Survivalism and Other Class Fantasies

In recent years, literary critiques of neoliberalism have moved away from class analysis into the local and subjective productions of contemporary personhood: the self-interests that seem rationally calculable, the principles of austerity that have been internalized, the creative self that has been liberated from the historical oppressions of, say, defined pensions, collective bargaining, and livable wages. Such a turn in criticism is valuable and necessary in defining the parameters of the neoliberal subject, and it is perhaps inevitable that the larger structural picture of struggle between haves and have-nots will be at least somewhat eclipsed.¹ But the very unevenness of attention to class in new critiques of capitalism calls for a renewed analysis of its changing terms and cultural iterations. One of literary studies' most powerful current ways of developing that analysis, I argue, lies in examining the disjunction between the rhetorics of neoliberal selfhood and the actualities of survival. The monographs under discussion here describe the formation of subjects in conditions that are narrowed in political scope, salvaged from the cultural past, and/or disconnected from the capitalist real. All of them are declensionist narratives in the sense that, like many texts centered on late-stage US capitalism, they situate current social and cultural conflicts within the longer narrative of capitalism's defensive turn over the last several decades.

Certainly, the realities of the class divide have been with us all along, as Sherry Lee Linkon argues in her book on US deindustrialization literature. The media's shock at the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and discovery of how much of the country enthusiastically supported him attest not to a sudden outburst of anti-elitist sentiment but to the persistence of class resentments that have been apparent since at least the Bill Clinton years. That J. D. Vance's bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016) or Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) could come as revelatory to so many readers further attests to a widespread denial of the impact of economic displacement that is in its own way as powerful as the brief fantasy of postracialism was after 2008. So a focus on the material fortunes of the US worker seems more urgent than ever. And as such analyses map the contours of an unevenly postindustrialized economy, they may lead to an even thicker understanding of the ways that race, gender, and other identity forms combine with the dismantling of the industrial family, even at times providing cover for neoliberalism in the name of feminism or racial diversification. In short, the terms making it possible either to address class or to continue to deny it are as central as they have ever been to our analysis of the present.

Class might not seem like the obvious point of departure for discussing Jane Elliott's The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (2018). Yet the book demonstrates precisely the need to develop a broad new account of it in a world structured by implicit decisions about who is and who is not considered worth saving. In theorizing an emergent political shift from the subject of liberal individualism to a subject of "life-interest," Elliott exposes the troubling erasure of class as a means of analyzing who can and cannot successfully rise to the level of claiming full human subjectivity. In inviting an understanding of how so much of the globe's population comes to be accepted as disposable, the microeconomic mode elicits a rewriting of the terms of class analysis for a coming postliberal age.

According to Elliott, contemporary texts often feature truly stark settings, like "the life raft, the desert island, the medical experiment, the prison cell" (1). Rather than function allegorically, she argues, these scaled-down worlds are laboratories for the emergence of a political subject defined by the capacity for choice and the overriding desire to stay alive. Primal choices must be made, often with life or death consequences. The stakes of choice are intensified, and the familiar field of traditional liberal...