mujila 2015: 7).
Tram 83 is set in the twenty-first century in “The City-State,” a fiction-
alized version of Lumambashi in the region of Katanga in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, a province notorious for its rich deposits, from
columbo-tantalite, cassiterite and tungsten, to diamonds, gold, and ura-
nium. But this wealth has always been siphoned away. The Congo is a
prime example of the kind of nested cycles of capital accumulation that we
discussed in our introduction to this volume and of a zone peripheralized
within the world-system, held in reserve for multiple cycles of exploita-
tion. As Jennifer Wenzel has memorably written,
If the Congo did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Time and again,
whatever natural resource became indispensable to European capitalist expan-
sion and technological innovation as to be found in the Congo in vast stores,
beginning with slave labor in the sixteenth century… In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Congo had ivory, which as Adam Hochschild notes, was like an
expense ‘plastic,’ capable of being carved into numerous items (74). Then, in
1890, wild rubber, ready for harvesting to meet the booming demand for
tires, hoses, and electrical and telegraph insulation. In an era of electrification
and industrial manufacturing, copper for wires and cobalt for alloys. At the
dawn of the nuclear age, the uranium the United States used in the bombs
that marked the transition from World War to Cold War. In the age of global-
ization, driven in part by telecommunications technologies […] the Congo
has coltan, or columbo-tantalite, a heat-resistant conductor used in the capac-
itors that power cell phones, pagers, and laptops. (Wenzel 2006: 1–2)
TRAINS, STONE, AND ENERGETICS: AFRICAN RESOURCE CULTURE… 243
And so the strike came to Thiès. An unlimited strike, which, for many, along
the whole length of the railroad, was a time for suffering, but for many was
also a time for thought. When the smoke from the trains no longer drifted
above the savanna, they realized that an age had ended- an age their elders
had told them about, when all of Africa was just a garden for food. Now the
machine ruled over their lands, and when they forced every machine within
a thousand miles to halt they became conscious of their strength, but also
conscious of their dependence. They began to understand that the machine
was making of them a whole new breed of men. It did not belong to them;
it was they who belonged to it. When it stopped, it taught them that lesson.
(Sembène 1962: 32–33)
Moving ahead a decade, the figure of the train is invested with a simi-
larly dialectical energetic materialism in “Stimela,” or “Coal Train,” by
Hugh Masekela, the great South African trumpeter, composer and singer,
first released on his 1974 album I Am Not Afraid. Fiston Mwanza Mujila
has written that he played this song incessantly as he wrote Tram 83, that
its aesthetics and political ecology profoundly influenced the polyphonic
form of his own composition:
protest, to the lyrical conclusion “And when they hear that Choo-Choo
train/ They always curse, curse the coal train/ The coal train that brought
them to Johannesburg” (Masekela 1974, n.pg.).
Denning points out that the spatiality of the “vernacular music revolu-
tion” arose from the new “archipelagos of polyphony” formed by com-
bined and uneven development under imperialism:
The new vernacular musics of the era of electrical recording emerged on the
edges and borders of the empires of global capitalism, in the barrios, bidon-
villes, barrack-yards, arrabales, and favelas of an archipelago of colonial
ports, linked by steamship routes, railway lines, and telegraph cables, mov-
ing commodities and people across and between empires. (Denning 2015,
n.pg.)
If the coal train drains the resources of the periphery, both human and
mineral, it also forges the material and spatial conditions for new potenti-
alities of internationalist solidarity and collective action, and for the emer-
gence of new cultural forms such as this combined and uneven music,
electrified with what Michael Niblett has recently called in the context of
fiction, “striking energies”: the kinetics, vectors, and velocities generated
by mass strike action and the collective attempts of workers to transform
ecologies “by seizing control of the flows of energy they generate” (Niblett
2017: 307).
