Reading Capitalist Realism

Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Realism in William T. Vollmann’s Poor People

c a r e n i r r Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Realism in William T. Vollmann’s Poor People As a slogan updating the presumably spoiled goods of socialist realism for the neoliberal present, “capitalist realism” initially suggests an effort to interpret and organize reality in terms consistent with capitalist ideology. Understood in this sense, capitalist realism might prove an especially unsustainable literary project, since so many American writers habitually present themselves as offering an insight deeper or more critical than that of the reigning ideology. Echoing the words of Bill Gray, Don DeLillo’s abject writer-hero in Mao II, they use the novel as a “democratic shout” just barely audible above the industrial din.1 Apart from a few devotees of Ayn Rand, who in the contemporary literary pantheon finds advocating capitalism a pressing literary task? Surely a far greater number of writers today adopt a stance premised on a disruptive or ironic relation to capitalism and therefore to any aesthetic described by a label such as capitalist realism. “Capitalism,” after all, is a word more commonly found on the lips of those who imagine themselves its critics (much like “communism,” for that matter). Its proponents prefer to repackage its phenomena in a discourse of “the market” ­ or—­ even more broadly and banally —“economics,” where that purported science is understood not in the comparative sense but rather as the on-going management of a naturally occurring and inevitable system of exchange to which only other, surely tendentious persons insist on attaching an “ism.” For economists of this sort, a literary project of capitalist realism implies an anti-capitalist agenda based on a revelation of the horrors of the system, and such a practice of exposé continues the aforementioned and unpopular socialist realism rather than inverting it. 1 7 8 c a r e n i r r In both of these senses, then, the cultivation of a literature designated “capitalist realism” initially seems unpromising. Capitalism as a system that writers in some sense oppose and yet cannot name or perhaps even know deeply strands its would-be analysts in a representational dilemma. In his still-pertinent writings on cognitive mapping , however, Fredric Jameson asserts that wrestling with the challenge of representing a swiftly changing practice on the periphery of aesthetic perception can lead artists to generate usefully indirect or “degraded” figures for the total system.2 Jameson’s famous examples of such figures from the heyday of postmodernism and the boom phase of the information economy include paranoia, conspiracy, and hysterical hyper-realism. The gambit of my own ­ essay—­ and perhaps of this collection as a ­ whole—­ is that capitalist realism might provide an opportunity to name a new set of similarly partial, incomplete or “degraded” figures for a new phase of capitalist accumulation. Faced with the pressing, yet apparently impossible task of representing a new capitalist reality that is still in the process of emerging , writers necessarily rummage through their toolboxes in search of handy items they might repurpose. Arguably, one such resource for the aspiring capitalist realist is the small but distinctive tradition of Anglophone prose documentaries. Devoted to exposing the social ills of urban capitalism, landmarks of the form from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) to Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001) use a middle-class eye to bring the collective subject they designate “the poor” into view.3 Their efforts are especially notable for their nondogmatic quality. None of these contributions to this baggy genre adopts a strictly pro- or anti-capitalist stance, for instance, since each wobbles between the two senses of capitalism outlined above, alternating between viewing capitalism as an ideologically charged enemy and a natural condition so deeply entrenched as to appear a law of nature. The commitment to realism as an aesthetic is similarly ambivalent in the prose documentary. This tradition relies equally at different moments on the revelation of social conditions assumed to actually a n t i - c a p i t a l i s m a n d a n t i - r e a l i s m 1 7 9 exist, the almost total absorption into the documentarian’s own recording consciousness, and a self-conscious attention to the conventions of the tradition itself...