In “Up, Simba,” David Foster Wallace’s account of the 2000 US presidential primaries, the author contrasts Republican candidate John McCain with Bill Clinton, “with his fake-friendly red face and ‘I feel your pain,’” a reference to Clinton’s famous response to an AIDS activist during the 1992 primaries.¹ If the most important question during the 1992 election was whether Clinton could truly “feel your pain” – or whether “feel your pain” was just one of “the politics industry’s proven sales pitches” – the most important question during the 2000 primaries, Wallace suggests, is whether you can feel McCain’s pain.² Describing McCain’s experience as a pilot during the Vietnam War, when he was shot down and thrown into a North Vietnamese prison with horrific injuries, Wallace breaks in periodically to encourage his readers to: “Try to imagine it …. Try for a moment to feel this … try to imagine at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important.”³

It’s “important” we feel this “hurt,” Wallace writes, in order to appreciate the enormity of what happened next, when, following McCain’s father’s promotion to commander of US naval forces in the Pacific, the North Vietnamese offered to set McCain free.⁴ He refused, at the cost of four more years of imprisonment and abuse, because “[t]he U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured.”⁵ McCain’s “promise” is based in this refusal: “it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he is capable of devotion to something other, more than, his own self-interest.”⁶ Encountering a politician who is “capable of” acting in a way unmediated by “self-interest,” we believe he is capable of speaking that way as well: when “crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at [McCain’s] simple promise not to lie … the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy.”⁷ As this language suggests, then, Wallace’s interest in McCain’s pain refers back to the “pain” of voters, a pain that, despite the corporal image of an “electoral tummy,” is a thoroughly emotional pain: “Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts.”⁸ Echoing his well-known critique of “postmodern irony” – which in a 1993 essay he accuses of contributing to a loss of community in American life – Wallace argues here that the “hurt” of being lied to by politicians triggers political apathy, “the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness.”⁹ Clinton’s “fake-friendly” insincerity only makes this “pain” and “sadness” worse, which is why, whereas Clinton promises “empathy with voters’ pain,” only McCain can “promise … relief from it.”¹⁰

Thus, despite dismissing Clinton’s rhetoric of “I feel your pain,” Wallace performs a strikingly similar gesture, transforming a contest between competing ideologies and interests into a referendum on a candidate’s connection to voters’ emotional “pain.” This logic persists throughout the text, even as Wallace comes to question the very possibility of the kind of unmediated relationship suggested by Clinton’s empathy and McCain’s promise: “The final paradox … is that whether [McCain is] truly ‘for real’ now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.”¹¹ According to this conclusion, politics is still a “heart” to “heart” relationship, albeit an internal relationship between two positions in the individual voter’s “heart” – “your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit.”¹² What makes this convergence important is that this vision of politics is central not just to Clinton’s campaign rhetoric, I argue, but to the broader cultural shift he represents, the shift we’ve come to know as the neoliberal turn. The personalization of otherwise irreducible conflicts was, indeed, part of how Clinton and his New Democrats differentiated themselves from old-fashioned Democrats. Clinton, for example, borrowed a Republican talking point and declared that welfare reform was a way to cure the painful psychic “dependency” he sensed in poor people, transforming what other liberal commentators described as a “war on the poor” into a therapeutic relationship between affective selves.¹³ Wallace’s focus on how “US voters feel, inside” has a similar function, moreover, as it allows him to resolve material and ideological conflicts by treating them as afterthoughts, something that even a left-leaning independent – who tells us he voted for Bill Bradley in the 2000 primaries – only remembers when he hears McCain’s canned speeches, which are “sometimes scary and right-wingish, and when you listen closely to these it’s as if some warm pleasant fog suddenly lifts.”¹⁴ More typically, in fact, ideology is simply dismissed altogether:

In this account, in other words, a candidate’s set of ideological commitments “counts for nothing” for those who would vote for him instead of someone else.

By making these literary and political connections visible, “Up, Simba” reveals something crucial about the broader “post-postmodern” project it represents, Wallace’s famous call for “single-entendre values” and writing that – like his political journalism – treats “old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.”¹⁶ As “Up, Simba” suggests, this literary project will turn out to embody the same neoliberal shift represented by Clinton, even as – like Clinton – it emerges in response to the free-market revolution of the 1980s, which Wallace describes as the transformation of American life from “some community of relationships to networks of strangers connected by self-interest and contest and image.”¹⁷ In this sense, Wallace’s foray into political journalism illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn – a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus.

