Neoliberal Scandals: Foxconn, Mike Daisey, and the Turn Toward Nonfiction Drama

This essay uses two performance scandals—the 2010 worker suicides at the Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, China, and the discovery of fictionalized material in Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs—to consider the different modalities of neoliberalism’s theatrical life. These modalities form a central set of techniques through which neoliberalism is activated, through which it moves from ideology to material reality.