We might recall here again Sembène. In invoking the collective sense of
solidarity and revolutionary totality needed for the general strike to suc-
ceed, Bakayoko deploys a locomotive metaphorics:
Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as
one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses
were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to
another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was
very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled
out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as
life. (Sembène 1962: 192)
The women’s ambulation is slow and torturous, as they suffer the priva-
tions of famine and thirst on the road, and are beaten by police. The
organic metaphor of the serpent, even as it alludes to the ‘iron snake’ of
the railtracks they walk alongside, counters the hypermasculinism of
Bakayoko’s locomotive consciousness, invoking an ecology of circular
reciprocity, rather than linear development and vehicular momentum. It is
generative and collective, rather than helmed by one charismatic or mes-
sianic male driver, and insurgent audiopolitics are evoked through their
invention of new music through which both to express and to fuel the
march. At the same time, the text intelligently examines the increasing
incorporation of women into informal economies of sex work when they
are denied formal employment, and foregrounds the gendering of the
250 S. DECKARD
labour of social reproduction, by showing how the long march is led and
conceived by Penda, who chafes against both European and traditional
African patriarchal norms of gender, and who sometimes sells sex in order
to survive without a husband; as such, she must overcome the censure not
only of the striking men, but of their wives.
If Sembène’s novel is set in the colonial period, retrospectively examin-
ing the great workers’ insurgencies of the 1940s in search of future pros-
pects of anti-colonial liberation, Masekela’s “Stimela” was first recorded in
1973, the same year of the mass strikes in Durban, when 100,000 African
workers came out in protest against the racist legislation and denial of
human and socio-economic rights at the heart of the apartheid regime:
from pass laws, forced removals and the refusal of the right to organize, to
the low wages and hardships of back-breaking migrant labour. In the first
large-scale protest since the political “stay at home” of the 1950s, Durban
workers sang and marched to make their demands heard. The insurgent
music of Masekela’s “Stimela” could thus be understand as both engen-
dered by and engendering the spirit of rebellion suffusing this watershed
moment, which re-opened the possibility of collective struggle not only in
the nationalist context of the apartheid regime, but against the larger con-
text of capitalist extraction on the continent. As such both cultural pro-
ductions invite interpretation in light of Jennifer Wenzel’s call for
counter-history that recognizes the “anti-apartheid struggle as a war
waged on—and for ENERGY,” in which power is understood in “two
senses”: power as energy and power as the empowerment of the people
through collective action (Wenzel 2017: 2–3).
and Asia. A vast divide characterizes energy access; in the simplest terms
there are those who expect to be ever on the grid and those who have
lived entire lives being off the grid. These are fundamentally different
encounters with energy” (Petrocultures Research Group 2016: 58). If, as
Rebecca Solnit argues, climate change would better be called “climate
violence” (Solnit 2014, n.pg.), then Dillon’s artwork evokes not only the
spectacular violence of the Marikana massacre, but the “slow violence” of
climate injustice (Nixon 2011). Yet one of the formal limitations of the
photograph’s emphasis on landscape is its depiction of frozen or static
time—the absence of motion, except for that of the lightning is of course
a political critique in itself—but the photograph can offer only its negative
critique of commodity-form and value; there is no intimation of an
otherwise.
So too in Mujila’s twenty-first-century novel Tram 83, with which I
opened the essay and to which I now return, is there no exit from the
violence of neoliberal capitalism, only the resourcefulness of language, an
audiopolitics of formal experimentation with the intermediality of music
and language—what Mujila calls “noise engineered.” This draws both on
local musical cultures and on wider traditions of African music but is unac-
companied by the potential for solidarity.
Mujila’s Tram 83 is a quintessential boom fiction, churning with the
aesthetics of the neoliberal mineral and metal rush in the Congo, describ-
ing the whole of the city as organized around the regime of extractivism:
“Administrative offices, banking, postal services, all sprang up around
twelve miles away. … In the beginning the stone and the stone, the rail-
roads, and the railroads and the arrival of men of diverse nationalities
speaking the same dialect of sex and coltan” (Mujila 2015: 24). The nar-
ration is prone to breathless lists, which try to capture an excessive and
teeming totality through litanies (rather than point of view characters or
plot, indeed, it is barely plotted at all), in a great forward-rush of language
and sound, whose noise self-consciously imitates the polyphonies and
polyrhythmic syncopations of African vernacular musics, both eulogizing
and refiguring the musical form of rumba.
