Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature beyond Fordism 9780367854096, 0367854090, 9781000750676, 1000750671, 9781000750782, 1000750787, 9781000750898, 1000750892

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Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late twentiethand twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the works of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul ­Murray, and Zadie Smith, among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism. Roberto del Valle Alcalá is Associate Professor of English Literature at Södertörn University.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

29 Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English Edited by Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa 30 Origin and Ellipsis in the Writing of Hilary Mantel An Elliptical Dialogue with the Thinking of Jacques Derrida Eileen Pollard 31 Haruki Murakami Storytelling and Productive Distance Chikako Nihei 32 David Foster Wallace and the Body Peter Sloane 33 Urban Captivity Narratives Women’s Writing After 9/11 Heather Hillsburg 34 The Humanist (Re)Turn Reclaiming the Self in Literature Michael Bryson 35 Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat Edited by Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin Hobson, and Danny Hoey 36 Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction Literature Beyond Fordism Roberto del Valle Alcalá For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge​.com

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction Literature Beyond Fordism Roberto del Valle Alcalá

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Roberto del Valle Alcalá to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951962 ISBN: 978-0-367-42649-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85409-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To Naia and Sol

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface 1 Post-Fordism and Crisis Beyond Fordism: Martin Amis’s Money  1 Cyber-capitalism and the Outside: Hari Kunzru’s Transmission  12

ix xi 1

2 Subjects of Abstraction Phantasms of Finance: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis  27 Knowledge in Crisis: Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know  36

27

3 The Crisis and the City The Metropolitan Factory: John Lanchester’s Capital  50 Entangled Circulations: Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void  59 Urban Precarities: Zadie Smith’s NW and The Embassy of Cambodia  67

50

4 Servile Becomings Codified Affect, Servile Care: The Remains of the Day  79 Dividual Labour and the Biopolitics of Care: Never Let Me Go  85

79

5 The Reproductive Imagination Reproductive Labour and Resistance in Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love  107 Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Non-reproductive Crisis, and the Strategy of Refusal 115

107

viii Contents Recommencing History: Reproduction and Primitive Accumulation in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood  122 6 The Politics of Division Index

131 147

Acknowledgements

I thank my former and current colleagues at Uppsala and Södertörn ­Universities for their intellectual support and encouragement. This book has greatly benefitted from discussions and conversations held in different settings and formats at both institutions. Many thanks to Jennifer Abbott at Routledge for believing in this project from day 1. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). This book is the main research output of project 2015-01746. But my greatest and most enduring debt is to my family. My parents gave generously of their time when it was most needed, relieving some of the pressures and anxieties of new parenthood. With her endless love and care, Sol Juárez continues to make my work possible and my life liveable. I cannot thank her enough. Section 1 of Chapter 1 was first published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 60.1, 1–10 (2018). A slightly different version of Section 2 in Chapter 2 first appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, online first, 1–13 (2018). An earlier version of Section 2 in Chapter 4 has appeared in Cultural Critique, 102, 37–60 (2019).

Preface

The cycle of economic crisis that began in 2007 with the crash of the subprime mortgage market in the United States has left an indelible mark on the cultural imaginaries of the early twenty-first century. In recent years, the economy, particularly its more immaterial developments in the realm of finance, have become prominent areas of journalistic discussion, artistic representation, and academic study. In this context, it is hardly surprising to observe that both literature and literary scholarship have served as fruitful terrains for the critical interrogation of what remains a relatively dry and abstruse field. More than a decade after the onset of the recession, our understanding of financialisation as an ongoing process, the dynamics of exacerbated abstraction that underpin the economic logic of our troubled present, and the increasingly central connection (both formal and thematic) between these and literature has been immensely advanced. Literary representation itself has come to be regarded as an exemplary site of engagement with the dematerialising tendencies of the economy. As critics have shown, the breakdown of social and economic relations characteristic of an earlier form of capitalism is rehearsed by contemporary creative writing with great urgency and acuity. Thus, what Alison Shonkwiler calls the “financial imaginary” developed by such texts “invites critical attention to the problem of recognizing a system that is understood to be less and less tethered to the material, less directly connected to specific modes of production, and therefore less tangible, visible, or controllable” (2017: xi). The loss of a solid material referent in the ambit of production remains an important theme in accounts of cultural engagements with finance and crisis. The notion that, in the ambit of representation, what follows the replacement of industrial capital with a finance-led regime of growth1 is a generalised epistemological and ontological crisis (often articulated through the trope of insanity)2 continues to inform readings of contemporary culture. Although these tend to be important contributions that perform a valuable service in correcting typically fetishistic accounts of economic life, it is also true that the critical conceptuality that they introduce is sometimes excessively concerned with the articulation of a discursive form (say, finance) rather than with the antagonistic

xii Preface process that accompanies its deployment. This is a crucial dimension that critics of the capitalist system and its social, economic, and cultural aspects cannot afford to miss. Even when the formal constellations of an integral system of power such as capitalism require specific frames of interrogation and analytical methodologies, the general political orientation (i.e., to put it in Marxist terms, the concrete class dimension of the analysis) should not recede from view. The specifically financial form that money adopts today cannot be separated from its political determinations. In this perspective, which certain currents of Marxist thought have emphasised over the years, 3 the language of crisis always speaks of a latent tension or an overt conflict in the social ordering of economic relations, and, correspondingly, what its cultural mediation offers is, in one way or another, a formalisation of antagonism or struggle.4 One of the central assumptions informing this book is that the idea of capitalist crisis can never be reduced to a strictly economic dimension. Capital expresses a relation – a productive relation, certainly, but only in a broad sense that includes social and political aspects, operations of power, and cultural articulations of various kinds. Thus, to say that capital is in crisis, or that it goes into crisis, implies that a particular structure of command over the system of relations underpinning the generation and accumulation of value has been upset. The analytical preoccupation with form (with the social form, the form of value, or the cultural form representing a given reality) cannot occlude the dynamic tension shaping the relation or framing the historical process as a whole. In this sense, the discourse of abstraction that often surrounds discussions of finance and financialisation needs to be understood in an active sense. Quite strictly, “abstraction” nominalises an action verb, “to abstract”. When we refer to the economic abstractions of capital (which, by the way, begin rather immediately with the passage from use-value to exchange-value), what we are effectively identifying is a dynamic operation, an intervention upon or against a pre-existing reality. In the case of contemporary finance and the logics of crisis that it invites, it is essential to grasp the social and political realities that it abstracts from and mobilises against. To identify in crisis a movement of capital away from and against this or that set of economic, social, political, and cultural relations is to posit a primary instance of mobility and resistance; it is to restore a dimension of antagonism and struggle at the other end of the capitalist relation. In other words, the Autonomist intuition, as articulated, for example, by Harry Cleaver, that the “current global crisis (…) is only the latest phase of a much longer and more general global crisis of capitalist command that has been going on for over forty years” is essentially correct.5 What needs to be retained for theoretical and methodological purposes is thus the notion that the form of crisis (that the capitalist form of crisis) is always necessarily a process of forming (or de-forming) of productive relations in society. As John Holloway puts it,

Preface  xiii The maintenance of capital as a form of social relations, therefore, can only mean the maintenance and restructuring of capitalist social relations, the constant reformulation-through-crisis of the relations between capital and labour. Inevitably, this reformulation is always a struggle to impose or reimpose certain forms of social relations, to contain social activity within or channel social activity into those (developing) forms. (2019: 15) The processual quality of the dynamics of containment and (re)imposition through which the capitalist relation comes to be is thus its unsurpassable ontological horizon. It is therefore “essential that we conceive of these forms” adopted by capital “not as static entities but as ‘form processes’, as processes that seek to impose ever-changing but always fragmented forms of social relations upon the resistance inevitably aroused by class oppression” (2019: 15). In this sense, it is essential to approach the matter of crisis in capitalism not in terms of the relatively static and perhaps even complacent language of form but in terms of “form-processing (i.e., processing into certain forms, Formierung, ­forming)” ­(Holloway 2019: 15).6 The aim of this book is to show how contemporary literary fiction imagines the antagonisms and the evasions prompted by these at the heart of post-Fordist or neoliberal capitalism.7 The conceptualisation of crisis it will develop will thus be framed by the dialectic between antagonism and evasion, while remaining attentive to the solutions and compositions offered by the fictional strategy. In some cases, as we will see, the alternative to crisis (the attempt to resolve the crisis of form, either textual or contextual) will reside in an exacerbated logic of abstraction and vertical deterritorialisation towards a purer form of value that is presumably untainted by the density of social relations. In other cases, the “madness of economic reason” (Derrida 1992), as aggravated in the current financialised configuration of capitalism, will lead to an immanent reversal of its totalising sociality, to a countervailing logic of mutuality in which the driving principles and mechanisms of credit and debt may yield a renewal of solidarity and community beyond the alienations of value. In both fictional strategies, the imagination of finance as a force that abstracts and therefore expropriates the concreteness of non-­ monetary relations reveals its embattled nature. For what is glimpsed at the end of the narrative journey into abstraction is the recalcitrance of life, of a social (and also biological) life whose autonomous productive ­potentiality has to be torn away and objectified if it is to be effectively commanded and exploited. In capitalism (and its Marxist critique), any reference to this living potential that lies at the root of the notion of value immediately evokes the idea of living labour, that is, of labour conceived of as the subjective force that determines and guides the productive

xiv Preface process. In Marx’s Capital, living labour emerges as an energy and a “fire” that comes up against the objective edifice of raw materials and means of production erected by capital: “Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values”. It is so that the universe of value comes into being “[b]athed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy” (Marx 1990: 289). Stripped down to its metaphorical minimum, capital expresses nothing but the conflictual relationship between life and death, between living labour as “vital energy” and dead labour as expropriated wealth. This confrontation is relatively easy to visualise in the material setting of the industrial factory and the universe of commodities it commands. But a world of economic activity in which labour is increasingly perceived as a diffuse reality extending beyond the “system of objects” (Baudrillard 1996) generated by industrial capitalism, a world in which living labour is either sublimated as a logical outside to the order of value or relegated to the position of an external resource, is one where exploitation acquires a particularly insidious quality. Lurking behind the circulatory velocity of financialised money, or behind the precariousness of post-industrial labour regimes, what contemporary fictions often serve up is an image of brutality and violence. As the immediate abstractions of the material commodity are replaced by the sublimity of monetary idealisations or by work dynamics that call to mind pre-industrial forms of unfree labour, the antagonistic nature of capital is rediscovered in all its starkness and brutality. Thus, a horizon towards which post-Fordist fictions of crisis often point is one in which economic quantification gives way to bioeconomic, or biopolitical, qualification. The theoretical centrality of biopolitics to the study of literature has been widely acknowledged in recent years, but it is important to insist on its specific relevance to the concept and reality of capitalism and its contemporary inflection of crisis. As industrial imaginaries recede into the background, the semantic field of work becomes saturated with references to the bios, that is, to the socially qualified life whose productive and reproductive dimensions are today increasingly recognised as the true source of wealth. The sociological discourse of precarity (and the more exaggerated, but certainly symptomatic one announcing universal automation and the “end of work”)8 thus often masks the reality of a fundamental displacement from the commodification of labour (understood as the transformation of living labour into dead labour) to the uncommodifiable capture of productive and reproductive capacities in the common domain of social life.9 Moving beyond the dynamics of conflict and struggle on the factory floor explored by earlier industrial fiction,10 contemporary narratives locate, in the generation of a diffuse surplus pervading the social body, a surplus of bios that no commodity can ­effectively contain or realise as profit through its sale,11 and consequently the roots of crisis

Preface  xv in the governance of productive relations. In this context, as I will try to demonstrate, the notion of reproduction becomes central, for it is here, in a dimension that both exceeds and creates the conditions of ­possibility of production in a conventional economic sense, that the historically determinate, “form-processing” (as Holloway says) nature of capitalist crisis can be observed at its most transparent. The chapters that follow chart a sequence of fictional engagements with the collapse of Fordism and its replacement by post-Fordist dynamics since the 1970s. The first chapter begins by tracing the contours of Fordism’s institutional collapse in Martin Amis’s classic novel of 1984, Money. Here, finance is investigated as a direct function of the crisis of Fordist-style class coordination that came to define capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. With its overtly satirical orientation, this novel offers a particularly incisive analysis of the instability of capitalist command as it gradually loses its post-war social foundations. The reading of Money is followed by an engagement with Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, where the social problematic surrounding the discourse of cyber-labour and digital capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century is presented in terms of an emergent and recalcitrant outside that capital can no longer harness. Chapter 2 analyses fictional representations of capitalist subjectivity in the context of advanced financialisation. Through detailed readings of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, I argue that the post-Fordist emphasis on immateriality can be read as an attempt to psychologise and privatise (and therefore elude) the social dynamics that continue to frame economic forms and processes in the twenty-first century. I pay special attention to the semantics of abstraction deployed by these narratives of finance, suggesting that their preoccupation with the subjective universe of traders and financial operators in the run-up to the 2008 crash offers a reconstruction of capitalist self-­referentiality as a definitive discursive move beyond the system of mediations and interactions with the labour process that characterised Fordism. In both of these novels, crisis emerges as the repressed or disavowed antagonism returning to haunt the ­capitalist accumulation process after a subjectivist detour through the private ­obsessions of the financier. Chapter 3 explores the centrality of urban settings in the context of the post-2008 landscape of crisis and the various inflections these are given in John Lanchester’s Capital, Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void, and Zadie Smith’s NW and The Embassy of Cambodia. Beginning with an assessment of Lanchester’s vision of the crisis-stricken metropolis as an ambivalent composite of singularities and commonalities through which earlier neoliberal figurations are both critiqued and surpassed, the chapter then shows (through a reading of Murray’s novel) how the pervasive denunciation of the debt economy in contemporary critical discourse can be turned on its head by fiction and re-read as a radical plea for mutuality and socialisation. The last part of the chapter

xvi Preface considers a further fictional articulation of crisis and city through the notion of precarity. I read Zadie Smith’s NW and The Embassy of Cambodia as comprehensive indictments of post-Fordist urban life where the commonalities of risk and the dynamics of circulation explored by fictions of finance are recast in terms of existential vulnerability, social fracture, and exacerbated unfreedom in the ambit of labour. Chapter 4 investigates the notion of servility as a crucial trope of capitalist reorganisation in the face of crisis and as an attempt to transcend the contradictory entanglements of finance. I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as a meditation on the limits of late twentieth-­ century discourses of human capital. My claim is that Ishiguro’s historically mediated projection suggests that neoliberalism’s version of homo economicus as an entrepreneur of the self is not an expansive matrix of subjective possibility, but rather a function of closure as well as enslavement. I also analyse Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a more fully developed vision of servility in post-Fordism. My contention here is that, while the earlier novel presents this as a tentative dogma or ideology, the later novel engages servility as an accomplished dystopia in which labour becomes literally indistinguishable from life, and thus in which exploitation is rendered as a form of biopolitics. The thematisation of life as an immediate sphere of economic intervention, but also as a particularly unstable and crisis-prone terrain for capital, is central to the argument of Chapter 5. Here, I analyse two recent fictional engagements with the field of reproduction, Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, where living labour is resituated at the centre of capitalism’s post-industrial strategy of appropriation and exploitation. In Kavenna’s novel, I argue, the characteristically post-Fordist erosion of experiential boundaries between production and reproduction, between work and life, is tackled through a vindication of parturition as a terrain of struggle and resistance. Heti’s text, in turn, challenges a recently revitalised discourse of demographic crisis that specifically targets women’s alleged failure to comply with their reproductive mandate. By turning this reactionary narrative on its head, Motherhood proposes an alternative vindication of reproductive temporalities and of women’s agency in contemporary capitalism. ­Finally, the chapter turns to a classic fictional engagement with the matter of reproduction, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, in order to consider the broader historical and cultural implications of the role played by reproduction in capitalism. Finally, Chapter 6 proposes the notion of division (and a number of conceptual variations, including war and enclosure) as a capacious framework for the literary interpretation of crisis in contemporary capitalism. I expand my reading of Emecheta in Chapter 5 by referring to an earlier novel, In the Ditch, which offers a prescient reading of the crisis of Fordism in terms of the experiences of separation and indiscipline associated with poor and migrant women. I then turn to Anna Burns’

Preface  xvii Milkman for a recent iteration of the intuition that, several decades after the collapse of Fordism’s imaginaries of social pacification, capitalism continues to experience its social and economic dynamics as a series of (undeniably antagonistic) divisions that no fresh initiative can effectively halt or contain. I conclude with a general reflection on the place of this divisive logic in literary engagements with the history of capital since the eighteenth century.

Notes 1 This way of referring to contemporary financial capitalism has been proposed by French economist Robert Boyer (2000). 2 Or more specifically, “psychosis”. See, for example, De Boever (2018). 3 In particular, the Autonomist tradition that begins in Italy in the 1960s around the journal Quaderni Rossi and under the intellectual leadership of Mario Tronti. For a good historical and theoretical overview of this school, see Wright (2002). 4 E.P. Thompson’s polemical definition of culture, in response to Raymond Williams’ famous invocation of “a whole way of life”, as “a whole way of struggle” would be relevant here. See Williams (1961) and Thompson (1961a, 1961b). 5 “That longer, general crisis has been brought about by a panoply of struggles that have ruptured the fundamental substance and sinew of capitalist society: its subordination of peoples’ lives to work (or labor). The depth of the crisis – for capital – is the reason for the brutality of its responses, responses that have included, but have by no means been limited to, the imposition of austerity” (Cleaver 2017: 17). 6 As Holloway adds elsewhere apropos of this notion, “Crisis, then, is not an external framework imposed on class struggle: it is the crisis of the class relation, the crisis of the rule of capital over labour. Crisis shows the limits of capitalist domination: the established patterns of class relations can no longer contain labour, can no longer suppress life” (Holloway 1991: 100). 7 I will follow Autonomist and other Marxist authors in privileging the terms Fordism and post-Fordism over more partial or vague alternatives. As, again, Holloway explains, “The term [Fordism] has the great merit of drawing our attention immediately to the core question of the way in which our daily activity is organised. It refers to a world in which mass production in the factories was integrated with the promotion of mass consumption through a combination of relatively high wages and the so-called welfare state” (2019: 220–221). 8 Rifkin (1995, 2014), Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014), and Srnicek and Williams (2015) offer different versions of this overconfident reading of transformations in post-Fordist labour processes. Connell (2017) is a good example of how literary scholarship is increasingly turning its attention to precarious forms of labour. 9 Leigh Claire La Berge has recently argued that “decommodified labor” “offers cultural critics a concept for isolating labor today that takes account of its relation to the wage, that may assist in periodizing our current capital-­ labor relation, and that highlights financial change alongside labor’s durational necessity under capitalism” (2018: n.p.). 10 For an analysis of the literary representation of class conflict in Fordism, see my reading of Alan Sillitoe’s classic post-war fiction in Del Valle Alcalá (2016). 11 See Marazzi (2016) for an insightful analysis of the concept of surplus value.

xviii Preface

References Baudrillard, Jean. (1996) The System of Objects. London: Verso. Boyer, Robert. (2000) “Is a Finance-led Growth Regime a Viable Alternative to Fordism? A Preliminary Analysis”. Economy and Society. 29.1: 111–145. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee. (2014) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: Norton. Cleaver, Harry. (2017) Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle Against Work, Money and Financialization. Chico and Edinburgh: AK Press. Connell, Liam. (2017) Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. De Boever, Arne. (2018) Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis. New York: Fordham University Press. Del Valle Alcalá, Roberto. (2016) British Working-Class Literature: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Derrida, Jacques. (1992) Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holloway, John. (1991) “The Great Bear: Post-Fordism and Class Struggle”. Post-Fordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State. Ed. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Holloway, John. (2019) We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader. Oakland: PM Press. La Berge, Leigh Claire. (2018) “Decommodified Labor: Conceptualizing Work After the Wage”. Lateral 7.1. Online. Marazzi, Christian. (2016) Che cos’è il plusvalore? Bellinzona: Casagrande. Marx, Karl. (1990) Capital, vol. 1. London: Penguin. Rifkin, Jeremy. (1995) The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. Rifkin, Jeremy. (2014) The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. New York: ­Palgrave Macmillan. Shonkwiler, Alison. (2017) The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. (2015) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso. Thompson, Edward Palmer (1961a) “The Long Revolution I”. New Left ­Review 9: 24–33. Thompson, Edward Palmer (1961b) “The Long Revolution II”. New Left ­Review 10: 34–39. Williams, Raymond. (1961) Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Wright, Steve. (2002) Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto Press.

1 Post-Fordism and Crisis

Beyond Fordism: Martin Amis’s Money Martin Amis’s Money stands out in the literary landscape of the 1980s as a mordant commentary on the follies and complexities of late twentieth-­ century capitalism. Its eponymous focus on money as an increasingly enigmatic and intractable economic entity is guided by an overarching interest in Gresham’s law, that general principle according to which bad money drives out good.1 In a sense, the novel’s entire fictional strategy appears to offer a lengthy transcription of this notion, as it follows the misadventures of protagonist John Self along the unreal circuits of transatlantic credit and high finance. One of the plot’s main triggers is in fact Self’s decision to quit his previous job making controversial yet profitable commercials in order to embark on an ultimately stillborn filmic project initially entitled “Good Money” and later renamed, as the destabilising effects of his financial dealings begin to register, “Bad Money”. Set in 1981, the narrative is nevertheless motivated at a deeper level by an acute historical awareness of the fact that Nixon’s decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971 had effectively ushered in a new regime of monetary policy, which in turn enabled a reconstruction of political–economic relations in capitalism as a whole. Following the central admission that “money went wrong ten years ago” (1985: 7), the novel inscribes its farcical treatment of money, and the distorted subjective dynamics it enables, within a broader horizon of historical transformation, whether we choose to call it post-Fordism, neoliberalism, or even postmodernism. Critics have abundantly insisted on this point, suggesting, for example, as Joseph Brooker does, that “we cannot pin the culture described by the book too rigidly on the 1980s. A slightly longer development of post-war or post-sixties society is clearly in question” (2006: 330). Focusing more directly on the economic logic centrally engaged by the novel, Jon Begley has observed that “Money’s depiction of postmodernity is premised upon a specific socioeconomic thesis”, in the sense that “Amis apprehends the emerging culture of the 1980s as predicated upon the OPEC crisis and the recessionary cycles and economic reorganization that followed in its wake” (2004: 81). Thus, the novel

2  Post-Fordism and Crisis offers a sharp assessment not only of early Thatcherism in Britain and the first wave of neoliberal experimentation with what deputy Labour Party leader Denis Healy notoriously described as “sado-monetarism”, 2 but also of a much broader conjuncture of crisis and transformation in late twentieth-century capitalism.3 Money’s figurative strategy, with its insistence on the intractable slippages and substitutions operating within (and ultimately driving) money in contemporary capitalism, points, as Nicky Marsh has noted, to “the divergence between […] financial and industrial forms of capital” and more specifically, to “the hierarchical relationship” whereby the former subordinates and diminishes “the ­political purchase” of the latter (2012: 116–117). The end of dollar–gold convertibility (that specific moment when “money went wrong”) marks the centre of the ongoing crisis to which the novel responds from the vantage point of the early 1980s. The de-linking of the monetary expression of value from the solid materiality of a general equivalent (gold) amounted to a generalised crisis in the very measurability and representability of value,4 which in turn exacerbated, as Marsh writes, “the distance between the speculative and industrial economies” (2012: 118). This is the focal point of many literary and cultural critical engagements with financialisation in this period and a constant theoretical reference for readings of so-called financial ­fiction (including Money). An emphasis on the self-referentiality of money was at the heart of ground-breaking interventions such as those of Jean-­ Joseph Goux and the New Economic Criticism5 but also of leading post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida.6 Authors such as Jean Baudrillard went even further in their assessment of this historic turning point, suggesting that, in the 1970s, “[w]e are at the end of production” (1993: 9): “Determinacy is dead, indeterminacy holds sway. There has been an extermination (in the literal sense of the word) of the real of production and the real of signification” (1993: 7). And yet the growing divergence between finance and industry in the 1970s and 1980s is only fully intelligible, I would like to suggest, from an integrated perspective on the relational (which is to say, the ­political) dimensions of capitalism itself and, specifically, on the historically ­operative institutional forms governing productive, or class, relations over this period. In other words, if the historical context and experience on which the novel draws is one defined by crisis (a crisis of the representation of economic value in terms of money), then we should also attend to the ways in which the latter registers – or possibly even originates – at the level of class relations and the institutional forms regulating them. In effect, while Money is committed to a representation of the crisis haunting the monetary/linguistic sign (and as such, to the representation of a general crisis in economic and semiotic representation), the novel is also centrally attentive to the concrete processes of social rupture and disjunction to which the abstraction of money from its material referent

Post-Fordism and Crisis  3 sought to respond. The turbulent and troubling phenomenology of capital depicted by Money (one in which subjective experience is frequently denoted by disorientation, confusion, and forgetting, not to mention excess in all forms) is a primary aspect, but its real triggers lie in the broader dynamics of conflict, in an imaginary of creeping, and sometimes explosively overt, social convulsion to which the novel does not fail to pay attention. I want to begin by insisting on the significance of the 1970s crisis in terms of its political reorganisation of class relations. This, I will then try to demonstrate, is the central context for the novel’s investigation of the disjunction between material production and monetary self-­referentiality. It is a well-documented fact of economic history that capitalism underwent a series of dramatic transformations in the central decades of the twentieth century, giving rise, in the post-war period, to an unprecedented phase of both economic growth and social stability.7 In A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, one of the most important interventions in Marxian political economy in the 1970s (and the founding text of what would later be known as the regulation school of economics),8 Michel Aglietta describes the general characteristics of this post-war phase of capitalist history, which he names Fordism. The technological development and rationalisation of mechanisation processes, combined with a new social rule of mass consumption, would lead to “a gigantic upsurge in accumulation” after the Second World War (2015: 381). First introduced at the Ford Motor Company in 1914 with the pioneering “Five Dollar Day” (Beynon 1973: 20), the basic principle of scientifically managed production plus high wages “rested”, as John Holloway points out, “on an implicit trade-off between a high degree of alienation and boredom at work and rising consumption after hours”, where “dissatisfaction was transformed into demand” and, consequently, a firm separation between the times of production and reproduction (or in other words, between work and life) was enshrined (1996: 22). The seeds of crisis were deeply planted in the Fordist system, however. The basis for growth, namely “the long-run fall in the social cost of reproduction of labour-power” (Aglietta 2015: 381), would undergo a steady reversal from the mid-1960s under the cumulative effects of its two main dynamics. As Aglietta explains, “an ever more intensive application of the principle of mechanization tends to exhaust its productive potentialities and renews the class struggle in production”. On the other hand, the rule of mass consumption was “disturbed by the fact that Fordism drives the production of these collective goods to the margins of capitalist accumulation”, and therefore, their “cost increases dramatically with a rise in social demand” (2015: 384). The inflationary climate of the 1970s was a clear expression of these structural problems within the regime of accumulation. As Holloway observes,

4  Post-Fordism and Crisis In the face of rigidity and revolt, money was the great lubricant. Wage-bargaining became the focus of both managerial change and worker discontent. Raising wages (or granting special bonuses) became the principal means by which management overcame its own rigidities and introduced changes in working practices. (1996: 23) The final revocation of gold-based constraints on the money supply represented by the 1971 inconvertibility decision amounted to a last-ditch attempt to escape the accumulated class contradictions, which had manifested themselves in heightened levels of overt social conflict. The basic principle on which Fordist growth had rested over the years was the political coordination between the classes, and it was precisely in the possibility of disruption along the temporal axis of this coordination that the potential for crisis resided. The Fordist use of money as a social “lubricant” in the form of wages paid out in advance of production could only work if these remained tied to productivity and were therefore followed by increases in the rate of capitalist accumulation. But the reactivated dynamics of class struggle and the corresponding disturbance of managed productive flows since the 1960s had shown that this was no longer the case. As Christian Marazzi summarises the situation in the mid-1970s, The resistance of workers to productivity increases and their continuous pressure to push up wages has made it impossible to reduce wage costs relative to new investment projects. As a result, industrial capital has been forced to move further and further along the path of restructuration of more and more investment to reach necessary levels of productivity: this spiral of investment has become an ­ever-increasing spiral of debt. (1996: 80) While the manipulation of the money supply initially seemed to delay the effects of capital devalorisation (Aglietta 2015: 384), the increasing detachment of working-class demands and temporalities – in terms of a self-valorising and autonomous assessment of needs – from production9 resulted in an uncontrollable inflationary spiral where money was “blocked from becoming capital” and could “only remain at the level of simple circulation” (Marazzi 1996: 80). Admittedly, the social universe depicted by Amis’s Money does not immediately match this description. The “working class transformation of money into income” (80) identified by Marazzi at the heart of the crisis appears to have been replaced, ten years after “money went wrong”, by a social landscape of extreme class polarisation in which money emerges as a blunt economic instrument for the enactment of exclusion and

Post-Fordism and Crisis  5 marginalisation rather than the coordination and management of class relations (even in the temporally dislocated form characteristic of the inflationary periods). But we should remain attentive to the fact that the picture drawn by Money is framed by a profound sense of uncertainty and political irresolution in the restructuring of capitalism. ­Essentially, the prevailing atmosphere of confusion and disorientation in the novel is warranted by not just one but effectively two disarticulations in the postwar configuration of money. To its literal dematerialisation ­after the ending of dollar–gold convertibility and the fixed-exchange rate system, we should add the – arguably – more profound disarticulation of money from the political cycle of Fordist relations of production. John Self’s enduring impotence and inability to comprehend the world around him effectively transcribe the proven incapacity of capital, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to govern its relationship with the working class or, in other words, to exploit living labour in a successful and stable manner. The characterisation of the working class that we find in Money is one that results from this experience of social disarticulation: rather than appearing as a factor of production, it is imagined as an abject other, as a crime-prone lumpenproletariat arising from the broken sociality of late Fordism and its increasingly untenable financial temporality.10 And yet this image of extreme social polarisation that the novel cultivates assumes an illusory temporal relation of its own. As John Self observes soon after arriving in New York on the first of many transatlantic trips, “Inflation, they say, is cleaning up this city. Dough is rolling up its sleeves and mucking the place out. But things still happen here” (3). This implies, we could say, a wishful reversal of the growing temporal gap between Fordist spending (in the form of working-class incomes) and deferred production. Rather than as a factor of socialisation, money is ­effectively imagined as an element of coercion – as an autonomous agency charged with keeping working-class subjectivity in check. Of course, the ironic uncertainty of the situation is confirmed by the ambiguous final sentence, for indeed “things” are still happening in 1981 that do not suggest a durable restructuration of capitalist command. The failure of the monetarist experiment (begun in 1979 with President Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve and continued by the first Thatcher government in Britain), which for over two years was unable to meet its aim of containing inflation, is rather the immediate backdrop to John Self’s imaginings. The inflationary atmosphere that saturates the novel is thus tinged with a sense of failure and negativity. Projected as a wishful anticipation of a political resolution that has not been attained, the social effectivity of this money that is imagined as “cleaning up the city” is little more than a form of withdrawal, a rearguard action devised to maintain the social fracture rather than solidify the power of capital. John’s travelogue in the universe of financial abstraction is countersigned by his insistent forays into the nether world of urban poverty

6  Post-Fordism and Crisis and exclusion. While the former is marked by an enduring sense of disorienting opacity, the latter stands out for its transparent brutality. He thus straightforwardly observes that “certain less-than-fashionable New Yorkers have taken up residence in the sewers and subway shafts”, since money “has driven them deeper into the planet, money has brought them down in the world” (199). These victims of “the money c­ onspiracy” make up a consistently grotesque, and ultimately threatening, sub-­ human landscape of “proletarian ghosts” (24). The agency of money is thus refracted through a general social condition of extreme inequality. As John points out, when he “came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances”, “if you wanted, you could just drop out” (153). But now that those chances have been destroyed for the majority, now that “the dolequeue starts at the exit to the playground”, “[y]ou can’t drop out any more. Money has seen to that. There’s nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money” (153). This presents an interesting contrast to John’s repeated admission that he knows “very little” about money (23). The growing abstraction of money’s post-Fordist logic seems to evade scientific description and intelligibility,11 but not a concrete manifestation as social violence. Having done away with the mediations and balances of Keynesian policy, with its temporality of deferred accumulation and commitment to proportionality, the political nature of money reappears now, more crudely than ever, as a dynamic attempt to institutionalise a social practice of inequality. As Antonio Negri suggests in a 1980s essay, It is not enough – say the theorists of the capitalist offensive – to destroy the conditions of the socialization of the labour force or the horizontal communication entailed by productive cooperation; more positively, it is necessary to establish conditions of separation and detachment (…) The almost religious – and therefore even more mystified – spirit of inequality among people is inherent in this project. (1989: 134) But this attempt to consecrate inequality as a regulative principle remains haunted by the spectre of uncontrollability. As John Self repeatedly insinuates and, at one point, openly declares, “Money, I think, is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can’t control it” (154). Beyond its presumed abstraction from production, the enduring problem of money at this critical conjuncture is exactly this: for all its inflationary violence, money’s agency appears to be bereft of a guiding subjective principle. Its power is that of a class determination without control over its social directionality: command (naked, brutal command) without the connective tissue that would make it effective and fully coherent as an expression of class subjectivity. The confused social phenomenology of the novel is punctuated, in John Self’s paradoxically cogent formulations

Post-Fordism and Crisis  7 (cogent in that they effectively manage to capture this internal crisis in the strategy of capital), by a split between money’s abstract trajectories and the more “primitive” material hoarding it enables. When later in the novel his American friend Martina Twain gives him a book entitled Money, which happens to be his first attempt at an intellectual engagement with the elusive entity that governs his life, John is delighted to learn that they used to use meat for money, and snout, and booze, and chicks of course, and ammunition for fighting with. Now those sound like my kind of market forces. I’d have been happier in the old days. You wouldn’t have had to pay me in money. You could have used all that other stuff, that bad money. (284–285) In his commitment to the more mystified expressions of finance, John is forced to admit that this hyper-material version of commodity money, rather a grotesque iteration of the barter economy, is “bad money”. And just like the eponymous film that is never made and which, with its entropic pull of fraudulent negativity, ends up dragging him to the bottom of society, the experiential reality of money as a destructive but ultimately rather base fact of life insistently provides a graphic instantiation of Gresham’s law as the ruling principle of John’s existence. Indeed, as he candidly puts it, “my life is also my private culture – that’s what I’m showing you, after all, that’s what I’m letting you into, my private culture. And I mean look at my private culture. Look at the state of it. It really isn’t very nice in here” (123). Money’s uncontrollability is thus experientially registered, first of all, as subjective destitution. Deprived of proper agency, John Self – as the name ominously reminds us – is reduced to tautological self-­referentiality, to a reified privacy that contrasts sharply with the eminently public (and therefore politically meaningful) logic of Fordist mass consumption. For all his attempts to rise above this level of self-cancelling fetishism, John’s lot in the universe of intractable money remains with those “primitive creatures driving around with money in their Torpedoes and Boomerangs (…), innocent beneficiaries of the global joke which money keeps cracking” (153), a class of subjectless capitalists, of conspicuous consumers who “don’t do anything” since “it’s their currencies that do things” (153–154). John “long[s] to burst out of” this stagnant world of passive fetishism and into “the world of thought and fascination” (123), but in his absolute impotence and exhaustion, “the exhaustion of not knowing anything” (184), the most immediate road to fascination lies precisely in an aestheticisation of money as pure abstraction. If money is fundamentally uncontrollable, it is then best to imagine it as a higher level of experience, well above the base materialism of “primitive creatures” like

8  Post-Fordism and Crisis himself. This is the level inhabited, for example, by Martina’s husband, Ossie, whom John effectively describes as an irrationally exuberant object of fascination: Her English husband Ossie, now he’s rich-for-life but he works in money, in pure money. His job has nothing to do with anything except money, the stuff itself. No fucking around with stocks, shares, commodities, futures. Just money. Sitting in his spectral towers on Sixth Avenue and Cheapside, blond Ossie uses money to buy and sell money. Equipped with only a telephone, he buys money with money, sells money for money. He works in the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange. For these services he is rewarded with money. Lots of it. It is beautiful, and so is he. (120) Monetary self-referentiality reaches its paroxysm here. Described as practically a Nietzschean Übermensch, a blond beast of late capitalism, Ossie charts the unexplored territories of financial abstraction with a phallic confidence (clearly suggested by his natural habitat, those ­“towers on Sixth Avenue and Cheapside”) that continues to elude John in his impotent disorientation and ignorance. Such an extreme cartography of hyper-capitalist masculinity is, nevertheless, as stratospheric in its verticality as it is “spectral”, impermanent, and ambivalent. High finance is a matter of “cracks”, “vents”, and “tides” with no centre of gravity, no solid foundation to properly anchor capitalist accumulation and class power. However, perhaps the character that represents this impermanence and ambiguity best is Fielding Goodney. The presumptive sponsor of John Self’s doomed filmic project, Goodney appears to Self as “money incarnate” in Elie Edmondson’s phrase (2001: 147), a blend of expertise, determination, and sheer deceitfulness that make of him the focal point of mystification in the novel’s treatment of money. In a sense, what John repeatedly describes as the “money conspiracy” of financialised ­capital becomes indistinguishable from the protracted scam perpetrated by Goodney. As Cathryn Setz has noted, he is “a protean, flickering presence across the novel”, a hybrid of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Shakespeare’s Iago whose main character traits come across in “a visceral form of fluidity and physical transformation” (2012: 73). Beyond his main act as Self’s faux mentor, whose ostensible purpose is to bring about John’s downfall by encouraging him to spend on the assumption that his credit is unlimited, Goodney also impersonates an anonymous caller, referred to as “Frank the Phone”, who torments him with unmotivated threats and taunts. But as the character Martin Amis, Self’s occasional confidant and the novel’s pinnacle of narrative self-referentiality, suggests

Post-Fordism and Crisis  9 to him once Fielding’s masquerade as Frank is uncovered, motivation has ceased to function as a prime mover in the present: “Go for a walk in the streets. How much motivation do you see?” (359). According to Colin Hutchinson, “Self may be correct in claiming that he never hurt Frank/Goodney personally, but the nature of the anonymous calls is collective, not personal” (2008: 62). At one point, challenged by John to explain why he keeps “doing this”, Goodney/Frank declares, “Oh, it’s motivation you want. You want motivation. Okay. Here. Have some motivation”: Remember, in Trenton, the school on Budd Street, the pale boy with glasses in the yard? You made him cry. It was me. Last December, Los Angeles, the hired car you were driving when you jumped that light in Coldwater Canyon? A cab crashed and you didn’t stop. The cab had a passenger. It was me. 1978, New York, you were auditioning at the Walden Center, remember? The redhead, you had her strip and then passed her over, and you laughed. It was me. Yesterday you stepped over a bum in Fifth Avenue and you looked down and swore and made to kick. It was me. It was me. (217–218) The irony here is of course that this collective dimension is at the same time premised on the most radical anti-sociality, on a structural condition of violent disarticulation between the classes that renders Goodney’s purported motive immediately void of real political meaning. In the absence of a proper inter-class politics, of an effective structure of command over the process of exploitation and accumulation, what surfaces is a logic of intra-class self-harm. This, I would like to argue, is the precise sense of the novel’s insistence on suicide, from its revealing subtitle (Money: A Suicide Note) to the effective proliferation of suicidal gestures whereby the various representatives of capital in the novel take their accumulated class hatred, in the face of real uncontrollability, out on themselves, as it were. It is therefore instructive to consider the central notion that money is both “wrong” and out of control in the early 1980s alongside, for example, the claim that “[d]ollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes” (116). Indeed, the cash nexus provided by inconvertible paper money in this context is not only devoid of the solidity of Fordist command over productive relations but also an extremely flimsy class link, a weak foundation for the production of a viable post-Fordist subjectivity of capital. What effectively holds this class together is a negative and, from the point of view of their collective interests, essentially suicidal commitment to deceit. We may compare Goodney the con-artist to John’s occasional lover Selina Street, whom he describes as a “sack artist” while pointing out that

10  Post-Fordism and Crisis Modern sack artists aren’t languid Creoles who loll around the boudoir eating chocolates all day, licking their lips and purring, their whiskers flecked with come and cream. No, they’re business heads on business shoulders, keen-sensed and foxy, not young-looking ­either but tough, tanned and weathered. (162) With Selina, ambivalence and duplicity are modulated as sexual attributes, but these continue to appear as tactical means to the sole strategic end of pursuing money. Behind the hyperbolic misogyny of the characterisation, it is not difficult to sense in Selina yet another instance of negativity and intra-class violence. For what emerges as the central quality of this business-mindedness, of the “High Street instincts” which “propel her into the world of money and exchange” (155), is, as in the case of Fielding Goodney, the ability, indeed the “talent”, to deceive John Self, the capitalist everyman of this phase of crisis and uncertain reorganisation, and therefore the “talent” to undermine the subjective foundations of the class as a whole. As she confesses to John after her final betrayal, “You know, it can be good fun deceiving people … You don’t see that because you’re no good at it. You haven’t got the talent” (363). This apparently motiveless self-violence (just like the phone bullying carried out by Goodney/Frank) may be read as one of the internal consequences, for capital, of the breakdown of Fordism. But we should not forget that this crisis was rich in external effects, across class lines, as it were. The collapse of regulation over productive temporalities, rather than the collapse of production as such, as suggested by theorists like Baudrillard, not only exacerbated inequality but also presented the class terms of the resulting social disproportion as increasingly irreducible. While unreality continues to shape and define the experiential universe of self-referential money in the novel, the narrative does not fail to register a harder edge, a much more solid dimension of experience, arising, so to speak, from the depths of working-class disenfranchisement. In the midst of so much confusion and duplicity, the encounter with class otherness in the form of (lumpen)proletarian violence provides a fundamental reality check. From the topical reminder that in 1981 “England has been scalded by tumult and mutiny, by social crack-up” (66) in places like Brixton and Toxteth, to John’s first-hand experience of mugging in Harlem, the enduring notion that “slums bite back” (169), that “[y]ou just cannot go slumming, because slumming pretends that slums aren’t real” (while in fact, he adds, “[t]hey were real. They would show us that much” (114)), continues to impose itself throughout the novel. This particular modulation of inequality reveals, even more flagrantly than John’s own fall back to his humble origins following Goodney’s swindle, the fundamental truth behind the money conspiracy: its sheer inability to absorb this class other into a stable structure of command.

Post-Fordism and Crisis  11 In a book entitled The Mirror of Production, where he first puts forward his controversial analysis of the 1970s crisis, Jean Baudrillard perceptively suggests that, unlike in the previous era of industrial class conflict, where antagonisms were still framed by a general pattern of “integration of labour power as a factor of production” (1975: 133), what the “new social groups, de facto dropouts” demonstrate is precisely the “incapacity of the system to ‘socialize the society’ in its traditionally strategic level” (1975: 133). The lumpen expressions of working-class being, the more obvious manifestations of social disarticulation and rupture in the political fabric of capitalism, pose an undeniable threat to the system, which might at any point “crumble on this non-place, on this disaffected zone” (1975: 133). In Baudrillard’s somewhat apocalyptic reading of the crisis, this external quality of contemporary social conflict is precisely what confirms its superiority over traditional class struggle, which was merely of the order of an internal contradiction (and effectively, in Fordism, a spur to further growth): “Subversion is born there, an elsewhere, whereas contradiction operates at the interior of the system” (1975: 133–134). In a different reading of the 1970s decomposition of the industrial proletariat, André Gorz suggests that the resulting “non-class” “includes all the supernumeraries of present-day social production, who are potentially or actually unemployed, whether permanently or temporarily, partially or completely” (1982: 68). In fact, the “majority of the population now belong to the post-industrial neo-­ proletariat which, with no job security or definite class identity, fill the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment” (1982: 69). The dissolution of Fordist employment is in effect the general backdrop against which the novel is set, with the increasingly prevalent condition of worklessness and precarity clearly pointing towards a dramatic reconfiguration of the working class.12 But in Money, the latter remains an external factor, a limit to effective accumulation whose internal logic is not explored, precisely because what has gone into crisis in the novel’s social universe is the system of coordination and equivalence that made class relations the motor of capitalist accumulation in the post-war period. Read in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the protracted recessionary cycle it led to, and against a literary landscape that seems to have metabolised its social outcomes into recognisable generic patterns, Amis’s Money offers a particularly intriguing insight into the earlier stages of that long historical cycle of capitalist reorganisation and turbulence we now often describe with the term neoliberalism. Beyond the emphasis on commodification and individualism, what is particularly distinctive about Amis’s intervention is, precisely, its entropic depiction of social dynamics and its representation of class relations in dramatically negative terms, through figures of disarticulation, rupture, and violence. In this sense, the (ultimately semiotic) problem of monetary

12  Post-Fordism and Crisis self-referentiality emerges as only secondary to the political problem of command and class subjectivation. Although it is indeed a prescient fiction of the 1980s, of financial deregulation and expanding neoliberal policy, Money is also, and perhaps even more importantly, an incisive investigation of the politico-institutional edifice that capital sought to dismantle, with dramatic consequences (initially also for itself), throughout the long 1970s.

