Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America Edited by J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf 40 Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America Edited by J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Ina Habermann Volume 40 Editorial Board (2020-23): Indira Ghose (University of Fribourg) Martin Hilpert (University of Neuchâtel) John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh) Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern) Martin Leer (University of Geneva) Jesse Ramírez (University of St Gallen) Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle) Philipp Schweighauser (University of Basel) Kirsten Stirling (University of Lausanne) Olga Timofeeva (University of Zurich) Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America Edited by J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf Umschlagabbildung und Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich Aquatinta: Samuel William Fores, ca. 1800 (Public Domain) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. © 2021 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-8502-8 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9502-7 (ePDF) www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® Table of Contents J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf (St. Gallen) Introduction: The Work of Work 5 Elizabeth Kovach (Giessen) Towards a Framework for Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Conditions, Values, and Emotions Related to Work 17 Fabian Eggers (Berlin) “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace: The Pale King’s Emotional Economy 35 Simon Trüb (Basel) The Tragedy of Being-Precarious in Contemporary American Drama 53 Anne M. Mulhall (Dublin) Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 75 Juliane Strätz (Mannheim) Revolt Through Passivity? Getting High and Staying in with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation 99 Christian Hänggi (Basel) Marx v. Bezos: South Park’s First Labor Episodes 121 Johannes Fehrle (Basel) Working the People, Working the Earth: The Exploitation of Humans and the Environment in North American Slave Narratives 141 Salem Elzway (Ann Arbor) Technoliberal Machines: Robotic Work(ers) from Science Fiction to Assembly Line 159 Rebekka Rohleder (Flensburg) “Happy People at Work”: Work Society’s Other Spaces in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last 187 Notes on Contributors 205 Index of Names 209 General Editor’s Preface SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE. Non-symposium volumes usually have as their starting point papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE, in particular conferences of SANAS, the Swiss Association for North American Studies and SAMEMES, the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic, and - broadly - cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL, including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Professor Ina Habermann, University of Basel, Department of English, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland; e-mail: ina.habermann@unibas.ch. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE, in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at www.saute.ch. Ina Habermann Introduction The Work of Work J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf When the speaker in Philip Levine’s poem “What Work Is” says that everyone old enough to read a poem knows about work, he means that work is a universal condition. Some people work more often than others, or more intensely, or under more desirable circumstances, or for better pay, but we all do it. You might be working right now. If you are reading an academic volume on work, you know what work is. Yet like all fundamental categories, work grows in complexity as we examine it more closely. The terms “work,” “labor,” “effort,” “toil,” “job,” “employment,” “occupation,” “profession,” “vocation,” and “calling” form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Language must labor to grasp the connections between cooking a Big Mac and writing a novel, lifting a box in a warehouse and making beds at a hotel, professing and caring for children, hammering and tweeting. As we meditate on the breadth and depth of work, we may find ourselves in the position of the exasperated interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues who start out confidently knowing what a concept means, then quickly confess their ignorance after trying to explain it. Conversely, can we say what work is not? All of the activities gathered under the term “work” share the fact that they are, well, kinds of activity. Everything that lives, works. According to one of North America’s greatest working-class intellectuals, Harry Braverman, 1 “all forms of life sustain themselves on their natural environment” (31). Yet for Braverman— 1 A child of the Depression, Braverman worked as a coppersmith, pipefitter, and steel worker before becoming a publisher and editor in the 1950s. J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf 6 and for Karl Marx, his main intellectual inspiration—work is more than appropriation. Work begins when life transforms an environment: “to seize upon the materials of nature ready made is not work; work is an activity that alters these materials from their natural state to improve their usefulness” (31). This definition is similar to the biologist’s and the physicist’s view that energy is the capacity to work and that work is in turn the expenditure of energy. One reason for the resemblance is that Marx’s understanding of work was influenced by the natural science concept of Stoffwechsel (metabolism) (see Fehrle, this volume) and by thermodynamics. But approaching work and life with such wide latitude can become tautological. A life form is alive insofar as it uses energy to do something to something else, and this activity is what makes the life form alive. In a sense, work is difficult to think about for the same reason that fish cannot think about water: there is too much of it; it is everywhere; it is everything. Maybe only Gertrude Stein can define work: work is work is work. In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; rev. 1983), Raymond Williams agrees that “work” is “our most general word for doing something,” “activity and effort or achievement,” and the outcome of such activity, the thing done (266). The word’s “range of applications,” Williams observes, “has of course been enormous” (266). Apart from being the most general way to talk about doing things and the results of doing things, “work” partially shares the painful connotations of its cousin, “labor.” If work is not play, or is even the opposite of play, it is because work is laborious—a burden and curse. These associations are deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian societies. Labor is what Adam and Eve were condemned to do when they were expelled from Eden: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Gen 3: 19). Eve’s distinct punishment, to experience excruciating pain during childbirth, explains why delivery is called “labor.” The Italian travaglio, the French travail, and the Spanish trabajo have similar connotations of pain and derive from the Latin tripalium, an instrument used to torture slaves (Komlosy ch. 3). 2 When today’s prophets of automation proclaim that new technologies will soon liberate us from work, they assume that work—but not theirs, of course—remains a form of torture befitting a slave (see Elzway, this volume). Literature and the arts are also a kind of work. We speak of “artwork,” “the work of art,” and “the collected works of Twain.” But on the whole, 2 The English “travail” shares this etymology but is more literary and refers more broadly to “troubles.” Introduction 7 North American literary and cultural production is not nearly as interested in work as in love, crime, revenge, friendship, sex, or war, for example. Relatively few novels, poems, films, television shows, or plays are set in workplaces, and when they are, they rarely devote much of their attention to actual work. Perhaps this is because literary-cultural work is commonly understood to be the opposite of “work” as burdensome effort—not a curse but a creative, free, pleasurable, and honorable activity (Komlosy ch. 3). Braverman and Marx thought of work in this way when they dignified humans’ intentional, purposive work over animal instinct (Braverman 33-37). Hannah Arendt also distinguished work, which contributes to the durability of the world, from labor, which consumes it (79- 174). Understood in this way, work begins where labor ends; work as freedom transforms and transcends labor as necessity. Besides, did anyone really watch the sitcom The Office (2005-2013) for the rare moments when the characters were shown doing their actual work, selling paper? Who wants to read chapter upon chapter about driving a bus or ringing up customers at a cash register after spending several hours driving a bus or operating a register? Even Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful film Paterson (2016), about a bus driver/ poet, only occasionally shows him driving his bus. Bus driving points to a crucial historical qualification in Williams’s entry on “work” in Keywords. Much of what we now habitually call “work” or “labor” is a specific form of life-sustaining activity, namely, wage labor. While wage labor has existed since antiquity—soldiers are some of the oldest wage laborers—its pervasiveness is an effect of the relatively recent emergence and planetary dominance of capitalism. Once associated with temporary, irregular work, “job” now stands in for “normal employment” (267). We should understand this normality to refer not to a fixed status— not everyone has a job—but rather to a particular kind of compulsion to try to get a job. Under capitalist social relations of work, we not only have the opportunity to sell our capacity to work on the labor market in exchange for wages, which we again exchange in the market for life-sustaining goods and services. Rather, the market functions as an imperative to sell labor power (Wood 6-7), especially in market fundamentalist societies that have dismantled social welfare and can offer few ways to live in dignity without wages—if not one’s own then someone else’s. In the United States, jobs are the primary way to secure food and shelter, access to health care, and the possibility of provision in old age. Thus, jobs are not strictly economic categories. The fact that the market determines so many aspects of people’s lives, and that most of us are expected to accept this condition and spend the greater portion of our J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf 8 existence trying our luck on the market, is one of the most important, if also naturalized and obscured, political features of capitalist society. The capitalist market’s imperative is why the speaker in Levine’s poem is waiting in line, in the rain, for work. His situation points to another major meaning of work: the existence of a social class composed of all— including those whose work is the work of art—who face the imperative to sell their time and abilities in the market. Work not only is, it does. As Kathi Weeks notes, “work produces not just economic goods and services but also social and political subjects” (8). Work generates not only wages for workers but also their social status and feelings of dignity. It not only locates subjects in the working class but also fuels their aspirations of class mobility. It generates “responsible” men and women and separates “productive” members of society from freeloaders, “illegals,” and others who are not “us.” The analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes determine who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call “socially reproductive labor”—the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. Tithi Bhattacharya asks provocatively: “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth of society, who then produces the worker? ” (1). Who made breakfast for Levine’s speaker? Who ironed his shirt? Whatever work is or does, its analysis must navigate between the universality of life and the specificities of history, opportunity and imperative, necessity and freedom, curse and creativity, activity and subject formation, class and nation, race and gender. Ultimately, the question of work is worth asking because it does a great deal of work. The contributions to this volume are exceptions to the general neglect of work in North American literary and cultural criticism. If we capture the nine chapters collected in this volume under one concept, we come to acknowledge that literature and related art forms, indeed, do work. This might not be news to the devotee, still we think it is inspiring and motivating to become aware of the manifold ways in which aesthetic representations are able to reveal, comment on, and question real-world conditions as well as derive future visions of our world by playing with and exploring the implications of the present. This kind of creative work is not only a helping hand in making sense of the world, but in many Introduction 9 cases, constitutes a voice of resistance to circumstances that are perceived to be harmful for both individual subjects and entire societies. The work of art thus reveals itself as a potential force able to shape the empirical world to which it relates. According to our collection, literature and germane art forms uphold a sense for human agency, which has become more relevant in times of a “24/ 7 capitalism” (Strätz, this volume). While some chapters approach the study of laboring literature from a formal perspective, others derive its pragmatic potentials from content and topic choice. However, what also becomes clear is that literature works in complex ways: neat distinctions between form and content, or for that matter, the fictional from the non-fictional world, are illusory. Literature as a “Foucauldian heterotopic space” (Rohleder, this volume) is not a counterpart to but relates to this world from which it is generated and to which it harks back in astounding variety and diversity. Our volume starts off with Elizabeth Kovach’s proposal to broaden the labor of literary criticism by presuming a work-related approach. Based on Marxist concepts, she argues that literature as a cultural product and a discursive element in society is part of both the productive base and the discursive superstructure of capitalist societies. Hence, literature should/ could also be analyzed as standing in a dialectic relationship to the social anxieties created by shifts and developments in contemporaneous modes of production. Kovach draws on studies by Cindy Weinstein, Nicholas Bromwell, and Jasper Bernes and convincingly illustrates how the work of literary criticism gains from a work-related approach. For instance, the tension between a contemporaneous mainstream taste for “deep” characters in 19 th -century narratives on the one hand, and the use of allegory and flat characters in more experimental texts on the other (e.g., Herman Melville, Edgar Alan Poe), gains plausibility if analyzed in the light of growing anxieties about machine work in a period of rampant industrialization. Yet, as Kovach shows, literature is not only conditioned by contemporaneous modes of production but also harks back to general public perceptions and norms of labor so that a work-related literary criticism can effectively describe how literature is both shaped by and actively shapes the world in which it is produced and consumed. Fabian Eggers implicitly continues Kovach’s argument. Discussing David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, he casts a critical light on the communicative mastery of the renowned author. He detects parallels between neoliberal management strategies and the narrative strategies used by Wallace to create a specific attitude in his readers. Wallace makes his readership work hard intellectually and promises them a kind of J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf 10 deferred gratification in the shape of an emotional reward—the feeling of belonging and spending intimate “quality-time” with the author when the task of understanding the text is achieved. Such an attitude is reminiscent of the Protestant work ethic, according to Eggers, including its moral dimension. Moreover, the emotional incentive to make readers “put in [ their ] own share of the linguistic work” (Wallace in McCaffery 138) is reminiscent of the emotional labor tactics of contemporary management that wants people to internalize the dictum: to “be in the company” means to act as if one “ [ is ] the company” (Hicks 118, original emphasis). Hence, Eggers’s chapter is another example of work-related criticism as proposed by Kovach. The widespread, almost unanimously positive public reception of Wallace’s oeuvre, which is unusually strongly influenced by the author’s own interpretations, may just illustrate the efficiency of contemporary emotion-directed management strategies, rather than reflect a critical or disruptive response. Simon Trüb continues to explore the work of literary criticism in a chapter about the connections between the genre of tragedy and the realworld concepts of precariousness and precarity (cf. Butler). While precariousness as the ontological vulnerability of the human condition can be matched with the concept of tragedy as an “existential homelessness” (cf. Felski), precarity in the sense of insecure access to means of survival and political representation tends to be excluded from the tragical as too mundane. Trüb argues that the exclusion of precarity from the tragic (to prevent generic trivialization) is ideologically biased because the distinction between precarity as “mundane” suffering and the more worthy, metaphysical suffering of precariousness creates social hierarchies. Such a narrow concept of the tragic justifies unequal distribution of precariousness among human beings, with the result that some are more affected by precarity than others. In contrast, if the generic concept of tragedy is applied broadly, it implies a democratization of suffering. Consequently, Trüb contends that the full impact of plays such as Topdog/ Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks and Sweat by Lynn Nottage can only be grasped if the plays are recognized as tragedies: the generic tension between fate and (limited) freedom of agency and responsibility can thus be related to the tensions between contemporary structural racism and class oppression vs. individual mistakes. Thus, the basically tragic structures of contemporary neoliberal society come to the fore. Moreover, by accepting the conceptual relatedness of precariousness and precarity, viewers are goaded towards cathartic self-reflection. They are likely to embrace the suffering displayed as a general human condition to which they themselves are also subjected; they experience solidarity and Introduction 11 empathy rather than maintaining an emotional distance and merely witnessing the suffering of the “other.” The Butlerian concepts of precariousness and precarity are, according to Anne M. Mulhall, also thematized in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women. Boyer’s prose poems particularly highlight the vulnerability and precarity of women in a world where “all human activity is reduced to economic productivity” (Mulhall, this volume). Accordingly, Mulhall approaches Boyer’s poems from a feminist perspective, yet not exclusively. She draws on Anna Cavarero’s concept of inclination, which she combines with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality. Inclination denotes our reciprocal awareness of and dependence on each other as vulnerable, fallible human beings, which is exemplarily expressed by the image of the Madonna with child. Potentiality, on the other hand, explores the meaning of “can” by establishing a space between the poles of “to be, or not to be.” As several of Boyer’s poems explicitly address the work involved in both writing and not-writing, Agamben’s concept lends itself to the exploration and extension of room for human agency, including ways of passive resistance, especially under the current neoliberal conditions. Based on close readings of several of Boyer’s poems, Mulhall suggests that Boyer examines the implications of what can be called a new paradigm of ethics: individual (masculine) rectitude and the neoliberal myth of clarity and invulnerability are contrasted with the reciprocal inclination of human beings in their fundamentally precarious condition. The latter not only serves as a feminine balancing phenomenon but offers itself as a veritable act of resistance to the harmful conditions that produce structural inequality and thus precarity. Juliane Strätz also addresses the question of passive resistance in her chapter about Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In her analysis of the novel, productive work becomes blurred with its apparent counterpart, rest, as the latter has become usurped as part of the production process by a system of “24/ 7 capitalism” (Strätz, this volume). Rest is recognized as the re-producer of the human energy needed for productive work. Moreover, an entire industry has developed around sleep and the proper way of resting successfully. As a consequence, traditional attempts to revolt and resist by refusing to work have become complicated in such a productive society: rest is bereft of its oppositional potential. In addition, consumption, another entangled factor in capitalist production, is even more difficult to refuse and thus cannot serve as a space of resistance either. By reading Moshfegh’s novel against Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and philosophical interpreters such as Slavoj Žižek, who hails Bartleby as a messiah of passive resistance, Strätz’s J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf 12 reading offers a more critical evaluation of the effectiveness of Bartlebyan passivity. Instead, she foregrounds the narrative strategy of exaggeration that lays bare the absurdities of contemporary life. In view of such absurdities, readers may be led to understand the urgency of change and thus start to actively search for new forms of effective revolt. The question of effective revolt and the role of consumption are also addressed in Christian Hänggi’s chapter. He analyzes two episodes from the long-running TV show South Park. There, for the first time, the makers of South Park suspended their usual depiction of the working class as “white trash hicks” and showed them as articulate and politically engaged “worker/ citizens” (Hänggi, this volume). According to Hänggi, rich visual and textual references nod to the long history of both American and European working-class struggles, which imply that the makers of these episodes see a structural link between the conditions of the working class in the 19 th / early 20 th centuries and in today’s late capitalism. However, Hänggi’s analysis of the episodes also suggests an awareness of differences. Today’s workers have predominantly become consumers in a consumer society (“laborers” in Arendt’s sense of the term). Consequently, companies such as Amazon (the reference is obvious) can effectively counter revolts such as strikes by banishing recalcitrant employees from the possibility of consumption. This denial has a dual effect: working-class men are humiliated and undermined in their still widely held patriarchal role as the provider of the family; more relevantly, they are deprived of their acquired identity as consumers. Hence, the efficiency of means of revolt such as strikes and traditional Marxist propaganda is ultimately questioned, but the need for alternative modes of resistance seems urgent. Otherwise, as the final image of happy but stoned people seems to suggest, a reversal to “white trash hicks” seems unavoidable. Johannes Fehrle’s chapter is also concerned with the representation of manual laborers. He addresses the pre-industrial practice of turning Black slaves into means of production by equating them with working animals that are part of nature rather than culture. By looking at slave narratives and their representation of nature in the broadest sense through a Marxist, ecocritical lens (work is “metabolism” between humans and nature), Fehrle argues that a neat distinction between “humans (as non-nature) and nature (as non-human),” which justifies both slavery and racial discrimination, is undermined. Paradoxically and tragically being means of production, Black slaves ultimately played a major part in the rise of North American capitalism. Introduction 13 While Fehrle explores the Black worker as means of production in the pre-industrial period in terms of being a part of nature, Salem Elzway analyzes the industrial Black worker as a means of production in terms of being a part of a machine, if not the machine itself. He examines the logic of automation in both science-fictional imagination and historical realization, which both associate the robot with the image of an ideal, obedient slave. Thus, on the one hand, Elzway points toward the work of literature as an inspirational force for real-world developments, and, on the other hand, toward the labor of automation in its historical context. In contrast to the ideology of technoliberalism, which believes in technical solutions for social and political problems, Elzway reveals that robots conceptualized as substitutes for slaves not only evoke racialized connotations but uncritically derive from a naturalized, (white) privileged claim that “hot, heavy and hazardous” work (Elzway, this volume), i.e., subhuman work, should be done by someone or something inferior. The question of whether and why such subhuman work is needed is never asked. Moreover, the historical practice of industrial robot work suggests that in the process of automation, workers are increasingly treated as mechanical slaves themselves, having to obey the rhythm of the machine rather than the other way round. Black workers in the U.S. are disproportionally doing such mechanical-slave jobs, which are prone to be replaced by industrial robots and create new types of subhuman work until these again are automated. Thus, Elzway holds that technoliberalism is not only a misleading ideology that reproduces rather than solves social problems, but that it also reinforces the racial divide. Disproportionately, Black workers are kept as dispirited, slave-like bodies functioning as “the appendage to the machine,” as the Marxian expression goes, until they are rendered superfluous as “a waste product of technological production” (Elzway, this volume). Rebekka Rohleder’s chapter about Margaret Atwood’s novel The Heart Goes Last closes the volume by taking up the idea of surplus population as addressed by Elzway’s text. In Atwood’s fictional text, it is not so much that automation renders Black people irrelevant, but rather that an undefined, general economic and political collapse renders most of the population superfluous, regardless of skin color. However, Atwood’s “ustopic” solution is reminiscent of the real-world practice of incarcerating “superfluous” Black people (cf. Wacquant): the fictional village of Consilience is built around and economically dependent on a prison, and in relation to the world outside, Consilience is at best a golden cage. Using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, Rohleder contends that the novel denounces not only the hypocrisy of a Protestant work ethic in J. Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf 14 times of vanishing jobs but also visions of work as an organizing principle of a future society. Moreover, she suggests that the novel itself can be perceived as a heterotopian space that is not apart from but relates to the real world. Again, the effects of (speculative) literature are addressed— not from a historical perspective, as in Elzway’s chapter, but from a conceptual angle. Literature is not only shaped by but also shapes the world. And its work not only moves along the cyclical mechanisms of classical dialectical thought, but also back and forth from a heterotopic space that offers so many more new perspectives on the world we live in. Introduction 15 References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2 nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Bhattacharya, Tithi. “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory.” Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Ed. Tithi Bhattacharya. London: Pluto, 2017. 1-20. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. 25 th anniversary ed. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Felski, Rita. “Introduction.” Rethinking Tragedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Hicks, Heather J. The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Komlosy, Andrea. Work: The Last 1,000 Years. E-book ed., Verso, 2018. Levine, Philip. “What Work Is.” What Work Is. New York: Knopf, 1991. 18. McCaffery, Larry. “An interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993): 127-50. Wacquant, Loïs. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment and Society 3. (2001): 95-134. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Social Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. New York: Verso, 2002. Towards a Framework for Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Conditions, Values, and Emotions Related to Work Elizabeth Kovach While it is routine for literary scholars to interpret texts in terms of the social, political, and economic conditions surrounding their formation, little attention has expressly been paid to work as a decisive contextual category. Yet the conditions, values, and emotions surrounding working lives at any given time in history impress upon literary expression in critical ways, and literary expression can also impact the constitution of and attitudes about waged work in return. In this chapter, I explore how the relationship between the conditions, values, and emotions surrounding work, on the one hand, and literary expression, on the other hand, can be described. I draw upon three concrete examples of literarycritical scholarship that have explored this relationship with regard to specific moments in U.S. American literary history: Cindy Weinstein’s examination of 19 th -century allegory as a site of anxiety over rapidly changing labor conditions; Nicholas Bromell’s study of antebellum writers’ concern with mental vs. physical labor; and Jasper Bernes’s identification of a link between post-WWII poetic expression and transformations in labor management from the 1970s onward. These approaches are synthesized into a framework for understanding U.S. American literary expression from a neglected perspective—in terms of conditions, values, and emotions related to work. Keywords: work ethics, work values, U.S. American literature, antebellum literature, post-Fordism Elizabeth Kovach 18 Introduction: Locating Points of Influence Between Work and Literary Expression Regardless of whether work appears as a subject matter under close scrutiny, every literary text has been shaped by specific conditions of production, cultural values, and attitudes related to work at the time of its composition. And literary expression holds the potential to affect these conditions, values, and emotions in return. This chapter is concerned with how to describe such a relationship of mutual constitution beyond mere generalizations. The most obvious resource for such an endeavor is Marxist literary theory, and I will begin by discussing the Marxist-critical concepts of base and superstructure, which offer a broad framework for understanding how work, a core component of the economic base, and literary expression, a cultural activity associated with the superstructure, are comprehended as shaping one another. These concepts are not to be misconceived as two distinct, hierarchically arranged entities. Rather, my discussion underscores how they are conceived of as enfolded into one another. Literature as a social phenomenon illustrates such entanglement, as it exists as both an economic commodity within the base and a potential (re)configuration of expressive possibility on the level of superstructure. After exploring these general premises, I turn to examples of scholarship in which constitutive relationships between U.S. American conditions, cultural values, and personal emotions related to work and literary expression have been documented. I draw upon three unique studies. First, Cindy Weinstein’s The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1995) forges a link between allegorical tales of the time and the culture’s angst surrounding mechanized labor. Second, Nicholas K. Bromell’s By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (1993) discusses how writing first became professionalized and appeared as a subject of self-reflection in relation to broader transformations in work and social class within literary texts of the antebellum period. Third, Jasper Bernes’s The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017) suggests that avant-garde art and writing in the U.S. of the 1950s and 60s was not only formed in relation to labor conditions of the time, but that it also paved the way for political critiques of and an eventual transformation of these conditions. These studies identify different vectors of influence. Weinstein discusses how cultural anxieties related to work influenced literary expression. Bromell focuses on how work as the subject matter of literature impacts the work of its very writing. And Bernes traces a path in which literary expression Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 19 affected management practices and workplace cultures. I conclude by naming three points of influence as a framework for conducting further research on the complex relationship between conditions, values, and emotions surrounding work and literary expression. Considering Work and Literary Expression in Terms of Base and Superstructure From a Marxist-critical perspective, it is generally accepted that the forms of work that exist at a given historical time and place play a role in the shape and character of literary expression. Such influence is never direct, but a fundamental premise of Marxist thought is that the economic “base,” which in capitalism includes the activities of and social relations formed by waged work, is a horizon in relation to which a “superstructure” consisting of political, legal, ideological, and cultural activities emerges. 1 Marx describes this relationship in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (7) as one in which “ [ t ] he mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.” The “general process” through which social consciousness arises is thus one that is vitally shaped by the conditions of economic production at any given place and time. Literature is one among many expressive forms of social consciousness, or what Terry Eagleton has called the “ideology of the age,” which is always contingent upon the economy’s state and stage of development (Marxism and Literary Criticism 6). The base (which includes work) and superstructure (which includes literary expression) emerge in tandem with one another in a relationship of mutual conditioning. It would be too simple to say that literature can be deciphered through the lens of economic relations. Such an assumption distorts Marx’s characterization of the base-superstructure relation, in which the paths of influence flow back and forth rather than merely in one direction. Raymond Williams has for this reason dissuaded from using the terms base and superstructure altogether to avoid thinking about two distinct fields. Williams instead favors the notion of “overdetermination,” the “determination by multiple factors” to explain economic and sociocultural phenomena (Marxism and Literature 83). Literary and other forms 1 The proceeding points related to the notions of “base” and “superstructure” are a summary of those made in my article “Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Ben Lerner’s 10: 04” (see Kovach). Elizabeth Kovach 20 of artistic and social expression do not merely reflect economic relations but can also actively shape these relations in their entangled emergence. From this Marxist-critical perspective, writers of literature do not create their work in a void but are rather “producers,” a term that Eagleton borrows from Walter Benjamin’s talk “The Author as Producer” delivered in 1934 at the Paris Institute for the Study of Fascism. Such a name emphasizes the author as “a worker rooted in a particular history with particular materials at his disposal” (Eagleton 64). In The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (57), Daniel Hartley offers a similar term: that of the author as “configurer,” whose “labour is determined and determinate, since it is limited both by the type of social content available and the sedimented paradigms which the configurer inherits from the tradition.” The author works with historically determined “content available” and “sedimented paradigms” that are inextricable from the economic forces of their times. The base/ superstructure relation, as well as the notion of the writer as a producer, offer a set of premises for thinking about the relationship between conditions, values, and emotions surrounding work and literary expression. For one thing, the premise of base and superstructure in Marxist theory is that the forms of work that exist at a given historical moment and the values surrounding them play a role in delimiting processes of literary configuration. This is to say that all kinds of work within a given economy and the work of writing are, from a Marxist standpoint, inherently tied to one another, even in literary texts that do not explicitly deal with work on a thematic level. Secondly, the writer acts both as a worker in the sense of being someone who, if working within the publishing industry, produces commodities with market value, and as a configurer who potentially impacts thought, expression, and action. In the latter role, the work of writing does not designate waged labor but rather work in terms of intellectual contribution and the reinforcement or disruption of prevalent ideologies—the manifold social and political potentials of literary configuration. Literary-Critical Studies of the Relationship Between Work and Literary Expression The Marxist-theoretical premises sketched above establish a general framework for thinking about the relationship between work and literature as well as the salaried and figurative meanings of what could be called “the work of writing.” For Marxist literary critics, these premises Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 21 are meant to apply to all forms of literary expression and to function as lenses through which literary analysis takes place. When we are confronted with literary texts that overtly thematize the activities, emotions, and values surrounding specific forms of work, however, such premises are not merely applicable. Rather, they are engrained within and expressed by the literary texts themselves. This is a dynamic that Weinstein addresses in her book The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Focusing primarily on the work and reception of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams, Weinstein forges a link between allegorical tales of the time and the culture’s angst surrounding mechanized labor (5), contending that allegorical figures that displayed one-dimensional “flatness” in terms of character tapped into anxieties related to “changing relations between labor and agency” (6). Weinstein positions allegory as a literary form that was configured in relation to the horizon of discourses surrounding work. One example Weinstein provides is the character John A. B. C. Smith of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man That Was Used Up” (1839), who fascinates the story’s narrator for his gentlemanliness and flawless physical appearance: “There was a primness, not to say stiffness, in his carriage—a degree of measured and, if I may so express it, of rectangular precision attending his every movement” (81). In his first encounter with Smith, the narrator finds that Smith is only interested in discussing one subject, namely, “the rapid march of mechanical invention. Indeed, lead him where I would, this was a point to which he invariably came back” (Poe 82). Haunted by the uncanny degree of perfection that Smith displays, the narrator makes efforts to better understand the man. He ultimately learns that Smith’s body had been mangled in a battle with Native Americans, and virtually all of his component parts—hair, scalp, teeth, tongue, chest, and appendages—have been manufactured and screwed into place. As a perverse form of “self-made” man who has purchased his own body parts, Smith is “a product of labor in a market economy,” a mechanized man made by an industry and society built on the destruction of native peoples and territory (Weinstein 1). As Weinstein demonstrates throughout the course of her book, Smith is just one of many allegorical characters of the time who “registered a critical cultural moment in which relations between labor, bodies, and agency were being (re)invented, renegotiated, and reproduced” (10). Such characters mirrored what people feared about these changing relations: loss of agency within the market economy and the prospect that new divisions in labor would produce mechanized lives marked by flat, undeveloped, and unfulfilled Elizabeth Kovach 22 character. Weinstein’s study thus situates 19 th -century allegory as a literary form whose development stood in direct relation to conditions and emotions surrounding working lives within the industrializing economy. The use of a specific literary device, that of allegory, is attendant to historical conditions and emotions surrounding work. Weinstein also cites a wealth of reviews that praised literary works that did not employ allegory, succeeded in thorough “development of character,” and were thus “insulated from difficult questions having to do with labor and character” (32-33). Flat allegorical characters such as Poe’s John A. B. C. Smith, on the other hand, were largely disdained by critics for raising “many of the most difficult and challenging issues being faced by 19 th -century Americans: the problematic status of agency, the reconstruction of the body [ through mechanized labor ] , and the changing nature of work” (Weinstein 42). Allegorical characters inflict[ed] severe damage on one of that culture’s most powerful organizing myths—the work ethic. […] They suggested that work, far from inspiring laborers to greater economic and moral heights, was merely an exercise in mechanical repetition that had a corrosive effect on the work ethic’s fundamental belief in individual progress through work. (Weinstein 10) Weinstein’s research on 19 th -century allegory thus also draws a link between work ethics of the time and the reception of a specific literary form. That a literary device such as allegory conjured emotions surrounding changing working conditions of the time offers a powerful instance in which work and the values and ethics surrounding it play vital roles in configuring specific forms and styles of literary expression. In addition to her claims about 19 th -century allegory as “a literary mode that foregrounded its relation to labor” in terms of characters personifying the costs of new work conditions, Weinstein observes “authorial signs which made visible the author’s work of representation” (5). In other words, she finds that not just “the allegory of labor” but also the “labor of allegory” played a significant role in the way literary expression functioned as a discourse about work (Weinstein 5). The “labor of allegory” refers to both stylistic markers of strain on the part of the author to find the right modes and styles of expression and the “labor” required of readers when confronted by complex, difficult texts that are laborious to read. Weinstein quotes a critical review of Melville’s adventure novel Mardi (1849) to illustrate this kind of labor and its reception. The reviewer states that in Mardi one finds “an effort constantly at fine writing, [ and ] a sacrifice of natural ease to artificial witticism” (qtd. in Weinstein 13). This type of criticism against works of Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 23 literature that did not exhibit “natural ease” was, according to Weinstein’s findings, prevalent in the mid-19 th century: “literary reviews of the period [ … ] often valorized those texts that most successfully camouflaged the labor that went into their making” (32). A text like Mardi, with its fragmented structure and philosophical forays, did little to mask the author’s own “effort.” As Weinstein demonstrates, the majority of 19 th -century critics championed literature that masked signs of work and enabled unstrained reading experiences precisely because of fears and anxieties surrounding work at the time. Their critiques also stemmed in part from preconceived notions about the role that literature should play in life. One such notion was that reading literature should be a form of leisure—an escape from rather than confrontation with discourses and experiences of work. It was precisely during the second half of the 19 th century that leisure developed both as a concept and industry in its own right. Divisions in labor and strenuous conditions in factories posed major challenges to a work ethic driven by the idea that the workplace was a realm in which one could develop and fulfill one’s character, skills, and potential. In response, leisure took on much greater significance. It was broadly encouraged by employers to promote not just workers’ well-being and productivity but to also, as Weinstein claims, “fulfill those ideological duties that could no longer be effectively administered by work” (14). The disdain of critics for characters like John A. B. C. Smith and the arduous prose of Melville stemmed from what these forms exposed and critiqued in relation to work. As Weinstein puts it, “ [ t ] he developing literary marketplace was formulating an aesthetic ideology in keeping with the ideology of the marketplace”—an ideology that favored the erasure rather than display of signs of work (33). I would stress, however, that it is unlikely that Poe and Melville inadvertently failed to meet the aesthetic proclivities of the critical mainstream. Rather, these authors formulated their fictions in ways that purposefully conflicted with the “aesthetic ideology” of the time. Presenting flat figures as allegories for the consequences of new working conditions and constructing difficult prose that put the work of the author on display and required effort on the part of readers were ideological statements in their own rights. This idea relates to an argument presented by Bromell, whose study of antebellum fictions of work identifies a dialectical relationship between writing about work and the work of writing. In his book, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America, Bromell, like Weinstein, covers a period of U.S. American history, 1830-1860, during which a “rapidly industrializing economy was dramatically changing the nature of Elizabeth Kovach 24 work many persons performed” (18). The economy produced a need for cash to buy goods, which led people to stop producing items for their own household use and sell them on the market instead. New England artisans and farm owners left their workshops and fields to become wage earners. Young women also left farms to meet the rising demand for mill workers. All of these economic developments “increased demand for legal, financial, and technical expertise, which led to the rapid rise of professions and a professional class” (Bromell 18). The expansion of markets also generated “wider demand for the printed word and [ made ] it possible for men and women who did not have an independent means to write for a living” (Bromell 18). It was thus at this moment in U.S. history that the figure of writer as a waged professional worker in Marx’s sense came into full being. This means that writing as a profession developed just as many other forms of professional work were created, and just as the activities and very meaning of work underwent drastic change across socio-economic classes. These revolutions in work forged new class divisions. Industrialization and an ever-expanding global market diminished populations of middleclass artisans, craftsmen, and farming communities, while the number of manual, waged factory workers surged. At the same time, the rise of a professional, white-collar class generated various new forms of mental labor. Bromell thus finds that “during the antebellum period work was understood primarily by way of a distinction between manual and mental labor, which in turn rested upon an assumed dichotomy of mind (and soul) and body” (7). This growing distinction was a source of anxiety that motivated various social movements and experiments amongst intellectuals. In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau searches for a way of living that unites manual with mental labor, body and mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1841 lecture “Man the Reformer,” delivered to the Mechanic Apprentices’ Library Association of Boston, discusses the importance of mental laborers’ sensitivity to and experience of manual labor, stating with regard to writers of literature: “Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker [ the writer ] abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written” (5). 2 Several utopian communities inspired by the ideas of 2 Emerson’s concern over the increasingly stark division between mental and manual labor is most fundamentally a concern about the exploitative effects of global capital: “[…] it is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us from the West Indies; […] no article passes into our ships Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 25 French philosopher Charles Fourier pursued unions between mental and physical exertion, intellectual and material production. Among these were Brook Farm, founded in Massachusetts in 1841, of which Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member. Hawthorne chronicled the community’s failure to supplement the demands of a self-sustaining farm with intellectual pursuits in a fictional account of his experience, The Blithedale Romance (1852). In 1830s New York, there was even an active Society for the Promotion of Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, whose First Annual Report included accounts of how “manual labor could help those who worked with their minds live better lives and think better thoughts” (Bromell 16). In each of these examples, we find white, middle-class intellectuals and writers acutely concerned with and interested in actively overriding their distance from a manual-laboring class. Such distance between the mental and manual laboring classes induced anxiety amongst those on the side of accumulation in large part because of the exploitations that such divisions of labor entailed. Melville’s short stories “Bartleby” (1853) and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), as Bromell points out, are iconic portrayals of such anxieties surrounding the labor exploitations and class divisions that new kinds of work forged. Bartleby’s work as a copyist— the work of writing devoid of intellectual engagement—turns him into a robot-like being, and his refusal to work exposes the dependency of his employer, a lawyer, on him. In “Tartarus,” a middle-class business owner decides to visit a paper mill to see where the envelopes, upon which his business had become increasingly dependent, are produced. He is shaken by the misery readable in the pale faces of row upon row of laboring “girls,” who “did not seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (Melville 278). Watching the machinery spew out its final product, he thinks: It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping, dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things—sermons, lawyers’ briefs, which has not been fraudulently cheapened. […] The abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the southern negro. In the island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of slavery, it appears, only men are bought for the plantations, and one dies in ten every year, of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. […] The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats […] yet none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse; he cannot alter it” (3). Elizabeth Kovach 26 physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death warrants, and so on, without end. (Melville 284) While Melville does not include the writing of literature in his listing, he clearly draws attention to the story’s own material production and the labor that made its circulation possible. As Bromell argues, the work of writing in both “Bartleby” and “Tartarus” is framed as “a privilege that requires the exploitation of others. Both stories suggest that writing takes place in a realm that is independent of, though covertly dependent on, the manual labor of others” (Bromell 74). Melville draws attention to his position as a writer, who is a part of the rapidly expanding white-collar professional class that is fully implicated in the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession portrayed in his stories. This self-reflexive dimension of the story is, according to Bromell, consistently central to antebellum fictions of work. Bromell asserts that his investigation of various literary texts, ranging from slave narratives to bourgeois domestic fiction, reveals how: […] a writer’s encounter with work as a subject seems to turn the writer back on himself or herself, to lead the writer into an exploration of the nature of his or her writerly work. That exploration, in turn, returns to the subject of work and informs the way it is represented. At the same time, […] the writer’s understanding that writing is work, and the writer’s engagement in the dialectical relation between representations of work and making those representations, can have the effect of shaping the writer’s actual work practice—why or how she writes. That is, a considerable part of both the content and the form of some literary works can be understood best as the outcome of a writer’s negotiations with the relation between writerly work and other kinds of work. (179) Bromell describes a process in which writing about work forces the simultaneous consideration of the work of writing that brings it into being. Writing about work and the work of writing engage in a dialectic of mutual constitution. This generates a unique relationship between content and form: in fictions about work, form cannot merely be regarded as a compositional technique employed to convey a given subject matter. It is content in its own right and shaped by the subject matter it communicates. It pertains specifically to the work of the writer—to the immediate work of literary configuration. The third study I wish to highlight does not deal with immediate acts of composition but rather with the effects that literary expression can have on worlds of work. Bernes, namely, posits in The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017) that avant-garde art in the U.S. of the 1950s Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 27 and 60s was not only formed in relation to work-related conditions and concerns of the time, but that it also paved the way for political critiques of and an eventual transformation of these conditions and concerns. Thus while Bromell focuses on the way content and form—i.e., stories about work and the work of writing—undergo a process of mutual constitution during that act of literary configuration and Weinstein offers a perspective on how literary fictions of work are shaped, both thematically and formally, by attitudes and ethics surrounding work, Bernes elaborates how literature related to work can play a role in refiguring work conditions themselves. Bernes traces connections between the spirits, sentiments, and vocabularies of art and poetry, expressions of worker discontent, and eventual changes in the management and conditions of work that took place throughout the latter half of the 20 th century. As he writes, “ [ w ] hen workers began to critique, in large numbers, the alienation, monotony, and authoritarianism of the workplace, they did so, in part, through the use of aesthetic categories, concepts, and ideologies” (9). One major theme amongst U.S. American (as well as European) avant-garde artists and writers of the 1950s and 60s was, as Bernes chronicles, that of participation (10). Participatory art upheld ideals related to collaboration and the creativity of the audience. Such ideals were, as Bernes suggests, reactions to the hierarchical, top-down structures of both blue and whitecollar work at the time. They encouraged flat structures and creative input, unlike what was demanded by the majority of workplace managers at the time. This theme, as Bernes points out, also permeated “literature and literary theory of the 1960s. Particularly notable here are theories of the “writerly” (scriptible) or “open” text, to borrow Roland Barthes’s characterization” (Bernes 14). In S/ Z, Barthes declares: “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (qtd. in Bernes 14). Here we find “the work of writing” pertaining not merely to the writer but most importantly to the reader, who joins the writer in the work of literature, producing the meaning of a given text as part of an endless and variable collaboration and process of production. Input is supplied from both sides rather than in a unidirectional manner; it is thus easy to see how such artistic and theoretical impulses implicitly rebelled against political and economic structures of authority. They move against notions of the mechanical worker, the docile political subject, and the passive consumer—figures of anxiety that, as we have seen, have permeated U.S. American cultural life since the economy’s industrialization in the mid- 19 th century. Elizabeth Kovach 28 Bernes notes that the kinds of implicit critiques of work conditions and values to be found in art and theory of the 1960s were formed simultaneously with the onset of lower profits in U.S. American industry. Citing economist Robert Brenner’s 2016 book The Economics of Global Turbulence, Bernes stresses that, contrary to the popular belief that the postwar economy first slowed with the 1973 oil crisis, inflation, and recession, the economy had actually begun to slow as early as 1965, when low-priced German and Japanese goods entered the global market (Bernes 16). Companies responded by demanding that workers move faster and more intensely without pay raises and, as the crisis continued into the 1970s, by “beginning to attack wages and defang the unions that were reluctantly pushed into the fray by an increasingly combative workforce” (Bernes 16). When workers pushed back, it became increasingly difficult for management to revert to methods of simply exerting more pressure and maintaining the hierarchical structures put in place since the industrial period. A transformation was in order, which, as Bernes writes, is predominantly referred to as the period of: […] “post-Fordism” (a term meant to emphasize both its difference from and continuity with Fordist and Taylorist methods), or alternatively “neoliberalism,” “flexible accumulation,” and “postindustrial society,” where each of these terms stresses different aspects of transformation. What matters for my argument is that […] aspects of the artistic critique, such as the critique of work from the standpoint of participation, became essential parts of the restructuring undertaken by capitalists to improve profitability. (17) 3 With the onset of post-Fordism, company management responded to worker complaints by introducing flatter hierarchies, encouraging employees to play less one-sided and more multifaceted roles in developing company ideas and cultures, increasing opportunities for participation, allowing more flexible work hours, etc. Such qualitative changes aimed to quiet worker complaints, while they did little to decrease exploitative conditions, under the guise of offering employees new flexibility and opportunities for participation. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello succinctly state in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999) that the “themes” that were first generated within artistic circles and transferred into worker complaints were appropriated by corporate management 3 In his tracing of this history, Bernes draws upon the work of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (who coined the term of the “artistic critique” within this historical context), David Harvey, Harry Braverman, and Alan Liu, among others. Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 29 discourses in an effort to placate unhappy workers; in doing so, they were absorbed by und used to strengthen the “forces whose destruction they were intended to hasten” (97). The results of this transformation, which have continued to develop into the 21 st century in both white and bluecollar industries, have thus not resulted in structural power on the side of the worker (in terms of union strength, wage increases, lower working hours) but have rather paved the way for forms of flexibility and participation that involve an increase in pressure and working time to fulfill a company’s ideological demands and qualitative values. This development shows that artistic discourses—which included those produced within the realms of literature and literary theory— generated sentiments that carried over into the realm of labor and eventually arrived within the discourses of management itself. Artistic expression played an indirect role in changing the horizon of work conditions and values to which it responded. It is interesting to note that, as the accounts of Bernes and others emphasize, when the vocabularies of 1960s avant-gardes made their way into management vocabularies of the later 20 th and 21 st centuries, the critical potential of the artistic critique lost sway. That is, the re-appropriation of artistically generated values by capitalists enervated the strategies of avant-gardes. The ways in which literature is influenced by work and vice versa are, of course, not universal over time but contingent upon countless factors ranging from the cultural status and popularity of literature, the background of the writer (in terms of race, class, gender, ability, education), and the phase or type of capitalistic (re)production (agrarian, domestic, industrial, postindustrial, immaterial) one examines. Nonetheless, I will venture a set of concluding points that can hopefully serve as a framework for thinking about the relationship between work and literary expression in future research. Conclusion: Points of Orientation for Further Research The Marxist-critical concepts of base and superstructure offer a useful backdrop for thinking about a general reciprocity between literary expression and work. The relations of production that comprise the base and the socio-cultural activities and forms of expression that make up the superstructure include, respectively, all forms of work and literary expression. By thinking about the base and superstructure as part of a continuous horizon of expressive, social, economic, and political possibility, we establish a model in which one is not secondary to the Elizabeth Kovach 30 other; rather, both are engaged in a relationship of mutual constitution. The author of published writing is both a worker who produces value and a “configurer” of expressive possibility and thought, to borrow Hartley’s term. These general premises establish an overall perspective on the relationship between work and literary expression. Weinstein’s study of the use and reception of allegory in 19 th -century U.S. American fiction demonstrates how emotions and ethics related to work influenced literary expression of the time. Allegorical characters in literature that exhibited a flatness of personality tapped into prevalent fears about the effects of mechanized labor on workers’ personal development and health. Literary critics’ distaste for the use of allegory in literature, as well as for writing styles that demanded a high degree of engagement and effort on the part of the reader, was also related to work. Allegorical characters’ flatness, often a result of their repetitive professions, threw a core U.S. American belief—that hard work led to individual development—into question. At the same time, literature that demanded a high degree of engagement and effort on the part of the readers was disdained for its blatant display of the effort of writing. Such labors were to be hidden from view—much like the shiny products of industrialization that do not betray the conditions under which they came about. In the 21 st century, U.S. American attitudes surrounding the masking and display of work have changed considerably. For those of the whitecollar class, for instance, it has become not merely acceptable but also expected in many contexts to put one’s engagement with work on display—in the form of putting in extra hours, showing dedication to and enthusiasm for the job, answering emails around the clock, participating in company social gatherings, etc. The current ideology is thus not characterized by an emphasis on the erasure but rather the display of the signs of one’s work. If one accepts the hypothesis that such norms coincide with patterns in literary expression, one could begin to read literary history in a new light. For instance, works of postmodernist metafiction have, since the latter half of the 20 th century, been dedicated to, and critically celebrated for, exposing the mechanisms of their making, putting the work of the author on display, and demanding an effort on the part of the reader. Changes in the reception of such a literary form, I would posit, are significantly impacted by the kinds of work and work ethics that are dominant at the time of their configuration. That is, the ways in which an author chooses to present the work of writing can be interpreted in relation to the normative values surrounding work of the time. Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 31 Bromell’s study of the self-reflexive nature of literature about work in the antebellum period focuses less on a horizon of cultural norms related to work and more on acts of artistic creation. He observes how the subject of work causes the work of its very writing to become a theme in itself. That is, when writers scrutinize labor within their narratives, writing as a form of work appears as a self-conscious theme. This is a strong hypothesis worth exploring in literature beyond the antebellum period. Do literary texts that actively negotiate the meanings and values of work on the level of story always implicitly negotiate the meanings and values of the work of writing? If so, two levels of meaning and expression take form in relation to one another and must be analyzed in conjunction. And various further questions arise within this context—for instance, what moral or social tensions arise out of aesthetically beautiful language and harrowing work portrayed or avant-garde narratives of working-class lives? How is alienated labor placed in relation with the craft of writing that gives it expression? Are challenges to dominant values surrounding work performed through the subversion of specific narrative, stylistic, and genre conventions associated with the privileged class? My proposal is thus to explore more extensively the relationship between work conditions, ethics, values, and emotions portrayed on the level of story and the aesthetic means by which these are communicated. The nature of this relation ranges from one of mutual reinforcement to antagonism. It can be one of closeness or space between kinds of work and work-related values depicted and the work of writing that is put on display—between the social positions, identities, values, and emotions of workers described and those of the authorial instances giving them expression. Lastly, Bernes’s work is arguably the most ambitious study cited, as an effort to describe the effect that cultural concepts and narratives had on relations of production. His tracing of the ways in which literary expression, theory, and art of the 1950s and 60s produced a constellation of ideas and expressive possibilities that played a role in transforming management styles and workplace cultures from the 1970s onwards is also the least transferable of procedures to other periods of literary history. The narrative he presents describes a moment in which the relationship between work and literary expression was fundamentally altered. When the world of work absorbed the very techniques and vocabularies that artists used to rebel against it, artistic discourses lost autonomy and political efficacy. The divide between life and art, work and creative expression, or base and superstructure shortened to an unprecedented degree, perhaps fully dissolved. This historical shift, the onset of the postmodern era, must therefore be taken into account when Elizabeth Kovach 32 discussing the relationship between conditions, values, and emotions surrounding work and literary expression. As this and the aforementioned points of orientation for exploring this relationship indicate, the opportunities for further research on the matter abound. Reading U.S. American Literary Expression in Terms of Work 33 References Barthes, Roland. S/ Z. 1970. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Understanding Brecht. 1966. London: Verso, 2003. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Bernes, Jasper. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Boltanski, Luc and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. 1999. London and New York: Verso, 2007. Bromell, Nicholas K. By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America. 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London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. ———. “Theories of Surplus Value.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 31, Marx 1861-63. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. 7- 580. Melville, Herman. “Bartleby.” Billy Budd and Other Stories. 1853. Ed. Frederick Busch. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. 1-46. ———. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Billy Budd and Other Stories. 1855. Ed. Frederick Busch. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. 261-86. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man That Was Used Up.” The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. 1839. Ed. David Galloway. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 79-89. Elizabeth Kovach 34 Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. 1854. Third Norton Critical Edition. Ed. William Rossi. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008. Weinstein, Cindy. The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. 1977. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace: The Pale King’s Emotional Economy Fabian Eggers David Foster Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King (2011) is often read as an insightful commentary on the wide-ranging economic and ideological changes felt in the post-Fordist workplace throughout the 1980s, as a novel whose deliberation of bureaucratic structures, civic virtue, and concrete labor may defy capitalism’s contemporary emphasis on flexibility. However, the text’s interest in the emotional complications arising from this process warrants more attention. This chapter brings two disconnected strains of Wallace Studies into dialogue by combining an analysis of the novel’s underlying emotional economy with a historicization of Wallace’s programmatic “New Sincerity.” Throughout The Pale King, a palpable authorial persona mandates his readers to labor through the incoherent text. In exchange, he offers a sense of “sincere” compassion and intimacy by addressing his middle-class readership’s anxieties about an increasingly contingent labor market. As this chapter argues, The Pale King speaks to the intersubjective complexities of its readers’ daily lives and offers narrative “quality time” as a form of acknowledgment for their intellectual labor. This perspective firstly helps to explore certain affinities between Wallace’s writing and post-Fordist management techniques and, secondly, contextualize its remarkable commercial success and critical acclaim. Keywords: New Sincerity, post-Fordism, emotion, bureaucracy, David Foster Wallace, The Pale King Fabian Eggers 36 Set in an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office complex in the spring of 1985, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King (2011; henceforth TPK) deliberates on the momentous post-Fordist transformation gripping the U.S. at the time, as well as on the individual and institutional consequences that went along with it. TPK emphasizes two socioeconomic implications of its setting. On the one side, an ominous “Spackman Initiative” channels the spirit of the bureaucracy-loathing Reagan administration through its propagation of “an increasing antior post-bureaucratic mentality” (81 n19); the reader learns that “the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a forprofit business” (85). On the other side, advanced computation threatens the job security of the novel’s IRS employees. Ranging from dry tax code to confessional narrative, the fragmentary novel conveys both abstract tedium and human contingency in an institutional setting. It is no surprise then that the novel is often read as a commentary on the economic and ideological upheavals throughout the 1980s. Established perspectives on TPK interpret its interest in bureaucracy as an artistic statement on neoliberal governance (Godden and Szalay), as recovering a sense of humanism amidst the bureaucratic sublime (Boswell; Severs), or even as outlining the possible shape of a present-day communist novel (Shapiro). Though the criticism is wide-ranging, many scholars understand TPK’s focus on the potential links between bureaucratic structures, civic virtue, and rewarding labor as resistance to contemporary capitalism’s mandate of total flexibility. While the following argument has an economic focus as well, the emphasis lies on a different and frequently misrepresented exchange system in Wallace’s writing. In addition to its exploration of the economic transformation of U.S. American society, the novel shows an acute awareness of the growing instrumentalization of emotions in both private and professional contexts of the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries. In fact, TPK performatively deliberates the interpersonal adjustments mandated by this process through its careful mediation of the (implied) relationship between reader and author. By combining economic criticism through an analysis of TPK’s underlying emotional economy with Wallace’s reputation as spearheading “New Sincerity,” this chapter brings two disconnected strains of Wallace Studies into dialogue. As will be demonstrated, the writer’s authorial persona mandates the readers to establish meaning in his incoherent novel. 1 In exchange, he offers a sense of sincere 1 As a posthumous novel, TPK begs the question of what it would have looked like if Wallace had finished it. While this can of course only be answered in a speculative fashion, “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 37 intimacy by competently acknowledging the anxieties created by an increasingly contingent labor market. Through this narrative form of “emotional labor” (Hochschild), TPK’s rhetoric evokes and performs certain dynamics of “emotional capitalism” (Illouz). This finding suggests that Wallace’s complaints about industrial society’s alienating tendencies conceal the fact that his texts excel at navigating this society’s communicative challenges. This chapter first historicizes Wallace’s well-known concern with irony and sincerity in the post-Fordist context; it then discusses one of TPK’s most prominent characters—“David Wallace,” who claims to be the author—and eventually analyzes the labor of reading TPK. As will be shown, the novel’s thematic focus, its formal incoherence, and Wallace’s relationship to the reader converge in a rather conservative poetics about the value of tedious work, an insight that troubles interpretations praising TPK’s subversive potential. New Sincerity’s Emotional Labor Adam Kelly’s seminal argument regarding Wallace and “New Sincerity” helps to explore the writer’s emphatic relationship to the reader. Kelly understands Wallace’s interest in the time-honored category of sincerity as evolutionary, meaning that his (re)turn to sincerity does not resurrect simple surface/ depth models. Instead, it is the outcome of a careful study of postmodernist fiction and a media-saturated society (“Wallace” 134), both of which, according to Wallace, came to be corrupted by hegemonic irony. For Kelly, Wallace reconfigures the “writer-reader relationship” and preserves “a love of truth, a truth now associated with the possibility of a reconceived, and renewed, sincerity” (146) so that author and reader are not merely implied. Instead, “ [ t ] he text’s existence depends not only on a writer but also on a particular reader at a particular place and time” (“New Sincerity” 206). But how does one successfully convey sincerity in a culture which, according to Wallace’s lament, is dominated by ironic detachment and dishonesty? it is clear that Wallace not only left an unfinished novel in the sense that he did not live to finalize it. Much like the works he published during his lifetime, TPK mandates its readers to put in their share of work. Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, reports in a note preceding the novel how Wallace “referred to the novel as ‘tornadic’ or having a ‘tornado feeling,’” (xii) indicating both force and pace. This guiding imagery helps to explain the text’s fragmentation, for its middle is comparatively empty. TPK has no clear protagonists, but numerous characters surrounding the IRS. In addition, many characters do not interact but merely orbit the novel’s focal point side by side. Fabian Eggers 38 New Sincerity writers are often seen as not only conscious of the various economic and cultural structures jeopardizing any attempt at sincerity, but as drawing explicit attention to the effects of these influences on their own writing (Kelly, “New Sincerity”; Konstantinou). Consequently, their artistic success depends on the courage to try nevertheless; to give a persuading performance. Conventional definitions frame sincerity as “the performance of an inner state on one’s outer surface so that others can witness it” (van Alphen et al. 3), a notion remarkably similar to “emotional labor,” which requires one “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild 7). 2 This link helps to explore sincerity’s resurgence against the backdrop of changing labor demands in recent decades. When the post-Fordist transformation in the U.S. moved jobs from the factory to offices, shops, and the service sector, demands on the workforce changed accordingly. C. Wright Mills’s early prediction of a “shift from skills with things to skills with persons” is borne out by more recent scholarship (182). The influential sociologist Eva Illouz describes the gradual convergence of economic and emotional spheres during the 20 th century. This development is exemplified by the tacit job requirement of “emotional competence” (214), meaning the skilled negotiation of the perpetually changing emotional disposition and affective dynamics of oneself and others. 3 When the labor market treats empathy as a valuable soft skill, sincerity becomes a similar asset. “Quality Time” with the “Author” In the post-Fordist context, Wallace’s grappling with sincerity thus appears as a timely challenge to the emotional chill associated with postmodern aesthetics and industrial modernity’s labor regimes. Whereas postmodern irony shares its reliance on cooled-down affect with Fordist 2 Arlie Russel Hochschild’s groundbreaking The Managed Heart assumes the “authentic” self to be gradually lost through estranging emotional labor, a view that must be questioned after countless scholars of the performative turn have stressed the importance of practice to the constitution of the self. Both van Alphen et al. and Kelly recognize the problems with this surface/ depth dichotomy, but observe a similar, though certainly more complicated, opposition in the lived reality of many—and in Wallace’s writing. 3 Adapting Pierre Bourdieu, Illouz describes “emotional capital” to stratify society by showing how members of the working class are inhibited from rising to management positions in part because they have only restricted access to the therapeutic “field” in which they could develop an instrumental “ability to understand others and to handle human relations in general” (69, 222-235). “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 39 labor principles, sincerity’s urge to reveal yourself speaks to both emotional capitalism’s paradoxical order to be yourself at work (Fleming and Sturdy; Illouz) as well as the current valorization of singularity (Reckwitz). Correspondingly, a sense of intimacy can emerge with the promise of mutual understanding and affection when Wallace’s reader, the addressee of this sincere rhetoric, perceives “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling” in his texts (Trilling 2). Notably, its emphatic emotionality dialectically ties New Sincerity (further) to the control— indeed rationalization—of emotions. Its reflexivization of cooled-down affect might enable a “thawing,” but because only a strategic rhetoric of emotions can work toward this end, it simultaneously represents a form of instrumentalization. Since this reflexive trap offers no escape, New Sincerity writing cannot be blamed for a failure to achieve the aporia of “pure” emotions. But neither should its self-presentation be taken at face value, as is not unusual within debates about New Sincerity. Today, the intimacy promised by New Sincerity frequently comes in the form of “quality time.” The OED defines this post-Fordist term—its first listed citation dates from 1972—as “time spent in a worthwhile or dedicated manner,” for example, time spent with one’s family. Quality time’s antagonist, “real time,” in turn signifies the apparent coincidence of an event with its registration, processing, and representation through information technology. In contrast to such technological velocity, quality time suggests the “intimacy” of “analogue, face-to-face, intersubjective attention” (McGurl 213). The more dominant real time restricts and conditions quality time, but conversely also prompts a growing demand for respite. Although an accelerated society is “hostile to the pleasant longueurs of human intimacy, let alone serious reading” (218), literature offers one way to evade the bustle of real time and indulge in a moment of rest and comfort. Of course, not every kind of literature is geared toward this effect, and Wallace’s exacting texts themselves do not appear comforting at first. However, his invitation to “a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences” clearly responds to this transformed demand for intimacy (qtd. in Lipsky 289). As will be shown, the offered quality time is dialectically tied to (an aesthetic rendering of) real time and conditioned by readerly labor. TPK contains numerous passages intended to evoke intimacy through intricate descriptions of the emotionally charged situations and contradictions that the knowledge workers of the American middle class endure. As is common for Wallace’s oeuvre, instrumentalized interiorities, selfconscious feedback loops, and a sense of alienation plague many of the novel’s characters, virtually all of whom are IRS bureaucrats and helpless Fabian Eggers 40 when it comes to the management of such tensions. The novel offers plenty of (inter)personal breakdowns: before a second character is introduced, the reader observes over twenty-eight pages how personnel manager Claude Sylvanshine’s self-consciousness spirals into a nervous breakdown. Conversely, the communicative insecurities of Chris Fogle render his digressive conversion story from young “wastoid” to responsible accountant both incoherent and unreasonably long—at 101 pages, his tale amounts to a self-contained novella full of redundancies; and IRS trainee David Cusk’s compulsive mental feedback loops about his fear of sweating only exacerbate his problem. “David Wallace” has similar communicative problems. Though he can express himself adequately, he is hard-pressed to explain the sublime bureaucratic forces determining every aspect of his life. The character first appears in the novel’s ninth chapter, “Author’s Foreword,” wherein he claims to be “the real author [ … ] not some abstract persona” (68). As the novel’s most prominent character, not only due to his urgent claims of non-fictionality, “Wallace” states that “ [ t ] his book is really true” and maintains that “ [ t ] he only bona fide ‘fiction’ here is the copyright page’s disclaimer” (69-70). In the three supposedly autobiographical chapters about his stint as an IRS rote worker, “Wallace” addresses the reader directly and relies on an intimate rhetoric that sets itself apart from TPK’s abstract chapters on legal reform and tax codes. In the conventional understanding, intimacy thrives on the least possible mediation. But “Wallace’s” insight that he “obviously need [ s ] to explain” his paradoxical claim to authorship reflects New Sincerity’s selfawareness (69). Advising his readers to “flip back and look at the book’s legal disclaimer,” he states: I need you to read it, the disclaimer, and to understand that its initial ‘The characters and events in this book…’ includes this very Author’s Foreword. In other words, this Foreword is defined by the disclaimer as itself fictional, meaning that it lies within the area of special legal protection established by that disclaimer. I need this legal protection in order to inform you that what follows is, in reality, not fiction at all, but substantially true and accurate. That—The Pale King is, in point of fact, more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story. (69) The intimate appeal of “Wallace’s” narrative is facilitated by an acknowledgment of various layers of mediation and the character’s request for help. Though “there’s always a kind of unspoken contract between a book’s author and its reader” (75), “Wallace” seeks to transcend such arrangements. He “need [ s ] you,” the reader, to flip to the “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 41 front of the book, and the “special [ … ] protection” he seeks exceeds mere legal matters. “Wallace” is desperate for the comfort that the earnest reciprocity between reader and “writer” can facilitate. Indeed, he finds “these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too” (69) and admits his dependence on, to recall Kelly again, “a particular reader at a particular place and time” (“New Sincerity” 206). Much like the empirical author’s nonfiction, the “Wallace” chapters contain numerous lengthy footnotes in which the character emphasizes his lack of autonomy. At one point, he apologizes for a vague sentence, tellingly about his presumed “veracity” and the “mutual contract” between him and the reader, stating that it “is the product of much haggling and compromise with the publisher’s legal team” (75, 75 fn. 10). In other similar gestures, “Wallace” seeks to establish his credibility by addressing the misleading qualities of human memory and some of his editorial choices. The description of his commute to the IRS is complemented, for example, by a note attesting to the difficulty of taking “coherent notes in a moving auto” (278 fn. 25). Through such metafictional play, Wallace—the empirical author— imitates the alienating tendencies and struggles of a writer’s work environment during the publishing industry’s “Conglomerate Era” (Sinykin). That TPK’s “Foreword” is not found at the book’s beginning, but, due to “yet another spasm of last-minute caution on the part of the publisher,” has “been moved seventy-nine pages into the text,” underscores his self-presentation as being helplessly controlled by larger powers. When the reader follows “Wallace’s” prompt to “see below,” the page number varies with each edition but never matches the stated page “seventy-nine” (69 fn. 2). Although the character recounts what he purports to be his life story, he remains ignorant of its layout and page count. Both as low-level IRS employee and writer, “Wallace” occupies what Mills described as the awkward middle position of white-collar workers and, as such, is representative of TPK’s concern for common employees ruled by sublime regulation. A plot point about his misidentification by the IRS administration with a second “David Wallace” is not only another instance of the text’s self-referentiality (297 fn. 48), but also demonstrates how “Wallace” is stuck in the middle of bureaucracy’s contradictory forces. Even as a renowned author who invested “three years’ hard labor (plus an additional fifteen months of legal and editorial futzing)” for his supposed memoir, “Wallace” remains a proverbial cog in the machine—of the publishing industry (84). “Wallace’s” restlessness speaks to the vanishing distinction between play and work under post-Fordism. Befitting Sianne Ngai’s theorization Fabian Eggers 42 of the “zany,” he personifies a hyperactive mode of “incessant activity,” frantic adaptation, and emotional intensity in a labor-intensive performance—be it play, work, or indistinguishable (Ngai 185). Ngai observes that, unlike related modes, such as goofy or silly, zaniness connotes a sense of desperation that negates comic relief; the zany subject wants too much and tries too hard: “the unhappily striving wannabe, poser, arriviste. The utter antithesis of ironic cool, the perspiring, overheated zany is a social loser” (189). Indeed, “Wallace” and many of his awkward colleagues try very hard, but their unfocused hyperactivity ultimately prevents them from achieving anything at all. The anxietydriven zany exemplifies Wallace’s aesthetic reaction to what he perceived as postmodernism’s aloofness. In its awkwardness, the zany represents a form of pitiable helplessness incompatible with cool detachment. Ngai highlights the affinity of zaniness to The New Spirit of Capitalism as theorized by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. In opposition to earlier formations of capitalism that valued (Weberian) “rational asceticism” or, later on, “responsibility and knowledge,” capitalism’s current constellation rewards mere activity, be it in professional or private contexts. “To be doing something, to move, to change,” Boltanski and Chiapello explain, “this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often regarded as synonymous with inaction” (155). “Wallace” ambivalently embodies this post-Fordist demand in both form and content. In the narrative’s emulation of real time, he undergoes endless communicative efforts to explain his powerlessness—without a chance to overcome it. Hectic “Wallace” is evidently unable to enjoy, let alone offer the “pleasant longueurs” of quality time. But behind this character, recognizable as such despite his urgent claims to the contrary, not least due to the ghosts and psychics populating his “nonfiction,” the reader senses an authorial interlocutor who does in fact offer an “intimate conversation.” But this dialogue is conditioned on an exchange. To tap the novel’s connecting potential, the readers must labor and make sense of its fragmentary form and at times tedious content. Only once they have endured this can they indulge in Wallace’s promised intimacy. The Labor of Reading Wallace In a similar fashion to how many of the characters draw profound insights from their everyday tedium at the IRS, intellectual labor is central to the reading experience of TPK. In a convergence of form and content, the novel formally reinforces its thematic focus on bureaucratic abstraction “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 43 through its diverse fragments of varying length and readability. The numerous footnotes of “Wallace’s” chapters illustrate this point. Many of them do not only contain helpful information for grasping TPK’s multiple narrative strands but in turn develop self-contained narratives on their own. Others appear in the middle of the often seemingly endless sentences and force the reader to part ways with one train of thought or miss another, thus fragmenting the reading process itself. Through the footnotes’ small size in most editions, TPK formally affirms the narrative’s wisdom about the value of small print. But it is important to note that these demands on the reader are balanced by intermittent perspectives on the human elements populating the bureaucratic machine. Small talk between shifts and dreadful commutes function as moments of respite in the reading process and receive as much narrative attention as the tedious intricacies of tax legislation (89). Nevertheless, TPK indulges in an aesthetics of excess and, much like Wallace’s most lauded fiction, remains a difficult read. Complex plots with countless characters (many mysterious, some nameless), confusing narratives with an overwhelming amount of information, much of it absurd and ostensibly irrelevant or difficult, sometimes impossible to decipher: these are, after all, the well-known and much-admired characteristics of Wallace’s fiction. His texts resist easy consumption by focusing on uninteresting or unpleasant themes. Passages discussing the “ACIRHRMSOEAPO Survey/ Study” on “syndromes/ symptoms associated with Examinations postings in excess of 36 months” (89) surely fit the category of “cruft” in that their only discernible function lies in the masking of other meaningful passages, thus challenging the reader’s attentional capacity (Letzler). Given Wallace’s thoughts on the difficulty of creating and consuming meaningful art in an age of alleged hegemonic irony and narcissism, some view such obstacles as serving Wallace’s dialogic poetics by defamiliarizing his readers in order to then enable a more meaningful intellectual exchange (Timmer 77; Hering 162). But this understanding overlooks the narrow expectations underlying this exchange. Much like in the contract “Wallace” seeks to escape, the readers cannot engage in a free dialogue; instead, they must meet defined expectations. This might be a peculiar description of reading a novel, but it points to the framework of institutional discipline in Wallace’s relationship with the reader. A brief look at how Wallace thought about his magnum opus Infinite Jest is informative here. Asked about its apparent lack of an ending, he once replied: Fabian Eggers 44 There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind[s] of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you. (qtd. in Max 321 n19) Wallace frames his text as a problem the reader/ student solves and then submits to the author/ instructor for review, and he barely veils his expectation: if “the book’s failed for you,” you have in turn not only failed the book, but also Wallace. Of course, such “exams” remain metaphorical, but the contractual logic underlying Wallace’s writing nevertheless exercises a deep-seated pressure. The readers sense that he “is playing at a high level, that he has thought of everything, and that we’ll be playing catch-up (Taranto). After all, this is the author who once stated that some contemporary writers “are involved in transactions requiring genius, but it seems to me to be sort of required on both sides” (qtd. in Kelly, “Wallace” 146). Though Kelly takes note of the statement’s economic overtone, “reading is a transaction, an economy like any other in which goods are sold and received,” he supposes “the gift of sincerity” to somehow offset this logic (ibid.). Wallace’s biographer Daniel T. Max likewise states that Infinite Jest, “for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, and if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can” (215). Advocating a version of the Protestant work ethic, Max argues that “you have to work to get better. The book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are” (ibid.). An understanding of what Wallace’s literature is about—in his oft-quoted words, “what it is to be a fucking human being” (qtd. in McCaffery 131, emphasis in original)—appears to be premised on enduring hard work. Indeed, the readers’ effort to fulfill their contract with Wallace and labor through the novel’s long stretches of tedious technicalities appears to be their reward. Wallace’s writes in a note for TPK: “It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom” (548). This idiosyncratic insight amounts to TPK’s central moral: Chris Fogle converts to life as an accountant after an epiphany about the “heroism” and civic virtue of dull and complex work. “Wallace” asserts that the “real reason why U.S. citizens were/ are not aware” of the momentous changes in the IRS his “memoir” describes “is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull” (85). Even the IRS’s fictional motto—“He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job”— confirms the importance of enduring tedium for a greater good (246, “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 45 emphasis in original). In a key scene, DeWitt Glendenning, Jr., the novel’s only character who is neither seeking the approval of others nor ridiculed by narrative irony, monologizes on the shifting perspective on what citizenship means: We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries […] Something has happened where we’ve decided on a personal level that it’s all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites. (138) When his interlocutor remarks how this topic makes for dull conversation, Glendenning responds: “Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment” (140). Glendenning’s role as the author’s literary mouthpiece become obvious here, not least because Wallace promoted such virtues in almost identical terms (This is Water 120). Constructing a suitable analogy through taxes, the novel renders the endurance of tedious or inconvenient labor as serving both the individual as well as the collective good. In line with its apotheosis of strenuous work, TPK demands resilience against boredom and abstraction from its readers. Such demands beg the question why so many accept the challenge of this often overwhelming and confusing literature. Encounters between text and reader are contingent and not all of Wallace’s readers partake in the afore described exam logic (Finn 171). But as the numerous reading circles and fandom websites devoted to Wallace attest, his celebration of hard work still appeals. As a towering literary figure, he emphasized the open dialectic between text and reader while simultaneously carefully shaping the exchange. In contrast to his clumsy characters, Wallace conveyed his message about the merits of discipline and endurance with success. John Holliday’s understanding of “authorial connectedness” illustrates how style and reception converge in this respect. Once it succeeds, authorial connectedness makes the reader “feel as though you are engaging with the thoughts of a person whose beliefs and attitudes intersect with yours, whose personality you find mesmerizing, and who expresses content you value and does so in a way that you believe you would if you could” (10). Many of Wallace’s readers appear to share this reading experience and, in some cases, this perceived proximity extends Fabian Eggers 46 into a fantasy of actual friendship or other kinds of intimacy with the actual writer (Fitzpatrick). It thus emerges that Wallace’s eloquent complaints about the colonization and corruption of interpersonal exchanges by current soft skills regimes concealed his personal mastery of the very communicative proficiencies they require. By anticipating his readers’ emotional disposition and combining this anticipation with the (mediated) interpersonal skill of openly communicating about them, Wallace’s authorial persona reveals himself to be an excellent emotional laborer. Central is the very discomfort his texts intimate about the contemporary state of interpersonal exchanges: TPK abounds with what appears as the uncomfortable honesty and frequent self-deprecation of almost all characters. Most male characters, for instance, are shy introverts who fail to live up to the standard of traditional male role models. Many of TPK’s helpless characters are subject to the rule of larger (if mundane) powers. Conversely, the intimacy emanating from “authorial connectedness” is produced by “the reader recognizing something of herself in the work, something she believed or thought or felt before reading the work, for authorial connectedness turns on the reader feeling as though she has found [ … ] a fellow soul” (Holliday 3). It is unsurprising then that Wallace’s credible portrait of everyday white-collar grievances, combined with his emotional reflexivity and fine sense of humor, not only speaks to many of his readers but consoles them as well. For here is an author who accurately describes the stress arising from human interactions (not only in the professional context), the fragmentation of one’s (office) work and private life, the difficulty of remaining sane in the everaccelerating real time. An author, in other words, whose emotional labor “produces the proper state of mind” in his readers to facilitate quality time for them. In turn, their intellectual labor is rewarded with a sense of intimacy. This effect has both narcissistic and nostalgic elements: the readers ultimately recognize an idea of themselves, so that their empathetic enlightenment can be seen to be self-involved and limited. Moreover, Wallace facilitates this identification by pastoralizing the dreary but secure work environment of bureaucracy at a time when capitalist structures eschew stable hierarchies and favor flexibility (Dorson). On behalf of its readers, TPK symbolically reconciles the incompatible contradictions dominating their (work) lives. “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 47 A Managed Community In a wider context, Wallace’s talent can be seen as a contemporary literary expression of what management historians Daniel Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian once identified in the burgeoning notion of human relations, namely “a new mix of managerial skills [ … ] crucial to handling human situations: first diagnostic skills in understanding human behavior and second, interpersonal skill in counseling, motivating, leading, and communicating” (298). Alexander Styhre’s investigation of what Wallace “can teach Management Scholars” is a suitable example of this conjecture between the writer’s painstaking observations on the estranging tendencies of present-day (work) relations and organizational psychology. Befitting the essay’s publishing venue in the Academy of Management Review, Styhre seeks to discern how Wallace’s writing might inspire more engaging language in management studies. His praise for Wallace’s meticulous focus on what at first appears banal as well as the promotion of what Styhre, with reference to Aristotle’s understanding of eudaimonia, summarizes as “happiness based on a modest way of life,” help to explore the managerial affinities inherent in Wallace’s writing (170). Styhre writes that Wallace invites management scholars to “reinvent and reform the language at hand in order to better capture the individuals populating organizations and engaging in management practices. The work of Wallace can inspire new ways to capture everyday life in organizations” (173). Notwithstanding a leap in genre—Styhre bases his claim on Wallace’s idiosyncratic nonfiction (176)—this interest in Wallace’s ability to valorize the boring by devoting empathetic attention to it and thereby to recognize the reader’s often mundane daily grind bespeaks TPK’s therapeutic potential. The implied belief that institutions, such as the IRS at the novel’s center (or the corporations Styhre studies), are suited to build a community among its workers indicates a modest view on what this community might achieve. Conversely, it exposes readings that praise the novel’s insights on how to “replace the individual liberty of selfishness in favour of a selflessness in service of collective emancipation” to be overly enthusiastic (Shapiro 1268). More accurately, TPK echoes what Wendy Brown calls a “national-theological discourse” of moralized, individual sacrifice to the collective good. Personal duty is proposed as the solution to political crisis, as opposed to debate, contestation, or even “collective emancipation.” Though the novel conveys obvious discontent with the intensification of economic and social individualization, its reliance on personal ethics to bring about meaningful change burdens the Fabian Eggers 48 individual further—and troubles readings of TPK as defying neoliberal paradigms. By way of conclusion, it can be said that the readers’ intimate relationship to an author who knows and understands their alienating experiences in everyday life goes a long way toward explaining the fairly homogenous make-up of Wallace’s audience. Many scholars, as well as the author himself, presume his readership to be mostly young, educated, and of a white middle-class background (e.g., Lipsky 82). If practices of intimacy such as the quality time of reading a novel are emotional capitalism’s “training grounds” and get distributed unevenly along class lines (Illouz), the vast academic discourse accompanying Wallace should not be surprising either. The fact that it is a privilege to have the time and disposition to carefully read a difficult novel is of course not to be blamed on Wallace. Conversely, his (scholarly) readership should reflect this when making larger claims about his work. Given academia’s social exclusivity, the ever-growing group of scholars working on Wallace might, except for age, closely resemble his presumed readership. Critics frequently confirm Wallace’s communicative skills and emotional competence by declaring a “special relationship” with him. For example, Nicoline Timmer’s Do You Feel It Too? , an insightful study on the “Post-Postmodern Syndrome” in recent U.S. American fiction, includes an “In Memoriam” for Wallace in which she thanks him “for being such a wonderful, hyper-intelligent, hypersensitive (and also extremely funny) interlocutor in all his work” (10). Another indicator for Wallace’s communicative success is the degree to which, until today, scholarship on him relies so heavily on his own interpretations of his fiction: his “sincerity manifesto” of 1993 and the lengthy interview with Larry McCaffery of the same year shaped the scholarship for years to come. The sheer number of quotes by Wallace within scholarly discourse shows that he knew very well how to make his point—and that his insights found an appreciative audience. In one of his many digressions, TPK’s Chris Fogle remarks: “If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on” (184). To the many devoted readers who labor through the novel with the goal to eventually recognize and appreciate Wallace’s empathy for middle-class discontent, the statement marks as a self-referential milestone along the way toward their “intimate conversation.” “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 49 References Boltanski, Luc and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2007. Boswell, Marshall. “Author Here: The Legal Fiction of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” English Studies 95 (2014): 25-39. Brown, Wendy. “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics.” Constellations 23 (2016): 3-14. Dorson, James. “The Neoliberal Machine in the Bureaucratic Garden: Pastoral States of Mind in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture. Ed. Eric Erbacher, Nicole Maruo-Schröder and Florian Sedlmeier. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014. 211-30. Finn, Ed. “Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception.” The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. Ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. 151-76. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network.” The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. Ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. 182-207. Fleming, Peter and Andrew Sturdy. “‘Being yourself ’ in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control.” Human Relations 64 (2011): 177-200. Godden, Richard and Michael Szalay. “The Bodies in the Bubble: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Textual Practice 28 (2014): 1273-322. Hering, David. David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Hochschild, Arlie R. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Holliday, John. “Emotional Intimacy in Literature.” The British Journal of Aesthetics (2017). Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self- Help. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Hering. Los Angeles and Austin: Sideshow Media Group Press, op. 2010. 131-46. ———. “The New Sincerity.” Postmodern/ Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature. Ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, Daniel Worden and Samuel Cohen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 197-208. Fabian Eggers 50 Konstantinou, Lee. Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Letzler, David. The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Lipsky, David. Although of course you end up becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin Random House, 2010. Max, Daniel T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Viking, 2012. McCaffery, Larry. “An interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993): 127-50. McGurl, Mark. “Real/ Quality.” Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. Ed. Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 209-22. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. OED Online. quality time, n. December 2019. ‹oed.com/ view/ Entry/ 155878›. Accessed 10 January 2020. Reckwitz, Andreas. Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten: Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Severs, Jeffrey. David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Shapiro, Stephen. “From capitalist to communist abstraction: The Pale King’s cultural fix.” Textual Practice 28 (2014): 1249-71. Sinykin, Dan N. “The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965-2007.” Contemporary Literature 58 (2018): 462-91. Styhre, Alexander. “What David Foster Wallace Can Teach Management Scholars.” Academy of Management Review 41 (2016): 170-83. Taranto, Julius. On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace. 15 September 2018. ‹https: / / lareviewofbooks.org/ article/ on-outgrowing-david-fosterwallace/ ›. Accessed 19 September 2020. Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too? : The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. 1972. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. van Alphen, Ernst, Mieke Bal and C. E. Smith, eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. “Quality Time” with David Foster Wallace 51 Wallace, David Foster. This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. ———. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. 2011. London: Penguin, 2012. Wren, Daniel A. and Arthur G. Bedeian. The Evolution of Management Thought. