Four Theses on Economic Totality

Late capitalism, communicative capitalism, hypercapitalism, financialization, post-Fordism, neoliberalism. These are just some of the terms we use today to designate economic totality: our sense that capitalism has no outside, no alternative; our fear that Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek are correct when they observe that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; our struggle to locate any aspect of society and culture free from the taint of profit and economic valuation. Basically, Karl Marx's real subsumption on steroids. To be sure, these terms are not identical to each other. Each tells a slightly different story about how we arrived here and where we're going, emphasizing distinct facets of the economy and its manifold relations to the social, cultural, and political spheres of contemporary experience. But despite these variations on a theme, each sign generally points to capital's total incorporation of life, the foreclosing of all horizons, the demise of History. Little surprise, then, that this apparently ineluctable economic totality grounds most current scholarship produced in a culturally materialist vein.

This is true of my own work, and it's also true of three fantastic books, all released in 2017, that explore the complex relationship between our present-day economic conjuncture and contemporary cultural production: Eva Cherniavsky's Neocitizenship: Political Culture after Democracy, Annie McClanahan's Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, and Alison Shonkwiler's The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystifications and the Limits of Realist Fiction. For Cherniavsky, "a fully predatory capitalism" has infiltrated democracy, rendering obsolete previous models of citizenship grounded in the now-outmoded notion that the state should be accountable to the public interest (160). Her corpus of culture—American studies programs in eastern Europe, the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and novels by Paul Beatty and Bruce Sterling—indicates that there's no going back. Reinstituting norms, cohering ideology, recoupling citizen and state: these are fools' errands in the postnormative, postideological, post-democratic unreality of contemporary capital. Culture doesn't provide Cherniavsky any clear answers, but, to the extent that it "think[s] about the changing present" better than theory can, it does offer models of neocitizenship that are more than just debased forms of an earlier, richer form of citizenship (4). A bit less sanguine about her post-2008 cultural touchstones, McClanahan describes a swath of contemporary culture (novels, poetry, visual art, horror films, and documentary photography) that directly registers the impact of the financial crisis on our contemporary experience of personhood, property, and social order. Economic totality, or the vast structural complexity of global capital, plays a dual role in McClanahan's work, standing both as the cause of the crisis ("the exhaustion of all other sources of profit" prompted rampant, and ultimately dangerous, speculation [15]) and as the large-scale historical truth that her texts, focused as they are on the individual experience of risks associated with credit, debt, mortgages, and foreclosure, struggle to represent. Shonkwiler also highlights the challenges that economic totality, in the form of a financial abstraction that increasingly renders the economy "less tangible, visible, or controllable," poses for contemporary realist novels, highlighting fiction by Jane Smiley, Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Teddy Wayne, and Mohsin Hamid (xi). In particular, she explores the new forms of realism these authors develop to resist financial abstraction even as their realist forms rely on the same representational logic responsible for fueling capital's financialization.¹

Taken together, these three scholars consider a range of new cultural forms that emerge from the economic totality. Some of the cultural examples are mere reflections or symptoms of it, while others respond to, or even resist, its squid-like grasp. Each book speculates fruitfully about the political valences we might ascribe to culture produced in the shadow of economic totality, and they all suggest, in rather...