Cyber-capitalism and the Outside: Hari Kunzru’s Transmission I want to turn, in the second part of this chapter, to a novel that can be read as a companion volume, published 20 years later, to Amis’s Money: Hari Kunzru’s 2004 Transmission. There are multiple similarities between the two novels, not least in terms of characterisation and in an overriding thematic preoccupation with immateriality in post-Fordist capitalism. One significant difference, however, concerns the detailed exploration, in Transmission, of a particular evolution of that “post-­ industrial neo-proletariat” described by Gorz in the quotation above, namely that globally mobile, and often precarious labour force referred to in contemporary social analysis as the “cybertariat” (Huws 2001, 2014) or “cyber-proletariat” (Dyer-Witheford 2015). In contrast to Amis’s novel, this class figure does not appear as an external limit to an otherwise uncertain accumulation process where finance seems to self-reproduce. In this context, rather, capital’s class other is rediscovered at the strategic core of the valorisation process. To put it schematically, in Transmission, the working class, understood first and foremost as a transnational agent of value production, comes first, while capital comes second. As a result, the treatment of money as an immaterial and virtual entity is not so easily construed as an attempt to extricate capital from proletarian conflict. For indeed the latter manifests itself in a capillary, diffuse, and ultimately viral manner (a bottom-up expression of the fluid and globally dispersed articulation of labour) which both conditions and neutralises capital’s financial strategy. Transmission begins by reconstructing, through the misadventures of its protagonist Arjun Mehta, the subcontracting practice known as body shopping. As described by Xiang Biao in a major study of the phenomenon, Body shopping is arguably a uniquely Indian practice whereby an ­Indian-run consultancy (body shop) anywhere in the world recruits IT workers, in most cases from India, to be placed out as project-based labor with different clients. Unlike conventional recruitment agents who introduce employees to employers, body shops manage workers on behalf of employers – from sponsoring their temporary work visas to paying their salaries, arranging for accommodation and the like. (Biao 2006: 4)

Post-Fordism and Crisis  13 The novel traces the contradictions pertaining to this rather extreme form of labour mobility, where the promise of status as a highly qualified expatriate professional clashes with the brutal realities of precarious and intermittent employment. The ambivalent class position and identity of the migrant information technology (IT) worker is in effect at the centre of this novel’s examination of post-Fordism, suggesting a far more complex and dynamic configuration of class relations than the one we found in Amis’s Money. As we discover a few pages into the book, Arjun’s family are clearly middle-class, his father having recently switched jobs from ­provincial “government service” to “the private sector” in New Delhi: “The ­Mehtas were no longer the family of a small-town administrator but modern people, participants in the great Indian boom” (2005: 15). Himself equipped with a university degree from “a middle-ranking school which had the compensatory advantage (…) of allowing him to live at home while he studied” (15), Arjun’s position is, at first sight, not even remotely identifiable as working class. On the contrary, in the polarised and extremely diverse social landscape of early twenty-first-century New Delhi, the contrast between this aspiring and globally minded class fraction of young middle-class university graduates and the lower strata of the local working class is immediately apparent.13 Thus, for example, as he distractedly walks into the main offices of the aptly named consultancy Databodies for his job interview, daydreaming about the effects of globalisation with a mental image of “the globe contracting like a deflating beach ball” (6), what calls him back to reality is the banal but effective reminder of a lower-class presence that is presumably still prevalent in this context: “[the image of the globe] was punctured by a cleaner pushing a mop over his toes” (6). On the other hand, the aspirational middle-class horizon of the bodyshopped consultant is represented by Arjun’s interviewer, Sunny Srinivasan: “From his gelled hair to his lightly burnished penny loafers, every particular of his appearance carried a set of aspirational associations” (8). Less a human resources manager than a “channel for the transmission of consumer lifestyle messages”, Arjun obtains from him a readymade image of America as the focus of these middle-class associations, the “Residence of the Non-Resident Indian”, and as such, an improvement on his father’s own upward mobility. The revelation that the terms implied by the body shopping system are far less promising, placing him in fact alongside the more impoverished and excluded sections of the American proletariat, may not be enough to dispel this basic class identification of Arjun Mehta as professional, white-collar, and ultimately middle-class.14 However, a more integrated perspective on the productive relations of post-Fordist globalisation would invite a different analysis, past the external signs of identification in terms of background, training, or ­status.15 In a context where the valorisation and accumulation processes

14  Post-Fordism and Crisis of capitalism are shown to be increasingly reliant on immaterial assets, from the value of a brand to that of the potential for innovation ­(Moulier Boutang 2011: 32), the living labour supplied by the precariously ­employed Indian software programmer is all the more readable as a strategic site for the generation and extortion of surplus value, and consequently, as a paradigmatically post-Fordist expression of the Marxian category of the proletariat (Fuchs 2010: 181). Moreover, as we will see, Transmission presents the relationship between this cyber-labour and global capital as a fundamentally antagonistic one. But in order to fully comprehend the implications of this antagonistic relation in what theorists such as Carlo Vercellone (2007) and Yann Moulier Boutang (2011) describe as “cognitive capitalism”, we first need to grasp the topological structure that properly defines it. Thus, the singularity of body-shopping, and more generally of the global cybertariat, is its paradoxical location with respect to capital and its valorising processes. I want to argue that the novel’s articulation of what could be described as class struggle in the form of hacking centrally engages the ambiguous positionality of cognitive (or cybernetic) living labour as simultaneously inside and outside the system of production. This is in fact one of the crucially distinctive features of post-Fordism, especially in its so-called cognitive or informational manifestations. The economic concept of externalities or external effects has been repeatedly invoked to account for this peculiarity in the relationship between labour and capital in contemporary processes of valorisation. Moulier Boutang provides the following general definition: [W]henever a transaction T1 between two agents A and B results in the production of an EX1 effect on another party or parties that are not taken into account, one has a production of externalities or external effects. In current terminology we refer to collateral effects, by-products or joint production. If the effect in question increases the resources, wellbeing or power of action of one or several other agents, we call this a positive externality. If the effect diminishes the resources, well-being, or the power of action and causes damage to third parties, we call it a negative externality. (2011: 22) The characteristic precarity of the IT worker described by Kunzru’s novel can be understood rather precisely in the light of this notion. First, the body-shopping system presupposes an explicitly external and indirect managing of labour. Recruited by Databodies in New Delhi, Arjun is flown to America, assigned accommodation (for which he has to pay), and put “on the bench” (40) as part of a larger, highly qualified, and fully prepared, reserve army of labour awaiting their first actual job offer from a local company.16

Post-Fordism and Crisis  15 But more generally, the labour of the computer programmer, as the novel goes on to show, is an irreducibly external, and potentially ­v iral, factor of production that cannot be directly accounted for in traditional economic terms. Arjun is eventually hired by Virugenix, a “global ­computer-security specialist” (53) and “new-economy success story” (55), to work as an “assistant tester” with the anti-virus team. The novel’s description of the latter offers an ironic but rather pointed observation on the paradoxical nature of a work dynamic that is simultaneously individualistic and collective, spatially fixed and eminently mobile and diffuse. Thus, against a general background of global digital interconnectedness, of shared technical languages and processes rising above national and cultural borders, the actual labour of the programmer is shown to be conducted under conditions of extreme isolation: “Everyone left their phones on voicemail and most wore headsets while they worked, creating a private sonic space that was, according to custom, violated only in an emergency. Interaction was via email, even if the participants occupied neighbouring cubicles” (56–57). Despite the physical location of the AV team in the company headquarters, this pathology-­i nducing17 pseudo-­Taylorisation of cognitive work cultivates a fiction of individual control over code, a fiction, we could say, of internalisation of the product of labour: When you write code you are in control. You construct a world from first principles, drawing up the axioms that govern it, setting in motion the engines of generation and decay. Even in a computer environment designed by someone else you can relax, safe in the knowledge that you are engaged with a system that runs according to potentially knowable rules. (103) Of course, the central twist in the plot, Arjun’s creation of the Leela virus following his redundancy, emphasises the truly external and ultimately uncontrollable nature of this labour, which is no longer directly attributable to an individual worker or even assignable as an internal ­position within the productive process. There is a precise temporal dimension to this external quality of digital labour since, as Franco Berardi has written, in fact “Capital no longer recruits people, it buys packets of time (…) De-personalized time is now the real agent of the process of  valorization” (2009: 192). In this context, not only is the product of cyber-labour no longer properly measurable as it had been throughout the Fordist era in terms of working time, but more importantly, it immediately becomes impersonal, abstract, and yet autonomous by virtue of its own virality, rhizomatically expanding and mutating beyond any anchoring point inside the circuit of value. The

16  Post-Fordism and Crisis true ontology of the virus finally becomes apparent halfway through the novel: The truth is that Leela was not one thing. She was not even a set or a group or family. She was a swarm, a horde. At the same time as Leela01 was being spread via email, other Leelas, other things with her face, were being uploaded to shareware sites, were tunnelling their way into webservers to be doled out as Applets, were propagating at a phenomenal rate through peer-to-peer networks. There were versions of her that broke completely with the past, that were targeted at the complex operating systems used by businesses and universities, at the stripped-down ones designed for cellphone handsets and personal organizers (…) The glory of all these variants, the glamour that caught so many people unawares, lay in their power of metamorphosis. (113) As Liam Connell has noted, “the destruction that the Leela virus causes is produced by its reuse of existing elements of code to create entirely new messages, and particularly messages which oppose the original purpose of the code” (2010: 285). While this would effectively suggest, as Connell indicates, the presence of a strategy of détournement in the Situationist sense of reusing “preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble”, with the ultimate political goal of “disrupt[ing] the coherence” of the sanctioned technical construct or language (285), the narrative all but precludes the possibility of ascribing this strategy to an individual subject. Precisely what the recombinant logic of the virus produces is a multitudinous and metamorphic entity, “a swarm, a horde” that is neither “one thing” nor “a group or family”. The collective dimension of the virus is not the result of aggregation or enactment by an external force as the industrial proletariat had been in relation to capital, for example.18 It is, on the contrary, entirely external and therefore autonomous from proprietary principles. We could even say that the virus is not dissimilar from the lumpenproletarian groups alluded to in Amis’s Money, dangerous, shape-shifting, and abstractly collective at the same time as effectively destabilising of “the original purpose of the code”, as Connell (2010: 285) says.19 Unsurprisingly, once Leela begins to realise its metamorphic and destructive potential, Arjun Mehta disappears from the foreground of the narrative, ultimately turning into a vague symbol of oppositionality for various groups. 20 This is an interesting shift in the plot that would suggest a further development of the antagonism (beyond the observable markers of class) between what Vercellone calls the “living knowledge” mobilised by cognitive or digital labour and the “dead knowledge” embodied in capital (2007: 33). Thus, the apparent contradiction between Arjun’s class origins and his actual precariousness as a body-shopped

Post-Fordism and Crisis  17 programmer is resolved by the novel in this manner. The “abstract l­abour”, 21 to use the precise Marxian terminology, produced by the worker in what are but effective conditions of network cooperation, through shared technological conventions and languages, returns to the public or common space of the infosphere in the radically externalised and no longer appropriable form of a computer virus. The viral living knowledge of the cyberproletarian thus becomes a cipher for the crisis of capitalist command. The novel’s economy of opposites pits this logic of uncontrollable publicness embodied in the virus to the stylised individualism of Guy Swift. On this point, Transmission seems to faithfully replicate the narrative strategy of Money. A John Self figure upgraded to the hype of the digital age, Swift stands for everything that is “personalized, individual, signature” (119). The emphasis on hyper-consumerist self-referentiality thus remains a central component in the characterisation of the post-Fordist homo economicus. But this new Self differs from his early 1980s predecessor in that his equally fetishistic relationship to money appears to be subordinated to a more assertive temporal strategy. Thus, while Amis’s protagonist was essentially defined by an inability to grasp, and therefore control, the accelerated movements of financialised money, Swift, as the name suggests, is presented as the epitome of globalised capitalist ­velocity. Another New Economy success story (like Virugenix), Guy’s global advertising company is tellingly named Tomorrow*, and its corporate vision amounts to a programmatic commitment to speed and f­ uturity (since “in today’s fast-moving future the worst place to do business is the past” (20)). Beyond the satirical effect of the hyperbole surrounding this character, there is a clear sense of urgency and ­apprehension in the face of an economic process that is felt as essentially ungovernable: When, like Guy, you put yourself ahead of the curve, you live in the future. Literally. How else are you to understand it? It is as if you have become subject to a freak physical effect, a blurring which stretches you out beyond the trivial temporality of the unpersonalized masses of the earth. (…) When Guy slept, he dreamed of tall buildings. He knew that the tiniest lapse of concentration, the smallest failure of response, could send him tumbling down towards the place of discount clothing outlets, woodchip wallpaper and economy chicken pieces. (22) In a way that connects with Money’s insistence on the fragility of its affluent universe, there is an anxious recognition here that the temporal structure of anticipation on which the capitalist’s very survival depends is far from stable, and that the consequences of failure in this context are no less dire than those found in Amis’s novel. Yet the sources of instability no longer lie in the mere abstraction of money from production,

18  Post-Fordism and Crisis but rather in the eminently social nature of the productive factors at the heart of the valorisation process. Behind the temporal hyperbole and the marketing rhetoric, Guy’s corporate strategy of “deep branding” (built on the assumption that, since human beings “are social” and “need relationships”, a “brand is the perfect way to come together” (21)) suggests a strategic targeting of immaterial resources, an external pool of cognitive and emotional responses, of know-how and “invention power” (Lazzarato 1996; Moulier Boutang 2011: 32), that the capitalist sets out to capture. Although there is a far more explicit treatment of the link between accumulation and production here than there was in Money, and indeed a more assertive exploration of the valorising opportunities offered by social intelligence and affectivity, the profound structural instability inherent in immateriality produces similarly ironic results for the representation of the capitalist class. There is, for example, a running comparison between Guy’s idiosyncratic work with brands and old forms of industrial labour. At one point we learn how “Guy liked to take new members of staff to stand by” an “antique industrial sewing machine” presiding over “the brainstorm zone”: “Your inspiration should come from there, he would tell them. That hunk of metal understands the true meaning of work” (124). In a further twist, Guy describes the task of capturing externalities in the form of “emotions, relationships and sense of self” through branding as “getting one’s hands dirty at the brandface” (122). Behind the irony of the comparison with coalmining, however, there is an implicit and absolutely pertinent focalisation on the extractive logic at the heart of capitalist relations of production in this context. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have emphasised the growing importance of extraction, both in the literal sense of a renewed interest in primary economic activities, including mining and intensive farming, and in the figurative sense suggested by Transmission of capturing immaterial resources from society. They have drawn attention to the fact that this strategic reliance on extraction presupposes a new dynamic interaction between capital and its “multiple outsides” that cannot be reduced to a traditional Marxist understanding in terms of “spaces (…) or materials ‘not yet’ subdued to domination and appropriation by capital” (2017: 200). On the contrary, as Mezzadra and Neilson suggest, an examination of the different ways in which “[e]xtractive operations relate to their outsides” entails a deeper understanding of the manner “in which these outsides are produced from within capital” (200). What this indicates is a relation of immanence in the process of valorisation that may at first be occluded by the extraordinary enlargement of the sphere of production implied by immaterial activities. But this ­immanence, I want to argue, is what lies at the centre of the novel’s strategy, and it is precisely what distinguishes its formalisation of the class antagonism in post-Fordist capitalism from Amis’s approach, for example. After all, what brings

Post-Fordism and Crisis  19 together the various experiential fragments of the novel’s global landscape is nothing but the literal production of an outside from within the global chain of production of informational capital. The Leela virus is not, in this sense, a space yet to be subdued or colonised, as Mezzadra and Neilson say, or a pure zone of exteriority generated by the ­collapse of Fordism’s social-productive time as the ­urban lumpenproletariat was in Money. Rather, the virus is an internal short-­circuiting of the system’s very interconnectedness, a multitudinous diffraction of accumulated social intelligence resulting in “a furring of the global ­arteries” (176). With the virus, we could say, the productive ­potentiality  – the living labour – mobilised by the system as an external social resource returns as an inassimilable, non-commodifiable surplus. Capital’s crisis of command is no longer a problem of discipline over the temporal structure of ­exploitation (or, as in Money, of the destructive potential released by the disarticulation of this temporality), but the c­ umulative effect of a disproportion in value, the result of an excess generated at the heart of capital but without the effective control of capital.22 Transmission’s crisis is, as its title suggests, a crisis in/of circulation. Precisely because circulation is revealed as productive (in contrast with the industrial-capitalist context in which circulation represented a differentiated moment), the generative movement of value is processed by the system as simultaneously its most intimate centre and a hostile outside, as both its lifeblood and a pathogenic outbreak. 23 In a context of generalised acceleration, the collapse of Fordist time is rediscovered as a topological or spatial problematic. The subverted hierarchy between inside and outside, between centre and periphery, pointed up by the global circulation of value (especially in its immaterial forms) furnishes capital with an extraordinary opportunity for accumulation at the same time as it confronts it with a major problem of political governance. This central paradox is explored in the final sections of the novel as the border becomes a central image of its narrative resolution. Guy’s last great project, an advertising campaign for a European Union (EU) scheme of external border reinforcement and immigration control, succumbs to the global destruction sown by the Leela virus (as his computer crashes during the pitch presentation) at the same time that it casts the very idea of the border as irreducibly contradictory and unstable. Guy suggests that “in the twenty-first century the border is not just a line on the earth any more. It’s so much more than that. It’s about status. It’s about opportunity. Sure, you’re either inside or outside, but you can be on the inside and still be outside, right? Or on the outside looking in” (252). Once again, lurking behind the satirical glibness, there is an important observation on the political instability inherent in capitalist globalisation, since against the complex background of labour ­mobility and restructuration of the valorisation process beyond traditional distinctions between inside and outside, the nature of sovereignty is

20  Post-Fordism and Crisis dramatically modified. The EU itself is presented as an extremely problematic institutional construct in which “the physical has been ruthlessly subordinated to the immaterial” (249) in a way that seems to faithfully transcribe the post-Fordist logic of capitalist accumulation. Deprived of its national-statist coherence, the border is here torn between a farcical iteration of the problem of status that we encountered at the beginning of the novel and its construction as a strategic nexus in the productive matrix of global capital. For Guy, “[c]itizenship is about being one of the gang, or as we like to say at Tomorrow*, ‘in with the in crowd’” (253). In other words, national sovereignty is voided of political content and saturated, to the point of parody, with the semantics of class identification. But in the context of global body-shopping and precarious cyber-labour, borders continue to play a crucial role in the structuring of productive relations, generating new entanglements and distributions beyond the political fixities of the past. In this context, as Mezzadra and Neilson note, the border should not be regarded as synonymous with the wall, that is, “as a device that serves first and foremost to exclude” (2013: 7), but as a far more dynamic political technology. Under the globalising pressures of capital, borders are not sovereign apparatuses supporting the international division of labour but productive matrices leading to what these authors describe as a contemporary “multiplication of labour”. 24 In effect, the general problematic presented by the novel can be summarised as a substitution of multiplication for division, of proliferation and speed (in the form of capital, but also, crucially, of potentially viral abstract labour) for political regulation and state control. With the sovereign logic of exclusion and containment giving way to a much more ambivalent dynamic of accelerated circulation, Transmission posits disappearance as a probable outcome and general figure of crisis resulting precisely from this violent dynamic. In a sense, the novel’s inconclusive dénouement rests on a series of disappearances offering an inverted image of capitalist ­proliferation. ­Following his failed presentation, Guy Swift is caught up in an ­immigration raid (part of the border control scheme he had intended to work for) at an illegal brothel in Brussels and is subsequently deported to Albania as his identity is mistaken on the Leela-infected EU databases for that of a suspected criminal. For his part, Arjun Mehta is briefly shown at the US–Mexico border, which “[f]or days”, as the narrator points out, “had acted as the outer limit of his imagination” (267). Such a notorious symbol of national sovereignty and state power paradoxically becomes a site of intractable mobility, for it is precisely at this point in the novel that Arjun disappears for good. Moreover, Leela Zahir, the Bollywood superstar on whom Arjun had originally modelled the eponymous virus, also disappears while filming on location in Scotland. Yet these physical, personal, and individualisable disappearances are only, as the narrator observes, “part of a much larger pattern of virus-related disturbance”

Post-Fordism and Crisis  21 (275), including the climactic point of the Leela crisis, Greyday, which the narrator describes as a “moment of maximal uncertainty” when “a certain amount of money simply ceased to exist” (272). We could say that these concrete, individual disappearances transcribe the crisis in/ of capitalist circulation at the fictional level of character, revealing the fundamental inability of the system of accumulation, but also that of narrative representation, to regulate and control their own generative flows in the absence of an overarching subjective principle. What the novel demonstrates with its lack of resolution is, as Philip Leonard has noted, that “generically as well as thematically, representation fails” since “what happens in this novel becomes lost or erased, as though by a virus” (2014: 284). We might qualify this by adding that precisely what fails and becomes lost is the possibility of individualising agency (especially value-­ producing agency). By denying itself a dénouement befitting its realist mode, Transmission dramatises the topological structure of contemporary capitalist crisis: there is no room for transcendence (of a ­narrative or political-­economic kind) when the outside is rediscovered as the most intimate inside, as the productive lifeblood of the system. The capture of the external, the enclosure of the outside, which for so long has been one of the basic aspirations of capital, becomes in the context of post-­Fordism a problem of disproportion and uncontrollability. With the rise, indeed with the multiplication, of cognitive, immaterial, and otherwise intractable forms of labour, the sphere of circulation becomes ­ubiquitous and inescapable, an extending inside of capital that nevertheless ­continues to generate its own outsides.

Notes 1 The Oxford Dictionary of Finance and Banking offers the following definition of Gresham’s law: “The maxim named after the 16th-century adviser to the royal court, Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519–1579), that ‘bad money drives out good money, but that good money does not drive out bad’. It arose from the once widespread practice of ‘clipping’ gold and silver coins (i.e. removing shavings from the edges of the coins) or of counterfeiting gold and silver coins. The bad coins (clipped or counterfeit coins) tended to be passed on quickly, whereas the good coins were retained or hoarded” (Law 2015: n.p.). 2 The reference to “sado-monetarism” has been taken up and explored in relation to Money by Nicky Marsh (2007) and Joseph Brooker (2012). Jackson Ayres, for his part, suggests that Money effectively “anticipates Thatcherism’s amplification” throughout the 1980s (2014: 62). 3 While it could be argued that Amis the public intellectual is far less openly critical of capitalism as a social and economic system than this novel, his verdict on late twentieth-century developments, typically expressed as a moral indictment of Thatcherism, is damning. For example, in a 1990 interview with The New York Times, he claims, “I think Thatcher has done a lot of harm. The money age we’re living through now is a short-term, futureless kind of prosperity that will last as long as North Sea oil lasts. But it’s really

22  Post-Fordism and Crisis a ‘live now, pay later’ thing” (Stout 1990). It is worth insisting, however, that Amis’s rejection, in interviews and other non-fictional expressions, of Thatcher and the neoliberal ethos of the late 1970s and 1980s falls short of the broader historical focus and incisive analysis articulated by the novel. 4 As Marx explains in Capital, gold “has historically conquered” the “advantageous position” of functioning as a general or “universal equivalent” against which all other commodities can be measured (1990: 162). For Marx, and classical political economy in general, money is inseparable from this role as general equivalent “within the world of commodities” (1990: 162) and, as such, tends to be synonymous with gold. The end of the gold standard will therefore also mark the end of this understanding of money as a particular commodity elevated to the position of a general or universal equivalent. 5 Thus, for example, Goux points out in one of his seminal interventions that “[j]ust as nominal money has value only in relation to other signs in a system, and its convertibility into a unit of intrinsic, real value is always ­deferred, likewise language becomes a system of pure values, with no roots in things and in no way deriving sense from the simple operation of direct designation of an object” (1988: 20). 6 Michael Tratner (2003) has uncovered a revealing affinity between ­Derridean deconstruction and monetarist economic theory. 7 This period is sometimes referred to with the French expression coined by economist Jean Fourastié (1979), “les trente glorieuses”, that is, the “glorious thirty” years between 1945 and 1975. 8 For an overview of this approach, see, for example, Robert Boyer and Yves Saillard (2002). A more recent summation can be found in Boyer (2015). 9 The concept of proletarian self-valorisation, deployed by militant (especially Italian) Marxists at the height of the 1970s crisis, specifically alluded to this tendential disarticulation between working-class use-values and the logic of Fordist accumulation. In Toni Negri’s words, “When we say self-­ valorization, we mean the alternative that the working class sets in motion on the terrain of production and reproduction, by appropriating power and reappropriating wealth, in opposition to the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and development” (2005: 255, italics in the original). This will become an important concept in my discussion of reproduction narratives below. 10 In the Marxist tradition, the term “lumpenproletariat” (translatable as the “ragged” or, alternatively, “knavish” proletariat) typically refers to those lower social strata whose ambiguous position in the class structure configures them as a potentially reactionary force. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, but also with the emergence of new forms of class struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, the concept was to some extent rehabilitated. See Stallybrass (1990) and Thoburn (2002). 11 Money offers a sustained rebuke to monetarism’s claims of scientificity and political neutrality. For a recent critical assessment of the latter, see Ho-fung Hung and Daniel Thompson (2016). 12 References to precarity (or precariousness) have become a staple of contemporary analyses of working and living conditions. The erosion of the stable employment model consecrated by Fordism has been described by leading commentators such as Guy Standing as part of “an agenda for transferring risks and insecurity onto workers and families. The result has been the creation of a global ‘precariat’, consisting of many millions around the world without an anchor of stability” (2011: 1). For a recent literary investigation of this increasingly prominent notion (and social reality), see Connell (2017).

Post-Fordism and Crisis  23 13 As noted by early twenty-first-century commentators on the Indian economic boom, “the very criteria of recruitment of these workers as of today are such that they are from two-income families, most from ‘white collar’ parents, people with an education in English and so on. This today at least excludes people from lower castes, people from the rural areas, and people whose parents are from what may be called the ‘traditional working-class’ families’” (Gothoskar, quoted in Huws 2001: 18). 14 It is nevertheless true that Arjun’s subsequent discovery of race as an organising principle of class dynamics in American society in practice redraws the boundaries of this initial class affiliation. As we read soon after his arrival in California, “The idea of American poverty, especially a poverty which did not exclude cars, refrigerators, cable TV or obesity, was a new and disturbing paradox, a hint that something ungovernable and threatening lurked beneath the reflective surface of California (…) When he went to ‘middle-class’ areas (middle class being, he had discovered, an American word for white) he felt overwhelmed” (43). 15 Note that the Marxist notion of class is distinguished from other, sociological and arguably less politically sensitive, formulations by its relational nature. As leading Marxist historian E.P. Thompson famously put it, “the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure” (1991: 8). 16 The contractual novelty introduced by this system is in effect, as Xiang Biao notes, that “workers do not enter into any direct relationships with their contract employers and can be retrenched at any time” (2006: 4). According to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “This system of benching and the creation of a virtual shortage implicit in it can be understood as a technology for the timing and pacing of IT labor supply with respect to demand” (2013: 136). 17 This pathological quality of alienation is almost regarded as a measure of the value of each worker’s labour power: “Asperger’s was a badge of honour (…) Gradually a competition developed, as people tried to prove that their own special cocktail of dysfunctional personality traits was casually connected to professional brilliance” (59). 18 As Marx reminds us apropos of cooperation in the factory, “the co-­operation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them. Their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, lies outside their competence. These things are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings them together and maintains them in that situation. Hence the interconnection between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose” (1990: 450). 19 Note that Baudrillard spoke about the revolt waged by the excluded social groups precisely in these terms: “Segregated, discriminated against, ­satellitized – they are gradually relegated to a position of non-marked terms by the structuration of the system as a code. Their revolt thus aims at the abolition of this code (…)” (1975: 134). 20 “The figures of the outlaw and the unrecognized genius are dear to many in the computer underground, and Mehta (combining both) has become a hero to a younger generation of disaffected hackers” (287). Moreover, “A series of autonomist tracts written in Italian and signed with his name caused a huge stir in left-wing European political circles”, while “In recent times”, the

24  Post-Fordism and Crisis narrator informs us, “‘Arjun Mehta’ has authored statements on the food industry and the World Trade Organization” (287). 21 John Holloway has recapitulated this notion as the central focus of antagonism in capitalism, defining it thus: “Abstract labour is labour seen in abstraction from its particular characteristics (…) Abstract labour is labour devoid of particularity, devoid of meaning. It produces the society of capital, in which the only meaning is the accumulation of abstract labour, the constant pursuit of profit” (2017: 221). For a sustained theoretical examination of this concept in Marx, see Bonefeld (2010). 22 Brian Massumi names this excess “affect”: “Affect is a name for factors that make their mark on market dynamics while overspilling them, that modulate economic logic without belonging to it as such. A better way to capture affect’s fraught status than to say that it is an externality is to say that it is the market’s immanent outside. This term points to the fact that there are factors that belong to capitalism’s field but do not belong to its system” (2018: n.p.). 23 For a reading of Transmission’s metaphorics of contagion and viral proliferation in relation to the AIDS pandemic, see Brock (2008). 24 “It is certainly still possible to speak of a global division of labor connecting (as well as dividing) workers employed within specific productive cycles and commodity chains. But the concept of an international division of labor is becoming less relevant due to processes of heterogenization that single out ‘regions’ more than nations as significant economic units” (2013: 92).

References Aglietta, Michel. (2015) A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. London: Verso. Amis, Martin. (1985) Money: A Suicide Note. London: Penguin. Ayres, Jackson. (2014) “Confirming the New Orthodoxy: Martin Amis’s Money and Thatcherism”. Twentieth-Century Literature 60.1: 59–78. Baudrillard, Jean. (1975) The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos Press. Baudrillard, Jean. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: SAGE. Begley, Jon. (2004) “Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism: The Transatlantic and Dialogic Structure of Martin Amis’s Money”. Contemporary Literature 45.1: 79–105. Berardi, Franco. (2009) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. New York: Semiotexte. Beynon, Huw. (1973) Working for Ford. London: Allen Lane. Biao, Xiang. (2006) Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bonefeld, Werner. (2010) “Abstract Labour: Against Its Nature and on Its Time”. Capital and Class 34.2: 257–276. Boyer, Robert. (2015) Économie politique des capitalismes: Théorie de la régulation et des crises. Paris: La Découverte. Boyer, Robert and Yves Saillard (eds.). (2002) Régulation Theory: The State of the Art. London: Routledge. Brock, Richard. (2008) “An ‘Onerous Citizenship’: Globalization, Cultural Flows and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.4: 379–390.

Post-Fordism and Crisis  25 Brooker, Joseph. (2006) “Satire Bust: The Wagers of Money”. Law & Literature 17.3: 321–344. Brooker, Joseph. (2012) “Sado-monetarism: Thatcherite subjects in Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis”. Textual Practice 26.1: 135–154. Connell, Liam. (2010) “E-terror: Computer Viruses, Class and Transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.3–4: 279–290. Connell, Liam. (2017) Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. (2015) Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto Press. Edmonson, Elie. (2001). “Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.2: 145–154. Fourastié, Jean. (1979) Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. Fuchs, Christian. (2010) “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet”. The Information Society 26: 179–196. Gorz, André. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-­Industrial Socialism, trans. Michael Sonenscher. London: Pluto. Goux, Jean-Joseph. (1988) “Banking on Signs”, trans. Thomas DiPiero. Diacritics 18.2: 15–25. “Gresham’s Law”. (2015) A Dictionary of Finance and Banking, ed. Jonathan Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holloway, John. (1996) “The Abyss Opens: The Rise and Fall of ­Keynesianism”. Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money. Ed. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Holloway, John. (2017) We Are the Crisis of Capital. Oakland: PM Press. Hung, Ho-fung and Daniel Thompson. (2016) “Money Supply, Class Power, and Inflation: Monetarism Reassessed”. American Sociological Review 81.3: 447–466. Hutchinson, Colin. (2008) Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Huws, Ursula. (2001) “The Making of a Cybertariat? Virtual Work in a Real World”. Socialist Register 37: 1–23. Huws, Ursula. (2014) Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lazzarato, Maurizio. (1996) “Immaterial Labor”. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leonard, Philip. (2014) “‘A Revolution in Code’? Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and the Cultural Politics of Hacking”. Textual Practice 28.2: 267–287. Marazzi, Christian. (1996) “Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power”. Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money. Ed. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Marsh, Nicky. (2007) Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction. London: Continuum. Marsh, Nicky. (2012) “Money’s doubles: reading, fiction and finance capital”. Textual Practice 26.1: 115–133. Marx, Karl. (1990) Capital Volume I. London: Penguin.

26  Post-Fordism and Crisis Massumi, Brian. (2018) 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://manifold.umn. edu/read/99-theses-on-the-revaluation-of-value/section/7a105a04-8cb54b6f-8818-2ca4cd070862 (last accessed 1 April 2019). Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Value. Durham: Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. (2017) “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism”. Cultural Studies 31.2–3: 185–204. Moulier Boutang, Yann. (2011) Cognitive Capitalism. London: Polity Press. Negri, Antonio. (1989) The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-­ First Century. London: Polity Press. Negri, Antonio. (2005) Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. London: Verso. Setz, Cathryn. (2012) “Money Men”. Textual Practice 26.1: 63–77. Stallybrass, Peter. (1990) “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat”. Representations 31: 69–95. Standing, Guy. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Stout, Mira. (1990) “Martin Amis: Down London’s Mean Streets”. The New York Times Magazine 4 February. Thoburn, Nicholas. (2002) “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnameable”. Economy and Society 31.3: 434–460. Thompson, E. P. (1991) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin Books. Tratner, Michael. (2003) “Derrida’s Debt to Milton Friedman”. New Literary History 34.4: 791–806. Vercellone, Carlo. (2007) “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: ­Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism”. ­Historical Materialism 15.1: 13–36.

2 Subjects of Abstraction

Phantasms of Finance: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis As we saw in Chapter 1, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission bases its topological characterisation of crisis in post-Fordist cyber-capitalism on the notion that pervasive and accelerated circulation confounds traditional relations between inside and outside, but also between profitability and political control. The boundless possibilities for valorisation generated under conditions of immaterial production at a global scale nevertheless entail, as the novel suggests, a profound sense of intractability. In this context, the computer virus emerges as a privileged trope combining an imaginary of pathogenic proliferation and an emblem of technological autonomisation. But perhaps most importantly, what this novel intimates, both formally and thematically, is the idea that the representation of post-Fordist capitalism requires a serious consideration of abstraction. Thus, the relevant point about the growing immateriality of labour raised by Transmission concerns its tendential detachment from the production of concrete use-values and its increasing identification with the circulatory movement of exchange-value in a context of digital interconnectedness. At the narrative level, this imposes a restriction on the epistemological immediacy of realist representation, since capital itself is discovered as that which cannot be subjectivised, indeed as an unruly dynamic whose ambivalent topological structure denies the novel formal closure. The uncontrollable immanence of capital identified by the viral imaginary of circulation presents disappearance (the vanishing of Arjun Mehta, Guy Swift, and Leela Zahir) as the only possible conclusion. The literal fading of the novel’s various subjective anchoring points therefore emerges as the realist novel’s response to the predominance of abstraction. In fact, abstraction is effectively narrativised through a general substitution of viral circulation for individuated experience, whether as concrete (precarious) labour in the case of Arjun Mehta or as conspicuous consumption in that of Swift. The first novel I discuss in this chapter offers a precise inversion of this substitution. Don DeLillo’s 2003 Cosmopolis narrates a day in the life of currency trader Eric Packer, a much more archetypal representation of the post-Fordist financier than either John Self or Guy Swift. Set in

28  Subjects of Abstraction 2000, DeLillo’s novel may be considered, as Mark Osteen has pointed out, “even more timely” in the post-2008 world “than it was in 2003”, as “it plumbs the psychology and social role of the traders and financiers who engineered the crisis” (2014: 293). Indeed, this novel’s preoccupation with the psychology or, more generally, with the subjective universe of the financial speculator accounts for its very different narrative treatment of capitalist abstraction from those of Amis and Kunzru. While Transmission opted for a materialist interpretation of the dominance of circulation in post-Fordist capitalism, with viral proliferation and destruction enacting a very material corollary to its ­presumptive immateriality, financial abstraction is constructed in Cosmopolis primarily as a phenomenological and psychic undertaking, as we will see. Amis’s Money, it is worth recalling, also addressed the problem of cognition surrounding the rise of free-floating currencies and financial self-­referentiality. But this was articulated in terms of opacity and disorientation, as a fundamental failure in the collective subjectivity of capital. In Money, the crisis was fundamentally presented as one of political coordination between the classes. The phenomenology of confusion embodied in its protagonist was a symptom of the overarching fracture in capitalism’s temporality of control, which in turn resulted in a social imaginary of extreme and inassimilable exteriority. Financial abstraction was therefore nothing but the discursive index of a critical bifurcation in capitalism, with living labour (and, implicitly, the sphere of use-value that stemmed from it) following a course of violent marginalisation while capital became increasingly synonymous with cognitive impenetrability and subjective destitution. Perhaps the most striking difference between Amis’s and DeLillo’s novels is the way in which abstraction appears to function in the latter as a buttress rather than an obstacle to subjectivation. We first encounter Packer during one of his sleepless nights, a hyperactive consciousness in a temporal void shaped by his own chronic adaptation to the continuous rhythms of finance. For insomnia seems to function in the opening pages as a paradoxical moment of subjective intensification, a recurring condition that results in greater alertness and self-possession: “He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry (…) Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice” (2011: 5). Far from acknowledging this as a characteristic psychopathology of the financial trader, and consequently as a potential source of mental confusion and disorientation à la John Self, Packer presents it as an emphatic celebration of the self by intellectual means: He did not consult an analyst in a tall leather chair. Freud is finished, Einstein’s next. He was reading the Special Theory tonight, in English and German, but put the book aside, finally, and lay

Subjects of Abstraction  29 completely still, trying to summon the will to speak the single word that would turn off the lights. Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his head, the mind in time. (6) What counts here is not intellectual endeavour as such but the subjective affirmation that a purely instrumental and possessive utilisation of the intellect can enable. Indeed, whether mediated by the reading of “spare poems sited minutely in white space” (5) or by the intermittent sampling of theoretical physics, the financier’s subjectivity stands as a magnetic pole towards which everything gravitates. As Victor Li writes apropos of this passage, “Packer is because there is only his ravenous mind, his restless consciousness. Time is made secondary to mind; in time, we can only find the mind. Time becomes an object that exists only because it is represented by the Cartesian subject” (2016: 259). We do not find in Cosmopolis the crisis of externalisation through which Amis and Kunzru represented the rise of post-Fordism, that is, the breakdown of temporal continuities across the cycle of valorisation and the emergence of pockets of exteriority within the system. And this is because the temporality of post-Fordist capital is reimagined here as a totality of consciousness predicated (contra Kunzru and Amis) on the supremacy of the financial subject. As Li points out, time (which is to say the temporality of financial capital itself) is completely s­ ubordinated to the phenomenological universe of the trader and his distinctive ­fetishisation of information flows. This is the precise status of the intellect in the novel. Far from embodying an untrammelled creative power, a deterritorialised and deterritorialising force of world-changing proportions (which is the exact remit of Transmission’s viral trope), the intellect appears here as the strict negation of global living labour, as a crystallisation of information animated exclusively by capital’s self-referentiality. For Packer, “data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form” (24). Thus, financial abstraction, punctuated by the rise of digital systems of representation, signals for the post-Fordist financier a higher level of experience rather than a zone of uncontrollability and potential crisis (as it had done in both Money and Transmission). Disembodiment marks the apex of this phenomenology, a promissory state of being in which the crude liveliness of the embodied self, and the concomitant sphere of tangible use-values (indeed, of material wealth), gives way to a thoroughly immaterial ontology. Alison Shonkwiler suggestively applies the phrase “financial sublime” to the “full range of mystifications of capital” (2017: 75) deployed by the novel. But the sublime strategy of this novel, it is worth insisting, turns on a hypostasis of capitalist subjectivity, on an idealist teleology of essential individualism that can only end in the protagonist’s destruction,

30  Subjects of Abstraction both physical (at the hands of his former employee Richard Sheets) and economic (after a day-long spell of reckless betting on the yen). Narratively, this quest for the immaterial essence of capitalist selfhood takes the form of a journey across New York City, as Packer decides to get a literal haircut in the West Side barbershop of his youth, as well as a metaphorical one through currency manipulation (“taking a haircut” is financial slang for losing money). Cloistered in his limousine, conferring with a variety of advisors, and prompted by a series of unforeseen circumstances and whimsical choices to repeatedly stray off-course, ­Packer’s journey enacts the novel’s overarching vision of post-Fordist capital as pure circulation. This circulatory motion of capitalist and capital is markedly different from the multiple circulations (of consumption, ­labour power, as well as finance itself) we found in Amis and Kunzru. Viewed from inside the limo, or even better, from the abstract standpoint of “the mind in time”, the city emerges as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a “smooth space” (2011) in which potential detours and slowdowns represent partial distractions rather than real obstacles, let alone moments of crisis. The momentary halts and slowdowns in Packer’s limo journey across town are particularly significant. There is a first revealing episode where the car’s movement is described as “an inchworm creep” (64) as it passes through a Jewish district in the Lower East Side. As if interfering not only with the physical circulation of the vehicle but also with the intangible flows of money, the street produces a backward reminder of material forms of value and exchange in the figure of old-fashioned gem traders, “Hasidim in frock coats and tall felt hats”, and “a form of money so obsolete Eric didn’t know how to think about it. It was hard, shiny, faceted. It was everything he’d left behind or never encountered, cut and polished, intensely three-dimensional.” (64) The resurfacing – in the middle of this thoroughly financialised city – of a quintessential representation of commodity money introduces an element of nostalgia for a capitalist past that constitutes no real alternative to the immaterial and circulatory logic of contemporary finance, but rather a welcome opportunity to reminisce and even indulge in a sort of capitalist antiquarianism: “In the grain of the street he sensed the Lower East Side of the 1920s and the diamond centers of Europe before the second war, Amsterdam and Antwerp” (64–65). Once again, the trader’s mind appears to tower over time, in this case, over the exotic temporality of a historical residue made up of “[r]ings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry, antique jewelry”, “hagglers and talebearers”, “scrapmongers”, and “dealers” inhabiting this American throwback to the Old World “souk” and “shtetl” (65). It is interesting that this temporal otherness, this intrusion of the past on early twenty-first-century financialised life, is not experienced by Packer as a threat. While these street scenes are recognised as “an offense to the truth of the future” (65), and thus to his own personal project of dematerialisation, the sense of superiority and detachment, the sheer idealism

Subjects of Abstraction  31 of this capitalist subjectivity, of this “mind in time”, allows him to experience the temporal otherness as an enjoyable break from an otherwise unstoppable circulation: “The car stopped dead and he got out and stretched. Traffic ahead was a long liquid shimmer of idling metal” (65). Just as the encounter with old-fashioned exchange does not represent, as it did in Money, a counterpoint to the immateriality of finance (let us recall that John Self recognised in a somewhat grotesque version of barter his “own kind of money”), the sighting of other experiential frames, perhaps suggestive of knowledges not readily available to the contemporary capitalist, is not a source of anxiety or disorientation either. A first symptom of disarticulation and crisis in Money had been precisely the cognitive fracture assailing the capitalist, the sheer opaqueness of the world around him and his inability to grasp it. But Packer’s approach is very different. However shallow and episodic the nature of his relationship with knowledge, the latter never detracts from the hegemony of “mind”, from the superior detachment of the circulating self. Just as poetry and science are marshalled – in quick, rather superficial dips – as appurtenances to a mental existence that really thrives on the incommensurable flows of cyber-capital, a certain, perhaps cosmetic, knowledge about these preterite historical and social realities (“He knew some history… He knew some languages but not this one” (65)) completes this brief interruption of the “long liquid shimmer” of his circulatory course. A second moment of interruption occurs as Packer’s limo runs into an anti-globalisation protest in the middle of Manhattan. As the car drives into a group of demonstrators, “protesters, anarchists, whoever they were”, deploying a combination of traditional Marxist slogans (“A specter is haunting the world”) and postmodern gestures of “street theater” (88), Packer has a revealing conversation with his “chief of theory” Vija Kinski in which she suggests that these self-described “grave-diggers” of the system are in fact “a fantasy generated by the market” itself: “They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside” (90). As we have seen, the deeper relevance of this proposition to the realities of world capitalist development in the post-Fordist era is as patent as the fact that the very substance of crisis in this context turns on capitalism’s endless generation of immanent moments of exteriority. Packer agrees that the “protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating”, and thus also attesting “to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it” (99). But the sudden self-immolation of one of the demonstrators brings this incantatory evocation of capitalist seamlessness to a halt: Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was