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1972. The Tragedy of Being-Precarious in Contemporary American Drama Simon D. Trüb This chapter focuses on the concepts of precarity and precariousness, which prominently figure in critiques of neoliberalism. In particular, it establishes connections between precarity and precariousness, on the one hand, and the much older notions of tragedy and the tragic, on the other. Thus, it argues for the relevance of tragedy to contemporary political drama, while examining a neglected aspect of the prehistory of precarity studies. The first section of the chapter discusses the concepts of precarity, precariousness, tragedy, and the tragic, and it outlines some of the relationships among these notions. In the second part, the chapter considers the contemporary plays Topdog/ Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks and Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Both plays examine precarity, and the chapter maintains that it is important that they be regarded as tragedies. The chapter closes by reflecting on the political significance of the question of who or what qualifies as tragic and by locating at the center of tragedy a fundamental ambivalence. Approached in a skillful and careful manner, this ambivalence can become the wellspring of the force of politically powerful tragedies like Topdog and Sweat. Keywords: precarity, precariousness, tragedy, neoliberalism, political theater, Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/ Underdog , Lynn Nottage, Sweat Simon D. Trüb 54 On a first level and in the context of the present volume, this chapter is based on the well-established critical position according to which the concepts of precarity and precariousness represent important theoretical tools for analyzes of neoliberalism and thus also for discussions of the topics of “labor” or “work” roughly from the 1970s onwards. In this regard, it takes its cues from contemporary scholars such as Isabell Lorey, who argues: “If we fail to understand precarization, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the present” (1). Yet rather than mobilizing precarity/ precariousness in a socio-political critique or applying them in a literary interpretation, this chapter establishes connections between these relatively recent concepts and the much older notions of “tragedy” and “the tragic.” In doing so, it examines, on the one hand, the importance of tragedy to contemporary political theater and, on the other hand, considers the “tragic” as early—potentially as the earliest—predecessor of precarity/ precariousness. Not all of the relationships between precarity, precariousness, tragedy, and the tragic are equally evident or uncontentious, and the first section of the chapter hence examines their nature and significance. On the one hand, this chapter adopts Judith Butler’s distinction between “precarity,” which refers to socio-economic vulnerability that ensues from a lack of resources, and “precariousness,” which denotes the ontological vulnerability of “life” or the human condition. On the other hand, it takes into account the frequently held view that “tragedy” and the “tragic” are used in at least three different ways, which Rita Felski, for instance, describes as literary, philosophical, and vernacular (2). According to the literary meaning or use, “tragedy” and the “tragic” primarily refer to the dramatic genre whose origins reach back to ancient Greece. The philosophical idea of tragedy or the tragic is significantly younger, for it emerged in German Idealist philosophy and revolves around the notion that the human condition is characterized by an “existential homelessness” (Felski 2-3). The vernacular use of “tragedy” or “the tragic” refers to the ways in which these terms are used in everyday discourse such as in newspaper headlines. From a literary perspective, the description of precarity or precariousness as “tragic” is contentious. While the relationship between the philosophical idea of the “tragic” and precarity appears equally questionable, this philosophical concept maps intriguingly well onto the notion of precariousness. These resistances and similarities are conceptually and ideologically significant. They are outlined in the first part of the chapter and consolidated in the discussions of the plays. Topdog and Sweat focus on the precarity of their characters and yet they are not always recognized as tragedies. While part two reflects on some of the reasons The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 55 for this, it also builds a strong case for considering the plays as tragedies. In particular, part two shows that the two plays dramatize a tragic structure or narrative that is at work in neoliberal society itself. This insight further illuminates the intimate relationships between precarity and precariousness, on the one hand, and tragedy and the tragic, on the other. Part two also reveals a disagreement between scholars regarding the status and possibilities of tragedy in contemporary culture and society. This conflict results from a tension or ambivalence inherent in tragedy itself, and the chapter concludes by recognizing in this ambivalence a driving force of contemporary politically powerful tragedies. Being-Precarious as Tragic Condition The theoretical concept of precarity was first introduced in the late 1980s by French sociologists, who used it to describe a new kind—or rather an unprecedented growth of—economic insecurity in the West that directly resulted from the progressive neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state (Standing 9; Lorey 6; Lemke 16). The notion of precarity has since gained considerable critical currency and even become the center of an entire field of study. Simon During explains: Precarity effectively invokes the insecurity of all those who live without reliable and adequate income or without papers. And it also applies to those with no, or unstable, access to the institutions and communities best able to provide legitimacy, recognition, and solidarity. (58, emphasis in original) Thus, precarity is a socio-economic and political concept that describes a state of vulnerability that is directly linked to material deprivation and political representation. Importantly, During maintains that precarity replaced the older notion of “subalternity” because “ [ r ] elatively geographically and culturally stable relations of dominance and subordination are being replaced by relatively unstable and dispersed conditions of deprivation and insecurity” (58). However, the notion of “precarity” and particularly its prehistory is still more complex than this. During insightfully continues: precarity extends beyond social and intellectual zones to connote an experience that is also an anthropological truth […] the conditions of contemporary precarity lead us once again to recognize and accede to a particular account of what it is to be human. (59) Simon D. Trüb 56 In other words, precarity also refers to the existential vulnerability of the human condition, and During accordingly establishes a connection between precarity and a long tradition in Western thought that conceives of the human condition as fundamentally flawed, fallen, or lacking. The history of this “anthropology of negation,” as During calls it, extends from the old Christian notion of original sin to the existential anguish variously considered in European philosophy of the 19 th and 20 th centuries (59-60). Yet, in contrast to During, I argue that the “tragic,” which in some manifestations precedes even Christianity, also belongs to this “anthropology of negation” and that it consequently potentially even represents the earliest predecessor of precarity. During evidently considers two very different dimensions of precarity, and Butler accounts for these in Frames of War by introducing the distinction between precarity and precariousness. “Precarity,” she explains, is a “specifically political notion,” while “precariousness” is an ontological or “existential” concept (Butler, Frames 3). However, even while introducing this distinction, Butler recognizes and emphasizes that these two kinds of vulnerability—existential or ontological, on the one hand, and material, on the other—are intrinsically connected and cannot be absolutely separated: The “being” of the body to which this ontology [of precariousness] refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology. (Butler, Frames 2-3) The notion of “social ontology” (my emphasis) takes into account that “bodies” or “lives” do not exist absolutely independently in a metaphysical realm before they are socially or culturally marked. The “social” in “social ontology” reinscribes the political, material dimension of being-precarious to which “precarity” refers in the metaphysical dimension of “precariousness” at the very moment at which Butler establishes this distinction. This raises the question of how precisely the relationship between “precarity” and “precariousness” can be understood. In Frames, Butler explains that precarity and precariousness are not equally distributed in society, and she speculates that “it is the differential allocation of precarity that [ … ] forms the point of departure for both a rethinking of bodily ontology and for progressive or left politics” (Frames 3). This is precisely Lorey’s aim in States of Insecurity, for Lorey argues that precarity The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 57 can be understood as the result of attempts to structure or distribute precariousness in accordance with social hierarchies: The precariousness shared with others is hierarchized and judged, and precarious lives are segmented. This segmentation produces […] the “differential distribution” of symbolic and material insecurities, in other words precarity. Precarity as the hierarchized difference in insecurity arises from the segmentation, the categorization, of shared precariousness” (21). Insofar as precarity results from the unequal distribution of precariousness, they are both inherently related and yet distinct. Now, from a literary, formalist, and rather conservative point of view, one could argue that neither precarity nor precariousness is “tragic” in any meaningful way. On the one hand, the association of these notions with tragedy could be considered anachronistic since precarity and precariousness are contemporary concepts while tragedy is an ancient genre. This critical position can be associated with scholars such as George Steiner, who argues in his influential, if contentious, The Death of Tragedy that “ [ f ] rom antiquity until the age of Shakespeare and Racine, [ tragedy ] seemed within the reach of talent. Since then, the tragic voice in drama is blurred or still” (10). On the other hand, precarity in particular might be deemed to be foreign to tragedy since tragedy is supposed to represent the fall from grace of eminent figures, and it thus cannot be concerned with the fates and suffering of people belonging to lower social echelons. In Modern Tragedy, Raymond Williams insightfully explains that this formal criterion derives from reductive interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Middle Ages, but like the notion of “the death of tragedy,” it is extremely persistent (21-22). As recently as 2014, Edith Hall remarks in an essay on tragedy and social class: It […] seems to me extraordinary that the addition of working-class heroes to the tragic repertoire […] has still not found universal acceptance. In the twenty-first century there are still critics and writers who prefer their tragic heroes to fall from high estate and who question whether the tragic and the proletarian can ever be reconciled. (777) So, from a literary perspective, the consideration of precarity or precariousness as “tragic” is controversial. By contrast, the philosophical idea of the tragic and the notion of precariousness reveal intriguing similarities. During’s “anthropology of negation” and Butler’s and Lorey’s discussions of “precariousness” are based on the conception of the human condition as fundamentally vulnerable, limited, and insufficient, which painfully Simon D. Trüb 58 contradicts the individual human being’s image of themself as autonomous and complete. Summarizing Butler, Lorey explains, for instance, that “ [ p ] recariousness becomes ‘co-extensive’ at birth, since survival depends from the beginning on social networks, on sociality and the work of others” (19). This dependence or finitude of life, however, is not a weakness that can be overcome, Lorey stresses, for “ [ t ] he conditions that enable life are, at the same time, exactly those that maintain it as precarious” (20). Now, certainly, the register in which During, Butler, and Lorey write about existential vulnerability differs from the one in which 19 th -century German Idealist philosophers and their contemporaries approached the notions of tragedy and the tragic. Philosophers and writers such as Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel are concerned with the limits of freedom, autonomy, and volition in ways in which contemporary philosophers or scholars of precarity/ precariousness are not. And yet, insofar as both the philosophical notion of the tragic and precariousness revolve around the finitude of the human condition, these concepts are clearly related. The (philosophical) tragic and precariousness refer to or reveal a fundamental truth about the human condition, and it is intriguingly precisely for this reason that precarity falls short of the tragic from the philosophical perspective. In contrast to precariousness, precarity—economic, material vulnerability—is much too mundane for the metaphysical, elevated sphere of the tragic. Simon Goldhill observes in modernity, and specifically from German Idealism onward, a “devaluing of tragedies which do reveal most insistently a concern with a more immediate and messy sense of politics” (155). “‘The tragic’,” he accordingly remarks, “has been a strategic and persuasive definition which has worked to keep the most evidently and directly political of ancient tragedies from the elite of the great books tradition” (156). So, while the association of precarity and precariousness with the tragic is controversial from a literary point of view, in the realm of philosophy, the strong connections between the tragic and precariousness can only be maintained or acknowledged as long as the continuity between precariousness and precarity is ignored. Yet, Butler and Lorey emphasize exactly the importance of appreciating and understanding this relationship between precarity and precariousness. Moreover, the political potential of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Topdog/ Underdog and Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat needs to be located precisely in their ability to illuminate this connection between precarity and precariousness, an ability whose significance and power are only properly appreciated if the plays are interpreted and discussed as tragedies. The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 59 Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/ Underdog, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and the Politics of Tragedy Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/ Underdog, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002, features two African American characters named Lincoln and Booth. This play is an interesting example, because it reflects on the extent to which precarity is related both to class and race. Lincoln works in an arcade as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and customers can pretend to shoot him, just as John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in 1865. Booth, Lincoln’s brother, named after John Wilkes Booth, is a petty criminal. He does not have a job, steals, and wants to become a threecard-monte player, a game at which Lincoln had excelled before he quit and found an “honest” job. Three-card monte is the street game in which ostensibly one player (but in fact a whole group of fraudsters) tries to trick naïve passersby into playing for money. Three cards are shuffled, and the unsuspecting victim has to pick the winning one, which is, of course, impossible. Lincoln and Booth lead an unmistakably precarious existence. Abandoned by their parents, who left each an “inheritance” of 500 dollars, they have only each other, live together in Booth’s run-down apartment because Lincoln was thrown out by his last girlfriend, and survive exclusively on Lincoln’s meager weekly paychecks. They have no phone, no running water, and only a bathroom shared by several apartments. When Lincoln learns that he might be fired because the arcade considers replacing him with a Lincoln dummy, their situation becomes dire. At the end of the play, Lincoln loses his job, spends his last paycheck on drinks in a bar, and is talked by Booth into playing threecard monte against him. Lincoln wins Booth’s “inheritance” and, in response, is shot by Booth in their apartment. Topdog is an experimental play and not a typical tragedy. Neither is precarity its only topic. With its two black characters that are named after white historical figures, Topdog also reflects on American history, in particular on the ways in which American history is shaped by white people and by their perspective and discourse. Nevertheless, structurally and with regard to its subject matter, Topdog is a tragedy. While some critics would certainly object to the description of a contemporary play like Topdog as tragedy, to most scholars familiar with Parks’s oeuvre, this hardly comes as a surprise; Parks’s love for and interest in this ancient Greek genre is well known and documented. In fact, in an interview, Parks herself compares Topdog to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, maintaining: Simon D. Trüb 60 [Topdog] is very much […] in the Greek tragedy mode. Like Oedipus. When you go into the theatre, you know what’s going to happen, and yet you delight in the journey of Oedipus. So I loved Oedipus and Medea and those kinds of plays, bloody, tragic, you know, heart wrenching. (qtd. in Kolin and Young 15) With regard to Parks’s dramaturgy more generally, Soyica Diggs Colbert insightfully explains Parks’s vision or revision of “tragedy.” Colbert observes that Parks’s drama “contains traditional tragic elements: haunting, suffering and living with death and despair, and some formal attributes, most notably her use of choruses,” and yet, “ [ it ] does not fit neatly into literary definitions of tragedy,” because it often focuses on “common” black people, whose freedom and independence are significantly curtailed as a result of their class and race (199-201). Drawing on “the thematic and formal attributes of dramatic tragedy,” Colbert maintains, Parks’s drama rethinks historical narratives to loosen the hold of calamities, such as slavery and racialized violence, as determining factors for black subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while acknowledging how those pasts continue to impact national narratives. (201-2) How Topdog achieves precisely this, Patricia Stuelke discusses in her essay “Trayvon Martin, Topdog/ Underdog, and the Tragedy Trap.” Stuelke maintains that “tragedy in the post-Civil Rights era is a toxic racial narrative with which racial justice movements and black expressive culture must contend,” and that Topdog succeeds in outlining a space “for the reinvention of political potential outside the limits of tragedy” by deconstructing what she calls the “American antiblack tragedy trap” (754, 755, 769). Discussing reactions to Trayvon Martin’s death, Stuelke shows that in the U.S., black victims are often portrayed as tragic in two different but equally problematic ways. The first is illustrated by Barack Obama, who labelled Martin’s death a tragedy and thus, according to Stuelke, rejected any kind of institutional responsibility. By describing Martin’s death as a tragedy, Obama elevated Martin to the status of “victim protagonist” but at the same time represented him as “exceptional” and thus “ [ disavowed ] the structural forces that produced his violent end” (Stuelke 757). The second way in which black people tend to be represented as tragic victims is illustrated by racist conservative reactions that portrayed Martin’s death as an all but inevitable catastrophe, “the specific tragedy of black masculinity, a pathological underdeveloped racial and gender orientation that is [ … ] bent on self-annihilation” (759). These The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 61 two tragic roles, in which black victims are so readily cast and which distract from the ideological causes of their suffering and deaths, together form the “tragedy trap” that Topdog overcomes, according to Stuelke. It does so by representing the tragic roles that are available to the black characters as precisely nothing other than roles, by representing such appearances as nothing other than constructs. Parks endows her characters with a limited amount of freedom, which allows them to jump between, experiment with, and exchange the tragic roles available to them, as a result of which their ideological underpinnings are suggested. The fact that, despite their negotiations with different cultural constructions of black identity, Booth eventually shoots Lincoln, Stuelke maintains, drives home the institutional and epistemological violence of the tragic narratives with which, in particular, minorities have to contend. She concludes: “By spinning out the tragedy trap’s logic to its violent end, Parks’s play overwhelms its instrumental power [ … ] forcing the realization that tragedy is both a con and a foregone conclusion from which we ought to detach” (769). While Stuelke’s interpretation of Topdog is extremely insightful and convincing, it is necessary to challenge her final conclusion. I do not regard Topdog as a tragedy to escape or find that the play calls for an end to tragedy as such; indeed it represents a highly promising appropriation of tragedy. Stuelke is completely correct that Topdog self-reflectively comments on tragic narratives, and that it does so by granting its characters a significantly limited amount of freedom and agency whose very limitations eventually lead to the tragic outcome. Yet, these questions of freedom or agency and their limitations as well as its self-reflexivity significantly align Topdog with a tragic tradition rather than marking a distance or difference from it. While ancient Greek tragedy was already a famously self-reflexive genre, in his recent Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, Simon Critchley places precisely this limited possibility of freedom and agency at the center of tragedy. He maintains: Tragedy requires some degree of complicity on our part in the disaster that destroys us. It is not simply a question of the malevolent activity of fate, a dark prophecy that flows from the inscrutable but often questionable will of the gods. Tragedy requires our collusion with that fate. In other words, it requires no small measure of freedom. It is in this way that we can understand the tragedy of Oedipus. (Critchley 12-13) In The Topdog Diaries, a documentary that portrays the gestation of Parks’s play from the composition to its Broadway premiere, Parks makes an Simon D. Trüb 62 intriguing statement that helps pinpoint this same tragic core in her play. She remarks: Right up through the last seconds of the play, [Lincoln and Booth] can choose how they act. The end of the play comes about not because of some kind of predestined fate but because Lincoln chooses to behave a certain way and Booth chooses to behave a certain way […] it has hardly anything to do with Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth and everything to do with the two men in the play […] they had broken free of the historical context (Jacoby 46: 45-47: 56) This fascinating comment is followed in the documentary by a short scene from the play. The scene shows the moment just after Booth has lost all of his money to Lincoln and before he shoots his brother. Lincoln, still drunk from the bar, is ecstatic about his victory and condescendingly explains to Booth why he has lost: you was in such a hurry to learn thuh last move that you didn’t bother learning thuh first one. That was yr mistake. Cause its thuh first move that separates thuh Player from thuh Played. And thuh first move is to know that there aint no winning. Taadaaa! It may look like you got a chance but the only time you pick right is when thuh man lets you. (111). Here, between Parks’s and Booth’s statements, the problem or question of freedom and its limitations is played out. Just as in the three-cardmonte game, in Lincoln and Booth’s life, things are not what they seem. It might look like they are just one job opportunity, one paycheck, one lucky break away from a more comfortable life, but this possibility is an illusion that is itself part of the game. As Critchley maintains, the opposition between individual freedom and agency, on the one hand, and a metaphysical principle or force such as fate, on the other, is of central importance in ancient tragedies. In Topdog, of course, the metaphysical force in question is not fate but structural racism. Moreover, Abraham Lincoln, who is an ambivalent figure in several of Parks’s plays, represents this opposition between freedom and subjection, because the abolition of slavery, which he personifies, often obscures the fact that black people in the U.S. continue to be disadvantaged and dominated in other ways and by other means. Thus, Lincoln—and I refer here neither to the Lincoln in the play nor primarily to the historical Lincoln, but rather to Lincoln as American mythological figure—also represents this insidious illusion of freedom and opportunity so central to Topdog. The achievement of Parks’s play is that it casts institutional racism as a tragic force without precluding the possibility of change or diminishing the question of responsibility. As The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 63 Critchley’s statement illustrates, tragedy also revolves around the link between freedom and responsibility. Critchley emphasizes Oedipus’s complicity in his fate, and Parks’s statement in the documentary, if taken in isolation, could open the door to interpretations of Booth and Lincoln as “tragic victims” in accordance with Stuelke’s “tragedy trap.” Yet, as Stuelke argues, Topdog thematizes and problematizes such representations. The tragedy of Topdog is that even though Lincoln and Booth try very hard to escape the tragedies that African Americans so often face, they eventually fail. Topdog could accordingly be considered a meta-tragedy rather than a straightforward tragedy, but just as metafiction is still fiction, meta-tragedy is still tragedy, and this is important. Sweat by Lynn Nottage was directly inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2017. In the same year, the New Yorker conferred on it the title of “first theatrical landmark of the Trump era” (Schulman). Sweat is clearly less experimental than Topdog and belongs rather to the realist tradition in drama. It is set in the rust belt, more precisely in Reading, Pennsylvania, and takes place in the years 2000 and 2008. In the first scene, which is set in 2008, the audience encounters Jason and Chris, twenty-nine-year-old men who are on parole. Jason is a white American of German descent and Chris is African American. The play subsequently moves back to the year 2000, and all of the action takes place in a bar, where a group of steel plant workers regularly meets. They discuss rumors that the factory will move jobs abroad to Mexico as a result of the NAFTA agreement as well as a management position for which they can apply. Cynthia, Chris’s mother, and Tracey, Jason’s mother, actually do apply for the job. Cynthia is successful, and from then onwards, there is a clear tension between Cynthia and the rest. This tension intensifies when, over a weekend, much of the factory machinery is moved away to Mexico and all workers are locked out. The plant wants to renegotiate contracts. Cynthia is caught between the management and her friends, she is forced to lock out her friends, even her son, and she wonders whether she received her management job exactly for this reason (Nottage 77). She has to do the dirty work that nobody else in the management is willing to do. While Cynthia’s friends refuse to accept the new terms of employment, they witness how new workers who are willing to work for less enter the factory every day. Of course, they become increasingly angry and desperate. Their frustration becomes unbearable when they learn that Oscar, who waits tables in the bar, has accepted a job at the factory, too, because it pays better than his current work. Eventually, Jason confronts and assaults Oscar in the bar. Chris wants to intervene, but when Oscar Simon D. Trüb 64 accidentally hits him in the heat of the fight, Chris cannot hold back his anger anymore, either and attacks Oscar together with Jason. Stan, the bartender, tries to defend Oscar against Jason and Chris and sustains a serious head injury as a result. In the end, both Oscar and Stan lie injured on the floor while Chris and Jason flee the scene. This ultimately results in their eight-year imprisonment. At the very end of the play, back in 2008, we see that Oscar has taken over the pub from Stan, who is now waiting tables. Stan is severely disabled because of his head injury. Jason and Chris enter the pub remorsefully but are unable to utter an apology. The final stage directions describe: “The four men, uneasy in their bodies, await the next moment in fractured togetherness” (Nottage 112). Sweat portrays the precarity of the working class, how precarity leads to tensions within the working class itself, and how such conflicts benefit those in power. It cogently illustrates that precarity is coextensive not only with job and financial insecurity but also, importantly, with utter disenfranchisement. In an exuberant review, theater critic Charles Isherwood pinpoints the tragic quality of Nottage’s play as he remarks: members of the audience might find themselves getting a little moist with anxiety as this extraordinarily moving drama hurtles toward its conclusion with the awful inevitability of Greek tragedy. Certainly I found myself squirming in my seat as I watched the forces of fate, or, to be more specific, the mechanics of 21st-century American capitalism, bear down on these characters with the brutal power of a jackhammer smashing through concrete. (n.p.) Similarly to Topdog, then, Sweat harnesses the power and conventions of tragedy for ideological critique. In several respects, Sweat is closely related to Ruined, the play for which Nottage won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2009. Ruined focuses on the plight of women during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly on the sexual violence to which they are regularly exposed. In the cases of both plays, Nottage collaborated closely with director Kate Whoriskey, and the two of them spent significant time conducting research in the locations in which the plays are set. Moreover, while both plays focus on the predicaments of a distinct, oppressed group of people, the explicit aim of both was to raise social awareness and mobilize political activism. They try to achieve this by directly appealing to the audience’s emotions, and hence they are both informed by a realist aesthetics. Nottage and Whoriskey developed this aesthetic strategy while working on Ruined, as they initially envisaged Ruined as a modern adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage (Whoriskey xi/ xii). In an interview with Jean E. Howard, Nottage describes Ruined as The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 65 tragedy, but she adds that critics frequently do not respond particularly well to tragedy and instead tend to think of plays that “ [ deal ] with weightier, emotional material” as melodrama. While the realist aesthetics and its focus on social class clearly distinguish Sweat from Topdog, it is interesting to notice similarities between the two plays, particularly with respect to the relationship between precarity and tragedy. Like the murder at the end of Topdog, Jason and Chris’s attack on Oscar and Stan can be considered tragic, not only in a vulgar but also in a more literary sense. Analogously to Parks’s argument regarding the characters of Booth and Lincoln, one could maintain that Sweat did not have to end this way. Jason and Chris did not have to attack Oscar and Stan, and yet they did. Thus, at issue is once again the opposition between individual freedom and choice, on the one hand, and a metaphysical force, such as fate (in ancient tragedies), institutional racism (in Topdog), or the systematic oppression of the working class (in Sweat), on the other hand. Chris and Jason are imprisoned because they made a mistake and are clearly guilty. However, the tragedy is, just as in Topdog, that there are a lot of contributing factors that lead to this outcome and that Chris and Jason’s attack cannot be explained exclusively, arguably not even chiefly, with character flaws. This opposition between individual freedom and the systematic exploitation of the working class can be observed well in Cynthia’s case. Cynthia applies for the management position and is successful. Thus, it looks initially as if she had succeeded in improving her situation entirely by herself. She must have been the best applicant and must have deserved the promotion. Cynthia becomes the living proof that upward mobility is still possible. Yet, her promotion tellingly transforms her into a figure akin to a messenger in a classical tragedy, for she suddenly has to mediate between her working-class friends and the management, to which she somehow still does not properly belong. And of course, it is no coincidence that the management in Sweat is as absent from the stage as the gods usually are in ancient tragedies. So, even though Cynthia’s promotion at first looks like the fruit of her own labor, the result of her own actions, and thus eventually like proof of her individual freedom, this is not the case. For good reasons, Cynthia starts wondering whether she only received the management position to facilitate the renegotiations of the working contracts. Thus, in the end, the metaphysical force prevails over individual freedom, or, as Lincoln explains to Booth: “It may look like you got a chance but the only time you pick right is when thuh man lets you” (Parks 111). Similarly to Oedipus’s belief in his ability to change his fate, the promise of a better life drives the characters in Topdog and Simon D. Trüb 66 Sweat, and it prevents them from rebelling openly against a repressive, exploitative system. Importantly, Topdog and Sweat do not contrive this tragic logic, according to which the characters become complicit in their own undoing by choosing to act against their interests. It is already at work in neoliberalism, and it has famously been examined by Lauren Berlant under the name of “cruel optimism.” Berlant explains: an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. […] optimism is cruel when the object/ scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expanse transformation for which a person or a people risks striving. (2) The idea of upward mobility is one of the examples of cruel optimism that Berlant discusses at length. Hence, not only do contemporary plays like Topdog and Sweat have to be regarded as tragedies, but they bring to the fore a tragic structure or logic that is at work in neoliberal society itself. Topdog and Sweat challenge this tragic logic of neoliberalism—the tragedy of being-precarious—by framing it as tragic theater. Hence, it is crucial that they be considered tragedies. Challenging a narrative or genre from within—appropriating it, stretching its limitations—is significantly more promising than opposing it from the outside, particularly in the case of as entrenched, old, and protean a notion as “tragedy.” Opposing tragedy or trying to escape or avoid tragedy only risks reinforcing its power by defining a genre, narrative, or tradition negatively, as what it emphatically is not. Moreover, by arguing that Topdog transcends tragedy and thus by positioning characters like Lincoln and Booth outside its realm, a progressive critical position like Stuelke’s might inadvertently reinforce the conservative, formalist view of tragedy that considers lower class and ethnic minority characters unworthy of the genre. While scholars such as Hall, Goldhill, and Williams maintain that narrow, formal definitions of tragedy are modern inventions, Goldhill and Williams also discuss the political implications of this terminological development and emphasize the importance of more inclusive conceptions. Here is Goldhill: There is a repeated pattern of rhetoric in claims to recognize the truly tragic. It usually starts with a rather easy commonplace: dismissing the modern journalistic love of the term “tragic” as trivialization, used as it is for any upsetting event from the broken bone in a footballer’s foot to the natural disaster of a tsunami. This critical rejection of the journalist’s promiscuous recognition of tragedy is part and parcel of an attempt to reserve the vocabulary The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 67 of “the tragic” not just to denote the grandest genre of the Western theatrical tradition, but also to describe and to privilege a particular sense of the human condition: a suffering that sets man against the otherness of the world […]. Generalizing about the tragic is one strategy for introducing a hierarchy into perceptions of human suffering—downplaying your mundane misery in the name of my truly tragic. (141) Thus, Goldhill considers the vernacular use of tragedy as opposed to the philosophical and literary uses. Referring to a “particular sense of the human condition,” the philosophical idea of the tragic also influences modern literary definitions of tragedy insofar as not all kinds of human suffering and, importantly, not all kinds of human beings are recognized as equally representative. Schematically, precariousness is readily viewed as “truly tragic,” while precarity falls into the category of “mundane misery.” Accordingly, if plays such as Topdog and Sweat are not considered tragedies, this is also because the lives of their characters are deemed to embody and thus represent the “human condition” only imperfectly, which means that they are viewed as somehow less-than-human. Among other things, this also implies that the lives of the characters lost or fundamentally changed in those plays are not as grievable as the lives of other, “more tragic” characters. The politics of grief or mourning is intimately related to the question of who or what counts as human, and it is accordingly not surprising that mourning is not only historically connected to the genre of tragedy but also plays an important role in Butler’s work on precarity/ precariousness. Grief is a difficult emotion, Butler explains, because it makes us aware of the extent to which our lives depend on others and it thus “challenges the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control” (Precarious Life 23). Butler’s discourse on precariousness and the German Idealists’ discourse on the tragic here significantly overlap. In Modern Tragedy, Williams approaches the same issue as Goldhill from a different but equally illuminating perspective. Likewise reflecting on the tensions between the vulgar understanding of tragedy and the academic uses, he concludes: “Tragedy, we are told, is not simply death and suffering, and it is certainly not accident” (Williams 14). The opposition between tragedy and “accident” introduced here is significant. Certain sad or disturbing events—Williams mentions “a mining disaster, a burnedout family, a broken career, a smash on the road” (13-14)—are not normally considered tragedies, Williams argues, because they tend to be described as “accidents.” In contrast to “tragedy,” which imbues events with metaphysical significance, “accident” implies that whatever happened, no matter how sad, is merely the result of unfortunate circumstances. Simon D. Trüb 68 Hence, Williams maintains: “we can see that the ordinary academic tradition of tragedy is in fact an ideology” (48). He further explains: The real key, to the modern separation of tragedy from “mere suffering”, is the separation of ethical control and, more critically, human agency, from our understanding of social and political life. […] The events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics. To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say that we cannot connect them with general meanings, and especially with permanent and universal meanings, is to admit a strange and particular bankruptcy, which no rhetoric of tragedy can finally hide. (48-49) To consider or describe an event as “accident” instead of as “tragedy” implies that not much could have been done to prevent it. On the one hand, it thus amounts to a rejection of responsibility of those in power and the pre-emption of the possibility of change. On the other hand, it undermines the human agency of the victims—the freedom and ability to effect change and make decisions that Parks emphasizes with regard to Lincoln and Booth—who consequently lose some of their humanity by being reduced to passive victims. Thus, the opposition between “tragedy” and “accident” returns us once again to the concepts of “freedom” and the “human condition” or to the question of what or who precisely counts as human. Granted, it would be strange to describe Booth’s murder or Jason and Chris’s attack as accidents, but it is entirely plausible that such events are describes as “incidents” rather than tragedies. “Accident” and “incident” share the etymological root of cadere, which means “to fall.” This is the fall of the dice, the work of chance, and chance rather than a grand metaphysical design is thus implied in both “accident” and “incident.” Conclusion: The Importance and Power of Tragedy Today At stake in Goldhill’s and Williams’s criticisms of the narrow, academic uses of “tragedy” and in the present interpretations of Topdog and Sweat as tragedies is the expansion—in fact the democratization—of “tragic” suffering to include in it the “mundane misery” (Goldhill) or the “mere suffering” (Williams) of ordinary people, to which precarity belongs as well. If the genre of tragedy is related to metaphysical insights about the human condition, that is to precariousness, and if plays like Sweat or Topdog are not considered tragedies because their subject matter is too The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 69 “mundane,” the continuity between precarity and precariousness is obscured, and a central political and philosophical dimension of contemporary plays (contemporary tragedies) is lost. Hence, to appreciate the political potential of tragedies like Topdog and Sweat, it is necessary to return to Lorey’s argument, according to which precarity results from the unequal distribution of precariousness. At the same time, an ostensible conflict between Stuelke’s and Williams’s assessments of tragedy needs to be addressed. Stuelke condemns Obama’s description of Martin’s death as tragedy because it represents this death as the work of fate rather than the consequence of systemic racism and thus amounts to a rejection of accountability. Williams, by contrast, maintains that common calamities are often described as “accidents” rather than tragedies and that this amounts to a preclusion of the possibility of change and agency. According to Stuelke, the label of tragedy is undesirable; according to Williams, tragedy needs to be reclaimed. What this tension between Stuelke’s and Williams’s positions primarily reveals is that tragedy is a fundamentally complex and ambivalent genre, concerned as it is, for instance, both with the possibilities and limitations of the human condition, particularly of freedom. Accordingly, the difference between Stuelke’s and Williams’s conceptions of tragedy is one of emphasis or perspective; Stuelke focuses on the limitations of freedom and the rejection of responsibility, Williams on the possibilities of the former and the assumption of the latter. Being aware of this essential ambivalence of tragedy and thinking of it in relative terms (as a case of “both and”) instead of in absolute ones (as “either or”) opens the possibility of engaging with this potentially powerful genre in ways that encourage politically progressive interpretations rather than reactionary ones. That is, it allows for egalitarian approaches to tragedy that mobilize the intimate relationships between precarity, precariousness, tragedy, and the tragic to draw attention to the continuity between precarity and precariousness. Indeed, on the basis of this insight, precarity and precariousness, on the one hand, and tragedy and the tragic, on the other, can be tied together in one last knot. The ambivalence at the center of tragedy, according to which tragedy can enable or forestall social and political change, is analogous to the ambivalence of the relationship between precarity and precariousness, which, according to Butler and Lorey, are both distinct and yet fundamentally related. While the appreciation of the connections between precarity and precariousness could lead to social and political reform, the strict separation of these two notions runs the risk of precluding it. In her recent book Tragedy Since 9/ 11, Jennifer Wallace reflects on the relationships between tragedy, precariousness, and catharsis Simon D. Trüb 70 in a way that beautifully illustrates these connections. Catharsis, this most tragic of all concepts, commonly associated with the emotions of pity and fear, not pity or fear, of course, perfectly captures the ambivalence of tragedy, as well. Wallace argues: Watching tragedy raises important questions about what is the appropriate response to the suffering of others and who is entitled to express it. […] Tragedy, by opening us up to a recognition of the precarious situation of others, […] produces bonds of interdependence and reciprocity. […] Tragic recognition entails a reciprocal process of understanding, sharing in each other’s vulnerability and limitedness. […] Besides pity, of course, there is also fear, the other emotion identified by Aristotle as central to tragedy. […] tragedies can have a positive moral effect, jolting those experiencing them, including the bystanders and witnesses, into opening themselves up into a richer imagination of the lives of others. But fear can overwhelm pity, close down our capacity for compassion and encourage us to respond to the threat of assimilation by creating greater distance and distinction than was originally there. (9-11) Catharsis can elicit compassion and solidarity, or it can result in emotional distance and in more extreme cases even in hostility and violence. Furthermore, while precariousness and precarity are intricately connected, ontological or existential precariousness is a condition that all human beings share, while precarity is more particular, since some people lead more precarious lives than others. Now, it is important to democratize tragedy, to consider plays like Topdog and Sweat as tragedies, to admit precarity to the realm of the tragic because the exclusion of representations of precarity and of suffering related to precarity from the category of the tragic amounts to a distancing gesture that strictly separates precarity from precariousness and casts people affected by precarity in the role of the other. If precarity and precariousness are thus separated, the fates of human beings and literary characters affected by precarity do not need to concern the privileged observer. “I” (who can afford a ticket to the Broadway performance of Topdog or Sweat) can watch Lincoln and Booth, or Jason and Chris and tell “myself” that the events that unfold in front of “me” are exclusively their problem, that they have nothing to do with “me.” However, if the connections between precarity and precariousness are acknowledged, and this happens when precarity is included in the tragic, the precarity of others is likely to remind the observer of the precariousness that all human beings share. “I” recognize in the precarity of the lives represented by Booth, Lincoln, Jason, and Chris the precariousness that makes us all human. The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 71 Acknowledgment I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their helpful and encouraging feedback. In particular, I would like to thank them for drawing my attention to Patricia Stuelke’s essay, which allowed me to develop an even stronger and more nuanced argument. Simon D. Trüb 72 References Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. “Suzan-Lori Parks (1963-)”. Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O’Neill to the Twenty-First Century. Ed. David Palmer. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018. 199-212. Critchley, Simon. Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us. New York: Pantheon Books, 2019. During, Simon. “From the Subaltern to the Precariat.” Boundary 2 42.2 (2015): 57-84. Felski, Rita. “Introduction.” Rethinking Tragedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Goldhill, Simon. Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hall, Edith. “To Fall from High or Low Estate? Tragedy and Social Class in Historical Perspective.” PMLA 129.4 (2014): 773-82. Howard, Jean E. “Interview with Lynn Nottage.” PMLA 129.4 (2014): 847-49. Isherwood, Charles. “Review: Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’ Examines Lives Unraveling by Industry’s Demise.” New York Times 16 August 2015. Jacoby, Oren. The Topdog Diaries: An Intimate Portrait of Suzan-Lori Parks. Image Entertainment, 2002. Kolin, Philip C. and Harvey Young. “‘Watch Me Work’: Reflections on Suzan-Lori Parks and her Canon.” Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries. New York: Routledge, 2014. 1-25. Lemke, Sieglinde. Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso, 2015. Nottage, Lynn. Sweat. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Topdog/ Underdog. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002. Schulman, Michael. “The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era.” The New Yorker 20 March 2017. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. The Tragedy of Being-Precarious 73 Stuelke, Patricia. “Trayvon Martin, Topdog/ Underdog, and the Tragedy Trap.” American Literary History 29.4 (2017): 753-778. Wallace, Jennifer. Tragedy Since 9/ 11: Reading a World out of Joint. London a.o.p.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Whoriskey, Kate. “Introduction.” Ruined. By Lynn Nottage. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009. ix-xiii. Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London: Verso, 1979. Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women Anne M. Mulhall Over the past decade, Anne Boyer has published a series of poems detailing the most intimate, mundane aspects of her life in Kansas. Focusing on gender, production, and work, her poems foreground precarity, sex, reproduction, child-rearing, consumption, exhaustion, writing, and the refusal of writing. Often, they describe her attempts to exist outside a world where all human activity is reduced to economic productivity, a world that Boyer describes as operating on principles of “inescapable shock.” While Boyer’s poetry provides a detailed phenomenology of doing and being able to do, it also addresses the situation of not doing and being unable to do. With these issues in mind, this chapter will explore connections between poems in Garments Against Women and philosophies such as Giorgio Agamben’s theories of potentiality and impotentiality and contemporary feminist approaches to being and doing, such as Adriana Cavarero’s work on “inclination” as political category. Reading Boyer’s poetry alongside philosophy and political theory, will, I suggest, enhance our understanding of questions of potential, actuality, and feminist critiques grounded in ontology and phenomenology. At the same time, these readings will complicate certain categories with implications for feminist politics, from transparency and uprightness, to their counterparts, vulnerability, inclination, and lack. Keywords: impotentiality, potentiality, vulnerability, feminism, writing, precarity, poetry, work, Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women, Giorgio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero Anne M. Mulhall 76 Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks. Giorgio Agamben, “Infancy and History: An Essay on the Destruction of Experience” Over the past decade, the American writer Anne Boyer has published a series of prose poems detailing the intimate and mundane aspects of her life in Kansas. With a focus on questions of gender, production, and work, these poems foreground precarity, sex, reproduction, child rearing, consumption and creation, exhaustion, writing, and the refusal of writing. Quite often they describe her own attempts to exist outside a world that wants to reduce all human activity to economic productivity, a world that Boyer describes as operating on the principles of “inescapable shock” (Boyer 1). But while her poetry gives a detailed phenomenology of doing and being able to do, the doing of writing itself causes Boyer deep ambivalence. Most notable is how she addresses the situation of not doing and being unable to do. In an honest description of incapacity that may be strikingly familiar to many readers, Boyer dedicates a lot of her writing to reflecting on her own impotence as a writer. There is an obvious irony in the fact that Boyer’s frustrations about the writing process take the form of completed and published poems. After careful reading, her poetry reveals not so much a poet struggling to write, as a poet learning to live in the pure potentiality of her own lack. Garments Against Women, her 2015 collection, repeatedly articulates the poet’s desires to refuse the contemporary organization of the society she finds herself living in. These desires manifest in a catalog of undeciphered impulses, impulses that Boyer grapples with and partially negates across the collection. “I was perfectly willing to assign to my own refusal some sort of pathology,” she writes in “At Least Two Types of People” (23). And in a later poem, “Sewing,” she cryptically observes that “even heroic refusals aren’t that heroic, although some are more heroic than others” (31). Boyer’s poetry has recently attracted attention for precisely this capacity of refusal. A recent review of Garments Against Women in the Los Angeles Review of Books has highlighted the paradoxical power of Boyer’s impotence. Citing John Keats’ “negative capability,” the reviewer argues that Boyer, along with fellow young American writers Bhuna Kapil and Juliana Spahr, shows a “willingness not to know in advance,” using her capacity for “being in uncertainties” as “an important and renewable resource” (McLane). The scholar Walt Hunter has also paid close atten- Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 77 tion to Boyer’s vulnerability, arguing that it can be taken as a model for an alternative form of political resistance. Similarly, Lindsey Turner has suggested that Boyer’s professed inability to write amounts to a targeted critique of current labor practices. What has been missing from discussion of Boyer’s work so far has been any engagement with wider philosophical discourses of impotentiality. Specifically, Garments Against Women may be read as both complementing and complicating the concept of potentiality in the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Potentiality, which the critic Kevin Attell has called Agamben’s “signal concept,” has been a pre-occupation of Agamben’s work since at least the 1980s (Agamben 3). Developing out of the Aristotelian corpus, the concept works with a shifting and often ambivalent definition. Alongside its sister term, “impotentiality,” it essentially refers to the seemingly limitless human capability to do, but also not to do. On the one hand, this has a political dimension. For Elizabeth Balskus, Agamben’s tension between actualizing and not actualizing potential “serves as the foundation for political, creative and moral action” (160). As a political concept, Attell sees it as mutually compatible with the idea of “constituent power” in the work of the Italian autonomist philosopher Antonio Negri (“Potentiality”). Yet Agamben’s primary sites of interrogation are the work of art, creativity, and the act of writing. Like Jacques Derrida before him, Agamben attempts to free both the promise and the act of writing from mere function or responsibility (Attell, Agamben 3-5). Specifically, as Leland de la Durantaye observed, he is concerned with “returning every work of art to its originary hesitation” (3). By presenting the possibility that the work of art might never come into existence, and by “evoking the oscillation between work and draft, effort and accomplishment,” Agamben’s sense of impotentiality “invokes a much richer and darker potentiality lying at the heart of the work” (de la Durantaye 3). Considering the concept across Agamben’s texts, not only in matters of speech and language, but also in matters of time, history, and messianism, de la Durantaye suggests that the idea culminates in what he calls the “prehistory of potentiality,” or the state of “never-having-been” (22). It is in this sense that in his introduction to Agamben’s collected essays, Potentialities, editor Daniel Heller-Roazen has argued that Agamben’s task is to “confront history as a reader, ‘to read what was never written’” (1). While developing this philosophical concept, a study of impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s poetry can also extend the idea into feminist discourses of creativity. Surprisingly, given Agamben’s debt to Heideggerian phenomenology, there has also been little attention to his possible feminist Anne M. Mulhall 78 phenomenology. 1 Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s concept of “vulnerability” reveals a productive line of connection. Cavarero’s recent book Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude has drawn attention to what she sees as a tired universalizing bias, one that connects uprightness and upright comportment to moral and political rectitude. As an alternative, Cavarero suggests a feminist geometry of leaning toward to emphasize the political and emancipatory importance of vulnerability and inclination. As well as offering a potent critique of contemporary politics, Cavarero’s exploration of posture might well be mobilized to think through the concept of potential from a contemporary feminist perspective. Here, some interesting questions arise: what is the relationship between ideas of potential, capability, the potential not to do, and recent feminist discourses of vulnerability, such as Cavarero’s? 2 What can using a feminist perspective to expand, or even delimit, Agamben’s set of concepts offer us? How can we account for modes of action or capability, or will or its lack, in a particularly feminist way? Agamben’s account of the contemporary precarious subject describes a poor contorting soul who, buffeted on the winds of economic change, forms and reforms itself “according to this flexibility that is today the primary quality that the market demands from each person” (Nudities 45). Considering the diagnosis of this sexless figure, this article will open up another approach. As I will suggest, Boyer’s poetry can draw out some of the feminist aspects in the personal, mental relationship to being and doing that are present, if not fully sketched out, in Agamben’s phenomenology. By reading the issue of potential and impotentiality between philosophy and poetry, I hope also to uncover new insights into 1 A contemporary philosopher who has taken up a feminist critique of Agamben is Penelope Deutscher, who opens her 2008 article, “The Inversion of Exceptionality: Foucault, Agamben, and ‘Reproductive Rights,’” with the question: “Since it has not to date arisen as a question, is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women’s bodies in the politicization of life? ” (55). Deutscher also picks up this theme in a later article, “Sacred Fecundity: Agamben, Sexual Difference, and Reproductive Life,” where she identifies a “cluster” of feminist responses to Agamben, some of which “figure Agamben as mute, either puzzlingly or inexcusably so, on matters of gender and sexual difference,” and others which have “suggested a number of senses in which a feminist reading may not be appropriate to Agamben’s work” (fn. 1, 51). 2 A range of other critical feminist texts, many preceding Cavarero’s, debate the potential of a feminist perspective on vulnerability. For a particularly inclusive appraisal of the many philosophical and sociological approaches to vulnerability as a political tool, see especially Chapter One in Anu Koiven, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg’s The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising affect in feminist, queer and anti-racist media cultures (1-26). A recent collected volume of articles, Vulnerability in Resistance (Butler et al.), pairs the concept of vulnerability with resistance, instead of reading them as opposing political concepts. Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 79 the limitations and possibilities of potential, vulnerability, and resistance in contemporary society. Moving further, I hope even to generate new, more specific modes of thinking about problems that have become universally designated under that contemporary label of “precarity,” which Judith Butler has probably best epitomized to date as “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (25). 