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era argues that a new aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as a group of American writers – including Mary Gaitskill, Jonathan Franzen, Ben Marcus, Richard Powers, and Karen Tei Yamashita – grapples with the political triumph of free-market ideology. The book shows how these writers resist the anti-social qualities of this “frantic twist to the right” while still performing, more often than not, its essential gesture, the personalization of otherwise irreducible social conflicts.¹⁸ In this way, these writers embrace the logic of “human capital,” the neoliberal discourse that transforms the free market from a structure made possible by the antagonism between workers and capitalists to a structure in which everyone is a capitalist, an “entrepreneur of the self” intent on maximizing economic and psychic income.¹⁹ Thus, we see these writers reinvent material struggles and ideological disagreements as differences in “value, emotion, or vulnerability,” a logic that personalizes even when, as in Wallace’s texts, those values, emotions, or vulnerabilities all relate to a desire to “transcend our own selfishness.”²⁰ Such commitments generate texts that celebrate socially conscious values like empathy, sincerity, and respect for “internal experience” and that explore non-antagonistic social forms like families, networks, and (in a more complicated sense) the relationship between corporations and their “stakeholders.”²¹ As Wallace suggests, this personalizing vision distinguishes these writers (all born in or around the 1960s) from their postmodern predecessors, who tend to imagine social conflict in terms of impersonal systems of control and cultural hierarchy. But, whereas Wallace and other writers and critics characterize this shift as a rejection of postmodern irony, I characterize it, instead, as an intensification of postmodernism’s resistance to class politics – the literary equivalent of the evolution of the New Left movements of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s into the center-left neoliberalism of the 1990s and beyond. Like Clintonism itself, this aesthetic vision will remain influential well into the twenty-first century.

To explore these connections, the book situates contemporary fiction in the context of the controversies that have defined this rightward “twist,” from debates among elected officials about issues like free trade, welfare reform, and family values to debates among activists about the direction of social moments like feminism and environmentalism. What distinguishes my approach from other recent accounts of this relationship between literature and neoliberalism is my focus on representations of political struggle itself. Through this critical lens, many of these accounts appear, in fact, to be symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret, as they strive to imagine alternatives to free-market culture while reproducing this culture’s disavowal of economic and ideological antagonism. Many critics and theorists express some version of the claim, for example, that because “neoliberal doctrines and suppositions” have become “normative rituals in their own right,” seemingly impervious even to discrediting events like the 2008 financial crisis, these doctrines cannot be reduced to “simply … ‘false’ or ‘exploitative’ depictions of reality.”²² To put this another way, many critics resist the argument, made most famously by David Harvey, that neoliberalism can be defined as a “political project to re-establish the conditions of capitalist accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”²³

My assumption is that there is no necessary contradiction between acknowledging neoliberalism’s complex causes and cultural impact – the latter of which is, indeed, one of the main goals of this book – and acknowledging that it has functioned as a politics of upward redistribution.²⁴ To approach neoliberalism this way, as a political project – rather than as the only possible response to the economic downturn of the 1970s or to the Reaganism of the 1980s – requires taking neoliberal ideology seriously, however, as both “normative ritual” shaping reality and (to borrow a workaday definition from Michael Clune) a way of producing “an interest in an oppressive social system.”²⁵ Taking ideology seriously also has a specific consequence for literary studies, moreover, as it requires pushing back against the contemporary trend toward affective and “post-critical” criticism. As I argue below, these theoretical strands tend to be marked by the same internal contradictions as center-left neoliberalism, including a desire, on one hand, to identify alternatives to free-market ideology, while, on the other, an explicit or implicit resistance to reading texts in terms of their ideological content.

Underlying this contradiction is what appears to be an anxiety about how to talk about the politics of literary texts without effacing what is distinctive about literary form (and, as result, literary studies itself). As Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri note, the question of the relationship between the literary and “the social, the economic, and the political” has long been one of literature and criticism’s “big questions,” an issue revived in the past two decades as “literary criticism increasingly busies itself with frenzied attempts to conceptualize its future and to defend its legitimacy in the twenty-first century.”²⁶ At the risk of appearing dismissive about one of the major problems in the history of literary criticism, I want to simply note that this problem tends to resolve itself in practice (if not always in theory): as I’ll show, even when contemporary critics gesture to the possibility of post-ideological modes of meaning, they inevitably wind up discussing literary texts in terms of their ideological content or, in other words (using a still-more basic definition of ideology), their political commitments. In this, I believe they are perfectly justified: my assumption is that while literary texts have distinct stakes, goals, and formal expectations, they are no more or less likely to reflect or transform ideological beliefs than narrowly political texts. Understanding what Richard Powers calls a novel’s “political vision” requires attending to these unique formal elements, but the converse is obviously true as well.²⁷ Indeed, as Powers’s comment suggests, many of the authors in this study insist that their fictions be understood as interventions in both literary and political history.