32  Subjects of Abstraction not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach. (99–100) To put it in Lacanian terms, the irruption of this inassimilable real, this act of stark brutality in the midst of capital’s imaginary and symbolic projections effectively attests, according to Packer, to the system’s impossible closure upon itself. But this admission is actually belied by the narrative, as the circulatory movement through which both capital and capitalist are made does not appear to be fundamentally affected by this event. As in the previous episode among the Hasidim, it seems that the exposure to otherness actually becomes an opportunity, and that the financialised subject thrives on an expanded ability to metabolise such interruptions into his own circulatory motion. For the fact remains that this and other acts (including the series of deaths, not least Packer’s own, that punctuate the novel closer to the end) emerge, in the final account, as perfectly assimilable, indeed as temporal lapses that only reinforce the generalised subsumption of historical and narrative time under the subjectivist ideology of dematerialisation that drives plot and character forward. The nature of these interruptions is indeed very different from the viral formula explored in Transmission. If the latter manages to offer a fictional account of cyber-capitalist crisis, while simultaneously exploring the representational limits reached by literary realism under such systemic conditions, that is precisely because the “real” of capitalist contradiction is mapped onto the circulatory sphere as a whole or, in other words, because the crisis as such is made coterminous with circulation. Thus, crisis was eponymously articulated as “transmission”, as interruption in continuity, or, as the novel puts it at one point, as “a furring of the global arteries” of capital that just certifies the unsustainability of its own dynamic. But there is nothing in the disruptive events, including the more traumatic or destructive ones, narrated in Cosmopolis that effectively stands in the way of capital’s immaterial becoming. The true moments of self-doubt, we could say, concern the internal competition between subjects in pursuit of an ideal standard of disembodiment and fluency that the financial trader attempts to monopolise without, for that matter, making it exclusive to his financial calling. Thus, for example, the United States president represents, for Packer, a superior instance of detached impersonality, a perfected model of immateriality rendered all the more haunting by its virtual iteration as a televised image: Eric studied the man. He watched for ten motionless minutes. He didn’t move and neither did the president, except reflexively, and neither did the traffic in either location (…) He did not scratch or yawn and began to resemble a person sitting in an offstage lounge waiting

Subjects of Abstraction  33 to do a guest spot on TV. Only it was eerier and deeper than that because his eyes carried no sign of immanence, of vital occupancy, and because he seemed to exist in some little hollow of nontime, and because he was the president. Eric hated him for that. (76) For all his affinity with the spectral fluctuations of cyber-capital, Packer experiences the president’s own phantasmatic standing as a genuine affront, no longer in the form of an external threat (or inassimilable outside), but as a great leap forward along his own trajectory of dematerialisation. To Packer’s subjective intensity, to his superimposition of mind over time (in a way that the figurations of post-Fordist capital by Amis and Kunzru had ultimately found insincere), the president opposes a mixture of power and ontological voiding: in effect, an ideal image or ideal-I that promises to articulate sovereignty with the sublime abstractions of finance.1 This phantasmatic projection offered by the presidential figure aligns itself with Kinski’s claim, and Packer’s agreement with it, that cyber-­ capital has created an imaginary totality (with very real effects in terms of power relations) from which there is no escape. The novel appears to corroborate this claim through its narrative exploration of what could be called Packer’s sublime becoming, that is, through his pursuit of subjective ideality in and through financial circulation. The momentary interruptions of the phantasmatic scene, those sudden shocks to the temporal flow of his quest, in the form of strange reminders of economic backwardness or brutal acts of sabotage (from the self-immolation of a demonstrator to the assassination of the IMF director, broadcast live “on the Money Channel” (33)), come across as structural components of this psychic formation. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory differentiates between “the Thing”, that sphere of human existence “far beyond the domain of affectivity, (…) moving, obscure and without reference points” (Lacan 2008: 127), which signals “to us the space beyond the pleasure principle” (Lacan 2008: 128), and the object-cause of desire whose function is precisely to substitute for, and therefore reduce, the destructive potential of the Thing. With the subject’s entry into the symbolic order of language and culture, the fluency and psychic indivisibility of pre-linguistic life is reconfigured as an impossible immanence (jouissance) that can only be functionally re-enacted through the mediation of this object (objet ­petit a) that both stands in for the threatening and irretrievable realm of the Thing and, in doing so, offers the subject an imaginary sense of closure (a phantasmatic projection as an ideal, fully formed I). 2 Lacan describes the psychic phenomenon of sublimation precisely as an operation of substitution between these two terms: “the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an object (…)

34  Subjects of Abstraction to the dignity of the Thing” (Lacan 2008: 138). In sublimation, Lacan says, the phantasmatic, that is, the – strictly – sublime object of desire, secures the subject’s sense of closure (and even plenitude) by standing in as the Thing, as the ontological totality that cannot be retrieved. It would seem that DeLillo’s preoccupation with the inflationary nature of ­cyber-capitalist subjectivity in the novel replicates this analysis by positing cyber-capital itself, clearly a non-symbolic (or a-signifying) object with rather spectral qualities as the structural element that sutures the protagonist’s subjective imaginary. Finance is indeed sublime in Cosmopolis, as pointed out by Alison Shonkwiler, but specifically in the sense that it predicates a fantasy of selfhood on the sublimatory substitution of a techno-economic phantasmagoria for a lost socio-economic “Thing” (Fordism). The sublime object of financial circulation pursued by Packer throughout the novel both triggers and is supported by a specific phantasm of knowledge: the recognition that what lies behind the imaginary of circulation, of speculation and celebration of cyber-­capital’s ideality, is an impossible jouissance. In other words, the knowledge that real knowledge about the workings (or meaning) of finance is unattainable and that it ultimately rests on a void.3 Approximating this void, without immediately falling into it (or rather, without putting the ideal self at risk by exposing it too directly to the void) appears to be the enduring task of the protagonist. Packer’s fantasy of ideal subjectivity is thus buttressed by another fantasy of sublime cognition. And both are sustained until the end, without serious interruptions or uncontrollable crises. Herein lies the central difference between Packer and his nemesis, the author of that “credible threat” on his life that forces various detours on his way to the barbershop: former employee Richard Sheets. This character is introduced early on under an alias, in a section entitled “The Confessions of Benno Levin” (which is actually chronologically subsequent to the events narrated in the main plot), as a disgruntled expert, a former “assistant professor of computer applications” who left academia “to make my million” (56). The phantasmatic structure of Levin’s incursion into the world of finance is, unlike Packer’s, hampered by a subjective timidity that makes him accept various professional snubs: “They said I had problems of normalcy and they demoted me to lesser currencies. I became a minor technical element in the firm, a technical fact. I was generic labor to them. And I accepted this. Then they let me go without notice or severance package. And I accepted this” (60). Levin’s phantasm is characterised by its inability to attain closure at the imaginary level required by cyber-capital. It thus fails to operate the sublimatory substitution on which Packer’s cult of the self rests, settling instead for an acceptance of incompleteness that irremediably precipitates him into madness. Levin’s susceptibility to “strains of global illness”, from “susto, which is soul loss, more or less, from the Caribbean, which I contracted originally on the Internet” (152) to “spells of hwa-byung” or Korean

Subjects of Abstraction  35 “cultural panic” also “caught on the Internet” (56), similarly reimagines the global circuitry of capital as a psychic affair, fully internal to the workings of financialised subjectivity. When crisis strikes, it does so exclusively as a psychopathological opening, as a rupture in the imaginary fabric of selfhood and not at the level of abstract sociality addressed by Transmission. Both Packer and Levin articulate the real as that which subtends their idealisations and that which remains implicit in their respective fantasies until it becomes exposed in the destructive violence of the final act that brings them together. Levin says, “I am determined finally to act. It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before” (154). In other words, what psychoanalysis names acting out, the psychotic plunge that occurs when the symbolic order collapses around the subject and the real is suddenly exposed, is the natural corollary to Levin’s successive fits of “global illness”.4 For Packer, the real emerges as a suffering experience of the body. Through the pain felt in his torn hand (after Levin shoots him), the point of jouissance is almost reached without for that matter sacrificing the sublimity of his phantasmatic trajectory so far. On the contrary, this literal approximation of physical destruction consecrates his sublime cognition of cyber-capital as an undisturbed realm of ideality. If the wounded body represents the point of inassimilable excess at which symbolic identity falters, it is also true that it doesn’t essentially disrupt the phantasmatic organisation of his subjectivity as a strategy of dematerialisation, as a determination “to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass” (206). What we encounter in the novel’s final pages is a moment of closure around Packer’s idealisation enabled by the discovery of the body in pain, that real – in Lacan’s terms – object which substitutes for the irretrievable Thing itself (the sheer jouissance of dissolution in cyber-capital). While the latter is identified with life “outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data”, the shock of the real offers a paradoxical recalibration of his subjectivity as “too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn’t think, to computer emulation”: The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the ­neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. (207) What this final episode reveals is the inconvertibility of the novel’s subjective imaginary. Not unlike the financialised figure of money, the subject is discovered, at the end of circulation, as that intensely self-­ referential entity that cannot be “converted” or subsumed under any system of signification or equivalence. Thus, the financial sublime of

36  Subjects of Abstraction Cosmopolis rests on the projection of an underlying subjective sublime, an imagination of capitalist subjectivity as doubly detached from any social substance: first, in a figure of circulation that posits the subject as an extensive and uncontested totality, and, finally, as an extreme hypostasis of inconvertibility. The second part of this chapter will focus on a 2014 novel, Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, in which the cognitive dimensions unfolded by financial abstraction reveal, specifically in the post2008 context of generalised crisis, a fundamental disjunction at the heart of capitalist subjectivity. As we will see, Rahman’s novel opens up again the enduring idealisations of the financial trader’s psyche to the deep currents of class antagonism, presenting the subjective sublime explored by DeLillo as inevitably haunted by the drama of social eventuation.

Knowledge in Crisis: Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know offers a wide-­ ranging dissection of early twenty-first-century crises, from 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan to – most notably – the onset of the financial crisis. Set in the ominous September of 2008, its unnamed narrator, a Princeton-born derivatives trader of Pakistani descent, receives the unannounced visit of an old friend from his days as an Oxford student. Zafar – such is the friend’s name – immediately comes across as an intellectually acerbic and somewhat elusive character, whose deprived origins in rural Bangladesh and enduring sense of postcolonial displacement provide the background against which the narrative is set. In the Light of What We Know offers a suggestive but ultimately problematic interrogation of the link between knowledge and finance, with the novel’s central reflection on narration ultimately working towards an obliteration or concealment of the grave political crisis at the heart of post-Fordist capitalism. There exists in Rahman’s novel a celebration of knowledge – of historical, philosophical, mathematical, and many other forms of knowledge – that expresses a preoccupation with the state of the world on various levels and in different registers, but that also gestures towards a decided elision or transcendence of its living determinations, of sociality and its central role in post-industrial production, at a time of peaking uncertainty and contradiction in the global structuring of capitalism. It is true, as James Wood has written in an early review for The New Yorker, that this novel “wears its knowledge heavily, as a burden, a crisis, an injury (…) because Rahman is interested in the possession of knowledge, and in the politics of that possession” (2014: n.p.). This articulation of crisis in the possession of knowledge amounts to a privatising operation that is nevertheless indicative of the conflictual dimensions it seeks to evacuate. The great paradox in this novel is the fact

Subjects of Abstraction  37 that capitalist subjectivity can no longer be kept within its phantasmatic limits. As we shall see, In the Light of What We Know is laden with idealising gestures, but unlike those of Cosmopolis, they never manage to subdue or properly accommodate the destabilising immanence of the real underpinning them. If DeLillo’s protagonist rested on a fundamentally unchallenged conception of mind, on an effective fantasy of detachment from the material world, the version of intellect we find among Rahman’s characters symptomatises, as we will see, an ultimately failed attempt to escape from the social and its real pressures. The crisis implicit in the novel’s treatment of knowledge (and intellectual activity in general) as a private object of possession, of mastery and control, defines the more problematic aspects in the characterisation of the novel’s protagonist. Zafar’s (ultimately failed) relationship with his upper-class English wife Emily is one of the focal points of his urge to understand and thereby control the world around him. As the details of his tortured marriage are disclosed later in the novel, it also becomes apparent that even sexual intimacy is regarded as an opportunity to “approach understanding” by mentally “tak[ing] control of her being” (2014: 384). The possibility of an unmediated interpersonal relation, of experience without the directive and hierarchical control of the proprietary intellect, seems to be excluded. For, as Zafar ultimately avows, “understanding is a mode of control” which “subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head” (385). The profound anti-sociality implied by this possessive stance is further highlighted by a thoroughly abstract and depersonalised modulation of knowledge as a practice of pure cognition. Of all the intellectual forms and modes of understanding rehearsed by the novel, mathematics is without any doubt the most advanced and paradigmatic expression of impersonal knowledge, an abstract realm of intellectual contemplation that conveniently evacuates the contextual pressures of the present. In this sense, I would argue, mathematics emerges as the ideal complement to the discursive practice that takes up the bulk of Zafar’s presence in the novel, namely storytelling. Zafar the storyteller and Zafar the mathematician appear as two sides of a model subjectivity (for Zafar functions as the narrator’s – and by extension, the novel’s – ideal ego) defined by an evasion of the socially dense temporalities of the unfolding economic crisis. At a time when the linguistic and communicative nature of productive processes has been ascertained as a defining historical feature of the economic system, 5 the strategy of rendering interpersonal communication private and exclusive in the restrictive discursive mode explored by the novel is surely symptomatic. In Zafar, we could say, the “general intellect” that defines social production in post-Fordism is transformed into a private intellect.6 In the following pages, I will try to show how these two elements, mathematics and storytelling, interpenetrate and reinforce one another in a general

38  Subjects of Abstraction crystallisation of knowledge that seeks to obliterate the fundamentally political nature of the crisis. Throughout the novel, Zafar voices his profound admiration for pure mathematics, which he describes as “the product of the human mind turning to face itself”, as a “realm of necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched” (129). This disavowal of experience reaches its paroxysm in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Zafar’s most cherished mathematical idea which, as he explains, conveys “the simple message that the farthest reaches of what we can ever know fall short of the limits of what is true, even in mathematics” (9). This implies a projection of the intellect as an ideal realm of logical truth in excess of agency and subjectivity, the materiality of experience, and the sociality that it entails. With the articulation of this notion, logical or mathematical truth (despite, or rather because of, the admission of incompleteness, and therefore of transcendence, that it implies) is pitted against a dynamic conception of temporality and the event. According to Zafar, our “choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm and devour us” (131). Although events are only made sense of retrospectively, their t­ emporality is orientated towards the future, a future that remains essentially ­unknowable – true, and often even dramatically true – but fundamentally in excess of knowledge. It is very telling that Zafar should illustrate his point with a reference to Alan Greenspan, “that wily chairman of the Federal Reserve”, and the run-up to the subprime crisis: Under him interest rates fell and money became so cheap that there was little to give investors and banks pause before putting more and more borrowed funds into riskier and riskier investments. Enter subprime mortgages, mortgages to those who couldn’t really afford them, who would default in due course. But it is only after the event that the eyes of history look back. Who could know that in the hills of Central Asia, trouble was brewing that would spill from the skies of Manhattan? (132) The notion of event that transpires from this characterisation is one that has been thoroughly detached from agency – and consequently from responsibility. By implicitly comparing neoliberal monetary policy to 9/11, the agential specificity of the crisis is blurred and neutralised. With this parallel characterisation of early twenty-first-century convulsions as virtually subject-less, and ultimately inevitable, tragedies waiting to “spill from the skies”, politics is effectively reimagined as an impersonal and supra-sensible system of causality leading to “the realm of necessary consequences” that defines mathematical knowledge according to Zafar.

Subjects of Abstraction  39 For all the intellectual ascendancy and detached superiority that the narrator concedes to Zafar, the latter’s discourse contains the basic ingredients of his own rationalisation (and personal justification) of the financial crisis. For beneath the multiple discursive modulations and apparent divergences between the two throughout the novel, there is a shared interpretation of finance in fundamentally idealist-­individualist, and therefore radically anti-political, terms. Faced with the prospect of public responsibility (and possibly a criminal conviction) for his actions as a derivatives trader, the narrator comes to the conclusion that the crisis resulted in large measure from a general lack of mathematical knowledge: General incomprehension of derivatives (…) is understandable: any decent exposition requires a fair bit of mathematics (…) Even the basic elements of financial derivatives are mathematical. But quite apart from the mathematical content, the other problem is that to understand derivatives requires, I think, an understanding of other more basic ideas in finance, whether or not they in turn have some mathematical content. It’s accretive, to use Zafar’s language. (284−285) So derivative finance is not only mathematical in content but also formally analogous to mathematics in its accretive and vertical disposition of knowledge. The narrator appends a revealing footnote to these thoughts in which he quotes an article from Science magazine by American novelist David Foster Wallace, where the image of mathematics as an abstract pinnacle of the intellect is restated and dwelt upon. A ­ ccording to Wallace, Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and context-less formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius”, viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterises what is best about the human mind. (284) This discursive strategy is unequivocal: the heights of intellectual abstraction represented by pure mathematics simultaneously signal the best and the most uncontrollable in human activity. It is precisely at these stratospheric levels of complexity that the agency and responsibility ordinarily predicated on knowledge dissolve and are replaced by what Zafar calls “events”. Clearly, as the narrator implies with his many rationalisations and explanations, there is only so much in the irreducibly

40  Subjects of Abstraction complex practice of finance – a form of knowledge that thrives and pushes at the limits of knowledge itself – that can be imputed to interest or intention. And even those aspects of it whose concomitance with interest and intention cannot be denied are to a great extent overruled by the ungovernably abstract nature of this knowledge. As Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee have suggested, mathematics is a central tool in the creation and commodification of the abstract risk on which derivative finance rests: “It alone is thought to provide truths that are pure in the sense that they are uncontaminated by politics” (LiPuma and Lee 2005: 416). But this consecration of mathematics as a bulwark of truth is in turn predicated on a pre-existing objectification of risk without which the very existence of the financial community would be called into question. In other words, the epistemological position of privilege accorded to mathematics is not spontaneous, natural, or objective. It is, rather, saturated with the subjectivity, the agency, and the political will of an advanced economic technology designed to maximise the extraction of profit from a public, common, or general intellect that extends its material and immaterial production over the expanded body of global society and that has nothing to do with the elitist imaginaries invoked by the novel’s protagonists. Thus, what lurks behind the intellectualist veil of “reason and ecstatic creativity”, in Wallace’s words, is nothing but the haunting (and never properly exorcised in the novel) spectre of class. Social class, as Zafar insists, remains the insuperable barrier in his repeated and failed attempts to resolve his abiding postcolonial melancholia and finally become British. As he says in relation to his ultimately unsuccessful marriage to Emily (who is white and English, but more damningly, upper-class): “race, or as everyone now likes to say ethnicity, was never so much a source of anxiety as class” (381; emphasis in original). It is therefore extremely revealing that Zafar should refer to finance as precisely a sphere where class barriers are irrelevant: “Finance is not about connections, it’s not about who you know but what you know, it isn’t like your grandfather’s world, with secret deals on golf courses and in country clubs, kickbacks and Swiss bank accounts” (213). Finance, argues Zafar, is very much unlike the old family background of received privilege and hierarchy from which both the narrator – who is being addressed here – and his wife Emily hail. Ultimately, finance is profoundly un-British in the sense that it openly challenges the old country’s onerous class complex, while being solidly consistent with America’s entrenched egalitarianism. It is also revealing that, speaking against the immediate backdrop of the United States (US) subprime crisis, Zafar repeatedly proclaims America’s superiority as a country that “bears the forbidden fruit of egalitarian hope, and everyone, high and low, can shake the branches of that tree” (120–121).

Subjects of Abstraction  41 This opposition between America’s alleged egalitarianism and Britain’s elitism is, of course, symptomatic of Zafar’s frustrated attachment to the old imperial metropolis. He even declares, at one point, “If an immigration officer at Heathrow had ever said ‘Welcome home’ to me, I would have given my life for England, for my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that” (107). However, the UK−US pairing is also a telling sign of the discursive operation at work in the exchanges between Zafar and the narrator. The idealist-individualist vocation of their intellectual meditations (in which mathematics signals the apex of abstraction and desirability) paradoxically finds in Zafar’s melancholic pronouncements a solid rhetorical and affective buttress rather than an experiential counter. The indictment of Britain’s burdensome class hierarchy can thus be read as a virtual foil against which the idealising abstraction of actual class divisions and antagonisms fostered by finance can be deployed. “Class isn’t something you look at, it’s not stuff around you”, declares Zafar, thereby contradicting or wilfully projecting himself beyond his concerns about class in British society. Class is, he goes on, “the eyes with which you see the world” (214), an intellectual operation, ultimately, that can be transcended by following the course of abstraction pointed up by mathematics. Once again, the impersonality or “inhumanity” of mathematics (which is also its asociality) is mobilised against the antagonistic dynamism of a society saturated with capitalist mechanisms of valorisation. Zafar’s plea for this kind of supra-sensible knowledge perhaps reaches its climax in the following passage, where it is directly opposed to the problematical universe of social experience (and class): [Bertrand] Russell said he liked mathematics because it was not human and had nothing in particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return (…) Mathematics doesn’t care about authority, it doesn’t care about who you are, where you’re from, what your eye colour is, or who you’re having supper with. (214–215) From a systemic point of view, what lurks behind this abhorrence of the concrete is not so much individual mauvaise foi (or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate his otherwise stinging awareness of social boundaries and contradictions) as a crisis within the valorisation process itself; that is to say, within the class determinations of finance as it faces the limits of its recent expansion and depredation of the social. In other words, the flight to mathematical abstraction is symptomatic of a failure of governance in post-Fordist capitalism, which ultimately expresses the impossibility of measuring value in a system of production and accumulation where capital is no longer fully in control.

42  Subjects of Abstraction Nowhere is this crisis more palpable in the novel than in the narrator’s allusions to the difficulty of pricing derivatives. At one point, we find the narrator evoking a conversation with Crane Forrester, an old family friend from their time in Princeton as well as a former senator and “prominent figure in New York’s financial community” (366). The founding manager of a credit ratings agency, Forrester asks the narrator to persuade his son not to join the Marines and instead opt for a political career in Washington or, alternatively, on Wall Street. It becomes apparent that Forrester intends to repay this favour (suggesting that this would merely be the latest instalment in a series of personal favours between the two families, going back to the narrator’s grandfather) by involving his agency in the assessment of Collateralised Debt Obligations which the narrator is developing. The latter quickly realises, however, that the appearance of reciprocity actually conceals a business opportunity for Forrester: “the truth was that, if anything, any ratings agency that agreed to rate my CDOs stood to make more than a tidy sum” (371). The conclusion is soon reached that rating the credit-worthiness of these complex and elusive financial products is no easier than pricing them (that is “pric[ing] them relative to other securities” (372)), and thus, that what ultimately counts for financial valuation – what counts in the determination of financial value – is precisely the web of interpersonal ­relations, the connections, and secret deals decried by Zafar. According to him, this network of relationships pertains to a bygone or residual social universe that is radically alien to the world of finance: In the month following my conversation with Forrester, Crane held off joining the military (though only for a year). In the same month, the senior tranche of the new CDOs, my CDOs, received a triple-A investment grade credit rating from the agency Crane Morton Forrester II had established, as did the tranche of CDOs immediately below that. As simple as that. Business moves fast. So much for conflicts of interest. Let me point out, if it isn’t obvious already, that there’s some irony in the term conflict of interest. In practice there is seldom a conflict but rather a confluence, a mutually rewarding arrangement. I think that to Zafar it might have been the ugliest thing in the world, though I expect he would have added that it’s simply inevitable. (372; emphasis in original) This is a revealing passage. Not only is the subjective dimension of financial valuation affirmed against the idealising evasions of the two main characters, but it is also ultimately assumed to be inevitable. This is not to be dismissed, however, as merely a dishonest reintroduction of corrupt practices through, as it were, the back door of an otherwise elevated discourse about virtuous financial practice (despite the palpable

Subjects of Abstraction  43 contradictions we observe in this and other passages). For what announces itself in the shocking intimation that conflicts of interest – or rather, “confluences of interest”, as the narrator names them – are integral to financial valorisation is that general shift from tangible, ­material production (in the factory) to a largely immaterial and socially diffuse production where value ceases to appear as objectively definable and measurable. The old accounting practices of industrial capitalism are rendered inadequate by the dominance of immaterial and intangible aspects, while finance, with its self-referential and speculative logic, emerges as the only viable way of quantifying value.7 But it would be wrong to conclude, in the manner of traditional critical analyses of finance, that this particular matrix of valorisation corresponds to exclusively parasitical or unproductive deviations from true forms of capitalist accumulation. On the contrary, the crisis of valorisation typified by the convulsions and apparently ungovernable ­abstractions of finance points to a real displacement and amplification of productive relations. Increasingly, the multiplying possibilities of immaterial valorisation, the virtual anticipation of value that remains to be captured or produced through innovation, threaten to destabilise not only the old industrial-capitalist faith in objective quantification but also the very subjective foundations on which financial valuation supposedly thrives. As a result, the real (if unstable and unquantifiable) value contained in the personal and subjective remains at risk of collapse and co-optation. A clear example of this is the strong suggestion of cronyism and corruption that surrounds Crane Forrester and his son, whom we will later encounter as a shady figure with the US mission in Afghanistan (where he is eventually killed, amid unclarified accusations of rape). But more significantly, the sense of subjective crisis comes to a head with Zafar’s mental breakdown, which makes him question his own personal coherence and sense of self. The way this is presented is particularly interesting, as it casts a different light on his position as the pre-eminent voice and consciousness in the novel. Indeed, we learn that, a number of years earlier, Zafar had had a serious depressive episode as a result of which he was interned in a rather exclusive English clinic. Significantly, the prevalent symptom he describes is boredom, a boredom that comes with a devastating amount of suffering: My thoughts and sense-experience used to hop from one thing to another, as if the world was just coming at me with meaningless stimuli, one after another. I couldn’t latch on to a thought and then be carried by it as it moved into new territory. To do that, I think you need a narrative self inside you connecting you with experience, telling you how to fit into the subjective encounter with what you’re seeing and attaching whatever significance it might hold for you. In

44  Subjects of Abstraction those days, it was as if the narrative self had decided to go on vacation, leaving me without continuity of thought and feeling. (445) This psychic crisis effectively amounts to a dismantling of what Zafar calls his “narrative self”, which is precisely, according to his revealing description, the necessary bridge between thought and experience, or indeed the connective tissue grounding the intellect – with its immaterial leaps towards abstraction – in the concrete and material realm of the sensible. It is very telling that this disarticulation is finally exposed as dysfunctional and ungovernable. With this episode, which is only recounted late in the novel, a pervasive tendency towards the segregation between knowledge and experience is retroactively construed as a symptom rather than an overcoming of crisis. As I have suggested above, the latter goes well beyond the personal ambit and effectively colours an entire social ontology of obfuscated, occluded, or disavowed relations and dynamics. In other words, Zafar’s mathematical fetishism (together with his and the narrator’s repeated justifications and exonerations of finance) functions as a marker of a seismic transformation in the governance of the valorisation process. With the sphere of value extraction increasingly detached from identifiable subjective relations and objective measurements, the only available narrativisation is one that points backwards and eludes the actuality of agency. Yet this is a narrative (indeed a temporal) imperative that inevitably collapses whenever it is confronted by the inescapable – even if unquantifiable – pressures of exploitation, of antagonism, and of class. For most of the novel, Zafar’s strategy of avoidance or sublimation of the crisis involves a peculiar attachment to storytelling. The narrative self whose loss he bemoans during his depressive bout is at first sight the driving force that comes to a halt under the pressures of a personal (in fact, conjugal) crisis. But it is worth pausing on the actual profile of his narrative commitment, on Zafar’s particular take on narrative as a defined temporal mode. In effect, his narrative voice – which, as I have suggested, is even more prominent than the narrator’s – expresses an exclusive attachment to the past, to a form of closure that sidesteps the destabilising forms of emergence of the event. Insistently urged by the narrator to stay with him in order to write a novel, Zafar adamantly refuses, suggesting that the novelistic mode implies a restrictiveness that he wants to avoid: “Has it occurred to you that I might not want to write, that I might actually want to talk (…) Putting things on paper makes things real, hardens them, makes them unchangeable, even before things have made sense” (322). The novel form, he suggests, is incompatible with profound understanding, since it is ultimately limited by that surplus of truth that cannot be known and that only a non-experiential formulation (such as that

Subjects of Abstraction  45 provided by mathematical logic) may hope to account for in an extremely abstract way. The novel, says Zafar, promises to make the event – the new – available to experience, but necessarily fails since “nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know” (320). What this refusal effectively signals is, once again, a renunciation, an abstraction of the event from agency and subjectivity, and thus from any prospect of emergent conflict, of responsibility and antagonism in the face of change. By folding back on the rather different narrative mode of the oral tale or the récit, Zafar confirms a crisis of governance, a crisis of power at the heart of financial capitalism, that is only later given a pathological justification. For all his efforts to sustain this narrative temporality where events appear as fixed in the past and thus immune to futurity and the possibility of transformation,8 Zafar (and the narrator) is constantly pulled by the violent turmoil of a living present that cannot exorcise its political contents. The narrative self (which the storytelling mode invariably presupposed) is defeated by a convulsive openness to eventuation, by an immanence of crisis that, ultimately, cannot be narrated. While Zafar is effectively forced to accept his crisis-self, there is no promise of narrative closure, no safe mathematical projection beyond the violent actuality of the emergent event. From the depths of his depression, he admits that the “real me was always the me I was at any given moment, and not the unattainable me I could fancifully call from my imagination” (447). This “real me” marks a fundamental departure from the phantasmatic projections of capitalist subjectivity in Cosmopolis. And yet it would be wrong to conclude that this admission of dividuality (as opposed to the individuality presupposed by his now disjointed “narrative self”) results in the development of a critical consciousness or in a political re-examination of these characters’ trajectories.9 On the contrary, as the novel draws to a close, the logic of incompleteness that comes to define subjectivity at its core (after, let us remember, a first abstract invocation in the form of Gödel’s theorem) pushes towards a general realignment of the protagonists’ lives with the functional principles of finance. Thus, Zafar’s discovery of dividuality in the course of his psychiatric crisis, instead of representing a practical admission of incompleteness (beyond the theoretical admission that seems to preside over the entire novel), signals a definitive turn away from collective responsibility and the political nature of financialisation. Both the apportioning of knowledge to the dead temporality of the récit and the practical acceptance of an excess over which actual knowing practices exert no control (both of which seem to be the terminal points of Zafar’s itinerary) ultimately elude a real confrontation with the event – including the narrative event – understood as crisis, as conflict, and as politics. Zafar announces, through the narrator’s mediation (which continues to reinforce his vision to the very last), a will to speak,

46  Subjects of Abstraction a will to confess that is ultimately truncated and interrupted, and yet finds in that interruption the measure of its own exculpatory evasiveness. ­ isturbing The narrator declares that there was something potentially d in Zafar’s notebook entries pertaining to his final days in Kabul, where he seems to have last met his wife Emily after a series of dramatic events (including a bomb attack that had apparently targeted him and ended up killing Crane Forrester, Jr). The entries in question contain two ­epigraphs: one, from the British Sexual Offences Act of 1956, offering a legal definition of rape, and the other, a brief quotation from Rabindranath Tagore: “I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times … In life after life, in age after age forever” (510). What is disturbing, says the narrator, is the “juxtaposition” of these two texts. While it is immediately apparent that Zafar raped Emily, and that this final act of brutality stands at the heart of his narrative urge throughout the novel, its discursive treatment in these final passages only confirms the strategy on which I have insisted. Faced by the “event”, by the naked truth of his position as a political subject (for all his functional incompleteness and dividuality), which is emphatically summed up in an act of overt violence, the will to tell is suddenly short-circuited, deflected, and – once again – abstracted away from the actuality of experience: I have said enough. I wanted to tell you something, I thought I would be explicit, make it clear what I did [sic], leave no room to hide, but now I know I can’t. I came this far, down the long river, visiting spurs and detouring to tributaries along the way, but here at the brink of the cliff, where the river meets the sea, I don’t know how to speak the unspeakable. (547−548) With this invocation of “the unspeakable”, the novel reaches its own Conradian heart of darkness (its own point of destructive jouissance, to reiterate the Lacanian terminology). Yet what lies at the end of “the long river” in this case is not a vision of the outside negotiated by classic imperialism (after all, Zafar demonstrates that postcolonial displacement is not incompatible with capitalist power) but the contradictory violence at the heart of financial abstraction (again, an outside that remains internal, immanent to the system). With the implicit confession of Emily’s rape, the immaterial logic of control implied by understanding and the privatised intellect (which “subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head” (285), as Zafar had put it) is traumatically confronted with its material limits. Rather than a metaphysical “horror” in Conrad’s manner, the violent iteration of the body presents the self-referential bubble of post-Fordist capital with a surplus of truth that it cannot absorb. As with Fordism before, crisis is the name for this violent imbalance between the abstractions of value and the embodied realities that produce them.

Subjects of Abstraction  47

Notes 1 Lacan claims that the ideal image of the I (which he names the “ideal-I”) “situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction” (1977: 2). 2 As Slavoj Žižek points out, “[the Thing] is the absolute void, the lethal abyss which swallows the subject; while objet petit a designates that which ­remains of the Thing after it has undergone the process of symbolization. The basic premiss of the Lacanian ontology is that if our experience of reality is to maintain its consistency, the positive field of reality has to be ‘sutured’ with a supplement which the subject (mis)perceives as a positive entity, but is ­effectively a ‘negative magnitude’” (2008: 105). 3 Packer’s speculative strategy is premised on this paradoxical articulation of knowledge. As he explains to Vija Kinski, he keeps “borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates” “because he knew the yen could not go any higher (…) The market knew this (…) The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did go higher, time and again” (84, my emphasis). Financial knowledge thus emerges here as an eminently fragile construction founded on the cynical awareness that what subtends its presumptive cognition is sheer emptiness. As he further explains to Kinski, finance “wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it’s all random phenomena” (85). 4 Lacan observes that “acting out” is “equivalent to a hallucinatory phenomenon of the delusional type that occurs when you symbolize prematurely, when you address something in the order of reality and not within the symbolic register” (1993: 80). 5 As Marazzi observes, “the chain of production has, in fact, become a ­linguistic chain, a semantic connection, in which communication, the transmission of information, has become both a raw material and an instrument of work, just like electricity” (2008: 50). Paolo Virno, for his part, has noted that the “sharing of linguistic and cognitive habits is the constituent element in the post-Fordist process of labor” (2004: 41). 6 Marx introduced the concept of the “general intellect” in the Grundrisse (1993). A number of authors adhering to the analytical thesis of cognitive capitalism have taken this up as a fitting characterisation of productive relations in the post-Fordist or post-industrial era. But these authors also insist that the role of capital in this context of “immaterial” production is analogous to that of the pre-industrial rentier, profiting by capturing or ­“extracting” value in whose generation it has not directly participated. See also Andrea Fumagalli (2011), Carlo Vercellone (2013), Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2017), and Antonio Negri and Carlo Vercellone (2018). 7 As economist André Orléan notes, “Financial speculation may be said to be self-referential in the sense that the constant attempt to decipher the market’s opinion concerning the future direction of prices looks for guidance not to any standard of reference that is external to the market, such as fundamental value or utility, but to the market itself” (2014: 205). 8 As Fredric Jameson has pointed out, “The time of the récit is then a time of the preterite, of events completed, over and done with, events that have entered history once and for all. It will be clear enough what a philosophy of freedom must object to in such an inauthentic and reified temporality: it necessarily blocks out the freshness of the event happening, along with the agony of decision of its protagonists. It omits, in other words, the present of time and turns the future into a ‘dead future’” (2013: 18).

48  Subjects of Abstraction 9 A number of contemporary theorists have taken up Gilles Deleuze’s neologism and placed the concept of the “dividual” at the heart of the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism. Arjun Appadurai, for example, defines it in the following terms: “The dividual is not an elementary particle (or homunculus) of the individual but something more like the material substrate from which the individual emerges, the precursor and precondition of the individual, more protean and less easy to discern and to name than the individual, which is one of its structural products” (2016: 101). And he goes on to suggest that “the erosion of the individual and the rise of the dividual is largely an effect of the workings of financial capitalism since the early 1970s and in particular a collateral effect of the spread of the derivative form as the quintessential tool of making money out of uncertainty in this era of financialization. The form of dividualism produced by financial capital is ideal for the masking of inequality, for the multiplication of opaque quantitative forms that are illegible to the average citizen, and for the multiplication of profit-making tools and techniques, which can escape audit, regulation, and social control” (2016: 101−102).

References Appadurai, Arjun. (2016) Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (2011) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. DeLillo, Don. (2011) Cosmopolis. London: Picador. Fumagalli, Andrea. (2011) “Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism). Angelaki 16.3: 7–17. Jameson, Fredric. (2013) The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso Lacan, Jacques. (1977) “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”. Écrits. London: Norton. Lacan, Jacques. (1993) The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III. London: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. (2008) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. London: Routledge. Li, Victor. (2016) “The Untimely in Globalization’s Time: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis”. Globalizations 13.3: 256–269. LiPuma, Edward and Benjamin Lee. (2005) “Financial Derivatives and the Rise of Circulation”. Economy and Society 34.3: 404–427. Marazzi, Christian. (2008) Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. New York: Semiotext(e). Marx, Karl. (1993) Grundrisse. London: Penguin. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. (2017) “On the Multiple Frontiers of ­Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism”. Cultural Studies 31.2–3: 185–204. Negri, Antonio and Carlo Vercellone. (2018) “The Capital-Labour Relation in Cognitive Capitalism”. In From the Factory to the Metropolis. Ed. Federico Tomasello. London: Polity Press. ­ conomics. Orléan, André. (2014) The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for E Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.