The fictional “City-State” in the novel is the semiperipheral zone
where migrants and jobbers from the hinterland congregate to sell their
labour to the visiting bosses and managers from Northern cores and to
translate raw materials from the mines into commodities. At the same
time, it is the site of cultural mixing and innovation, as in the exuberant
polyphony of the Tram 83 music hall and hooker club where the novel’s
TRAINS, STONE, AND ENERGETICS: AFRICAN RESOURCE CULTURE… 253
primary action is set, literally situated at the train juncture where lines
meet, and where musical forms and oral culture from across the African
continent and diaspora collide and are re-mixed. A microcosm of the social
life of the City-State, the music hall is where all the workers, miners, and
diggers, “their bodies stiffened with radioactivity” (Mujila 2015: 4), con-
gregate together with the unemployed, the hustlers, the brokers, and the
bosses and “tourists.” The latter is Mujila’s sarcastic term for the represen-
tatives of transnational corporations, humanitarian NGOs, and foreign
state-owned mining concessions. Chinese and Brazilian bosses and work-
ers populate the bar alongside European and American elites and African
workers from across the continent, an example of the way representations
of non-European mining transnationals and South-South development
are beginning to be invoked in African resource fictions.
Mujila’s Tram 83 is motific in its organization, repeating refrains, many
of which invoke the spectre of the railway as symbol of the cyclical drain-
ing of the continent and the enduring inequities of capitalist civilization;
the very repetition of the motifs is both redolent of the musical riffs of jazz
improvisation and of the recurrent periodicity of boom and bust cycles. As
the miners lament in chorus, “We are of the railroad civilization” (Mujila
2015: 25). The opening two pages foreground one of the most prominent
of these motifs, “the railroad built by Stanley,” describing the decaying
colonial infrastructure of the train station next to the music club:
The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished
metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called
to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy
spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by
men of all generations and nationalities combined. […] According to the
fickle but ever-recurring legend, the seeds of all resistance movements, all
wars of liberation, sprouted at the station, between two locomotives. As if
that weren’t enough, the same legends claims that the building of the rail-
road resulted in numerous deaths attributed to tropical disease, technical
blunders, the poor working conditions imposed by the colonial authori-
ties—in short, all the usual clichés. (Mujila 2015: 1–2)
The locomotive here is dialectical, invoking both the long history of impe-
rialist exploitation and the resistance movements which arose in opposi-
tion to it, but through the jaded eyes of political disillusion, in which both
associations have taken on the dimensions of weary cliché. The political
exuberance of a text such as God’s Bits of Wood is wholly lacking here.
254 S. DECKARD
who occasionally resorts to selling sex in order to keep her financial inde-
pendence, and who becomes radicalized in the course of the strike.
The foreclosure of the book’s political horizons and its turn to pyro-
technical experimentation and mimicry of musical rhapsody as a kind of
aesthetic compensation can partly be understood as mediating the political
paralysis of neoliberal presentism. This can be partly understood as corre-
sponding to the particular difficulties of mobilizing mass workers’ strikes
under new regimes of extraction, as Timothy Mitchell has shown in his
study of the energy politics of “carbon democracy” and the transition
from coal to oil (Mitchell 2011). The democratic potential to shut down
the totality of social operations by stopping the railway that we see in God’s
Bits of Wood can no longer be achieved as easily in the age of pipelines,
containerization, jet-engines, and motorway networks. Furthermore,
Mujila’s text emerges in a phase of the neoliberal world-system where
peripheral states are economically and politically dominated by capitalist
cores and international governance networks, and where existing forms of
collective solidarity (including unions, left political parties, and communi-
ties) have systematically been eroded as independent self-organized enti-
ties. This fragmentation has been particularly intense in the DR Congo
after decades of civil war, and more than half a century of Euro-American
interference in their governance, beginning with the assassination of
Lumumba, and it is therefore unsurprising that Congolese resource fic-
tions by contemporary authors such as Mujila, Alain Mabanckou, and Koli
Jean Bofane, among others should be marked by a particular extremity of
form and satirical tone corresponding to the intensity of the violence in
both Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville.