Examining the relationship between neoliberalism and literature is important not just because many post-postmodern writers do embrace this ideology, moreover, but because a smaller group of writers contest it. As I show, novelists like Sapphire, Dennis Cooper, Colson Whitehead, and Helena María Viramontes reject this contemporary version of literary liberalism in favor of more radical commitments. Sometimes they do so by looking backward to pre-neoliberal forms of political struggle, from the fight by African-American slaves to achieve full autonomy (the historical secret in Whitehead’s 2006 novel Apex Hides the Hurt) to a Mexican migrant’s efforts to unionize a mid-twentieth century meat-packing plant (dramatized in Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex).²⁸ At other moments, they experiment with aesthetic form in order to articulate new forms of struggle, from Bret Easton Ellis’s “surface”-level drama of Reaganism run amok in American Psycho to Alex Rivera’s speculative metaphors for the violence of globalization in his film Sleep Dealer.²⁹ Many of these artists are “critically regarded” and have produced “award-winning novels” – Jeffrey J. Williams’s rule-of-thumb for “what is considered literary fiction in the mainstream of the field of literature” – but, as his mapping of this field suggests, they have not dominated the “mainstream” in the same way as writers like Wallace, Franzen, and Gaitskill.³⁰ In the book’s Afterword, however, I argue that this alternative view of political conflict is reemerging as one of the most crucial sources of innovation in US fiction, a development that mirrors broader changes in American political culture, from the reemergence of economic justice as a key campaign issue to the apparent “End” (as one post-2016 election headline put it) “of the Clinton Era of Democratic Politics.”³¹

It Had to Do with Character

Bill Clinton was not the first Democratic president or presidential candidate to endorse elements of neoliberal economic policy, that “new set of rules for governing capitalism” that became orthodoxy during the “so-called Reagan Revolution.”³² Before Reagan, the “carrot-and-stick of corporate money was already playing an often decisive role in tipping legislative outcomes toward business under [Jimmy] Carter, especially on labour law, taxation and business regulation”; by the 1988 campaign, moreover, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis “supported the core neoliberal agenda – fiscal restraint, including no new taxes, a balanced budget, and an investment in entrepreneurialism to encourage growth.”³³ What made Clinton’s presidency transformative is that he went much further than his predecessors in distancing himself from the party’s then-traditional concerns and constituencies, a repudiation of the past that amounted to the creation of a whole new version of Democratic politics. Whereas Carter still paid lip service to liberal ideals like guaranteed full-employment, and whereas the Dukakis campaign represented a “neoliberal economic plan joined to a still-very-liberal agenda on social policy issues” – including issues like “the question of how to address the economic insecurity of poor families” – Clinton and the politicians who supported him rejected “three fundamental principles at the heart of New Deal liberalism.”³⁴ Summarizing the 1990 “New Orleans Declaration” by the Clinton-chaired Democratic Leadership Council, political scientist Eve Bertram explains that:

Clinton and his followers thereby completed the Democrats’ rebirth as a party geared primarily toward serving business interests, a transition implicit in the shift from “redistribution” to “growth,” federal authority to the “authority” of the market. These and other “key tropes” – including “opportunity” and “responsibility,” as Bertram mentions, as well as the trope of “community” – were central to Clinton’s own account of what was “new” about the New Democrats: “We offer people a new choice based on old values. We offer opportunity. We demand responsibility. We will build an American community again.”³⁶