Subjects of Abstraction  49 Osteen, Mark. (2014) “The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.3: 291–304. Rahman, Zia Haider. (2014) In the Light of What We Know. London: Picador. Shonkwiler, Alison. (2017) The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vercellone, Carlo. (2013) “The Becoming Rent of Profit? The New Articulation of Wage, Rent and Profit”. Knowledge Cultures 1.2: 194–207. Virno, Paolo. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext(e). Wood, James. (2014) “The World as We Know It: Zia Haider Rahman’s Dazzling Début”. New Yorker, 19 May. Available at: https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2014/05/19/the-world-as-weknow-it (last accessed 10 April 2018). Žižek, Slavoj. (2008) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

3 The Crisis and the City

The Metropolitan Factory: John Lanchester’s Capital The financial meltdown of 2008 and the worldwide recession that followed have also resulted in fictional reconsiderations of crisis where the central problem of abstraction becomes indissociable from its concrete spatial – particularly urban – settings. The city that we encounter in novels such as John Lanchester’s Capital is not the phantasmagoria depicted by Amis’s Money, which was a suffering emblem of the recently broken social compact of Fordism, and consequently a brutally polarised environment of rarefied privilege and boundless social exclusion. But neither is it the subjectivist projection of the New Economy super-capitalist imagined by DeLillo as primarily a trigger and accelerator of capital’s increasingly manic circulations. Rather, Lanchester’s city is, let us provisionally argue, an unstable composite of singularities and commonalities, of speculative or fictitious, and very real and embodied circulations. As a classic example of what Katy Shaw calls “Crunch Lit”, Capital is “concerned with representing the impact of financialization on business, domestic and virtual spaces in contemporary cities during and after the 2007–8 credit crunch” (Shaw 2015: 70). Yet financialisation is presented here as a multi-layered and capillary social process that conditions and shapes, but also adapts to the complex dynamics of an urban environment that can be rendered through “an efficient if deliberately schematic use of metonymy” (Bernard 2015: 147), in the figure of a single street – Pepys Road – and its inhabitants, but which cannot be reduced to the devastating binaries of an earlier neoliberal conjuncture. What my reading of Lanchester will try to demonstrate is that the relevance of the city to the dynamics of abstraction and crisis in advanced post-Fordism (particularly following the convulsion of 2008) is articulated within a context of structural substitution, where urban life comes to embody a range of processes at the root of capitalist value production and accumulation which at the time of, say, Amis’s Money may still have been primarily associated with the Fordist factory. As Marxist geographer David Harvey has shown, “[u]rbanization (…) has been a key means for the absorption of capital and labor surpluses

The Crisis and the City  51 throughout capitalism’s history”. The tendency to over-accumulation in commodity production, one of the long-term regularities of mature capitalism, can be temporarily relieved through investments “in the built environment” (2012: 42). However, this characteristic spatial dynamic of capitalism, which accounts for a range of speculative financial processes, is significantly modified in the context of post-Fordism. Rather than merely absorbing surpluses as a way of preventing a sudden devalorisation of newly accumulated capital arising from profits generated in commodity production (thus, in properly industrial environments), the post-Fordist city emerges as a place where the production and the realisation of value become mutually entangled processes. As Antonio Negri observes, “the city, the metropolis, has become a factory. To pass through the city today is to pass through an immense factory (…) The metropolis is ‘constant capital’ in action, and thus frenetic expropriation of labour power” (2018: 62).1 This is an essential aspect of capitalism’s structural transformation since the 1970s, and one that necessarily determines representations and interpretations of city life in the face of financial expansion. As we will see, the financialised urban universe depicted in Lanchester’s novel is not a derivative outlet for real production and real labour taking place elsewhere but a complex setting for the intersection of both human and economic factors. Lanchester’s London is in effect a factory where the immateriality of capitalist value becomes inseparable from the embodied materiality of a heterogeneous human multitude whose complex and often contradictory interactions (re)produce the city and the economic system it supports. 2 The novel prefaces its multitudinous plot with a presentation of the ­urban history of Pepys Road. The street, we are told, was developed “in the late nineteenth century, during the boom that followed the ­abolition of the tax on brick” and was specifically conceived as an upwardly mobile locale for “the respectable, aspirational no-longer-poor” (Lanchester 2013: 1–2). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the houses on the street had emerged as a primary agent of economic and social change: no longer a mere “backdrop to [the] lives” of its lower-­middle-class inhabitants, they were now “central actors in their own right” (5); “The houses were now like people, and rich people at that, imperious, with needs of their own that they were not shy about having serviced” (6). This personification of the houses is symptomatic and, again, hints at the repositioning of the urban in financialised, post-­ Fordist capitalism, away from an unproductive role within the accumulation process and towards a paradoxically productive one. We will come back to this. But first let us consider the place assigned in the novel to the two characters who best epitomise the “imperious” (and downright greedy) aspect of this urban logic: the couple formed by Roger and ­A rabella Yount. A City banker and his conspicuously consuming wife, the Younts represent crude financial rentierism as an enduring

52  The Crisis and the City feature of the contemporary capitalist landscape imagined by the novel. Hailing from a background of privilege (including a traditional public school education), Roger is described as someone who “would have fitted seamlessly in the old City of London”, with its traditional hierarchies and regard for personal connections, whilst loving the “new City’s way of doing things” (16). But Roger’s engagement in the foreign exchange business is predominantly marked by a rather vulgar money fetishism, where a preoccupation with personal earnings takes precedence over any detailed understanding of financial technicalities: “Roger did not love the fact that his footing was no longer entirely secure, and that he could no longer explain, right the way down to the finest grain of detail, exactly what was going on in the trading his department supervised” (25). But this insecurity in his fundamental lack of understanding of finance’s mathematical underpinnings is quickly brushed away as “just the nature of the work that went on in the City these days” (25). There is no extended rationalisation (in the manner of Rahman’s characters, for example) or aestheticisation (à la Cosmopolis) of the cognitive abstractions operating at the heart of finance. Instead, the financier’s attention is immediately turned to the forthcoming annual bonus he feels entitled to: “He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth” (19). Yet the element of ­aggressive affirmation is only fully intelligible as part of a very real overall need dictated by the Younts’ excessive lifestyle, at the core of which lies a constant stream of investment in the Pepys Road house, mainly through expensive renovation work. There is a hint in the presentation of these two characters at the return of the capitalist “leisure class” described by Thorstein Veblen at the end of the nineteenth century,3 which is in turn consistent with what Barbara Korte has described as the novel’s neo-Victorian agenda (Korte 2017). The recurring critical comparison with Dickens and Trollope is effectively warranted by the thematics of ostentation and “profligacy” (Korte 2017: 493) so prominently featured in the characterisation of the Younts. But there is a more profound sense in which Capital’s strategy in this emblematic section of the novel harks back to a pre-Fordist context, not only of “conspicuous consumption”, to use another Veblenian notion, but also of wealth distribution on the margins or at the expense of real value production. In economic theory, the term “rent” refers precisely to those incomes that do not arise from participation or investment in production, but exclusively from ownership of a naturally (as in the case of land) or artificially scarce good.4 When John Maynard Keynes, and other social and economic critics of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century laissez faire capitalism, invoked the “euthanasia of the rentier” following the crash of 1929, the target was a financial logic of profit-seeking based on the relative scarcity of capital rather than on its involvement (through reinvestment) in the productive process. As Keynes explained, “Interest to-day rewards no genuine sacrifice,

The Crisis and the City  53 any more than does the rent of land. The owner of capital can obtain interest because capital is scarce, just as the owner of land can obtain rent because land is scarce” (2013: 375). The novel’s characterisation of Roger Yount, and in particular of his professional engagement as a forex trader, is perfectly in accordance with the critical economic dismissal of interest-bearing capital as an unjustifiable relic from the nineteenth century. But the distribution and penetration of rent depicted by Capital also goes beyond the parasitical consumption of surpluses associated with the pre-Fordist rentier. There is a general sense in the fictional microcosm of Pepys Road that the distributive logic of this new financial rentierism reaches beyond the plutocratic establishment of the City. And in fact it would seem that the “city”, as opposed to the City – that is, the built environment metonymically signified by Pepys Road – offers new channels, across traditional class barriers, for the circulation of unearned incomes. After all, as we read in the opening pages: Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner (…) Britain had become a country of winners and losers, and all the people in the street, just by living there, had won. (7, my emphasis) The latter point is particularly significant, for it suggests that, in this context of the post-Fordist return of rent, life as a whole, and not just a distinctive set of activities, becomes integrated into the matrix of value in a way that ultimately confuses the distinction between the productive and the parasitical. The character of the Polish builder Zbigniew is particularly enlightening in this respect. Hired by the Younts to undertake the expensive renovation of their house, he would initially seem to offer a sharp counterpoint to the obscene, rentier-like, accumulation represented by Roger and Arabella, and, more generally, by London as a paradigmatic site of wealth concentration: “A boy who grew up in a tower block on the outskirts of Warsaw could not fail to notice marble worktops, teak furniture, carpets and clothes and adult toys and the routine daily extravagances that were everywhere in this city” (72). Zbigniew’s declared aspirations accord with a markedly working-class ethos in which labour, in this case the purposeful and dedicated labour of the migrant worker, stands as the sole and exclusive source of wealth and is predicated on its strict separation from consumerist enjoyment – or, as he puts it, “life”: he was there to work and make money before going home to his real life in Poland. Zbigniew did not know whether that would be in a year’s time or five years or ten, but he knew it was going to happen. He was Polish and his real life would be in Poland. (71)

54  The Crisis and the City What is particularly interesting is that the entire trajectory of this character in the novel openly contradicts the idea of an unreal temporary existence consumed by work in a similarly unreal setting of extravagant rentierism and a deferred life elsewhere (in turn based on and justified by the solidity of real – manual – work). In fact, we almost immediately find Zbigniew casually spending his free time (and more often than not, also his time on the job) engaging in online trading. Thus, we surprisingly learn that he “had £8,000, his entire savings, invested in stocks. At the moment he was mainly in tech, with half of his portfolio in Google, Apple and Nintendo, all of which had more than doubled in the past year” (78). Beyond the genuine confusion that this revelation casts on any assumed opposition between financial rentierism and “real” work (as coexisting but diametrically opposed experiences of the city), the strict separation between labour and life expressed by Zbigniew’s initial desire is eventually also undercut. For, by the end of the novel, following a series of interactions and encounters derived from his professional role (most significantly, with Matya, the Younts’ Hungarian babysitter), the sense that he has effectively managed to form a life in London is undeniable. Capital’s multi-strand and polyphonic plot underscores the notion that no such oppositions, for all their partial heuristic validity, are sustainable as systemic characterisations of city dynamics. The post-Fordist process of financialisation is reinterpreted by the novel as a complex and often co-occurring entanglement of predatory and productive, exploitative and resistant, gestures. The city thus emerges as a primordial locus in which these dynamics are given a territorial expression. Earlier interpretations of globalisation tended to emphasise precisely the de-­ territorialising ­impulses rehearsed by capital in its immediate reaction to Fordism-Keynesianism and its functional attachment to the nation-state. In this sense, we have seen how the postmodern city of the early 1980s was imagined by Martin Amis as a fundamentally subtractive space, where character and value were essentially defined by their negative mobility – that is, by their capacity for evasion and flight from the increasingly uncontrollable frontiers of the urban. But, as Brett Neilson observes, while commentators in the final years of the twentieth century “hypothesized that we were entering an age that tended toward the ‘end of territories’ (…) it is now apparent that we are witnessing a proliferation, multiplication, and complexification of territorial forms” (2018: 382). And in this context, cities increasingly appear as “zones of organizing influence” (Shaw 2015: 70), precisely as complex spaces where systemic contradictions become amplified. Just as the crude opposition between parasitical financial rent and solid material labour collapses around the character of the Polish builder, the twenty-first-century city’s territorial status emerges in Capital as a field of suggestive contradictions between the material and immaterial claims of the urban experience, and

The Crisis and the City  55 between its simultaneous affinity with notions of circulation and stasis. This becomes particularly apparent to a series of characters by whom the global condition of post-Fordist capitalism is experienced as an openly contradictory reality. There is, for instance, the case of Quentina ­ olitical asylum seeker from Zimbabwe whose life in London Mkfesi, a p is marked by the enduring violence of state sovereignty and its juridical apparatus, as the threat of deportation looms over her throughout the novel. Illegally employed on fake ID papers as a traffic warden, Quentina “embodies”, as Catherine Bernard suggests, “the inner contradictions of a society both globalized and static, both supposedly ‘nomadic’ and inured to the plight of the political exiles” (2015: 148). It is worth noting that, while most other characters in the novel can effectively call Pepys Road home (by residing there, with a greater or lesser degree of attachment), Quentina only appears as an unwelcome occasional visitor whose main role is to give parking fines. Defined by a double exclusion through her “legal state of semi-existence” (132) and outsider status in the street, this character is nevertheless a true emblem (Bernard calls her “the most emblematic of the novel’s characters” (2015: 148)) of embodied, tangible risk. As Korte points out, Capital presents “a society of connected risks” in which “risk-taking in the ‘financescape’” is contrasted “with the valences of risk in London’s contemporary ‘ethnoscape’ of migrants and refugees” (2017: 492). The risk of incarceration in an immigration centre (and subsequent deportation to the country of origin, “the place they had risked everything to escape” (528)) faced by the refugee offers a drastic phenomenological counterpoint to the fleeting temporality of risk rehearsed by financial speculation.5 But the global process – “global” in the double sense of totalising and transnational – represented by the city as a social space of “connected risks” makes for a more complex and embedded temporality in which slowness and speed, movement and paralysis converge and intersect. An interesting perspective on this is offered by yet another (and again different) case of global mobility: that of the Senegalese football superstar, and new arrival in Pepys Road, Freddy Kamo. With Freddy, the traditional paradigm of labour migration from the Global South is re-imagined through the lens of economic privilege associated with the football industry. But this is also a character upon whom the multiple experiences of risk and time that compose the contradictory universe of the global city converge in a very straightforward manner. As it turns out, Freddy’s exclusive and unhindered mobility as a multi-million-earning “migrant worker” immediately transmutes into literal paralysis upon arrival in London, as he dramatically breaks his leg just a few seconds into his inaugural match. What follows this incident is a protracted negotiation of the meaning and value (both economic and personal) of risk, as Freddy’s future life as a professional sportsman is put on the line while becoming the object of scrutiny and speculation by doctors, lawyers, and insurance companies.

56  The Crisis and the City The initial tropes of agility, speed, and movement are displaced by an immobilising discourse of l­egal ­conditionalities establishing, after an economic settlement, ­Freddy’s prohibition from ever playing professional football in Europe again. Although under markedly different circumstances and social frames of reference, risk-taking for these two African characters displays none of the abstraction and plasticity of financial calculation and in fact results in a very concrete and material expulsion from the metropolitan core back to their native periphery. The enduring significance of the unequal geography implied by these two characters’ stories is nevertheless fully inscribed and determined by the ontological complexity of post-Fordist urban life. Thus, rather than coordinating a stable global distribution or division of labour, the city towards which Senegalese footballers, Zimbabwean political refugees, Polish construction workers, and financial traders simultaneously gravitate is in effect a factory of differential but interlocking risks and values, a territory of conflicting yet commonly articulated temporalities – and therefore also a source of systemic crisis and instability. In Lanchester’s Capital, the city is not a guarantee of individual success or realisation. The theme of middle-class social and geographical mobility, with its traditional spatial opposition between the suburban and the properly urban, remains an important focus of attention, but there is none of the triumphalism evinced by earlier neoliberal imaginaries. In this respect, I want to consider three more characters in whom this other kind of internal mobility (without as obvious a global dimension) becomes particularly significant, and then make a comparative point by briefly referring to an important precursor of the post-Fordist city novel, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. One of the main motifs in Capital is the wave of threatening anonymous postcards with the message “We Want What You Have” received by the various inhabitants of Pepys Road. While the message itself is a rather obvious insinuation of class hatred aimed at the winners of the gentrification “casino” (whom subsequent waves of postcards variously define as “rich cunts” and “Tory scum” (352)), it is hardly surprising to learn that the author of the postcards is a middle-class aspiring artist frustrated by his boss’s lack of appreciation and general sense of exclusion from metropolitan success. The way this is expressed, in a conversation with his girlfriend after being fired, is interesting: “‘(…) One minute it’s all, you know London’ – and this was an important word for both of them, a code for Escape, for the Big Life and the open road and the possibilities of things that were larger than home – ‘and the next it’s just, I don’t know, it’s like I’m suddenly on the rubbish heap. I’m nobody. I’m back to being nobody again.’” (307–308). The temporality of risk this suggests is banal in comparison with the plight of a globally mobile character such as Quentina, but it points to an ongoing logic of neoliberal subjectivation in which the city operates as a precipitating force. This articulation of the city as a spatio-temporal precondition to personal

The Crisis and the City  57 achievement is also one of the defining traits of Roger’s deputy, Mark, a former PhD candidate in mathematics turned algorithmic trader and the person responsible for Roger’s downfall by trading illegally behind his back. For Mark, perhaps even more vocally than for Parker, the city – strictly, the City – represents the triumph of the “extraordinary” over, as he puts it, “[s]uburban mediocrity”: “The City of London is one of the few places in which this tyranny of the mediocre, the mean, the average, the banal, the ordinary, the complacent, is challenged” (192). In both of these cases, the city is imagined as a site of competitive struggle for the aspiring middle classes, yet one in which the rewards of upward mobility are no longer guaranteed. The ressentiment evinced by Parker’s “We Want What You Have” campaign, on the one hand, and Mark’s symmetrical aversion to suburban sociality, on the other, is significantly set against the diverging temporalities and experiences of exclusion or separation (but also of mobility and self-affirmation) endured by the migrant characters. In a sense, the novel invites a reading of white middle-class frustration expressed as a defensive and revanchist stance against metropolitan complexity.6 Despite their differences, the – by 2008 – largely defeated urban vision shared by Mark and Parker is consistent with the early neoliberal imaginaries rehearsed by Kureishi in his 1990 novel. Set in the 1970s, The Buddha of Suburbia examines the collapse of Fordism through the lens of petty bourgeois, suburban enthusiasm for neoliberal discourses and practices of self-entrepreneurship – precisely the sort of social and ideological ferment that resulted in the victory of Thatcherism in 1979 (the political event, by the way, with which the novel concludes). In contrast to Amis’s Money, the articulation of crisis we find in this novel does not speak of social rupture and irremediable class antagonism but rather deploys an optimistic and ideologically loaded identification of post-Fordist transformations with subjective reinvention and liberation from traditional constraints. While the narrative is by no means uncritical of this dynamic and its excesses, the social cartography on which it rests is fundamentally attuned to the neoliberal project. And in this cartography, a central place is occupied precisely by a conception of the urban guided by notions of middle-class attainment in which the city emerges as a site of experimentation for the new homo economicus, while the suburbs represent both an internal obstacle and the necessary precondition to the transcendence of petty bourgeois limitations. The novel is narrated by Karim Amir, the son of a working-class English mother and Indian immigrant father who decides one day to leave behind his life as a low-rank civil servant and conventional suburbanite by transforming into a pseudo-oriental guru. Under the influence of Eva and Charlie, the bohemian and enterprising (but also fundamentally opportunistic) mother and son, respectively, who truly incarnate the neoliberal paradigm in the novel, Karim’s universe begins to define city life as the required antidote to suburban stasis and the guarantee of

58  The Crisis and the City individual advancement. Charlie, in particular, emerges as an extremely developed version of what Foucault called the neoliberal “entrepreneur of himself”, displaying a remarkable ability to adapt his entire existence to the latest musical fashion and turn it into a profitable act. With Eva’s wholehearted support, Charlie’s relentless nomadising across artistic personae and spatial boundaries (from obscure suburban rock band boy to leading London punk star) brings Karim to the fundamental realisation “that our suburbs were a leaving place, the start of a life” (1990: 117). The city that logically follows from this realisation cannot be the Fordist city of relatively fixed spatial and temporal divisions and stratifications, but rather a fertile ground for the eminently discontinuous and malleable “aesthetics of existence” (Foucault 2001: 1204) of the entrepreneur of himself. This is what French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the “projective city”: In a projective city, the general equivalent – what the status of persons and things is measured by – is activity. But in contrast to what we observe in the industrial city, where activity merges with work and the active are quintessentially those who have stable, productive waged work, activity in the projective city surmounts the ­oppositions ­ nstable, wage-­ between work and non-work, the stable and the u earning class and non-wage-earning class, paid work and voluntary work, that which may be assessed in terms of productivity and that which, not being measurable, eludes calculable assessment. (2005: 109) This city is “projective” in the fundamental sense that the continuous subordination of activity to work that characterised Fordism is now replaced by the former’s transformation into an ability “to generate projects” (109). In this setting, life “is conceived as a succession of projects; and the more they differ from one another, the more valuable they are” (110). The main characters in Kureishi’s novel are all interpellated and entrained by this conception of both the city and the individual’s life as an entrepreneurial “series of temporary, discrete engagements” (Bröckling 2016, 179), while the final ideological justification – which goes largely uncontested and, in a sense, serves as the novel’s conclusion – is delivered by Eva on the day of Thatcher’s election victory: We have to empower ourselves. Look at those people who live on sordid housing estates. They expect others – the Government – to do everything for them. They are only half human, because only half active. We have to find a way to enable them to grow. Individual human flourishing isn’t something that either socialism or conservatism caters for. (263)

The Crisis and the City  59 The revocation of Fordist stabilities and spatio-temporal continuities is equated, in this paradigmatic profession of neoliberal faith, with empowerment. But such a smooth ideological construct is no longer available in Capital, where the proclamations of excellence – in characters such as Roger and Mark – are offset by an undeniable sense of disempowerment arising from the neutralisation of entrepreneurial agency implied by finance. Against the backdrop of Lehman Brothers, and in a socio-geographical space defined by the multiplication and inevitable interweaving of risks, the aesthetic subjective paradigm of the neoliberal subject goes into irrevocable crisis. The fundamental atomisation of perspective on which neoliberalism is premised fractures under the pressures of a multitudinous social logic in which heterogeneity and singularity (or in other words, phenomenologically different but ontologically interconnected realities) come together in the form of a spatial process that cannot disavow its commonality.7 The pre-eminence of economic value as incarnated in finance (from forex trading to real estate) does have the effect of a confounding mediator, clouding the sense of immediacy expressed by more traditional understandings of community.8 Thus, Katy Shaw is right to note that there is a fundamental “absence of non-economic interaction” and that the inhabitants of Pepys Road “are ‘neighbours’ in spatial terms only” (2015: 81), but this does not mean that a common horizon is absent from the narrative. The great paradox of metropolitan existence under advanced post-Fordism is precisely that the process of financialisation, in its totalising dynamic, is productive of sociality (a sociality of “connected risks”, indeed, but also common hopes and possibilities of resistance) as much as of abstraction. Admittedly, Lanchester’s Capital introduces a general, structural perspective on this common horizon, while leaving the effective exploration of ­alternatives out of its narrative scope. It is precisely to these alternatives, generated from within the social ontology of financialisation, that we turn our attention in the second part of this chapter.

Entangled Circulations: Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void Paul Murray’s 2015 The Mark and the Void proposes a narrative of the 2008 crisis in which the abstract and self-referential aspects of financialisation are inextricable from their trans-individual or common properties. Unlike in previous novels we have discussed, however, the common or social dimension – of mutual entanglement and i­nterdependence – is presented as being paradoxically but decidedly internal to the transactional space of finance, implied by its logic of virtuality and anticipation but also tangibly enacted in the lived experiences of its characters. While Lanchester explores the demise of the projective city of early neoliberalism and its replacement with a post-Fordist metropolitan “factory” of

60  The Crisis and the City intersecting risks and circulations through the metonymic setting of Pepys Road, Murray chooses to locate his fictional universe directly in one of global finance’s own non-places – in this case, Dublin’s ­I nternational Financial Services Centre (IFSC)– and to create a protagonist-narrator who is not only experientially engulfed by the intractable immateriality of contemporary finance but also capable of reflecting on its theoretical implications: a French investment banker with an academic training in philosophy, Claude is certainly an interesting counterpoint to the crass superficiality of a Roger Yount or John Self. The immediate effect of this double choice is the fact that the urban ­dimension is presented with a mixture of literate evocation and conceptual awareness about the ambivalent position occupied by a city like Dublin (rather than a country like Ireland, the national being decidedly subordinated to the metropolitan also in this novel) in the global unravelling of financialisation. In contrast to Capital’s London, which was – let us insist – metonymically rooted in the tangible solidity of a single street, Dublin is presented by Claude as a fleeting and ethereal reality, the stuff of forgetfulness and disappearance, and, as such, a natural home for finance capital. First, he remembers the city not meaning much to him, a mere compound of vague cultural references without any real substance: “Before I came here I knew little about Dublin. I had an idea it was famous for its dead writers; I remembered the name of the river from arguments in school over whether it’s Liffey or Lethe the singer floats down in ‘How to Disappear Completely’. I entertained vague notions about Guinness and authenticity” (Murray 2015: 23). But the city he encounters upon arrival from his native France, having accepted a job in the thriving banking sector, is markedly different. Far from incarnating any notion of authenticity, the Dublin he sees and inhabits seems to be a perfect representation of the concept of the virtual he had previously read about as a philosophy student: “I didn’t think, after graduating, that I would require the concept again; I certainly never dreamed I’d find myself living in it” (23). The IFSC is described physically as a “jumble of stumpy glass buildings”, “stretch[ing] along the river like a pygmy Manhattan, on what used to be docklands”. But what truly defines the place is the fact that Its main function is to be a kind of legal elsewhere: multinationals sends their profits here to avoid tax, banks conduct their more sensitive activities with the guarantee of a blind eye from the authorities. Many of the companies here have billions in assets but no employees (…) They call this shadow-banking, and the IFSC is a shadow-place – an alibi that will say you are here when you are not, and cover your presence when you don’t want to be seen. (23)

The Crisis and the City  61 The play of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence (also in terms of memory, as the recurring suggestion to the mythological river Lethe suggests) on which the novel’s articulation of setting is based is nevertheless firmly anchored in the horizon of debt and credit, the very substance of finance itself, with its ambivalent mix of temporal anticipation and irrevocable mutuality.9 Thus, this virtual Dublin of the IFSC ends up being a complex and ambivalent stage for the narrative, where duplicity and greed ultimately compete with a very different set of affects geared towards cooperation and solidarity. Risk-laden deferral is an organising theme of the novel. Arising from its central preoccupation with finance immediately before and during the 2008 crisis, it also proposes an interesting meta-narrative strand in the plot which directly concerns the status of literary fiction (as well as the conditions of its production) today. Indeed, the novel really begins with a literary scenario: Claude is approached by Paul, an out-of-work and heavily indebted Irish writer who follows him around under the pretence of collecting material for his novel, a Ulysses-inspired portrayal of the financier as a sort of contemporary Bloomian Everyman (15). This is revealed to be a ploy through which Paul and his rather colourful accomplice Igor, a “pest exterminator” from a former Soviet republic (121), try to gain access to the bank’s vault, only to find out that investment banks such as the Bank of Torabundo where Claude works do not have one, and in fact that “there is no money” as such (90) – just like there is no novel about the contemporary Everyman. But again, the sheer immateriality of finance (like the deferred, perhaps impossible, materiality of literature, or rather the growing unlikelihood of its actualisation as artefact) in no way diminishes its social effects. Throughout the novel, the interaction between Paul and Claude is defined by a boom-and-bust cycle of affirmed and betrayed confidence, by a prospective and projective entanglement in which the anticipative temporality of financial speculation (or, in the theoretical language preferred by Paul, in which the virtual prefiguration of the actual) effectuates a very real ontology of practical, if at first sight paradoxical, solidarities and interdependencies.10 But the constitutive precariousness of this logic of social entanglement produces a reverse effect of nostalgia for apparently archaic economic structures. As Paul’s bank becomes engulfed in the risky corporate strategy of “Master of the Universe” financier Porter Blankly (who is ­described by Forbes magazine as one of the unrepentant architects of the credit bubble and ensuing crash), the evocative image of an anti-­ utilitarian gift economy is presented as a utopian alternative and as a sharply contrasting expression of a tangible, and therefore liveable, sociality. It is Ish, Claude’s Australian colleague and friend, who insists upon and advocates this concrete alternative to the scandalously

62  The Crisis and the City abstract (and more often than not, criminal) logic of finance capital. She explains, invoking the names of Malinowski and Mauss, that the island of ­Torabundo, after which the bank is named and where its headquarters are – at least nominally – located, “used to be part of this really famous kula ring” (93). When Jurgen, another colleague, suggests that what she really is referring to is barter, Ish strongly objects, “Not barter. They didn’t exchange things. They gave things”: Kokomoko was famous for these beautiful necklaces, for instance, and they’d give them to the tribes on the neighbouring islands. Like, they’d sail over to Torabundo and there’d be a gifting ceremony with a big feast. But the Torabundans wouldn’t keep them, they’d sail on to the next island a few months later and pass the necklaces along to the tribe there. And that tribe would pass them on again, to the next island. And meanwhile there were other gifts from other tribes  – cowries or arrowheads or whatever it might be – going from island to island in the opposite direction. That’s the kula ring. All of these islands, hundreds of miles apart, brought together by gifts. (94) This distinction between barter and gift exchange is fundamental and arguably offers one the central keys to the novel’s investigation of ­fi nance. In effect, Marcel Mauss insists in his famous eponymous essay on the gift that the kula ceremonies studied by Malinowski in the Trobriand archipelago were “carried out in noble fashion, disinterestedly and modestly. [They were] distinguished from the straightforward exchange of useful goods known as the gimwali” (1966: 20). In fact, Mauss observes, “It is said of the individual who does not behave in his kula with proper magnanimity that he is conducting it ‘as a gimwali’” (1966: 20). So there is a certain ritual behaviour, a certain pragmatics, in this emblematic ethnographic reality referenced by the novel that squarely situates gifting-giving above exchange. But there is also an ontological dimension that sets the social logic of the gift apart from that of the mere circulation of use-values (the simple “exchange [of] things”, as Ish puts it). In Mauss’s account, The gift received is in fact owned, but the ownership is of a particular kind. One might say that it includes many legal principles which we moderns have isolated from one another. It is at the same time property and a possession, a pledge and a loan, an object sold and an object bought, a deposit, a mandate, a trust; for it is given only on condition that it will be used on behalf of, or transmitted to, a third person, the remote partner. (1966: 22)

The Crisis and the City  63 In contrast to the simple (and historically dubious, as anthropologists have noted)11 image suggested by the notion of barter, the gift emerges as a highly complex economic entity combining the abstract and the concrete, the virtual and the actual. Interestingly, we can sense in this description offered by Mauss an approximative prefiguration of financial instruments such as the derivative, whose very essence is the compounding of features from (in principle) rather different economic realities. As Claude explains to Paul in one of their early conversations, “A derivative is a contract derived from an underlying asset(…) An asset being something you own – your house, your car, and so on. Instead of buying or selling the asset itself, a derivative allows you to do other kinds of deals based on it” (41). So, the derivative, like the gift, combines the actuality of a possession with the virtuality of a claim, a promise. But more than that, the derivative, like the gift, is essentially defined by circulation, by its constantly being “used on behalf of, or transmitted to, a third person”, as Mauss says (22). Unlike the commodity of simple exchange or barter, which can never be fully abstracted from its use-value, derivatives are, as Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty have pointed out, “commodities that exist purely within circulation” (2007: 148). The substance that makes up this strange commodity is nothing but the risk implicit in a promise – say, a promise to buy or sell another commodity. As Claude explains to Paul, “For example, one simple kind of derivative is an option. This is a contract that gives me the right, but not the obligation, to buy something from you for an agreed price at an agreed date in the future. I am calculating that when the date comes, the price will be more than our agreed price” (41). Paul and Ish concur that, in principle, there is little to differentiate this potentially complex financial construct from a simple bet one might place at the bookie’s (42). However, the development of the plot does suggest that the construction and handling of risk that financialisation entails is a far more social process. Not unlike the kula ring of the Trobrianders, the promissory deferrals and virtual anticipations of the derivative are productive of real material entanglements. This point has been emphatically belaboured by Randy Martin, who claims that derivatives in effect “trade in risk, but also manufacture risk; they disclose the internal logic of financial expansion as well as the social entailments of mutual indebtedness. Hence, like Marx’s account of the commodity, starting with derivatives gets us to the internal workings of social interdependence that is the basis for society” (2014: 194). This contrasts sharply with Claude’s favourite philosopher and former teacher’s account of finance as a “machine for producing unreality” (265) – a statement that seems to be more in keeping with the idealising rationalisations of Rahman’s characters (for whom, let us remember, derivatives were first and foremost superior creations of the mathematical intellect). According to Texier, we are all fundamentally complicit

64  The Crisis and the City in the necromancy of the financial corporations, in their systematic depredation of the material world, “because we ourselves aspire to the condition of persona ficta: free from reality’s contingencies and humiliations, insubstantial, unchanging, inviolable, endlessly apart” (266). This dissociative operation has always been the preserve of narrative, of storytelling, suggests Texier, but now the rapid growth of digital technologies “allows unprecedented quantities of reality to be turned into story. Reality thereby become secondary; just as the banks use the underlying only for what can be derived from it, life becomes merely raw material for our own narratives” (266). What this account neglects is, again, the social materiality of entanglement that such an operation brings to the surface. The homology between fiction and finance is premised on their similarly predatory position in relation to social life. But there is also a connective tissue, an effect of synthesis, so to speak, that these forms produce and that such a critical account tends to overlook. Thus, the fictive, the deceptive cover used by Paul in his failed attempt to rob the bank – which involves using Claude as the mark of the title, that is, “the mark, the patsy, the mug, the sucker” (120) – has the paradoxical effect of strengthening the bond between the two, a bond that increasingly reveals itself as one of mutual indebtedness: a debt-based, life-shaping entanglement not too dissimilar from the one described by Mauss. The ploy whereby Paul had initially planned to use fiction as a cover to, as it were, re-materialise by re-appropriating financial value is soon exposed by Claude. But rather than signalling an abrupt end to their relationship, this first failure of fiction only encourages a second, more dynamic, and intense entanglement as Claude asks Paul to put his fictional skill to work by scripting Claude’s interactions with Ariadne, a Greek migrant he has recently met and fallen in love with. He suggests, “Move the narrative forward, create scenes, maybe some dialogue. Essentially, nothing different from what you have done before, only that, instead of putting my life into your book, you would, so to speak, put your book into my life” (163). This is a significant inversion. Literature, instead of being a commodity available for exchange whose value is determined by real-life contents, suddenly acquires the traits of a promissory (and consequently, risk-laden) operation. Literature – or writing – is here strictly modelled on the anticipative logic of credit money and the gift; it appears as the ex ante validation of a life to be lived precisely on the terms of this mutual entanglement. If this operation enables a hopeful rethinking of finance, it does not dispel the latter’s exploitative efficacity in contemporary capitalism. We continue to observe in the novel the brutal effects of processes that are not determined by an anticipation of, or commitment to, social (re) production. The virtual creation of liquidity that drove the credit bubble is repeatedly unmasked as a predatory operation which, far from producing unreality (as suggested by Texier), exploits and colonises

The Crisis and the City  65 social reality from a position of exteriority. Thus, behind the purported counter-intuitiveness of criminal speculators like Porter Blankly and the widely accepted notion that a “large bank would create its own reality as opposed to simply reacting to consensus” (193), there lies the harsh truth that finance profits from the exacerbation of inequality; indeed, that the ex ante and ex nihilo creation of liquidity steers the future of society not on the basis of mutual entanglement but on the basis of a deliberately created and indefinitely updated unrepayable debt.12 There is a brutal moment when Howie, one of the senior consultants whose actions finally bring about the downfall of the Bank of Torabundo, unashamedly declares, There’s not much you can sell to a world full of poor people, Crazy. So instead you make them the product. To be fair, we didn’t invent the idea. The real visionaries were the boys on Wall Street. They’re the ones who first saw this vast, untapped resource out there, these millions of Americans who were shit poor but who nobody trusted enough to loan money to. They saw that if they could get these deadbeats into the debt market – well, it’s like the oil under Alaska, right? Billions and billions of dollars just waiting to be released. I mean, the sheer audacity of it! (…) Lack is the last great gold rush, Claude. The world is poor and getting poorer. But we can turn that to our advantage. When someone’s got nothing, does he care how much debt he gets into? When he’s walled in, and someone offers him a way out, does he stop to read the small print? (286)13 Far from representing a retreat from reality, this is finance characterised as an operation of capture and depredation of life. It is under the sign of this brutal inflection that Paul’s own lack of faith in his ability and possibilities as a writer is to be understood. For the figure of value that insistently comes to the fore in this extractive regime of accumulation is one that, to paraphrase Claude, puts life into the book rather than the book into life. The satirical climax of this logic is Paul’s – and Igor’s – website “myhotswaitress.com” (typo included for extra effect), basically an online stalking “service” promising to offer detailed personal information about women working as waitresses in the city’s cafés. Beyond the grotesque misogyny of the project, there is the haunting and recurring suggestion that “This is what people want. They don’t want novels. They want reality, up close and personal” (223). And Paul goes on: “Think about how we live now, packed off in our digital eyries. Yes, we have phones, we have email, but we might not speak to an actual fleshand-blood person all day. And then we go to a café, and suddenly in the midst of our fully networked isolation there’s a pretty girl who smiles at us and asks how we are” (221).

66  The Crisis and the City Clearly, Paul’s venture offers a commodification of life that is almost paradigmatic of post-Fordist transformations. But beyond that, there is the extremely irrational or, to use the term that is repeatedly used to describe Porter Blankly’s financial wizardry, the extremely “counterintuitive” notion that failure – in this case, the failure of the social bond itself, of shared social life – can be directly monetised. When Ish emails Blankly about the bleak fate looming over the island of Kokomoko due to rising sea levels and the unsustainable policies enforced by the Bank-sponsored government of Torabundo, a chain reaction of counterintuitive moves is unleashed. Thus, Howie explains how the latest financial instrument he has been working on – or rather, had Grisha, a dishevelled Russian mathematician, working on – “can essentially reverse the polarity of losses, meaning that if you invest with us, you’re guaranteed to make money” (360). Under this distorted, “non-linear” angle, ecological disaster on the faraway island emerges as an ideal investment opportunity: So I thought to myself, what if, instead of using the instrument as a backup, we used it offensively? You’ll remember Wall Street did that with credit default swaps – first they used them to insure their own loans against default, and then they started using them to bet on other people’s loans defaulting. What if we started deliberately targeting losing propositions? (…) I’m talking about monetizing failure. (361) The emphatically “counterintuitive” quality of this operation is paradoxically borne out by the notion that the more fictive capital becomes, the more incontestable are its operations of wealth capture. It is precisely in this spirit that Howie counters Claude’s scepticism regarding the new financial instrument (“It isn’t anything. It’s a fiction. A fairy tale”) by solemnly declaring “We’re in the business of fairy tales, Claude” (363). The general implication, one that is punctuated by the subplot involving star novelist Bimal Banerjee (whom Paul regards as an undeservingly successful rival), is that literary fiction, beyond tracing a parallel trajectory to finance, has actually been supplanted by it. Against the ­hyper-commodified and increasingly stagnant realm of world literature, the fairy tale universe of finance seems to offer superior promises – and far more lucrative results. The novel’s high-paced dénouement, however, posits an alternative that, as already suggested, had accompanied the figure of virtuality encompassing both money and writing all along. During a failed attempt to steal a rare painting by Texier (bearing the novel’s title The Mark and the Void) from Paul’s former publisher’s house, the promise of a new novel – on which his hopes of personal and artistic redemption have been pinned for so long – is renewed and actualised by Claude when he comes up with an idea for a plot that, to everybody’s surprise, the editor seems to like. The improvised plot is,

The Crisis and the City  67 of course, none other than the “real” story of Paul and Claude’s paradoxical friendship. As the editor synthesises it, in what amounts to a radically metafictional but highly perceptive summary, It’s all about giving, isn’t it? The writer gives the banker companionship, the banker gives the writer faith, the writer begins a new book, about the banker, the same man he once believed was nothing more than an empty shell – and he gives that to us! We realize it’s the very book that we’re now holding in our hands! (435) What ensues from this exchange is a simultaneously material and immaterial renewal of credit, as Paul is offered both a contract and an a­ dvance. But the circulation of the gift goes beyond this point. In the face of Porter Blankly’s great financial scam (his counterintuitive strategy of mergers and acquisitions turns out to be an acrobatic feat of insider trading), Claude also actualises the plan, first outlined by Paul at the beginning of the novel, of robbing the bank. The stolen money will be used to anonymously bail out both Paul and his family (Claude purchases their heavily mortgaged apartment using the cover of a fictitious investment company, while letting them stay in it until the new novel is well under way) and to – also secretly – pay off the debt that threatened the survival of Ariadne’s café. The stolen money thus further feeds into the circuit of social (re)production and mutual entanglement in a way that effectively transforms the ethical and political valences of credit, reconfiguring it as gift circulation – which amounts to saying, as social mutuality.14

Urban Precarities: Zadie Smith’s NW and The Embassy of Cambodia The fundamental optimism that rounds off Paul Murray’s excoriating investigation of finance and crisis in The Mark and the Void has no place in Zadie Smith’s acclaimed 2012 novel NW. Although the latter can be read as a similarly critical examination of the advanced neoliberal condition, specifically in the context of the recession, its narrative vision pursues and extends Capital’s understanding of post-Fordist metropolitan life as driven by a far-reaching commonality of risk. However, the operativity of this social economy of circulations and contradictions (of ­bodies, affects, and values – exchange and otherwise) is subjected to an even more radical questioning after which the very ontology of the social  – of this socialised factory which is the post-Fordist, financialised city – emerges as an eminently precarious compound. Smith’s novel effectively proposes an interpretative frame for contemporary capitalist-urban life in which the themes of mobility and connectivity are necessarily mediated by an overarching sense of vulnerability. In

68  The Crisis and the City its affirmation of the generalised precariousness of existence, NW confirms, and in a sense radicalises, Lanchester’s and Murray’s intuitions regarding mutuality and the common. For, as Isabell Lorey observes, “[t]o say that life is precarious is thus to point out that it does not exist independently and autonomously” (2015: 7). What the increasingly visible “vulnerability of the poor, the disabled, and the subordinated in terms of gender, sexuality, and race forces us to recognize”, add Hardt and Negri, is “the ineluctable dependence on others that all of us share”; thus, “the development of circuits of interdependence” is “the primary (perhaps only) path to a real security” (2017: 60).15 NW maps an urban territory and social microcosm which, unlike that of Capital, is defined by its blurry and insecure lines of demarcation as much as by its “strong communitarian bent” (Slavin 2015: 105). The novel’s formal strategy, which Wendy Knepper calls “revisionary late modernist” (2013: 112),16 contributes decisively to this ambivalence. Emphatically conscious of its geographical location, London’s NorthWest, “NW eschews chronology”, as Knepper points out, “in favour of a spatially configured story concerning various ‘visitations’ or encounters in the space of NW” (2013: 111). This spatial self-awareness is posited as radically immanent and, as a result, phenomenologically diffuse, in the sense that there is no vantage point from which to accord it an external or transcendent perspective. A traffic of encounters or “visitations” and “crossings”, but also separations, is what – perhaps paradoxically – holds this urban universe together across class and ethnic differences, making for an eminently common (or “communitarian”, as Slavin says), but also radically precarious, social experience. The novel begins with the story of Leah Hanwell, one of the three main characters originally from the Caldwell housing estate whose lives diverge and intersect at various points. In contrast to her friend Natalie (born Keisha) Blake, an upwardly mobile black woman of Caribbean descent, Leah represents, on the one hand, stagnation and failure in the face of neoliberal aspiration, but on the other, a residual sense of commitment to her class origins and the bygone social structures on which they rest. The insistence on empathy as an outstanding trait of this character offers a pervasive reminder of the tension between an ­ethical outlook no longer warranted by post-Fordist city life and a persistent desire to redraw fading communal bonds. Leah’s interactions with a local drug addict in the first section of the novel are particularly significant in this respect. As various critics have observed, the character Shar represents that moment of alterity on which the ethical premise of the novel’s “visitations” is based.17 When she turns up screaming for help on Leah’s doorstep, announcing that her mother has been rushed to hospital and she is in desperate need of money for a taxi, Leah is moved to counter the general inertia of enclosure presiding over this ­urban microcosm, which seems to be universally “[f]enced in, on all sides”

The Crisis and the City  69 (Smith 2013a: 3). In “releas[ing] the chain” (5) that secures her private realm from the potential threat of an external social world grown threatening and disconnected, Leah performs what Kristian Shaw has called “an act of cosmopolitan solidarity” (2017: 71) through which the abstract moral economy of empathy may be enacted as an intersubjective practice founded on precariousness. Shar’s outsider status, her symbolic position as a representative of the devastated social landscape of Caldwell, makes her vulnerability immediately apparent. But, by releasing the physical hold on the boundary separating her from Shar’s world, Leah also makes herself vulnerable.18 The mutuality of risk once again emerges as the dynamic foundation of community beyond the routine alienations and expropriations of contemporary urban life. By granting Shar hospitality in her presumptive moment of need, the uncertain social universe of NW seems to momentarily open up to the logic of gift circulation explored by The Mark and the Void. But this hope is short-lived, as the ontology of precarity is immediately overlaid with an overarching phenomenology of failure – in trust, in ethics, and, generally, in the possibility of being-in-common. Shar’s calls for help are exposed as lies (she wanted the money for a fix), just as Leah’s claims to empathy gradually become voided of meaning under the pressures of her own existential enclosure.19 The crisis-stricken London of NW is indeed a place of proliferating enclosures: external and tangible boundary walls (such as the one demarcating Caldwell) drawing an urban geography of social exclusion, but also internal ones, dividing the individual from any sense of plenitude or self-fulfilment. Just as Leah’s attachment to the promise of ­empathy (or rather, to the promise of deliverance – from her own sense of ­stagnation – through empathy) fails, her husband Michel’s socially ­mobile aspirations are contradicted by an overall effect of stasis. ­Secluded in his room, Michel invests a lot of his time and money in online trading, thus trying to emulate Natalie’s husband Frank (who is a successful ­fi nancier) and ultimately follow their upward social journey across class, national, language, and race boundaries.20 The way he justifies his hopeful engagement with finance bears a close resemblance to Zafar’s claims in Rahman’s novel: This is why I’m on the laptop every night. I’m trying to do this – because it’s pure market on there, nothing about skin, about is your English perfect, do you have the right piece of university paper or some bullshit like this. I can trade like anyone. There’s money to be got out there, you know? (30) While the “windfall that will transport them to another urban suburb more to his taste” (90) never comes, the feeling of enclosure and stasis

70  The Crisis and the City increases, multiplying the moments of separation from one another (“He is two feet away. He is on the other side of the world” (49)) and the sense ­ orizon of that their London, far from being that dynamically projective h the early Thatcherite imagination, as expressed by Eva and Charlie in The Buddha of Suburbia, is essentially a space of broken sociality. This sense of fracture and isolation becomes exacerbated in the section dealing with Felix Cooper. A black man also from the Caldwell estate, Felix is in a sense the pinnacle of precariousness in the narrative. The life he recounts seems to be an endless stream of petty jobs and moments of socioeconomic vulnerability, but it is his tragic death halfway through the novel that ultimately imparts the latter’s truth on post-Fordist metropolitan life. Following an argument with two men on the train, Felix is ambushed in the street, mugged, and rather gratuitously murdered within sight of a passing bus: Down Willesden Lane a bus came rumbling; at the same moment in which Felix glimpsed the handle and the blade he saw the 98 reopen its doors to accept the last soul in sight – a young girl in a yellow summer dress. She ran with her ticket held high above her head like the proof of something, got there just in time, cried out: “Thank you!” and let the doors fold neatly behind her. (169) The sober third-person narration which brings this section to an end graphically captures the brutality of the crisis haunting this urban landscape, an environment of secluded lives and lonely deaths on which endless doors keep closing. In this novel, the only credible claim on neoliberal subjectivation, and therefore on an experience of post-Fordist city life at least potentially ­resembling the dynamics explored in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, comes from Natalie. As we follow the vignettes telling her rags-to-riches story, we are told that she was, from an early age, “crazy busy with self-invention” (209). But the adult and already successful Natalie we encounter throughout the novel is a woman in whom the self-­entrepreneurial elasticity of her younger years has been largely displaced by rigidity and enclosure: a phenomenology of subjective compression and temporal implosion ends up presiding over her life story. 21 Even the frenetic nomadising she engages in towards the end of the novel symptomatises a general atmosphere of crisis rather than a celebration of sanctioned mobilities. The fact that Natalie is joined in her compulsive walk across North London by Nathan Bogle, a delinquent and fellow Caldwell native whose probable participation in Felix’s crime is implied, suggests a downward equalising tendency, an almost entropic tension in this ­urban environment that ultimately neutralises all ideological justifications and interpretations à la Kureishi. In a sense, the

The Crisis and the City  71 symbolic “boundary wall” that demarcates Caldwell (300) and introduces a principle of spatial ­division and distribution into the various settings and interactions of the novel expands its perimeter, subsuming different experiences of the social under a common logic of precariousness. The resulting effect is not merely a fall from acquired status to deprived origins (as suggested by Natalie’s return in this section to her given name, Keisha)22 but a dissolution of the self-identitarian profile on which neoliberal projections are founded. As Eva Ulrike Pirker reminds us, Natalie Blake and Nathan Bogle share a first name (Nathan being the masculine version of Natalie) “and initials which could equally be read as abbreviation for ‘no-body’” (2016: 68). 23 Moreover, their shared flight (“Come join me; I’m flying”, says Nathan (301)) through the city points “nowhere”, which is perhaps the definitive inflection of this spatial experience and the true (non-)­setting alluded to in the novel’s title. 24 The precarious metropolis of NW seems to constantly oscillate between the provisional security of enclosure and identity (with its ambivalent and often self-defeating structure of hospitality and visitation) and the dissolving inertia of nomad crossings (across boundaries, names, and social affiliations). A central preoccupation with the vulnerability of metropolitan life and its failure to coalesce into a positive or operative commonality (remaining rather an ontological horizon without available institutional articulations) leads to a general verdict on the limits of neoliberal understandings of self and city. This verdict, which can ultimately be read as a definitive break with the ideological composition of texts such as The Buddha of Suburbia in ways that go beyond the critical scope of crisis novels like Lanchester’s and Murray’s, is given an even more damning emphasis in Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia. Originally published as a short story in The New Yorker in 2013, 25 this brief text offers a sober and incisive interrogation of the metropolitan dialectic between mobility and enclosure. While the setting is still Willesden, the lived geography charted by the story is defined by a more emphatic preoccupation with confinement – specifically, with the dynamics of confinement and servitude endured by its protagonist. Enclosure is articulated here not only as a proliferation of walls (which are nevertheless an even more central motif than in NW) but crucially as a defining labour regime from which all traces of Fordist sociality have been erased. Fatou is a West African woman ­working for the Derawal family as an indentured domestic servant. 26 Even though her employers refer to her, on the occasion of her being fired, as a “nanny” (Smith 2013b: 64), her work is neither waged nor defined by any measure of contractual freedom. In fact, the question of whether she may have to count herself a slave becomes central after she comes across a newspaper article featuring a “story about a Sudanese ‘slave’ living in a rich man’s house in London” (15).27 While “[i]t was not the first time that Fatou had wondered if she herself was a slave”, reading