Yet, for all this, the novel’s lack of political horizons and profound
disillusion with the failures of revolutionary liberation movements—as
epitomized by the character Requiem, a Marxist turned free market ideo-
logue, gun runner, and hustler—serve to occlude the existence of ongo-
ing resistance in the Congo. Congolese women in particular have been at
the fore of multiple forms of protest and collective political action in real
life. These include the demands of precarious artisanal female miners for
better pay, and the climate action plans of female subsistence farmers to
resist mega-dams and mines and to replant trees and vegetation in defor-
ested areas, articulating solidarity with indigenous women’s movements
in Latin America that emphasize the correlation between gender violence
and environmental crisis. Mujila’s novel offers a scathing critique of neo-
liberal domination, but cannot conceive of experiments in self-determination,
256 S. DECKARD
beyond the linguistic and cultural polyphony of its narration. Even that is
self-consciously framed as already-commodified and distorted by the
expectations of the world-literary market, as when Lucien constantly
warps and rewrites his “locomotive stage-tale” to fit the ever more ludi-
crous demands of his Parisian agent for reified depictions of “Africa,” a
wry commentary on the market conditions of the African literary field, in
which literary works are often disseminated and developed for readerships
outside Africa and subjected to the ideological and aesthetic dispositions
of “a transnational coterie of editors, writers, prize judges, event organiz-
ers, and workshop instructors” (Brouillette 2017, n.pg.).
Resource Futures
If the tendency of many contemporary left-wing cultural critics is to
“accentuate categorisations of domination to the detriment of new ways
of talking about liberation” (Murray 2016: 353), then it is useful to
heed John Holloway’s exhortation that we seek to analyse capitalism
not primarily in terms of domination, but rather “from the perspective
of its crisis, its contradiction,” its cracks that can be levered open
through experiments in self-determination (Holloway 2010: 9). In this
spirit, I want to conclude with the utopian experiment of Afro-diasporic
speculative fiction writer Nisi Shawl’s novel Everfair (2016), one final
tale of steam and stone set in the Congo, which attempts to circumnavi-
gate the formal tendency towards conflict dystopia in the portrayal of
late neoliberal extractivism by offering a counterfactual history of the
Congo.
Everfair is a Neo-Victorian novel that subverts the steampunk genre to
deconstruct the white supremacist, heteronormative, and classist ideolo-
gies of the genres of imperialist romance and adventure. It is a speculative
experiment in imagining an alternative history in which Belgium’s cata-
strophic colonization of the Congo is halted and reversed through collec-
tive, armed resistance. African-American missionaries and Fabian Socialists
from Great Britain together purchase land from King Leopold II to create
a utopian haven, Everfair, for native populations of the Congo fleeing the
‘rubber terror,’ as well as escaped slaves returning from the Americas, and
various immigrants and traders from East Asia, including the Chinese
inventor Ho Lin-Huang, imagined as ally rather than antagonist. The
inhabitants of Everfair subsequently join forces with King Mwenda and
Queen Josina, who are waging a guerrilla war against Leopold’s forces in
TRAINS, STONE, AND ENERGETICS: AFRICAN RESOURCE CULTURE… 257
the occupied territories, and eventually liberate the whole of the Congo.
The narrative foregrounds the point of view of a whole transnational range
of characters, from the Congo, China, France, the United Kingdom, and
the United States. In contrast to Mujila’s novel, it is especially rich in its
characterization of women, portraying cross-racial and queer relationships
between central protagonists, Daisy, a white British Fabian, and Lisette, of
mixed Belgian and African heritage.
In this novel, the first appearance of the steam-train is to the African-
American missionary Thomas (who later converts to become a priest dedi-
cated to an African deity, exchanging his charismatic evangelical theology
for animism), carrying European traders and agents of Leopold:
Four cars comprised the steam train’s entire length. Their iron fuselages had
been painted a brilliant yellow with gaudy red, blue, and green trim. This
jaunty coloring and the fortuitous semblance of a face in the alignment of
their doors and windows lent the cars a charming air much like the illustra-
tion in a children’s book. Thomas at first had succumbed to this charm and
to the undeniable romance of such a small machine so beautifully built—
until his peregrinations brought home to him the human cost involved.