This new vocabulary emerges, communications scholar Janice Peck notes, precisely because the DLC felt that ’80s Democrats had not gone far enough in responding to Reaganism’s (racialized, anti-urban) “narrative” of “national decline,” which attributed the economic downturn of the 1970s to “the excesses of ‘big government’ (e.g., high taxes, unrestrained spending, overregulation); the privileging of ‘special interests’ at the expense of ‘average Americans’; and the deterioration of ‘traditional’ American values of hard work, individual initiative, and self-sufficiency.”³⁷ By combining a pro-business economic policy with a compassionate “values politics,” the New Democrats “sought to win back – or convert” some of the voters swayed by this narrative, while, at the same time, differentiating themselves from Republicans, whose polices amounted to “a dramatic redistribution of wealth as the money supply was not just tightened but aggressively channeled upward.”³⁸ Thus, in his 1992 nominating-convention acceptance speech, Clinton promises a government that demands “responsibility” from and provides “opportunity” to all Americans, not just the rich, poor, or middle class, a position he describes as neither “conservative [nor] liberal. In many ways it’s not even Republican or Democratic. It’s different. It’s new. And it will work.”³⁹

In other words, like David Foster Wallace – who celebrates McCain for his display of “moral authority” and commitment to “‘service’ and ‘sacrifice’ and ‘honor’” – Clinton responds to the extremes of free-market ideology by imagining that “American community” can be rebuilt through the practice of what he calls “old values,” or what Hillary Clinton calls, in a 1993 speech, the “politics of meaning.”⁴⁰ In this sense, Clintonian rhetoric offers a particularly clear, particularly influential example of the kind of centrist “communitarianism” that would shape American writing and politics – including the politics of the party’s next president, Barack Obama, a self-described “New Democrat” – for at least a generation.⁴¹ During this period, the aggressive “upward” channeling of wealth that began under Reagan would continue mostly unabated, in the context of an economy that has “functioned decreasingly well, but for the wealthy ever more satisfactorily.”⁴² Indeed, as left-wing critics stress, neoliberalism’s ideological triumph – a triumph made possible by Clinton’s crafting of a centrist version of this ideology – should be understood as victory over labor (which was given “a greater share of national wealth” under the previous “Keynesian compromise”) and a victory for a “new social order in which the power and income of the upper fractions of the ruling classes – the wealthiest persons – was re-established in the wake of a setback.”⁴³

In his influential 1978–79 lectures on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault neglects to analyze or predict such “transformations” in “capital itself,” and thus a number of recent critics have challenged the notion that his work offers “a prescient critique.”⁴⁴ Still, while literary critics would be ill-advised to look to Foucault (or subsequent theorists of subjectification) for “everything they wanted to know about neoliberalism,” his account remains crucial for understanding how this ideology, in both its Reaganite and Clintonian versions, reimagines human subjectivity.⁴⁵ His analysis focuses on the economic theory of “human capital” – developed in works like Gary Becker’s Human Capital (1964) and The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976) and T. W. Schultz’s Investment in Human Capital (1971) – which, Foucault argues, represents an extension of the neoclassical analysis of “substitutable choices … the way in which scarce means are allocated to competing ends” to the realm of labor economics.⁴⁶ In this approach, a worker’s wages are conceived not as “the price at which he sells his labor power” but as the product of such “substitutable choices,” specifically choices about the allocation of “scarce means” – time and money – toward investments in education, training, and other forms of personal development.⁴⁷ From this perspective, the worker should be understood not as a worker but as “an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”⁴⁸ Becker later takes this concept to its logical endpoint, expanding what counts as “both input (not only education but parental and social influences, lifestyle choices, etc.) and output (not only monetary earnings but satisfactions of all kinds).⁴⁹ From this perspective, even moral “virtues” can count as a form of capital and even an “appreciation of literature” can count as a form of income.⁵⁰

This discourse thereby encapsulates the new way the subject is formulated in neoliberal governmentality: instead of a “social subject” split between a productive self and inalienable right(s) to life guaranteed by the state – a worker who can safely enter into the productive realm precisely because of this split – there is simply the productive self, composed of nothing else but that which they make of and for themselves, as understood by themselves.⁵¹ This vision is implicit in many of the policy interventions that would later define post-Keynesian politics: cuts in spending can be justified if one makes the case that poor people are poor because they made bad choices, like failing to invest in their human capital, or even that they are poor by choice, since a loss of “monetary” income can be described as a choice to pursue “psychic income” instead.⁵² At the same time, this view of the subject assumes that both individual and aggregate well-being will be maximized if individuals are allowed to choose freely, liberated from high taxes and government interference through deregulation and market liberalization.⁵³