72  The Crisis and the City the story confirms “in her own mind that she was not” (15). Even though (“just like the girl in the newspaper”) both her passport and wages are retained for the duration of her employment, Fatou invokes her relative freedom of movement as a differentiating element. The fact that she “had an Oyster Card, given to her by the Derawals, and was trusted to do the food shopping and other outside tasks” reinforces her conviction that, in effect, she “was not confined to the house” (17). Moreover, she notes, the specific circumstances of her migration from her home in the Ivory Coast (first to work, along with her father, at a hotel in Accra, and then at the age of 18, on to Europe via Libya and Italy) offer a sharp contrast to the “kidnapped” status of the Sudanese girl. The fundamental paradox on which the story builds is that these claims to relative freedom are belied not only by the material description of her indenture but also by a more symbolic level of entrapment inscribed in the urban framing of the narrative. Thus, the story’s eponymous preoccupation with the Embassy of Cambodia, articulated by the narrator as a surprise emergence in the opening lines of the text (“Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia?” (1)), suggests a multiplying effect on the semantics of separation and enclosure. The building itself is not only removed from its more natural location “in the centre of the city” (6) but also barely a tangible presence beyond the high “redbrick wall” surrounding it (2). Unremarkable and visually inaccessible, its main link to the outside world of passers-by such as Fatou is the recurring flight of a shuttlecock, “back and forth, cresting this wall horizontally” (2), which announces an ongoing and seemingly endless game of badminton inside the Embassy. The latter symbolises a further level of removal and inaccessibility through the narrator’s allusion to the Cambodian genocide. Declaring the “prosaic” nature of Willesden people while assuming a paradoxical role of representation of the collective, 28 the narrator intimates that genocide is undoubtedly what every “man or woman among us” thought “upon passing the Embassy of Cambodia for the first time” (6). Hidden behind a high wall of historical and experiential distance, however, genocide (like slavery) becomes a floating signifier whose semantic and experiential anchoring is deferred and displaced (or batted to and fro, like the shuttlecock) by the contradiction between movement and enclosure. This is the living paradox represented by Fatou. Herself an avid extramural observer of the badminton game in the Embassy, this character’s entrapment is qualified – and in a sense entirely defined – by her also recurring itinerancy between the Derawals’ home and the local health club, where she goes to swim every day using their guest passes without their authorisation or knowledge. Unlike Natalie’s nomadising in NW, Fatou’s mobility projects itself as a temporal axis pointing back to her past exploitation in Africa and forward to a probable future of continued precarity (but not unimaginable agency). Swimming in the

The Crisis and the City  73 club’s pool, Fatou’s memory flows back to a site of personal trauma, the sordid beach resort in Accra where she endured and witnessed multiple forms of exploitation and abuse. But this traumatic past is not a point of fixation for the subject. The act of memory is both imagined and performed as an experiential fluency (the aquatic imagery is not accidental) that cannot be reduced to the encapsulated or immured spatiality of any of these particular settings or events. The correlation of historical and personal traumas on which the story rests (from Cambodia to Rwanda, from the Carib Beach hotel to the Derawals) does not produce an absolutised horizon of suffering, but rather a prospective ethical formulation in which vulnerability appears as the foundation of subjectivity and not as its negation. At various points, Fatou insists on the importance of “making your own arrangements” in the face of adversity and as a general strategy of resistance. Even at the heart of brutality – this crucial refrain seems to imply – there pulsates a core of autonomy, a self-­ valorising pragmatics of existence defined by relative freedom. We may here detect an echo of Foucault’s famous suggestion that “[p]ower is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free”. Power relationships are not scenarios of total domination resulting in abjection or destruction of the subject. Rather, they are strategic relations of “reciprocal incitation and struggle” in which the powerful agency owes its very ­existence and efficiency to “the recalcitrance of the will” expressed by its target (1982: 790). There is a fundamental split in The Embassy of Cambodia between the molar level of historical trauma (which remains fundamentally abstract and experientially opaque) and the molecular level of vulnerability and power at which Fatou’s subjectivity is articulated. It is notable that the historical level of signification, where the analogies between Fatou’s condition and the traumas of the past are established, is the purview of the intrusive narrator. Thus, the latter’s explicit reference to vulnerability in Pol Pot’s Cambodia (“Vulnerability was punishable by death” (39)) seeks to draw a clear comparison with the protagonist’s plight. 29 But the image of vulnerability that arises from Fatou’s relatively autonomous actions in the story points to a practical rejection of the narrator’s implied reduction of her suffering to mere domination. The Embassy of Cambodia thus ends up recreating, through its own narrative strategy, a potentiality for resistance founded, in turn, on the constitutive precarity of contemporary (urban) life. Fatou’s status as an indentured migrant worker engaged in the sphere of care offers a fundamental inflection of the representation of labour in contemporary capitalism. The preoccupation with urban precarities expressed by Smith in NW and The Embassy of Cambodia takes us beyond the circulatory sphere of financial valorisation and right into the heart of post-Fordist reconfigurations of the labour process. As the tide of monetary abstraction momentarily rolls out of view in these

74  The Crisis and the City idiosyncratic engagements with the crisis, what emerges is not just a social landscape of disaffiliation and inequality but a new sense and experience of the defining relationship in capitalism (labour). The outliers and exceptions to the Fordist rule of protected employment thus become increasingly visible and central to the accumulation process in ways that often fuse the servility and unfreedom characteristic of early capitalist forms with the subjective complexity proper to neoliberal exigencies (in terms of an increased attention to affect, for example). The profoundly paradoxical quality of this development is at the heart of contemporary fiction’s most incisive portraits of the crisis-prone entanglement between life and work. It is precisely to two such portraits that I turn in Chapter 4: Kazuo Ishiguro’s exemplary investigations of servility in The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

Notes 1 “There is no class struggle without a place in which it could develop. T ­ oday this place is the territory of the metropolis. Once it was the factory; and it is still the factory today, but to say ‘factory’ today is to say something different from what it meant in the old days. Today’s factory is the metropolis – with its production relations, its research sectors, its sites of direct production and flows of circulation-communication, its trains and transportations, its separations and borders, its crises of production and circulation, its different forms of employment, and so on. The metropolis is a very modern factory (…) and yet it is a very old factory, in which immigrants and women, the precarious and the excluded are equally put to work, like slaves, and exploitation pervades every aspect and every ­moment of life” (Negri 2018: 94). 2 To his claim that the contemporary city is a factory, Negri adds the important qualification that “contrary to what happened in factories, where the toil of production intersected with the joy of the encounter and the pain of labour intersected with class consciousness, solitude and the multitude live under one roof in the metropolis today” (2018: 62). 3 In his eponymous classic of 1899, Veblen defines the “leisure class” as comprising a range of occupations and functional differentiations throughout history while displaying “the common economic characteristic of being non-industrial” (1994: 1). 4 As Carlo Vercellone puts it, “According to the model we have inherited from the classics, rent can be understood as that which remains when all who contribute to production have been remunerated” (2014: 426). 5 As Edward LiPuma points out, “for speculative capital, the mitigation of risk depends on the compression or neutralization of the effects of time” (2017: 157). 6 Urban theorist Neil Smith has famously described the post-Fordist city that began to take shape in the 1980s and 1990s as a “revanchist city”. He gives the following account of its emergence: “the end of the 1980s boom, the crystallized effects of a decade of deregulation, privatization and emerging cuts in welfare and social service budgets rewrote the urban future as one of gloom, not boom (…) Revenge against minorities, the working class, women, environmental legislation, gays and lesbians, immigrants became the increasingly common denominator of public discourse. Attacks on affirmative action and immigration policy, street violence against gays and

The Crisis and the City  75 homeless people, feminist bashing and public campaigns against political correctness and multiculturalism were the most visible vehicles of this reaction. In short, the 1990s have witnessed the emergence of what we can think of as the revanchist city” (Smith 1996: 42–43). 7 As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have suggested apropos of the entrepreneurial logics underpinning neoliberalism, “The generalization of the enterprise form in the social fabric also points in the opposite direction to neoliberalism, toward the freedom and autonomy of cooperative social subjectivities. Before and beneath the neoliberal homo economicus, in other words, we find the entrepreneurship of the multitude” (2017: 209). 8 This becomes apparent in Pepys Road’s oldest resident Petunia’s nostalgia for the post-war version of the British social contract: “We’re all in this together: Petunia was the right age for that once to have been a very important idea, a defining idea, about what it meant to be British” (61–62). But this sense of crisis is problematically linked to an increase in the cultural heterogeneity of British society: “Petunia disliked feeling such an alien, such an exotic, sitting here in the surgery, where everyone was in Lycra, or crop tops, or T-shirts, or texting, or nodding to just-audible music, or wearing headscarves (two women) or in full concealing hijab (one) or speaking East European languages to each other or over their mobiles” (61). 9 The ambivalent nature of credit was famously noted by Marx in the third volume of Capital: “The credit system has a dual character immanent to it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of others’ labour, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards a new mode of production. It is this dual character that gives the principal spokesmen for credit, from Law through to Isaac Péreire, their nicely mixed character of swindler and prophet” (1991: 572–573). 10 As Randy Martin reminds us, financialisation “is ultimately not simply more finance everywhere, but also more socialization, more interdependence, more mutual debt” (2014: 197). 11 Mauss himself observes that “Economic evolution has not gone from barter to sale and from cash to credit. Barter arose from the system of gifts given and received on credit, simplified by drawing together the moments of time which had previously been distinct” (1966: 35). More recently, anthropologists such as David Graeber have gone on to denounce barter as a myth unfoundedly appealed to by economists: “It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations (…) The problem is there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not” (2011: 28). See also Felix Martin (2014). 12 This is an idea that has been amply developed by Maurizio Lazzarato, in contrast to more optimistic characterisations of indebtedness such as that proposed by Randy Martin. See, for example, Lazzarato (2015). 13 In a far less celebratory vein, Christian Marazzi confirms Howie’s assessment when he writes: “The expansion of subprime loans shows that, in order to raise and make profits, finance also needs to involve the poor, in addition to the middle class” (2011: 39). 14 The final kula of the novel is fittingly carried out by Claude’s friend Ish, who conserves a leaked report on the bank’s damning record with which she intends to protect Claude. 15 Hardt and Negri build here upon Judith Butler’s fundamental theorisation of precarity (see, for example, Butler 2010). The emphasis they add, on the

76  The Crisis and the City

16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

28

question of the common, is of immediate relevance to my own argument: “We read Butler’s affirmation of interdependence in line with theories of the common that pose open and expanding networks of productive social cooperation, inside and outside the capitalist economy, as a powerful basis for generating free and autonomous forms of life” (2017: 60). Joyce Carol Oates (2012) has also underlined the neo-modernist credentials of the novel, emphasising, in particular, its Joycean legacy. See, for example, Tammy Amiel Houser (2017), Kristian Shaw (2017), and Katy Shaw (2018). As Tammy Amiel Houser points out, “In this world, the homeless Shar and drug-addict friends prey on local residents, as Leah later learns (…) Taking in a stranger thus involves potential harm, in which one might be become [sic] a victim” (2017: 130). Kristian Shaw offers the following summary: “Only a week later, another drug addict appears on Leah’s doorstep to take advantage of her good nature, resulting in Leah’s beginning to question her sympathetic tendencies and regret her altruism, ironically doodling ‘I AM SO FULL OF ­E MPATHY’ at work – an environment in which she constantly feels isolated and excluded” (2017: 73). Natalie, let us remember, is black and second-generation Caribbean, while Frank comes from an Anglo-Italian family. The following scene is characteristic of the overarching sense of acceleration and temporal deprivation surrounding this character: “Natalie Blake was busy with the Kashmiri border dispute, at least as far as it related to importing stereos into India through Dubai on behalf of her giant Japanese electronics manufacturing client. Her husband, Frank De Angelis, was out entertaining clients. They were ‘time poor’. They didn’t even have time to collect their latest reward for all their hard work” (266). This is, let us remember, the “fall” that defined post-Fordist instability in Martin Amis’s Money. Pirker further notes that “when they meet, she also shares the outcast’s style of dress” (2016: 68). For a careful reading of this “nowhere”, see Slavin (2015). It was subsequently published as a short book. I will be referring to this separate edition. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas suggests that the “indentured” status of “migrant domestic workers”, which is primarily expressed by their inability “to participate freely in the labor market”, arises “from their liminal status of being legally ‘at sea,’ caught outside the juridical protection of both sending and receiving states” (2017: 114). Moreover – and this is apparent in the case of Fatou – “the situation of domestic workers is aggravated by the live-in requirement of their occupation” (Salazar Parreñas 2017: 115). Abigail Ward clarifies this allusion thus: “Smith’s story references, in particular, the case of Mende Nazer, whose autobiography Slave was co-written with journalist Damien Lewis and published in Britain in 2004. (…) Nazer was abducted aged twelve or thirteen in the Nuba mountains in Sudan and kept as a slave for six years in Khartoum, before being passed to another member of the same family living in London. She eventually escaped on 11 September 2000, though her initial application for political asylum was rejected by the Home Office” (2016: 41). “I have been chosen to speak for them, though they did not choose me and must wonder what gives me the right” (40). Set against her reference to the Cambodian genocide and the Khmer Rouge, there is an obvious metanarrative hint here to the discursive subterfuge of “democratic centralism” invoked by twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.

The Crisis and the City  77 29 The narrator uses the ominous Khmer Rouge slogan “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss” (39) as an allusive link between Cambodia and Fatou.

References Amiel Houser, Tammy. (2017) “Zadie Smith’s NW: Unsettling the Promise of Empathy”. Contemporary Literature 58.1: 116–148. Bernard, Catherine. (2015) “Writing Capital, or, John Lanchester’s Debt to Realism”. Études Anglaises 68.2: 143–155. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Bröckling, Ulrich. (2016) The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject. London: Sage. Bryan, Dick and Michael Rafferty. (2007) “Financial Derivatives and the Theory of Money”. Economy and Society 36.1: 134–158 Butler, Judith. (2010) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Foucault, Michel. (1982) “The Subject and Power”. Critical Inquiry 8.4: 777–795. Foucault, Michel. (2001) Dits et écrits II. 1976–1988. Paris: Gallimard. Graeber, David. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2017) Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Keynes, John Maynard. (2013) The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes Volume VII: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knepper, Wendy. (2013) “Revisionary Modernism and Postmillenial Experimentation in Zadie Smith’s NW”. Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Korte, Barbara. (2017) “John Lanchester’s Capital: Financial Risk and Its Counterpoints”. Textual Practice 31.3: 491–504. Kureishi, Hanif. (1990) The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Lanchester, John. (2013) Capital. London: Faber and Faber. Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2015) Governing by Debt. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). LiPuma, Edward. (2017) The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time. Durham: Duke University Press. Lorey, Isabell. (2015) State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Marazzi, Christian. (2011) The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Martin, Randy. (2014) “What Difference do Derivatives Make? From the Technical to the Political Conjuncture”. Culture Unbound 6: 189–210. Marx, Karl. (1991) Capital: Volume 3. London: Penguin. Mauss, Marcel. (1966) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West. Murray, Paul. (2015) The Mark and the Void. London: Hamish Hamilton. Negri, Antonio. (2018) From the Factory to the Metropolis. Essays Volume 2. London: Polity Press.

78  The Crisis and the City Neilson, Brett. (2018) “The Currency of Migration”. South Atlantic Quarterly 117.2: 375–396. Oates, Joyce Carol. (2012) “Cards of Identity”. The New York Review of Books 59.14: 20–24. Pirker, Eva Ulrike. (2016) “Approaching Space: Zadie Smith’s North London Fiction”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.1: 64–76. Salazar Parreñas, Rhacel. (2017) “The Indenture of Migrant Domestic W ­ orkers”. Women’s Studies Quarterly 45.1–2: 113–127. Shaw, Katy. (2015) Crunch Lit. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Shaw, Katy. (2018) Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, Kristian. (2017) Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Slavin, Molly. (2015) “Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW”. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 48.1: 97–119. Smith, Neil. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Smith, Zadie. (2013a) NW. London: Penguin. Smith, Zadie. (2013b) The Embassy of Cambodia. London: Hamish Hamilton. Veblen, Thorstein. (1994) The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover. Vercellone, Carlo. (2014) “From the Mass Worker to Cognitive Labour: Historical and Theoretical Considerations”. Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth. Leiden: Brill. Ward, Abigail. (2016) “Servitude and Slave Narratives”. Wasafiri 31.3: 42–48.

4 Servile Becomings

Codified Affect, Servile Care: The Remains of the Day A fruitful interaction between the dynamics of care, servility, and enclosure is precisely what Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day proposes. There is in this novel a historically deflected but rather evident topicality in the treatment of transformations in the sphere of work – a metafictional awareness, indeed, of the peculiar mix of features defining labour in the wake of deindustrialisation. Thus, I would like to argue, Ishiguro’s novel about a butler’s memories of work at an old-fashioned country house in the 1920s and 1930s somehow interrogates the characteristically post-Fordist hegemony of immaterial labour. This prominent concept in discussions of cognitive capitalism broadly refers to that range of activities which, as Hardt and Negri schematically point out, result “in no material and durable good”, but rather in “an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (2000: 290). The concept of immaterial labour thus also centrally addresses the proliferation of activities in the ambit of care, which, despite being “entirely immersed in the corporeal”, nevertheless produce “social networks, forms of community, biopower” (2000: 293) – in sum, a whole sphere of activity and resulting value which exceeds the objective limits of the industrial commodity. This novel’s thematic preoccupation with the meaning of domestic service in a backward social setting of static and well-defined class stratifications, no less than its temporality of change and loss, situates the sphere of care in particular at the centre of its fictional construction. Yet, while Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia identified care with the precarity of female migrant work, The Remains of the Day posits it as a function of self-management characteristic of late twentieth-­century neoliberal discourse. There is thus a clear sense in which Ishiguro’s butler Stevens is an entrepreneur of the self – indeed, an immaterial worker whose main production is his own subjectivity. But, unlike the ideological version of neoliberalism’s homo economicus, what Ishiguro’s historically mediated projection discovers is that this self-productive subjectivity, this “machine” of skill and ability, as Foucault describes it

80  Servile Becomings in his famous discussion of human capital theories,1 is not an expansive and generative matrix of possibility but rather a function of closure (or indeed enclosure), as well as enslavement. By placing the focus on oldstyle servilities (and the atomistic forms of subjectivation associated with them), rather than on the commonalities of risk and vulnerability characteristic of post-Fordist metropolitan life, the novel offers an important reading of the so-called crisis of care on which recent discussions of post-Fordist labour dynamics have tended to focus. 2 And I want to argue that the novel articulates this crisis as a contradictory unfolding of subjectivising exertions, which ultimately result in the systematic privatisation of the common terrain on which care and the affective labour it involves are necessarily played out. One of the main driving forces in the narrative is the contradictory overlap and interaction between individual and collective dynamics. While Stevens’s role is defined by an overbearing preoccupation with professional self-improvement and self-esteem, there is also a reiteration throughout the novel of the collective dimension implicit in his identification with the job. Thus, Stevens repeatedly refers to his “generation” of butlers sharing a certain professional outlook and set of values, as well as to the “true camaraderie” (Ishiguro 2005a: 19) which existed in the bygone days on which his reminiscence focuses. In her discussion of Stevens’s (and other Ishiguro characters’) immaterial labour, Lisa Fluet has noted how this character “feels that he struggles in common with others” (2007: 269) to accomplish the tasks pertaining to his role, but also to achieve the larger goals set by his employer Lord Darlington, a pro-German aristocrat whose unofficial diplomatic efforts through the organisation of international conferences become an emblem of 1930s appeasement. Stevens’s sense of common struggle rests on the purported idealism of his generation of butlers: For we were, as I say, an idealistic generation for whom the question was not simply one of how well one practised one’s skills, but to what end one did so; each of us harboured the desire to make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world, and saw that, as professionals, the surest means of doing so would be to serve the great gentlemen of our times in whose hands civilization had been entrusted. (122) The idealism of this defining self-declarative move on the part of Stevens is to be understood precisely as the opposite of what it claims to be: the alleged commitment to the common good is so structurally determined by his cultivation of a subordinate role that it can only reveal a distorted understanding of the social horizon to which it appeals. This is a fundamental distortion which the narrative exploits and amplifies through its

Servile Becomings  81 detailed, and increasingly painful, reconstruction of its protagonist’s effective (and affective) disconnection from the world beyond the job. The ethical claims laid on this presumptive form of inter-class cooperation, in which butlers would ultimately labour, with their expertise in the ambit of care, towards “the highly immaterial goal of the global good” (Fluet 2007: 269), are soon rendered void by the labour of abstraction (from any real sense of social context or commitment) implicit in Stevens’s professional conduct. There is, for example, the notorious episode in which Lord Darlington’s decision to dismiss two maids on the grounds of their being Jewish leads to a confrontation between the housekeeper Miss Kenton and the butler. While the former points to the fundamental injustice of this decision, and even threatens to resign should it be implemented, Stevens offers a revealing rationalisation that effectively contradicts the purported ethicality of his earlier claims. First, by negating any measure of content to their job beyond a total subordination to their employer’s will: “Surely I don’t have to remind you that our professional duty is not to our own foibles and sentiments, but to the wishes of our employer” (157). But this is a formal appeal to duty that also entails a substantive alignment with the master’s will, with no room left for the servants to exercise any measure of individual or collective autonomy. Thus, Stevens’s justification of Darlington’s decision at the time rests on a stern gesture of intellectual and ethical self-annulment: “There are many things you and I are simply not in a position to understand concerning, say, the nature of Jewry” (157–158). Yet interestingly, this self-cancelling alignment with Darlington’s antisemitic instincts (as well as with his pro-fascist leanings elsewhere in the narrative) is not something he comes to assume as part of a personal ideological baggage or outlook, for indeed, as he retorts against Miss Kenton’s suggestion that Stevens was “positively cheerful about” the dismissal of the two girls: “The whole matter caused me great concern, great concern indeed. It is hardly the sort of thing I like to see happen in this house” (162). Miss Kenton’s befuddled reaction is to ask why he chose to conceal his feelings at the time, knowing how she felt about the maids being dismissed. More interestingly still, she goes on to characterise Stevens’s behaviour as pretence: “Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?” (162). Perhaps the distance between these two characters (which encompasses a general failure, on the part of Stevens, to engage with Miss Kenton’s romantic feelings for him) hinges precisely on the more fundamental division signalled by this semantic disagreement. Stevens merely laughs off the suggestion that he had been pretending, but the true riposte follows, a few pages later, in an observation that connects with the ideological matrix of his entire narrative. Although not explicitly pitted against the idea of pretence, the ethics of alignment with the master’s wishes imply a strict and programmatic contrast between the surface act of mere dissimulation and

82  Servile Becomings the integral engagement of subjectivity involved in his notion of professionalism: “A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume” (178). Stevens sketches here something like a theory of servile performativity in which the defining criterion of value, of professional “quality”, or in the more idiosyncratic terminology privileged by Stevens himself, of “dignity”, rests on a logic of identification with the appointed role that operates at a deep structural, almost ontological, level. Thus, “dignity” has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits. Lesser butlers will abandon their professional being for the private one at the least provocation. For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push, a slight stumble, and the façade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. (43–44) This professional enactment is performative precisely in the sense that it is not a mere performance. It presupposes and requires an intensive material practice of self-fashioning, indeed a “labour”, as Foucault remarks apropos of the classical doctrines around the care of the self.3 Beyond the “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1988: 519) identified by critical theorists of performativity, Stevens foregrounds a pragmatics of restraint and a codification of conduct that dramatically reduces the ethical basis on which subjectivity is premised. Thus, to become the job (which would be a schematic but effective way of paraphrasing Stevens’ injunction) is essentially to reduce its ontological possibilities as a subordinated but relatively autonomous practice of the self to a function of alignment with the extrinsic determinations of a radically de-socialised other (the master, the employer). Any suggestion of subjective depth, or, in Stevens’s own terms, intrinsic “dignity”, is thus brushed away by the exigencies of a correct (almost) physical orientation of the employee’s will with that of the master.4 As Frédéric Lordon has pointed out in his Spinoza-influenced account of “passionate servitude” (2014: 16), the enlistment or mobilisation of workers under a regime of exploitation can be explained much better in geometrical than in psychological terms: For, generically speaking, mobilisation is a matter of co-linearity. The desire of the enlistees must be aligned with the master-desire. In other words, if the conatus to be enlisted is a force acting with a certain intensity, it must be given a “correct” orientation, namely a

Servile Becomings  83 direction that conforms to the direction of the boss’s desire (whether the latter is an individual or an organisation). Since it is a question of direction and alignment, vectors offer an appropriate metaphor. (Lordon 2014: 33) The specific “conatus” and “intensity” that characterise Stevens’s doctrine and practice of professional dignity are “given a correct orientation” by the trope of restraint that presides over the narrative. This is not only the attribute connecting his personal/professional trajectory to the English landscape and national essence as he discovers them in his belated journey through the West Country but also a fundamental discursive vector along which social contradictions may be neutralised or transcended. Stevens specifically argues that “emotional restraint” is a necessary aspect of any butler’s claim to dignity, and since this is a quality to be found almost exclusively among the English, he concludes that “butlers only truly exist in England”: “Continentals – and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree – are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations” (44). This inherent restraint is also a quality that adorns the English landscape and inevitably singles it out “to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world” (28) – a quality, says Stevens, which “is probably best summed up by the term ‘greatness’” (28). His definition of greatness is quite remarkable for its ideological density: what “sets the beauty of our land apart” – indeed what alone “would justify” the “lofty adjective” in the naming of “Great Britain” – is “the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle”, “the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint” (29). The semantic constellation (restraint/calmness/greatness/dignity) Stevens proposes as the discursive frame for his theory and practice of servility is thus ultimately predicated on the obliteration of conflict – which is also an outright negation of the historical sociality shaping the national and professional realities he describes. For indeed, just as dignity is reduced, in Lordon’s terms, to a “matter of co-linearity” with the master’s desire, and is thus abstracted from its specific social context as labour, the nationalist synecdoche of the landscape manages to reabsorb and neutralise an entire social history of work and class conflict (in short, of “obvious drama”).5 The stylised image of England Stevens invokes can be properly described as servile precisely on account of its affective alignment with a certain master-desire to obliterate the ruling-class legacies of oppression, exploitation and eviction (the ominous marks of the enclosure movement, for example, go unnoticed in this account of the landscape),6 and the working-class traditions of resistance and struggle. This generalised servility, which transcends the work-related ambit to encompass an entire subjective outlook, is only thrown into sharper

84  Servile Becomings relief by the contrast of opposing views (without ever being truly challenged). There are, for example, two interesting moments in the novel when overtly social (if not clearly socialist) definitions of dignity are put forward by people Stevens encounters along his journey. On one occasion, a man named Harry Smith declares, in what reads almost as a general debunking of Stevens’s servile doctrine, that “there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave” (196). This remark by an ordinary working man obviously pertaining to a world far removed from Stevens’s ideological horizon introduces precisely the historical dimension of conflict and social transformation on whose containment the entire narrative is premised. Smith claims that dignity, far from being an inherent attribute of a particularly privileged class, is what the victory over fascism in the war delivered for all: “That’s what we fought for and that’s what we won. We won the right to be free citizens” (196). Of course, Stevens’s dehistoricising efforts throughout the novel ultimately seek a temporal compression whereby the narrative present of the 1950s would offer a seamless and unproblematic standpoint from which to contemplate (and whitewash) the worst of 1920s and 1930s appeasement and fascist ­fellow-travelling. In a fundamental sense, the solidity of his servile construct and its doctrine of dignity rest on the necessity of forgetting the war as a socially transformative historical event – indeed, we could say, as a source of “drama and spectacle” that would inevitably problematise the semantics of greatness. There is a further instance of this external challenge coming, as it were, from the very forefront of historical eventuation in the topical remarks about post-war socialism made by another character, a rural doctor he encounters in Cornwall. In this case, dignity is explicitly linked (at least as a horizon of possibility) to the political change that took place in 1945: “‘You know, Mr Stevens,’ he said, eventually, ‘when I first came out here, I was a committed socialist. Believed in the best services for all the people and all the rest of it. First came here in ‘forty-nine. Socialism would allow people to live with dignity” (220–221). When doctor Carlisle in turn asks Stevens what he thinks “dignity’s all about” (221), the latter’s somewhat anti-climactic reply is “I suspect it comes down to not removing one’s clothing in public” (221). This could be read as an uncomfortable attempt to evade a debate that obviously exceeds the dogmatic bounds of his ideological construct. But there is also a sense that the challenge implicit in these external contradictions of his worldview is unable to fissure the solid monolith of what is first and foremost an ontological disposition having to do with a totalising conception of “professional being” (43). For Stevens’s servile doctrine is constructed as a specific codification of subjectivity that effectively annuls any ­exteriority – whether temporal, experiential, or strictly ideological. If this subjective construct is so impenetrable, that is because it is presented as being coextensive with the act of narration itself. In other words, Stevens’s

Servile Becomings  85 unchallengeable servility begins and ends with his affective labour of narrative alignment with the “master-desire” of desocialisation/dehistoricisation and its concomitant neutralisation of political alternatives. This would seem to be Ishiguro’s important contribution to late twentieth-­century (critical) discussions of neoliberal subjectivation: a formulation of self-entrepreneurship and the production of subjectivity as inverted images of servile mobilisation. I want to argue that this critical interweaving of subjectivation, servility, and a post-Fordist preoccupation with the centrality of care reaches a peak in his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, which I will discuss at length in the following section.

Dividual Labour and the Biopolitics of Care: Never Let Me Go I have been arguing that Ishiguro’s portrayal of Stevens in The Remains of the Day offers a radical critique of neoliberal imaginaries of subjectivation, uncovering profoundly antisocial tendencies in a modulation of affective labour from which all traces of precariousness and mutuality have been expunged. The character of the butler can be read as a figure of the implosive dynamics surrounding the crisis of Fordist employment, with the blurring of statutory divisions between work and life taking on an increasingly ontological – rather than conjunctural – quality, and resulting in dramatically regressive and antisocial formulations of the labour process. For its part, Never Let Me Go can be read as expanding this bleak portrayal of specific tendencies in the post-Fordist reconfiguration of labour, with the ambit of care still situated as its strategic focus and presented as a particularly fraught and sensitive ambit for the development of ­hyper-exploitative and servile scenarios. In a sense, given this thematic and conceptual continuity with The Remains of the Day around the sphere of care, with particular reference to its centrality within the post-Fordist labour process, it is hardly surprising that Ishiguro’s expanded view, so to speak, should take the form of an overtly dystopian fiction. If servility was primarily a doctrine in the earlier novel (with dire consequences for those around, and especially, those hierarchically under, Stevens), Never Let Me Go presents it as a seemingly ­accomplished – and, to the reader’s distress, widely accepted – social system in which the labour process is literally indistinguishable from the life process. Ishiguro’s historical mediation takes here the form of a dystopian re-imagination of the recent past, an alternative late twentieth century in which human clones are forced to “donate” their organs in order to meet the medical needs of real humans until they “complete” (i.e., die). The novel begins with protagonist Kathy H., a clone approaching the beginning of her donation cycle, offering a self-congratulatory appreciation of the labour performed by carers like herself, that is, clones whose job is

86  Servile Becomings to look after fellow clones already enlisted as donors before they themselves are called up to begin their donations. Kathy proudly explains how donors under her responsibility “have always tended to do much better than expected” (Ishiguro 2005b: 3). She is particularly emphatic about the way in which she has consistently managed to prevent them from getting “agitated”: “it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying ‘calm’” (3). The first striking aspect in this opening is the identification of professionalism in care work with docility in her patients. Thus, according to Kathy, what makes a good, successful carer is her ability to secure a state of acquiescent passivity among her donors. The restraint and affective subordination which were so prominently self-directed in the case of Stevens are here modulated as a group dynamic with a phased division of labour. But instead of an individual servile alignment with an outstanding master-desire, what we have here is a technical, and also properly social, specialisation of servility – indeed, a fully fledged sociality of servile forms of life and work in which subjects are enlisted and mobilised, under the paradoxical cover of affect and care, towards their own destruction. When Kathy suggests that, after so many years of care work, she has “developed a kind of instinct around donors” (3) that allows her to read their moods, to evaluate and identify peaks of enthusiasm and troughs of depression, she is actually uncovering a modulating capacity in care work to produce a certain kind of amenable subjectivity and even a trans-subjective complex (an assemblage of carer and donor, we could say) that will ultimately maximise the cost-efficiency of the entire cycle of donations. For, after all, the fact that some donors manage to reach a fourth donation before they complete is implicitly related to the quality of the care they receive. Affect in this context is both the raw material and the resulting product, an intangible outcome of this expansive labour process without breaks or alternatives in which the capacity to feel and to endure through feeling is directly proportional to the success of the whole system. Yet, first and foremost, affect plays a central role in securing the carer’s complicity, in creating that psychological environment in which her labour can be made to last. As Kathy puts it, “There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way” (6). A remarkable aspect of her dedication to care work, and a point at which the convergence between The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go becomes particularly apparent, is her unwavering cultivation of an interiority of feeling and memory sustained by her unrelenting work of narration and evocation of her past. At the level of form, this has been read by critics as a strategy of capture and involvement of the reader within the narratorial act of subjectivation. According to Shameem Black, for example, the proliferation of “rhetorical devices that

Servile Becomings  87 implicate us in the world of the novel” (a frequent example being the indirect, ­second-person interrogation about the reader’s background: “I  don’t know how it was where you were”) generates a fundamental “likeness between teller and listener at every turn” (2009: 790–791). Kathy begins by explaining how she learned to “stop resisting” an early instinct to repress those memories and “leave Hailsham behind” (4–5) after working with a donor who made her realise how lucky her and her friends’ childhoods had been in comparison with his (and, more generally, as the novel gradually reveals, in comparison with those of most other clones). In this exchange, the boarding school where Kathy and her close friends Ruth and Tommy spent their early years appears for the first time, not only as an irrepressible pole of mnemonic attraction around which her discursive identity and authority as a narrator are woven but also as a structural component of the subjective, inter-­subjective, and infra-subjective assemblages on which the system of donations rests. Through the revitalisation and constant revisiting of this site of memory and its affective underpinnings, Kathy’s productive capacity is maximised (and, correlatively, her conscious and unconscious resistance to the smooth functioning of the process is minimised and contained): He’d ask me about the big things and the little things (…) Sometimes he’d make me say things over and over (…) At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that’s what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they’d really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. (5) Memory emerges in this scene as a form of socialisation in the service of the system of organ extraction and circulation, as a locus of combination, investment, and accumulation of the different labour powers of carer and donor. Strictly, the reason why this particular donor insists on appropriating Kathy’s memory is, of course, the uneven distribution of subjective experience and quality of life among the different groups of clones (a distribution in which Hailsham and its “students” stand out for their humanitarian and liberal outlook). But, more profoundly, what this scene suggests is a general concern with the production of an enabling continuum between formed subjectivity, that is, between the narrativising logic that governs Kathy’s account of Hailsham and that in turn produces her as a relatively coherent and three-dimensional subject, and the fragmentary and destitute subjectivities of most donors (especially as they approach the end of their lives).

88  Servile Becomings This continuum necessarily uncovers a tension and a disjunction at the heart of subjectivity in the novel which goes well beyond the parameters defined by The Remains of the Day. The fully fledged universe of subjectivation and work on the self inhabited by the Hailsham clones – their almost convincing humanity, which Kathy’s role as a narrator ­ostensibly preserves and extends – contrasts sharply with the de-subjectivising echoes of their ultimate fate as living charnel houses (which are perhaps most emphatically amplified by the fact that the clones, despite their capacity for affect and psychological development, remain invariably submissive to this fate). What is then at work here is a dynamic and highly productive tension between forms of what Deleuze and Guattari call “social subjection” and “machinic enslavement” (2011: 504). Social subjection refers to those processes of formation and assignment of an individual subjectivity that are functional to the division of labour. As Maurizio Lazzarato has pointed out, “Through language it creates a signifying and representational web from which no one escapes. Social subjection produces an ‘individuated subject’ whose paradigmatic form in neoliberalism has been that of ‘human capital’ and the ‘entrepreneur of the self’” (2014: 24). This is, then, an eminently discursive form of productive control geared toward a unitary and atomistic construction of subjectivity, toward the consolidation of an operative identity through which the burden of capitalist creativity is thoroughly individualised and internalised.7 But beyond or beneath this atomistic government of the self, we need to acknowledge the effectivity of larval and dynamic processes of conjunction and disjunction, of assemblage and transformation, through which the molar profile of subjectivity is undermined and opened up to fresh productive relations and combinations: In machinic enslavement, the individual is no longer instituted as an “individuated subject,” “economic subject” (human capital, entrepreneur of the self), or “citizen.” He is instead considered a gear, a cog, a component part in the “business” and “financial system” assemblages, in the media assemblage, and the “welfare-state” assemblage and its collective institutions (schools, hospitals, museums, theaters, television, Internet, etc.). (Lazzarato 2014: 25) The individual is suddenly rediscovered in the midst of things and relations without that formal coherence that the various forms of social interpellation had conferred upon her. As in my earlier discussion of Rahman’s novel, the concept that suggests itself here is that of the dividual, which, as Lazzarato reminds us, is a figure directly concerned with functioning, directly involved in functional arrangements, and thus caught up in the immediacy of machinic relations: “The dividual

Servile Becomings  89 does not stand opposite machines or make use of an external object; the dividual is contiguous with machines” (2014: 26). What posits this fragmented, de-totalised subject beyond the thematics of subjection is precisely its extreme functionality, which goes to the root of the system of production, communication, and consumption. Its lack of anthropocentrism further enhances its capacity to enlist subjectivity in the production of the social, clearing any remaining idealisms and irrelevancies. But again, the price to pay for this dividual form of the subject is the loss (or at least the profound destabilisation) of that atomistic form that had kept it tidily discursive and identifiable. As part of the machine, of the machinic assemblage that is the quotidian reality of productive dynamics, “the component parts of subjectivity (intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, memory, physical force)” (Lazzarato 2014: 27) are released from their unifying shell and disseminated in a flow without guarantees. Thus, “To say that the neoliberal economy is a subjective economy does not mean that it promises a new ‘humanization’ of the alienated subject through industrial capitalism, but only that subjectivity exists for the machine, that subjective components are functions of enslavement” (Lazzarato 2014: 29). Indeed, the false promise of new humanisations emerges in the context of Never Let Me Go as one of the principal indices that a different operation is at work and that the anthropocentric and subject(ivis) ing dialectic of alienation and emancipation needs to be corrected and displaced by the grasping of machinisms (i.e., those pervasive assemblages of human-machine, of human-as-inhuman-machine even, of which the dividual is the basic unit) and the new forms of exploitation that they bring attached. An economy of dividuals thus moves beyond the bounded perimeter of subjective forms and oppositions, opening up the possibilities of production, of labour broadly understood, to new dynamics. One of the first indications of the unfolding contradiction between the regime of subjection that Kathy H.’s narration seems to endorse and the dividual traffic of affects and memories in which the clones partake occurs in her evocation of her friend Tommy. Indeed, Tommy gradually emerges in the novel as a problem, as an increasingly elusive instance of deviation from the subjectivising ideal that Kathy seeks to articulate. According to her, Tommy was repeatedly mocked and picked on by fellow students because of his lack of creativity, because he “never even tried to be creative” (10). As Kathy observes, creativity constitutes one of the central axes around which socialisation is conducted at Hailsham. The school, as much a pedagogical as a “humanitarian” experiment in which students are raised in relative material and emotional comfort (especially in comparison with the standardised, factory-like conditions of their peers across the country), encourages students to rehearse – indeed to prove – their humanity through the

90  Servile Becomings production of works of art that are subsequently traded at quarterly “Exchanges”: Four times a year – spring, summer, autumn, winter – we had a kind of big exhibition-cum-sale of all the things we’d been creating in the three months since the last Exchange. Paintings, drawings, pottery; all sorts of “sculptures” made from whatever was the craze of the day – bashed-up cans, maybe, or bottle tops stuck onto cardboard. For each thing you put in, you were paid in Exchange Tokens – the guardians decided how many your particular masterpiece merited – and then on the day of the Exchange you went along with your tokens and ‘bought’ the stuff you liked. (16) Far from representing a true transaction (the absence of real money is telling), the Exchanges mark the ritual climax of an accumulating frenzy in which the determination of value is directly linked to the creative capacity of the subject. On a superficial level, the Exchanges provide the students with an opportunity to acquire material goods (to build up “a collection of personal possessions” (16), as Kathy notes). But, more fundamentally, this is the space where the self-productive worth of the subject qua subject is systematically assessed, where he can parade the material outcomes of his work on the self. Tommy’s significance and mystery lie precisely in his failure to live up to this subjectivising programme, which results in a devaluation of his presumptive humanity (of the worth and esteem accorded by his peers insofar as they participate in the humanitarian narrative of Hailsham). Kathy’s narrative voice justifies this devaluation as a logical consequence of his breach of the students’ inter-subjective contract – in other words, as a rational effect of his refusal to accept and embrace the subjective properties (emblematised here by the creative faculty) on which Hailsham’s society is premised. Thus, she deems the “Tommy business” “typical”: “If you think about it, being dependent on each other to produce the stuff that might become your private treasures – that’s bound to do things to your relationships” (16). And, consequently, only if this closed circuit of production and circulation is preserved and actively supported, in as much as it supplies the relational, socialising structure on which their self-construction as human subjects is based, can a rational calculation of one’s individual worth (qua individual) be performed: “A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at creating” (16). With Tommy, what we have instead of an individualised quantity of measurable value is an incalculable succession of raving outbursts, which indeed make him the target of his peers’ attacks but which also fundamentally block the smooth projection – the smooth narrativisation, in the manner of Kathy’s own narrative labour – of the clones’ individual

Servile Becomings  91 and inter-individual universe. Tommy’s recurring cycle of failure and rage ushers the fundamental and generalised acceptance of the terms of the students’ fictitious humanity/subjectivity (and, correlatively, of their dreadful fate) into a “zone of indistinction” governed by the intensive complexity of the dividual. The surfacing of Tommy’s unmanageable and unexplainable affects (both the rage and the deficit of humanistic/ aesthetic sensibility) effectively disturbs the regulated economy of creative labour and subjective entrepreneurship on which Hailsham’s advanced vision is premised. The tension that Tommy’s unexplained tantrums uncover concerns the irreducible nature of the dividual and its operationalisation as an element of economic subjection.8 As already mentioned, Foucault points out in The Birth of Biopolitics that labour is understood by theorists of human capital as a “machine” made up of skills and abilities that produces “an earnings stream” in the form of wages (2008: 224). However, this machine is inseparable from the individuality (from the subjective form) of the economic agent: “the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself” (224). Brian Massumi observes that this reading of neoliberal agency does not necessarily entail pitting the individual against the dividual in terms of an abstract categorical opposition (as Lazzarato’s understanding of the opposition between subjection and enslavement may imply) but rather requires acknowledging the machinic foundation of neoliberal selfhood itself – uncovering, in other words, the irreducible realm of uncontrollability and “oscillation” that supports the edifice of subjectivity in a way that ultimately redefines it as a post-human process without closure (36–37).9 In this sense, the artistic production of the Hailsham students becomes the conflicted terrain upon which the machine of subjective production is redefined. We soon learn that the students are actually encouraged to create art in order to prove their humanity or, rather, in order to help this particular school (which stands in sharp contrast to the brutal mass production of clones at most other establishments across the country) achieve its goal of showing society an alternative, more humanitarian path founded on the belief, which few people share, that the clones are in fact human. As one of the school guardians informs Kathy and Tommy later in the novel, “We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all” (255). This compulsion to cultivate the self, to invest in the students’ ­human capital, is precisely what points toward their tentative humanisation, what constitutes the basis of their presumptive humanity. The function of the clones’ artistic productions is thus to provide a basis for their self-­ enactment as human, for an inventorying of human traits that the school can subsequently store and display (in a mysterious place called “the Gallery”) as a way of validating its humanising mission in the face of an increasingly sceptical society. At Hailsham, as Nathan Snaza observes,