(Shawl 2016, n.pg.)
As perceived by Thomas, the train is not invested with the heroic qualities
of technological mastery and the European “civilizing mission” which it is
more often attributed in imperialist adventure stories and their steampunk
reboots. Instead, it is provincialized by his gaze, rendered curiously paro-
chial, even as its seeming charm belies the extreme socio-ecological vio-
lence of the ivory and rubber extraction which it enables.
The second significant encounter with the steam locomotive is when
Lisette leaves Belgium for the first time:
This erotics of the masculinized Mighty Engine is more typical of the ste-
ampunk lauding of technological power, a feminized version of “locomo-
tive consciousness” with an orientalist undercurrent, but with the crucial
difference that it is celebrated through a queer female gaze not as an
instrument of imperial conquest, but rather as a technic whose coal/
steam-powered energetics seems to offer a radical new mobility that will
enable her to burst out of the confines of her gender and race position
within Brussels, the rotten centre of empire. This locomotive encounter is
also the first signifier of Lisette’s scientific vocation as an engineer, which
she is unable to fulfil in Victorian society, until she reaches Everfair and
avails of its utopian freedom to develop all of her human capacities.
Elsewhere, Lisette recalls her steam-power bicycle as having offered a
remarkably erotic kinetics of freedom, but after her encounter with
Congolese survivors of the “rubber terror,” she recognizes that its very
production relied on relations of exploitation:
She recalled the bicycle she’d ridden so far, so recklessly as a girl: it had been
her friend, her freedom, its black frame and hard rubber tires vital and alive.
[…] [P]robably the rubber forming her friend’s tires had originated here,
harvested in fear and misery by the likes of Mr. Mkoi or Yoka. (Shawl 2016,
n.pg.)
which power capitalist modernity. This is not dissimilar from the Marvel
comics fantasy of the mythical kingdom of Wakanda ruled by T’Challa,
the Black Panther, whose technological capacities and aesthetic innova-
tions far outshine those of Euro-America, but whose very Afro-politanism
is dependent on the giant, inexhaustible mound of priceless vibranium at
the centre of the kingdom: a myth of the endless “free gifts” of nature if
ever there were one. Everfair thus poses a central question for the futu-
rity of resource sovereignty and anti-extractivist movements in our con-
temporary moment. If sovereignty and autonomy are gained over
resources, what revolutionary, more emancipatory organizations of
human and extra-human nature can be put into place, what new energet-
ics can be conceived that guarantee the diversity not only of human life
but of the rest of nature as well?
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Index1
C
Cabiya, Pedro, 79 D
Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, 244 Dancehall music, 39
Campo Alegre, 76 Dardot, Pierre, 137
Capitalocene, 7 Data colonialism, 243
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 95 Davis, Mike, 9, 134
Cardoso, 61 Dawson, Ashley, 69
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 51 de Oliveira, Francisco, 51, 54
Caribbean (Trinidad), 117 de Onís, Catalina M., 72
Caribbean Basin Initiative, 25, 53 Deckard, Sharae, 29, 121
Carmody, Pádraig, 240 Decolonization, 22, 23, 247, 254
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 100 Democratic Republic of Congo, 242