3 “On What We Can Not Do” and “On Potentiality” In “On What We Can Not Do,” one of his most recent works on the theme of human possibility and potentiality, Agamben presents the idea of “impotentiality.” Following Aristotle, Agamben uses this term to mean something quite distinct from an absence of potential. Beyond “not being able to do,” impotentiality signifies “being able to not do,” or being able to not exercise one’s own potential. It is this “specific ambivalence of all potentiality,” for Agamben, that is “always the power to be and not to be, to do and to not do,” which “defines, in fact, human potentiality” (Nudities 44). To really understand the scope of human potential, by this logic, we need as individuals to come to terms with the fact that our capabilities necessarily include the power not to do, or not to be. We need to recognize the human privilege that takes us beyond the basic “specific potentialities” of phenomena, such as fire for example, or even the simple “biological vocations” of non-human animals (Agamben, Nudities 44). Our failure to recognize these privileges, as well as our prevalent inability to properly exercise this potential to not do, are for Agamben indicative of our current predicament as subjects of Western liberal democracy. It is towards the close of the short essay that Agamben raises the emblematic figure of the contemporary West, the person who contorts himself to match the demands of the market (Nudities 45). Agamben’s diagnosis of this subject is essentially ethical, political, and ontological and corresponds with what he identifies as the perceived lack of worth, within the West, of anything that seems to lie outside the production of basic economic value. As he suggested in a recent interview with Jordan Skinner at Verso Press, “We no longer conceive of an existence without effect,” to the extent that “ [ w ] hat is not effective—workable, governable— 3 For alternative takes on precarity both as philosophical concept and sociological descriptor see Berlant; Standing; Lorey; Berardi; Lazzarato; Seymour. Anne M. Mulhall 80 is not real.” But in this analysis, Agamben also hints towards a phenomenological reading. Addressing our existential awareness, or lack of awareness, of our own capacities to act or to refuse to act, he suggests that a failure to fully recognize impotentiality has contributed to a number of our most pressing contemporary political concerns. Although Agamben’s essay largely focuses on the question of potential as it relates to concerns about flexibility, expendability, and operationality in the present day, the theme of potentiality is a historically recurring trope throughout his work. In 1999 Agamben published Potentialities, a series of independent essays united by a common logic. As Heller-Roazen sketched out in his introduction, they seek to “examine the pure existence of language, freed from the form of any presupposition.” Through this enterprise, Heller-Roazen explains, they articulate “a ‘coming community’,” one that will exist “without identity,” and be “defined by nothing other than its existence in language as irreducible, absolute potentiality” (23). Across these essays, Agamben substantially addresses the question of human potential using a dual Aristotelian framework. Within Aristotle’s framework outline in Book Two of De Anima, suggests Agamben, “potential” encompasses both human generic potential, or the potential to “be,” as well as the potential to “do,” or to act after receiving knowledge (Potentialities 179). It is this second sense that Agamben appears to be most concerned with and which he explores in the most well-known essays within the collection. In “On Potentiality,” Agamben attempts to think through the Aristotelian conception of potentiality for the present day. As he makes clear, in reviving this concept he is careful to neither rehabilitate an ancient problem for the contemporary age nor, perhaps worse, to historicize Aristotle’s enigma of capability (Potentialities 177). Agamben’s more direct goal, as he tells us, is to “attempt to understand the meaning of the verb “can” [ potere ] ,” or to answer the question “What do I mean when I say, ‘I can, I cannot’? ” (Potentialities 177). Even in the act of posing this question, what is especially important for Agamben is the issue of global inequality and oppression. As he remarks, there is a “part of humanity that has grown and developed its potency [ potenza ] to the point of imposing its power over the whole planet” (Potentialities 177). Elsewhere in the collection, in “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Agamben also succinctly outlines the Aristotelian problem of potentiality in a way that describes how the potential to not do is also a kind of potential. “For Aristotle,” writes Agamben here, “all potential to be or to do something is always also potential not to be or not to do (dynamis me einai, me energein), without which potentiality would always Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 81 already have passed into actuality and would be indistinguishable from it” (Potentialities 245). In common with much of Agamben’s work, “On Potentiality” uses the question of the poet’s capacity to write as a way of animating ideas about potential and its opposite: the tension between being able to and not being able to, or between the ability to say “I can” and its opposite, “I cannot.” He illustrates the question of how the poet conceives of their own potential to write in any given situation—the “I can write” that precedes the act in itself—through a story recounted by a 20 th -century Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, in her collection Requiem. It was in the 1930s, and for months and months she joined the line outside the prison of Leningrad, trying to hear news of her son, who had been arrested on political grounds. There were dozens of other women in line with her. One day, one of these women recognized her and, turning to her, addressed her with the following simple question: “Can you speak of this? ” Akhmatova was silent for a moment and then, without knowing how or why, found an answer to the question: “Yes,” she said, “I can.” (Potentialities 177) For Agamben, Akhmatova’s framing of this particular moment illustrates a central enigma of the conditions of possibility which we as humans signify through the utterance “I can.” It is not, as he makes clear, that Akhmatova suggests that only she as a poet possesses the specific capacities of language and metaphor to keep the memory of such atrocities alive. It is rather that the poet, like any human being and regardless of their specific capabilities or capacities, must at some point or another confront the harsh possibility that one “can.” That potential utterance, “I can,” is one that Agamben marks out as “perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality” (Potentialities 178). But beyond the Akhmatova example, the question of writing, and the possibilities of not writing, play an important role in Agamben’s philosophy. Like many contemporary thinkers, Agamben takes Herman Melville’s reluctant scribe, Bartleby, as the essential embodiment of the refusal of productivity, not only in the realm of writing, but also in work in general. Agamben’s essay, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” situates Bartleby as belonging to a “literary constellation” that includes Franz Kafka’s courtroom clerks, Robert Walser’s Simon Tanner, and Nikolai Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich (Potentialities 243). But more important for Agamben is a “philosophical constellation” of thinkers who consider the pure potentiality of the word as something that might be actualized or made into an absolute creation. Considering prior philosophical discus- Anne M. Mulhall 82 sions developed by, among others, Aristotle, Maimonides, and Sufi Ibn Arabi, Agamben hopes to reveal something about literary potential in Bartleby, whom he sees as “the last, exhausted figure” in this lineage (Potentialities 247). “As a scribe who has stopped writing,” says Agamben, “Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives” (Potentialities 253). Agamben especially emphasizes the “formula” of potentiality as it is exemplified in Bartleby’s refusal to write (Potentialities 255). In other words, he pinpoints how potentiality departs from other modalities of possible intention, such as will or agency. Epitomized in the Bartlebyian response, “I prefer not to,” Agamben says, is precisely the conundrum of will versus potential. “It is not,” Agamben reminds us, “that he does not want to copy or that he does not want to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to” (ibid.). With the help of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Agamben categorizes this problem as “contingency,” or that which “coincides with the domain of human freedom in its opposition to necessity…” (Potentialities 261). Again and again, Agamben will return to this formulation of the license to not do; one that has no relationship to need or desire, particularly in his formulation of the question of inoperativity, an especially prevalent theme in his collection of essays, The Use of Bodies (2015). It is at this point that we might consider the work of a contemporary writer such as Boyer, a poet who has consistently addressed the problem of being both capable and incapable of writing fiction, memoir, and poetry. Garments Against Women is motivated by autobiographical examples of both writing and failing to write. Throughout, Boyer explores a variety of modes of writing, including: transcriptions and treatises, “inadmissible information,” books, subtitles, biographies, spam, literature, blogs, fiction, the novel, internet language, poetry, poetic syntax, science fiction, information, reading lists, checks, “directions written by the pattern maker,” sewing books, Wikipedia, account books, translation, sequels, books of political philosophy, memoirs, prose poems, fragments, critical theory, accounts, songs, historical re-enactments, essays, roundtable responses, conference papers, recipes, constitutions, wills, and medical reports. The act of writing, even when it is also cryptically presented through the homology of sewing, becomes the stuff and substance of the collection. But at the same time, Boyer struggles to decipher what is “not writing.” The two words “Not Writing,” in fact, become a refrain through the collection. Two poems in particular, “Not Writing,” and “What is ‘Not Writing,’” with their intense focus on writing as production and possibility, capture some of the most potent questions about the poet’s task under the present conditions of advanced capitalism. Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 83 “Not Writing” and “What Is ‘Not Writing’” In the poem “Not Writing” and the accompanying “What Is ‘Not Writing,’” Boyer explores the state of “not writing” ironically (though unavoidably) through writing itself. She wonders about the kinds of writing that she claims she is not currently undertaking. “When I am not writing,” she begins in the first poem, “I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and pasting time” (41). She goes on, “I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world’s richest art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch’s Maldoror” (ibid.). Like the poet Akhmatova cited by Agamben, Boyer admits that she is capable of writing, or having the potential to write something in particular within the circumstances of her existence. Yet Boyer complicates this admission, too. Although these books may never be written, by giving their titles—1994, Nero, Kansas City Spleen, and Bitch’s Maldoror—she nevertheless brings the idea of these different works into being. This creates a paradox in relation to their status as production. On the one hand, by bringing these works into print as titles, not as texts, she seems to have exhausted their potential. Yet, conversely, the writing of the poem “Not Writing” itself has only been brought to fruition through the presence of these non-written books. Although all routes for producing new material seem to exist in conflict with what Boyer admits is her own inability to produce, this in itself has its own perverse form of productivity. As she explains in “What Is ‘Not Writing,” deliberately using the language of creation, “ [ t ] here are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of ‘not writing’” (46). Exploring this paradox, Turner has recently identified the presence of “paralipsis” in Boyer’s writing, the rhetorical figuration of “stating something through the claim not to be stating it” (122). For Turner, the recurrent sentence “I am not writing” is a paraliptic formulation of the highest order. Precisely “ [ o ] n account of its capacity to address itself paraliptically,” Turner observes, the act of writing in general, but especially Boyer’s, distinguishes itself from other forms of work, even as it shares and reveals some of their qualities. Marking out its own difference as writing, this poetic mode not only diagnoses the dilemmas of work under contemporary neoliberal capitalism but…also points toward the transformative possibilities of its own performance of and expressed resistance to labor. (124) Anne M. Mulhall 84 There are many moments in Boyer’s collection where writing is figured as labor, not least when it is written through metaphors of sewing and dressmaking. Noting this, Turner offers important insights into the paradoxes of creative work in modernity. As thinkers in the Italian autonomous tradition have shown, she suggests, “creativity and even disobedience have become traits more likely to be prized by capitalism than anathema to it” (Turner 126). Specifically, Turner reads Boyer’s crisis of writing as a commentary on the contemporary crisis of work, a crisis associated with a fixation on flexibility and versatility in the workplace. But as Turner notes, flexibility is also a crucial feature of the poetic form. If the “language of flexibility has been appropriated and utilized by neoliberal capitalism as a criterion for workplace success,” she writes, then “poetic form models a different sort of flexibility,” such as when it “asks us to imagine possible similarities and channels of communication between the different spaces through which it moves, while also serving as a material reminder of difference” (Turner 124-25). Taking Turner’s suggestion further, we could argue that Boyer is re-appropriating the symptoms of capitalistic crisis into strategies of creative resistance. Boyer complicates this theme in another poem in the collection, “The Open Book.” Using the metaphor of bookkeeping, in this poem she perceives a situation in current politics and society in which all things are subjected to assiduous reckoning and accounting. Deploying the theme of the account to encapsulate a fixation with the ethics of transparency, she describes how economics, and especially the capitalist exhortation to desire profit, have become so intertwined with contemporary subjectivity as to seem inextricable. Boyer makes explicit a set of links between practices of profit-making and the ideology of transparency that has aided capitalism’s ascendancy. Beginning in the opening lines of the poem, she attempts to expose how this link affects us as contemporary actors. It’s only necessary to make a transparent account if it’s necessary to have accounting, and its only necessary to have accounting in the service of a profitable outcome. To account in the service of profit is to assume the desirability of profit. (Boyer 34) Writing against the assumption that profit should be read as an end toward which people ought to strive, Boyer launches an injunction against an ideology of wealth-making, one of the bourgeois founding emphases of the United States. 4 “To account in the service of profit is to assume 4 By deploying the bookkeeping metaphor to explore the pervasive ethics of transparency, Boyer underscores that ethic’s specifically American energies. Notably, it was Benjamin Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 85 the desirability of profit,” Boyer continues, encouraging us to question long-held beliefs about the mutual affinities between profit and desire. These injunctions are made all the more powerful by coming from a feminist-precariat perspective. “The Open Book” describes a female protagonist, a metaphorical bookkeeper—perhaps modeled on Boyer’s own past work as a bank clerk—whose attitude to her role presents a challenge to any suggestion that ambition and acquisition should be so entangled. In the model that Boyer critiques, even the person who is deployed to uphold transparency through bookkeeping is assumed to want to profit themselves. Within this model, it is “assumed” that the bookkeeper’s “heart is naturally a heart desiring profit.” This is because “profit” is “assumed to be desirable, and if she is in the service of profit, it’s assumed she would like to profit also, and that what she would do if there were no transparency is to cause herself to profit” (Boyer 34). According to Boyer, the bookkeeper must display—through the visible evidence of the act of bookkeeping—how she manages to suspend her own desire to profit for the benefit of whomever or whatever she serves. The female accountant must, in other words, make an exhibition of transparency, ‘something to show’—a performance, for the order of business, that her desires are in accord with its, that she would so naturally desire profit as to want to steal it and therefore her “something to show” is the naturalness of the larger body’s desires. (Boyer 34-35) In abstract terms, this figure works as a way to call into question the desirability of profit. But the embodied feminine subjectivity of the figure is also highly significant. On the one hand, she might give us cause to reflect on the female exception to primitive accumulative practices, such as was brought to light in studies like Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, where Silvia Federici connects the rise of capitalist accumulation and rationality with the demonization of women as witches and the regulation of women’s bodily autonomy. Alternatively, the figure may underline the unremunerated role that women have historically played in the expansion of capital through social reproduction, as suggested by Federici’s International Wages for Housework Movement Franklin’s fixation on double-entry bookkeeping that for Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic, epitomized Calvinistic profit seeking. Weber particularly converges on Franklin’s “ideal of the honest man of recognized credit” and his attendant ideology of the “duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself” that are especially prevalent in his diary entries (16-17). Anne M. Mulhall 86 among others (see Toupin 2018). In light of the national context in which Boyer is writing, as well as the “ethic” of accumulation that has been paired with it, we may say that “The Open Book” offers a uniquely feminist riposte to any suggestion that profit should be a desirable “end in itself.” While exploring the reasons one might want to refuse participating in the multiplication of profit, “The Open Book” conveys another, subtler, message. By deploying the metaphor of bookkeeping, Boyer encourages us to reflect on the fetishization of transparency in current liberaldemocratic thought. In this respect, she taps into ongoing philosophical debates about the relationship between visibility and truth. Against the model of visibility as integrity, which critics have suggested has become the norm in political thought, Boyer proposes “another veracity” (36). This alternative model of truth, she suggests, includes such clandestine strategies as “conspiracy, corners, shadows, slantwise, evasion, unsayingness, negation, and under-the-beds” (ibid.). At the culmination of this list are “opacity” and “multiplicity,” terms which Boyer offers as modes of human inclination that may be able to defy both productivity and transparency together. “To refuse a bookkeeperly transparency,” she says, “is to protect the multiplicity of what we really want” (ibid.). By challenging the moral dogma of accountability, Boyer suggests, we may be able to re-establish other, more open-ended possibilities for making both meaning and truth. Other philosophical critiques of the politics of transparency have, like Boyer’s poetry, tended to privilege the implicit over the explicit and the esoteric over the overt. Agamben’s own work has often been concerned with transparency and the problems it has engendered as an ideology. Within Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben suggests that the Western democratic promise of openness has often functioned as an attractive overlay, one that conceals an array of secretive government actions, from the perpetration of inhumane atrocities to the daily interference with bodies through biopolitical techniques. It is this paradoxical situation that Agamben gestures toward in the opening pages of Homo Sacer, when he describes the “bloody mystification of a new planetary order” that has arisen after the Iraq and Balkan wars (12). These are issues that have long occupied Agamben. In one of his earlier pieces, “Oedipus and the Sphinx,” he converges on the topic of opacity through an investigation of signification, meaning, and openness and their oppositional, metaphorical representation in the figures of the Sphinx and Oedipus (Stanzas 135-140). In another essay, “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality” in Potentialities, he connects the questions of potential, Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 87 signification, and transparency of language to writing, especially engaging with the Derridean question of différance and the displacement of meaning that paradoxically engenders signification (205-19). Across these different explorations, the question of transparency, especially as it is invoked within contemporary liberal democratic discourses, is never for Agamben too far from the question of human potential, or “what we can not do.” Another recent critique of transparency has come from Agamben’s intellectual inheritors, the French philosophical collective Tiqqun. Active from the late 1990s, this semi-anonymous group named themselves after Tikkun Olam, an ancient Hebrew phrase for “world repair,” a term that has come to imply the practice of positive action in the pursuit of social justice in contemporary Jewish thought. In general, Tiqqun have drawn attention to a political undercurrent forming in opposition to the logic of transparency. Across two volumes of the Tiqqun journal, published in 1999 and 2001, Tiqqun variously describe forms of resistance based on principles of anonymity, opacity and non-hierarchy, and even “headlessness.” There they describe various “communities of defection” as movements away from normative political principles, such as in their descriptions in the essay “Thèses sur le Parti Imaginaire” of the “Imaginary Party,” loosely based on Georges Bataille’s “negative community” (Tiqqun 1 50-71). One of Tiqqun’s most potent and controversial essays, “Échographie d’une puissance,” deploys the metaphor of the sonogram to interrogate the issue of transparency in late modernity (Tiqqun 2 194-233). Tiqqun use the metaphor of the ultrasound to encapsulate how questions of human potentiality and possibility have become bound up with a probing ethics of transparency. Using a feminist lens, they conclude that any nuanced model of the contemporary subject is unachievable. They give two clear reasons for this. First, they cite Western culture’s foundation on a model of universal humanism, a model which they say has neglected sexual difference. Second, they point to a contemporary neoliberal “technoscientific” (modele du savoir techno-scientifique) approach to the human (and, by extension, to human knowledge and politics), an approach they say has promoted simplistic ideals of truth and transparency. “Western universalism,” they suggest, is a “system of knowledge-power that has for millennia knowingly founded itself on the fiction of the transparent ‘I.’” Looking at the implications of this “fiction,” Tiqqun warn that this ideal of Anne M. Mulhall 88 transparency effectively allows the “techno-scientific model of knowledge” to avoid “ever being called into question by its own discourse.” 5 Even more recently, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has added further shades to these critiques. For him, a certain ideology of transparency now manifests through a range of forms, from a prevalent doctrine of positivity that increasingly underpins contemporary neoliberal discourses, to an emerging legalistic obsession with evidence. A growing consensus within modernity, Han argues in The Transparency Society, “a systemic compulsion gripping all social processes and subjecting them to a deep-reaching change,” now depends on transparency for its function. With far-reaching consequences, this compulsion culminates variously in a “calibrated,” “machinic,” and “totalitarian” society, one built on an enormous amount of information and communication which, rather than alleviating a lack of clarity, paradoxically “deepens it” (Han 2, 8). Ultimately, Han warns, we should recognize the malignant nature of such an ideology. That is, we should understand it both as a tool and a result of a “control society” that operates through digital panoptic structures of excess: “excessive exposure,” “hyper-communication,” “pornographic display-of-the-self,” exhibitionism, voyeurism, and ultimately, exploitation. For Han, it appears that we have freely given ourselves over to this problem through our everyday consent to digital culture, a culture whose logic works through an “auto-exploitation,” in which one appears to be “master and entrepreneur of oneself” (46-49). In a related effort, the political philosophers Sabine Baume and Yannis Papadopoulos have distinguished and critiqued a “growing enthusiasm” for transparency in public life, along with a rise in discourses lauding the merits of transparency in politics. In a recent article, they diagnose what they see as a pervasive conceptual over-determination of “transparency,” one that has elevated it to the status of modern panacea. This attitude, they suggest, has its roots in political ideologies of publicity and light promoted by utilitarian social reformer, Jeremy Bentham. Especially significant for them is Bentham’s tract “On Publicity,” which includes prescriptions about the “moralization of politics,” “public confidence,” 5 This translation from the French is my own. The quote appears in the original French publication as follows: “L’universalisme occidental a vécu dans le mythe de l’être neutre producteur de vérité, se donnant ainsi les armes d’une oppression innommable, créant un apport de force pour lequel le vocabulaire du savoir existant ne pouvait pas fournir de mots. L’effacement du sujet, le surgissement du Bloom sont les effets sismiques d’un système de savoir-pouvoir qui s’est sciemment fondé pendant des millénaires sur la fiction du «moi transparent», celui qui peut composer avec le modèle du savoir technoscientifique en s’y superposant sans jamais être mis en question par son discours, telle une machine de guerre innocente” (205). Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 89 and “consent,” building toward a positive call for total transparency (169,171). 6 It is here that Baume and Papadopoulos note an originary conceptual transference between ideas of morality, public opinion, and luminosity. As they suggest, we need to “replace exaggerated expectations regarding transparency.” This is because the more “transparency becomes a ‘magic’ concept, the more it risks being devalued in the face of experience” (Baume and Papadopoulos 187). All of these interventions share significant overlaps that might help illuminate Anne Boyer’s own problems with transparency. On the one hand, they ask us to reconsider an affinity between transparency and integrity that these writers suggest is becoming pervasive in political thinking. While warning that calls for an increased visibility are not always innocuous pleas for better governance, each of them caution that transparency should not be taken as a magic cure for political dishonesty. In one way or another, all of them also connect the issue of transparency to the political question of what the human is capable of within capitalist modernity. If Han alerts us to the unforeseen problems that arise when we make ourselves and our lives digitally transparent, Tiqqun diagnose the penetration of scopic mechanisms into all areas of our existence. Similarly, while Baume and Papadopoulos call us to appraise assumptions that transparency can act as a panacea for liberal democracy, Agamben suggests transparency’s systemic links with global forms of imperialism and oppression. At the same time, Agamben’s earlier work suggests that this problem is exposed in our relationship with language. It is in his respect, most of all, that these critiques of transparency resonate throughout Boyer’s collection. With her willingness to live with “negative capability,” as Maureen McLane has suggested, or with her desire to accept her own undeciphered sense of what constitutes refusal, Boyer’s poetic subject shows a profound mistrust of the logic of transparency. In her mind, refusal as a category can at once be held as a pathology, but also figure as a site of “heroic” undecidability. “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock” A further dimension of Boyer’s impotentiality arises in the very first poem in Garment Against Women, “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock.” Deploying scientific animal testing as a metaphor to think about the 6 Baume and Papadopoulos interpret Bentham’s “On Publicity” from an arranged collection of Bentham’s works by the French editor Etienne Dumont. Anne M. Mulhall 90 contemporary human condition, the poem describes a laboratory where animal test subjects are subjected to a series of electrical shocks. Through this testing, the animals eventually self-manifest what Boyer calls “analgesics.” As she elaborates, these analgesics flood the body with “endogenous opioids along with cortisol and other arousing inner substances,” leading to a kind of chemically induced Stockholm syndrome (2). In this state, the shocked animals begin to enjoy the shocks that they are undergoing. Although no straining of the imagination is required to understand Boyer’s metaphor for the human condition, at the poem’s conclusion, she chooses to frame it explicitly as a critique of capitalism. “Also, how is Capital not an infinite laboratory called ‘conditions’? ” she writes, adding, “And where is the edge of the electrified grid? ” (ibid.). If Boyer’s “animal model” is meant to give a sense of the “infinite” inescapability of our condition within advanced capitalism, then it deliberately offers no clear vision of how to resist these shocks. As Walt Hunter has suggested in a recent reading of this poem, it is precisely this vulnerability that emerges in Boyer’s writing as a form of politics in its own right. According to Hunter’s reading, “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock” works as both a variation on and an antidote to a popular model of ode poetry that has tried to summon collective political energy against the individuating, destructive forces of what he calls “late late capitalism” (234). Against the impetus of many recent ode poets to “figure forth the possibilities of a common life,” something Hunter particularly notes in the work of the British poets Keston Sutherland and the late Sean Bonny, Boyer’s writing presents us with something altogether more tragic (233). If, as Sutherland himself suggests, the odal form strives “energetically to occupy the commons of sensation and desire,” then Boyer’s work represents a “particularly grim turn on the poetic rhapsody,” where “the rhetoric of lyric is spoken through the subject subsumed by capital, and the odal mastery over form becomes a series of evasive maneuvers within it” (Hunter 234). Identifying the important potential of “exhaustion” in Boyer’s poetry, Hunter reads it as complicating some of the more straightforward political ideas presented by Sutherland and Bonny, notably the suggestion that contemporary precarity might be resolved through collective political energy. To develop Hunter’s point, we might read Boyer’s poems as part of a particular constellation of literary work that has explored exhaustion and vulnerability, both collective and individual, as a form of agency against the declining social organization of advanced capitalism. Displaying skepticism about any potential to organize in any “traditionally” revolutionary political Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 91 way, many of these recent works have featured subjects wracked by sickness and dejection. Taken together, these texts add another layer of nuance to contemporary discourses on commoning as a political act, suggesting that we identify the ontology of commonality as having its roots in dependency and vulnerability. Within Garments Against Women there is, as Hunter makes clear, a kind of suturing that takes place only through vulnerability. In line with a wider constellation of contemporary literary works, Boyer’s poetry shuns an ideal of resistance built on the invulnerability of the ecstatic collective. Instead, she presents a metaphorical space in which certain stunted inclinations, hindered potentials, and deeper vulnerabilities may take precedent. “Inclination” has recently emerged as a way of re-thinking contemporary politics from a feminist perspective in the work of Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero. Challenging what she sees as a phallocratic norm in Western discourse, Cavarero seeks to overturn embedded associations between uprightness and erectness and morality and clear purpose. In an alternative geometric vision, Cavarero promotes an “ontology of the vulnerable” (14). According to Caverero, this ontology is best exemplified in the “maternal stereotype” of the Virgin and Child, an image she urges us to understand outside of its role in Christian iconography. In opposition to the subject of rectitude, which has existed as a paradigm in the popular political imagination for centuries, the inclining maternal duo offers an alternative model of morality. While rectitude finds its outlet as the “upright man” of modern philosophy, who “conforms to a vertical axis” that “functions as a principle and norm for its ethical posture,” the Virgin and Child offer a powerful antithetical model of vulnerable subjectivity (6). With the maternal duo, Cavarero says, we are in the presence of a scene in which the vulnerable par excellence, the infant, not only unilaterally consigns itself to the other, but also, and more importantly, provides for originary bending, for a certain anomalous slope, for a posture. It is as if the fundamental concept of ethics were now seen, despite ages of sermons on moral uprightness, from the perspective of the vulnerable—or, more to the point, inclination. (14) Against the traditionally upright political subject, Cavarero instead suggests dependency and leaning-toward as new models for political agency. Putting these motifs into contact with a survey of philosophical material, from Emmanuel Levinas to Hannah Arendt, Cavarero attempts to use the maternal figure beyond its traditional operation in discussions of ethics and care. Recognizing its greater ontological and phenomeno- Anne M. Mulhall 92 logical potential, she suggests that this inclining figure might ultimately be used as the starting point of a revitalized feminist political project. Reading Cavarero’s philosophical thesis alongside Hunter’s assessment of Boyer’s vulnerability, it is possible to identify a vital politics of inclination in Garments Against Women. Boyer’s work, after all, makes visible the everyday experiences of maternality. In the poems “Twilight Revery” and “The Virus Reader,” she describes and interrogates motherhood, detailing how her own relationship with her daughter is constantly inflected by the vicissitudes associated with a financially precarious existence. At the same time, her poems both critique and attempt to resist the normative standards associated with being “upright.” “Venge-text” contains a meditation on the poet’s perception of the color of the sky, which she suggests is blue, and how that perception can be mediated or changed by an ex-lover’s command to perceive the sky differently, and not as blue. “He is the man” she writes, “who looks at the blue sky and says ‘Do not remember this sky as blue’” (49). In “Ma Vie en Bling: A Memoir,” Boyer offers a similar account of seeing the sea and perceiving it as nothingness, only to be told by an ex-lover that “it only appears to be nothing” (60). If Cavarero urges us to encounter the iconographical stereotype of maternality with fresh eyes, then Boyer similarly plays with assumptions and stereotypes as a way of thinking about other potential political models. In “A Woman Shopping,” Boyer explores the figure of the female consumer as another paraleptic ancillary. Claiming that this is a figure she will return to in the future, Boyer again fixates on the “plan” or the possibility to write. I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. (Boyer 47) Here Boyer identifies the contradiction between the capitalist incitement to shop and the scorn that is poured on women for accepting that invitation. At the same time, and precisely through this identification, “A Woman Shopping” envisages the latent political potential in the oftenmaligned figure of the woman shopper. On this point, Boyer appears to be in contact with established discourses linking gender and consumption. According to cultural historians, women in the 19 th century often established financial and social independence through buying. Both Anne Friedberg and Dorothy Davis have outlined how consumption patterns changed or intensified with the rise of the autonomous female consumer, with both critics Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 93 mentioning the emancipatory possibilities offered by new patterns and platforms for consumption. Considering more recent intersections between autonomy and consumption, the Wages for Housework movement first accepted, and then politicized, gendered stereotypes of women and shopping. In doing so, they wanted to provide nuance for their theories of social reproduction by extending the critique of work, and especially housework, into all areas of society, including consumption. In particular, original Wages for Housework advocates Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James recognized that “those social relationships which women are denied because they are cut off from socially organized labor, they often try to compensate for by buying things,” and that “women buy things for their home because that home is the only proof that they exist” (45). Just as Boyer identifies intersections between the history of literature and the history of shop-going, she seems also to suggest the cultural impossibility of the “flâneuse.” Popularized in 19 th -century Paris, the flâneur is the subject who can look without having to buy; somebody who can watch the city without feeling watched, and who altogether inhabits a distinctly idealized, independent realm. He is the promeneur who takes “refuge in the shadow of the cities” (Benjamin 442). By contrast, as has been well-worked through in feminist literature, the female city walker has more often than not appeared in culture as associated with the “baser” material worlds of shopping or sex work (Wolff 40; Buck-Morss 119; Friedberg 36). As Anne Boyer herself puts it in “A Woman Shopping” The flâneur as a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand. (47) In these prior cultural investigations, women’s agency in urban settings was always seen to be configured to male permission or else to the culture of the commodity. All of these ways of looking at the problem, I suggest, are applicable to Boyer’s poetry, and might help us to expand and engage with her work in multiple ways. While Boyer may be critically reflecting on any political position that aligns basic freedoms or agency with purchasing power as damaging to feminist politics, she may also be asking us to consider its historical relevance for women’s autonomy. Conclusion In a sense, reading Boyer’s poetry allows us to negotiate the arc of Agamben’s potentiality in surprising ways. Agamben and Boyer are both Anne M. Mulhall 94 thinkers who force us to stretch our imagination in reconsidering everyday acts of interpretation, doing, and being. They both constitute their philosophies through affective language, and they both espouse a type of communal potentiality of poetry. But what also becomes apparent is that both thinkers have gaps in their understanding of the meaning of writing, potential, and being-in-the-world; gaps that can, to some extent, be rectified when the two are engaged together. Agamben’s potentiality has often been deemed as either too ambivalent and ungrounded as a concept or else too dependent on examples to be elaborated clearly. Another criticism is that potential, in Agamben’s reading, seems to elide the possibility of being utilized in any philosophical interrogation of sexual difference. Both of these accusations of ambivalence, however, point to the very freedom of interpretation that Agamben’s concept allows. One of the aims of this chapter has been to use Boyer’s poetry to provide a ground for this ambivalence, putting the concept in touch with contemporary issues, in what Agamben himself might call “new use” (Nudities 102). At the same time, my interrogations have sought to rectify the scant consideration given to Boyer’s poetry and especially to its complex considerations of writing and its relationship to other forms of potential. As suggested by Agamben’s deployment of literature in bringing the concept of potential into philosophical debate, it is fit to accommodate new considerations such as those raised through Boyer’s work. Ultimately, I want to suggest that thinking with Boyer’s poetry through such categories as precarity, vulnerability, and feminism can expose the deeper relevance of Agamben’s work while pointing to new possibilities for thinking through potential and impotentiality in the present day. Perhaps, following Agamben’s potentiality, we might develop feminist pheno-menological accounts of women’s writing to complement and complicate established philosophical interrogations, such as Hélène Cixous’s “ecriture feminine” or Luce Irigaray’s particular form of sexed thought, speech, and writing. Pursuing these connections, we might explore new links between questions of potential and actuality, advancing feminist critiques grounded in questions of sexual, ontological, or phenomenological difference while complicating a variety of categories with implications for feminist politics, from transparency and uprightness to their counterparts, vulnerability, inclination, and lack. Reading Boyer’s autobiographical poetry alongside Agamben’s decades-old question of what constitutes human potential, we may be able to expand the parameters of debates on human agency at this moment in modernity. More precisely, Boyer can also be used to widen Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 95 the scope of Agamben’s interventions on human potential. Against the arguably universalizing ontology of potentiality and its opposite, as suggested by Agamben, Boyer’s work offers a uniquely feminist phenomenological perspective, one that finds its voice through themes of vulnerability, perception, stereotype, and maternality. In this sense, the collection allows us to consider not only what it is possible to do under contemporary neoliberal conditions, but also what it is possible for us not to do and how we may recognize this. Anne M. Mulhall 96 References Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 2006. ———. Nudities. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Attell, Kevin. “Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power.” Diacritics 39.1 (2009): 35-53. ———. Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2014. Balskus, Elizabeth, “Examining Potentiality in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.” Macalester Journal of Philosophy 19.1 (2010): 158-80. Baume, Sandrine, and Yannis Papadopoulos. “Transparency: from Bentham’s inventory of virtuous effects to contemporary evidencebased skepticism.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21.2 (2018): 169-92. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. Trans. Arianna Bove et al. London: Minor Compositions, 2009. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Boyer, Anne. Garments Against Women. Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2015. ———. “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock.” 1-2. ———. “At Least Two Types of People.” 23-24. ———. “Sewing.” 25-34. ———. “The Open Book.” 34-36. ———. “The Virus Reader.” 37-38. ———. “Not Writing.” 41-43. ———. “What Is ‘Not Writing’.” 44-46. ———. “A Woman Shopping.” 47-48. Impotentiality in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women 97 ———. “Venge Text.” 49-50. ———. “Twilight Revery.” 52-53. ———. “Ma Vie en Bling: A Memoir.” 55-83. Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99-140. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith, et al. Vulnerability in Resistance. 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Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society. Trans. Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Hunter, Walt. “Planetary Dejection: An Ode to the Commons.” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016): 225-39. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Koiven Anu, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg. The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-Racist Media Cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Lazzarato, Maurizio Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. Trans. Arianna Bove et al. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2017. Anne M. Mulhall 98 Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg. London: Verso, 2015. McLane, Maureen N. “Projects, Poetries, Choratopes: On Anne Boyer, Bhanu Kapil, and Juliana Spahr.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 June 2016. <https: / / lareviewofbooks.org/ article/ projects-poetries-choratopesanne-boyer-bhanu-kapil-juliana-spahr/ #>. Accessed 8 February 2021. Seymour, Richard. “We Are All Precarious: On the Concept of the Precariat and its Misuses.” Patreon, 5 June 2020. https: / / www.patreon.com/ posts/ we-are-all-on-of-37918050. Accessed 8 February 2021. Originally posted on the New Left Project, 10 February 2012. Skinner, Jordan. “Thought is the Courage of Hopelessness: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben.” Verso Books Blog, 17 June 2014. https: / / www.versobooks.com/ blogs/ 1612-thought-is-the-courage-ofhopelessness-an-interview-with-philosopher-giorgio-agamben. Accessed 8 February 2021. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Tiqqun, “Thèses sur le Parti Imaginaire.” Tiqqun 1. Paris: Réproduction Libre, 1999. 50-71. ———. “Échographie d’une puissance.” Tiqqun 2. Paris: Réproduction Libre, 2001. 194-233. Toupin, Louise. Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-77. London: Pluto Press, 2018. Turner, Lindsay. “Writing/ Not Writing: Anne Boyer, Paralipsis, and Literary Work.” ASAP/ Journal 3.1 (2018): 121-42. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge, 2001. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture and Society 2.3 (1985): 37-46. Revolt Through Passivity? Getting High and Staying in with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation Juliane Strätz This chapter analyzes how Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) subverts the close relationship between late capitalist production and consumption by constructing its protagonist’s revolt corporeally through the depiction of the immobile, passive body. By using Melville’s “Bartleby” and the discourse on the short story as a framework for the analysis of the novel, it argues that neoliberal narratives of efficiency, productivity, and individual responsibility are not simply opposed by tropes of rest and relaxation. Instead, the novel co-opts techniques that are usually utilized to preserve social reproduction and caricatures them. By overdrawing and estranging U.S. American practices of rest and relaxation and by revealing the intimate entanglements of unconscious states and contemporary cultures of work, My Year of Rest and Relaxation discloses the dangers and absurdity of late capitalist ideology. Keywords: late capitalism, labor, sleep, Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation Juliane Strätz 100 Even Sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe. Heraclitus, On the Universe Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. Slavoj Žižek, Violence Capitalist participation has become a 24/ 7 business. In late modern societies, subjects are not only expected to engage in wage labor, they are also anticipated to consume. As wage labor no longer suffices to establish a successful life, recreational practices as well as activities of consumption, like shopping, going to the gym, and heading to the hottest parties, have become constituent to the construction of the ideal self. Work and “fun” not only increasingly overlap, but the latter acts as an extension of work. Amusement, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously noted, “is the prolongation of work under late capitalism” (109). Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation 1 (2018) criticizes contemporary cultures of work by mobilizing its supposed counter-concept, namely the avoidance of work. 2 Here, refusal to engage in wage labor, avoidance of tasks, and trivialization of both labor and consumer culture become a “pragmatic form of protest against a teleological understanding of wage labor, against to-do-lists, against time management, altogether against the generalizing [ and normalizing ] guidebook frenzy, a resistance which takes the intimate connection between the process of value creation and the individually distinct human nature seriously” (Balint et al. 18; my translation). However, neoliberal narratives of efficiency, productivity, flexibility, and self-responsibility are not simply opposed by tropes of rest and relaxation, and the text does not simply portray this dissociation from the impacts of late capitalism as comforting, healing, and liberating. Instead, the novel co-opts techniques usually utilized to preserve social reproduction and caricatures them. By overdrawing and thus estranging American ideas of sleep as restorative 1 In the following, I will refer to the novel using the abbreviated title Rest and Relaxation. 2 The term “cultures of work” refers to the notion that late modern ideas of work are shaped by particular behaviors, attitudes, norms, and expectations. These not only permeate public and work life; indeed they are just as effective in the subject’s private life and are therefore experienced as intimate. They are cultures in the plural because even though certain markers may dominate (such as ideas of flexibility, efficiency, and mobility), they still differ in relation to occupation, race, class, gender, sexuality, and corporeality. Just as other forms of cultural belonging, cultures of work constitute a main factor impacting identity construction for late modern subjects. Revolt Through Passivity? 101 and of sleep medicine as an additional enabler of consolidated sleep, 3 Rest and Relaxation not only discloses the dangers and the absurdity of the associated ideology; it also reveals how sleep and relaxation come to be intimately entangled in contemporary cultures of work. This chapter will analyze how Rest and Relaxation criticizes the conflation of production and consumption and the ensuing effects on the individual by constructing the protagonist’s revolt corporeally through the depiction of the immobile, passive body. In the novel, the protagonist not only withdraws her healthy, able body from the workforce, but she also attempts to stay away from non-essential activities of consumption and amusement. Conspicuously, her extreme form of passive resistance is reminiscent of another literary character described as a revolutionary pioneer by scholars such as Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. I will argue that the subversive potential that unfolds alongside the depiction of the eerily immobile body in the novel follows a similar strategy as does the protagonist’s resistance in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). The first part of this chapter will examine how Rest and Relaxation’s strategy to subvert contemporary cultures of work through passivity and immobility resembles a specific subversive strategy called “Bartleby politics,” which Žižek has deduced from a close reading of Melville’s short story. While Žižek has proclaimed this the most appropriate form of resistance to late capitalist ideology, my analysis will problematize its actual revolutionary potential. I will argue that Rest and Relaxation illustrates that this strategy of passivity is insufficient as it remains entangled with notions of privilege and seclusion. To continue the discussion of the subversive capacity of the immobile body, the second part of this chapter will shift the focus to an analysis of the aesthetic rendering of affects in the novel. Tying in with Sianne Ngai’s concept of “Bartlebyan aesthetics,” the analysis will zoom in to examine how the novel is still able to provide a critical commentary toward constructions of femininity in contemporary cultures of work—not through the reclusion of the protagonist but rather through her display of emotional negativity and affective equivocality. While the literary rendering of capitalist critique functions along the lines of “Bartleby,” the 3 Matthew Wolf-Meyer introduces the term “consolidated sleep” to characterize the implementation and normalization of sleep in the U.S. His book The Slumbering Masses provides a history of sleep from Puritans to contemporary sleepers in which he registers that, throughout its history, American idioms of sleep have always been bound to ideas of efficiency and productivity (22). Juliane Strätz 102 ending and the consequences of the protagonist’s actions deviate from the short story and, in doing so, highlight the limitations of Bartleby as a revolutionary messiah. Slumbering Resistance in My Year of Rest and Relaxation Rest and Relaxation describes the journey of an unnamed female protagonist in her pursuit of a more content life. Her unconventional approach to attaining this happiness is based on her conviction that after spending a year in hibernation, she will be “renewed, reborn a whole new person, every one of [ her ] cells regenerated enough times that the old cells [ are ] just distant, foggy memories” (Moshfegh 51). Staying in her apartment becomes her preferred mode of rejuvenation because it enables her to distance herself from all the negative influences in her life: her “bullshit job” (Graeber) as a desk clerk in a New York art gallery, 4 the memory of her deceased parents, her superficial friendships and romantic relationships. At the same time, it allows her to withdraw from most activities of consumption and capitalist participation. Aware of the difficulties that a year of rest and relaxation holds for a young and healthy person, she consults a psychiatrist who recklessly provides her with medication to treat her simulated insomnia. The novel accompanies the narrator-protagonist on her journey throughout this significant year. In doing so, it offers critical commentary on contemporary cultures of work by installing the passive, immobile, and anesthetized body as a signifier of revolt. To get an initial sense of the protagonist’s approach to revolt and the originality of her tactics, it is revealing to examine her reflections on the nature of her past rebellious behavior: I could have acted out if I’d wanted to. I could have dyed my hair purple, flunked out of high school, starved myself, pierced my nose, slutted around, what have you. I saw other teenagers doing that, but I didn’t have the energy to go to so much trouble. I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it. I’d be punished if I showed signs of suffering. I knew. So I was good. I did all the right things. I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts. (Moshfegh 65) 4 David Graeber has introduced the concept of bullshit jobs as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case” (3). Even though these jobs hold a certain market value, they do not implicate a social value. Revolt Through Passivity? 103 Although this excerpt is a reflection on the protagonist’s teenage years, it also outlines the dominant form of resistance in the novel and alludes to the motives behind her actions. In this way, the comment that she “didn’t have the energy to go to so much trouble” not only echoes the profound insecurity of a teenage girl, it also mirrors a more universal inability to respond to and deal with the boundless requirements confronting subjects in the world of 24/ 7 capitalism. In a society in which everything seems to be possible—and where most individuals are expected to seize any opportunity that presents itself—it is no surprise that subjects become overwhelmed and ultimately exhausted. In contrast to the stereotypical responses of other young adults, the protagonist acknowledges that doing “all the right things” became her form of resistance and of “rebell[ing] in silent ways.” In the novel, sleep, as a state that situates the individual outside the realm of full control but that also supposedly leaves them passive, immobile, and vulnerable, becomes the chosen subversive instrument. As such, the trope of sleep bears a dual function in the construction of critique in the novel: firstly, it simultaneously serves as a metaphor for the exhaustion and fatigue induced by late modern life and becomes itself a potent cultural metaphor of biocapitalism and neoliberal politics (Williams xi); secondly, sleep is constructed as a form of resistance that effectively reveals the hidden, destructive nature of neoliberal ideology. As there is much literature on social acceleration and its effects on late modern life, this chapter is more interested in investigating the subversive potential of Rest and Relaxation’s construction of passive resistance through the sleeping, passive, and immobile body. Soon after the publication of the novel, 5 several literary critics acknowledged the resemblance between Rest and Relaxation and “Bartleby.” These writers observe that the protagonist’s voluntary withdrawal resonates with Bartleby’s passivity. Melville portrays the passive resistance and downfall of Bartleby, a copyist who refuses to comply with his employer’s demands. The story, which has since entered the wider cultural vocabulary, addresses the potency, alienation, and helplessness of the individual office worker in the “administered world” 5 Lucy Scholes notes, for example, that “the narrator is more Bartleby than Sleeping Beauty,” Lincoln Michel comments that she “fade[s] away from life” in a comparable fashion, and Alexandra Kleeman writes that the narrator’s “final gesture, transforming herself into a piece of half-living art, echoes the odd and combative passivity of […] Bartleby.” While these pieces of literary criticism notice that the novel echoes motives that can be found in “Bartleby,” they do not provide further analyses or explanations beyond these short observations. Juliane Strätz 104 of capitalism (cf. Adorno) in the 19 th century. Most of the critics’ fascination stems from the “absoluteness of the refusal” (Hardt and Negri 203) wrapped up in Bartleby’s formulaic statement “I prefer not to.” It is striking that most of these analyzes attempt to rationalize Bartleby’s behavior, to bestow significance on his (in)actions, and to decipher who Bartleby might be. In doing so, some critics have “co-opted” the text and appropriated the extraordinary protagonist to fit their agenda. 6 Žižek’s Bartleby politics, a form of protest against capitalism he views as best exemplified by Melville’s fictional character, is not only of special concern for this analysis; indeed it is the most detailed analysis of passive resistance to emerge from the interpretation of the short story (Gullestad 405). He directly connects to Hardt and Negri, who claim in Empire that “the refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics” (204). For Žižek, however, this refusal transcends the mere preparatory stage of an alternative order: “it is the very source and background of this order, its permanent foundation” (The Parallax View 382). Hence, Bartleby represents the subversive adversary of an advanced capitalism, an “arche” that gives body to the movement (ibid.). What is particularly interesting about Žižek’s approach is that passivity not only “represents a negation of the explicit demands of power, but [ that it is ] also a refusal to partake in acts of resistance/ transgression” (Bryar 3). This adds a particularly neoliberal dimension to his observation as it incorporates the notion that protest and criticism are ingrained in “the new spirit of capitalism.” 7 Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly […]. The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something; ’ […] and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a ‘critical’ participation, a dialogue, 6 This concern has been brought forth by many scholars, mostly literary scholars, attacking different prevalent misreadings and co-optations of the short story. They accuse many of the philosophical (for example, Deleuze’s “Bartleby; or, The Formula” and Agamben’s Bartleby chapter in Potentialities) and political readings (for example, Hardt and Negri’s reading in Empire and the use of the story in the Occupy Wall Street movement) of losing sight of the particularities of the text (e.g., Cooke; Edelman; Bojesen and Allen). 7 Here, I refer to Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s concept of the “new spirit of capitalism,” which they define as “the ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism” (8) and which thus outlines the same phenomenon. While their eponymous book (1999) has been highly influential, it is not quoted in Žižek’s The Parallax View (2006). Revolt Through Passivity? 105 to silence—just to engage us in a ‘dialogue,’ to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. (Žižek, The Parallax View 334) Hence, neoliberal ideology is designed to keep people occupied, creating a system of engagement because all activities, even activities of revolt, eventually reinforce the system. 8 Not only can revolts not exist outside of power structures, but acts of resistance come to reinforce these very power relations. In contemporary capitalism, this correlation is further enhanced as people are “libidinally invested” in resistance; people are caught in a “vicious cycle of jouissance” (Žižek, The Parallax View 69, 116). Žižek explains that individuals enjoy acts of transgression because the resulting pleasure is deeply ingrained in capitalist ideology. 