92  Servile Becomings “aesthetic experience is the sine qua non of humanity” (2015:  222). The sanctioned form of this aesthetic experience invokes a horizon of achieved humanisation and molar subjectivation that openly contradicts the intimate experience of clone life, especially as it becomes apparent toward the end of their existence. The qualitative criteria of adequate and inadequate, good and bad, by which the students’ performance at Hailsham is judged ultimately run up against the essential incompatibility of their real existence with moral and aesthetic norms. This implicitly confirms the radical failure, as Snaza insists, of Hailsham’s humanising mission, revealing, in turn, the fundamental likeness between the different groups of clones beyond the mirage of exceptionalism created, in part, by Kathy’s narration. Thus, when Tommy finally sets about producing the art that is required of him, the result comes across as particularly ill-adjusted to the discourse of Hailsham’s mission. His drawings of machine-like animals depart from the humanistic standard according to which the students’ productions are deemed good: “I was taken aback at how densely detailed each one was. In fact, it took a moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird” (184–185). The aesthetic experience that Tommy inadvertently serves up in these creations is machinic in a sense that cannot be recuperated for the molar project, in a sense that breaks with the formal closure implied by Hailsham’s declared humanism/humanitarianism around categories of individuality, identity, and subjectivity. Thus, in contrast to Kathy’s enactment of what we could describe as humanising effects (through her rehearsal of memory and narration), Tommy’s animals introduce a moment of aesthetic rupture and machinic disconnection from the prevailing ontological structure upon which the Hailsham universe is predicated. These metallic shapes effectively cut into the harmonious tapestry of school life and clone socialisation, threatening their horizon of value (i.e., the terms and principles according to which the students’ comparatively good life is defined) with a less straightforward, less humanistic, and consequently less subjected regime. We could even say that they contradict the formal mirage of inter-subjectivity and individualisation created by Kathy’s narrative strategy, opening it up to a regime of uncontrollable transformation. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it (…) Machines are always singular keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory” (2011: 367–368). If Hailsham is an assemblage in this sense, a territory organised around a certain effect of subjective closure, of individual and collective

Servile Becomings  93 identification and affective investment, then Tommy’s inarticulate refusal (first, to acquiesce in the aesthetic imperative enforced and accepted by all, and, second, to adapt his creations to the humanising mission of Hailsham) signals a machinic opening, a deterritorialising drift that confronts the system with its repressed, infra-individual – or, indeed, ­dividual – underbelly. A virtual horizon of resistant possibilities insinuates itself at this point in the form of an uncontrollable, emergent unravelling of the affective realm, in the form of a subjective tendency that subverts the lines of complicity and integration within the formed assemblage. The affective tonalities uncovered by Tommy’s machinisms (from his drawn animals to his animal-like outbursts) signal an infra-level of true irreducibility to the various subjections and humanisations fostered by the system. This is not to say that the realm of the dividual and the machine succeeds in destabilising the predatory system of exploitation under which the clones are created, raised, and finally destroyed (for Ishiguro’s novel can be described, in the final account, as less interested in resistance than in the dystopian complexities of biopolitical exploitation) but that the continuum between the poles of formed subjectivity and infra-­subjective life (between the apparently stable territories of belonging, memory and identity, and the machinic phylum of the clones’ inhuman life) is far more fluid than may seem at first. This is in fact to say that the realm of the dividual, of the non-subjective and the inhuman, is also centrally at the root of the system of extraction. For beyond the shocking viciousness of a human world that appears to humanise non-humans, to impose its liberating grace (in the form of aesthetic sensibility, of relational expertise, and so on) upon those whom it simultaneously prepares for destruction, the heart of its exploitative nature lies in those aspects of the extractive process that remain less than human (and less than subjective). Thus, as much as Tommy’s inarticulate rage and imaginary animals, the ruinous, increasingly fragile and precarious bodies and minds of the ­donors – especially as they draw nearer to completion – point to the latent truth, to the veritable operational logic of valorisation in this universe. Beyond the work on the self performed by the clones at Hailsham (with its emphasis on liberal abstractions of taste and aesthetic value), their machinic production of organs, their inescapable growth of tangible use-values within their own bodies – and thus beneath the ideological skin of subjectivity and interpellation – represents the fulcrum of the system, its exploitative truth. This is the level at which value and machinic enslavement, the infraindividual (the singular, fragmentary, non-totalisable, and therefore machinic) and the “economic” heart of this fictional world, become most clearly intertwined. In other words, the exploitative truth of the novel is here presented as a problem of machinic labour, as a problem of servility concerning the material and immaterial, corporeal and affective

94  Servile Becomings dimensions of subjective life beneath the formed level of subjectivity. It is therefore crucial to understand the economic dimension of the ­machinisms at work in Never Let Me Go. What is truly at stake is the possibility of imagining a system of value extraction that may be maximised without the participation of subjects qua subjects, a system that may effectively rest on the redefinition of the body as constant or fixed capital. Developing their distinction between the concepts of enslavement and subjection, Deleuze and Guattari point out that the massive growth of automation and the full penetration of cybernetics into the production process have rendered traditional forms of subjection relatively marginal in contemporary capitalism: In the organic composition of capital, variable capital defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. (2011: 506) What Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting here is that the older industrial regime in which disciplinary surveillance and ideological interpellation proliferated has given way in the last decades of the twentieth century not only to more refined and supple forms of control but also to fresh modes of valorisation, to new dynamics of extraction of surplus value. These are no longer exclusively circumscribed to a humanist definition of living labour (to that material basis on which the subjective figure of the proletariat was predicated) but are now found primarily along the non-subjective, nonhuman circuits of machinic or dividual life. The resulting order of capitalist valorisation (the organic composition of neoliberal capital) is thus one in which the boundary between constant and variable capital grows increasingly blurry, in which the human–­ subjective dimension of labour and the mechanical-fixed dimension of capital undergo a process of gradual fusion and confusion. The factory of late capitalism is replaced by what Mario Tronti (and after him, the entire Autonomist tradition of Italian Operaismo) described as the “social factory”, a diffuse assemblage of productive forces and processes that exceeds the spatial and temporal limits of the old industrial factory, as well as the subjective and human profile of its traditional protagonists. The position of the body in this transformation is crucial. From representing an essential factor in the subjection of the worker and therefore in the generation of surplus value, it now becomes a component or set of components within a broad and non-subjectifiable assemblage, within

Servile Becomings  95 a machinic continuum made up of heterogeneous parts (e.g., organs, affects, signs, technics). Thus, the fixed dimension of constant capital – traditionally associated with machinery – is fluidified and displaced onto the body. As Christian Marazzi suggests, in contemporary capitalism the body of the labour force, in addition to harbouring the strict “faculty of labour” with which it was traditionally associated in Marxism, also “operates as a container for functions typical of fixed capital, of means of production [in so far as these are] the sedimentation of codified and historically acquired knowledges, productive grammars, experiences  – in sum, past labour” (2010: 207; my translation). The passage from primarily material/industrial production to a growing and increasingly productive (of surplus value) range of immaterial, service, or tertiary activities supposes that the necessary tasks of cognitive accumulation and codification that industrial capitalism had entrusted to technical machines (according to Marx, the depositories of “general intellect”), that is, to dead capital, are now devolved to the realm of the living itself. The figure of living labour that emerges from this shift is not only fluid and mobile, ever ready to incorporate and adapt to new knowledges and experiences, but also frighteningly servile. As Matteo Pasquinelli has noted, “The living as machinic capital seems to suggest a totalitarian scenario where capitalism no longer needs machines to subject the population, as the technical composition has been introjected and socialized” (2014: 188). The suggestion of a “totalitarian scenario,” of a nightmarish situation in which capital absorbs and dissolves the phenomenological and ontological boundaries between the living and the dead, points toward a vision of life characterised by profound destitution. Theoretical discourses about the multiplication of the state of exception and the normalisation of bare life have naturally ensued in recent years. It is undeniable that Ishiguro’s novel, for its part, can be read in the light of such discourses as a rehearsal and clarification of some of their central themes. Thus, for example, Arne De Boever (2013) focuses on those aspects that liken Hailsham to Agamben’s notion of the camp10 and that, more generally, establish a reasonable parallel between the clones in this fictional universe and the homines sacri of our own modern and contemporary politics of exception. There are the relatively obvious instances when Hailsham suddenly appears to be in direct continuity with the historical reality of the Second World War camps, such as the moment when Miss Lucy (one of the more sceptical teachers at the school) offers a muted remark that only Kathy picks up on in which the distant strangeness of the historic camps becomes confused with and almost indistinguishable from the apparently placid existence of the students: We’d been looking at some poetry, but had somehow drifted onto talking about soldiers in World War Two being kept in prison camps.

96  Servile Becomings One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence (…) I went on watching Miss Lucy through all this and I could see, just for a second, a ghostly expression come over her face as she watched the class in front of her. Then – I kept watching carefully – she pulled herself together, smiled and said: “It’s just as well the fences at Hailsham aren’t electrified. You get terrible accidents sometimes.” (76–77) Both the passing ghostliness of Miss Lucy’s facial expression and the lingering opaqueness of her comment on Hailsham’s fences indubitably point to a coherence in the working “logic”, as De Boever notes, “that existence at Hailsham and existence in the camp (…) share” (65). But, beyond this formal likeness, there is a more substantial continuity in the way that life itself is constructed in both the fictional world drawn up by Ishiguro and the extreme politics of modern war and extermination. And this has to do with the conditionality of these characters’ existence, with its absolute dependence on the exceptional decision of the sovereign,11 which immediately puts it on a par with the eminently precarious life of the camp’s denizens. De Boever suggests that Never Let Me Go is a notable rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that foundationally modern “allegory about the novelist trying to bring her or his characters to life” (68), as both novels subordinate “plot entirely to the biographical, life-writing element in fiction” (68). What is at stake in these texts is the interrogation of character life, of that extremely limited and conditional existence that the fictional exercise constructs within its terms and boundaries (here foregrounded emphatically in the form of characters/ creatures that enact their character-like, their eminently vulnerable and revocable, nature), as conceivably valuable life: What is the life of a living dead man, of a man consisting of the parts of other dead men? Is it the life of a monster? Can we care for this kind of life? Does it care? Or is it a sorry existence that we would prefer not to have any business with? If the latter, then why do we care about literary characters? How are they any different? Are they not too curiously put together, alive but not quite – living, but not a life that we would consider worth living? These are, of course, also the questions that haunt Ishiguro’s clones, who are “like” characters. (68) Without wishing to deny the pertinence of such critical modelling, I would, nevertheless, insist that the reconfiguration of labour processes and modes of value extraction in post-Fordism imposes a certain context

Servile Becomings  97 and a certain caution regarding hasty determinations of life’s exceptional character – even within the scope of the novel. For indeed what may seem from a strictly political point of view the effect of a sovereign operation (in the decisionist sense) suspending a certain conception of the law may also transact as the effect of a far less sudden and voluntarist mutation in productive relations. Thus, the emergence of a servile paradigm of ­labour, rooted in the redefinition of hitherto safe boundaries between the human and the non-human and even the living and the dead (in classic Marxist parlance), sanctions a less restricted conceptualisation of the biopolitical than the paradigm of the camp might afford. As authors in the Autonomist Marxist tradition have noted, biopolitics cannot be separated from an analysis of the expansive circuit of valorisation that has seen contemporary capital make unforeseen inroads into the realms of intellectual, affective, reproductive, and strictly biological life, steadily transforming each of them into vast opportunities for accumulation. We have seen that the transfer of general intellect, of sedimented productive knowledge from the fixed part of constant capital (machinery) to the body of the labour force, implies a fundamental shift not only in the organic composition of capital but also in the status of labour power as essentially human. What the transformation of the productive body into a machinic function signals is the proliferation of dynamics that no humanistic measure of identification can capture (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “human surplus value”), the rhizomatic growth of labour at infra- and supra-individual levels and inhuman relations. This consequently qualifies any possible interpretation of character life in the sense suggested by De Boever as not immediately, or at least not exclusively, “bare” and “exceptional” but also productive in ways that a previous concern with the narrowly human nature of variable capital had tended to neglect. The eminently disposable and ad hoc form of character life suddenly finds its real-life model in the endemic precariousness of indentured labourers, of cognitarian workers, of clinical trial participants, and of tissue and organ donors. The latter especially might supply a particularly instructive paradigm for the biopolitical tonalities of this novel in so far as they present a telling instance of vulnerability and destitution with tangible effects beyond the sphere of ethics and political theology. Indeed, the multiple forms of what Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby call “clinical labour” uncover a growing and expanding complex of valorising dynamics below the subjective level of the traditional work force. As these authors suggest, contemporary capitalism has encouraged and appropriated a wide range of forms of “in vivo labor” that “are increasingly central to the valorization process of the post-Fordist economy”: “The life science industries rely on an extensive yet unacknowledged labour force whose service consists in the visceral experience of experimental drug consumption, hormonal

98  Servile Becomings transformation, more or less invasive biomedical procedures, ejaculation, tissue extraction, and gestation” (2014: 7). The multiplication of these and other forms of labour lying outside the regulative frame consecrated by Fordism also involves an ­alarming ­development in the monetary logic governing capitalist exchange. Indeed, one of the outstanding features of clinical labour is precisely its exclusion from the logic of the wage that had presided over Fordist relations, its frequent substitution of bioethical paradigms (and their accompanying legal frameworks) for commercial ones. Thus, in the examples investigated by Cooper and Waldby, “the ethical insistence that the biological should not be waged only serves to facilitate atavistic (yet fully functional) forms of labor contract and desultory forms of compensation” (2014: 8). This effectively invokes an exceptional state of affairs, but one that remains – again, as Cooper and Waldby i­nsist – “fully ­f unctional” and internal to capitalist dynamics of ­valorisation. The ­exclusion of money – or, more specifically, the e­ xclusion of the wage form – from this exchange, its actual reduction to an extractive ­arrangement in which compensation is somehow connoted non-­ economically (and yet in which the valorising function is intensified), seems to point all the more emphatically to the logic of machinic enslavement or servility. A particularly relevant example analysed by Cooper and Waldby concerns those situations “where clinical labor is performed in exchange for health care, reconfigured as an ‘in kind’ compensation for service, comparable to ‘workfare,’ where the payment of welfare benefits is made contingent upon the obligation to work” (2014: 8–9). This “exceptional” arrangement speaks directly to the dynamics of care explored by Ishiguro’s novel. From the mutual implication and practical inseparability of care work and organ donation to the functional logic underpinning Hailsham life, monetary exchange is consistently replaced with a range of forms of in-kind compensation. Most significant, perhaps, is the pervasive emphasis on humane treatment of the clones, beginning with their overriding identification as students and continuing with a variety of practices of psychological and physical freedom: from the sexual freedom they are not only allowed but effectively encouraged to embrace to a rather surprising freedom of movement beyond the limits of the school. These and other elements amounting to a relatively wholesome existence are easily readable in terms of welfare, that is, in terms of an expansive relation of care established between these servile proletarians and their human exploiters. Indeed, as Bruce Robbins has pointed out, “the institution in our society that seems most centrally alluded to here is the welfare state” (2007: 295). Yet this is not a welfare state resulting from an extension of the social wage (which was, in practice, what welfare under Fordism amounted to, a socialised expression of the downward rigidity of the wage), but rather

Servile Becomings  99 the outcome of a radical mutation in the economic rationale presiding over contemporary labour. The status of the more intimate relations between the clones, and especially the centrality of sexual intercourse, is of particular significance here. It is not long before the functional aspect of sex becomes apparent to the reader, indeed before we come to realise the ways in which it is placed virtually on the same level as care itself within the broad systemic arrangement of this universe of limitless exploitation. Just as Kathy maintains all throughout her narration, often making a point of clarification against Tommy’s sceptical insinuations, that care work “makes a big difference to what a donor’s life’s actually like” (276), sexual activity is put in direct relationship to the smooth functioning of the system of enslavement. Despite some initial doubts regarding the guardians’ stance towards sex (“we couldn’t decide whether or not the guardians wanted us to have sex or not” (94)), the students soon come to embrace its machinic quality, its central position within a functional logic that binds them to their fate above and beneath the subjective level. Thus, the theory advanced by one of them that “things like your kidneys and pancreas didn’t work properly unless you kept having sex” (94), a­ lthough never openly corroborated, is affirmed in practice by the increasingly central – and indeed functional – role played by sex in later life. After leaving Hailsham for the Cottages (one of the establishments the clones are sent to before initiating their care service), sexual intimacy is suddenly deprived of its more human attributes, of emotional complexity and mystery (which are, paradoxically, associated with childhood and immaturity), and presented instead as almost mechanical: “when I look back, the sex at the Cottages seems a bit functional. Maybe it was precisely because all the gossip and secrecy had gone. Or maybe it was because of the cold” (125). Despite her doubts at the time (to which Ruth contributes by falsely claiming that she has never felt in such a way), Kathy’s pressing sexual urges are ultimately revealed to be the norm – a machinic unravelling of bodily affects beyond the controlling mediation of the individual will (as she puts it, “the one-nighters … [had] happened without my really wanting them to” (126)). If this is compounded by the fact that the clones are incapable of reproducing, it is indeed easy to conclude that sex, for them, is work; in other words, sex appears as part and parcel of a machinic assemblage that effectively suspends and confuses the economic distinctions operating under a previous regime of labour. In short, sex, just like the other forms and expressions of a supposedly wholesome and humane condition of life (education, health care, and so on), is here introjected and operationalised as a means of production, as a central component of the inhuman logic of value extraction. In this biopolitical dystopia of post-Fordist capitalism, the “in-kind” compensation represented by increasingly immaterial and elusive forms of welfare is always already part of the extractive agency, always already fixed capital.

100  Servile Becomings In such a situation, the dream of subjective identity is not only illfounded and essentially illusory but also inversely proportional to the clones’ capacity for valorisation. As the novel demonstrates, the particular worth of their lives is linked to their lack of ontological particularity, to their coming from an indistinct genetic pool of social marginality (164). A central subplot concerns the theory of “possibles” whereby clones would on occasion spot an older human lookalike on whom – they speculate – one of them might have been modelled (and, further, whose normal working life may serve as indication of what awaits them in later life). As a “possible” for Kathy’s friend Ruth is located in a nearby town, the group of friends sets out on an excursion to find her. What they come across is a very different kind of labour from the one they are used to, a – to them – powerfully and exotically compelling scene of office work in which temporal divisions are uncertain and life may or may not be distinguishable from work: There was a big glass front at street-level, so anyone going by could see right into it: a large open-plan room with maybe a dozen desks arranged in irregular L-patterns. There the potted palms, the shiny machines and swooping desk lamps. People were moving about between desks, or leaning on a partition, chatting and sharing jokes, while others had pulled their swivel chairs close to each other and were enjoying a coffee and sandwich. “Look,” Tommy said. “It’s their lunch break, but they don’t go out. Don’t blame them either.” We kept on staring, and it looked like a smart, cosy, self-­contained world. (156) The inversion is remarkable, and extremely paradoxical: apparently free-roaming and healthy youths are drawn in semi-rapturous a­ dmiration toward an ordinary scene of presumably cognitive labour. The conventional enclosure (still intensely reminiscent of the Fordist factory, despite its cosier outlook) is suddenly re-signified as an unreachable object of desire from the seemingly free outside, as a human environment where, as somebody points out, workers “do have days off, you know. They’re not always at their work” (149). The dramatic weight of the inversion, of course, rests on the implications of this latter observation, on the fact that, unlike for the denizens of ordinary post-Fordist exploitation, for the clones (indeed the denizens of an exceptional, far more advanced, regime of labour) there is no clocking off. The utopian ghost of an amount of time off work, of a temporal retreat from this intensive realignment of labour power around the functions and distributions of a machinic arrangement, will accompany Kathy and Tommy for most of their remaining time. Indeed, one of the recurring myths among Hailsham students, and one that they investigate

Servile Becomings  101 and pursue, is that if a couple can demonstrate genuine love, they may become eligible for a “deferral”: “You could ask for your donations to be put back by three, even four years. It wasn’t easy, but just sometimes they’d let you do it” (150). This, of course, introduces a dramatic counterpoint to and an imaginary break from the relentless continuity and systemic immanence of clone labour, a high-Fordist dream, we could even say, of a protracted and properly “paid” holiday (in the sense that life during this period of deferral would not be part of the servile assemblage) before the final round of service. When the myth is finally debunked, what takes its place is a symmetrical nightmare of freed-up servile time, of bare life rendered infinite labour. As Tommy is called up for his fourth and presumably final donation, a horrific possibility is invoked: that it may turn out not to be so and that a nebulous future of endless donations may lie ahead instead: How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off. It’s horror movie stuff, and most of the time people don’t want to think about it. (274) This is eschatological imagination without eschatos, the sort of undifferentiated temporal dynamic that subtends the more radical transformations in post-Fordism. The abolition of resolution and, therefore, of the possibility of imagining even the merest form of transcendence in “completion” suddenly links the novel’s plot to the static fate of the act of narration. Beyond the fourth donation, we could say, lies the congealed ontology of infinitised exploitation, the machinic assemblage of enslavement rendered autonomous from any residual reference to the teleological humanistic subject. In other words, without the possibility of graspable continuity, of a temporality made up of phenomenological separations and ontological differences (in short, the kind of temporality on which subjective autonomies are predicated), what remains is the self-contained presentness of narration,12 a labour of memory that re-creates, perpetually, the experiential carcass of subjects that are not (and may never have been) such. The pervasive servility of post-Fordist production thus now exposes the work of narration for what it really is. For all of Kathy’s initial protestations that “carers aren’t machines” and, by implication, that narrators aren’t either, representing instead the pole of temporal duration around which subjectivity crystallises and survives, what becomes apparent at the end of the novel is that the act of narrating and the event of memory

102  Servile Becomings re-creation that it involves13 are actually the machinic, the servile fulcrum on which the entire system of exploitation rests. Not unlike the nightmarish prospect of the donor who survives a fourth donation, the narrator projects her promise of boundless servility and reiteration, implicating the reader in this dynamic of infinite labour. Thus, reflecting on the status of her memories, Kathy declares that, unlike their material referent, they are something she will never lose: “I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them” (280). The fact that she too has lost Hailsham (as it is rumoured to have been transformed into “a hotel, a school, a ruin”) does not detract from the effectivity of its memory, from its functional aliveness to what remains of her existence. Kathy actually refuses to go looking for the physical Hailsham, all the better to remember it: But as I say, I don’t go searching for it, and anyway, by the end of the year, I won’t be driving around like this any more. So the chances are I won’t ever come across it now, and on reflection, I’m glad that’s the way it’ll be. It’s like with my memories of Tommy and of Ruth. Once I’m able to have a quieter life, in whichever centre they send me to, I’ll have Hailsham with me, safely in my head, and that’ll be something no one can take away. (281) The direct implications of what Kathy is saying here are actually chilling: come the end of the year, she will no longer be driving around because she will have become a donor. In other words, the possibility of matching memory to actuality will no longer be available since she is about to be reduced to the living charnel house, to the assemblage of organs and vital functions she was designed to be in the first place. And it is significantly in this post-subjective state, in this condition of intensified enslavement and productive bare life, that she will get closest to the tasks of memory on which her narrative work is premised. In this near future of temporal abolition and organic immediacy, the servility of clinical labour will finally be joined to the servility of language and communication. With this final turn, the novel fully discloses at the level of its formal strategy the nightmarish consequences of what Marazzi has referred to as the contemporary “mentalization of capital” (2008: 51). Beyond any suggestion of exceptionality, the ordinary brutality of contemporary biopolitical existence is suddenly extended to the reader, who becomes an unwilling partner in the machinic labour of servile narration. Jane Elliott has perceptively noted that our own “enclosure within Kathy’s consciousness” “stage[s] on the level of form the inability to think past the terms of neoliberal personhood” (97). In the context of her final thoughts in the novel, this reading effectively suggests the coming into

Servile Becomings  103 being of a functional assemblage without escape, of a machinic version of “personhood” that is not exhausted in inter-subjectivity or individualisation. In a narrative gesture that parallels the dystopian temporal horizon of the surviving donor, the servility of her post-human memory is ultimately passed on to the reader with the unstated demand of perpetuating it indefinitely, in a way that confronts us directly, in the act of reading, with the broader implications of contemporary capitalism’s redefinition of labour. This contemporary fictional preoccupation with biopolitical modes of exploitation and servility in the ambit of care, and more generally, with the subsumption of life as a whole by the logic of capital, finds in the terrain of reproduction one of its most fruitful and critical areas of development. When specifically considered from the standpoint of women and of their age-old position of structural subordination to the value practices of capital (which have long rested on a problematic separation of production from other, supposedly unproductive activities), reproduction emerges as a sphere of particular vulnerability and exposure to the advance of neo-servile regimes and biocapitalist strategies of social colonisation. But literary explorations of reproduction under contemporary capitalism have also pointed to the dynamics of tension and fracture that it unveils, and thus to an entire register of experience of crisis that takes us beyond the more restricted focus on post-Fordist mechanisms of exploitation and offers an important re-evaluation of antagonism and resistance as driving forces in the history of capitalism. Chapter 5 will focus on three novels that approach the matter of reproduction with varying emphases but with a common understanding that crisis in capitalism recurrently turns on the structural obstacle that reproduction poses as both an ineluctable condition of possibility for accumulation and as the problematic other to labour (which, in standard economic accounts, remains productive and therefore non-reproductive).

Notes 1 “Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing. In other words, the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself, which does not exactly mean, as economic, sociological, or psychological criticism said traditionally, that capitalism transforms the worker into a machine and alienates him as a result. We should think of the skill that is united with the worker as, in a way, the side through which the worker is a machine, but a machine understood in the positive sense, since it is a machine that produces an earnings stream” (Foucault 2008: 224). 2 See, for example, Nancy Fraser (2017) and Precarias a la Deriva (2006). 3 See, for example, what Foucault writes apropos of the Greek concept of epimeleia: “The term epimeleia designates not just a preoccupation but a whole set of occupations; it is epimeleia that is employed in speaking of the

104  Servile Becomings activities of the master of a household, the tasks of the ruler who looks after his subjects, the care that must be given to a sick or wounded patient, or the honors that must be paid to the gods or the dead. With regard to oneself as well, epimeleia implies a labor” (1990: 50). 4 Stevens’s concept of dignity supposes, as David Medalie has noted, that “where servitude is concerned, there cannot be an intrinsic dignity, but only one that is maintained in the context of one’s position and the conditions of service” (2004: 51–52). 5 Raymond Williams’s remark that “A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation” (1973: 120) offers a particularly apt critical commentary on Stevens’s claims. 6 E.P. Thompson reminds us of the drama and overt class violence of the process which shaped Britain’s modern landscape: “In village after village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of the poor. The cottager without legal proof of rights was rarely compensated. The cottager who was able to establish his claim was left with a parcel of land inadequate for subsistence and a disproportionate share of the very high enclosure cost”. As a result, he concludes that “Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers” (Thompson 1991: 237–238). 7 As Isabell Lorey has pointed out, “Nomalizing self-government is based on an imagination of coherence, identity and wholeness that goes back to the construction of a male, white, bourgeois subject” (2015: 30). 8 Towards the end of the novel, the generally unexplained quality of Tommy’s outbursts is to some extent qualified or problematised by Kathy’s suggestion that “maybe the reason [he] used to get like that was because at some level [he] always knew” (270). Although this is not presented as a definitive answer to the mystery of his past behaviour (Tommy seems to concede the point, yet without further elaboration), the plausibility of this theory would indicate that the subjective and the machinic are not mutually exclusive but rather coextensive. In other words, the irreducible nature of the dividual inevitably recasts subjectivity as what I have called an enabling continuum. This means, among other things, that the affective level always functions – as John Protevi reminds us – “above, below, and alongside the subject” (2009: 3). 9 Massumi interprets this surpassing of the molar form of subjectivity (which Foucault introduces with his reference to the “machine” of skills and abilities) as characteristic of neoliberalism’s coming of age. In other words, the rise of the dividual (and the range of infra-, supra-, and inter-subjective ­relationalities and assemblages that it effectively fosters under the functional sign of the machinic) does not mark the end of neoliberalism as analysed by Foucault in his famous lectures of 1978–1979 but the full unravelling of its generative potential. 10 Let us remember that the camp, according to Agamben, “is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (1998: 168–169). 11 According to Carl Schmitt’s famous definition, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (1985: 5). 12 As Lisa Fluet notes, “Instead of a future, immaterial labor … offers only a perpetual succession of present moments that blur the lines between work and leisure … For better or worse, Ishiguro’s protagonists are hostages to the present; they invite us to imagine merely what companionship with them in that present might feel like” (2007: 285).

Servile Becomings  105 13 According to Massumi, “A memory is always an event, never a representation. The event of memory varies according to the conditions under which it is produced. Personal memory is an evolving dynamic system that is predicated not on reproduction but on re-creation. In the vocabulary of cognitive science, memory is by nature ‘reconstructive’. This means that the person we are as a function of our memories is self-re-creating” (2015: 27).

References Agamben, Giorgio. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Black, Shameem. (2009) “Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics”. Modern Fiction Studies 55.4: 785–807. Butler, Judith. (1988) “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. Theatre Journal 40.4: 519–531. Cooper, Melinda and Catherine Waldby. (2014) Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham: Duke University Press. De Boever, Arne. (2013) Narraive Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. New York: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (2011) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Elliott, Jane. (2013) “Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in North America and Britain”. Social Text 31.2 (115): 83–101. Fluet, Lisa. (2007) “Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class, and Affect”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40.3: 265–288. Foucault, Michel. (1990) The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume 3. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fraser, Nancy. (2017) “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism”. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Ed. Tithi Bhattacharya. London: Pluto Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000) Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ishiguro, Kazuo. (2005a) The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, Kazuo. (2005b) Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber. Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lordon, Frédéric. (2014) Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on ­Desire. London: Verso. Lorey, Isabell. (2015) State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Marazzi, Christian. (2008) Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, Christian. (2010) Il comunismo del capitale: Finanziarizzazione, biopolitiche del lavoro e crisi globale. Verona: Ombre Corte. Massumi, Brian. (2015) The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham: Duke University Press.

106  Servile Becomings Medalie, David. (2004) “‘What Dignity is There in That?’: The Crisis of Dignity in Selected Late-Twentieth-Century Novels”. Journal of Literary Studies 20.1–2: 48–61. Pasquinelli, Matteo. (2014) “To Anticipate and Accelerate: Italian Operaismo and Reading Marx’s Notion of the Organic Composition of Capital”. ­Rethinking Marxism 26.2: 178–192. Precarias a la Deriva. (2006) “A Very Careful Strike”. The Commoner 11: 33–45. Protevi, John. (2009) Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robbins, Bruce. (2007) “Cruelty Is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40.3: 289–302. Schmitt, Carl. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press. Snaza, Nathan. (2015) “The Failure of Humanizing Education in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 26.3: 215–234. Thompson, Edward Palmer. (1991) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin. Williams, Raymond. (1973) The Country and the City. London: The Hogarth Press.

5 The Reproductive Imagination

Reproductive Labour and Resistance in Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love Published in 2010, Joanna Kavenna’s novel The Birth of Love deftly weaves a variety of modes and concerns around a central preoccupation with the matter of birth and motherhood, stressing the co-­extensiveness and co-implication of female suffering and resistance against a patriarchal backdrop of scientific, social, and economic rationalities. The narrative shuttles between the years 2009, 1865, and 2153, alternately following Brigid Hayes, a London woman about to give birth to her second child; Michael Stone, a troubled novelist whose latest work charts the guilt-ridden discoveries and subsequent fall into madness of mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis; and an imprisoned woman in a dystopian futuristic setting where apocalyptic climate change has resulted in the establishment of a totalitarian regime fiercely committed to the eradication of sexual reproduction (and its replacement with advanced bio-engineering techniques). The first significant aspect of this layering of settings and plot lines is the clear identification of an antagonistic gradient, ranging from the destructive backwardness of a scientific status quo ante, through the apparently benign rationalities of contemporary birthing practices, to the standard biopolitical horrors of a hyper-scientific patriarchal dystopia. This thematic structure carries an emphatic focalisation and portrayal of reproductive labour as surplus and excess. As we will see, the characterisation of pregnancy and birth in this novel goes beyond the logic of dispossession and victimisation of the female body, and stresses instead the qualitative difference between living labour stricto sensu and the various forms of appropriation and commodification of labour that preside over the structural subordination of women under capitalism. By positing reproduction as a contested field traversed by typically “productive” dynamics of exploitation and resistance, Kavenna’s novel offers a thorough examination of the disproportion between unengaged, embodied labour, and its standard economic representation as an estranged and abstract quantity.

108  The Reproductive Imagination The contemporary plot interestingly begins with a direct reference to the pressures exerted by post-Fordist working practices on the rhythms and cycles of life. We immediately learn that Brigid delayed motherhood until she was 39 and then became pregnant with her second and “last” child – “she was sure of that” (Kavenna 2010: 48) – only 17 months later. It is clear that this is not a temporality of her choosing, that neither the timing of the pregnancies nor the actual experience of bonding with her baby is immune to the dictate of necessity or the invasive nature of her freelance job. In the everyday phenomenology of confusion and erosion of the boundaries between life and labour, the activities of care and nurture, as well as the physicality of her bodily transformations, are reconfigured as extensions of an alien discipline that has nevertheless become entrenched at the core of her existence: When she wasn’t dealing with her son and the physical demands of pregnancy she was working, dull copy-editing work but she did it because they needed the money. She had given up her teaching job but now she pored over manuscripts and wrote symbols in the margins. She was precise and disciplined in her work, chaotic and self-critical with her child. (48) We might say that the fatigue and suffering of pregnancy, which the novel goes on to describe in great detail, is actually prefigured, framed, and conditioned by this more general psychic suffering from which there seems to be no reprieve (except perhaps, paradoxically, through the physical pain of parturition, as we will see). The feeling of inadequacy, belatedness, and sheer fatigue that her role as a precarious cognitive worker turned mother inevitably breeds is compounded with a sense of personal estrangement from those around her. The perceived distance from her husband Patrick is at its greatest precisely when he is most supportive: “He was trying to encourage her, though it made her feel alone, too, that her experience was untranslatable, obscure to him” (48–49). The incommensurability of their respective roles as father and mother is only aggravated by his unnegotiable position as a worker – indeed, by the abstract logic of labour he embodies, an externally determined quantity (of hours, clients, wages, etc.) that remains separate from the autonomous temporalities of the pregnant body: “She thought of Patrick in his office, typing emails, fielding calls from strangers. Leaning over his desk, a photograph of Calumn among the books and clutter. Living through time, elsewhere, apart from her” (57). Far from being over, the sexual division of labour is exacerbated. And yet the division is no longer between productive and reproductive labour in the traditional sense, but between an externally modulated figure of

The Reproductive Imagination  109 value, of measured economic activity (however secure or precarious its contractual definition and remuneration), and an embodied productivity that cannot be reduced to, or commensurated with, external forms, temporalities, and determinations. In Brigid’s case, freelance job, pregnancy, and care of her first born are all part of one living-labouring continuum. The central point here is that this feminised, biopolitical inflection stands in sharp contrast to, and thereby demarcates, a figure of labour that is simultaneously connoted as alien and male: in other words, heteronomous and servile and at the same time primarily associated with men. Thus, while Brigid’s fatigue and stress (but also sense of determination and agency) take centre stage, Patrick is reduced to a ghostly background presence, “saving up” time “for when the baby’s born” (67), miserably trying to change jobs, and generally suffering a sense of dispossession and loss of ownership over his own life that is particularly felt in the gradual estrangement from his family: [A]t first they had been allies, equally shell-shocked and excited, taking turns to rock Calumn when he cried, changing nappies, laughing together about the debris and chaos of it all. Slowly things had shifted. They needed money, one of them had to work fulltime. Brigid could claim maternity pay, so she stayed with Calumn, while Patrick trudged back to the office. He had been sad about it, she knew; he called her up, wanting news from home. (193) Indeed, the gendered division of labour results here in a tendential disempowerment of men or, more precisely, in their assimilation to more traditional forms of alienation in the labour process. While it seems that, as Brigid’s mother insists, Patrick’s job is in fact a good one (even if the details are never given), and thus, we can infer, better paid and far more secure than Brigid’s own activity as a freelance editor, the psychic burden appears to be far more onerous in the long term. Even more precarious and vulnerable is the situation of Michael Stone, the writer whose semi-fictional exploration of Semmelweis’s life we follow in one of the novel’s subplots. Not unlike his protagonist, Michael’s working (and personal) life is an emblem of failure. For years unable to have his work published, and feeling increasingly estranged from an overtly unsympathetic family, his existence, which one might at first imagine as to some extent defined by the vital elan of artistic creation, actually registers (even at the time of his long-awaited success) as one of protracted and irremediable suffering: “He could not really take pleasure in anything, and then he had grown so angry with his family – really his mother – because she was so foul about it all, told him he was wasting his time, that he would never achieve anything worth the years he had taken over it all” (87). The publication of his novel actually

110  The Reproductive Imagination coincides with her mother’s being diagnosed with dementia, which closes off any prospect of reconciliation or vindication of his life’s worth in her eyes. It is not surprising that the summit of his labours should be a book about guilt, about male guilt in the face of maternal death. The symbolic structure of this conflict is rather obvious, but its consequences for the general valuation of the gendered division of l­abour in the novel are significant. In turn, the psychic crisis suffered by Ignaz Semmelweis in the nineteenth-­century plot (which leads to his being ostracised from the medical profession and confined to a Vienna asylum) to some extent parallels that of Michael Stone himself. In the case of his character, the technical labour performed by doctors in mid-nineteenth-century hospitals is presented as a brutal negation of life. Tracing the causes of puerperal sepsis (or childbed fever) to the unhygienic protocols of the first modern hospitals, Semmelweis emerges as the scapegoat of his all-male profession, simultaneously condemned for his precocious views about clinical antisepsis and defeated by his own sense of guilt and failure in trying to persuade fellow doctors about their responsibility for the death of so many women. Nineteenth-century medical science appears here as an iteration of the rationality underpinning industrial capitalism’s configuration of knowledge as a disembodied objectivity and a technical fact of the productive process.1 Once again, the characterisation of non-­ reproductive labour as mechanical, disembodied, and invariably male (or in the words of Michael Stone’s radio interviewer, as the “imposition of technology on ancient process” (56)) produces a contrasting figure of generative life – of feminised living labour – that emerges as essentially disproportionate and incommensurable with it. Within this structural opposition, literature figures as a problematic extension of nineteenth-century gynaecological science, similarly antithetical to the creation of life and the sociality, the textures of bonding and communing, it entails. Semmelweis’s trajectory of seclusion and self-destruction is not very different from that of Michael Stone, who is in turn unambiguous about the “reasons why you became a writer”: “Diffidence, a fear of social events. An affinity for solitude. Perhaps even misanthropy” (97). Rather than these being the adverse but necessary conditions for a true creative unravelling, Stone’s reclusiveness prescribes a tendential diminution of literature’s socialising potentialities, which, in the final account, amounts to a devastating negation of life itself. There is a telling moment during the launch of his novel when another writer suggests that his literary project may actually conceal a Blakean strategy, with the “birthing of life – the human form divine. The terrible divinity of nature” (222) at its centre. This conversation brings Michael to the brink of a nervous breakdown, as he realises the mechanical nature of his writing, and therefore its separation from any form, literal or metaphorical, of life-giving.

The Reproductive Imagination  111 Deserted by writing (writing about the past and its failures, across personal biography and collective experience), the “terrible ­divinity of nature” embodied in the “birthing of life” is reconstructed as a ­future-oriented articulation of personal expectation and societal change. If Semmelweis and Stone echo one another’s plights, the continuity between Brigid’s contemporary struggles and the dystopian challenges faced by Prisoner 730004 becomes increasingly apparent as the novel unfolds. In this futuristic, post-apocalyptic setting, nature has been tampered with and corrupted to such an extent that human beings (presumably at the behest of a totalitarian system known as the “Darwinian Protectorate”) have completely turned their backs on it. Definitively stripped of their “divinity”, the processes of generation and sustenance of life have become fully abstracted and detached from their natural environments, while the planet itself seems to have been left at the mercy of catastrophic global warming. In this dystopian context, reproduction is disconnected from sex and carried out vicariously as a brutally eugenic process that has women “harvested” for their eggs and subsequently sterilised, before embryos are mechanically produced “in the pristine technocratic sanctuary of the Genetix” (129). Planetary devastation has resulted in the decreed abandonment of open spaces for a tightly regulated existence in large urban agglomerations (of which “Darwin C” appears to be the main one), where human beings perform tasks conducive, according to the official rhetoric of the regime, to the survival of the species. As part of this hyper-disciplinary design, Prisoner 730004 is said to have worked caring “for babies” at the “nurture grounds” (247) in Darwin C, while Birgitta, the presumptive ring leader of the resistance, a descendant of Brigid Hayes who comes to embody birth-giving as a subversive principle, reportedly “worked in the Sexual Release Centre. Once upon a time she might have been called a whore” (119). The resistance led by Birgitta and her group, which the novel reconstructs in this subplot via the ongoing interrogation of the nameless prisoner, consists in their having fled the city and their appointed roles under the Darwinian Protectorate for a fugitive life in the Arctic. While there is no open struggle against the system, the perception of their activities as hostile to the regime (they are repeatedly accused of threatening the survival of the species) comes to a head when Birgitta manages to break through the biological controls of the Genetix and, against all rational explanation, gives birth to a child, described by Prisoner 730004 as “a tiny packed mass of life and energy, reddish purple and covered in gore, but the most beautiful thing I have ever seen” (139). For all their insistence to the contrary and attempts to eradicate from her testimony subversive terms reminiscent of long-proscribed reproductive practices (in this world, mothers are systematically referred to as “egg donors”, babies as “progeny”, and so on), the government officials interrogating

112  The Reproductive Imagination Prisoner 730004 are unable to counter the sense of accomplished autonomy in her account. If there is no apparent desire to fight back at this stage, after the community has been dismantled and its members either murdered or imprisoned, that is because the conatus of reproductive life, 2 the ­“terrible divinity of nature” alluded to by Michael Stone’s interlocutor, has proven to be qualitatively, ontologically, in excess of the various historical forms (including this futuristic dystopia of perfected control) seeking to contain it. As the prisoner says, she was led to escape from the city and her work “guided by desire” (115) – desire to return to her parents’ island, presumably in northern Norway (for the place is only referred to, in the hyper-bureaucratic nomenclature of the Protectorate, as “Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424”), and thereby unearth a long-repressed sense of personal history and filiation, but also desire to reassert her autonomous ability to generate life. The traumatic realisation that her “living body had been rendered barren” does not so much indicate an essentialising quest for womanhood as an oppositional determination to “regain our former power”: When I was working at the nurture grounds, each day I would hold these beautiful little babies – “progeny” you would say – in my arms and feel how monstrous it was that my living body had been rendered barren, that the eggs had been ripped out of my womb when I was merely eighteen and taken to a laboratory somewhere, where I didn’t even know, and fertilised without love or passion. And if not fertilised then thrown away, discarded. When I thought about this I felt a terrible ache, the mourning of my body, and I always consoled myself – or tried to – with the thought that something might go wrong. The Genetix might fail. Society might collapse. And afterwards, from the ruins, women might regain our former power, to create life within our bodies. (117) Reproduction is thus presented as an act of defiance against the extremes of instrumental reason, but also, more generally, against the dynamics of reduction and containment of the living within measurable and quantifiable forms. It could be argued that the prospect of sexual reproduction articulates a promise of power, indeed of surplus exceeding the limits and boundaries of external command over life. Having experienced this radical freedom and autonomy, this biopolitical excess of unregulated reproduction in the wake of Birgitta’s childbirth, Prisoner 730004 appears immune to the disciplinary logics – the striations of time and space – governing life (especially in prison) under the Protectorate. Thus, she explains to her befuddled interrogators how “I no longer thought in hours or even days or months. The moon waxed and waned. Then again and again” (253).