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 26 Denning, Michael, 11, 40, 132, 138,
Chauhan, Anuja, 113, 124 244, 246, 248
Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo, 104 Depersonalization, 14, 132, 133
Cheap food, 85 Depression, 14, 195, 203
Chiapello, Ève, 136 Derivatives, 34–40
Chicago School, 24 Derivative wars, 182, 187
Class-differentiated, 10 Desai, Radhika, 180
Classes, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 14, 23, 25, Dictatorship in Brazil, 51
40–42, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, Disability, 205, 259
62, 66, 73, 75, 96–98, 101, 103, Discontent, 15
114, 125, 133, 134, 137, 138, Dominican Republic, 76, 77
141, 163, 164, 170, 188, 247 Drug War, 25, 30, 103
Clinton, Bill, 33, 41 Duménil, Gérard, 1, 41, 42, 56,
Coke, Christopher “Dudus,” 51 163
Coke, Lester, 50 Dunaway, Wilma, 8
Colander, David, 18 Durban, 250
Colón Reyes, Linda I., 84 Dystopia, 83, 87, 240, 244, 250–256
INDEX 265
Human-as-waste, 86 L
Hurricane Maria, 69, 73, 87 Labrousse cycle, 31
Landreth, Harry, 18
Lane, Rose Wilder, 19
I Latin America, 22
Ianni, Octavio, 54 Laval, Christian, 137
Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 105 Lavín, Ana María Fuster, 79
India, 113, 117, 122, 128 Lawson, Catherine, 20
Indignados, 34 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 167
Iraq, 182 Lenin, Vladimir, 113
Iraq War, 117 Lévy, Dominique, 1, 41, 42, 56, 163
Isar, Yudhishthir Raj, 160 Lewis, Michael, 189
Lewis, Rupert, 53
Lins, Paulo, 49–66
J Lippman, Walter, 97
Jamaica, 23, 24 Long spiral, 6, 29
Jamaican sound system, 38 Lower-class, 39, 85
James, C.L.R., 49–51 Luhnow, Harold, 20
James, Marlon, 11, 25, 49–66 Lukács, Georg, 171, 172
Jameson, Fredric, 3, 62, 131, 142 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 60
Jelly-Schapiro, Eli, 29, 34, 135, 138,
147
Jessop, Bob, 157 M
Jones Act, 72 Mabanckou, Alain, 255
Machuki, Count, 38
Macron, E., 57
K Mais, Roger, 55, 58
Kaletsky, Anatole, 1, 32 Manley, Michael, 24, 53, 55
Kennedy, Liam, 5, 17 Marazzi, Christian, 184
Kerry Packer’s World Series, 112 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 147
Keynes, John, 35 Marsh, Dillon, 243, 250
Keynesian, 18–20, 22, 23, 25, 41, 94 Marx, Karl, 12, 27, 132, 133, 188
Keynesianism, 24, 100 Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), 114
King Leopold II, 256 Masekela, Hugh, 243, 246, 247
Kitchin cycle, 31 Massop, Claudie, 50
Klare, Michael, 241 May, Theresa, 199
Klein, Naomi (The Shock Doctrine), 1, Mbeki, Thabo, 218, 220
21, 22, 93, 215 Mda, Zakes, 228
Kondratieff cycle, 13, 31 Mendes, Alfred, 55
Kushner, Rachel, 133, 141, 146 Mental health, 14, 202, 203, 208
Kuznets cycle, 31 Mexican crisis of 1994, 94
INDEX 267
T W
Tarantino, 56 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 7, 8, 13, 14
Tardan, Isabel, 101 Warne, Shane, 115
Tarshis, Lorie, 19 War on Drugs, 95, 102, 106
Tax Reform Act of 1976, 70 Warwick Research Collective (WReC),
Tendulkar, Sachin, 115 7, 28, 71, 86, 112
Thatcher, Margaret, 33 Washington Consensus, 65
INDEX 269
Waste, 76 Y
Wenzel, Jennifer, 242, 250 Yanagihara, Hanya, 195
Westall, Claire, 240 Yates, Michelle, 76
Williams, Raymond, 43
Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 132
Working-class, 38 Z
World-culture, 29 Zaid, Gabriel, 99
World Cups, 113, 124 Zaluar, Alba, 59
World-ecology, 7, 25, 71, 239, 243, Zapatismo, 44
251 Zapatista, 102, 104
World-literature, 7 Zapatista uprising, 95
WReC, see Warwick Research Zavala, Oswaldo, 102
Collective Žižek, Slavoj, 103
Wright, Richard, 65 Zombie, 80
Wynter, Sylvia, 83 Zombie Island, 82