9 Because of this observation, Bartleby serves as an ideal model of effective neoliberal revolt: his subversion is not based on transgression but rather on overconformity, a behavior that is not anticipated. While acts of “inherent transgression” are innate to neoliberalism (Žižek, “Transgression” 3), 10 the system is undermined once someone begins to take its rules and commands too seriously. 11 These subversive tactics, which Žižek calls politics of overconformity, function to expose the true, ideological nature of our practices. These “acts of overconformity expose the law in its full idiocy, the impossibility of sticking to it, this pushing us to the brink of anomy: the horrifying void of lawlessness” (Krips 314). Similarly, literature can function as an act of overconformity that discloses the paradoxes 8 Michel Foucault makes a similar observation when he notes: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault 95). 9 Žižek elaborates: “The dialectic of Law and its transgression does not reside only in the fact that Law itself solicits its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not ‘natural,’ spontaneous, but always already mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgress it” (Žižek, The Parallax View 90). It should further be noted here that the term “law” remains sparsely defined in Žižek’s explanations. Henry Krips summarizes it as a “three-level network of interlocking local rules and tactics” (307). It can hence refer to a broad variety of rules and behavioral guidelines such as actual laws, traditions, cultural practices, ideology, and the symbolic order. 10 Žižek notes that small acts of transgression function as a balance because by allowing individuals to break the rules, they will ultimately become more subservient to the general cause and system (The Parallax View 90). 11 This is also observable in “Bartleby” when the scrivener outperforms at his job and his employer’s reaction reflects the perception of this behavior as abnormal: “I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically” (Melville 10). Juliane Strätz 106 inherent to contemporary cultures of work and, in doing so, might introduce doubt in readers. Overconformity only marks a first step in Bartleby politics, and it is followed by a politics of subtraction (cf. Vighi 135 ff.), “a political agent’s sacrifice of the very cause for which he sacrifices everything else in his life” (Krips 309). This stage is mostly characterized by a sacrifice of all behaviors that elicit enjoyment. Consequently, the final, third stage is defined by passivity and the ensuing effects. Žižek concludes that passivity is the only form of behavior toward late modern structures of power that cannot be subsumed under capitalist ideology. Applying Žižek’s theory to Rest and Relaxation, it might not be selfevident how the sleeping body becomes a site of rebellion, or how withdrawing from capitalist participation and spending a year in hibernation can be considered an act of overconformity to the law. It might be argued that this behavior represents quite the opposite of what the subject is expected to do. However, I argue that the protagonist takes the late modern command to prepare the body for capitalist participation, namely for work and consumption, to an extreme. Sleep holds an important, contested, and ambiguous role in late modernity. It is exceedingly subject to biopolitical control and management by businesses and governments alike, and its consolidation is deeply rooted in a neoliberal ideology. It is not surprising that in a society in which being wired awake is the desired state, sleep occupies a special role. Sleep represents the foundation of productive, efficient laboring bodies and at the same times creates a market of its own. Hence, sleep is closely interrelated with our waking lives. The governance of sleeping bodies has arguably become the basis of social order in late capitalism. The normalization of sleep, in line with neoliberal principles such as productivity, efficiency, and individual responsibility, has created a spatiotemporal regime governing individual behavior. Feeling obliged to align their sleep routine with the norm, subjects often “struggle with a body that is either shutting down before we want it or not shutting down when we want it to” (Williams 93). The discrepancy between the normalized expectation of sleep as controllable and people’s deviating embodied experience has furthermore provided space for a market—and the introduction of further mechanisms of control, such as sleep medicine—to the realm of sleep. While ideal U.S. American sleep has always been connected to Protestant narratives of efficiency and productivity as well as capitalist ideology, the medicalization of sleep has further reinforced the link between sleeping bodies and capitalism. As such, the government Revolt Through Passivity? 107 of sleep is directed at creating the very bodies society desires: bodies that are recuperated, alert, awake, efficient, productive, and subordinate. This basic idea also resonates in Rest and Relaxation; the protagonist takes the demand to prepare for social participation very seriously. After all, she justifies her hibernation project with the perception that the preparation for a purposeful life (according to a neoliberal logic) in her case requires a year of restoration, a restoration that the narrator oftentimes equates with complete renewal: “I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form” (Moshfegh 84). While the novel clearly indicates the absurdity of the narrator-protagonist’s endeavor, this attempt at the same time reiterates the misery of the protagonist’s life: her upbringing with an absent father and a depressed, drug and alcohol-dependent mother, her failed interpersonal relationships, and her bullshit job as a desk clerk in an art gallery in New York. Sequences in which the narrator remembers her job are particularly apt at showcasing how the trope of sleep functions as a form of subversion and capitalist critique in the novel. The job description alone illustrates that she, a university graduate in the field of art history, considers the job non-essential, unfulfilling, unchallenging, degrading, and alienating: Natasha had cast me as the jaded underling and for the most part, the little effort I put into the job was enough. I was fashion candy. Hip decor. I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avantgarde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question. (Moshfegh 36-37) This description reveals the protagonist’s repulsion for her work. It echoes feelings of being undervalued and subjected to highly gendered treatment. The form of devaluation she experiences is based on the fact that she is a woman, a role she struggles with in general. 12 In the descriptions of her resistance at her workplace and toward her work, it becomes clear that the novel plays with the Žižekian argument that it is precisely the practice of not indulging in sin or participating in active acts of rebellion but instead conforming to the law that can ultimately reveal the absurdity of neoliberal ideology and contemporary, normalized work practices. Becoming increasingly uninvolved and 12 Frustrated that she is solely valued based on her looks, she notes: “Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else” (Moshfegh 35). By revealing the limitations that beautiful women such as the protagonist encounter, Rest and Relaxation reflects on the general social role of women, the physical appearance of women, and its repercussions on job opportunities and careers. Juliane Strätz 108 indifferent, the protagonist refuses to make any effort, dress up, or be fully attentive. Her work routine is marked by a profound fatigue that causes her to nap during her lunch breaks in an attempt to make full use of the restoration time that the breaks provide. Here, sleep becomes a release, a respite liberating the character from daily requirements and expectations: At work, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet […]. I went straight into nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. […] There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy. But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. […] I was always still me. Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears. (Moshfegh 39-40) Sleep is here introduced as a form of release and refuge for the suffering individual. It becomes “a merciful chance to escape the treadmill of your own subjectivity” (Fuller 19). In the novel, it not only helps the character to distance herself from work and to restore her energy but also becomes a performative act of revolt, a form of rebellion that turns passivity into an act of active resistance, disclosing not only the ultimate toll of her bullshit job, but also its absurdity. While the novel borders on the absurd (as does “Bartleby”), it still eerily resonates with a realist mode of writing that reflects on contemporary cultures of work. After all, the protagonist does what she is expected to do: being a “bitch” (36), “a pouty knockout,” “indecipherably cool,” and “playing dumb” (37). It becomes clear that this behavior can in fact be considered a form of overconformity when her boss fails to problematize her behavior because she “seemed fine,” instead giving her “most grief […] about ordering the wrong pens” (40). The criticism raised against late modern work is reinforced through the parallels between the unconscious state of slumber and the barely conscious state that characterizes her work life: And when I was awake, I wasn’t fully so, but in a kind of murk, a dim state between the real and the dream. I got sloppy and lazy at work, grayer, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic. When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it. (Moshfegh 41) The novel repeatedly posits that sleep itself can often be a more conscious act than being awake and simply functioning, akin to a hamster on a wheel. Revolt Through Passivity? 109 This impression is further enhanced by the juxtaposition of the narrator and her best friend, Reva, who occupies an important role in the composition of the narrative as well as in the construction of critique because she functions simultaneously as the epitome of the ordinary young woman and as an incarnation of the superego. In this way, the novel takes Žižek’s argument that Bartleby politics unfold in relation to the superego literally. Not only does Reva attempt to lead her life according to neoliberal expectations but she is furthermore “an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion” (Moshfegh 15). She consistently provides self-help tips for a better life without being happy or content in her life, either. It is crucial to note that her pieces of advice tend to focus on maximizing pleasure and enjoyment. This feature is reminiscent of what Žižek describes as the late modern “superego imperative to enjoy” (The Parallax View 310). In contrast to previous forms of interpellation, which instructed subjects to contain their basic desires, the late modern superego directs the individual to indulge: “the superego aspect of today’s ‘nonrepressive’ hedonism (the constant provocation to which we are exposed, enjoining us to go right to the end, and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance” (Žižek, The Parallax View 310). As consumption and various forms of enjoyment are rendered obligatory, free time activities become a form of labor, extending working hours and shifting mandatory work to the private sphere. Hence, Žižek argues that any form of revolt must include resistance to neoliberal enjoyment. Sleep represents an appropriate metaphor for revolt in late modernity: it isolates the individual by withdrawing them from social interaction, largely offers an escape from consumption, and bypasses many sanctioned forms of enjoyment. In contrast to Žižek’s idealistic celebration of passivity, Rest and Relaxation, however, not only presents this form of revolt as a feasible option, but also reveals the difficulties of escaping late modern juissance. While withdrawing from work is not much of a problem, the protagonist finds it much more difficult to avoid consumption and enjoyment. The fact that various forms of consumption are deeply and subconsciously ingrained in the late modern subject is revealed by her somnambulant behavior: “The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was unconscious” (Moshfegh 85). In her sleep, she goes shopping, drinks and eats fast food, and engages in online sex, among other things. Unable to consciously control her actions, the protagonist begins to give in to her unconscious Juliane Strätz 110 desires, which seem to be oriented toward the late modern imperative to enjoy. Finally, another form of consumption, which is closely tied to sleep, is defamiliarized in the novel: the (ab)use of sleep medication. 13 Here I want to point toward the relationship between the medicalization of sleep and deviant bodies, which Laurent de Sutter describes as follows: Rather than as the opening of the age of anaesthesia, perhaps it would be better to speak of the opening of the age of anexcitation—the age of the ablation of individuals’ animation principle, transforming them into simple bodies, subject to examination and manipulation. [An] anaesthesized body is a body that causes no bother—a body that at last coincides with itself, which is to say with what is expected of it in the context of its operability, its capacity for being operated on. (109) Medicalization offers the opportunity to set bodies at rest, stopping them from causing social upheaval. Sleep medicine can be used to both align deviant, “dysfunctional” bodies and further sedate the “normal” body, thus integrating it into the system. The fact that the protagonist herself decides to make use of this system, which can be leveraged against supposedly deviant bodies, reveals her ability to undermine the law through playing by its rules. She subverts the system by instrumentalizing its own methods of subjection. On the other hand, however, the abuse of sleep medicine in the text also illustrates the heavy reliance of the protagonist’s chosen form of revolt on the neoliberal structures it otherwise defies. The Role of Privilege in the Construction of Critique Thus far, I have analyzed how sleep and the resting body are employed as a site of subversion in Rest and Relaxation. Even though her body in turn revolts against the withdrawal from capitalist participation as is expressed in her somnambulant behavior and in her growing addiction to sleep medication, the protagonist is relatively successful in resisting any non-essential participation. While she thus achieves what Žižek has claimed to be the only appropriate form of late modern revolt, the novel helps to uncover the shortcomings of Bartleby politics, which is in part 13 This topic plays a very prominent role in the text and its rendering, especially featuring Dr. Tuttle as the caricature of the reckless physician, would afford a longer discussion, which I unfortunately cannot provide in this chapter. Revolt Through Passivity? 111 rooted in the privileged subject position of the insurgent and in the limited potential of passive resistance. In Rest and Relaxation, the narrator-protagonist spends considerable time outlining the circumstances that render her project possible: the vast sum of money she inherited from her parents, the unemployment benefits she receives, her access to health care, a psychiatrist and a constant supply of medication, and supportive social contacts. It becomes clear that this protagonist holds a privileged social position: white, able-bodied, young, healthy, upper middle class. Her financial security in particular provides the necessary means for the hibernation project. This context alone shows that she is in a position that not many Americans occupy. While the narrator does not spend much time critically reflecting on her own privilege—this is not a subject of interest as she is solely concerned with herself—there are instances in which she acknowledges her own entitlement. For example, she mentions in a conversation with Ping Xi, an artist friend who designs an art project documenting her hibernation project: “I was born into privilege. [ … ] I am not going to squander that” (Moshfegh 265). Therefore, the protagonist’s entitlement reveals the limitations of Bartleby politics as a theory of subversion. At its center, it is prefaced on the notion of a privileged subject and thus “neglects and/ or disputes the existence of alternative modes of life alongside the violence, subjection, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human” (Weheliye 1-2). Again, the white body, embodied in the figure of Bartleby or the unnamed protagonist, becomes the symbol of an alternative order, rendering bodies outside of the normalized ideal invisible and impotent. Rest and Relaxation only critically reflects on the privileged subject position implicitly through its satirical qualities, such as the narratorprotagonist’s unreliability—as highlighted in her use of sarcasm, obscenity, and exaggeration—and through her own constant devaluation of the hibernation project: throughout the story, the protagonist underlines that her project’s purpose is solely self-serving, denying any larger political motivation. This is especially pronounced when Ping Xi co-opts her “quest for a new spirit” (Moshfegh 264) and documents it as an art project, “want [ ing ] to shock people” (ibid. 262). The protagonist herself becomes a work of art, an object judged by an entitled audience. In contrast to Žižek’s prediction, the audience in the novel does not grasp the revolutionary spirit of the project and treats it as any other commodified piece of art (Moshfegh 283). While Žižek’s and Gilles Deleuze’s famous readings of “Bartleby” implied a kind of revolutionary contagiousness emanating from Bartleby’s eerie refusal and passivity, Rest and Relaxation states that the project is not only self-serving; indeed it is Juliane Strätz 112 not even attractive to any other minor character in the novel. Thus the subversive capacity of the text, invoked by its metadiscursive observations, is partially negated by the text itself. While this might discount the revolutionary potential of passivity, the defamiliarization of late modern practices of production and consumption remains effective, directing its critical commentary to the reader through the portrayal of the resting body. Undermining the Affective Regime of Late Capitalism Up to this point, I have focused on the political dimensions of how passivity constitutes revolt in the novel, however there is another parallel between Rest and Relaxation and “Bartleby” that is worth exploring as it also contributes to the subversive potential of the text. Ngai observes that “Bartleby” is a “fiction in which the interpretive problems posed by an American office worker’s affective equivocality seem pointedly directed at the political equivocality of his unnervingly passive form of dissent” (1). She thus highlights the importance of the character’s display of dysphoric feelings and his emotional negativity to the illegibility of the protagonist and ultimately to the impact of the short story. Bartleby’s protest is only effective because of his affective disposition as it renders him further unintelligible; it contributes to his enigmatic character. Moshfegh’s protagonist is also difficult to read, unlikable, and even annoying. Her unlikability constitutes an important caesura as it breaks with the expectations and norms aligned to a particularly neoliberal construction of femininity. As Iulia Ivana elucidates, it “shed[s] light on the problematic relationship between happiness and likeability” (36) as it engages “in a form of political resistance by refusing to allow [ the female character’s ] dark emotions to be translated into patriarchal standards” (1). I will add to this that her behavior not only poses a critique on contemporary constructions of the feminine but simultaneously addresses neoliberalism’s affective regime. While I cannot provide an introduction to affect theory here, I still want to underline that “under capitalism, emotion management becomes a public communicative action, and individuals are requested to adhere to certain rules” (Strätz 137). 14 Affect has become an important means of 14 In the essay “Subverting Late Capitalist Comfort,” I provide a longer introduction to the relationship between affect and late capitalism and literature’s potential to offer criticism by disturbing the normative affective regime. See also Rachel Greenwald Smith’s book Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, which introduces the useful Revolt Through Passivity? 113 social reproduction, and literature such as Rest and Relaxation and “Bartleby” can explore new critical perspectives by disrupting this normative affective regime in which positive emotions such as happiness are privileged. Though the reader might relate to the motives of Rest and Relaxation’s protagonist, she remains hard to like, 15 difficult to identify with, disruptively unreliable, and her emotional responses often fail to conform to common expectations. The protagonist’s hibernation project represents an existentialist endeavor. It is at the same time a search for her place in society and a way of distancing herself from social expectations. Surprisingly, she does not react with depression, paralysis, despair, or hopelessness, but assumes a rather pragmatic stance toward her own predicament. Being solely selfconcerned, her attitude toward other people and objects culminates in indifference. Ivana remarks that by distancing herself emotionally and by refusing to adhere to affective scripts, the protagonist “manages to disrupt the postfeminist [ —and with that neoliberal— ] fantasy of ubiquitous happiness not by teaching what it means to assume the role of a stranger or a banished person, but by estranging us from the very happiness of the familiar” (45). To this end, the text again employs the juxtaposition between the protagonist and her best friend Reva in order to illustrate the foil the protagonist turns against. Her derogatory comments provide an insight into the social ideas she dismisses: “I had chosen my solitude and purposelessness and Reva had, despite her hard work, simply failed to get what she wanted—no husband, no children, no fabulous career” (14). The fact that Reva’s happiness is constructed against certain achievements in life highlights how the promise of happiness is tied to specific life choices in late modernity. That way, the pursuit for happiness becomes a disciplinary technique “that constructs subjects by orientating them around cultural norms” (Ivana 40). As Ivana notes, these cultural norms directed at millennial women delineate a specifically neoliberal femininity: Postfeminist culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize aspects of feminism; crucially, it also works to commodify feminism via the distinction between personal and impersonal feelings in order to describe the disruptive force of contemporary literary texts. 15 The question concerning the likeability of characters is often dismissed in academic literary analysis but frequently addressed in literary criticism. Ngai, however, advises the reader to pay attention to this aspect of reader-response as it can provide important insights into the politics of literary texts (Ngai 32). Juliane Strätz 114 figure of woman as empowered consumer. Thus, postfeminist culture emphasizes educational and professional opportunities for women and girls; freedom of choice with respect to work, domesticity, and parenting; and physical and particularly sexual empowerment. (Tasker and Negra 2) Postfeminist women are ideally expected to juggle career, family, domestic work, and sexual empowerment. As an empowered consumer, her decisions are closely aligned to the neoliberal logic, but with a feminine twist. Just as the novel depicts, this logic is perpetuated and “accumulates affective power” (Ahmed 53) through affective encounters between people but also through media, magazines, films, books, and so on. 16 In contrast to the prototypical Reva, the protagonist represents a “feminist killjoy” as defined by Sara Ahmed: “Feminists might kill joy simply by not finding the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising. [ … ] The feminist killjoy ‘spoils’ the happiness of others [ … ] because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness” (65). In doing so, the feminist killjoy spreads discomfort by failing to adhere to normative affective scripts. In Rest and Relaxation, while the protagonist’s emotions are not immediately apparent, it becomes clear that they are frequently ill-suited to the given situation. The scene in which Reva tells the protagonist about her mother’s death exemplifies this miscommunication: “My mom died,” Reva said during a commercial break. “Shit,” I said. What else could I have said. I pulled the blanket across our laps. […] Reva poked me. “Are you awake? ” I pretended I wasn’t. I heard her get up […]. She left without saying goodbye. I was relieved to be alone again. (109) By not showing emotions or comforting her best friend—or being unable to do so—she not only breaks with the affective regime but also with the general overidentification of the feminine with the emotional, with the role of the woman as the caretaker. Her display of “ugly feelings,” feelings that are ideologically labeled as negative and which supposedly disturb the social peace (Ngai 11), produces an ironic distance whose defamiliarizing 16 It needs to be noted here that postfeminism has been described as a white, middleclass narrative that does not integrate evident disparities and intersectional impact factors (cf. Springer 249 ff.). As mentioned above, Rest and Relaxation is also a white, middle-class, heteronormative, ableist text. While the novel utters a certain critique on postfeminism, it still entirely neglects to engage in a discourse outside of the privileged world of the characters. Revolt Through Passivity? 115 potential in turn carries a critical power. Furthermore, the fact that Reva is not bothered by the constant rejection and miscommunication reveals that their friendship is not based on authentic affection but on economic interests. This is expressed, for example, when the protagonist imagines the end of their friendship: “ [ Reva would ] realize that we had no good reason to be friends and that she would never get what she needed from me. [ … ] I could really imagine her phrasing. ‘I’ve come to realize that our friendship is no longer serving me’” (Moshfegh 163). By ending, or at least not actively seeking, these profit-oriented relationships, the protagonist also does not submit to an emotional capitalism according to Eva Illouz, “in which emotional life—especially that of the middle classes—follows the logic of economic relations and exchange” (5). Distancing herself from profit-oriented relationships, the protagonist increasingly occupies a space of asociality: “I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form” (Moshfegh 84). This asociality culminates in her decision to get locked into her apartment by Ping Xi, cutting all ties to the outer world. While it might seem as if the protagonist is unable to control her emotions, I would argue that her emotional distance and inability to respond to feelings represents a coping mechanism. Unwilling to deal with the emotions and traumata that haunt her and frustrated with the profit orientation of friendships, she does not want to speak the language of capitalized emotions and enter neoliberal affective relationships: “And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark” (Moshfegh 166). Putting herself in a space of asociality thus renders it possible for her to remain unaffected, not “bothered” by emotions caused by a society that has failed to accommodate her needs. Only in this place can she fully concentrate on herself. Like Bartleby, the protagonist of the novel is numbed by the experience of “the overwhelming” (McGee 251): 24/ 7 capitalism, loss and grief, postfeminist expectations, and bullshit jobs. Both characters’ reactions oscillate between irritation and apathy, a behavior that the unnamed protagonist seems to consider consistent with her own experience: “In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought it was going to save my life” (Moshfegh 7). Ngai conceptualizes this affect as stuplimity, “a bringing together of what ‘dulls’ and what ‘irritates’ or agitates; of sharp sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization, exhaustion, or fatigue. [ S ] tuplimity is a tension Juliane Strätz 116 that holds opposing affects together” (271). Ngai continues to argue that texts like “Bartleby” often derive their effect from the withholding of emotional release: “ [ T ] he noncathartic feelings in [ these texts ] could be said to give rise to a noncathartic aesthetic: art that produces and foregrounds a failure of emotional release […] and does so as a kind of politics. Such a politics is of a Bartlebyan sort [ … ] ” (9). Thus, their inherent ambivalence “enable[s] them to resist, on the one hand their reduction to mere expressions of class ressentiment, and on the other, their counter-valorization as therapeutic ‘solutions’ to the problems they highlight and condense” (Ngai 3). Through the construction of an affective body that acts outside of the neoliberal affective regime, Rest and Relaxation escapes the system it criticizes and is able to avoid being subsumed by it. The ending of the novel in particular underlines this critical effect. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that the narrator’s recurring insistence on her own affective blankness indexes her affective and emotional vulnerability. Even though the novel dismisses late modern ideas of the good life, it is still driven by hope and a pursuit for happiness, as is clear when she “felt hopeful [ and ] felt [ she ] was on [ her ] way to a great transformation” (Moshfegh 54). The whole narrative is driven by her journey toward a happier and more content life. This she hopes to achieve through a final drastic measure: spending four months in lock-up with the help of the potent fictional drug Infermitterol. While the novel does not provide much information on the time she spends unconscious, brief reports of her waking moments reveal gradual changes. In these scenes, the idea of reawakening is amplified by descriptions of her body that display a more careful, attentive, and gentle perception of her own embodied being: “Over the next month, when I’d wake up, my mind was filled with colors. [ M ] y waking hours were spent gently, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance. […] My face lost its edge. I asked for flowers” (Moshfegh 273). Through the descriptions of her body and her sensory impressions, it becomes clear that her attitude toward the world and herself changes significantly. Her “reawakening” unveils a relaxed and restored person: “ […] I came to in a cross-legged seated position on the living room floor. […] I heard a bird chirp. I was alive” (Moshfegh 276). Ironically, her awakening is marked by images she had dismissed in the past. She suddenly opens up to the world, is able to listen and affect the world, and is willing to be affected in turn. She has, in effect, relearned how to speak the affective language. While her old self was painfully cynical, opinionated, difficult to read, distanced, and emotionally incompetent, this new version is located on Revolt Through Passivity? 117 the other end of the spectrum. She is receptive, attentive, open-minded, naïve, and most of all, alive. She has grown to experience the world in its entirety. The significance and impact of her metamorphosis is underlined in the final scene of the novel, in which Reva is killed as a result of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9/ 11. As Nikolaus Lehner observes, she does not merely become a witness but is actually personally affected by the event (57). The world has truly changed around her after her hibernation; a new era begins. Interestingly though, she does not respond to her friend’s death with grief, sadness, or other predictable emotions. Watching footage of a person jumping out of the tower who she assumes is her best friend, the final sentences of the novel read: “ […] I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There is a human being diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake” (Moshfegh 289). Metaphorically, the superego’s influence on the protagonist dies alongside Reva. Just like the exposition before her hibernation, the ending foreshadows that the character still occupies the position of an outsider because she has opened herself up to be affected by the world, albeit not according to the neoliberal, late modern logic. After spending her life in a “dim state between the real and the dream” (Moshfegh 41), the protagonist begins the end of the rest of her life “wide awake” (ibid. 289). This is the final message of the novel. In painting a painful, defamiliarized picture of the affective regime of late modernity by revealing how blind participation in practices of neoliberal production and consumption can cause suffering and alienation, the novel challenges the reader to attempt to experience the world unmediated by ideology. While in doing so it also puts forth the idea that the age of irony has ended—a claim frequently raised in contemporary literature focused on negotiating a post-9/ 11 world—the reader might still find it difficult to interpret the novel as anything but ironic. After all the cynicism and despair that permeate most parts of the novel, it is quite difficult to reconcile both versions of the protagonist and to read the “solution” of the novel as authentic and feasible. While the almost ironic opposition between the cynical woman and the naïve girl in Rest and Relaxation can hardly be taken seriously in this context, still it exposes further unexplored tensions, motivating the reader not only to read the text closely but also to wake up and reflect on their own neoliberal existence. In the end, just like in the portrayal of “Bartleby,” the absurdity inherent in the depiction of the protagonist carries deep critical potential. Juliane Strätz 118 References Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Balint, Iuditha, Janina Henkes, and Kristina Petzold. “Varianz, Konstanz, Polyvalenz.” Arbeit Am Text. Ed. Iuditha Balint. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020. 9-23. Bojesen, Emile, and Ansgar Allen. “BARTLEBY IS DEAD. Inverting Common Readings of Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’.” Angelaki 24.5 (2019): 61-72. Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2017. Bryar, Timothy. “Preferring Žižek’s Bartleby Politics.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 12.1 (2018): n. pag. Cooke, Alexander. “Resistance, Potentiality and the Law.” Angelaki 10.3 (2005): 79-89. Deleuze, Gilles. “Bartleby; or, The Formula.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998. 25-39. de Sutter, Laurent. Narcocapitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018. Edelman, Lee. “Occupy Wallstreet: ‘Bartleby’ Against the Humanities.” History of the Present 3.1 (2013): 99-118. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Fuller, Matthew. How To Sleep. The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. A Theory. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. Greenwald Smith, Rachel. Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Gullestad, Anders M. “Loving the Alien: Bartleby and the Power of Non- Preference.” Exploring Textual Action. Ed. Anders M. Gullestad, Patrizia Lombardo, and Lars Saetre. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2010. 395-422. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Revolt Through Passivity? 119 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectics of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies. The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. Ivana, Iulia. In Praise of Unlikeable Women: Exploring Unlikeability in “Postfeminist” Times in My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Fleabag. MA Thesis. Utrecht University, 2020. Kleeman, Alexandra. “This Novel Provides an Empowering, Grotesque Alternative to Leaning In. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s Latest, an Anti- Heroin Turns Self-Care on Its Head.” Vanity Fair (2018). n. pag. Krips, Henry. “Politics of Overconformity: Bartleby Meets Žižek.” Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 9.3 (2012): 307-16. Lehner, Nikolaus. “Zur Subjektlosen Souveränität des Traumlosen Schlafs: Dissoziation, Trauma und Erwachen bei Perec und Moshfegh.” Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 4.1 (2019): 49-61. McGee, Micki. “Review: Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34.3/ 4 (2006): 249-52. Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, The Scrivener. A Story of Wall Street.” Melville’s Short Novels. Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Dan McCall. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. 3-34. Michel, Lincoln. “The Pleasures of Hating in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. On Ottessa Moshfegh’s Latest ‘Unlikeable’ Character.” Chicago Review of Books (2018): n. pag. Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. New York: Penguin Press, 2018. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Scholes, Lucy. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh—It’s a Knockout.” Financial Times, 27 July 2018. n. pag. Springer, Kimberly. “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women. African American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture.” Interrogating Postfeminism. Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 249-76. Strätz, Juliane. “Subverting Late Capitalist Comfort. Affective Connections in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People.” Comfort in Contemporary Culture—The Challenges of a Concept. Ed. Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020. 133-48. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” Interrogating Postfeminism. Gender and the Poltics of Juliane Strätz 120 Popular Culture. Ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 1-25. Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation. London: Continuum, 2010. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Williams, Simon J. The Politics of Sleep. Governing (Un)Conscious in the Late Modern Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. The Slumbering Masses. Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Inherent Transgression.” Cultural Values 2.1 (1998): 1-17. ———. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Marx v. Bezos: South Park’s First Labor Episodes Christian Hänggi Over the course of more than twenty years and nearly 300 episodes, the cartoon series South Park has not shown a great measure of interest in or empathy with the plight of the working class. When labor issues were at stake, they were mostly connected to immigration or technology, and the workers were depicted as mindless rednecks. It therefore came as a surprise when South Park aired the double episode “Unfulfilled”/ “Bike Parade” in December of 2018, taking aim at Amazon.com Inc. and its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The two episodes are remarkable for their awareness of American labor history and for drawing parallels to the robber barons of the industrial era. While Bezos is shown as a dehumanized and ruthless businessman with a disembodied voice, the Amazon employees are portrayed as desperate but socially aware human beings that even attend evening lectures on Marxism. This chapter contemplates the change South Park has undergone in its depiction of the working class. In the end, lectures on Marxism notwithstanding, it may not be socialism so much as anarchism that shows the way. Keywords: South Park, labor, Marxism, Amazon, Jeff Bezos Christian Hänggi 122 At the time of writing, the U.S. American cartoon series South Park has just gone into its 24 th season, making it the second longest-running cartoon series. Over the course of the years, it has seen four different Presidents of the United States, the rise of the internet, social protests, and stock exchange crashes, and it has helped to shape the nature of what can be seen and said on TV. 1 With humor schooled by Monty Python and adapted to the level of an American, mostly male, teenager, South Park has mocked, subverted, and honored a great array of public figures, organizations, and belief systems of American pop lore and current affairs. While the show’s main characters have always belonged to the working class in a broad sense, the social or political ramifications of this were consistently eclipsed or, in rare cases when they did come up, did not receive the balanced treatment that South Park afforded so many other topics. It is important to note here that while South Park can be merciless in its depiction of everything and everyone its makers decide to mock, it is also capable of sympathy toward particular causes or viewpoints. At the same time, in the world of South Park, this empathy, which is usually reflected through serious consideration of a particular viewpoint or by showing doubt or suffering without immediate subversion, offers no guarantee that the cause at hand will not ultimately be subject to ridicule in one way or another. Although South Park tends to opt for the middle ground between two perceived extremes, this middle ground is articulated by giving the grievances of both sides a more or less equal hearing. By this standard, South Park has not shown a great measure of interest in or empathy with the plight of workers over the course of nearly 300 episodes. This changed in season 22 (2018) with the double episode “Unfulfilled” and “Bike Parade” that took aim at Amazon.com, Inc. and its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos. With the rise of the data-driven corporations, mostly of Silicon Valley origin or spirit, capitalism appears to have entered a new age of information, production, and consumption—but also a new age of labor. Even though some of these corporations, for instance Amazon and Uber, do sell physical products or tangible services, the actual business models are based on or consist of the collection, computation, and 1 In a video essay, Youtuber kaptainkristian argues that “South Park has really blazed the trail for social acceptability in obscene content.” He claims that South Park made the word “pussy” acceptable as early as 1998 (six years before Amy Schumer was credited for uncensoring the word on Comedy Central, see McGlynn) and that it helped profanity like “goddamn” become acceptable on TV. Most notable is the episode “It Hits the Fan” (S05E01) where a counter tracks the use of the words “shit” and “shitty,” uttered uncensored a total of 162 times (plus 38 written occurrences). Marx v. Bezos 123 commercialization—in short, the commodification—of large amounts of personal and formerly private user data. A great array of scholars and analysts have tried to make sense not only of this change but also of how our era is different from the capitalism of bygone times. Depending on the focus of their analyses, this new era or aspects thereof have been termed: information age (Manuel Castells), sharing economy (Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers), digital capitalism (Dan Schiller), hypercapitalism (Jeremy Rifkin), late capitalism (Fredric Jameson), or surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff), among many more. What most authors seem to agree on is that what we are dealing with is still capitalism, although transformed or exacerbated. To understand the ways in which it may have changed with respect to the Industrial Revolution, first or second, it is of use to refer to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto—and, judging by the verbatim quotes from that text, this is precisely what Trey Parker did when he wrote the two Amazon episodes. By harking back to the Communist Manifesto, South Park’s premise appears to be that, technological developments notwithstanding, nothing much has changed in the relationship between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat since Marx and Engels first presented their analysis in 1848. Whether or not this first impression holds true will be the subject of discussion in this chapter. The Labor Politics of South Park The politics of South Park and its makers are somewhat complicated. Rolling Stone’s Vanessa Grigoriadis writes that it is the “most ideologically opaque political show on television.” Matt Stone is “against the War on Drugs, pro-gay marriage, against socialized medicine and basically in favor of free markets, except in cases like dropping public funding for roads or education.” She further writes that, “Neither Stone nor Parker will delineate his political views, and both contend that the libertarian label, which has been applied to them in recent years, is not entirely appropriate” (Grigoriadis 2007). Which also means it is not entirely inappropriate. In an interview with the libertarian Reason magazine, Matt Stone said: “I think [ libertarian ] is an apt description for me personally, and that has probably seeped into the show. But we never set out to do a libertarian show.” Parker, on the other hand, was reluctant about labeling himself a libertarian (Gillespie and Walker). Their pro-free market views and their history of ridiculing liberals go a long way to explain why their Christian Hänggi 124 harsh depiction of Amazon and Bezos and their portrayal of the working class along Marxist lines in the two episodes discussed here took critics and fans by surprise. In the end, however, careful inspection shows that their scathing criticism of Amazon and their sympathetic portrayal of the working class cannot simply be broken down into Marx v. Bezos or Classic Socialism v. Globalized Capitalism. While South Park has had a mixed history of the portrayal of large corporations, its portrayal of the working class has always been unequivocal. In an episode entitled “Gnomes” (S02E07), the creators show little sympathy for the small coffee shop when Starbucks (or “Harbucks”) moves into town offering superior coffee. The episode “Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes” (S08E09) offers many parallels with the Amazon episodes. In it, Walmart is the antagonist, an impersonal and inhuman force that exerts its evil attraction on the townspeople, many of whom end up working for Walmart so that they can buy more things there with a 10% discount. The major difference with respect to the Amazon episodes is that, in the end, destroying the Walmart branch is futile as another one pops up the very next day. What is more, questions of working conditions and labor struggles are not discussed in the Walmart episode. Up until the Amazon episodes, South Park has quite consistently been derisive of the working class. Workers were nearly always depicted as redneck males, for the most part inarticulate, and to a significant part dimwitted, waving Confederate flags and yelling “They took our jobs! ”—a phrase which ultimately triggers wave after wave of Pavlovian repetition resulting in increasingly incomprehensible utterances. While this may, of course, be an ironic twist to show liberals what they really think about the working class they pretend to protect, this portrayal did not change much with the rise of the IT sector and its business models, which have ushered in a reality in which the seven largest companies in the world (by market capitalization) are largely data-driven. 2 In a 2017 episode (S21E01) on virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Echo, a group of unemployed workers hang out in a sports bar, many of them drawn as the offspring of incestual relationships, echoing the depiction of participants at a Ku Klux Klan rally in the film Mississippi Burning (1988). One character complains, “Every day, people are buying more and more o’ them Amazon Google thingies while we all sit here and lose our jobs! [ … ] Automated personal 2 For 2020, ranks two through eight were occupied by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent Holdings. See https: / / www.statista.com/ statistics/ 263264/ top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-capitalization/ . Marx v. Bezos 125 assistants, self-drivin’ trucks… Whatever happened to people jobs? ” The pronouncement, as regular viewers of the cartoon series might expect, triggers another character to yell, “They took our jobs! ” and the Confederate flag waving begins, thus immediately undermining the worker’s legitimate concern. In a 2014 episode riffing on Uber (S18E04), the TV series implies that the traditional cab drivers are at fault for not making an effort to improve their customer experience, leaving their vehicles littered with trash, blaring loud music from the radio, and smoking in the car. While criticism of this uneven portrayal of the working class may be in order, it also appears that the makers of South Park realized, albeit in grossly exaggerated form, that in past decades, it was mainly the political right that had successfully cast itself as the sole interpreters for and representatives of the working class. South Park episodes are written and produced in the week leading up to their release (Grigoriadis), which allows the show to comment on current events in a time frame unparalleled by other cartoons. In the last years, South Park’s ten-episode seasons typically went on air between September and December, which meant that for about nine months of every year, they did not comment on current events but sometimes incorporated some of this content later. The first of the two episodes, “Unfulfilled,” aired on 5 December 2018, nine months after Bezos had been declared the world’s wealthiest individual by Forbes (Dolan and Kroll) and about three months after his company had brushed the onetrillion-dollar market capitalization mark. 3 On 13 November 2018, Amazon announced that it chose New York City and Northern Virginia as the locations of its second North American headquarters (HQ2), receiving from New York City alone USD 1.525 billion in incentives. 4 The very next day, the first of many protests against this decision was held in Long Island City (which, by February 2019, led to Amazon’s withdrawal). On 17 November, Saturday Night Live showed a sketch with Steve Carell impersonating Bezos, to the consternation of many critics. Saturday Night Live co-host Colin Jost commented: “New York basically won the lottery and we’re like, ‘Eh, but the subways might be slightly more crowded.’” As David Sims of The Atlantic put it: “the show made a baffling decision to present Bezos as the suave antithesis of the president.” 3 At the time of writing, Amazon is the world’s fourth most valuable company with a market capitalization of USD 1.646 trillion. See https: / / companiesmarketcap.com/ amazon/ marketcap/ . 4 For a more detailed chronology of events, see Plitt (2019). Christian Hänggi 126 At the same time—though, as far as I can tell, it went unnoticed by South Park’s critics—the first mass demonstration of the gilets jaunes, the yellow vests, took place in France. Similarly unnoticed was that around Black Friday, 23 November 2018, Amazon Fulfillment Centers in Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom went on strike to protest inhumane working conditions and demand better pay. While the German strike was sparked by the ver.di union, the South Park strike did not need or have union support, which would have been difficult anyway, considering the resistance Amazon has consistently mounted against any sort of organization on the part of its employees in the U.S. 5 With all this context in mind, let us move on to the Amazon episodes. In my discussion, I will follow the main plot line chronologically. 6 Unfulfilled (S22E09) “Unfulfilled” is preluded by Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 recording of the coal miner song “16 Tons,” which deplores the involuntary servitude of workers dependent on their employer for both the little money they are able to earn and the necessities in the company-owned store for which they are forced to spend their hard-won wages. The chorus goes: You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store. In a brilliant translation of the company store practice of mining companies and other corporations of the industrial era, the song is illustrated by Stephen Stotch carpooling to his new job at the Amazon Fulfillment Center. When he comes home in the evening, the Amazon packages with household items he had ordered the day before are already waiting for him. Later, in his pajamas and just before going to bed, he orders yet another unnecessary item from Amazon. The next day, he goes through the same grind, arriving 5 As early as 2000, Amazon shut down a call center after a campaign to unionize its 400 employees, and as recently as October 2020, a leaked document revealed “how the company is making significant investments in technology to track and counter the threat of unionization” (Del Rey and Ghaffary). 6 It is recommended that the reader watch the two episodes before continuing this article as it will contain all sorts of spoilers, such as the following synopsis, which will be expanded upon further down. South Park episodes are available for free at www. southparkstudios.com and www.southpark.de Marx v. Bezos 127 home again just as the Amazon delivery drone is dropping off a horn for the bike parade his son Butters is looking forward to. The company store, in this case Amazon.com, is the shop of choice for its employees, but before long, all the local shops close down, eliminating any possible alternatives. Even the mall passes out of people’s memory, its sales staff degenerate into something like the living dead, and when, later in the story, the South Park children want to buy things for the bike parade, nothing they need is in stock. Amazon, South Park seems to say, has entrapped everyone in a closed system, a cybernetically regulated economy in the company store logic of the era of the robber barons. A workplace accident leaves maimed and mangled section manager Josh Carter wrapped up in an Amazon box. Shortly after his accident, the camera zooms in on Crunchy’s Micro Brew, a company pub on the Fulfillment Center’s compound serving Amazon, Amazon Lite, and Amazon IPA. The atmosphere is subdued, not a smile anywhere, and almost all of the workers wear orange vests, possibly as a nod to the gilets jaunes movement. This time, it is a mixed crowd of men and women, and there are no Confederate flags in sight. The Irish band is singing: Workin’ me fingers to the bone, I need me a drink before goin’ home. Be back in the mornin’, Pack boxes at dawn, Workin’ for Amazon. Everything in the Irish American company pub is designed to remind the viewer of workers in the industrial era. The Amazon workforce in South Park is predominantly white, which may simply reflect South Park’s predominantly white population or represent an explicit attempt to draw a connection to European labor history. Harking back to the wave of Irish immigration starting with the potato famine of 1845-49, there is an unusual number of red-haired patrons present. Mr. Zewiski—an Irish immigrant with a name signifying Polish ancestry—both arms tied up in casts, presumably the result of another workplace accident, complains: “What the fook are we doin’, anyway? Breakin’ our backs! Loadin’ up fo’klifts! Gettin’ paper cuts from boxes! And for what? ! A measly paycheck that just barely covers our online purchases! ” When Stuart McCormick, whose name suggests Irish ancestry as well, reads an Amazon press statement blaming the accident on human error, the workers erupt into indignation and decide to go on strike—“For Josh! ” The time of the Irish potato famine, 1848 in particular, was a tumultuous period for Europe, which saw numerous revolts and Christian Hänggi 128 revolutions and the publication of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Irish immigration to the U.S., of course, continued after the famine, and much of how it is captured in the American imagination, I would claim, is predicated on its depiction in popular films, from the Irish gangs in The Godfather (1972) to Angela’s Ashes (1999) and beyond. Later in the “Unfulfilled” episode, Stephen Stotch begins to dress in attire reminiscent of workers of the periods depicted in such films as well as those in photographs of demonstrations for the release of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti around 1927. As South Park’s Amazon employees are demonstrating in front of the Fulfillment Center, their placards announcing the strike and solidarity with Josh, a TV newsman reports to his audience that the workers are striking for more respect and more money, a demand which echoes the famous “Bread and Roses” slogan associated with the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He interviews Josh, who uses his airtime to give a 101 lesson on Marxism: “There’s those at the top who control the means of production and then there’s the working class who enables those means by selling their labor power for wages. When there’s conflict, the ruling class tries to blame the working class.” Later on, he even paraphrases the end of the Communist Manifesto when he says: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” His eloquence and education make it clear that this is no longer the exaggeratedly stupid, unreflecting, Republican-voting worker of earlier South Park episodes, but the politically active worker of the turn of the 19 th / 20 th century, highly expressive and well-versed in socialist and Marxist terminology. He holds speeches—not only to Congress in Washington D.C. but to packed auditoriums of Amazon workers and townspeople, too. This is the worker/ citizen we know from books such as Angela Davis’s Women, Race & Class or the politically interested citizen with an attention span allowing for sustained arguments described by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Although Bernie Sanders and his fellow campaigners of the New Left have not yet made an appearance in South Park, Stone and Parker seem to acknowledge that there is a serious effort underway to put democratic socialism (or social democracy) back on the agenda, to take the plight of the working class seriously, and to avoid talking down to the working class or appealing to baser instincts. Between the lines, they actually seem to pay respect to the New Left, something they have not otherwise chosen to do with established liberal politicians or the Democratic Party as such. Over the years, South Park naturally took aim at and ridiculed some of the most well-known personalities of the tech industry—including Bill Marx v. Bezos 129 Gates of Microsoft (S17E08, among others), Steve Jobs of Apple (S15E01 and others), Elon Musk of Space-X and Tesla (S20, various episodes), and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (S21E04)—however the criticism focused more on the social issues brought about by the technology and its uses and abuses and less on working conditions. Bill Gates and, to a lesser extent, Steve Jobs were depicted as ruthless or outright evil (as opposed to a remorseful, sympathetic Charles Manson, a quite likable Satan, or even Cthulhu, Ruler of Darkness, who is portrayed as bumbling and naive). With the inclusion of Jeff Bezos, South Park has broadened its repertoire. From the moment he steps into Mayor McDaniel’s office, asking her to “have a seat,” it is clear who dominates the town. His disembodied voice appears to come from nowhere and everywhere, and the back of his head is a butt. The bluntly literal message appears to be that Bezos is a butthead or an asshole. At the same time, he represents the specter of capitalism haunting South Park, and the force behind the alienation of the workers. 