The Reproductive Imagination  113 The continuity between care work and this subversive reassertion of reproductive freedom is worth dwelling on. It is significant that the resistant impulse of the group should originate precisely among care workers such as Birgitta and Prisoner 730004. Note that the latter’s desire to escape arises from her experience working on the “nurture grounds”, and that Birgitta’s own job as “an expert in the administration of sexual release” (119) – an activity described by the regime as a rather central “aspect of the struggle for the survival of the human species” (262) – suggests that the ambit of care, far from being superseded or suppressed by the totalitarian machine, plays an increasingly strategic role in the maintenance of existing relations of power. For care is, after all, the non-codifiable, the non-mechanisable, and therefore the irreplaceable, element in reproduction (that which no measure of bio-engineering technology can substitute for). As Yann Moulier Boutang has noted, in the immaterial economy of post-Fordist capitalism, it is essential to distinguish between routine operations subject to standardisation and codification and those tasks, many of which can be subsumed under the category of care, that involve a “singularisation of situations” in which a standard protocol or rule of service must be modulated and adapted to the specific needs or wishes of the consumer (2010: 155). This necessarily entails a recalibration of the notion of value, as service work – especially, let us insist, care work – is primarily embodied in non-generalisable, non-codifiable practices. Perhaps this non-codifiability of care work, and the revaluation it involves, is already a telling index of Birgitta’s symbolic position in the novel. For indeed her role in “the administration of sexual release” epitomises an impossible reconciliation of measure and excess, of temporally contained and exploited work, on the one hand, and biopolitical resilience, on the other. In this dystopian universe of generalised unfreedom, in which the functional separation between public and private ambits has been dismantled, the traditional apportioning of prostitution work as an external complement to the unwaged labour of conjugal sex (which should be considered as one of the central, and often neglected, loci of the social reproduction of labour power)3 no longer seems to obtain. Care work appears to be homogeneously servile and yet socially geared towards the overarching goal of ensuring “the survival of the species”, which would suggest, in turn, a structural overcoming of the division between the productive and the reproductive. It is perhaps under these conditions that the implicit relegation of the female labouring body (its subordination to male labour) can be surpassed, and a radically autonomous figure of life, of uncontained living labour, imagined. Thus, the unravelling of Prisoner 730004’s and Birgitta’s story paves the way for the novel’s concluding vision of birth work. In a reading of Kavenna’s novel, Aline Ferreira has criticised the dichotomous opposition between the futuristic plot’s dystopia of abolished

114  The Reproductive Imagination motherhood and the portrayal of Brigid’s natural, although “extremely painful” and ultimately “medicalized birth” (Ferreira 2015: 23). While, as Ferreira observes, more enabling and emancipatory uses of reproductive technology (in particular “ectogenesis”, or the use of artificial wombs) remain unexplored, I would argue that, through this binary structure, the novel offers a compelling reflection on the radical political uses of care work, precisely at a time of maximum development of its subordination (more often than not, in precarious and neo-servile forms) to capital’s valorisation processes. Recent work arising from both feminist scholarship and activist birth communities has insisted on the political (and economic) relevance of “birth work as care work” (Apfel 2016). Thus, Silvia Federici has described birth work as “a transformative, autonomy-building activity, enabling women to ‘take charge of their reproductive journey’, overcome their fears, discover their inner powers, turn the moment in which they are most vulnerable into one in which they can be strongest and, thereby, begin a process of self-­ valorization” (2016: xxii). A minimally critical consideration of this ­activity would immediately suggest, as Alana Apfel has noted, that “the climate in which both reproduction and caregiving unfolds remains anything but ‘private’”, for indeed: The terrain of reproduction continues to be highly contested and itself [is] a site of resistance – for wherever capitalism exerts control over how we seek to reproduce ourselves and our communities, we find acts of rebellion, however small, that bring us closer to a collective reappropriation of reproduction from capitalist patriarchy. (2016: 3) In the novel’s portrayal of Brigid’s labour, we encounter a revealing analysis of the complexities surrounding birth work in the context of an increasingly invasive, biocapitalist regime. As she decides to proceed with a natural birth at home, which a number of complications will ultimately prevent, leading to hospitalisation and a Caesarean, the brutality of her present physical suffering, which is nevertheless also depicted as an extraordinary moment of corporeal intensity, is contrasted to the overriding sense of mental and bodily submission and estrangement during her first-born’s hyper-medicalised birth: “Last time – she explains – the ­really insidious pain had come after labour, when the drugs left her system and her body finally realised what had happened to it. She was in agony for weeks, and then it took months before she felt anything like normal again” (189). As capitalism erodes the experiential boundaries between work and non-work, between production and reproduction, the painful but determined attempt to reclaim birth work, with its self-valorising experience of the living body, from the estranged protocols and temporalities of medicalised labour (indeed of abstract,

The Reproductive Imagination  115 alienated labour) emerges – in Apfel’s words – as a proper act “of rebellion, however small”, however limited, and however unsuccessful in the final account.

Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Non-reproductive Crisis, and the Strategy of Refusal Sheila Heti’s 2018 Motherhood goes beyond any binary reductionism around the struggle over reproductive autonomy. If Kavenna’s The Birth of Love ultimately relied on a discursive opposition between reproduction as natural process and its techno-scientific negation in three distinct temporal settings, Heti’s narrative proposes a more synchronic and dynamic modulation of the problem. Motherhood presents itself as a thinly fictionalised memoir of sorts, as an intimate exploration of the author’s self-doubt, primarily about her status as a childless woman in her late thirties but also, crucially, as a writer and a daughter. The struggle over reproduction is not imagined here as a historically transmitted antagonism, with moments of external encroachment and internal resistance defining a relatively fixed position or identity, but rather as an immanent terrain of ontological constitution in which the category “woman” is enlisted primarily as subjectivity in process. This is not a reduction of reproductive politics to the private ambit of one woman’s individuality (even if the narrative strategy may momentarily suggest as much) but a decided bid to open up the question surrounding the sexual division of labour to a range of truly autonomous ethical and political determinations. Heti’s narrator, beset (and defined) as she is by a sense of personal crisis in the face of her own childlessness, nevertheless refuses, from the very beginning, to naturalise the reproductive role of women whilst legitimising a more general and increasingly pervasive discourse of systemic crisis that places social reproduction at its centre. For Heti, it is not a matter of corruption or co-optation of a process that may otherwise be experienced as wholesome and fulfilling, but rather of the undeniable presence of a dynamic that ruptures the temporal ontology of the social along gendered lines, configuring dramatically unequal valuations of life. In this sense, the personal is not only political but is, more precisely, the ethical ground, the matrix of subjective production, where the structural underpinnings of gendered inequality are engineered and where the logic of reproduction-as-crisis (reproduction understood first and foremost as a crucial function of social division) comes into being. As we will see in what follows, Heti’s Motherhood offers a critical pathway out of the reactionary discourse of “secular stagnation” while pointing to an alternative logic of self-valorising femininity. Melinda Cooper is one of the scholarly critics of neoliberalism to have recently focused on the resurgence, following the 2008 crisis, of 1930s

116  The Reproductive Imagination discourses on “secular stagnation”. First introduced by American economist Alvin Hansen, this notion “attributed America’s Depression-era woes to a dramatic drop in the birth rate”: “Deprived of the external drivers that had fueled economic growth throughout the long nineteenth century – high birth rates, territorial expansion, and new inventions – the American economy had entered a period of ‘secular stagnation’ that rendered it impervious to the usual tools of monetary stimulus” (Cooper 2016: n.p.). Although initially formulated as a politically left-of-centre plea for fiscal stimulus and state intervention in the economy, the recent revival of this theory of crisis resonates and intersects with conservative denunciations of a “global flight from the family” (Nicholas Eberstadt, in Cooper 2016: n.p.) where deflationary tendencies are directly traced to demographic decline and, in the increasingly moralistic tenor favoured by such critics, to a generalised desertion of reproductive duties. Thus, if “people aren’t consuming enough, this has nothing to do with the maldistribution of wealth and income, but can be blamed on the fact that they aren’t having enough children”. This is a theory, Cooper suggests, that “operates as much through elision and displacement as positive argument, actively working to override the distributional dimension of crisis in favour of a classless narrative of generational conflict or loss”. In its peaking moments of reactionary moralism, the crisis of reproduction becomes “personified in various figures of un(re)productive surplus, from sterile women to pampered pensioners” (2016: n.p.). Heti’s intervention is to be read as an incisive critique – and programmatic riposte – to this bitterly anti-feminist discourse of crisis. For crisis remains the semantic and existential mode in which a liberating re-­ appropriation of reproduction may be achieved. In Motherhood there is no transcendence of crisis. The possibility of autonomy is to be articulated within the lived textures of a personal and collective crisis, in an experiential milieu of suffering. Thus, the founding ethical link as stated by the narrator is the relationship, not with her own mother but with her sadness: “I want to turn my mother’s sadness into gold. When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep, and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold” (Heti 2018: 16). In contrast to the destructive (masculine) associations it had in Kavenna, literature emerges here as an opportunity to reverse the valences of crisis. Where the discourse of secular stagnation individualised systemic failure in the figure of the sterile woman, Heti’s promise to transmute her mother’s sadness into literary “gold” suggests a strategic move in the opposite direction. What is at stake in this opening formula is not just a vindication of matrilineal continuities in the private realm but an examination of the possibilities that failure to comply with the socially reproductive mandate may generate. Thus, a first task in the ethico-political reconstruction of female autonomy is the disavowal of its “successful” identifications with reproduction. As the narrator puts it, “What if I pursue

The Reproductive Imagination  117 being a bad woman and don’t breed – pursue failing biologically? Where is the realm of privacy? Only in failure. Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure” (113). This privacy is to be read not as a mere retreat from the collective, from the sociality implied in the notion of femininity, but as a critical recognition of its oppressive nature as a mechanism of enlistment and fixation: “This fog of sleepiness that is my femininity, which has often threatened to drown me – it has to be guarded against, for it has so much power” (113). To fail – consciously, deliberately – before the social mandate to reproduce is to resist the automatic subordination to this power, and thus potentially to imagine an alternative sociality or community of women. For the effects of such a naturalising power can be brutal and destructive. Early in the novel, the narrator recounts how her decision to have an abortion after accidentally becoming pregnant at the age of 21 was met by her doctor with a manipulative attempt to make her fall in line and accept her reproductive role: “The doctor who examined me advised me to keep the baby. He showed me the sonogram, even though I didn’t want to see it. He told me it was too early to get an abortion (…) Only today, as I’m writing this, does it occur to me that he was lying; he wanted me to change my mind. You don’t have to wait for an abortion. But I was too young then, and too all alone, to see it” (31–32). This aloneness, which contrasts sharply with the deliberate aloneness of failure (“Only in our failures are we absolutely alone”), is an integral part of the mechanism, a central element without which the spontaneous interpellation of the subject as a functionally reproductive woman collapses. But the more immediate question is, “Why was it important for that doctor that I did it?”. The narrator’s answer is unambiguous: “A woman must have children because she must be occupied (…) There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. (…) What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?” (32). This brings us back to the (re)productivist logic at the heart of the secular stagnation discourse. Not only is a woman’s desertion of her assigned reproductive role detrimental from the point of view of the valorisation process, but it is so inasmuch as it implies an alternative – and as such, necessarily destabilising – formulation of value. It may be worth ­invoking here a concept privileged by Marxist theorists in the Autonomist tradition (a concept which was alluded to by Federici in the quotation above): self-valorisation. While, in Marx, this term is exclusively associated with capital and its expanded ambit of economic reproduction, for thinkers such as Antonio Negri, self-valorisation refers to the converse process undertaken by the working class as it sets out to block capital’s coordination of social relations. Self-valorisation is another name for the systematic and essentially revolutionary subversion of the socialised labour process (which Autonomists term “the refusal of work”): “there can only be working-class use-value in the accumulated part of surplus labor that

118  The Reproductive Imagination it is possible to reappropriate, that part which can be reduced to nonwork, to working class liberty, to self-­valorization” (Negri 1991: 149). The crucial resignification of this concept in the Autonomist tradition with respect to Marx’s original sense implies a fundamental recognition of the effects of capitalist valorisation upon the textures of life – from the materiality of (re)producing bodies to their lived temporality. As Harry Cleaver observes, what capital processes as an eminently quantitative logic of value production is inevitably experienced by labouring human beings as qualitative expropriation. In this sense, capitalist valorisation is, from a worker’s point of view, nothing but “disvalorisation”: “if valorisation denotes the capitalist subordination of human productive activities to capitalist command, then disvalorisation expresses people’s loss of those abilities which are absorbed by capital” (Cleaver 1992: 120). Proletarian self-valorisation would then signal the strategic moment of reversal, the transmutation of (dis)valorised economic quantity into liberated human quality: in other words, a constitutive shift from subordinated time value to lived time. In the context of value struggles over the temporality of reproduction, the meaning of refusal may acquire very precise dimensions. Heti’s novel is unambiguous in this respect. For to refuse the structural subordination of women within the reproductive matrix deployed by secular stagnation narratives and other regressive interpretations of crisis is, essentially, to refuse a temporal logic that places women under erasure, forever in a state of subalternity that is first and foremost temporally dispossessing. As Heti’s narrator puts it in an initial approach, The most womanly problem is not giving oneself enough space or time, or not being allowed it. We squeeze ourselves into the moments we allow, or the moments that have been allowed us. We do not stretch out in time, languidly, but allot ourselves the smallest parcels of time in which to exist, miserly. (169) This temporal reduction effectively amounts to a form of ontological deprivation. The primary sign of female subjection (qua reproductive subject in a broader economy of subordination to the social reproduction of capital) is self-refusal. But, for women, the prospect of disvalorisation extends well beyond this, taking on dramatic proportions as the gendered aggregates of time value undergo their functional separation in the social division of labour: Time is always ticking for women. Whereas men, apparently, live in a timeless realm. In the dimension of men, there is no time – just space. Imagine living in a realm of space, not time! You put your dick into spaces, and the bigger your dick, the cozier the space. (194)

The Reproductive Imagination  119 The crude tone here reveals the harsh, ontological nature of the division. For there is nothing circumstantial or derivative about female self-­ abnegation as customarily associated with the reproductive role. The temporal compression presiding over women’s socialisation supposes that the time-span of a woman’s life is about thirty years. Apparently, during these thirty years – fourteen to forty-four – everything must be done. She must find a man, make babies, start and accelerate her career, avoid diseases, and collect enough money in a private account so that her husband can’t gamble their life’s savings away. (194) Against this brutal horizon of disvalorisation, the self-valorisation of women is imagined by the narrator as an expansive occupation of time that simultaneously re-appropriates it and voids it of content:4 I want to take up as much space as I can in time, stretch out and stroll with nowhere to go, and give myself the largest parcels of time in which to do nothing – to let my obligations slip to the ground, reply to no one, please no one, leave everyone hanging, impolitely, and try to win no one’s favour; not pile up politeness doled out to just everyone in the hopes of being pleasing (…) I get nostalgic for being a teenager for this reason. (170) Since what determines the brutal negativity of life under the reproductive mandate is a paradoxical temporality of curtailed possibility and slavish infinity (in a remark that calls to mind the nightmarish vision at the end of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Heti’s narrator intimates that what “has always frightened me most [is] the endlessness of motherhood, its eternity” (188)), its undoing is inevitably projected as a veering towards the as-yet uncolonised immanence of teenage lived time.5 Refusal becomes here a praxis of freedom, an ethical intervention upon the textures of socially (re)productive life that replaces the systemic imposition of heteronomous utility with the subversive anti-utility of liberated time. But Heti’s novel brings refusal to a more general level. The construction of a counter-ontology, indeed a properly feminist ontology of liberated time, implies a more comprehensive rejection of reproductive subordination that may open up substantive paths of alliance and spaces of community for both reproducing and non-reproducing women. The narrative takes a decided step towards the political (despite earlier insinuations that “[o]ne person’s life is not a political or general statement about how all lives should be” (134)) as the logic of refusal driving its ethical movement is revealed as a double cancellation: “I don’t want ‘not a mother’ to be part of who I am – for my identity to be the negative of

120  The Reproductive Imagination someone else’s positive identity. Then maybe instead of ‘not a mother’ I could be not ‘not a mother’. I could be not not” (157). Beyond the dialectical formalism, the negation of the negation is imagined here as the ontological foundation of a truly affirmative project, for “[i]f I am not not, then I am what I am(…) the not before the not shields me from being simply not a mother” (158). Refusal is given in a condensed logical form as a purposeful disavowal of the socially available terms of failure and exclusion, but also as the shared ground on which a self-valorising encounter of differential approaches to motherhood may be enabled. As such, the lack that the narrator identifies and painfully negotiates in her relation to motherhood (a lack that was tentatively contemplated as deliberate failure) can be transformed into an active ethical experience, into a moment in the process of subjectivation, we may say, My lack of the experience of motherhood is not an experience of motherhood. Or is it? Can I call it a motherhood, too? (…) Maybe if I could somehow figure out what not having a child is an ­experience of – make it into an active action, rather than the lack of an action – I might know what I am experiencing, and not feel so much like I was waiting to act. (159–160) But let us insist: this is not a solitary action. Subjectivation is not synonymous with solipsistic individualism. The double subtraction of the “not not” implies a common articulation of potentiality for both mothers and non-mothers to inhabit their modes of existence jointly without falling into the identificatory trap of the reproductive matrix.6 Both refusal to be in exclusion and refusal to merely exist as a functional identity can be resolved into a common ontology of and for women: “To be not not is what the mothers can be, and what the women who are not mothers can be. This is the term we can share. In this way, we can be the same” (158). The political tension towards the common, towards a common life for women beyond the disvalorising logic of social division and reproductive subordination that this narrative unquestionably articulates, is ultimately refracted, however, through an intimate drama of intergenerational suffering. This produces a general narrative effect, not of self-centred evasion from the collective but indeed of dialectical vindication (beyond the formal structure of the “not not” formula) of the temporality of liberation. The increasingly insistent references to the narrator’s mother and grandmother (and more indirectly, to the Jewish European tradition from which they hail) somehow place us face-to-face with Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianic” ontology of time. As in the German philosopher’s famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, the temporal structure indicated by the narrator’s wish to redeem her female forebears’ suffering suggests that “[t]here is a secret agreement

The Reproductive Imagination  121 between past generations and the present one” (Benjamin 2007: 254), and that the “past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption” (254). This “temporal index”, which Benjamin famously named the “time of the now”, or Jetztzeit in the German original, marks a fundamental break with the “homogeneous, empty time” of historicist thinking (and, we could add, of standard economic narratives of crisis, including those of secular stagnation). Heti strategically inscribes the reproductive mandate within this structural linearity of “homogeneous, empty” continuity and opposes it to a temporal dialectic “nourished”, as Benjamin puts it, “by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren” (260): I do not feel I have the luxury to have a child. I do not have the time. My mother worked hard to justify her mother’s life. She worked for her mother, to give meaning to her mother’s life. She was turned towards her mother, not turned towards me. And I am turned towards my mother, too, and not towards any son or daughter. We turn our love backwards to make sense of life, to make beauty and significance of our mother’s life. (200) This suggests indeed a “weak messianic” alternative to the engulfing continuity of reproduction: a crisis that does not transcend the ontology of the present (in the manner that a “strong”, future-oriented messianism would do) but rather destabilises it with a resistant modulation of past suffering. In this context, writing is the material basis on which the accumulated grief of female subjection can be finally emancipated and rendered as subjectivity, as temporal self-valorisation across generations. The “child” of the writer-narrator is thus, in contrast to the biological offspring that she refuses to have, “a child that will not die – a body that will speak and keep on speaking, which can’t be shot or burned up” (199). This opting out of the temporal structure imposed by the reproductive mandate, this re-appropriation of crisis as a redemptive strategy and exit route out of its oppressive continuity, may thus result in “a strong creature, stronger than any of us”, “a creature that lives inside many bodies, not just one body that is so vulnerable” (199). Heti’s weak-messianic articulation of reproductive continuity as a reversed temporality of backward-looking redemption rather than ­forward-looking submission lends a radically different semantic context to the experience of crisis. But it is important to remember how the notion of reproductive crisis has been rendered by authors dealing with the structural position of women in capitalism beyond its more immediate and contemporary conjunctures. Thus, a text such as Buchi Emecheta’s 1979 The Joys of Motherhood issues what I think is a fundamental reminder that, from the viewpoint of women’s reproductive

122  The Reproductive Imagination role, capitalism and the social modes it supports are ever-reliant on forms of extra- or proto-economic violence. Hence, the perspective on crisis is inverted and the linearity of capitalist progress is displaced by a much more jagged sequence of heterogeneous moments and ambits of experience. What I  want to do in the next section, through a reading of Emecheta, is thus to situate reproduction as a structural framework of crisis that subverts historical linearity and posits exteriority as a general mode of articulation for the system beyond conjunctural deviations and compositions (such as those signalled by Fordism).

Recommencing History: Reproduction and Primitive Accumulation in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood The links between reproduction and what Marx described as “so-called primitive accumulation” (1990: 874) have been explored at length by contemporary feminists such as Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhof, S­ ilvia Federici, and others. It is thanks to the pioneering work of these theorists that “we now recognize that primitive accumulation is not a onetime historical event confined to the origins of capitalism [but rather] a phenomenon constitutive of capitalist relations at all times” (Federici 2019: 15). While, for Marx, primitive or original (­ursprüngliche) accumulation referred to the process of separation of the producers from the means of production, a process that could be historically circumscribed to the creation of a modern proletariat out of England’s agricultural population between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, feminist scholars have extended this analysis, bringing into this process women, who, by witch hunts in Europe and by colonization outside Europe, were the first to be separated from their work and production means, their culture, their knowledge, and their skills, and from control over their own labor and even their bodies because of their reproductive capacities. (Werlhof 2000: 731) The resulting position of women as reproductive workers, as domestic labourers – indeed as housewives – within the capitalist mode of production, implies that this is a process of separation (of women from their means of production) that has to be “forced anew upon every new generation” (Werlhof 2000: 731).7 For the paradigm of waged labour to be sustained as the historical norm of capitalism, a realm of unwaged reproductive labour must be posited as its internal colony, so to speak. This form of “colonisation” precedes capitalist accumulation proper not as a linear-historical but as a structural pre-condition of the

The Reproductive Imagination  123 system which, as such, cannot be regarded as either residual or backward. Rather, as the contemporary history of capitalist globalisation shows, while the international division of labour between the North and the South has tended to disappear as a fixed map of the world market, “it survives and prospers as a principle” (Werlhof 2000: 733) for the non-­geographical division of labour: “Globalization, therefore, does not mean universalization of wage labor and the abolishing [of] slavery and unpaid ­labor – such as housework. On the contrary, it means global extension of colonial conditions” (Werlhof 2000: 733). Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood is particularly important because of its strategic position with respect to this process of continued primitive accumulation. Published in 1979, at a time when neoliberal globalisation was already under way with its dramatic programme of political and economic restructuring, the novel addresses an earlier moment of transition in Africa (specifically, Nigeria) from the old colonial structures of the early twentieth century to the new realities, following the Second World War, of post-colonial statehood and gradual integration into the capitalist economy. Emecheta’s novel tells the story of Nnu Ego, an Ibo woman whose tribal background and roots in the village of Ibuza stand in sharp contrast to the violent modernity of late-colonial and post-colonial Lagos. Caught up in the structural and cultural tensions of this spatio-temporal opposition between country and city, between tradition and “progress”, but also, crucially, between non-capitalist patriarchal norms and a capitalist regime of subordination in which colonial relations multiply and intersect at different levels, Nnu Ego represents the complex temporal status of reproduction under capitalism beyond any single historical determination. Thus, while the narrative focuses on Nnu Ego’s adult life in Lagos as a married woman, the novel actually begins with the story of her own mother and father and the circumstances that preceded and, in terms of the traditional temporality invoked by her tribe, explained her birth. It becomes immediately apparent, however, that tradition harbours no special protection for reproduction. On the contrary, the sexual division of labour on which the ongoing colonisation of women by capital is secured is already at work in this traditional social organisation. Two episodes of extraordinary brutality frame this pre-history. One reveals, in no ambiguous terms, the status of domestic labour as an eminently servile sphere of activity in which men feature as predators rather than mere beneficiaries. When Nnu Ego’s father Agbadi falls ill after sustaining a wound, her mother Ona, who had until then been an occasional (and, to his mind, insufficiently devoted) lover, automatically turns into his carer, leaving behind her father’s compound for his. Momentarily waking up from his feverish slumber, and seeing her lying beside him, Agbadi’s immediate instinct, “as he remembered how many times this young woman had teased and demeaned him sexually”, is to “teach” the

124  The Reproductive Imagination “heartless bitch” (Emecheta 1994: 19) by raping her. The brutal lesson this early scene effectively teaches us readers is that, in this presumably “primitive”, as in more “modern” settings later in the novel, the domestic labour performed by women is structurally inseparable from violence: She struggled fiercely like a trapped animal, but Agbadi was becoming himself again. He was still weak, but not weak enough to ignore his desire. He worked on her, breaking down all her resistance. He stroked and explord with his perfect hand, banking heavily on the fact that Ona was a woman, a mature woman, who had had him many a time. (20) The labour of care transmutes suddenly into an act of plunder exerted directly upon the female body. With his sexual assault on Ona, which is only complete once she is humiliated into acceptance, and once the noise attracts the attention of other people in the compound (“Having hurt her on purpose for the benefit of his people sleeping in the courtyard, he had had his satisfaction” (21)), the separation between the woman and her means of reproduction, between the worker and her labour power, is achieved, and a regime of violent subordination is posited as the general experiential horizon of female work in the novel. Thus, it is not entirely surprising to come across, only two pages later, a scene of even starker brutality with also a female reproductive worker at the centre. As Agbadi’s senior wife dies, her “personal slave” is summoned by the medicine man and commanded, in the name of tradition, to follow her into the afterlife: “A good slave was supposed to jump into the grave willingly, happy to accompany her mistress; but this young and beautiful woman did not wish to die yet. She kept begging for her life, much to the annoyance of many of the men standing around” (23). This resistance is suppressed in the most drastic manner when the dead woman’s son gives the slave a blow with his cutlass. Fatally wounded, her final words are both ominous and accepting of a servile fate that ultimately crosses boundaries and undoes distinctions between ordinary reproductive and strictly slave labour among women: “The slave woman turned her eyes, now glazed with approaching death, towards him. ‘Thank you for this kindness, Nwokocha the son of Agbadi. I shall come back to your household, but as a legitimate daughter. I shall come back…’” (23). The true significance of this episode is that it establishes slavery as the symbolic framework in which reproduction is made both intelligible and operative. For indeed, the slave “comes back” to Agbadi’s household as the daughter that her abused lover Ona bears shortly before her death. This characterisation of Nnu Ego as the reincarnation of her father’s household slave, combined with the ensuing narrative of her slavery as a wife and mother, offers a concise statement on the role of women as

The Reproductive Imagination  125 reproductive workers and on their status in relation to primitive accumulation. The heterogeneity of regimes of exploitation presented by the novel, with traditional servitude and patriarchy overlapping and intersecting with avowedly urban and modern forms of capitalist activity, forcefully suggests that primitive accumulation, indeed the colonial subordination of capital’s outside (understood in either geographical or functional terms), is not a problem of evolutionary stages but one of multiplication and coordination of heterogeneous modes of labour – or more precisely, of regimes of subsumption of labour to capital. The twofold concept of subsumption is central to Marx’s theorisation of the capitalist mode of production. Formal subsumption refers to that mode of subordination to capital in which labour remains virtually unchanged with respect to earlier forms of social and economic organisation. Under formal subsumption, says Marx, “production processes of varying social provenance have been transformed into capitalist production” (1990: 1020). Thus, for example, “a man who was formerly an independent peasant now finds himself a factor in a production process and dependent on the capitalist directing it” (1990: 1020). In this case, then, the effective subordination of labour to capital must be understood in terms of the imposition of a new, external constraint upon a process that conserves its previous formal aspects. Real subsumption, on the other hand, refers to the specifically capitalist development of the forces of production, with technological development and the introduction of complex machinery intervening directly as factors that both increase productivity and enable a reduction in the length of the working day. As Massimiliano Tomba has pointed out, To these two forms should also be added a third form, rarely studied: that of the hybrid or intermediate forms [Zwitterformen] of subsumption (…) They are forms in which surplus-labour is extracted by means of direct coercion [direkter Zwang], without there being formal subsumption of labour to capital. Marx observes how these forms can indeed be understood as forms of transition, but can also be reproduced in the background of large-scale industry. The ­hybrid-forms, though they are not formally subsumed to capital, and though labour is not given in the form of wage-labour, fall under the command of capital. (2009: 62) Emecheta’s focus and understanding of primitive accumulation in terms of a recurring process of colonisation of reproductive labour rests entirely on this logic of hybridity and synchronisation of heterogeneous dynamics of subsumption. What is crucial to the mechanism of subordination that makes of the accumulation process a permanent one (across social and organisational mutations in the labour process) is precisely the use

126  The Reproductive Imagination of coercion. Whether this is expressed in the more or less direct forms of State violence and the juridical organisation of property relations that it upholds, or in the crude versions of naked, colonial spoliation, what prevails as the operative basis of accumulation is the foundational act of violent imposition. The symbolic centrality of slavery in the novel emphasises both this primacy of coercion as the underlying condition for accumulation and the synchronisation of apparently conflicting temporalities. Shortly after arriving in Lagos, the contradictory but multifaceted experience of labour unfreedom in the supposedly modernising environment of a late-colonial city is fully revealed to the protagonist. Having just left behind the traditional hierarchies and divisions (of labour, gender roles, etc.) of her village, Nnu Ego is shocked to discover a world in which men can perform the domestic labour of women for money. When asking her husband “why he could not find a more respectable job”, “Nnaife had scoffed and told her that in a town people never minded what they did to get money, as long as it was honest. Did she not think the work easier and much more predictable than farming?” (47). Not only is domestic work subsumed here under the colonial structure of domination, but it is also effectively reorganised by the money economy beyond the sexual division of labour. But this complex coordination (or, in Tomba’s terms, synchronisation) of, in principle, contradictory temporal and functional ambits, does not mean that the transfer of reproductive duties to men like Nnaife (since the “Europeans were happy about this because it had long been an accepted thing that Ibo men made good domestic workers” (94)) marks a stage of emancipation for women. On the contrary, what this situation announces, as Nnu Ego immediately suspects, is a multiplication of relations of servility through which women remain tied to inherited gender roles and power dynamics, and the reportedly modern men who left behind their traditional livelihoods in the country emerge as new slaves. Discussing with her neighbour Cordelia this strange, new reality in which men “are too busy being white men’s servants to be men”, Nnu Ego protests that, while her father had been pressured by the British to release his slaves (because “it is illegal”), “these our husbands are like slaves” (51). To which Cordelia replies that “[t]hey are all slaves, including us. If their masters treat them badly, they take it out on us. The only difference is that they are given some pay for their work, instead of having been bought” (51). In a further remark, she notes that “[t]hey stopped being men long ago. Now they are machines” (53). Thus, machinic enslavement, to reiterate the Deleuzian terminology used in Chapter 4, surfaces as one of the definitive markers of so-called modernity. The scrambling of gender roles induced by capitalist subsumption can only be experienced as an extension of brutality already endured under pre-modern conditions of subordination. It is in this sense that the true nature of reproduction as a fresh layering of suffering (the “joys of

The Reproductive Imagination  127 motherhood” ironically pointed at in the title) is revealed in this urban setting. Even the bonds of affect harboured by traditional marital relations dissolve under the pressures of remunerated work and the lures of the commodity: “There was no time for petting or talking to each other about love. That type of family awareness which the illiterate farmer was able to show his wives, his household, his compound, had been lost in Lagos, for the job of the white man, for the joy of buying expensive lappas, and for the feel of shiny trinkets” (52). But the scale and intensity of the loss is far greater. The violent dispossession to which Nnu Ego is exposed in this alien environment comes to a head with the death of her first-born. Her initial reading of the tragedy suggests that “[i]t was because she wanted to be a woman of Ibuza in a town like Lagos that she lost her child. This time she was going to play according to the new rules” (81). From that point on, the novel essentially charts its protagonist’s attempt and ultimate failure to adapt to these “new rules”, which include, given her responsibility – as Nnaife callously reminds her – “to feed [her] children as best [she] can” (136), the necessity of supplementing the unsteady flow of an increasingly irresponsible husband’s wages. In this transitional universe, where it is agreed on that “it’s good to encourage women to trade, so that they know the value of money” (143), and yet where a husband can still ask his wife, demanding traditional submission, “Did I not pay your bride price? Am I not your owner?” (48), the role of the woman as a doubly subordinated reproductive worker with an extremely high level of exposure to the development of an informal market economy can only translate, experientially, into a truly exacerbated sense of “imprisonment”: “it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned in her role as the senior wife” (137). More damningly still, the ambivalent position of women’s labour in this complex capitalist universe of heterogeneous forms of exploitation results also in the difficulty of building alliances and structures of solidarity between women.8 The conflicts and disagreements between neighbours, fellow wives, and acquaintances make up a sizeable portion of the plot. The case of Nnu Ego’s interactions with her husband’s junior wife Adaku is particularly significant, for it rehearses a peaking moment of crisis in which the brutal exposé of reproductive exploitation and seemingly impossible collective action (which brings the representation of women in the novel dangerously close to generalised victimisation) gives way to a short-lived but revealing imaginary of resistance. After a series of humiliations motivated by her inability to produce a son, Adaku announces her decision to leave the house and become a prostitute: “I am going to live with those women in Montgomery Road (…) I am not prepared to stay here and be turned into a mad woman, just because I have no sons” (168–169). Interestingly, this sharp refusal of her traditional

128  The Reproductive Imagination reproductive role in favour of a morally objectionable alternative (which in this case registers as a shocking act of defiance and perhaps as a provocative appeal to solidarity) is ultimately inscribed by the novel under the accretive logic of capitalist subsumption. Thus, Adaku’s threat to exit the sphere of reproductive subordination is only expressed as a personal alignment with capital’s monetary logic. As she puts it, “Everybody accuses me of making money all the time. What else is there for me to do?” (168). Self-valorisation in this context cannot be articulated but in the form of a more willing and deliberate submission to capitalism. It is either this, then, or the dramatic fate reserved for traditionalists like Nnu Ego, whose entrapment between different temporal regimes and experiences of reproductive labour invariably leads to helplessness and to an even more definitive form of humiliation. For shortly after declaring her inability to “be anything else but a mother” (222), which stands as a final verdict on her life as a whole, Nnu Ego dies on a lonely road, “with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her” (224). Her “reward”, concludes the narrator with characteristically devastating irony, was that she had “the greatest funeral Ibuza had ever seen” (224).

Notes 1 As Marx writes in the first volume of Capital, “It is the result of the division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities [geistige Potenzen] of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. This process of separation starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him to a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital” (1990: 482). 2 Conatus is a central concept in Spinoza’s philosophy and is often translated as “striving”: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being (…) no thing has anything in itself by which it can be destroyed, or which takes its existence away” (Spinoza 1996: 75). See also Bove (2012). 3 For a detailed Marxist analysis of the capitalist function of sex (including the role of “prostitution work”), see Fortunati (1995). See also Federici (2012). 4 For a theoretico-practical exploration of the idea of “occupying time”, see Sharma (2014). 5 The teenager is invoked here as a figure of ambivalence and extreme potentiality, dramatising at the same time the cruel spectacle of anticipated violence and a promise (or at least a momentary vision) of deviation from the established channels of reproductive exploitation. As the narrator puts it in another moment of brutal lucidity, “A fourteen-year-old girl has so much time to be raped and have babies that she is like the greatest Midas” (194). The ontological difference of the 14-year-old girl’s lived time is its contradictory virtuality, its simultaneous enlistment in a prospect of subordination and inhabiting of an as-yet uncolonised temporal space.

The Reproductive Imagination  129 6 This formulation of potentiality comes very close to Giorgio Agamben’s, for whom To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being (…) Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality. (1999: 182) 7 Rita Laura Segato has argued that the historical constitution of the public sphere as unequivocally masculine implies an “abrupt devaluation” of the domestic space, “hitherto peopled by a multiplicity of presences” defined by “the activities of women and ruled by them” (2016: 94). My translation. 8 Critics have noted that the characterisation of Nnu Ego is particularly emphatic in this respect. Thus, Salome C. Nnoromele suggests that “in her obsessive pursuit of motherhood and her inability to see beyond her limited self, [she] consistently refuses the offers of assistance and grace given to her” (2002: 185).

References Agamben, Giorgio. (1999) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Apfel, Alana. (2016) Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities. Oakland: PM Press. Benjamin, Walter. (2007) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Bove, Laurent. (2012) La stratégie du conatus: affirmation et résistance chez Spinoza. Paris: Vrin. Cleaver, Harry. (1992) “The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation”. Open Marxism, Volume II: Theory and Practice. Ed. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis. London: Pluto Press. Cooper, Melinda. (2016) “Secular Stagnation: Fear of a Non-Reproductive ­Future”. Postmodern Culture 27.1. Online. (last accessed 1 June 2019). Emecheta, Buchi. (1994) The Joys of Motherhood. Oxford: Heinemann. Federici, Silvia. (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press. Federici, Silvia. (2016) “Introduction”. Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities. Ed. Alana Apfel. Oakland: PM Press. Federici, Silvia. (2019) Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. Ferreira, Aline. (2015) “Beyond the Womb? Posthuman Parturitions in Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love”. La Camera Blu: rivista di studi di genere 11.12: 11–28. Fortunati, Leopoldina. (1995) The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. New York: Autonomedia. Heti, Sheila. (2018) Motherhood. London: Harvill Secker. Kavenna, Joanna. (2010) The Birth of Love. London: Faber and Faber.

130  The Reproductive Imagination Marx, Karl. (1990) Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin. Moulier Boutang, Yann. (2010) L’abeille et l’économiste. Paris: Carnets Nord. Negri, Antonio. (1991) Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. London: Pluto. Nnoromele, Salome C. (2002) “Representing the African Woman: Subjectivity and Self in The Joys of Motherhood”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.2: 178–190. Segato, Laura Rita. (2016) La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Sharma, Sarah (2014) “Because the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupying the Time of Precarity”. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11.1: 5–14. Spinoza, Benedict De. (1996) Ethics. London: Penguin. Tomba, Massimiliano. (2009) “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An ­A nti-Historicist Perspective”. Historical Materialism 17: 44–65. Werlhof, Claudia von. (2000) “Globalization and the ‘Permanent’ Process of ‘Primitive Accumulation’: The Example of the MAI, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment”. Journal of World-Systems Research 6.3: 728–747.

6 The Politics of Division

The Joys of Motherhood offers a sobering characterisation of reproduction as a frontier realm where capital can continuously experiment with exteriority and violence. Emecheta’s intervention in 1979 (precisely at a time when the political internalisation of productive relations by Fordism was beginning to show signs of terminal crisis)1 insists on capital’s fundamental reliance on a strategy of separation (between work and worker, life and value, etc.) and enclosure (of “doing” as abstract ­labour)2 that precedes and exceeds the ordinary economic logic of capitalist accumulation. As Massimo De Angelis has pointed out, “the separation of producers and means of production is a common characteristic of both accumulation and primitive accumulation” (2004: 63), but while the former implies a constancy and regularity built into the system and sustained by the internal logic of capital, the latter “is a social process in which separation appears as a crystal-clear relation of expropriation, a relation that has not yet taken the fetishistic character assumed by ­capital’s normalisation” (De Angelis 2004: 67). The centrality of enclosure and primitive accumulation3 to Emecheta’s fictional investigation of reproduction is framed by an awareness of the systemic crisis traversing capital’s institutional architecture in the 1970s. For indeed, the recourse to extra-economic violence is, as ­Federici notes, characteristic of capitalism “in times of crisis, since expropriating ­workers and expanding the labor available for exploitation are the most effective methods to reestablish the ‘proper balance of power’ and gain the upper hand in the class struggle” (2019: 87). It may be worth remembering that the series of novels in which Emecheta critically ­envisions this unfolding of crisis and capital’s compensatory strategies of primitive accumulation, primarily in the ambit of reproduction, actually begins in 1972 with In the Ditch.4 This novel recounts the story of Adah, a divorced mother from ­Nigeria whose experience of poverty and violence, but also of solidarity and community among women, take us to the heart of social relations under capitalism’s late Fordist strategy of crisis management. Although the novel announces many of the themes and emphases that Emecheta would take up in her later fiction, by being set in London in the present

132  The Politics of Division (and thus immediately responding to the social experience of fracture in Fordism’s coordination of class dynamics), it represents an almost programmatic introduction to Emecheta’s project. Viewed from the vantage point of this first intervention, the logic of reproductive crisis explored in The Joys of Motherhood is revealed as a conjunctural deployment of a structural feature in capitalism (primitive accumulation, enclosure) at a moment of bitter reactivation of the class struggle precisely through the incorporation of hitherto neglected proletarian strata. If the “ditch” of Emecheta’s title metaphorises the operation of exclusion and separation to which women are subjected in the socialised system of class relations upheld by Fordism (in this case, migrant women like Adah, but also white women expelled from the protective structures of belonging and the normative roles assigned to women in the working-class household), this is only possible because the terrain of reproduction has become a fraught field of contestation and struggle situated at the centre and no longer the margins of the social factory. The “ditch” is not a site of abjection, a sort of “nether world” reserved for unproductive lumpen elements (women who may have renounced their subordinate role within the order of wage labour – prostitutes, for example), 5 but an embattled field, marginal in outlook yet strategically central, to which capital must respond with renewed enclosing impetus. Adah’s story is unequivocal: from the beginning, it is apparent that even for a black single mother like her, the experience of capitalist exploitation is that of being “caught in the entangled web of an industrial society” (Emecheta 1994: 5). In other words, the socialisation operated by Fordist capitalism leaves no marginal space beyond its control. It is significant, however, that this entanglement to which the novel refers does not require the presence of a conventional industrial universe of factories and “productive” labour, and that the focus of capital’s encroachment over society is placed on an exclusively female experience of socialisation on the margins.6 Adah’s story is indeed one of socialisation among lumpen women. Having lost her home and job, she relocates to the Pussy Cat Mansions, “a unique place, a separate place individualised for ‘problem families’” (17). The world of hardship, violence, and exclusion she encounters here, in this problem space whose very existence confirms the role of separation and enclosure at the core of industrial society, is nevertheless also a space of socialisation that produces belonging and community. Beyond the desperate admission that her “socialisation was complete” now that, “just like most of her neighbours”, Adah had become “shiftless, rootless, with no rightful claim to anything” (31), there is an acute sense that “Living in the ditch had its own consolations and advantages” (54): There were always warm and natural friends. Friends who took delight in flouting society’s laws. Some women indulged in having more and more children, a way of making the society that forced

The Politics of Division  133 them into the ditch suffer. Some enjoyed taking it out on the welfare officers of the Ministry of Social Security, others took to drink. (54) The routine violence of destitution imposed upon these women is subverted and transformed into its opposite, into a mode of counter-­ socialisation, we could say, indeed a logic of community that offers not only “consolation” but also effective resistance to the “entangled web” of industrial capitalism. Having herself studied sociology (which is a further indication of the ambivalent positionality of marginals in this changing universe of late Fordism), Adah soon notices – and embraces – the effects of this communal dynamic in a supposedly declassed and fragmented social space: She was not unaware of a few social theories. But the situation that was working itself out at the Pussy Cat Mansions fitted into no such theories. As a sort of community had worked itself into being, ­everybody knew the business of everybody else. That sort of life suited her. There was always a friend to run to in time of trouble. It was like living in a prison. Prisoners, after a long stay, usually find outside life more demanding. (87–88) By comparing the Pussy Cat Mansions to a prison, the oppositional quality of this community is joined to its paradoxical status in relation to capitalist socialisation. For indeed, what “had worked itself into being”, through a shared experience of disenfranchisement, but also, more importantly, through a common sense of defiance and struggle against the perceived class enemy (represented here by the social workers and welfare institutions), is an autonomous logic of needs and demands.7 This community of women effectively coalesces around a collective experience of injustice and institutional violence. Their confinement to this “separate place”, to this “problem place” for “problem families”, is a sign that the socialising strategy of capital, that capital’s attempted disciplining of society as a whole, is reaching a limit. For it is here, at the margins of society’s industrial-productive complex, where reproduction emerges as an exclusion zone, that uncontrollable desocialisation, that refusal (of reproductive subordination, of respect for the mediating institutions of capital, etc.) commences. Beginning with spontaneous rent strikes (which, we read, the tenants would usually win, since “council officers” “usually gave in” knowing that nobody else “except perhaps squatters” “would live in the vacant Pussy flats” (65)), a more defined sense of class hatred and hostility to the “benevolent power” (94) exerted upon them by the social workers gradually develops among the women, thereby reinforcing their antagonistic sense of community. The

134  The Politics of Division political, or rather biopolitical, logic of the Welfare State in this context is not missed by its presumptive beneficiaries. At one of their meetings, in a chapter significantly titled “The Ditch-Dwellers’ Revolt”, it is even suggested that Carol, the social worker (along with the institutional apparatus she represents), may actually have a vested interest in the reproduction of their misery and suffering, and therefore in their not moving away from the Mansions: “Didn’t you know, if we all move from here, we’ll no longer be ‘problems’? That means she’ll ‘ave no fucking job to do. (…) If we’re independent, happy, she’s out of bleeding work, see?” (94). Even Adah, whose stance towards the community’s rebellious move is ambivalent, eventually acknowledges that this diffidence had been the result of her own subalternity, not unlike that of a colonised country insecurely striving for independence: She had been spoonfed for so long that she could not cut off from Carol and the Children’s Department just like that. The position she was in reminded her of young nations seeking independence. When they got their independence, they found that it was a dangerous toy. She would eat her cake and have it. She would support the move, but must be friendly with “them”. (95) But the efficacity of what will ultimately be characterised as the w ­ orkings of “Carol and her other social police” (125) does not merely stem from the “pastoral” configuration of this power, to use a Foucauldian ­notion.8 Running through this novel (in a way that anticipates, a­ lthough in a more oblique form, the unleashing of violent mechanisms of primitive accumulation in The Joys of Motherhood), there is a sense that the ­socialisation of reproduction must be conducted as a warlike endeavour at a level of confrontation and antagonism where the managerial procedures of Welfare and other governmental practices no longer obtain. The enclosure to which the “ditch” is subjected is that which results from the realisation that the social-reproductive other, converted under the circumstances into a true class other, into an oppositional space of commonality beyond the subsumed realm of “productive work” (the male, industrial realm of the Fordist working class), is already separate from the social order: is, in other words, the crisis of the system.9 This is why beyond the benevolent outlook of the Welfare State and its functionaries, the principle of social intervention in the Mansions is one that internalises a logic of war – of class war, but also, more specifically, of sexual war – against the reproductive autonomy of women, who must be reduced to the position of victims, poor single mothers, and so on: The women not only had to be poor, but they had to be sex-starved too (…) To be deprived sexually, especially for women in their

The Politics of Division  135 twenties who had once been married, was probably one of the reasons why places like the Pussy Cat Mansions were usually a fertile ground for breeding hooligans and generations of unmarried mums. (60–61) With this figure of sexual starvation, the pastoral focus of biopower ­(simultaneously targeting the herd and the individual sheep, omnes et singulatim, according to the formula proposed by Foucault)10 transforms into a generalisation of the principle of civil war within and across the social body. The social itself becomes a function of war, a total military exertion against the proliferating loci of indiscipline. Maurizio Lazzarato and Éric Alliez have recently theorised the historical centrality of war (or rather “wars”, in the plural) as the “organizing principle of society” (2017: 16) under capitalism, and the specific role it has played in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Their analysis suggests that “The two world wars are responsible for realizing, for the first time, ‘total’ subordination (or ‘real subsumption’) of society and its ‘productive forces’ to the war economy through the organization and planning of production, labor and technology, science and consumption, at a hitherto unheard-of scale” (2017: 20). In this sense, the Welfare State of post-1945 capitalism was anticipated and even engineered by the Warfare State created by the World Wars (“Warfare pursued its logic by other means in welfare. Keynes himself recognized that the policy of effective demand had no other model of realization than a regime of war” (2017: 21)). Against this backdrop, the logic of crisis that came to define the collapse of Fordism was that of a progressive erosion of the internalising (or, in Lazzarato and Alliez’s Deleuzian terminology, territorialising) functions of the State. With the advent of post-Fordist, neoliberal globalisation, war itself, like capital, becomes deterritorialised: “Deterritorialized war is no longer inter-State war at all, but an uninterrupted succession of multiple wars against populations, definitively sending ‘governmentality’ to the side of governance” (Alliez and Lazzarato 2017: 26). At this point, capital can free itself from the complex machinery of subsumption and its seemingly benign strategies of biopolitical management and once again resort to enclosure. In this new context, “What is governed and what allows governing are the divisions that project wars into the heart of the population” (Alliez and Lazzarato 2017: 26), indeed the violent acts of separation that characterise and sustain primitive accumulation as a strategic force that capital mobilises in the face of resistance.11 Today, the meaning of capitalist crisis is inseparable from this biopolitical proliferation of wars, divisions and separations operated in the social fabric upon which capitalist domination had rested at the historical climax of industrialisation (Fordism). This is the context in which the sovereignty of the nation-state (once an unmissable institutional level for

136  The Politics of Division the global integration of capital and for the disciplining of labour qua national workforce) is reduced to an ultimately ineffective mechanism of political stabilisation. Precisely because capital develops (and encloses) at macro and micro levels that rarely coincide with the spatio-­temporalities of exploitation within the national factory of the Fordist-­Keynesian “Planner State”,12 the lines of fracture and extortion of social wealth are increasingly drawn by movements that cross over traditional borders – between nations, but also between social ambits and spheres of activity. An imaginary of intractable mobility, of social exodus or flight from the increasingly warlike attempts by capital to reassert control (through finance, servile regimes of labour, etc.), thus resurfaces at the historical level of political composition of the contemporary proletariat: “Thus, once again, as at the dawn of capitalism, the physiognomy of the world proletariat is that of the pauper, the vagabond, the criminal, the panhandler, the street peddler, the refugee sweatshop worker, the mercenary, the rioter” (Federici 2019: 28). Within this heterogeneous multitude of post-national and post-industrial labour, the resistant subjectivities arising from the field of reproduction accrue a centrality and strategic potential that contemporary writers such as Anna Burns – as was previously the case with Emecheta at an earlier moment of ­transition – have managed to articulate with prefigurative lucidity and power. I want to briefly examine the treatment of crisis (now transformed into a fully fledged crisis pervading the social body as warlike proliferation, after the paradigm described by Lazzarato and Alliez) offered by her Man Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman. This novel is a stylistically inventive exploration of precisely the sort of governing through war and enclosure that has come to define the terrain of social crisis in the present. In this case, the immediate context is not so much the implosion of a specific productive discipline or regime of capitalist expropriation but the collapse of a political order of integration and coordination of the social through the state form. Published in 2018, against a background of increasingly frantic debates about the meaning of Brexit and its consequences for particularly sensitive areas of the United Kingdom such as Northern Ireland, this is a novel that posits the crisis of state sovereignty and national affiliation as a function of their inability to control subjective proliferation and mobility. An anonymised, but tragically recognisable, Northern Ireland during the 1970s Troubles offers the strategic setting for a fictional reading of the present that continues to yield long-term associations and parallels with capitalism’s historical genealogy of crisis. Focalised through its nameless protagonist, a young girl only ever referred to as “middle sister”, the social universe of Milkman is one of sectarian division where community functions as a form of fixation and control of subjective mobility rather than as a mode of collective resistance. The contrast with Emecheta’s In the Ditch is notable. Community, as defined by the experience of

The Politics of Division  137 lumpen marginality embodied in the Pussy Cat Mansions, was never less than a hopeful horizon for the voiding of social discipline through which capitalist dominance had come to organise itself in the Fordist factory-society. Even in defeat, the space of community inhabited and co-created by women excluded from their normative reproductive roles represented a moment of flight from capitalist interiority, and therefore a crisis of competing logics of socialisation. But, in the sectarian world imagined by Burns’ novel, community can only offer a space for the anxious denial of differential forms of being in the community itself, indeed a strategy of sovereign containment of the multiplicity of social life as embodied in forms of mobility across and beyond centripetal and homogenising forces. The story middle sister tells is one of refusal of the exclusivist and violent claims of the various communities into which the political horizon of the state form has fragmented. In a context of warring loyalties seeking to crystallise as sovereign monoliths (as national state communities finally purified of competing cultural and legal bonds), women represent a radical alternative “beyond the pale” (a key phrase to which I will return) of identity and subordination – indeed, an outside that only exacerbates the proliferation of political and cultural borders, bringing its own internal logic of insoluble division (and enclosure within the well-policed confines of each community) to a breaking point. The narrative soon locates in the ambit of reproduction that recurring frontier where sanctioned divisions meet unsanctioned ones, and therefore a potential for destabilisation that takes a variety of forms but is symbolically unified in the figure of middle sister. Thus, we read, for example, that “Marriage wasn’t meant to be a bed of roses. It was a divine decree, a communal duty, a responsibility, it was acting your age, having right-religion babies and obligations and limitations and restrictions and hindrances” (Burns 2018: 50). In this context, reproduction is fully consistent with the logic of primitive accumulation explored by Emecheta, a formally incorporated ambit of experience in which extra-ordinary (indeed, extra-­ economic, extra-­juridical, etc.) mechanisms of violent subordination are customarily enlisted and deployed in the name of discipline, integration, progress (in this case, also revolution, national emancipation), and so on. When a Republican paramilitary – the eponymous “milkman” – ­begins to stalk the protagonist, her assessment of the resulting situation (one in which she is determined to reject his advances in a way that does not upset “the community”) offers a revealing analysis of the actual meaning of division in this context: I couldn’t tell brother-in-law about the milkman, not because he’d rush to defend me, beating up the milkman, then getting himself shot which would then have the community turn against the milkman, leading to the paramilitary-renouncers in the area in their turn

138  The Politics of Division getting the community by the throat. Then the community would get the renouncers by the throat, refusing to hide them anymore, to house them, to feed them, to transport arms for them. (…) The whole incident would cause division, would end that much-harkened pulling-together in order to overcome the enemy state. (64) While the logic of division remains central to the general strategy of violent containment on which community is predicated, it soon becomes apparent that, in this social universe, the menace of an indefinite replication of divisions (of an ad intra generalisation of the principle of civil war) is real and must be averted. But in this context, the tenuous grip on power is also an unmissable reality that the subjective autonomy of women necessarily transforms into crisis. For, in this novel, women represent a proliferative capacity at the heart of the identitarian construct, a nomadic force threatening the stability of the sovereign entity (whether this is imagined as a community of “renouncers” or defenders of a given state).13 This capacity is symbolically organised around the main character trait of middle sister – her devotion to reading while walking. It is through this act of “vigilance not to be vigilant” (65), of extravagant (in an etymological sense) performance of intellectuality as a form of external mobility openly defying the communitarian mandates of confinement, interiority, and discretion, that the narrative primarily inscribes the subversive role of women. While reading itself is suspect, what marks her acts as particularly “disturbing” and “deviant”, as her “best friend” informs her, is “the way you do it – reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as if you’re at some desk” (200) while in fact distractedly roaming the strictly demarcated streets of this divided city: “You’re the girl who walks. Sometimes the one who reads and other times you’re the pale, adamantine, unyielding girl who walks around with the entrenched, boxed-in thinking” (204). This reference to her thinking as “entrenched” and “boxed-in” is particularly significant given that closure – or more properly, enclosure – is the defining aspect of communitarian enlistment and precisely what “middle sister” challenges through her extravagant behaviour.14 That the community thinks of her as self-enclosed suggests, again, that the disciplinary principle of division produces its own functional limits, indeed that only a certain amount and certain kinds of division may be tolerated in this context. Division or separation in the name of subjective self-determination (and thus beyond the sovereign logic sustaining the community) is necessarily experienced as a subversive threat and thus, ultimately, as a crisis. But perhaps the most symptomatic instance of a female outside directly challenging the system of power in this novel is the formation of a small group of feminist activists. Their overt lack of interest in “our border issue or our political problems here at all” (154)

The Politics of Division  139 and their determination to open up the meaning of liberation beyond the narrow focus imposed by the nationalist imaginary immediately place them, in the eyes of the community, “beyond the pale”: These women, constituting the nascent feminist group in our area – and exactly because of constituting it – were firmly placed in the category of those way, way beyond-the-pale. The word “feminist” was beyond-the-pale. The word “woman” barely escaped beyondthe-pale. (152) The spatial metaphor neatly captures the substance of the crisis unleashed by these women’s autonomous formulation of needs and behaviours in the novel. For “beyond the pale” suggests a formal challenge to the structure of division upon which the power relation rests, indeed a movement that reverts the process of separation (of politically acceptable subjects, ways of organising and coming together, etc.) and opposes its own demarcation of the territory. In a rather straightforward sense, these feminist gatherings, just like middle sister’s “deviant” practice of “reading-while-walking”, deterritorialise the mental and spatial territorialities imposed by the community, bringing women in the novel to a different realm of experience in which the myriad enclosures of this social universe go into crisis. This is a fundamental point, for it signals what the political imagination of literature can offer by way of reframing the relationality of crisis and thus identifying the lines of force through which the latter effectively presents itself in capitalist societies. If the logic of separation and division introduces a formal regularity into the history of capitalism, and if the extra-ordinary nature of these interventions forms the basis of what social relations then register as crisis, it is no less true that their deployment is not only (and perhaps not even primarily) the cause but also the effect of an opposing presence, of an act of resistance (properly active or passive, conscious or spontaneous, latent or explicit) that throws ordinary forms of accumulation off-balance. Thus, “capital has to devise strategies of enclosures, either by promoting new areas of commodification vis-à-vis resistance, or by preserving old areas of commodification vis-à-vis ex novo attacks that it faces by ‘commoners’” (De Angelis 2007: 139). The fact that literature has historically offered such compelling entry points into the dynamics of capitalism and its crises is closely linked to its profound understanding of this duality and its effects. The formulation of resistance, often through external or marginal figurations,15 as an intimate locus of capitalist discourse and experience has been a crucial aspect of the development of literary imaginaries since the rise of the capitalist world-economy. Suffice to recall here one of the primal

140  The Politics of Division scenes in the history of Anglophone fiction: that island of the imagination where Daniel Defoe erected the first canonical enclosure of the novel form. Robinson Crusoe is no more a novel about the rise of liberal individualism, of homo economicus and the expansive possibilities of capital,16 than about the necessity of internalising (and thereby normalising) war as a mechanism of economic and social governance. As Lazzarato and Alliez observe, “The matrix” of the civil wars that offer capitalist society a general principle of organisation “is the c­ olonial war” (2017: 27). Thus, what sustains Crusoe’s sovereign tenure on the island and what enables the resumption of accumulation – in other words, “What is governed and what allows governing” in capitalism – “are the divisions that project wars” against the recalcitrant outsides of the system.17 The frenzied zeal with which he “fences and fortifies himself more and more, withdrawing further and further into isolation” (Hymer 2011: 27) speaks of an antagonistic tension between inside and outside that the nascent economic fetishism does little to dissimulate.18 In a more subtle and less frequently noticed (but no less crucial) manner, the logic of war – against the African populations of the “Coast of Guinea” (Defoe 2008: 34) – that effectively sets in motion his profitable career as a planter is implicitly framed by the proximity of an extraordinary outside threatening the very continuity of accumulation in far more dramatic ways than the ensuing shipwreck. For what effectively constitutes a challenge to the “prosperous Undertaking” and “thriving Circumstance” (36) of his Brazilian plantations is the unspoken but very real presence of maroon communities, or quilombos, such as Palmares.19 Crusoe’s unyielding alertness and commitment to war against the outside of capital (which his stay on the island only transcribes in detail) cannot be abstracted from this fact of division constituted in and through resistance to capital’s mirage of totalisation.20 For the quilombo is not a natural outside. It is not an external location waiting for capitalist colonisation. The maroon society (not unlike the feminist group in Milkman or the community of ditch-dwellers in Emecheta’s novel) is the product of a strategy of flight that constitutes a counterpower. It is an otherness generated at the heart of the system that ruptures the unity of command on which accumulation is premised. 21 The Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century offers a further classic example of this representational impulse towards enclosure as a standard response to the warlike menace of capital’s others. In his Collège de France lectures on The Punitive Society, Michel Foucault points to this genre after arguing that modern theories of penality derive from an understanding of crime as a form of civil war waged against society: The crime is an act that reactivates, provisionally no doubt, and momentarily, the war of all against all, that is to say, of one against

The Politics of Division  141 all. The criminal is the social enemy and consequently punishment must be neither reparation for the harm done to the other, nor punishment of the offense, but a measure of protection, of counter-war that society takes against the criminal. (2015: 33) ­ ostility” This “readjustment of the notion of crime around that of social h (Foucault 2015: 33) invites a conception of social order, precisely at a time of emergence of mature capitalist rationalities, as a defensive reaction against a warring outside. 22 The logic of confinement, which is theoretically and historically continuous with the notion of enclosure, is thus to be understood as an antagonistic articulation of the problem of civil war against the modern backdrop of solidifying capitalist relations. What the Gothic mode throws into sharp relief at the end of the eighteenth century, in a way that essentially positivises the negativity of Defoe’s enclosing impetus in Robinson Crusoe, is the inescapable presence of a social force that reactivates the war of all against all in the freshly antagonistic direction given by capitalist class dynamics. Thus, for example, in the novels of Ann Radcliffe the imagination of crime leaves no room for representational ambiguity (or displacement of any sort, as was the case with Defoe’s narrative strategy) and ushers in a totally divided social universe of villains and victims. As Foucault notes, “between the two worlds there can be only hatred, war, and fundamental hostility on the criminal side, and only relationships in the form of capture and imprisonment on the other side” (2015: 55). This rigid articulation of social division in Gothic fiction betrays a fresh economic understanding, which was still not available at the beginning of the century, of the dialectic between hostility and protection. Foucault draws our attention to the physiocratic political economist Le Trosne and his 1764 Mémoire sur les vagabonds et sur les mendiants, a text in which the problem of criminality and the social belligerence it expresses is analysed through the figure of the vagabond and what is read as his attack on the productive rationality of an agrarian capitalist economy. Thus, unlike earlier figures of delinquency, the vagabond is not someone who preys upon “the mass of goods available” (Foucault 2015: 45), someone who steals from society, but rather “someone who attacks the mechanisms of production” and “refuses to work” (Foucault 2015: 47). As Foucault notes, in this analysis “there is a primary and fundamental identity between moving around and refusing to work” (2015: 47–48). Thus, what vagabondage introduces into the social body is a mobile outside, an oppositional exteriority that challenges the foundations of the system and against which the latter must make war preparations and establish adequate defences. We could say that the vagabond takes the refusal of the runaway slave a step further. For, if the quilombo represents a topological outside (generated in and through the process of internalisation

142  The Politics of Division that slavery puts in place, but fixed as a spatial ­exteriority), the vagabond carries his mobile refusal beyond any single location, “spread[ing it] over the surface of the territory” (Foucault 2015: 49), and thereby subverting the conditions of social peace under which capitalist production must be undertaken. It is in this sense, as Foucault says, that “Le Trosne’s dream” was “confinement to the place of work” (2015: 51). And it is precisely against the nightmarish vision of an unregulated mobility among those who take their war of refusal to the heart of society that the significant innovations of the Gothic mode should be read. In Radcliffe, for example, the descriptive language of exotic settings and sublime landscapes would be incomplete without the characteristic presence of banditti haunting the “wild regions” of southern Europe.23 These are not just conventional triggers of an evocative function but insistent fictional reminders of a particular social geography in which crime, understood as irrational and unproductive excess, and thus as a direct challenge to economic reason, cannot be ignored or sublimated.24 Throughout the nineteenth century, Gothic figurations of this challenge will expand their critical remit and interpretative possibilities vis-à-vis capitalist logics of socialisation. As industrialisation gradually casts its productivist net over society, the mobile outside emerges as an internal property of the system, the monstrous offspring that capital can no longer harness. Thus, from Frankenstein’s proletarian sublime (symbolically articulated as a boundless wretchedness that breeds an equally boundless thirst for revenge) to Dracula’s more abstract and expansive menace, what we find is a genealogy of literary negotiations of the social war that capital must wage (and win, however provisionally, however tentatively) in order to impose its rule of value. Again and again, from the early days of capitalist development to our twenty-first-century landscape of pervasive economic, social and political uncertainty, literature comes forward with its imaginary elaborations of crisis, with its fictional acknowledgement of the antagonisms that define it. Ultimately, the truth it imparts is that, in capitalism, crisis is always a crisis of pacification and transcendence, a traumatic unravelling of division and conflict as the substance of its insuperable contradictions.

Notes 1 Let us not forget that this year marks a symbolic turning point, with the first election victory of Margaret Thatcher and, no less importantly, with the appointment of Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve as landmark events. 2 John Holloway identifies a central opposition between “abstract labour” and “concrete” or “useful labour” (which he also refers to as “doing”) in Marx: “The distinction between abstract and useful labour is a developed form of the earlier distinction between alienated labour and conscious life activity. Useful labour is creative-productive human activity (or doing), irrespective of the society in which it takes place; abstract labour is non-self-­determining labour in which all quality is reduced to quantity” (2010a: 913). See also Holloway (2010b).

The Politics of Division  143 3 I follow De Angelis (2004, 2007) here in treating these two terms, primitive accumulation and enclosure, as interchangeable. 4 These early novels include Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1975), and The Slave Girl (1977). 5 The social universe portrayed by “naturalist” nineteenth-century novels such as George Gissing’s The Nether World is founded on a rather strict separation between productive and unproductive classes, with poor women epitomising the latter end of the spectrum. 6 The classic statement on the social factory of advanced Fordism is Mario Tronti’s 1962 essay on “Factory and Society” (collected in his landmark 1966 volume Operai e Capitale), where he argues that “When the factory seizes the whole of society – all of social production becomes industrial ­production – the specific traits of the factory are lost within the generic traits of society. When the whole of society is reduced to the factory, the factory – as such – seems to disappear” (2013: 49, my translation). In other words, the extension of capitalist command through a generalisation of productive relations (on the model of industrial exploitation) across society abolishes hitherto central topological distinctions between the centre of production (the factory) and its social peripheries. From this point of view, the ambit of social reproduction becomes central to the strategy of valorisation and to the proletarian counter-­strategy of subversion. 7 Antonio Negri has theorised the rise of this autonomous logic as part of the process of antagonistic development of the wage relation in socialised (Fordist) capitalism: “The more work becomes abstract and socialized – this is the second element that displaces the analysis – the more the sphere of needs grows. Work creates its own needs and forces capital to satisfy them” (1991: 133). 8 Carol is overtly likened to a shepherd leading her “Pussy sheep” (124) – with all connotations of the phrasing enriching this presumptively “benevolent” relation of power. 9 In my discussion of Amis’s Money in Chapter 1, I evoked an insightful point made by Jean Baudrillard in the mid-1970s apropos of the (paradoxical) crisis of socialisation of class relations in Fordism. In contradistinction to traditional struggles in an earlier phase of capitalist development, when ­“violent contradiction” was still a function of integration “in the order of the general productive system”, the “new social groups, de facto dropouts, on the contrary, proved the incapacity of the system to ‘socialize the society’ in its traditionally strategic level” (1975: 132–133). In this context, the system goes into crisis through its encounter with a desocialised “non-place”, a “disaffected zone” at the heart of society (133). 10 “The shepherd’s role is to ensure the salvation of his flock (…) It’s not only a matter of saving them all, all together, when danger comes nigh. It’s a matter of constant, individualized, and final kindness” (Foucault 2000: 302). 11 The logic of division that animates what theorists such as Federici call the “new enclosures” of post-Fordist capitalism is thus specifically linked to a political strategy of deterritorialisation of working-class structures of ­organisation and subjective anchoring: “The new enclosures stand for a large-scale reorganization of the accumulation process that has been ­underway since the mid-1970s, and whose main objective is to uproot workers from the terrain on which their organizational power has been built, so that, like the African slaves transplanted to the Americas, they are forced to work and fight in a strange environment where the forms of resistance possible at home are no longer available” (Federici 2019: 28). 12 As theorised by Negri, the Planner-State represents the transformation, in the years between the end of the Second World War and the late 1960s,

144  The Politics of Division

13 14

15

16

17

18

19

of the nation-state into a general instance of socialisation of the capitalist relation: “The factory was subordinate to the state, which guaranteed the basic conditions for the functioning of the system – and of the factory system itself in the first place. Through the action of the state, exchange-value was guaranteed in its operation as the general law governing the reproduction of the productive conditions” (Negri 2005: 23). Let us not forget that what lies at the heart of every sovereign determination is the creation of a state or state-like form. For, as the narrator insists, “In those days, impossible it was not to be closed-up because closed-upness was everywhere: closings in our community, closings in their community, the state here closed, the government ‘over there’ closed, the newspapers and radio and television closed” (114). Federici is therefore absolutely right to emphasise that today, “as at the dawn of capitalism, the physiognomy of the world proletariat is that of the pauper, the vagabond, the criminal, the panhandler, the street peddler, the refugee sweatshop worker, the mercenary, the rioter” (2019: 28). Of course, the nomadic woman crossing over sovereign lines of demarcation and exclusion occupies a central place in the updated roll call of contemporary proletarian subjects. The critical literature on Defoe and the development of capitalism is too vast to be reviewed. Let me just recall here what Mary Poovey observes apropos of this early constellation of fictional writing and its direct influence on the immaterial logic of capital: “Fiction, which was not held to a standard of referential accuracy [helped] readers practice trust, tolerate deferral, evaluate character, and, in a general sense, believe in things that were immaterial” (2008: 89). Even if he acknowledges his objective weakness vis-à-vis the uncharted outside, Crusoe manages to think of himself as the sovereign proprietor of the island: “that this was all my own, that I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in Inheritance, as compleatly as any Lord of a Mannor in England” (85). See also Ian A. Bell (1988). Following his discovery of “Savage Wretches” upon the island, Crusoe’s sole obsession is to keep “my self entirely conceal’d”, “close within my own Circle” which, he clarifies, consists of “my three Plantations, viz. my Castle, my Country Seat, which I call’d my Bower, and my Enclosure in the Woods” (2008: 140). Thus, faced with the threat of a free native presence, of a living outside not subordinated to his command, Crusoe throws himself into a mad enclosing frenzy. The historical relevance of the quilombo of Palmares to any account of slavery in seventeenth-century Brazil cannot be overstated. As R.K. Kent points out in a classic article, nothing “compares in the annals of Brazilian history with the ‘Negro Republic’ of Palmares in Pernambuco. It spanned almost the entire seventeenth century” (1965: 163), consistently resisting the pressure of the Portuguese until its final destruction in 1695. But the extraordinary significance of this outside to the colonial logic of merchant capitalism does not only lie in its defensive power but also in its degree of social experimentation. Thus, historians have emphasised aspects such as the capacity to integrate cultural and linguistic differences, to “integrate refugees from a wide variety of African origins”, as well as, notably, the “innovative gender relations” developed in Palmares: “The reversal of social roles, enabling women to mate with several males, points to empowerment mechanisms within the African polities in the New World. The empowerment of former chattel slaves opened the way for other empowerments, not least a sexual one. This applies to women and probably to other sexual minorities, such as gays” (A Funari and Vieira de Carvalho 2016: 29).

The Politics of Division  145 20 Crusoe’s (and Defoe’s) determination is clear: the reality of this threat must be silenced at all costs. The plantations are profitable, and the use of slave labour must be naturalised. But even within the terms of this ideological mystification, the narrative cannot help avowing that this business of enslavement in Brazil had become “excessive dear” (35). 21 As De Angelis points out, “The ‘outside’ created by struggles is an outside that emerges from within, a social space created by virtue of creating relational patterns that are other than and incompatible with the relational practices of capital. (…)Our outside is a process of becoming other than capital, and thus presents itself as a barrier that the boundless process of accumulation and, in the first instance, processes of enclosure, must seek to overcome” (2007: 229). 22 “Civil war is, indeed, what threatens power from the outside” (Foucault 2015: 31). 23 This juxtaposition of banditti – sometimes roaming “gangs of gypsies” or “bands of robbers” – and “wild regions” in France and Italy is a staple element of Radcliffe’s construction of her settings. See, for example, her characteristic descriptions in The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe 2008: 38, 40). 24 As Foucault observes elsewhere, “The language of terror is dedicated to an endless expense, even though it only seeks to achieve a single effect. It drives itself out of any possible resting place” (1998: 98–99).

References A Funari, Pedro Paulo and Aline Vieira de Carvalho. (2016) “Palmares: A Rebel Polity through Archaeological Lenses”. Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil. Ed. João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes. New York: Diasporic Africa Press. Baudrillard, Jean. (1975) The Mirror of Production. New York: Telos Press. Bell, Ian A. (1988) “King Crusoe: Locke’s Political Theory in Robinson Crusoe”. English Studies 69.1: 27–36. Burns, Anna. (2018) Milkman. London: Faber and Faber. De Angelis, Massimo. (2004) “Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures”. Historical Materialism 12.2: 57–87. De Angelis, Massimo. (2007) The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London: Pluto Press. Defoe, Daniel. (2008) Robinson Crusoe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emecheta, Buchi. (1994) In the Ditch. London: Heinemann. Federici, Silvia. (2019) Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. Foucault, Michel. (1998) “Language to Infinity”. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume Two. Ed. James D. Faubion. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2000) “‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason”. Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume Three. Ed. James D. Faubion. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2015) The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holloway, John. (2010a) “Cracks and the Crisis of Abstract Labour”. Antipode 42.4: 909–923. Holloway, John. (2010b) Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

146  The Politics of Division Hymer, Stephen. (2011) “Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation”. Monthly Review 63.4: 18–39. Kent, Raymond K. (1965) “Palmares: An African State in Brazil”. The Journal of African History 6.2: 161–175. Lazzarato, Maurizio and Éric Alliez. (2017) Wars and Capital. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Negri, Antonio. (1991) Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. London: Pluto. Negri, Antonio. (2005) Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. London: Verso. Poovey, Mary. (2008) Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in ­Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of C ­ hicago Press. Radcliffe, Ann. (2008) The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tronti, Mario. (2013) Operai e capitale. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abstract labour 17, 24n21, 142n2 accumulation process 3, 9, 13–14, 74, 143n11; of abstract labour 24n21; capitalist 3, 4, 8, 11, 20, 43, 122, 131; cognitive 95; deferred 6; extractive regime of 65; resumption of 140 Agamben, Giorgio 129n6 Aglietta, Michel: A Theory of Capitalist Regulation 3 Alliez, Éric 135, 140 aloneness 117 Amis, Martin 28–30, 54; Money 1–13, 16, 18, 28, 50, 57, 143n9 Anglophone fiction 140 antagonisms 11, 16, 18, 24n21, 36, 41, 44, 45, 57, 103, 115, 134, 142 Apfel, Alana 114 automation 94 Autonomist Marxist tradition 97, 117–18 Ayres, Jackson 21n2 Baudrillard, Jean 2, 23n19, 143n9; The Mirror of Production 10 Begley, Jon 1 Benjamin, Walter 120, 121 Berardi, Franco 15 Bernard, Catherine 55 “beyond the pale” 137, 139 Biao, Xiang 12, 23n16 biopolitics 97; contemporary 102; dystopia of post-Fordist capitalism 99; modes of exploitation and servility 103 The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault) 91 The Birth of Love (Kavenna) 107–15 Black, Shameem 86–7 body shopping 12, 14

Boltanski, Luc 58 Boutang, Yann Moulier 14, 113 British Sexual Offences Act of 1956 46 Brooker, Joseph 1, 21n2 Bryan, Dick 63 The Buddha of Suburbia (Kureishi) 56, 57, 70 Burns, Anna: Milkman 136, 140 Butler, Judith 75–6n13 capital devalorisation 4 capitalism: antagonism in 24n21; aspect of 51; characteristic of 131; cognitive 79; contemporary 64, 94, 95, 97, 103; dimensions of 2; historical norm of 121; industrial 89; political–economic relations in 1; restructuring of 5; structural feature in 132; valorisation and accumulation processes of 13–14 capitalist: accumulation 3, 4, 8, 11, 20, 43, 122, 131; crisis 135; evocation of 31–2; globalisation 123; selfhood 30; subjectivity, in Cosmopolis 45; valorisation 94, 118 Capital (Lanchester) 50–9 Capital (Marx) 22n4, 128n1 care: activities of 108; ambit of 81, 103; biopolitics of 85–103; servile 79–85; sphere of 73 care work 113–14; dedication to 86; professionalism identification in 86 Carter, Jimmy 5 CDOs see Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) Chiapello, Eve 58

148 Index civil war 135, 140–1 class: antagonism 18, 36, 57; determinations of finance 41; Marxist notion of 23n15 Cleaver, Harry 118 clinical labour 97, 98, 102 cognitive accumulation 95 cognitive capitalism 14, 79 cognitive/informational manifestations 14 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) 42 colonisation 121–2 commodification 139; of abstract risk 40; individualism and 11; of labour 107; of life 66 commodity production 51 community: “beyond the pale” 137, 139; defined as 136–7 conatus 128n2 concrete/useful labour 142n2 “confluences of interest” 43 connected risks, social space of 55 Connell, Liam 15 contemporary capitalism 2, 64, 94, 95, 97, 103 contemporary finance 60 contemporary “mentalization of capital” 102 Cooper, Melinda 97, 98, 115–16 Cosmopolis (DeLillo) 27–37; capitalist subjectivity in 45 counterintuitive quality 66 credit: bubble 64; material and immaterial renewal of 67; nature of 75n9 crisis: of 2008 11, 50, 59, 61; avoidance/sublimation strategy of 44; of care 80; characterisation in post-Fordist cyber-capitalism 27; of externalisation 29; knowledge in 36–46; non-reproductive 115–22; of state sovereignty and national affiliation 136; treatment of 136; of valorisation 43 critical consciousness, development of 45 cyber-capitalism 12–21; fluctuations of 33; sublime cognition of 35 cyber-capitalist subjectivity, inflationary nature of 34 cybernetics 94 “cyber-proletariat” 12 “cybertariat” 12

dead knowledge 16 De Angelis, Massimo 131, 145n21 De Boever, Arne 95–7 “deep branding” 18 Defoe, Daniel 140, 143n16; Robinson Crusoe 140–1 Deleuze, Gilles 30, 48n9, 88, 92, 94 DeLillo, Don 50; Cosmopolis 27–37 Derrida, Jacques 2 deterritorialised war 135 dialectical formalism 120 digital systems, rise of 29 dignity 82, 104n4; intrinsic 82, 104n4; professional 83; social definitions of 84 disvalorisation 118, 119 dividuality 45, 48n9 dividual labour 85–103 “divinity” 111 dollar–gold convertibility 2, 5 economic theory 52 economic value, pre-eminence of 59 Edmondson, Elie 8 egalitarianism 41 elitism 41 The Embassy of Cambodia (Smith) 67–74, 79 Emecheta, Buchi: In the Ditch 131–2, 136–7; The Joys of Motherhood 121–8, 131, 132, 134 emotional restraint 83 enclosure 71, 138, 139; centrality of 131; notion of 141; of novel form 140; role at core of industrial society 132 entangled circulations 59–67 European Union (EU), advertising campaign for 19 externalities/external effects, economic concept of 14 Federici, Silvia 114, 144n15 femininity: notion of 117; ontology of 119; self-valorising 115; see also women Ferreira, Aline 113 figurative strategy 2 finance 34, 40; class divisions and antagonisms 41; contemporary 60; functional principles of 45; and industry 2; phantasms of 27–36; sheer immateriality of 61; traditional critical analyses of 43

Index  149 financial abstraction 5–6, 28, 29 financial capitalism 45, 48n9 financial circulation 34 financial community 40 financial crisis of 2008 11, 50, 59, 61 financialisation 50, 59; political nature of 45 financial self- referentiality 28 “financial sublime” 29 financial valorisation 43 financial value 42, 64 “Five Dollar Day” 3 fixed-exchange rate system 5 Fluet, Lisa 104n12 Forbes (magazine) 61 Fordism 3, 5, 11, 19, 22n12, 58, 98, 132, 135, 143n6, 143n9; breakdown of 10; collapse of 57; social compact of 50 Fordism-Keynesianism 54 Fordist employment, dissolution of 11 Fordist system 3 Ford Motor Company 3, 4 formal subsumption 125 Foucault, Michel 73, 79–80, 82, 142, 145n24; The Birth of Biopolitics 91; The Punitive Society 140–1 Frankenstein (Shelley) 96 fundamental atomisation 59 gendered inequality 115 “general intellect” 37, 40, 47n6 gimwali 62 Gissing, George: The Nether World 143n5 “global illness” 34–5 globalisation 13, 55; capitalist 123; interpretations of 54; neoliberal 123; post-Fordist 13 Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem 38 gold-based constraints, revocation of 4 Gorz, André 11, 12 Goux, Jean-Joseph 2, 22n5 Graeber, David 75n11 Greenspan, Alan 38 Gresham, Sir Thomas 21n1 Gresham’s law 1, 7, 21n1 Grundrisse (Marx) 47n6 Guattari, Félix 30, 88, 92, 94 Hansen, Alvin 116 Hardt, Michael 68, 75n7, 75n15, 79 Harvey, David 50

Heti, Sheila: Motherhood 115–22 Holloway, John 3, 24n21, 142n2 homo economicus 17, 57, 75n7, 79, 140 Houser, Tammy Amiel 76n18 human capital theories 79–80 humanism/humanitarianism 92 humanisation 89, 91–3 Hutchinson, Colin 9 hyper-disciplinary design 111 hyper-scientific patriarchal dystopia 107 idealist-individualist vocation 41 immaterial labour 80, 104n12; post-Fordist hegemony of 79 incarceration, risk of 55 individualism 29; commodification and 11; liberal 140; solipsistic 120; of woman 115 industrial capitalism 89; accounting practices of 43; configuration of knowledge 110 industrial-capitalist faith 43 industrialisation 135, 142 inequality 6; exacerbation of 65; gendered 115; modulation of 10 infinite labour 101, 102 in-kind compensation 98, 99 intellectual abstraction 39 intellectual meditations 41 International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) 60–1 In the Ditch (Emecheta) 131–2, 136–7 In the Light of What We Know (Rahman) 36–46 intrinsic dignity 82, 104n4 Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go 85–103, 119; The Remains of the Day 79–85, 87, 88 Jameson, Fredric 47n8 The Joys of Motherhood (Emecheta) 121–8, 131, 132, 134 Kavenna, Joanna: The Birth of Love 107–15 Kent, R.K. 144n19 Keynesian policy 6 Keynes, John Maynard 52 Knepper, Wendy 68 knowledge, in crisis 36–46 Korte, Barbara 52, 55

150 Index Kunzru, Hari 28–30; Transmission 12–21, 27, 28, 32, 35 Kureishi, Hanif: The Buddha of Suburbia 56, 57, 70 labour: appropriation and commodification of 107; boundaries between life and 108; of care 124; commodification of 107; functional separation in social division of 118; infinite 101, 102; international division of 123; of memory 101; migration of 55; post-Fordist reconfiguration of 85; post-national and post-industrial 136; servile paradigm of 97 Lacanian psychoanalytic theory 33 Lacan, Jacques 34, 47n1, 47n4 Lanchester, John 68, 71; Capital 50–9 Lazzarato, Maurizio 75n12, 88, 135, 140 Lee, Benjamin 40 Lehman Brothers 59 Leonard, Philip 21 liberal individualism 140 Li, Victor 29 LiPuma, Edward 40, 74n5 living knowledge 16–17 Lordon, Frédéric 82 Lorey, Isabell 104n7 “lumpenproletariat” 22n10 machinic enslavement 88, 93, 98, 126 Marazzi, Christian 4, 47n5, 75n13, 95, 102 The Mark and the Void (Murray) 59–67, 69 Marsh, Nicky 2, 21n2 Martin, Randy 63, 75n10, 75n12 Marxist theorists, in Autonomist tradition 22n10, 117–18 Marx, K. 23n18, 47n6, 63, 75n9, 117, 118, 121, 125, 128n1, 142n2; Capital 22n4; notion of class 23n15; political economy 3; terminology 17 mass consumption, rule of 3 Massumi, Brian 24n22, 91, 104n9, 105n13 material production vs. monetary self-referentiality 3 mathematics 37–41 Mauss, Marcel 62, 63, 75n11

mechanisation processes, technological development and rationalisation of 3 memory 86, 87, 105n13; effectivity of 102; labour of 101; personal 105n13; post-human 103 metafictional awareness 79 metropolitan factory 50–9 Mezzadra, Sandro 18–20, 23n16 Milkman (Burns) 136, 140 mind in time 29–31 The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard) 11 mobilisation, of workers 82–3 monetary self-referentiality 8, 11–12; vs. material production 3 Money (Amis) 1–13, 16, 18, 28, 31, 50, 57, 143n9 money conspiracy 6, 8, 10 Motherhood (Heti) 115–22 motiveless self-violence 10 Murray, Paul 68, 71; The Mark and the Void 59–67 mutual entanglement 59, 64, 65, 67 mutuality: of risk 69; social 67 narrative self 43–5 national sovereignty 20 Negri, Antonio 6, 22n9, 51, 68, 74n2, 75n7, 75n15, 79, 117, 143n7, 143n12 Neilson, Brett 18–20, 23n16 neoliberal faith 59 neoliberal globalisation 123 neoliberalism 75n7, 79 neoliberal subjectivation 85 neo-Victorian agenda 52 The Nether World (Gissing) 143n5 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) 85–103, 119 New Economic Criticism 2 The New Yorker (magazine) 36 nineteenth-century medical science 110 Nnoromele, Salome C. 129n8 non-reproductive crisis 115–22 non-reproductive labour, characterisation of 110 NW (Smith) 67–74 Oates, Joyce Carol 76n16 ontology: feminist 119; immaterial 29; Lacanian 47n3; of precarity

Index  151 69; social 44, 59, 67, 115; “weak messianic” 120, 121 Orléan, André 47n7 Osteen, Mark 28 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar 76n26 Pasquinelli, Matteo 95 “passionate servitude” 82 personal memory 105n13 Pirker, Eva Ulrike 71 Planner State 136, 143n12 political–economic relations, in capitalism 1 political reorganisation, of class relations 3 post-apocalyptic setting 111 post-Fordism 13, 14, 51, 59, 101; rise of 29; social production in 37; value extraction modes in 96–7 post-Fordist: cyber-capitalism, crisis characterisation in 27; globalisation 13; hegemony, of immaterial labour 79; labour dynamics 80; metropolitan factory 59–60; metropolitan life 80; reconfiguration of labour 85; transformations, identification of 57 post-Fordist capitalism 12, 18; biopolitical dystopia of 99; circulation in 28; governance failure in 41; immaterial economy of 113; new enclosures of 143n11; temporality of 29; vision of 30 post-industrial neo-proletariat 11, 12 postmodernity, depiction of 1–2 potentiality: ambivalence and extreme 128n5; common articulation of 120; formulation of 129n6 pregnancy: characterisation of 107; fatigue and suffering of 108 primitive accumulation: centrality of 131; reproduction and 121–8 product of labour, internalisation of 15 professional dignity 83 professionalism, identification of 86 proletarian self-valorisation 22n9 psychic crisis 110 The Punitive Society (Foucault) 140–1 Radcliffe, Ann 141, 142 Rafferty, Michael 63 Rahman, Zia Haider: In the Light of What We Know 36–46

real subsumption 125 refusal, strategy of 115–22 The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) 79–85, 87, 88 rent 52–3 reproduction: labour and resistance 107–15; and primitive accumulation 121–8 reproduction-as-crisis 115 resistance, reproductive labour and 107–15 risk-laden deferral 61 Robbins, Bruce 98 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 140–1 “sack artist” 9–10 “sado-monetarism” 21n2 Schmitt, Carl 104n11 Science (magazine) 39 secular stagnation 115–17 Segato, Rita Laura 129n7 self-abnegation 119 self-fashioning 82 self-referentiality: financial 28; monetary 3, 8, 11–12; of money 2 self-refusal 118 self-valorisation 117–19, 128 separation process 121, 143n5; process and logic of 139; role at core of industrial society 132; strategy of 131; violent acts of 135 servile care 79–85 servility 83–4, 98; of clinical labour 102; of post-Fordist production 101; specialisation of 86 Setz, Cathryn 8 sexual activity 98–9 Shaw, Katy 50, 59 Shaw, Kristian 76n19 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 96 Shonkwiler, Alison 29, 34 slavery: abolishing of 123; in seventeenth-century Brazil 144n19; symbolic centrality of 125–6 The Embassy of Cambodia (Smith) 79 Smith, Neil 74n6 Smith, Zadie: The Embassy of Cambodia 67–74; NW 67–74 “smooth space” 30 Snaza, Nathan 91–2 social class 40 social entanglement 61 “social factory” 94, 132, 143n6

152 Index socialism 84 socialisation 5, 75n10, 87, 89, 92, 119, 132–4, 137, 142, 143n9, 144n12 social ontology 44, 59, 67, 115 social subjection 88 socio-economic “Thing” 34 socio-geographical space 59 status quo ante 107 Stone, Michael 109–11 subjectivation 92, 120 Tagore, Rabindranath 46 temporal compression 119 “temporal index” 121 Thatcher, Margaret 21n3, 57, 58, 142n1 A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (Aglietta) 3 “the Thing” 33–5 Thompson, E.P. 23n15, 104n6 time 29–33, 36 Tomba, Massimiliano 125 totalitarian scenario 95 Transmission (Kunzru) 12–21, 27, 28, 32, 35 Tratner, Michael 22n6 twofold concept of subsumption 125 UK-US pairing 41 urban precarities 67–74 valorisation process 117; boundless possibilities for 27; capitalist 94, 118; crisis of 43; financial 43; labour mobility and restructuration of 19; operational logic of 93; relation of immanence in 18;

relationship between labour and capital 14 Veblen, Thorstein 52, 74n3 Vercellone, Carlo 14, 16, 74n4 violence 124; contradictory 46; of destitution 133; destructive 35; extra-economic 131; extra-/proto-economic 122; self-violence 10; social 6 Volcker, Paul 5, 142n1 Waldby, Catherine 97, 98 Wallace, David Foster 39 war: civil 135, 140–1; deterritorialised 134; historical centrality of 135; logic of 134, 140; as mechanism of economic and social governance 140 Ward, Abigail 76n27 “weak messianic” ontology 120, 121 Williams, Raymond 104n5 women: common life for 120; domestic labour performed by 124; individuality of 115; position of 121; reproductive role of 115; as reproductive workers 124–5; self-valorisation of 119; socialisation 119; structural position in capitalism 121; structural subordination of 107, 118; subjective autonomy of 138; see also femininity Wood, James 36 working class, characterisation of 5 working-class subjectivity 5 Žižek, Slavoj 47n2