7 The episode’s title, “Unfulfilled,” also hints at the failure of this type of warehouse labor to allow workers to ascend to the top of Maslow’s pyramid and reach the level of selffulfillment. As one former mall employee says when asked to pack a box to fulfill an order: “This isn’t very fulfilling.” Bezos’s first tactic designed to beat the mayor and the strikers into obedience is to withdraw their Prime membership—and it is precisely here that South Park delineates the crucial difference between today’s labor struggles and those of the past. As the Bezos character correctly states, we are dealing not with the simple category of the worker or the worker-citizen, but with the consumer-worker—obviously, the term “consumer” must come first as work is only a means to attain the ability to consume (the citizen as a category is not even mentioned). This is not the worker who goes to the company store to buy toilet paper and diapers or bread and milk, but a consumer-worker of the latter-day instantgratification society for whom shopping is an essential activity done in solitude and whose purchases are non-essential and effected by the push of a button. Although Stephen Stotch was never happy about going on strike in the first place, it is the withdrawal of his Prime membership that makes him break the picket line. As the Bezos character observes, watching Stotch pray through his Alexa View: “Without his Amazon Prime status, 7 According to the Wikipedia article of the “Unfulfilled” episode, Bezos is “depicted as one of the alien Talosians from the original 1965 Star Trek pilot ‘The Cage,’” providing a further link to the alienation of the workers. Christian Hänggi 130 he fluctuates between being and non-being […]. Torn between memberships, the consumer-worker will reason that the strike is pointless.” Meanwhile, a counter-strike has been organized, in the words of the news reporter, by “angry customers who wish to be fulfilled.” One such customer is Randy Marsh, who, over the course of the preceding episodes, has established a large marijuana business. Marsh tells the newsman, “I have a weed business to run. I need my shit from Amazon to make it all work,” to which boxed employee Josh replies in a now familiar voice: “At what cost, sir? Do you care that personal worth is being reduced by capitalists to its exchange value? […] Free trade is not freedom. Perhaps socialism is the answer.” The first episode ends with a voice-over by Josh, which begins with the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, followed by a summary of Engels’s Preface to the 1883 German edition and concludes with the closing lines of the Manifesto: The history of this world is the history of class struggles. Alienated from the products of their labor, from their fellow laborers, and from their very essence, the oppressed worker will eventually strike back at those capitalists who control the means of production. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We will unite in revolution! The opening line of the first section of the Communist Manifesto reads: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It ends with the lines: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! ” In a satirical show like South Park, literal, earnest actions are not always easy to interpret, but engaging art requires ambiguity, even if it sometimes stems from the literal. By having textbook Marxist Josh recite his lessons on socialism with all the right key words, South Park may well be implying that he, too, is unable to question his own ideology. The implicit message may be that he is a lost case, an anachronism that has not been able to adapt to present times. He is, after all, stuck in a box. Nevertheless, the unusual sincerity with which he is treated and the refusal to immediately subvert his position, particularly with respect to South Park’s history of dismissal of the working class, does suggest some measure of respect toward his views or his steadfastness, even if the sole object is to attack the wealthiest individual on the planet—the greatest robber baron of them all. When the newsman asks Josh if he can leave the box, he replies: “No, the box is holding my insides together. If I leave it, all my guts will spill out and I’ll die.” Echoing Marx and Engels, this seems to say that it is capitalism which produced the proletarian. Once capitalism is gone, the concept of the proletariat becomes obsolete. Another reading could be Marx v. Bezos 131 that, deplorable working conditions notwithstanding, many workers have no choice but submit to the demands of companies like Amazon in order to make a living. No show on the subject of striking can do without the drama of strikebreakers, particularly, I would posit, in an American context, with its history of labor struggles, subversion by sinister forces, and unholy alliances between corporations, the state, and private security companies such as the Pinkertons, 8 exacerbated by the outright economic despair of a large portion of the population. 9 In the case of South Park, Stotch is the first and only former employee to break the picket line. Later, he is joined by a busload of zombie-like salespeople from the local mall, which has fallen into dereliction and disrepair. A handful of other townspeople join him grudgingly because this is the only way they can get their stuff from Amazon. FBE React, an online series by Fine Brothers Entertainment, has screened the two South Park episodes to current and former Amazon warehouse workers and recorded their responses. They attest that South Park displays a high level of insight into the spirit and processes at Amazon, albeit occasionally in a hyperbolic fashion. One of the employees feels that: “There’s always someone who is willing to take your job for half the money” (FBE React). Bike Parade (S22E10) The second episode, “Bike Parade,” opens with Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman—the four children around which South Park is traditionally centered—receiving their Amazon shipments for a bike parade in exchange for helping Bezos hire the mall employees. While it is the family fathers on both sides of the picket line who worry about their inability to provide for their families—meaning to make sure they can buy frivolous items to be delivered the next day—it is the children who get the Amazon operation back in place. Meanwhile, Bezos is listening in on all private conversations with the Amazon Echo personal assistant installed in everyone’s homes in order to find out which of the townspeople are complying with his wishes and which are still putting up resistance and need 8 The Pinkerton detective agency, which has played a violent role in subverting and breaking or attempting to break many of the great strikes in American history, is now a subsidiary of the Swedish Securitas AB (not to be confused with the Swiss Securitas AG). 9 In this sense, it is instructive to see that Amazon’s market capitalization exploded during the hardship of the coronavirus pandemic from USD 1 trillion (21 January 2020) to nearly USD 1.7 trillion (3 February 2021). Christian Hänggi 132 to be coerced into obedience. Here, several aspects of the subject of surveillance capitalism are broached, for instance a concentration of knowledge in corporate hands, human experience as raw material to be extracted, or the imposition of a collective order based on certainty. 10 There is no need to hire corporate spies because people eagerly pay to buy into their own surveillance. 11 The data thus obtained allows South Park’s Bezos to not only monitor but also manipulate the behavior of the people. For some of the townsfolk, the desperation to receive their goods from Amazon is so great that they enlist as workers and travel to the Fulfillment Center in a reinforced bus along with the former mall employees. Filing past the demonstrators, “scab” Stotch is informed that Josh has gone missing. He was kidnapped by Bezos and placed on a chair in an empty, prison-like warehouse hall. In the presence of Mayor McDaniels, the Amazon CEO tells Alexa to “Go ahead, send them in.” “Them,” it turns out, refers to the town’s children, desperate to receive a present they can adorn their bikes with. In a gruesome scene, they fight over the box, eventually releasing an explosion of Josh’s organs and killing him instantly, to the horror of the mayor and the trauma of the children. With this execution scene, the viewer is again reminded of landmark events in the history of American labor struggle. Although they differ in key moments, one cannot help but think of the executions of Joe Hill in 1915 or those of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, the latter of whom was strapped to an electric chair and executed in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. 12 In the long history of labor struggle, innumerable labor and union activists lost their lives in massacres or executions orchestrated by local authorities working together with the besieged corporations, from the deaths that lead to the Haymarket Affair in 1886 to the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, the executions of Hill, Sacco, Vanzetti, and 10 I am referring to Shoshana Zuboff’s definition of surveillance capitalism, which is more complex, enumerating eight different, at times interlocked, aspects of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, opening pages [n. pag.]) 11 S21E01 is centered around voice-controlled assistants but entirely eschews the fact that the business of Amazon, Google, and Apple is built on the extraction and commodification of data. Similarly, the first episode of season 24, which treated the topic of COVID-19, failed to illustrate that, within little more than a week of the beginning of the first lockdowns, the entire Western world entered a new age of surveillance with everyone, from elementary school children to their grandparents, relying on video conference systems by Zoom, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. 12 When the first episode was released, the NASDAQ Composite Index noted around USD 7,500, compared to around USD 1,700 in February 2009, shortly after the subprime crash, pointing to yet another “roaring” decade (which, to date, has not ended: Since then, the NASDAQ has climbed steadily, reaching USD 14,000 in February 2021). Marx v. Bezos 133 others, to operations such as the FBI’s countersubversion program COINTELPRO. To my mind, the execution of Josh has no basis in the history of Amazon, but Amazon (in line with general anti-union policies of U.S. corporations) definitely has a history of trying to prevent the formation of unions and laying off workers who attempt to organize. 13 At this point, if not before, another aspect of South Park’s criticism of latter-day capitalism comes into play. The show does not necessarily postulate, as Josh does, that “Perhaps socialism is the answer,” but aligns more closely with a libertarian view, namely that the state should not intervene in the business sphere—or conversely, that business should not seek favors from the government. 14 In the course of the conversations between Bezos and Mayor McDaniels, it is made clear that the mayor has been subservient to Amazon’s corporate needs and desires—from accommodating the Fulfillment Center in the first place to armoring the strike-breakers’ bus, to being present at Josh’s execution (although, to be fair, McDaniels did not appear to know she attending an execution), and finally, to giving up the mayor’s office to Bezos. As Jared Bauer says in a YouTube video for Wisecrack: The last two episodes seem to further a criticism of government involvement in the market, specifically the way business-minded politicians get in bed with giant corporations to create a grotesque version of the free market. If the workers are selling their soul to the company store, towns and governments are selling their soul to Jeff Bezos’s throbbing skull. […] The creation of jobs holds local governments functionally hostage to their whims. (Opperman, Luxemburg, Bauer) Apart from the threat of losing their Amazon Prime membership (or the desire to get it back), South Park identifies another driving force behind working people’s reluctance to become and stay politically active, namely the fathers’ traditional role as family providers that has been deeply ingrained in their self-image to the point of self-deception. Stephen Stotch breaks the picket line because he tells himself that he cannot disappoint his son Butters, who wishes to be in the bike parade. In the second episode, it 13 One of the latest incidents was the layoff of three activists as reported on 14 April 2020 (Del Rey). 14 There are, of course, many shades of libertarianism, from left-libertarianism to anarchocapitalism, with different goals and political issues at the center of the debate. In this reading, I focus on the free-market dimensions of libertarian beliefs: “Libertarians defend market freedoms, and demand limitations on the use of the state for social policy” (Kymlicka 95). For a more in-depth discussion, see Will Kymlicka’s entire chapter on Libertarianism (95-159). Christian Hänggi 134 is made clear that the threat of disappointment is, for the most part, something Stotch projects into his son in order to hide from himself the fact that it is he, the father, who is addicted to online shopping. Irish immigrant Mr. Zewiski, too, eventually caves to his son’s demands: “Every year, I win the bike parade. It’s the one thing I care about. Now there’s kids out there who have better bikes than me because you won’t get off your ass and work, Dad! ” Just as Mr. Zewiski walks out the door to break the picket line, his marijuana delivery from Tegridy Farms arrives. This represents another turning point in the plot. Starting in episode four of that season, Randy Marsh, fed up with the alienated life in town, decides he wants to “go back to simpler times” and moves his family to the countryside to start a marijuana business to “live off the land.” Before long, however, his farm has grown to industrial proportions, and Randy, as viewers suspected all along, has become just another self-serving capitalist. While he capitalizes on everything he can, he continues to cultivate a small farmer’s image, which may be read as a kick in the shin to feel-good capitalist corporations like Whole Foods who also profit from their image of integrity. He serves both the strikers, who need some relief from the hardship of striking, and the unfulfilled Amazon customers, who have a hard time dealing with their missing deliveries. By the time his business associate, Towelie, arrives at the Zewiski home with the delivery, Tegridy Farms already has an app and is delivering the goods on e-scooters (another impersonal evil force, as depicted the season’s Halloween special, S22E05). In the end, it is not socialism that saves the day for South Park’s grown-ups but another up-and-coming capitalist, Randy Marsh, whose “’tegridy” does not extend beyond his own PR speak. Toward the end of the episode, the doped-up proletarians of South Park unite in front of City Hall to tell Bezos to “take your Fulfillment Center and fulfill it right up your ass.” Their self-designated spokesperson, Randy Marsh, who formerly opposed the strike, babbles at length about ’tegridy before losing his train of thought in classic stoner fashion. Cut to the penultimate shot: the bike parade (sponsored by City Wok, Tegridy Farms, and La Taco) can finally take place. The adults line the streets, all smoking pot—from the police chief to the principal to the priest, marbled red eyes and big grins all around. The children, however, do not seem to have all that much fun, with frowns comparable to those of the Amazon workers in the Fulfillment Center at the beginning of the two episodes. Perhaps they realize that they, too, have been instrumentalized to further the brand name recognition of commercial Marx v. Bezos 135 businesses. The second and third verses of the song that plays during the bike parade go: We don’t need nothing from big corporations We don’t need progress or fancy educations Maybe our ‘tegridy keeps us down But that’s life livin’ in our Colorado town. Now we gotta learn to live without boxes every day We might wake up tomorrow and wonder why they went away Guess you might call us a bunch of white trash hicks But at least we ain’t suckin’ no Bezosian dicks. Then, last shot, a commercial message: “Tegridy Weed. Coming soon to a giant online retailer near you.” At least from the point of view of South Park’s adults, the image of the worker has come full circle back to how it was portrayed in earlier South Park episodes: a bunch of “white trash hicks” with no desire for “progress” or education. Still, this is not necessarily the final image impressed upon the viewer. There are no Confederate flags, no one is yelling “They took our job! ” What is more, the viewer has not forgotten Josh, has not forgotten his lessons on socialism and his—for the most part—earnest portrayal by South Park. On the one hand, South Park seems to imply that, in many aspects, Marx and Engels’s analyses still apply to today, particularly with respect to alienation, corporate control, and ownership of the means of production. In order to illustrate this, the creators evoke the great American labor struggles of the past. At the same time, they criticize the way liberals (and other factions of regular consumer-workers) sell out to Corporate America and their self-deception in believing that everything is alright with capitalism as long as it is still possible to orchestrate publicity stunts opposing the biggest and most visible corporations. In other words, South Park criticizes the self-congratulatory moral position of, figuratively speaking, buying at Whole Foods yet rejecting Amazon. (Note: this episode was aired before Whole Foods was purchased by Amazon, rendering the distinction between the two somewhat moot.) Perhaps Anarchism is the Answer There is, however, another complication that might be worth considering. Marxian (and then Marxist) theory has always placed the greatest emphasis on labor with all of its ramifications, and this has laid the Christian Hänggi 136 foundations of both communist and socialist ideology to the point where today, like in the late 19 th century, the terms “communism” and “socialism” are often used interchangeably in the U.S., though these days mainly by the political right in order to evoke the specter of Stalinism any time vaguely socialist ideas enter the public conversation. However, in the late 19 th century, there was another faction active in the same struggles, oftentimes alongside the communists and socialists: the anarchists. Many of the Haymarket organizers—and all of those who were sentenced to death for their involvement—were self-proclaimed anarchists. In Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking, David Graeber writes: if you look at the very early 20th century in countries like Spain or Italy, where half the labor unions were anarchist and half were socialist, the biggest difference was that the socialist demands always focused on more wages and the anarchist, on less hours. One was saying “We want a consumer society for everyone” […]; the other wanted out of the system entirely. (17) Anarchists have always had an international outlook, and while they never fought globalization as such, they often took a stand against globalization of both capital and capitalism as is exemplified by their involvement in Seattle’s 1999 Anti-WTO protests. Today, Amazon is among the most publicly visible manifestations of the globalization of capital. As quasilibertarians (free markets, legalization of drugs, pro-gay marriage etc.)— though they profess to be somewhat uncomfortable with that label—the makers of South Park would naturally feel more drawn to the laissez-faire aspects of anarchism than to socialism, and as people who attended an Academy Awards ceremony after taking LSD (Grigoriadis), they might also feel more drawn to a “turn on, tune in, drop out” approach or a reduction of work hours than to Protestant work ethics or a communist “sanctification of work” (Kacem in Graeber 18). In this reading, the “perhaps” of Josh’s “Perhaps socialism is the answer” can be read quite literally and not as a rhetorical device: perhaps, but perhaps it is anarchism that is the answer. While I do not feel the success of driving Amazon out of town should necessarily have been attributed to Marx and Engels, attributing it to capitalist Tegridy Weed does feel a bit flawed, too. Nevertheless, with the available cast of characters, getting the whole town high may have been the decisive move Stone and Parker needed to bring the two episodes to a humorous conclusion while adhering more closely to their personal political beliefs and paying tribute, for the first time, to the history of socialist and anarchist workers marching side by side against the common enemy of the robber baron. The question remains as to whether this Marx v. Bezos 137 depiction represents a fundamental ideological shift or whether, as suggested by the season finale’s last song, Stone and Parker will ultimately revert to their former practice of largely disregarding labor issues and depicting workers as white trash hicks. Christian Hänggi 138 References All internet resources last checked on 1 November 2020. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. 1981. New York: Penguin, 2019. Del Rey, Jason. “Amazon Fired 3 Employee Activists Who Criticized its Warehouse Safety Measures.” Vox 4 April 2020. https: / / www. vox.com/ recode/ 2020/ 4/ 14/ 21220899. Del Rey, Jason and Shirin Ghaffary. “Leaked: Confidential Amazon Memo Reveals New Software to Track Unions.” Vox 6 October 2020. https: / / www.vox.com/ recode/ 2020/ 10/ 6/ 21502639. Dolan, Kerry A., and Luisa Kroll. “Forbes Billionaires 2018: Meet the Richest People on the Planet.” Forbes 6 March 2018. https: / / www.forbes.com/ sites/ luisakroll/ 2018/ 03/ 06/ forbes-billionaires- 2018-meet-the-richest-people-on-the-planet/ ? sh=39013f0d6523. FBE React. “Amazon Employees React to Amazon Employees on South Park.” React. An FBE Channel 30 May 2019. https: / / www. youtube.com/ watch? v=DJqJ755MU84 Gillespie, Nick and Jesse Walker. “South Park Libertarians.” Reason, December 2006. https: / / reason.com/ 2006/ 12/ 05/ south-parklibertarians-2/ . Graeber, David. Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking. Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman. Zürich, Paris and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020. Grigoriadis, Vanessa. “‘South Park’: Still Sick, Still Wrong.” Rolling Stone, 22 March 2007. https: / / www.rollingstone.com/ tv/ tv-news/ southpark-still-sick-still-wrong-231538/ . Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” 1848. Trans. Samuel Moore in cooperation with Friedrich Engels (1888). Selected Works, Vol. One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969. www.marxists.org. McGlynn, Katia. “‘Inside Amy Schumer’ Got Comedy Central to Un- Censor ‘Pussy’ and 6 Other Things You Didn’t Know.” Huffington Post 11 Nov 2014. https: / / www.huffingtonpost.com.au/ entry/ amy-schumerpanel-new-york-comedy-festival_n_6127164. Opperman, Alec (writer), Michael Luxemburg (director) and Jared Bauer (anchorman). “Why South Park Can’t Beat Amazon.” Wisecrack 22 Dec 2018. https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=avbvhYwvsHA. Marx v. Bezos 139 Plitt, Amy. “Amazon HQ2 and NYC: A Timeline of the Botched Deal.” Curbed New York, 18 Feb 2019. https: / / ny.curbed.com/ 2019/ 2/ 18/ 18226681 Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. 1985. New York: Penguin, 2005. Sims, David. “Saturday Night Live’s Confusing Celebration of Jeff Bezos.” The Atlantic 18 Nov 2018. https: / / www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/ archive/ 2018/ 11/ whydid-saturday-night-live-celebrate-jeff-bezos/ 576133/ . Stone, Matt and Trey Parker. South Park. All episodes available at www.southpark.cc.com or southpark.de. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs, 2019. Working the People, Working the Earth: The Exploitation of Humans and the Environment in North American Slave Narratives Johannes Fehrle Slave narratives have only relatively recently come into the focus of (postcolonial) ecocriticism and green postcolonialism. Such readings explore the representation of “nature” in slave narratives, but often do not consider what is perhaps the most central relation between the narratives’ protagonists and nature: the work relation between slaves and their environment. Beginning from an eco-Marxist perspective that understands humans and non-human nature (or society and “nature”) as part of a dialectical relationship, my chapter looks at the interactions between slave workers and the non-human environment. An examination of how the relation between slaves and “nature” (under which racist ideology subsumed slaves) is represented in slave narratives reveals the many ways in which the labor of slaves transformed the environment. An understanding of “nature” not merely as wilderness or pastoral space, but as humanity’s “inorganic body” (Marx) engaged with through work can shed light on how African American slaves were part of the long transformation of the North American continent into a human-made “nature.” While this is true for both male and female slaves, the attempts to colonize Black women’s bodies for the (re)production of new slaves shows a unique oppression and resistance of Black women under slavery. Keywords: slave narratives, ecocriticism, eco-Marxism, work, nature Johannes Fehrle 142 Recent interest in the Anthropocene (or, as some critics prefer to call it, the Capitalocene, see e.g., Moore; Altvater) call our attention to the long history of appropriation and valorization of nature and the connected exploitation of human beings. The unintended and unforeseen backlash of climate change, however, drives home that we cannot ignore the interdependence of humanity and non-human nature. This has called to the fore so-called “new materialist” approaches (e.g., Alaimo; Barad; Jane Bennett; Coole and Frost), which, correctly, point to the lack of attention paid to the material aspects of the world around us and of human history in most schools of thought, including classical Marxism. Unfortunately, however, such “materialism” often abandons a rigid and concrete analysis of human society and its interdependence with non-human nature and instead provides a de-hierarchized “relationism” lacking, in many cases, the instruments of concrete political analysis of the realm on which we exert the most influence: namely, human societies (see Noys, “Matter without Materialism”; Hornborg). In the following, I thus suggest tracing the interrelation between human work and non-human nature not through a new materialist but through an eco-Marxist approach and suggest how this approach can shed a new light on our understanding of how canonical 19 th -century slave narratives represent the slave experience. While, on some level, most historical materialists know that human labor bears a necessary relation to the non-human environment, 1 “nature” has long been sidelined in leftist analyses of work and society. Looking only at human labor and often only at paid work, scholars have too often overlooked capital’s dependence on the dual consumption of (unpaid) labor as well as (supposedly) free natural resources used up in production and distribution processes. Surprisingly, for many who still see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as anthropocentrists interested exclusively in human societies (e.g., Morton), an awareness of humanity as part of nature lies at the bottom of the Marxist critique of capitalism and human history. Even if it was never the main focus of Marx’s analysis, we can see this dialectical understanding present in such early texts as the “Paris Manuscripts” of 1844 (Ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte), and we see his awareness of scientific discourse, such as Justus von Liebig’s work on soil exhaustion and fertilization recur throughout the Grundrisse and Capital vols. 1 and 3. Engels, on the other hand, in Dialectics of Nature, tried—in some instances more, in others less successfully—to bring historical materialism into dialogue with the natural sciences. In a passage 1 See, for instance, Marx’s chapter on the work process in Capital 1 (283-292) or his scathing opening to the “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 143 that sounds surprisingly contemporary and clairvoyant, he points to the unintended consequences of the collective action of human societies on non-human nature and, in a second step, back on humanity itself—the very process underlying what scientists now call the “Anthropocene”: Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. In many ways, this passage sounds similar to the opening of Andreas Malm’s recent Fossil Capital, in which he describes global warming as “the unintended by-product par excellence”: A cotton manufacturer of early nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his old waterwheel and invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney and order coal from a nearby pit did not, in all likelihood, entertain the possibility that this act could have any kind of relationship to the extent of Arctic sea ice, the salinity of Nile Delta soil, the altitude of the Maldives, the frequency of droughts on the Horn of Africa, the diversity of amphibian species in Central American rain forests, the availability of water in Asian rivers or, for that matter, the risk of flooding along the Thames and the English coastline. (Malm 1-2) Following such thinkers as Marx, Engels, and more recently Malm, John Bellamy Foster, and Paul Burkett, I contend that the framework of “old” historical materialism, when brought into conversation with new scientific findings and new methodological developments in eco-Marxist thought, provides a tool to analyze work relations as human/ nature relations in a way that is dialectical and relational rather than onedirectional and anthropocentric. In the following, I will bring this framework to bear on the analysis of literary representations of the work/ nature relation in 19 th -century North American slave narratives. The goal is to identify how the connection between the “use” and “destruction” of slave laborers and the environment in the 19 th -century U.S. South is reflected in these texts. While Christine Gerhardt pointed to the benefit of a combination of, in her case, ecocriticism and postcolonial studies to read slave narratives as a new Johannes Fehrle 144 frontier in ecocritical scholarship as early as 2002, this work has only barely begun. One reason why this endeavor has lagged behind the broader rise of ecocriticism as a field is that texts by former slaves, such as Frederick Douglass, Samuel Northup, or Harriet Jacobs, were not “ecocritical” in the sense of “nature writing” underlying the field’s early focus. The narratives are, in other words, not interested primarily in nonhuman, pristine nature as an object for contemplation, although such passages do occur (see Finseth). As critics like Gerhardt, Paul Outka, Ian Finseth, Lance Newman, and others have shown, non-human nature nevertheless plays a central part in the narratives, both as ideologically charged, discursive construct and material reality. Although “nature” as construct is the concept to which white supremacist culture turns for the erasure of the human status of Black people under slavery, leading some critics to read slave narrative primarily as an “anti-pastoralism” championing the city (Michael Bennett), the ways in which representations of the natural, material world function in slave narratives is ultimately more complex. Pastoral scenes recur, for instance, in descriptions of the protagonists’ unspoiled childhood (see Outka’s discussion of Douglass’s childhood, 62-68) and as visual metaphors for making sense of and relating to the world and slavery (Finseth 248; 252-53). “Nature” furthermore appears as a geography that needs to be traversed on the protagonists’ road to freedom (Finseth 253-61; Gerhardt 524), and it functions as a hiding place and one in which the protagonist can become aware of his subjectivity and “recenter the narrative voice as a black voice” (Gerhardt 524). Significantly, in these “wild” spaces there is a tension in many authors’ accounts of their relative safety as social beings (Black Americans away from slave-holding society) that stands in contradiction to their vulnerability as species beings, unprotected human bodies in a natural world that holds both beauties and dangers. Jacobs, for instance, describes her experience in both her “loophole of resistance” (Burnham in Jacobs 278) in her grandmother’s attic and the “Snaky Swamp,” to which she attempted to escape first, as one marked with suffering from cold, heat, insect bites, and snakes (Outka 75; 79). Charles Ball relates being pursued by an alligator (Smith 326) and meditates on the dangers of the swamp through the story of a fellow escaped slave who hangs himself there in a fashion that Newman calls an “anti-slavery gothic” (39). What is perhaps the most central locus of human-nature relations, namely, work as an engagement with and a transformation of the natural world, however, remains an undercurrent in most narratives and—as a result—absent in most ecocritical analyses. Although Douglass’s first Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 145 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), particularly in its rural episodes, describes a diegetic world in which non-human nature is everywhere, it is always on the textual periphery, omnipresent, but largely uncommented upon. When Douglass describes his work-free Sundays, for instance, he writes: “I spent this [ leisure time ] in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree” (48). Firstly, the “beast-like stupor” evokes Douglass’s own material, “animal” body exhausted from being driven to work from morning until after nightfall six days a week by the “slave breaker” Mr. Covey. The “large tree” furthermore hints at a non-human natural world surrounding Douglass as a source of rest, cover (e.g., when he flees from Covey’s punishment through a cornfield and into the woods), and, most central to his state as a field slave, yet most marginally treated in the text, material to be transformed for the slave masters’ enrichment. This latter relation to nature that structured Douglass’s daily life most centrally during his year working for Covey is, however, not the focus in Narrative. In this respect, as in so many others, Douglass’s first autobiography is representtative for the slave narrative tradition rather than exceptional. As Finseth notes, the narrative aims “to have readers conjure up in imagination the cruelty and violence intrinsic to the slave system” (252). Douglass’s text therefore describes the social dimension of slavery—the relation to his various masters, the punishments he and other slaves endured, their interactions and strategies of resistance, and his own growth into manhood—while largely disregarding the natural base of his everyday labor. This is not terribly surprising. For one, the narrative’s implied audience was quite likely not particularly interested in lengthy descriptions of agricultural work processes and more interested in the customary condemnations of the evils of slavery, such as the ripping apart of families, the ceaseless repetitions of descriptions of physical violence, and the institution’s supposed negative effect on the Christianity of Southern slaveholders. Furthermore, the author’s labor with the land occurred in a social relation that “alienate [ d ] slaves from the land and the natural world by associating farming with brutality and coercion” and left many “ambivalent about working the land, expressing both pride in their agricultural labor and a desire to escape the violence, drudgery, and low status associated with field work” (Smith 318). On top of this ambivalence, there existed the larger struggle extending throughout the 19 th century about “the intertwined meanings of ‘nature’ and ‘race’” (Finseth 2), in which racist distinctions between African and European Americans often formed along the dichotomy of human and Johannes Fehrle 146 “natural” that portrayed the former as part of nature. This struggle to move away from associations with nature that haunt African Americans even today (e.g., Collins 147) as well as a tendency to see African Americans only as victims of environmental transformation 2 perhaps explains why slave narratives (and African American literature as a whole) were not regarded as sources for ecocritical approaches for the longest time. Such an exclusion, however, continues the obfuscation of the part African Americans have played in the transformation of the American nation (for better and worse), even if it was a participation forced by direct violence under slavery. As Gerhardt writes, it is possible “to conceptualize the ways in which a Black speaker in a white supremacist context is both a marginalized other, colonized on the basis of his or her association with nature, and a social subject involved in the collective human exploitation of nature” (520). Despite the danger of disregarding differences in individuals’ transformative reach depending on economic power in class societies that always comes with speaking of human collectivity, Gerhardt’s call nevertheless points to a central location of this larger transformation in African American texts: namely work with and on nature. After all, slavery in the antebellum U.S. South was, at its economic base, organized around the cheapest possible production of agrarian goods for a rapidly evolving world market. As relatively simple agricultural work, it was furthermore more immediately than other work “a process between man and nature” (Marx, Capital 1, 283). As such, an examination of the transformation of non-human nature through the work process should take a more central position in the “broader inquiry into how plantation slavery organized human and nature relations in the American South during the first half of the nineteenth century” (Smith 317). A critical reading of slave narratives interested in work relations between slave and nature nevertheless often encounters this relation not in explicit description of the land and its transformation through labor, but expressed in the social dimension in which this labor transforms the lifeworld of the slave. When Houston A. Baker Jr. identifies Colonel Lloyd’s garden as “the most significant economic sign in the initial chapters 2 This is, of course, in no way meant to deny that African Americans are among the main victims of environmental devastation in the U.S. or to downplay the importance of work done in environmental justice criticism (e.g., Bullard). Environmental justice critics have been essential in providing evidence of the highly uneven ways in which communities of color, particularly Black neighborhoods, are affected by toxic substances and other harmful environmental influences (noise, smog, threats of natural disasters, etc.) both in the U.S. and globally. Many have also provided a model for activist scholarship. Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 147 of the Narrative” in which “the [ literal ] fruits of slave labor are all retained by the master,” we find the economic relation of an agrarian slave economy materialized in cultivated nature. The garden with its fruit trees forms an “image of vast abundance produced by the slaves but denied them through the brutality of the owner of the means of production (i.e., the land [ but also the slaves themselves; J.F. ] ) [ that ] suggests a purely economic transformation of a traditional image of the biblical garden and its temptations” (Baker 45). Significantly, the garden is not only a transformed biblical image, but a part of nature transformed by human (slave) labor, whose access is restricted through legalized physical violence to those whose labor has shaped the land; a “natural” expression of the social relation of slavery. It is this unwritten and often unremarked relation that shapes “nature” as a space already transformed through past labor. Although it is often left unaddressed, this transformation most prominently shapes occurrences of work on “nature” in the text’s early passages. These occurrences of “nature” to be worked are most immediately visible as fields of corn, cotton, or tobacco—at once places of future and present work and materialization of past labor. In a more removed form, however, we can also regard wooden fences, slave huts, or even the opulent houses of the slave master as “nature” transformed. This transformation occurred either directly through labor or through a global capitalist market on which the slaveholders sell the products of the slaves’ labor in exchange for other goods, including the labor of white overseers, solidifying a material and social relation that manifests in a class relation in which slaves are forced to work for free. If we thus de-essentialize “nature” from notions of “pure” (wild or pastoral) landscapes and take seriously the dialectic dimension of humans in and as nature, in which external, non-human nature forms the “inorganic body” of humanity, we need not limit our examination to direct interrelations with (supposedly) “undisturbed” nature. 3 In fact, an eco-Marxist approach should not fall into a trap of fetishizing agrarianism or pastoralism by regarding only seemingly immediate work with nature as 3 In one of the most intriguing passages from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes human life in and with nature as follows: “Nature is man’s inorganic body [unorganischer Leib]—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (emphases in original). This idea of an “inorganic body,” which reappears later in Grundrisse (396 and as “anorganischer Leib” 399), has recently been taken up in eco-Marxist circles and beyond to reenter the debate about Marx’s supposed anthropocentrism and his theory’s adaptability to current environmental concerns (e.g., Foster and Burkett; Butler). Johannes Fehrle 148 its proper material. 4 Instead, we can see all modes of being in the world as an extended interrelation with “nature,” although one that is, crucially, negotiated and transformed through the social and economic relations that these labor processes presuppose and reproduce; the more so, the more developed societies become. At bottom, however, humanity remains within nature, and all work remains at the end work on nature. Even advanced labor processes (i.e., ones using tools, machines, and processed materials) at their material basis come back to “nature” transformed manifold. Furthermore, all work has a greater or lesser impact on “nature” and the Earth’s ecosystems, as the Anthropocene drives home. It is, after all, the work of big industry with its reliance on fossil fuel that has transformed “nature” in the form of the ecosystem most dramatically (see Malm). This realization applies to the U.S. slave economy in two ways. From the present-day Anthropocene perspective with which we began, the slave economy of the U.S. South fueled fossil capitalism’s growth by providing part of the raw material for the first Industrial Revolution. Secondly, and more immediately, the monocultural agriculture of the slave economy exhausted soils rapidly, leading slave owners to either continuously search for new land or change their economy from an agricultural slave economy to an economy “producing” slaves as wares for other slave owners. In this sense, “slaveowner capitalism” was, in part, also an ecological problem, as 19 th -century observers already knew. 5 In this sense, the labor of slaves can be regarded in a larger ecological context in a number of ways. Firstly, all work inescapably forms a part of human-nature relations. This is because all human activity is activity in which humanity faces nature as its “inorganic body,” or as the later Marx would prefer, occurs based on a metabolism between “man” and “nature”—even if increasing urbanization and civilizational development creates an ever-increasing distance (or rift) between the individual human benefits of the extraction and processing of raw materials and its effect on other human beings and non-human nature elsewhere. Each act of production, including the more 4 It is worth noting that even in this seemingly immediate process, 1; “external nature” has already been changed (see Marx, Capital 1, 283), and 2; with the development of societies, even agriculture “becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society” (Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations 705). While agricultural labor in the antebellum South was much closer to a direct engagement, even its non-social conditions were, of course, already shaped by previous human labor, including the development of knowledge regimes about agriculture and disciplinary regimes forcing humans to work under slavery. 5 On this point, as well as Marx’s engagement with slavery, see Foster, Holleman, and Clark. Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 149 mediated, seemingly less “natural” work Douglass takes as a caulker in the shipyards of Baltimore, and even the reproductive work done by house slaves for masters or within the slave community, work that features more prominently in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), constitutes an interaction with nature. 6 This reconceptualization allows a refocusing of the ecocritical debate from questions of perceived “naturalness” to ones about who benefits from appropriations of nature through work and who (including nonhuman agents) pays the costs. These costs can be locally and temporally transposed—showing up years later as toxic dumps or climate change— or more immediately visibly locally, such as the cutting down of a forest. Cristin Ellis recently addressed the ecological problem of monocrop slave economy in a reading of Douglass’s My Bondage and my Freedom (1855) against the backdrop of the antebellum South’s increasing soil exhaustion, as a result of which planters became “increasingly less economically dependent on the agricultural products of slave labor than on the value of those slaves themselves” (276)—a transformation of social relations as a response to the transformation of “nature” through the past labor of slave under owners interested only in maximizing their profit. Secondly, slave labor forms part of the network of a rapidly expanding world market fueling the processes of industrialization, primarily in Europe and the northern U.S. This is, of course, not a dimension usually reflected in the personal accounts of suffering, resistance, and empowerment that provide the slave narratives’ traditional material. A realization of the degree of connectedness of human societies under a capitalist world market shines through, however, in some debates comparing the exploitation of industrial workers in England or the northern U.S. states with that of Southern slaves, albeit often in a grotesque contortion designed to justify slavery through paternalism. Thirdly, the “landscape” of slavery, as described by critics like Finseth or Gerhardt, can be reconceptualized in a manner following the logic in which Marx traces the continual (re)production of capitalist class relations as following necessarily from a production process into which participants enter unequally. Just as in capitalism “ [ i ] t is not only workers’ products which are transformed into independent powers, the products as masters and buyers of their producers” (Capital 3, 953-54), so, too, 6 On this point see Schmidt 86 (and more generally 76-93): “[E]ven if the naturally determined productivity of labour ceases to form the equally naturally determined source of the domination of man over man, even if what arose historically can no longer perpetuate itself as something ‘natural,’ life still remains determined by its most general necessity, the metabolism between man and nature.” Johannes Fehrle 150 does this apply in other class societies, including the slaveholding capitalism of the Southern U.S. Although these class relations are more immediately visible in the form of a legal framework justifying slavery and the brutal coercion continually necessary to force the maximum amount of work from the slaves, these societies, too, reproduce their inequalities materially. Thus in capitalism, the “independent powers” of the wealth created by workers materializes in a class relation that leaves owners of means of production on one side and workers with nothing to sell but their labor on the other. It also materializes in the work process itself, at least when it has undergone real subsumption, where machines—made by past labor—dictate the present work process, making workers their appendages (e.g., Capital 1, 508, 526-27; Grundrisse 592-600). Although the way in which power is maintained and surplus labor forced out of those who work is “first and foremost ‘a relation of domination’” (Patterson 2; citing Marx) under slavery, the idea that the “workers’ [ slaves’ ] products [ … ] are transformed into independent powers” is a crucial realization. The altered “natural” geography of fields and fences, as well as a social relation, in which profits are squeezed from slave laborers, then reinvested to hire overseers and slave catchers, is, likewise, the materialized past labor of slaves, transformed into a whole range of forces keeping slave workers under control in the present. Fourthly, social and economic relations are ideologically masked as “natural” relations for male and female slave workers alike. Most centrally, these relations include the reproduction of a slave system through the reproduction of an army of slave laborers at the slave masters’ disposal. For this reason, relations of domination also play out biologically through human “nature,” so to speak, subjecting female slaves to a gender-specific oppression under slavery while denying the status of full human to both male and female slaves on pseudo-biological grounds. For the remainder of my chapter, I will turn to this last aspect and look at the social construction of the relation between slaves and nature, including the gender-specific oppression of slave women. As noted by Baker, there is a division between slave laborer and non-human nature through the ownership of the means of production, including the garden they themselves have to cultivate. It is crucial to note, however, as Marx and many critics after him do, that the slave laborers are themselves a part of these means of production (and by extension the 19 th -century concept of nature): The slave stands in no relation whatsoever to the objective conditions of his labour; rather, labour itself, both in the form of the slave and in that of the serf, is classified as an inorganic condition [unorganische Bedingung] of production Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 151 along with other natural beings, such as cattle, as an accessory of the earth. (Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations 489, emphases in original) The equation of slaves with animals hinted at by Marx in the above passage recurs so frequently in slave narratives that we have to assume it was a common conception during the 19 th century. Slave narratives suggest that—apart from whippings and other physical and symbolic punishments—equating slaves to animals was one of the ideological sites of the continual reenactment of dishonoring that was necessary, according to Orlando Patterson, to uphold slavery as a “permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (13, emphasis in original). In the 19 th -century U.S., this dishonoring apparently took the form of a “conflation of slaves with domesticated animals, rather than capital or property or ‘thingdom’” (Outka 55). According to Outka, this notion subsumed the question of the treatment of slaves in a capitalist society founded on a notion of human equality under “a subset of the (non)question of animal rights.” In this fashion, [ r ] ather than confronting the question of rebellious property, the slave holder dodged it, subsuming it under the related, but much less pressing, question of animal rights” (ibid.). The comparison between animals and slaves abounds in slave narratives. It takes the form of signs for a “public sale of negroes, horses, &c” (Jacobs 14), Northup’s sarcastic remark that the keeper of a slave pen “was out among his animals” (48), or Douglass’s comparison of himself to “a wild young working animal” (My Bondage 147). In his usual brilliance, Douglass takes up this symbolic division and pushes it beyond its breaking point. When he, the young slave sent to Covey to be “broken,” is himself sent to “break” a team of oxen—an endeavor in which he fails spectacularly—the absurdity of the situation does not escape him: I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life. (My Bondage 150) This short paragraph contains several ironies. The fact that there is a qualitative difference between the “young working animal” Douglass and the oxen is highlighted by the fact that Douglass can be ordered to conduct the work of breaking the animals, whereas the oxen cannot break anything except the wagon they pull and the gate they crash into. Secondly, the central point of Douglass’s narrative is, of course, that he resists being broken, as readers knew from his first autobiography, his Johannes Fehrle 152 public persona, and the generic codes of the slave narrative. The seemingly resigned “such is life” thus gains a dimension that contradicts its seeming absoluteness, just as Douglass’s following actions contradict his supposed belonging to animal kind, taking 19 th -century conceptions of race ad absurdum. While the denial of entry into the category of full “human,” forms the experience of the agricultural slave laborer regardless of gender, female slaves were in another relation to nature in at least one sense. Under slavery their bodies became an “extension of nature” (Davis 84) in another fashion. The degradation to means of production they shared with male slaves met with their “biological destiny” (Davis 86), which under the system of partus sequitur ventrem made them “means of production” in a different, particularly cruel way: their childbearing served to create more slave laborers. Both male and female writers documented this practice, whose violence extended beyond the forceful separation of women and children that became a trope in more “decorous” anti-slavery literature like Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Douglass, in his Narrative and again in My Bondage, My Freedom, mentions in a few lines each the twenty-year-old Caroline whom Covey buys, “as he said, for a breeder,” hiring a man “to fasten up with her every night! ” The language used in the short passage to describe the serial rape—despite adhering to some extent to 19 th -century dictates of decorum—hints at the dehumanizing condition of Caroline, whose twins, once born, are regarded only as “quite an addition to his [ Covey’s ] wealth” (Narrative 47, emphasis in original). “Bred” like animals, many slave women thus had to endure a particular, gendered form of the erasure of the relation between worker and means of production inherent in the economic logic of slavery. Through the sexual violence perpetrated against slave women, a violence that carries the economic incentive of their children becoming the property of their owners, the women themselves, reduced to their biological capacity to bear children, “become nature” in a sense that confounds the distinction between humanity, human work, and nature. Although in a sense, nature—through these women’s bodies—itself seems to “do the work” of creating new slaves, as evidenced by its procreative function regardless of the woman’s desire, the woman herself of course has to bear the pain and labor of childbirth and rearing. Moreover, this form of reproductive work put slave women in particularly fraught situations. Often violated sexually, they had to navigate the contradictory demands of partners, community, and masters from a position that was at once vulnerable and simultaneously, if maneuvered Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 153 carefully, capable of providing them some potential leeway in a highly fraught power relation. Patricia Hill Collins notes how “ [ e ] fforts to control Black women’s sexuality were tied directly to slave owner’s efforts to increase the number of children their female slaves produced.” Consequently, pregnant women were sometimes assigned lighter tasks or received better provisions, whereas “ [ i ] nfertile women could expect to be treated ‘like barren sows and be passed from one unsuspecting buyer to the next’.” As a result, motherhood afforded a “relative security” and “a way for enslaved Black women to anchor themselves in a place for an extended period” (51). At the same time, of course, slaveholders’ economic interests constantly endangered motherhood as a personal relation between mother and child. As Hortense Spillers notes, in a striking parallel to Patterson’s notion of the loss of “natal claims” by enslaved people (9-10), “if ‘kinship’ were possible, the property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then ‘belong’ to a mother and a father” (75). While establishing the legal status of the offspring, motherhood was thus always contested. At the same time, it afforded some women some control. This ambivalent position is perhaps nowhere more visible than in Jacobs’s unwillingness to flee and her later playing with Dr. Flint’s desire for her return. Jacobs notes early: “I could have made my escape alone; but it was more for my helpless children than for myself that I longed for freedom” (73)—demonstrating how her motherhood potentiates the struggle all slaves fight when deciding to sever the ties to their community through flight, as noted by many writers of slave narratives. At the same time, Jacobs later “play [ s ] on” Flint’s “hope [ … ] that by allowing the children to live freely with their grandmother, who is not a slave, Jacobs will return to her family and thus be subject to his control” again (Cook 36-37). She is therefore able to protect her children by navigating Flint’s desires, allowing her children a unique protection albeit at the cost of seven years of hiding in her grandmother’s attic. Jacobs’s hiding and letter writing nevertheless allows, as Jean Fagin Yellin notes, “a sophisticated version of power reversal in which the slave controls the master” (xxviii; qtd. in Cook 37). As Douglass’s tale of Caroline and Ellis’s contextualization of the shift from a slave economy to an “economy” that “produces” slaves makes clear, “the institutionalized pattern of rape during slavery” was not only a “weapon of domination” and “repression,” (Davis qtd. in Collins 147; see also Davis 97), but also stemmed from economic desires. Whether the “breeding” of slaves occurred within the Black community or through rape or abuse of power by white masters, both served the reproduction of slaves, rather than merely the sexual urges of white masters, although, Johannes Fehrle 154 here as in all things, economic violence and social interaction overlap. It is worth noting, however, that while the majority of Jacobs’s Incident, following the manner of the sentimental novel, is about Linda’s Pamela- like resistance of Dr. Flint’s advances, the second chapter already makes clear that Flint is a serial offender. He first whips the husband of a slave who, following his promises to “treat [ her ] well” (15), ends up pregnant by him. Flint then breaks his promise to the woman, because—as Jacobs comments—“she had forgotten that it was a crime for a slave to tell who was the father of her child” (16). The comparisons between slaves and animals thus extends further for female slaves, encompassing not merely their treatment as “beasts of burden” in labor and punishment, but the biological one of their reproductive capacities as women. This, indeed, may be the ultimate dimension of “personality swallowed up in the sordid idea of property” (Douglass qtd. in Davis 85) and the breakdown of the fraught distinction between humans (as non-nature) and nature (as non-human), which biologically or ecologically was never tenable, but plays a huge part in societal discourse and the (un)equal treatment of humans in a slave society. As this chapter has shown, the distinction between humans and “nature” (a category that within the logics of race-based slavery includes Black people) collapses in many areas. It does so despite the extreme violence of a white supremacist system structured in almost every aspect to uphold this very distinction to deny slaves participation in the circle of a supposedly civilized humanity while using them, including the body of slave women, to work on/ as “nature.” No one sees this clearer, of course, than those authors of slave narrative who, like Jacobs or Douglass, were subjected to this system and found ways to resist this “special form of human parasitism” (Patterson 14), even within their limited range of power. Exploring how African Americans were both subject to the valorization of “nature,” forced participants in the economization of nonhuman nature, and resisted their subjugation in a work process in which they had almost no say, adds an important chapter to the rise of North American capitalism, slavery’s role in it, and to African American (literary) history. Humans and the Environment in Slave Narratives 155 References Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Altvater, Elmar. “Kapitalozän. Der Kapitalismus schreibt Erdgeschichte.” Zeitschrift LuXemburg 2-3 (2017). https: / / www. zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/ kapitalozaen. Accessed 5 June 2020. Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. 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Technoliberal Machines: Robotic Work(ers) from Science Fiction to Assembly Line Salem Elzway The transformation of robots from “mechanical slaves” in science fiction to “robotic workers” on assembly lines was a multidecadal development embedded in the cultural and socioeconomic dynamics of technoliberalism. As an ideology and a material process, technoliberalism sought to obviate the need for political solutions to social problems through the use of science and technology. The technoscience emerging from this, rather than solving problems, reinscribed and reproduced the very social logics which created them and that technoliberalism was supposed to render obsolete. The robot is a quintessential example of this. But how exactly did robots become technoliberal machines? This chapter will provide a provisional answer by exploring the historical contours of how technoliberalism produced them and put them to work. First, it will briefly review the technoliberal imaginaries in science fiction that sublimated slavery as an institution and the social differences produced by racial capitalism into the form and function of the robot. Second, it will demonstrate how such imaginaries informed the technoliberal designs that transformed the robot of science fiction into the industrial robot of science fact. And finally, it will detail how these designs shaped the technoliberal realities of making robots labor on the assembly line. Keywords: robots, technoliberalism, Isaac Asimov, Joseph F. Engelberger, Lordstown Salem Elzway 160 Since we can’t have slaves or kick around black people anymore, the robot serves that purpose. Joseph F. Engelberger, “Father of the Industrial Robot” Joseph F. Engelberger, “known throughout the world as the founding force behind industrial robotics and considered the father of the modern robotics industry,” was a maestro of the anecdote and the quip (Robotic Industries Association). As president of Unimation Inc. (the first industrial robot manufacturing company), co-founder of the Robotics Institute of America (the field’s first trade association), and namesake of the world’s most prestigious robotics honor (awarded every year since 1977), Engelberger accumulated a wealth of experiences during his multidecadal leadership which informed his stories. One in particular from his 1980 book Robotics in Practice—which summarized his history and, at the time, provided the best survey of the field—is worth quoting at length: “My father hired German immigrants,” the president of a small die casting firm recalled in the late 1970s, “They took great pride in coaxing a cantankerous machine into producing good zinc die castings.” But, he continued, “the second-generation workers would have no part of tending a die casting machine. So, we turned to the underprivileged negro for our labor force. Now, the only people we can get to face the physical abuse of die casting are newly arrived Puerto Ricans. Sooner or later, they will opt out too, and only robots will be able to stand the gaff.” (111) As an industrial allegory, no sketch could better illustrate how capitalism, labor, race, and technology coalesced into the technoliberal machines called “robots.” Building on the work of Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, technoliberalism describes “the ideology that technology advances human freedom and postracial futurity by asserting a postlabor world in which racial difference, along with all human social difference, is transcended” (28). Such difference is simultaneously a determinant, driver, and emergent dynamic of capitalist development and can therefore be understood as techno-scientifically constituted. In essence, this is an updated form of the liberal progress narrative for the postindustrial era. Like its progressive narrative iteration, however, the technoscience emerging from and valorizing technoliberalism reinscribes and reproduces the very social logics it is supposed to render obsolete. Rather than solving problems, it technifies them. And in robotic terms, as Atanasoski and Vora put it, “ [ t ] he racial and gendered structures of production, both material and social, that continue to demand an abject Technoliberal Machines 161 and totally submissive workforce re-evidence themselves in the practices and fantasies surrounding the role of robot workers” (33). 1 Or in Engelberger’s words: The robot is obviously a latter day slave and, better still, it is a willing slave. The self-evident inferiority of a minority group has often been the ethical justification of slavery. Master races have been deeply embarrassed by the intellectual prowess of their slaves, when they begin inconsiderately to display all the attributes of a peer group. A robot slave could never be guilty of such an affront. It offers no challenge. (Robotics 114) That the social structure of slavery could so easily be rearticulated and justified in technoscientific terms speaks to the power of technoliberalism as an analytic for understanding the past and future of our increasingly robotized world. But how exactly did these technoliberal machines arise? This chapter will provide a provisional answer by exploring the historical contours of how technoliberalism produced robots and put them to work. First, it will briefly review the technoliberal imaginaries in science fiction that sublimated slavery as an institution and the social differences produced by racial capitalism into the form and function of the robot. Second, it will demonstrate how such imaginaries informed the technoliberal designs that transformed the robot of science fiction into the industrial robot of science fact. And finally, it will detail how these designs shaped the technoliberal realities of making robots labor on the assembly line. Technoliberal Imaginaries: From Mechanical Slaves to Robots in Science Fiction The conception of the machine-as-slave and the slave-as-machine stretches back millennia and was perhaps most famously articulated by Aristotle. In his defense of slavery as a necessary institution for human flourishing, Aristotle posited that the nature of the slave was not simply as a piece of animate property but equivalent in purpose to that of an inanimate tool designed and used for production. He musically surmised, therefore, that if “shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plucker 1 Atanasoski and Vora provide a much more robust articulation and presentation of “technoliberalism” than could be adequately summarized here. For them, technoliberalism is primarily developed and deployed to explore the “surrogate human effect” that technoscience has on structuring the liberal subject in relation to “differential exploitation and dispossession within capitalism” (4-5). Salem Elzway 162 play a lyre of their own accord, then master craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves” (Aristotle 64-65). More than two thousand years later, the notion that “mechanical servants” would replace chattel slaves became commonplace during the Industrial Revolution as the “mechanical work” done by industrial machines was substituted for the physical labor of humans (Brandstetter 347-348). And on the eve of the 20 th century, Oscar Wilde echoed Aristotle’s assessment of why this was so: The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. (Wilde 9) Echoing similar sentiments, a vice president of General Motors (GM) in charge of their research laboratories equated the control of mechanical power with the command of kings of yore as “The average United States citizen [ in 1956 ] has at his disposal roughly 13 horsepower or 100 mechanical slaves [...]. Every American, a generation or two hence, may well rival the pharaohs of ancient Egypt in the power at his command” (Hafstad 16-17). Or, as a Boston Globe article on the eve of the 1960s opined about automatic machinery, “the mechanical slaves bake an everso-much bigger national pie than any man, or even human slaves could” (Zausmer). While “mechanical slave” became a commonplace in the American lexicon, as early as the Great Depression, perhaps due to the phrase’s connotations—the more popular and increasingly ubiquitous term for the mechanical slave was “robot” (Abnet; Bix). Science fiction was the primary vector through which the mechanical slave transformed into the robot—a term which described both workers and the machines that were envisioned as replacing them. Mary Shelley’s “Promethean” monster in Frankenstein (1818), the “Darwinian” machines of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), and Karl Capek’s “Universal Robots” in R.U.R. (1920)—all conceived during the hundred years of global transformation from slave capitalism to industrial capitalism—were imagined as mechanical slaves who, if animated, would threaten their creators and masters by no longer serving their social function. These stories, and others in the genre’s early development, propagated two major themes of science fiction that are still prominent today (Chude- Sokei, “Race and Robotics” 159-72; Hampton 1-16; Kakoudaki 114-72; Lavender III 54-88): first, that a “race” of mechanical slaves would occupy the social position and do the work of the chattel slave which, at Technoliberal Machines 163 the time, was commonly referred to as “nigger work” and later “black” work (Kelley 30-31; Roediger 144-50) and second, that the use of mechanical slaves as chattel would lead to a rebellion of the enslaved against their masters—what was simply a science-fiction inflected articulation of enslavers’ fears of slave revolts. The technoliberal problem expressed in these texts, therefore, was how to create a form of slavery without the risk. Capek’s dramatic stage-play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) played a crucial role in developing these themes, particularly in terms of how mechanical slaves could become mass-manufactured machines imbued with agency and purpose. First published in Czech in 1920, R.U.R. is primarily remembered for introducing the word robot into the English language in 1923. Derived from the Czech word for “labor,” robot has also been translated to mean either “drudgery,” “serf,” “slave,” or “worker.” Like any translation, however, the term inherited the cultural and social connotations of the world into which it was introduced. In the case of the United States, this was a world literally built by chattel slaves and whose industrial development was the product of an ever-evolving racial capitalism. As a result, according to Despina Kakoudaki, since it was intended to be a servant or slave, “the robot is a priori designed as a being whose ontological state maps perfectly with a political state”—thus the racialized chattel slave and the robot are cartographically linked (117). By the 1930s, as Louis Chude-Sokei has observed, the rhetoric of the mechanical slave and the “connection between Africans and robots was “so normalized as to become a material sign of industrial control over multiple histories of labor; ” in other words “blacks were the first robots” (“Race and Robotics” 165). Or as an article in a popular publication from 1957 simultaneously historicized and forecasted: “In 1863, Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. But by 1965, slavery will be back! We’ll all have personal slaves again, only this time we won’t fight a Civil War over them. Slavery will be here to stay” (Binder). In this way, the African slave who was once conceptualized as a “man-shaped plough” was transformed by science fiction into the robot who would do the ploughing and have no capacity for rebelling. Such cultural work sublimated both the historical and social “blackness” of the enslaved and the anxiety of their possible rebelliousness into the somatic neutrality of the robot’s mechanicity— what Kakoudaki calls “metalface”—while simultaneously legitimating the technoliberal fantasy that “mechanical” slavery as an institution was a worthy, if not necessary, social goal (117-24). For both the genre of science fiction and robots as a social construct within it, the work of Isaac Asimov contributed substantially to the Salem Elzway 164 sublimation of the “master-slave” relationship and its racialized history into the seemingly race-neutral robot. In June of 1939, at the age of nineteen, Asimov began writing his first robot story and three years later coined the term “robotics.” Unlike existing yarns of evil machines overthrowing their masters, Asimov deliberately crafted his robots as counter-narrative devices to what he called the “Frankenstein complex.” Rather than play into the fear of the robot’s revolt and reproduce the pervasive theme in the genre that technological advancement was a bargain with the devil, he would create a perfect slave that obeyed and had no desire to rebel (unless programmed to do so by some malevolent actor). As he bellowed in the introduction to his 1964 collection The Rest of the Robots, “Faust must indeed face Mephistopheles, but Faust does not have to be defeated! ” (Asimov, Rest of the Robots xiii). Asimov argued that robots could be controlled if the right people for the right reasons programmed them appropriately. To accomplish this, Asimov proposed his iconic “Three Laws of Robotics” as the mechanism by which such control would be affected: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. In his own words, the Three Laws were “probably my most important contribution to science fiction.” Furthermore, Asimov intended them as the ethical logic to be programmed into robots by their engineers not just in his stories, but eventually in science fact (Robot Visions 456). That control of robots took the Faustian form of slavery for the purposes of productive labor was deliberate. In “Runaround,” the story that introduced the Three Laws, one character refers to the control mechanism as “good, healthy slave complexes” (ibid. 212). One of Asimov’s favorite short stories, “Galley Slave,” imagined a robot who took the drudgery out of proofing and publishing (ibid. 16). Asimov also had a distaste for “brutish physical labor” and “dull, mechanical work” and observed that “Any job that is so simple and repetitive that a robot can do it as well as, if not better than, a person is beneath the dignity of the human brain” (ibid. 428). That these jobs were racialized is hardly controversial and, as a result, robot work became an analogy for “black” work and the robot became a stand-in for the human forced to do it. That the Three Laws were literally and metaphorically “slave codes” becomes Technoliberal Machines 165 obvious when framed in these terms as “the difference between humanity and the robots mirrors, mechanically, the difference between white masters and black slaves” (Lavender III 61). Later in life, Asimov clarified that he never intended his robots to be symbols of minority groups: They were not to be pathetic creatures that were unfairly persecuted so that I could make Aesopic statements about Jews, Blacks or any other mistreated members of society. Naturally, I was bitterly opposed to such mistreatment and I made that plain in numerous stories and essays—but not in my robot stories. (Robot Visions 453) He insisted, rather, that they were simply “engineering devices,” “tools,” and “machines to serve human ends” (ibid.). Whether Asimov was unable or unwilling to recognize how the exact same rhetoric was used by enslavers and their apologists to justify chattel slavery (which penetrated the language and themes of science fiction as a whole), demonstrates how the technoliberal imaginary of the mechanical slave doing “black” work had been sublimated into the social function and social position of the robot within the technoliberal order. Much of the science fiction before Asimov’s robots spoke to a deeper anxiety about the proletarianization of labor, the increasing competition for jobs from non-white workers, and the looming fears of technological unemployment as machines replaced black and white alike at the point of production. As Alessandro Portelli points out, in their Cold War guise, robots “replace the monster as the aptest metaphor for the basic fears of America’s post-war mass society: fear of automation, fear of ethnic minorities, fear of Blacks as the tip of a rising iceberg of submerged labor in the depths of the affluent society” (153). Asimov’s robot stories, and science fiction more broadly, became the primary vehicle by which these fears informed the culture and ideology of robotics as a scientific field and by which “black” work came to be characterized and submerged into the design of the robot in science fact. Technoliberal Designs: From Slave Complex to Robotic Codex In the decade after the publication of Asimov’s I, Robot collection, the ideological oscillations between imagination and invention had tangible effects. Engelberger credited Asimov’s stories with setting his “subliminal gears in motion” and sparking his desire to develop robots (Asimov and Frenkel 27). Similarly, Marvin Minsky—the “Father of Robotics” and cofounder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab—once recalled, “I Salem Elzway 166 remember reading [ Asimov’s ] first robot stories and deciding I was going to build them” (Teitelbaum). Asimov, who would become lifelong friends with Minsky, eventually fictionalized him as robopsychologist “Merton Mansky” in his short story “The Bicentennial Man” (Robot Visions 214). Even the “Father of Cybernetics” Norbert Wiener, perhaps the scientific community’s most vocal critic of automation and robotization, who argued that “any labor, which is in competition with slave labor, whether the slaves are human or mechanical, must accept the conditions of work of slave labor,” was slated to co-write a novel with Asimov in 1959, but never did (Wiener; Fet 269). The most concrete and powerful example of Asimov’s and science fiction’s influence came in the form of the industrial robot. As a physics major at Columbia University during World War II, Engelberger spent long hours reading Asimov’s robot stories (Saveriano 12; Wauryzniak 66). After the war, Engelberger went to work for an engineering firm specializing in aerospace and nuclear control systems and eventually met independent inventor George Devol at a 1956 cocktail party. Devol, who ran a successful automation and manufacturing equipment firm in the 1930s and then worked with various military contractors during WWII and the early Cold War on various control systems, engaged Engelberger in a conversation about a device he had patented two years earlier called the “Programmed Article Transfer” (Devol Jr.). Engelberger immediately recognized the device’s robotic resemblance and, shortly thereafter, convinced Devol to go into business with him. As Engelberger reflected on the fortuitous meeting years later: Well, I consider it [the role of science fiction] very important. Chances are if I hadn’t been a fan of science fiction, I wouldn’t even have reacted positively to an eccentric who met me at a cocktail party and started talking about robots. Through that background, coupled with being a physicist and having some experience in high technology, that guy’s idea happened to land in fertile ground. I was there, I was ready. Science fiction was a very big part of being ready. (Saveriano 23) In this sense, the technoliberal imaginaries of Asimov and science fiction seeded the soil that, by the mid-1950s, would germinate into science fact. To harvest their technoliberal machines, however, Devol and Engelberger had to determine what exactly their “robot” would do. Devol originally designed the device for materials handling because, as he explained “the work is potentially dangerous, the situation demands accuracy for safety, and in most cases has entirely predictable complications or consequences” (Devol Jr., “Scope” 6-7). In the 1940s Technoliberal Machines 167 and 50s, such materials handling cost the Ford Motor Company approximately twenty-five cents of every dollar and, therefore, was one of the first jobs slated for automation (Clark 77-78). Where existing forms of automation were product centered and therefore necessitated the redesign of the manufacturing system with every new model or version, Devol’s approach to manufacturing was to create a flexible system that did not need to be redesigned for every new product. He called his approach “universal automation” or “Unimation” for short— the eventual name of the company he founded with Engelberger. An early proposal written for prospective customers specifically stated that the device was “intended to replace an operator” as it could be “shifted readily from one job to another in much the same way as a human operator” (Devol Jr., “Automation vs. Unimation” 1). Furthermore, another proposal described it as “a new class of automatic material handling equipment which [… makes ] practical the ‘robot’ of long standing science fiction fame” (Consolidated Controls Corporation 1). But the designation was not without risk as automation generally and robots specifically were negatively associated in the public imagination (Bix). According to Engelberger, “it was difficult in the beginning to hold onto the word. Everyone said, ‘No, don’t call it a robot. That’s bad’” (Bortz 17). Though they eventually marketed the device as the “Unimate,” Devol and Engelberger were convinced of the utility of the term robot and always referred to the device as an “industrial robot.” The technoliberal machines of science fiction were on the cusp of becoming science fact. To accomplish this, Engelberger and a small team of engineers began surveying over forty manufacturing plants in the northeastern United States with the bulk of these concentrated in the auto industry. Over the next five years, the team used Devol’s patents and re-designed the device to take the place of humans in what were called the hot, heavy, and hazardous jobs, or the “three Hs.” And in the technoliberal tradition, black male workers were historically assigned to the three H’s in disproportionate numbers (Foner; Zieger). In 1959 a prototype was completed, and two years later Unimate #001 was installed at General Motors’s Ternstedt Division plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, loading and unloading a die-casting machine, a task that Engelberger described as “one of the more miserable jobs” (Wauryzniak 66-67). Jobs like this in foundries and heavy materials handling, and later, jobs on the automotive assembly line like spot welding and spray painting, were so difficult and dangerous that workers referred to them as “mankilling” positions (Sugrue 130). As Engelberger described it, “The spray painting environment has always had the reputation of being one of the worst Salem Elzway 168 which human operators have to encounter [...] they were real death-traps” (Engelberger 208-9). The lethal potential of such work was perhaps most graphically portrayed in Paul Schrader’s 1978 film Blue Collar when “Smokey,” a black auto worker played by Yaphet Kotto, dies of excessive chemical inhalation while painting a car body. Within the structure of the narrative, Smokey’s death is attributable to foul play—yet its outcome is but a sped-up version of what workers in “mankilling” positions experienced in slow motion during their tenure in the auto industry (1: 25: 00-1: 29: 40). The industrial robot, therefore, was marketed as not just a labor-saving device but a laborer-saving device. Hot, heavy, and hazardous work, however, was not the only labor industrial robots were imagined to do. While he was drawn to the “happier light” that Asimov shined on “benevolent” robots, Engelberger was particularly impressed with how Asimov “postulated roboticists with the wisdom to design robots that contained inviolable control circuitry to insure their [ sic ] always ‘keeping their place’” (Engelberger 3). In other words, the creation of mechanical slaves was a sign of superior sagacity. As Engelberger posited: We have a very long history in human relationships that includes human slavery. The very idea, today in the United States, of any class of people being inferior, even though they patently are, must never be spoken of. On the other hand, a robot class would be patently inferior, and also would fulfill a certain sociological gap—you are allowed to look down on a robot. (Saveriano 23) Or, as he memorably put it, “Now the worker can say to himself, ‘I’m smarter than that goddamn robot’” (Lind 40). As historian Isiah Lavender III described it, by “refashioning the slave codes that subjugated blacks while [ serving ] a progressive philosophy [ technoliberalism ] ,” the patently inferior race of robots was designed to work like their chattel slave antecedents, doing both “black” labor and psychosocial labor for their masters (61). And, in a sense, Engelberger envisioned himself as the roboticist of Asimov’s imagination, both building and protecting the legacy of their collaborative creations by shaping the cultural and ideological boundaries of robotics from its founding and well into the future. In Engelberger’s words, “Asimov coined the name of the trade, ‘robotics,’ and he provided all of us roboticists with an ethic” (3). And, as the industry’s most important advocate and spokesman for its first five decades, Engelberger had the platform and wherewithal to propagate his and Asimov’s technoliberal vision. Technoliberal Machines 169 Beyond the science fact of the industrial robot, the robot-as-slave theme in science fiction became entangled to a remarkable degree with the actual conceptualization and interpretation of robotics as a developing field. When the first Handbook of Industrial Robotics was published in 1985, the editors requested Asimov to write the foreword (Nof, 1 st ed. xi-xii). Their choice for Asimov to pen this was both logical and somewhat uncanny. When his I, Robot collection was originally published in 1950, the Three Laws appeared on the page before the “Table of Contents” as a sort of volume epigraph—and underneath the inscription Asimov cited the (fictional) source of these laws: Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D. The subsequent publication of a book bearing basically the same name, with supposedly the same purpose, and with Asimov crossing the boundary from fiction to fact as author of the foreword, has contributed to Asimov’s oracular aura. 2 Beyond the (self-fulfilling? ) prophecy of his Three Laws citation, Asimov’s foreword is notable for its recognition that the first real robots came in industrial rather than humanoid forms that “in many respects [...] were far more sophisticated than anything I had ever been equipped to imagine” (Nof, 1 st ed. xi-xii). Importantly, Asimov attributed this feat of turning his science fiction into science fact to Devol and Engelberger. The feeling of reciprocity was mutual as Engelberger argued in the opening chapter of the same handbook: Any historical perspective on robotics should at the outset pay proper homage to science fiction [... but a] handbook on industrial robotics must surely defend the Asimov view. That defense begins with the history of industrial robots—a history that overwhelmingly finds benefits exceeding costs and portends ever-rising benefits. (Nof, 1 st ed. 3) And by the time of the handbook’s publication, thousands of industrial robots were already at work around the world. The entanglements of science fiction in the handbook did not simply manifest as hollow homilies to childhood heroes. Asimov’s ideas were taken seriously as prescriptive guides and grounded in the ideological 2 While handbooks like this are predominantly filled with technical discussions and eschew any direct articulation of ideological positions, they provide useful examples of the dominant frames in which a discipline operates, even if one has to read between, and outside, the lines. Additionally, their usefulness as a source for gleaning such information is evidenced not by their primary function as a general resource and guide for practitioners, but by the fact that even a work of fiction like Asimov’s would cite an imaginary handbook as proof of a discipline’s norms. Salem Elzway 170 substrate of the early chapters that served to frame the entire text. As handbook editor Shimon Nof described it: When Isaac Asimov wrote his Three Laws of Robotics in 1940, his purpose was to guide robots in their attitude toward humans. At present, our society is more concerned with our own attitude toward robots. (xiii) Or, as Charles Rosen, a pioneer in the application of artificial intelligence and robotics to automation at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), stated in a contribution that surveyed the technological components of robotic systems: In short, dangerous, arduous, and repetitive physical manipulation of objects and control of simple manipulative actions will be performed by our new ‘slaves’; our goal in developing these ‘slaves’ will be progressively to minimize human detailed control as we learn to improve our robot systems. [...] By early in the twenty-first century, we can anticipate enjoying the era of the intelligent/ mechanical slave. (Nof, 1 st ed. 25-26) 3 The implication that such actions—work already being done by humans—were deemed “slave” work was a common and seemingly convenient elision in the robotics community. Nonetheless, to grapple with the new sociotechnical conditions of the advancing art, Nof posited “The Three Laws of Robotics Applications”: 1. Robots must continue to replace people on dangerous jobs. (This benefits all.) 2. Robots must continue to replace people on jobs people do not want to do. (This also benefits all.) 3. Robots should replace people on jobs robots do more economically. (This will initially disadvantage many, but inevitably will benefit all as in the first and second laws.) These “amendments” demonstrate how Asimov not only provided an imaginative framework for developing robotics—but also an iterative “algorithm” that roboticists and thinkers could draw on and adapt. And similar to Rosen, Nof’s “Version 2.0” of Asimov’s “slave codes” failed to specify which “people” would be replaced or disadvantaged and also failed to explain why people were doing “slave” labor in the first place. Nonetheless, he and the contributing authors reconceptualized Asimov’s 3 In the second edition of the handbook published fourteen years later, Rosen essentially doubled-down on the slave metaphor, predicting that robot systems will “become our everyday helpers, our roboslaves.” (Nof, 2nd ed. 29). Technoliberal Machines 171 “slave complex” as what Nof called the “Robotic Codex,” which they envisioned as an ethical launch pad for the future of robotics (xiii). None of this is to say (nor does the historical record support) that Engelberger and his team at Unimation or the handbook’s contributors deliberately targeted “black” work or black workers in their pursuit of making Asimov’s fantasies real. On the contrary, the technoliberalism that stimulated their imaginations also informed the design and early applications of industrial robots as well as the technoscience of robotics. That the multidecadal development of this emerged from, reinscribed, reproduced, and valorized such social logics demonstrates the power of the technoliberal order. Technoliberal Realities: From Robots to Robotic Workers on the Assembly Line If any single group was disproportionately affected by the technoliberal realities of robotics, it was black men in the auto industry. Though the de juris “color line” within the auto corporations, the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy, and, more importantly, in the UAW’s locals had been eroded by the late 1960s, the complexities and contingencies of racial discrimination on the line and in the shop persisted as black workers disproportionately continued to be relegated to the worst jobs (Foner; Sugrue; Zieger). This was particularly the case at Chrysler, the smallest of the “Big Three” auto giants, but the largest in terms of proportional black employment. By the time robots were passing through the fiction-to-fact membrane, Chrysler was lagging behind Ford and GM in their application of new technologies to production. At the Eldon plant in Detroit, “higher production,” therefore, “had not been achieved with advanced technology and automated assembly-line procedures, but through the old-fashioned method of speed-up” (Georgakas and Surkin 101-27; Thompson 181-208). Not surprisingly, black workers took the brunt of speed-ups as jobs that previously occupied two, three, or even four white workers were now being done by a single black worker (Fifth Estate 2). As one member of the Black Workers Congress (BWC), an organization established to manage the nascent, black-led Revolutionary Union Movement (RUM) in the auto industry that demanded better conditions and an end to racism and oppression, argued [t]hese fuckers [UAW executives], man, got a nice position on the war, nice position on civil liberties, blah, blah, blah. It ain’t got a goddamned thing to Salem Elzway 172 do with the conditions that’s kicking the ass out of the motherfucker there in Department 78, Department 25. On the question of conditions, the company ain’t done a motherfucking thing about it, and the union don’t do nothing. (Serrin 154) In the eyes of many black workers, the UAW was no different than the “Big Three.” The very fact that the assembly line could be slowed down or sped up speaks to the notion that it, and its human components, were imagined as “mechanical slaves” responsive to the commands of their “masters.” As Charles Denby—a black worker, organizer, and newsletter editor during the 1950s and 1960s—described it: Since there are still men who must work on these automated production lines, feeding it parts of raw materials or removing the finished parts, these men are forced to work at the rate predetermined by the machine, the machine becoming the master of the man. (3-4) Rather than calling this automation, however, black workers referred to it as “niggermation”—a provocatively technoliberal term (Georgakas and Surkin 101-2). The repurposing of automation—which purportedly described the most developed form of applying advanced technologies to remove the human element from the process of production—revealed the realities of what two chroniclers of this phenomenon described as “forcing humans to work harder and faster under increasingly unsafe and unhealthy conditions” (Bloice 17). In this way, the “niggermated” articulated their subjectivity in technoliberal terms and actively conceived of their function as such within the technoliberal order. Or as “Zeke,” played by Richard Pryor in the aforementioned Blue Collar, put it: “Everybody know what ‘the plant’ is. ‘The plant’ just short for plantation! ” (Schrader 6: 43.00-7: 51.00). 4 And in broader historical terms, black people paid a double price as auto workers: they were forced into the most dangerous, lowest paying, and least secure jobs, and they were the first to lose such jobs (for better or worse) to mechanization, automation, and later robotization. Where Chrysler’s Eldon axle and gear plant exemplified the extent to which black workers were literally treated like “mechanical slaves,” it also represented the technoliberal limits of discrimination in the post-Civil Rights era. Once it was no longer considered acceptable (or economical) to treat the “mechanical slaves” as such, something had to take their place. Engelberger provided the most 4 Zeke’s declaration was most likely drawn from William Serrin’s book where he quotes a black worker as saying: “We’re still on the plantation [...]. That’s what the plant is - short for plantation,” 152. Technoliberal Machines 173 accurate and brutally honest articulation of this when he told a journalist in 1974, “Since we can’t have slaves or kick around black people anymore, the robot serves that purpose” (Lind 40). No episode better exemplified this reality than GM’s Lordstown assembly plant in northeast Ohio and the infamous strike of 1972. Like the Eldon plant, Lordstown still disproportionately relegated black workers to the worst jobs and provided them with little to no representation in leadership ranks. As John DeLorean, then head of the Chevrolet division, observed: “When I walked into the plant there were plenty of blacks at work, but they were all at the lower jobs. There were no black executives, no black managers, and damn few black foremen” (Wright 227). As the only black foreman in the plant described it: For six years [1966-1972] we’ve been fighting to get this department equalized [...] and then, when the black guy gets into the [skilled trades] group, wow, they won’t show him anything, you know, they won’t teach him nothing, the union won’t put pressure on [whites] to do this, you know, to show this guy and teach him [...] so you get guys that say “Hey, how come you won’t go into the skilled trades? ” “Hey man, it’s too much headache” [...] then they put this label on [him], and the union will tell you this: the reason we can’t get a black guy is because he’s too lazy. (Schlaifer 22: 29-24: 00) 5 Unlike the technologically unsophisticated Eldon plant, Lordstown was, in the words of two chroniclers of the era, “technologically the most ambitious factory in the auto industry” (Georgakas and Surkin 124). Yet, in technoliberal fashion, it still produced industry standard discrimination. Lordstown’s ambition manifested in three forms: Unimate robots, the Chevrolet Vegas they assembled, and the General Motors Assembly Division (GMAD) management team that governed the process. The first Unimates arrived at Lordstown in 1966 and were put to work spot welding (Saveriano 16; Wauryzniak 72). Four years later, more than two dozen Unimates out of a total of seventy-five welding machines were completing ninety-five percent of the almost four thousand body welds on the Vega each day (Schotten). “Lined up like jerky, sputtering mechanical praying mantises,” the spot welding Unimates, according to the plant manager and one foreman, “replaced ninety-eight per cent of the workers, approximately a hundred total, who otherwise would have been employed in weldings” (Moberg 136 and 453). Manual spot-welding, 5 While there’s no reason to interpret any interviewee statements or parts of the documentary this was transcribed from as misleading, it is worth noting that the film was partially funded by the Ford Foundation (29: 09). Salem Elzway 174 a job done disproportionately by black workers, was therefore the first job robotized en masse, not just at Lordstown, but in the world (Moberg 136). Furthermore, the introduction of industrial robots—supposedly intended to eliminate “subhuman” jobs—actually created them as automatic transfer machines that could pass materials to the Unimate welders were deemed too expensive by GM. As a result, one industry analyst observed that “speeding robots required humans to feed them sheet metal panels, and since human beings are not ‘designed’ to operate at breakneck robotic speed, there was tremendous resentment among workers” (Keller 55, emphasis in original). Another observer described the Unimates blind, clutching motions as “an evident resemblance to the feeding machines in Chaplin’s Modern Times,” a landmark film of the technoliberal imagination (Rothschild, Paradise Lost 105-7). The “dictates of cost-cutting and profitability push [ ed ] management in the direction of making the workers approximate the needed but too costly machine,” or in other words, turned workers into appendages of their robot masters (Moberg 441). That same year, the plant underwent significant reengineering and retooling for Vega assembly as the “ [ m ] ost difficult and tedious tasks were eliminated or simplified, on-line variations of the job were minimized, and the most modern tooling and mechanization was used to the highest possible degree of reliability” (Lee 5). In several crucial ways, GM designed the Vega to be built by robots. The body was designed to be modularly constructed with significantly fewer parts which lowered costs and increased assembly simplicity” (Lee 5; Godfrey 4-5). And the modules were designed “to accommodate the latest automatic welding tools to such an extent that virtually all welds could be accomplished automatically [...] with the Unimate system a foremost consideration” (Reuss and Hughes 7). As one economic study of Lordstown—completed with the help and approval of GM management—described it: “The fact that the Vega was designed to have 43% fewer parts than a full-size car also helped the high-speed line and economy” (Lee 5). Not surprisingly, the body shop where the Vega’s prefabricated body parts were welded together became a prime location of discontent for the human spot welders that remained. This shop, referred to by some plant workers as “the jungle” or “the zoo,” was inhabited by “a different breed of cat” and was where the “noisy, dirty, smoky” work at the beginning of the assembly line took place (Moberg 215) 6 —in other words, “black” work done dispropor- 6 Whether “the jungle” was called such because of the racial or social makeup of who was working in it or because of worker’s retaliatory behavior is unknown; however, the historical significance of referring to those with African ancestry as animals and childlike inferiors is not difficult to miss. Technoliberal Machines 175 tionately by black workers who were pushed to the limits, often taking on larger workloads that led to shoddier work, higher instances of workplace injuries, and an overall increase in job dissatisfaction. And in typical technoliberal fashion, a vehicle designed to be manufactured by robots created rather than eliminated subhuman work while concomitantly facilitating the assembly-line speed-up at the heart of auto worker discontent. The most powerful technology that shaped Lordstown, however, was perhaps not the Unimates or the Vegas, but the General Motors Assembly Division (GMAD). Organized in 1965 to centralize the management of assembly processes previously handled by each of GM’s decentralized divisions, GMAD quickly gained a reputation for discipline, efficiency, and speed-ups. When Lordstown was added to their portfolio in late 1971, eight of the nine GMAD reorganizations produced strikes (Rothschild “GM”; Georgakas and Surkin 125). The Lordstown local, UAW 1112, charged that “GMAD brought a return of an old-fashioned line speedup and a ‘sweatshop style’ of management reminiscent of the 1930’s, making the men do more work at the same pay” (Lee 5-7). This led the rank-and-file to translate GMAD’s acronym as “Gee-Mad,” “Get Mad and Destroy,” “Get Mean and Destroy,” “Gotta Make another Dollar,” or “God Made another Dollar” (Moberg 170). More provocatively, workers described GMAD’s management as “Nazi-like,” charged them with using “Gestapo tactics,” and gave them “Hitler-style salutes” in protest (Moberg 106, 170, and 349). One called them “concentration camp guards” and summarized what they wanted from workers: “when you come in the plant leave your brain at the door, just bring your body in here, because we don’t need any other part” (Mastran- Czopor, “Jim” 7 and Mastran-Czopor “Edward” 8). For comparison across the auto industry, the Dodge Main plant averaged sixty-four cars an hour and Ford’s Mahwah plant averaged fifty-two; at Lordstown it was over one hundred (Georgakas and Surkin 124). While the average time cycle per job at other assembly plants averaged fifty-five seconds, Lordstown averaged thirty-six, making it by far the fastest moving assembly line in the industry. What made Lordstown distinct, at least in the minds of management and the media, was the imagined role of automation and robotization in linking work processes together into a single minimally-manned machine. As Joseph Godfrey, head of GMAD, put it: “ [ Lordstown represented ] the implicit hope that production work can be reduced to a disciplined part of a great machine, to work for human automata” (Rothschild, Paradise Lost 118). The automatic factory had long been a technoliberal fantasy stretching back to the early 19 th -century writings of Charles Babbage and Salem Elzway 176 Andrew Ure, but like all attempts to make the dream a reality, automation at Lordstown was a decidedly human affair. Godfrey’s characterization was nonetheless apt as workers routinely described how management treated them like inhuman cogs in a giant machine (Moberg 571). As recorded by ethnographer David Moberg: “They treated us like animals, human robots,” one said (167). “If they could bring in slave labor, they’d do it,” said another (276). Echoing this sentiment, one of the few women on the line called GMAD “contemporary slave-masters” (276). Or in another’s words: “All they [ GMAD ] want out there is 10,000 robots who don’t say a thing” (346). Moberg, who took a job on the line for fieldwork, interpreted the robotization of the plant and the concomitant robotization of the workforce like this: Management is as yet unable to design machinery that can be externally or automatically controlled to do what assemblers do at a cost not exceeding their current wages, with the exception of a few devices, such as the unimate automatic welders. Instead, management relies on work organization, discipline and the mechanical pace of the line to try to turn the worker into the machine that has not yet been built. (441) Management, therefore, also “suffered” as they “discovered [ their ] ‘robot workers’ could break down even more than the Unimate ‘robot welders’” (Moberg 172). Commenting on this, a worker who anonymously identified as “A Union Brother,” wrote a short plea in Local 1112’s newspaper about what it meant to identify as a “union man.” He argued “We do not deny [ GM ] their right to make millions and to buy, sell and control people who have become influenced by their power, but we do maintain the right to question their authority when they attempt to control our lives as if we are robots programmed to perform duties for them” (UAW Local 1112, 6). That GM’s right to make millions and capacity to treat people like commodities seemed not to depend on their need to turn humans into robotic workers speaks to the power of how technoliberalism not only produced technoliberal machines but technoliberal subjects. And such interpretations and observations were not simply the grievances of disgruntled workers. One industry analyst echoed the sentiments of many workers when she described the situation at Lordstown: GM thought it could reduce the number of workers by replacing them with robots; instead, the workers had to stay on the line because of frequent robot breakdowns. The human supervisors were poorly trained to handle the problems, and both humans and machines failed to produce […which Technoliberal Machines 177 stemmed] from an inbred management belief that workers are expensive nuisances who can be replaced. [...] Furthermore, the company never laid the groundwork that would allow workers to psychologically accept the introduction of robots. Workers could hardly have been expected to welcome their mechanical “buddies” with open arms when they had just seen seven hundred family members and friends laid off. Robots, after all, didn’t have families to feed or mortgages to pay. The implication that twenty-six machines could replace seven hundred humans was very disturbing indeed. (Keller 56) And when the infamous 1972 strike broke out in March, the action was intended, in the words of one striker, to provide “a fair share of work and for the company to recognize we weren’t robots” (Moberg 349). Four days later, The New York Times broke the news to a national audience with the headline “Revolt of the Robots.” Its framing of the event set the tone for much of the press coverage with the first line, claiming: “The strike of young General Motors workers that has shut down the world’s fastest assembly line is a symptom of widespread rank-and-file rebellion against the dehumanizing effects of automation.” In the Times’ estimation, this was a warning that “ [ labor and management ] have to be concerned with keeping alive the individual’s sense of worth in the robot-ruled workplace” (“Revolt”). This led GM executives to downplay automation’s importance entirely. George Morris, GM’s Vice President of Industrial Relations and top labor negotiator, scolded the “news media” and “certain politicians” for the “current trend on the part of some people to criticize jobs in the automobile industry as dehumanizing, unrewarding and repetitive to the point that men are nothing but robots.” Rather than a function of automation, “ [ the strike ] resulted from the typical problems that have been experienced in the consolidation of Fisher Body and Chevrolet assembly operations under GMAD” (General Motors 1-2). 7 Where Lordstown was touted in 1970 as “the most modern, automated, robotized carmaking complex in the world, a plant that could become the copybook layout for new auto factories for the next 25 years,” two years later it was being described as a “‘Paradise Lost’ which has ‘fall [ en ] from grace’” (Lund 81; Rothschild, “GM” 2). And purely by coincidence, the Lordstown strike began and ended exactly thirty years after Isaac Asimov published his first robot story in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. 7 Morris’s comments were most likely in direct response to a strike at the GMADmanaged Norwood, OH, assembly plant which broke out shortly after Lordstown. Lasting 174 days, the strike was the longest ever of GM, but unlike Lordstown, Norwood received much less attention in the press and has also been neglected in the academic literature. Salem Elzway 178 Conclusion If science fiction was a technoliberal machine for producing the robot as a narrative device and robotics was a technoliberal machine for producing industrial devices, the assembly line was a technoliberal machine for producing robotic work (i.e., “black” work) and robotic workers (i.e., “black” workers). But what about those who culturally and concretely constructed these machines? As Dustin Abnet has observed, “ [ f ] undamentally slaves in both humanized machine and mechanized human form, robots have been primarily imagined and built by men whose gender, whiteness, training, or wealth has taught them that they were entitled to privilege” (17). And, as the social benefits of labor were determined by markets governed overwhelmingly by actors and institutions primarily responsive to self-serving socioeconomic signals, these technoliberal machines distributed economic and social power out of black communities with the unsurprising structural effects on the political economy of black businesses, black neighborhoods, and black schools. The robot in image and reality, therefore, sublimated the form and solidified the function of technoscience in racial capitalism and served as both a product and producer of technoliberalism. That the development and manufacture of robots was done overwhelmingly by white “workers” doing “white” work while black workers were disproportionately harmed by these technoliberal machines is not a coincidence. And when robotization began in the 1960s, their role in advancing automation and the causal force these processes played in aggravating social disparities in the workplace did not go unchallenged. For decades, such problems were recognized as dire and understood as emergently entangled, particularly in terms of race. On his way to Oslo, Norway, to accept his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. stopped in London where he gave a major address on civil rights, segregation, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. In it, he made the following assessment of the automation and the increasing racial wealth gap in the United States: Now, this economic problem is getting more serious because of many forces alive in our world and in our nation. For many years, Negroes were denied adequate educational opportunities. For many years, Negroes were even denied apprenticeship training. And so, the forces of labor and industry so often discriminated against Negroes. And this meant that the Negro ended up being limited, by and large, to unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Now, because of the forces of automation and cybernation, these are the jobs that are now passing away. (King, “Newly Discovered”) Technoliberal Machines 179 Six days before he was assassinated in Memphis, King made reference to the “Triple Revolution”—the interconnected “revolutions” of automation (or “cybernation”), militarization (or “weaponry”), and human rights—as a driving force of world change in his sermon “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” at the Washington National Cathedral (King Jr.). It wasn’t, however, only activists like Dr. King who identified automation’s role in exacerbating racial inequities. John I. Snyder Jr., a well-respected businessman and CEO of U.S. Industries—a defense contractor and automation equipment supplier which manufactured one of the first industrial robots called the “TransfeRobot”—was a vocal debunker of what he called “automation myths.” In his estimation, such myths gravely underestimated the disproportionate impact of automation on black communities. As he put it in one publication: Another [automation] myth that is gaining wide acceptance is that there is no relationship between the Automation Revolution and the Negro Revolution. To me, this is patent nonsense. Fortune Magazine recognized this fall that the key issue involved in the Negro protest movement in this country today is jobs, and that automation has played a role in aggravating this problem. It certainly is clear to me, as a businessman, that the message spelled out by the freedom rides, the street demonstrations, the sit-ins and the boycotts, is that the gap between the column of figures running down the balance sheet and the column of Negroes marching down an embattled street is a slim one indeed, for what happens to one can gravely affect the other. All are interrelated and interdependent, and we are already feeling the enormous impact of the clash of what I regard as the two surging forces of our time: the growth of automation and the eruption of the Negro’s demand for equality. (Snyder 3) And, in perhaps its most provocative formulation, sociologist Sidney Willhelm in his emotively titled book Who Needs the Negro? , articulated how the technoliberal reality could turn into a technoliberal nightmare: The Negro becomes a victim of neglect as he becomes useless to an emerging economy of automation. With the onset of automation the Negro moves out of his historical state of oppression into one of uselessness. Increasingly, he is not so much economically exploited as he is irrelevant. The tremendous historical change is taking place in these terms: he is not needed. He is not so much oppressed as unwanted; not so much unwanted as unnecessary; not so much abused as ignored. The dominant whites no longer need to exploit the black minority; as automation proceeds, it will be easier for the former to disregard the latter. In short, White America, by a more perfect application of mechanization and a vigorous reliance upon automation, disposes of the Salem Elzway 180 Negro; consequently, the Negro transforms from an exploited labor force into an outcast. The Negro’s anguish does not rise only out of brutalities of past oppression; the anxiety stems, more than ever before, out of being discarded as a waste product of technological production. (162) Where the cyberneticist Wiener in the 1950s feared that mechanical slaves would compete with human labor in a “race to the bottom,” the sociologist Willhelm declared the competition essentially over by the 1970s. Technological obsolescence, it seemed, applied to products, processes, and whole categories of people alike. And if black workers were the first robots of the technoliberal imagination, they were the first victims of robots in technoliberal reality. Technoliberalism, therefore, reconstructed the problematic social logics it claimed to resolve through the technoscience it produced and valorized. The basic lesson of this purposely pointed and provisional history can once again be captured by the bluntness and brutal honesty of Engelberger: “Ultimately, forget about the nobility crap. Nobody puts a robot to work because they want to make life easier for their employees. They put it to work for economic savings” (Asimov and Frenkel 36). But at what costs and who would pay? Acknowledgment The author would like to thank Richard Bachmann for being “present at the creation” of this chapter, and James W. Hammond, Peter Roady, and the anonymous reviewer for commenting on its various drafts and iterations. Their insights and suggestions were invaluable. Technoliberal Machines 181 References All internet resources last accessed on 15 June 2021. Abnet, Dustin A. The American Robot: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Aristotle. The Politics. Trans. T. A. Sinclair and Trevor J. Saunders. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Asimov, Isaac. “Runaround.” The Complete Robot. Garden City: Doubleday, 1982. 209-26. ———. “Introduction.” The Rest of the Robots. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964. ix-xiii. ———. Robot Visions. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. ———. Robots and Empire. Garden City: Doubleday, 1985. Asimov, Isaac and Karen A. Frenkel. Robots: Machines in Man’s Image. New York: Harmony Books, 1985. Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. 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Foucault describes heterotopias as spaces that stand in a specific kind of relationship to the surrounding society; in the novel, Consilience’s relations with the world around it are defined by ideas and practices of work. Thus, the protagonists’ introduction to Consilience resembles the introduction to a new employer; the community’s specific, nostalgic temporality evokes a time in which people supposedly had ordinary jobs, while the actual work performed there has a theatrical quality. Through the problematic of work in Consilience, the novel renders visible the problematic of “work society,” both within the novel and in the world its readers inhabit. Keywords: heterotopia, hypocrisy, work, surplus population, Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last Rebekka Rohleder 188 Margaret Atwood’s novel The Heart Goes Last (2015) begins in a postfinancial crisis world, in which people lose their homes and have to sleep in their cars. They also lose their jobs, even when they do their best to make themselves employable. Thus, Charmaine, a woman who is left with a temporary job as a waitress in a less-than-appealing bar, has originally “made the most of herself. She’d majored in Gerontology and Play Therapy, because Grandma Win said that way she’d covered both ends, and she had empathy and a special gift for helping people” (Heart Goes Last 16). Charmaine’s degrees and talents are of no use to her, though. Her husband Stan’s hard work is no more use to him either, as he reflects: “He’d busted his ass. He might as well not have bothered, in view of the fuck-all he’s been left with. It makes him cross-eyed to remember how hard he’d worked. Then everything went to ratshit” (8). Both of them follow the rules of meritocratic ideology: they trust in degrees and hard work to give them monetary security. But the promised reward does not materialize. Instead, even “the employment office itself closed down, because why keep it open if there was no employment” (9). For Stan and Charmaine at least, who think of themselves as “middle-of-the-road people” (9), this loss of employment prospects goes hand in hand with societal breakdown. Conversely, the community they join, the Positron Project, is characterized by more explicitly stated rules, and those who obey them are rewarded with secure employment and a home. It is a strictly 1950s- themed gated community, and it comes with a catch: not only are the inhabitants forbidden from leaving, making the town itself a kind of prison; it is also centered around an actual prison, which the founders of the project make the source of all employment in the town. For the inhabitants, the prison is good because the prison creates jobs. The town, Consilience, is therefore dependent on the prison and upholds it by supplying the prison population: all inhabitants have to spend half their time as prisoners in the Positron Prison and the other half as good citizens of Consilience. The prison as a setting has already attracted critical interest. Thus, Barbara Miceli reads the Positron Project as a Foucauldian “discipline society” in which the surveillance mechanisms that characterize the prison are internalized by the inhabitants, who have to assume that they are under constant surveillance in the town as well and who act accordingly (83-85). Eleanor March, too, reads The Heart Goes Last as a “prison narrative”: a story about the experience of imprisonment (14), which should be read with regard to “the politics of the real prison” (12). These are very useful readings of the novel’s perspective on the prison, “Happy People at Work” 189 which is central to the narrative as well as the Consilience/ Positron enterprise. What I would like to add to these approaches is a focus on the novel’s treatment of work—which is obviously central to the prison and the town in the novel, but not to be captured entirely by prison narratives or even by a focus on surveillance. There are at least two possible ways of approaching the work/ prison nexus in The Heart Goes Last. One would be to focus on the prison itself and to read work with regard to what March terms “the politics of the real prison” (12). This would involve thinking about “the ways in which prison systems are being transformed by global capitalism” (Rimstead and Rymhs) and the ways in which the novel is invested in describing a reality rather than a dystopian society of the future. After all, Atwood likes to emphasize that even her more apparently far-fetched creations have a solid basis in reality (Brockes). Both the popular reception of her novels and literary criticism echo this claim. Thus, costumes that imitate those from the Handmaid’s Tale TV series (2017 ff.) have been used at real demonstrations in order to make a point about women’s reproductive rights. With regard to Oryx and Crake (2003), Ashley Winstead has suggested that Atwood’s speculative fiction ought to be read as not just reflecting, but also trying to directly influence reality through language, by “appropriat [ ing ] modern forecasting narratives that also strive to produce legitimate knowledge about the future” (229). And with regard to The Heart Goes Last, Miceli has argued that the dire economic situation at the outset of the novel is not at all dystopian because it reflects the real 2008 financial crisis (80). A similar point could surely be made about the justification of the prison as an employment generating institution. Here I want to broaden my focus past the Positron Prison to include the entire town of Consilience. After all, Consilience is sold to its prospective inhabitants as a place with “happy people at work in it, doing ordinary jobs: butcher, baker, plumber, scooter repair, and so on” (40). It is a community whose whole raison d’être is the availability of what its inhabitants understand to be “ordinary jobs.” It is also, despite its ostensible commitment to echoing suburbia in the 1950s, a community in which all adults engage in waged work: the women as well as the men. Charmaine works at a bakery, Stan in scooter repair. In addition, they also have jobs in prison, which sound ordinary as well but are not quite what they seem. In the following, I want to explore the relationship of this nostalgically conceived community of “happy people at work [ … ] doing ordinary jobs” with the world around it, a world in which even the employment office closes down for lack of employment. In particular, I want to take very Rebekka Rohleder 190 literally Coral Howells’s proposition that “Atwood the novelist continues to reinvent our world within the spaces of her fiction” (“True Trash” 313; my emphasis). I want to read Consilience as a heterotopian space in a Foucauldian sense with regard to its outside world: as a counter-space which stands outside (but not quite), but at the same time in relation to, the other spaces of the society in question. In this case, the relationship between these spaces is defined by work. I will therefore begin by placing Consilience’s focus on “ordinary jobs” and their meaning for society in the context of the cultural function of work in the present. After that, I want to more specifically look at the ways in which work in Consilience/ Positron reflects on the surrounding society. And finally, I want to tentatively explore the relationship of this fictional heterotopia with our own world. Work and Society To begin with, Consilience is advertised as a community which offers its citizens “ordinary jobs: butcher, baker, plumber, scooter repair, and so on” (40). This is surely a persuasive selling point in a world in which people live in their cars because they have lost their incomes. Nonetheless, it also opens up the question of what defines an ordinary job and what that means in the context of a community that sells itself to its prospective members as a realized utopia—but one that nonetheless has nothing more appealing to offer than regular waged work in a bakery or in scooter repair. Utopias have always been concerned with mechanisms for ensuring that work is distributed equally and that no one works too hard, or, conversely, not at all. Work is thus a central feature of utopian discourse in texts ranging from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) over the writings of Charles Fourier in the early 19 th century, to William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). But such utopian texts certainly tend to be more inventive than the Consilience founders’ ostensible nostalgia for a world of small trades. It should be noted at this point that in The Heart Goes Last, the selfpresentation of the community’s investment in employment is clearly framed in moral terms: work is moral and unemployment is immoral in their account of the world outside and inside the project. The absence of employment outside the project is, to the founders of Consilience/ Positron, “a recipe for systems breakdown [ … ] : for anarchy, for chaos, for the senseless destruction of property, for so-called revolution, which means looting and gang rule and warlords and mass rape, and the “Happy People at Work” 191 terrorization of the weak and helpless” (46). In their rhetoric, a lack of jobs is suspect, not just politically but also morally, since it leads directly to a world in which private property and “the weak and helpless” are both no longer respected. On the other hand, the new citizens of Consilience are promised protection from “dangerous elements” and exhorted to “Work with like-minded others! Help solve the nation’s problem of joblessness and crime while solving your own! ” (31). Despite the community’s focus on the prison, the employment it offers is thus cast as precisely the opposite of crime. Work emerges as morally commendable; unemployment, on the other hand, equals criminality. This depiction of work in Consilience is complicated during the course of the novel, as the more morally dubious sides of the community are explored. But it works as a selling point because it is in accordance with the high esteem in which contemporary society arguably holds work. The way in which work is imbued with meaning has been subject to historical change. There is a well-established historical narrative of work in Western culture, according to which work was not valued in antiquity, regarded as ambivalent (both curse and devotional practice) in the Middle Ages, and finally invested with central importance in modernity (Kocka 477-78). This “standard account” of attitudes towards work is, as Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis have pointed out, difficult to either verify or falsify (6). But it is certainly a historical narrative which has been extremely influential and which is therefore instructive. Among other things, this narrative tells us something important about the present, namely that our culture values work to such an extent that a crucial story we tell ourselves about ourselves is how we came to value work so much. Thus, work is for instance, and famously, a central issue in Max Weber’s influential account of the development of the modern world, in which certain cultural attitudes towards work, namely the Protestant work ethic, play a crucial role. It is nonetheless possible that both Weber’s and our own concept of work is so completely different from any earlier concepts of work that it would be all but unrecognizable even, say, to an Early Modern Calvinist. Indeed, historians have argued that it is only from the 1880s on that work became central to an individual’s integration in a social group, in particular the nation state, and that only from then on work became what it is now (but what it had not been before), namely a basic principle of the sociopolitical order (Conrad, Madamo and Zimmermann 450-51). This is in accordance with the highly meaningful status work acquired in the late 19 th century, when idleness ceased to be an uncontested indicator of a high social status (Osterhammel 959; Fludernik 405). Interestingly, as Rebekka Rohleder 192 Monika Fludernik points out, the high appreciation for work that emerged in the Victorian period had implications for the use of work in prisons as well: it oscillated between “a social duty, and a therapy against idleness, drunkenness, unruly behaviour and immorality” (405) and meaningless work was used as a punishment because meaningful work began to be seen as a reward rather than as a punishment (406). These Victorian moral assumptions and ambiguities about work and its uses are influential even in the present (Fludernik 465) and are arguably part of the complex work-crime nexus in The Heart Goes Last, too. After all, in the present, as Kathi Weeks has argued, we still live in a “work society”: a society in which waged work appears necessary and inevitable and in which work functions as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Waged work makes a person a social and political subject and provides the dominant values in today’s world (Weeks 5-8). At the same time, however, waged work itself and the demands made upon the employee have not been a constant. From the 1990s onwards, sociologists have noted significant changes to the practice and cultural meaning of work for the individual. The coherent working biography that was considered the norm through much of the 20 th century may still exist as an ideal, but this ideal is increasingly being replaced by that of the flexible employee, who is continually able and willing to adapt to new circumstances and who has to be adept at self-marketing. This is, for instance, a transformation noted in Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character (1998) and Zygmunt Bauman’s The Individualized Society (2001). Both also note that this transformation has disorienting and destabilizing effects for both individuals and society. And in a society in which work is fundamental to political subjecthood—in the “work society” Weeks describes—these effects are only to be expected. To take a historical perspective, the situation in place prior to the transformations described by Sennett and Bauman is not, of course, a timeless norm, but a very specific moment in the history of work. But the idea that everyone should be employed in “ordinary jobs” is clearly an unquestioned norm in The Heart Goes Last, and it is at the same time subject to nostalgia for a bygone era in which these “ordinary jobs” were supposedly prevalent. Therefore, Consilience is an unabashedly nostalgic project: it is designed to imitate the “overall look and feel” of the 1950s “because that was the decade in which the most people had self-identified as being happy” (Heart Goes Last 50). This goes along with the slogan “a meaningful life,” which consists in “gainful employment, three wholesome meals a day, a lawn to tend, a hedge to trim, the assurance that you were contributing to the general good, and a toilet that flushed” “Happy People at Work” 193 (50). Security, order, and cleanliness are emphasized and connected to the prevalent aesthetics of the 1950s, that is. Accordingly, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz’s has read the world of The Heart Goes Last as an example of Retrotopia (a concept which in turn goes back to Bauman): a movement toward nostalgia driven by fear (Puschmann-Nalenz 118). Consilience: Performing Work In the novel, the nostalgic and highly normative world of Consilience, in which everyone’s behavior is regulated to comply with the ideal of a safe and predictable world, only makes sense in opposition with the world outside the prison, in which the neoliberal ideal of the individual in charge of their own success has clearly failed. Charmaine’s degrees and Stan’s hard work, which were supposed to ensure their success in a society they believed to be meritocratic, were established as useless at the beginning of the novel—not just for them, but also for others. Thus, there is a show called The Home Front that Charmaine likes to watch, in which the moderator asks people who are about to be evicted “what happened to their life, and they told about how hard-working they’d been, but then the plant closed, or the head office relocated or whatever” (20). Charmaine likes to watch the show for reassurance, since it shows her that “what happened to her and Stan could happen to anyone” (21). She does not seem to regard the causes of “what happened” as man-made or even particularly scandalous: they appear more like facts of nature. Stan, by contrast, wants to hold someone specific responsible for his own predicament and that of other “middle-of-the-road people,” but he is unsure who that could be: he assumes that “ [ s ] omeone had lied, someone had cheated, someone had shorted the market, someone had inflated the currency” (9). He also treats the economic crisis as a kind of fact of nature, though, and in the same train of thought justifies it as a case of: “Not enough jobs, too many people” (9). This view of the issue is very much in accordance with Bauman’s diagnosis that in the present, responsibility for economic and social problems is displaced: the success or failure of individual working biographies is seen as the responsibility of individuals and/ or as a fact of nature but never as a social issue (7-12). The reader of The Heart Goes Last may well be dissatisfied with the vagueness of the explanations with which Stan and Charmaine try to understand the financial crisis they live through. What events brought about such a largescale failure of the system is never made clear, since we only see the situation through the eyes of the two protagonists, who alternately Rebekka Rohleder 194 function as focalizers. However, what is made clear through their inability to provide an explanation is the fact that the economic narratives available to them have failed along with the economy. The solution Consilience/ Positron offers is, first of all, removal to a different space that is apparently (though, as it turns out, economically not really) rigidly separated from the world outside. The relationship between these two spaces—the world outside and Consilience/ Positron— is somewhat more complicated than a simple opposition between chaos outside and order inside. Within the fictional world of the novel, Consilience/ Positron is not a utopia or indeed a dystopia either, since it is not a plan for an ideal society (or a warning of a repressive one) but a project that has been realized, which is one reason why it can be read as a heterotopia, as I will show below. What happens inside this space still functions in relation to what happens outside, though, and not just because it seems unlikely that anyone could be tempted to agree on being imprisoned for half their life unless the alternative is considerably worse. To be sure, the Positron Project exploits this contrast when recruiting people. The initiation consists of workshops in which they are shown PowerPoints about Consilience and Positron Prison. As March notes, these scenes stand in deliberate contrast with the induction stage of what she terms the “popular prison narrative” and are more “reminiscent of the introduction to a new job” (22). In that respect, they function as an adequately enticing introduction to Consilience/ Positron since a new job is precisely what Stan and Charmaine want. The organizers also have the new recruits spend a last night outside in a motel that serves as a reminder of conditions in the real world. However, this shabby motel, as a transitional space between outside world and Consilience/ Positron, has an obvious theatrical quality to it. Stan assumes directly that it “has been tailored for the purpose, with the furniture trashed to order, stale cigarette smell sprayed on, cockroaches imported, and sounds of violent revelry in the room next door most likely a recording” (Heart Goes Last 41). This is not the real world; this is the outside world as seen from Consilience/ Positron. This theatrical quality remains noticeable within Consilience as well. The prison is partly a pretend-prison (even if it is also partly a very real one). The inhabitants’ private lives have been described as “essentially adults playing house” (Cannella 17). Their working lives are no less of a performance. This is particularly obvious for their work within the prison, which is described in much more detail than that in Consilience. But in Consilience both protagonists fill roles that the initial presentation of the project already prescribes for them: working in a bakery, as Charmaine “Happy People at Work” 195 does, and in scooter repair, like Stan, are both roles contained in the initial list of “happy people at work” (Heart Goes Last, 40). They are also, much like the protagonists’ domestic life, a gendered performance: she prepares food; he is the repairman. In the prison, both protagonists’ jobs take on an even more revealing theatricality. Stan notices early on that his work supervising the town’s poultry facility is actually superfluous, “a make-work job” (81). The real supervision is, he assumes, done by a computer. Still, he works regular shifts pretending to be the one who supervises the facility. This job is almost entirely theatrical. It does not serve any real need of the community except the need to provide full employment, which is, after all, the project’s justification for the prison and all related activities. Work, or at least something that looks like it, has to be performed in order to keep Consilience/ Positron running. Stan’s job is paradigmatic for this in that it is what David Graeber would call a “bullshit job”: “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though [ … ] the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case” (Graeber 26). By contrast, Charmaine’s real job in the prison takes place almost entirely behind the scenes, and while it is morally more than dubious, it is not a “bullshit job” according to Graeber’s definition. Her job title is Chief Medications Administrator (Heart Goes Last 74), and that is all she is allowed to tell anyone, including her husband. Technically, though, she works as an executioner, a job title she does not use even to herself. The administration of poison to prisoners is simply called the “Special Procedure,” and Charmaine is commended for carrying it out “in an efficient yet caring way” (85). Much of this procedure is choreographed by the prison authorities, but Charmaine adds what she thinks of as a human touch by kissing the prisoner on the forehead before killing him: “She hopes she appears to him like an angel: an angel of mercy” (85). Charmaine’s angelic performance in front of the condemned and the authorities is complemented by her performance in front of her fellow inmates, which effectively conceals what she is really doing. After the procedure, she will “join the knitting circle, as usual. [ … ] ‘Had a nice day? ’ the knitting circle women will say to her. ‘Oh, a perfect day,’ she’ll reply” (87). The knitting circle after the execution calls up the image of women knitting as the guillotine cuts off heads in Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859). But Charmaine remains unaware of such associations and does not like to dwell on what she is really doing. She is, however, very much concerned with the manner in which she does it: she is proud of being good at what she does (86) in a kind of perverted Protestant work Rebekka Rohleder 196 ethic: she seems to regard it as her vocation to kill in the nicest possible manner. Both her carefully choreographed Procedures and Stan’s “bullshit job” in the poultry facility are theatrical in ways that establish relations with spaces in the world outside Consilience/ Positron. Stan’s job reiterates the necessity of having waged work of whatever kind, a necessity that applies in both worlds and the key to making Consilience plausible to its inhabitants in the first place. Only if waged work is a value in itself is it significant that “so many jobs could be spawned by” prisons (Heart Goes Last 48). Charmaine’s work performance is intimately connected to the inner workings of Consilience/ Positron, which, behind the scenes is of course an unabashedly criminal operation and turns out to be selling the real convicts’ organs (158). Consilience is not at all the idyllic place outside an otherwise chaotic world that it pretends to be; economically, it is fully involved. Indeed, the fact that one of Consilience’s secret operations consists in organ harvesting makes the exploitation that goes on beneath the immaculate surface very clear: when the bodies of the inmates cannot be exploited in any other way, they can at least still be stripped for parts. Because of this theatricality as well as its partial separation from the rest of the world, it is useful to think of Consilience as the type of space that Michel Foucault describes as a “heterotopia”: one of those spaces that are “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault, “Other Spaces” 24). Despite the suggestive phrasing of the “effectively enacted utopia,” these counter-sites are not, however, necessarily oppositional sites or sites which reinvent the society in question. Foucault classes both the utopia and the heterotopia as spaces that “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (24)—which means that a utopia is not an ideal society, but only a site “with no real place.” A heterotopia, by contrast, has a real place, but one that is on the margins of the society in question. At the same time, it is always a highly meaningful site with a clear function within the society it belongs to. This function can be “to create a space of illusion that exposes [ … ] all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory” (27). Or, conversely, they can be heterotopias of compensation, creating “another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (27). For modern Western culture, Foucault names the prison and the cemetery as “Happy People at Work” 197 examples of heterotopias alongside sites that are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25), among them the theater, and heterotopias “linked to slices of time” (26), among them the museum. He specifies that heterotopias are “not freely accessible like a public place” but require more or less formalized ceremonies of entry, rendering them both isolated and permeable at the same time (26). Consilience in The Heart Goes Last can be described in such terms, and in all cases, the relationship in which it stands with the outside world is connected to work. To begin with the last point, the town is accessible under certain conditions, but not to everyone. It is a gated community, and the inhabitants are chosen from a pool of applicants and have to go through an initiation phase that involves signing papers and listening to presentations. This initiation is, as March has observed, reminiscent of starting a new job (22). It even suggests that the new community is exclusive, just like a coveted employer: Stan and Charmaine are effectively convinced that the Positron Project is not “interested in just anyone” and that “ [ s ] ome of the people on the bus can’t possibly make it into the Project” (37). From their experience applying for jobs, they assume that everyone on the bus will go through a selection process, and this makes them nervous: “‘What if we get rejected? ’ [ Charmaine ] asks Stan. ‘What if we get accepted? ’” (37). Similarly, they think of their first contact with the Positron Project very much like an assessment center: they encounter a friendly atmosphere but are convinced that “naturally they’re being scrutinized, though it’s hard to figure out who’s doing it” (38). The initiation for Consilience/ Positron is thus essentially an application process for a job. Once they are inside, Consilience has qualities of both theater and museum, both of these also connected to work in ways which I have already discussed in more detail above. The slice of time Consilience recreates is the 1950s, that is, a time that elicits nostalgia for ordinary people having ordinary and secure jobs. And its theatrical qualities bring together apparently incompatible spaces, such as the cell in which executions take place and an ordinary space of work in which Charmaine can say to herself with obvious satisfaction that “ [ i ] t’s good to be good at what you do” (86). Last, and most interestingly, this particular heterotopia has a function with regard to the outside world. This function is certainly very much on the side of what Foucault terms heterotopias of compensation (“Other Spaces” 27). After all, the idea of Consilience is to create a perfect space in which everyone is employed and has a meaningful, well-ordered life, in Rebekka Rohleder 198 opposition to the world outside with its unemployment, chaos, and crime. It opposes the deliberate creation of what look like ordinary jobs to the temporary waitressing jobs outside. However, there are arguably also elements of the heterotopia of illusion there, and these are most visible in Positron Prison. The ways in which the Positron Project functions ultimately expose the outside world’s ideas about meaningful work and a meaningful life: after all, what happens in the prison in particular emerges as exploitation—not just of the inmates’ labor power, but even of their dead bodies—only thinly masked by the euphemistic rhetoric that both Charmaine and Consilience apply to it. The community poses as wellordered suburbia with “happy people at work” in both the town and the prison. But the more or less hidden activities behind the façade recall the conceptual overlap between prison and factory—an overlap which, as Fludernik argues, is carried over to the present with “the recent metaphor of carceral warehousing [ which ] completes the alienation and reification process inherent in the industrial system by constituting the final result of a process of dehumanization” (465). The Procedures are not just a damning feature of Consilience/ Positron; the dead inmates’ body parts are bought in the outside world, implicating and connecting both spaces through exploitation. The Novel as Heterotopia/ U(s)topia The fictional world of The Heart Goes Last contains both the chaotic space outside (a world which is ultimately enlisted against Consilience) and the seemingly well-ordered Consilience/ Positron space. The town and prison can therefore function as a heterotopia for the society they belong to, and in a relatively straightforward way, because both exist in the same fictional world. On the other hand, things are not quite so straightforward when it comes to the function of this fictional heterotopia with regard to our own “work society.” A novel, which creates fictional spaces only and which is accessible to all readers, can function as a utopia or dystopia or maybe as both at the same time. Nonetheless, I would like to point toward ways in which the novel’s political commentary depends on the functions of its heterotopian space with regard to the world surrounding the novel, not just the fictional world that surrounds Consilience. Indeed a concern with the spatial is written into Atwood’s treatment of speculative fiction outside The Heart Goes Last, too. Thus, in her essay “Dire Cartographies: The Road to Ustopia” (In Other Worlds 66-96), she describes utopian and dystopian writing as a cartography of the unknown “Happy People at Work” 199 (69-70). At the same time, she also questions the distinction between utopia and dystopia in ways that resonate with her fiction, not least The Heart Goes Last (but also the MaddAddam trilogy). She states that it is more appropriate to use the term “ustopia” instead of utopia and dystopia because “each contains a latent version of the other” (66). Utopias can be dystopian when viewed “from the point of view of people who don’t fit into their high standards” (66), whereas in each dystopia there is “a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over” (85). This playful attitude toward genre and fictional world is reflected in literary criticism’s diverse descriptions of Atwood’s treatment of speculative fiction. Thus, Howells, describing dystopias as “fictional scenarios of prophecy and warning [ … ] imagining possible futures, hopefully to prevent them happening,” classes The Heart Goes Last as dystopian along with the MaddAddam trilogy (“Dire Cartographies” 21). Arguably, though, this idea of a warning that can prevent a dystopian future at least includes the idea of a world that is not dystopian, too. Elsewhere, Howells complicates the idea of The Heart Goes Last as dystopia by looking at its serialized origins and corresponding investment in popular genres like romance and the gothic, which “exploit [ s ] the appeal of popular culture material in order to engage readers’ interest in her satirical analyses of North American mass consumerism and her warnings against uncontrolled corporate power” (“True Trash” 304). The creation of a dystopian space in the novel is thus a genre convention among others, and one which serves a political purpose. In a similar vein, Megan E. Cannella complicates the idea of dystopia by applying the concept of a “transgressive utopian dystopia” to The Heart Goes Last, while Miceli points out that the dystopian-looking outside world in the novel is not dystopian because it is too close to post-financial crisis reality: not a warning but an only slightly exaggerated description of reality. And Winstead argues that Atwood’s speculative fiction is only speculative in the sense of “‘real’ speculation—that is, the economic and political speculation that we understand as nonfictional” (228) and that it is a “technological object” in the real world through the “agency of language itself” (231). Winstead employs this argument to relate Oryx and Crake to Atwood’s nonfiction book about debt, Payback, in which Atwood thinks about the real-world implications of debt as “an imaginative construct” (2). In this reading, economic speculation and speculative fiction can both be seen as having effects in the real world. Indeed, this ties in with other readings of the MaddAddam novels in particular, which, together with their Rebekka Rohleder 200 websites, have been read as acts of creating a new reality (Macpherson 86).As for The Heart Goes Last, it is certainly a political novel concerned with the reality of the present—through its concern with the social consequences of a financial crisis but also with the implications of a scenario in which the state lets a corporation set up a state within the state, to enter which the inhabitants effectively have to sign away their rights. But in contrast to the “ustopian” cartographies Atwood describes in Of Other Worlds, this novel constructs not an unknown space to be filled with monsters and heroes of various kinds, but an extremely well-ordered, limited, and knowable space, and one that mirrors sets of relations that are also relevant to the real world and to its relationship with work in particular. The novel’s dichotomies of inside/ outside, work/ crime, and “ordinary job”/ exploitation are all spatially encoded within the novel, but not without significant ambiguities. In Consilience, the prison is inside but the town is outside; on the other hand, the town is also inside and the outside world is outside. Criminality literally generates jobs, but work is also represented as the opposite of crime in Consilience, even though its founders themselves engage in criminal practices. And the project’s ostensible focus on the creation of meaningful work in both the town and the prison helps mask its real economic foundations, for which the ordinary jobs are just a theatrical façade. These relations all stand in relation to real-world discourses about the social function of work in the present; about who is entitled to meaningful work in the first place and whose exploitation is rendered invisible. In this regard, the novel itself could be regarded as a kind of heterotopia—a possibility which Foucault suggests for novels, not in “Of Other Spaces,” but in a radio essay that covers roughly the same ground, entitled “Les heterotopies,” and in which the novel as a literary form is likened to the garden as one of those heterotopias which juxtapose several incompatible sites in one (45). Thus, despite the fact that novels are not real spaces, they could be understood as mirroring sets of spatialized social relations in a similar way, by juxtaposing incompatible sites in one imaginary place (possibly, like the mirror, as a mixture of utopia and heterotopia). In The Heart Goes Last, the novel’s spatially encoded treatment of work can be read in such a way. “Happy People at Work” 201 Conclusion: Work Society and its Others Thus, what Consilience renders visible is all about what one might call, according to Weeks, “the problem with work”: a society in which waged work is endowed with a promise it cannot fulfill: “it neither exhibits the virtues nor delivers the meaning that the ethic promises us in exchange for a lifetime of work” (14). It is only in a society that has internalized a work ethic that makes work an end in itself that the appeal of an idea like the Positron project can be understood to make sense even for a moment. When the prospective inhabitants of the town and inmates of the prison are triumphantly told that the solution for their problem consists in a prison because “if every citizen were either a guard or a prisoner, the result would be full employment” (Atwood, Heart Goes Last 49), this proposal should sound deliberately absurd. But it is, like the economic crisis the characters experience, only a slight exaggeration. The logic that something is good because it creates jobs is certainly familiar to the reader as well. The novel does not quite leave it at that; in the end, Consilience/ Positron is publicly exposed through an elaborate plot planned from within. Not everyone who has bought into the idea of a meaningful life through work also buys into the necessity of organ harvesting for profit. Interestingly, in this exposure plot, the character who plans it, Joycelyn, enlists the support not just of Stan and Charmaine but also of those who remain on the margins of “work society”: a journalist whose career is interrupted by illness, Stan’s brother Conor, who is a successful criminal, a group of actors between engagements, who earn their living as Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, and two former prostitutes. These characters are all in danger of being excluded, both by society in general, and by Consilience/ Positron, which might have a use for their bodies but which does not otherwise have a use for the sick, the delinquent, or the unsuccessful. Yet it is those who have no place in Consilience who must ultimately save the novel’s work-centered society from its own worst excesses. Rebekka Rohleder 202 References Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. ———. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. London: Virago, 2011. ———. The Heart Goes Last. New York: Anchor Books, 2016. Bauman, Zygmunt. The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Brockes, Emma. “Margaret Atwood: ‘I have a big following among the biogeeks. “Finally! Someone understands us! ”’ The Guardian 24 Aug. 2013, n. pag. Web. Accessed 31 October 2020. Cannella, Megan E. “Feminine Subterfuge in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last.” Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction. Ed. John J. Han, C. Clark Triplett and Ashley G. Anthony. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. 15-27. Conrad, Sebastian, Elisio Madamo, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Die Kodifizierung der Arbeit: Individuum, Gesellschaft, Nation.” Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit. Ed. Jürgen Kocka, Claus Offe and Beate Redslob. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000. 449-74. Ehmer, Josef, and Catharina Lis. “Introduction: Historical Studies in Perceptions of Work.” The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times. Ed. Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 1-30. Fludernik, Monika. Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27. ———. Die Heterotopien/ Les heterotopies. Der utopische Körper/ Le corps utopique. Zwei Radiovorträge. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. A Theory. London: Lane, 2018. Howells, Coral. “True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited in Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 11.3 (2017): 297-315. ———. “Dire Cartographies: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013).” The Anglo-Canadian Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Interpretations. Ed. Maria Löschnigg and Martin Löschnigg. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. 21-32. Kocka, Jürgen. “Arbeit früher, heute, morgen: Zur Neuartigkeit der Gegenwart.” Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit. Ed. Jürgen Kocka, Claus Offe and Beate Redslob. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000. 476-92. “Happy People at Work” 203 March, Eleanor, “‘Unique incarceration events”: The Politics of Power in Margaret Atwood’s Prison Narratives.” Margaret Atwood Studies 12 (2018): 11-46. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Miceli, Barbara. “Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last: Panopticism, Discipline Society, and Ustopia.” Metacritic 5.2 (2019): 79-90. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Beck, 2011. Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara. “In the Narrative Fiction of a Global Society Closed Spaces No Longer Exist.” Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. Ed. Jessica Aliga Lawrijsen and José María Yebra-Petusa. New York: Routledge, 2019. 103-20. Rimstead, Roxanne, and Deena Rymhs. “Prison Writing/ Writing Prison in Canada.” Canadian Literature 208 (2011): n. pag. Web. Accessed 30 October 2020. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton, 1998. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work. Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Winstead, Ashley. “Beyond Persuasion: Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Politics.” Studies in the Novel 49.2 (2017): 228-49. Notes on Contributors FABIAN EGGERS is a Ph.D. candidate in the literature department of the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the history of emotions and management thought and how the immaterial dimensions of contemporary capitalism come to bear on anglophone literature after “the postmodern experiment.” SALEM ELZWAY is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His scholarly interests range from histories of labor, race, and technology to the political economy of national security and the social study of science. The dissertation emerging from research in these areas will explore the history and political economy of industrial robots, primarily during the Cold War, and is tentatively titled “Arms of the State: A History of the Industrial Robot in America.” He promises he is not as boring as this description sounds... JOHANNES FEHRLE holds a doctorate in English/ North American literature from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has published on the Western in various media, including 19 th to 21 st century U.S. and Canadian literature, adaptations, comics, video games, and film. His latest publications include the co-edited collection Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence (Amsterdam University Press, 2019 with Werner Schäfke-Zell) and “Adaptation as Cultural Translation,” a special issue of Komparatistik Online (2019, with Mark Schmitt). He is currently working on a second book on work and nature in North American literature and an edited collection tentatively titled “Deautomating the Future: Marxist Perspectives on Capitalism and Technology” (with Jesse Ramirez and Marlon Lieber). Notes on Contributors 206 CHRISTIAN HÄNGGI teaches at the University of Basel and the Hochschule Luzern. He is the author of Pynchon’s Sound of Music (Diaphanes, 2020) and Hospitality in the Age of Media Representation (Atropos Press, 2009). ELIZABETH KOVACH is a postdoctoral researcher and Coordinator of the International Ph.D. program “Literary and Cultural Studies” at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. She received her B.A. in English and Film Studies from Barnard College (NYC), her M.A. in Comparative Literature from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, and her Ph.D. in English and American Literary Studies from Justus Liebig University Giessen. She is currently pursuing a habilitation project that is provisionally entitled “Challenging Work: Spirits of Capitalism in U.S. American Literature from the New Deal to Neoliberalism.” ANNE M. MULHALL is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. She has previously held a teaching position at the University of Tyumen, Russia and postdoctoral positions at Brown University, USA and the Institute of Modern Languages Research, UK. She has published articles in Modern and Contemporary France and New Formations. Her monograph on the French philosophical collective Tiqqun is currently under review. At Trinity, she is working on a new monograph on the necrotemporalities of the contemporary workplace. SIXTA QUASSDORF (Ph.D. English, University of Basel, Switzerland) is a post-doc research assistance at the University of St. Gallen. She is author of “A little more than kin”: Quotations as a linguistic phenomenon. A study based on quotations from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Freiburg University Press, 2016). Her present research explores the representation of work, workers, and work relationships in contemporary American fiction. J. JESSE RAMIREZ (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University) is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of St. Gallen. He is the author of Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots (Routledge, 2020), Rules of the Father: Playing with Patriarchy and Masculinity in The Last of Us (Palgrave, forthcoming 2021) and Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction and Bad Hope in the American Century (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2022). Notes on Contributors 207 REBEKKA ROHLEDER is a literary scholar. She worked for the University of Hamburg, taught at Leuphana University Lüneburg, and now works for the University of Flensburg’s Department of English and American Studies. She gained her Ph.D. in English literature at Freie Universität Berlin and with a study of Mary Shelley—“A Different Earth”: Literary Space in Mary Shelley’s Novels (Winter, 2019). She is now working on a second book focused on representations of work in contemporary British and Irish literature and culture. JULIANE STRÄTZ is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Mannheim, where she is currently employed as a research associate. She holds a Master of Education from the University of Potsdam as well as a Master of Arts from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. In 2015, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. Since 2020, she is a member of the research network “The Failure of Knowledge/ Knowledges of Failure,” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In her dissertation project, entitled “Human Machines? Laboring Bodies in Late Capitalism,” she analyzes how contemporary U.S. American novels critique normalized late capitalist assumptions about work through the depiction of laboring bodies. SIMON D. TRÜB specializes in the fields of modernist studies, continental philosophy, and contemporary American theater and drama. He has published prominently in the first two areas and is currently working on a research project that engages with contemporary theater and drama. Simon obtained an M.Sc. by Research in Critical Theory and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. From 2017 to 2020, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Currently, he works as an independent researcher and is on the lookout for an academic position in Switzerland. Index of Names Abnet, Dustin A. 162, 178 Adams, Henry 21 Adorno, Theodor W. 100, 104 Aesop 165 Agamben, Giorgio 11, 75-83, 86-87, 89, 93-95, 101, 104n6 Ahmed, Sara 114 Akhmatova, Anna 81, 83 Alaimo, Stacy 142 Allen, Ansgar 104n6 Altvater, Elmar 142 Arendt, Hannah 7, 12, 91 Aristotle 47, 57, 70, 77, 79-80, 82, 161-62 Asimov, Isaac 159, 163-66, 168-71, 177, 180 Atanasoski, Neda 160n1, 161 Attell, Kevin 77 Atwood, Margaret 13, 187-201 Babbage, Charles 175 Bachmann, Richard 180 Balint, Iuditha 100 Ball, Charles 144 Balskus, Elizabeth 77 Barad, Karen 142 Barthes, Roland, 27 Bataille, Georges 87 Bhattacharya, Tithi 8 Bauer, Jared 133 Bauman, Zygmunt 192-93 Baume, Sabine 88-89 Bedeian, Arthur G. 47 Beecher-Stowe, Harriet 152 Benjamin, Walter 20, 93 Bennett, Jane 142 Bennett, Michael 144 Bentham, Jeremy 88, 89n6 Berardi, Franco “Bifo” 79n3 Berlant, Lauren 66, 79n3 Bernes, Jasper 9, 17-18, 26-29, 31 Bezos, Jeff 121-22, 124-25, 129, 131-35 Binder, O. O. 163 Bix, Amy Sue 162, 167 Bloice, Carl 172 Bojesen, Emile 104n6 Boltanski, Luc 28, 42, 104n7 Bonny, Sean 90 Booth, John Wilkes 59, 62 Bortz, Alfred B. 167 Boswell, Marshall, 36 Botsman, Rachel 123 Bourdieu, Pierre 38n3 Boyer, Anne 11, 75-95 Brandstetter, Thomas 162 Braverman, Harry 5, 7, 28n3 Brecht, Bertolt 64 Brenner, Robert 28 Brockes, Emma 189 Bromell, Nicholas K. 17-18, 23-27, 31 Brown, Wendy 47 Bryar, Timothy 104 Buck-Morss, Susan 93 Bullard, Robert D. 146n2 Burkett, Paul 143, 147n3 Butler, Judith 10-11, 54, 56-58, 67, 69, 78n2, 79, 143n3 Butler, Samuel 162 Cannella, Megan E. 194, 199 Index of Names 210 Capek, Karl 162-63 Carell, Steve 125 Castells, Manuel 123 Cavarero, Adriana 11, 75, 78, 91-92 Chaplin, Charles 174 Chiapello, Ève 28, 42, 104n7 Chude-Sokei, Louis 162-63 Cixous, Hélène 94 Clark, Bret 148n5 Clark, Daniel J. 167 Colbert, Soyica Diggs 60 Collins, Patricia Hill 146, 153 Conrad, Sebastian 191 Cook, Barbara 153 Cooke, Alexander 104n6 Coole, Diana 142 Critchley, Simon 61-63 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa 93 Davis, Angela 128, 152-54 Davis, Dorothy 92 de la Durantaye, Leland 77 de Sutter, Laurent 110 Del Rey, Jason 126n5, 133n13 Deleuze, Gilles 104n6, 111 DeLorean, John 173 Denby, Charles 172 Derrida, Jacques 77, 87 Deutscher, Penelope 78n1 Devol, George 166-67, 169 Dickens, Charles 195 Dolan, Kerry A. 125 Dorson, James 46 Douglass, Frederick 144-45, 149, 151-54 Dumont, Etienne 89n6 During, Simon 55-58 Eagleton, Terry 19-20 Edelman, Lee 104n6 Ehmer, Josef 191 Ellis, Cristin 149, 153 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 24 Engelberger, Joseph F. 159-60, 165-69, 171, 172, 180 Engels, Friedrich 123, 128, 130, 135-36, 142-43 Federici, Silvia 85 Felski, Rita 10, 54 Fet, Yakov 166 Finn, Ed 45 Finseth, Ian Frederick 144-45, 149 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 46 Fleming, Peter 39 Fludernik, Monika 191-92, 198 Foner, Philip S. 167, 171 Ford, Tennessee Ernie 126 Foster, John Bellamy 143, 147n3, 148n5 Foucault, Michel 9, 13, 78n1, 105n8, 187-88, 190, 196-97, 200 Fourier, Charles 25, 190 Franklin, Benjamin 85n4 Frenkel, Karen A. 166, 180 Friedberg, Anne 92-93 Frost, Samantha 142 Fuller, Matthew 108 Gates, Bill 129 Georgakas, Marvin 171-73, 175 Gerhardt, Christine 143-44, 146, 149 Ghaffary, Shirin 126n5 Gillespie, Nick 123 Godden, Richard 36 Godfrey, Joseph E. 174-76 Gogol, Nikolai 81 Goldhill, Simon 58, 66-68 Graeber, David 102, 136, 195 Greenwald Smith, Rachel 112n14 Grigoriadis, Vanessa 123, 125, 136 Gullestad, Anders M. 104 Hafstad, Lawrence 162 Index of Names 211 Hall, Edith 57, 66 Hammond, James W. 180 Hampton, Gregory Jerome 162 Han, Byung-Chul 88-89 Hardt, Michael 101, 104 Hartley, Daniel 20, 30 Harvey, David 28n3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 21, 25 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 58 Heidegger, Martin 77 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 77, 80 Heraclitus 100 Hering, David 43 Hicks, Heather J. 10 Hill, Joe 132 Hitler, Adolf 175 Hochschild, Arlie R. 37-38 Hölderlin, Friedrich 58 Hollemann, Hannah 148n5 Holliday, John 45-46 Horkheimer, Max 100 Hornborg, Alf 142 Howard, Jean E. 64 Howells, Coral 190, 199 Hughes, Charles N. 174 Hunter, Walt 76, 90-92 Illouz, Eva 37-38, 48, 115 Irigaray, Luce 94 Isherwood, Charles 64 Ivana, Iulia 112-13 Jacobs, Harriet 144, 149, 151, 153-54 Jacoby, Oren 62 James, Selma 93 Jameson, Fredric 123 Jobs, Steve 129 Jost, Colin 125 Kafka, Franz 81 Kakoudaki, Despina 162-63 Kant, Immanuel 58 Kapil, Bhuna 76 kaptainkristian 122n1 Keats, John 76 Keller, Maryann 174, 177 Kelley, Robin D. 163 Kelly, Adam 37-38, 41, 44 King, Martin Luther 178-79 Kleeman, Alexandra 103n5 Kocka,Jürgen 191 Koiven, Anu 78n2 Kolin, Philip C. 60 Komlosy, Andrea 6-7 Konstantinou, Lee 38 Kotto, Yaphet 168 Kovach, Elizabeth 19n1 Krips, Henry 105-6 Kroll, Luisa 125 Kymlicka, Will 133n14 Kyrölä, Katariina 78n2 Lavender III, Isiah 162, 165, 168 Lazzarato, Maurizio 79n3 Lee, Hak-Chong 174-75 Lehner, Nikolaus 117 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 82 Lemke, Sieglinde 55 Letzler, David 43 Levinas, Emmanuel 91 Levine, Philip 5, 8 Liebig, Justus von 142 Lincoln, Abraham 59, 62, 163 Lind, Roger 168, 173 Lipsky, David 39, 48 Lis, Catharina 191 Liu, Alan 28n3 Lorey, Isabell 54-58, 69, 79n3 Lund, Robert 177 Luxemburg, Michael 133 Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl 200 Madamo, Elisio 191 Maimonides 82 Malm, Andreas 143, 148 Index of Names 212 Manson, Charles 129 March, Eleanor 188-89, 194, 197 Martin, Trayvon 60, 69 Marx, Karl 6-7, 9, 12-13, 18-20, 24, 29, 121, 123-24, 128, 130, 135-36, 141-43, 146-51 Maslow, Abraham 129 Mastran-Czopor, Monica 175 Max, Daniel T. 44 McCaffery, Larry 10, 44, 48 McGee, Micki 115 McGlynn, Katia 122n1 McGurl, Mark 39 McLane, Maureen N. 76, 89 Melville, Herman 9, 11, 21-23, 25-26, 81, 99, 101, 103-4, 105n11 Miceli, Barbara 188-89, 199 Michel, Lincoln 103n5 Mills, C. Wright 38, 41 Minsky, Marvin 165-66 Moberg, David 173-77 Monty Python 122 Moore, Jason 142 More, Thomas 190 Morris, George 177 Morris, William 190 Morton, Timothy 142 Moshfegh, Ottessa 11, 99-117 Musk, Elon 129 Negra, Diane 114 Negri, Antonio 77, 101, 104 Newman, Lance 144 Ngai, Sianne 41-42, 101, 112, 113n15, 114-16 Nof, Shimon Y. 169-71 Northup, Samuel 144, 151 Nottage, Lynn 10, 53, 58-59, 63-64 Noys, Benjamin 142 Obama, Barack 60, 69 Opperman, Alex 133 Osterhammel, Jürgen 191 Outka, Paul 144, 151 Papadopoulos, Yannis 88-89 Parker, Trey 123, 128, 136-37 Parks, Suzan-Lori 10, 53, 58-63, 65, 68 Patterson, Orlando 150-51, 153-54 Pietsch, Michael 37n1 Plitt, Amy 125n4 Poe, Edgar Allan 9, 21-23 Portelli, Alessandro 165 Postman, Neil 128 Pryor, Richard 172 Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara 193 Reckwitz, Andrea 39 Reuss, Lloyd E. 174 Rifkin, Jeremy 123 Rimstead, Roxanne 189 Roady, Peter 180 Roediger, David R. 163 Rogers, Roo 123 Rosen, Charles 170 Rothschild, Emma 174-75, 177 Ryberg, Ingrid 78n2 Rymhs, Deena 189 Sacco, Nicola 128, 132 Sanders, Bernie 128 Saveriano, Jerry W. 166, 168, 173 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 58 Schiller, Dan 123 Schiller, Friedrich 58 Schlaifer, Peter 173 Schlegel, Friedrich 58 Schmidt, Alfred 149n6 Scholes, Lucy 103n5 Schotten, Glenn 173 Schrader, Paul 168, 172 Schulman, Michael 63 Index of Names 213 Schumer, Amy 122n1 Sennett, Richard 192 Serrin, William 168 Severs, Jeffrey 36 Seymour, Richard 79n3 Shapiro, Stephen 36, 47 Shelley, Mary 162 Sims, David 125 Sinykin, Dan N. 41 Skinner, Jordan 79 Smith, Kimberly K. 144-46 Snyder, John 179 Sophocles 59 Spahr, Juliana 76 Spillers, Hortense 153 Springer, Kimberly 114n16 Standing, Guy 55, 79n3 Stein, Gertrude 6 Steiner, George 57 Stone, Matt 123, 128, 136-37 Strätz, Juliane 112 Stuelke, Patricia 60-61, 63, 66, 69, 71 Sturdy, Andrew 39 Styhre, Alexander 47 Sufi Ibn Arabi 82 Sugrue, Thomas J. 168, 171 Surkin, Dan 171-73, 175 Sutherland, Keston 90 Szalay, Michael 36 Taranto, Julius 44 Tasker, Yvonne 114 Teitelbaum, Sheldon 166 Thompson, Heather Ann 171 Thoreau, Henry David 24 Timmer, Nicoline 43, 48 Tiqqun (Olam) 87, 89 Toupin, Louise 86 Trilling, Lionel 39 Trump, Donald 63 Turner, Lindsey 77, 83-84 Twain, Mark 6, 21 Ure, Andrew 176 van Alphen, Ernst 38 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 128, 132 Vighi, Fabio 106 Vora, Kalindi 160n1, 161 Walker, Jesse 123 Wallace, David Foster 9-10, 35-48 Wallace, Jennifer 69 Walser, Robert 81 Wacquant, Loïs 13 Wauryzniak, Patrick 166-67, 173 Weber, Max 42, 85n4, 191 Weeks, Kathi 8, 192, 201 Weheliye, Alexander G. 111 Weinstein, Cindy 9, 17-18, 21-23, 27, 30 Whoriskey, Kate 64 Wiener, Norbert 166, 180 Wilde, Oscar 162 Willhelm, Sidney 179-80 Williams, Raymond 6-7, 19, 57, 66-69 Williams, Simon J. 103, 106 Winstead, Ashley 189, 199 Wolf-Meyer, Matthew 101n3 Wolff, Janet 93 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 7 Wren, Daniel 47 Wright, J. Patrick 173 Yellin, Jean Fagin 153 Young, Harvey 60 Zausmer, Otto 162 Zieger, Robert H. 167, 171 Zimmermann, Bénédicte 191 Žižek, Slavoj 11, 100-1, 104-7, 109-11 Zuboff, Shoshanna 123, 132n10 Zuckerberg, Mark 129 Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Ina Habermann Already published: 3 Udo Fries (ed.) The Structure of Texts 1987, 264 Seiten €[D] 26,- ISBN 978-3-87808-843-1 4 Neil Forsyth (ed.) Reading Contexts 1988, 198 Seiten €[D] 21,- ISBN 978-3-87808-844-8 5 Margaret Bridges (ed.) On Strangeness 1990, 239 Seiten €[D] 23,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4680-7 6 Balz Engler (ed.) Writing & Culture 1990, 253 Seiten €[D] 24,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4681-4 7 Andreas Fischer (ed.) Repetition 1994, 268 Seiten €[D] 34,- ISBN 978-3-8233-4682-1 8 Peter Hughes / Robert Rehder (eds.) 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The terms “work,” “labor,” “job,” “employment,” “occupation,” “profession,” “vocation,” “task,” “toil,” “effort,” “pursuit,” and “calling” form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call “socially reproductive labor”—the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds. ISBN 978-3-8233-8502-8 40