As this study will show, liberal writers and thinkers have tended to be more sensitive than conservatives to the factors that might cause bad or “irrational” choices, to the fact that not all individuals have the same range of choices, and to the importance of social, not just personal, “responsibility.” Indeed, during the period covered in this book, this sensitivity seems to have come to practically define what it means to be a “liberal,” a label I use in the same functional way – those on “the left” instead of “the right” – it is used in mainstream, contemporary American political discourse, as determined by the narrow parameters of a two-party political system. Of course, part of the point of this analysis is to show that the mainstream “left” has moved to the center: if, by the mid-twentieth century, the term liberal “came surely, if gradually, to be disassociated from the laissez-faire creed and to be associated with the use of government action for aid to those at economic disadvantage” – the New Deal/Great Society politics of redistribution – by the 1990s, the term was just as likely to signify a resistance to redistribution (justified in the name of “deficit reduction” rather than Republican “tax cuts”) coupled with avowals of “compassion” and “kindness” (as opposed to Republican “meanness.”)⁵⁴

However, even this difference – liberals’ greater “compassion” in regard to limits on choice and personal responsibility – should not be overstated. With its rhetorical commitment to the importance of family, the conservative coalition that elected Reagan never fully embraced the neoliberal image of “Homo economicus” as

Moreover, while liberal “compassion” has sometimes corresponded with a more interventionist approach to the marketplace, most historians of the “neoliberal thought collective” stress that this approach does not actually depart from neoliberal orthodoxy.⁵⁶ That is, they stress that neoliberal political rationality is defined not by a “laissez-faire” philosophy but by its “explicit constructionism,” the idea that free markets – and the subjects who will thrive in them – must be constructed rather than appearing naturally.⁵⁷ Many of the theorists of human capital emphasized the importance, for example, of social spending on education, arguing that such investments are not only the source of higher wages but the solution to “the mystery of modern abundance,” the source of the innovation and productivity that will reverse the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.⁵⁸ This view has become even more widely accepted in the context of “the modern information economy.”⁵⁹ As Francine H. Jacobs notes, moreover, in the late 1980s social progressives began adopting the “investment metaphor,” in which children are described as social or human capital, something that has “instrumental value … to American society … for example, as future workforce participants and contributors to the Social Security system.”⁶⁰ Furthermore, neoliberal constructionism implies that, beyond helping people acquire the human capital they will need to thrive, the state may need to help them to think about themselves as human capital. Though homo entrepreneur is “a relationship of self-to-self,” it is, paradoxically, “a relationship that is governable.”⁶¹ The irrationality of the rational subject is already built in; neoliberalism assumes they may need to be taught – or put in the position where they are compelled – to ply the rational self-interest they are already assumed to have.

In William Davies’s account, this acknowledgment of the need to “nudge” (rather than assume) rational behavior is a recent development within neoliberal governance, a by-product of the growing influence of “economic psychology” and chiefly associated with the Obama and Cameron administrations.⁶² The texts in this study and the work of post-Foucaultian theorists of governmentality suggest, however, that this commitment to constructing subjectivity (albeit in less overt forms) has been crucial to neoliberalism from the beginning.⁶³ Still, Davies is certainly correct to note that the “rise of behavioral economics represents an attempt to preserve a form of market rationality in the face of crisis …. This remains an economistic logic, inasmuch as it prepares people to live efficient, productive, competitive lives.”⁶⁴ The “neocommunitarian” mode of subjection, as he calls it, is structurally equivalent to the neoliberal mode, in that it too attributes economic outcomes to something “embedded or embodied in the person,” whether a personal choice or a personal quality.⁶⁵ In this sense, both the left-wing and right-wing versions of neoliberalism reflect an embrace of capitalist markets and market logic and a disavowal of the collective, structural tensions that – from the materialist perspective assumed by this book – make capitalism possible in the first place.⁶⁶ In the case of education policy, for example, both the call for liberalization and the call for state “investment” reflect a faith in the power of the market to meet people’s needs, either by providing sufficient human capital for people to get well-paying jobs, or, in the latter view, by providing sufficient well-paying jobs for people with human capital.⁶⁷

As a motive for literary form, the logic of human capital – understood as a broad social discourse rather than a narrow economic theory – is most evident in the texts I explore in the first half of my book (Chapters 1 and 2), texts that, like Wallace’s attraction to McCain, have “to do with ‘character.’”⁶⁸ That is, these texts concern themselves primarily with “personal experience,” “emotionality,” family values, and other aspects of individual human consciousness.⁶⁹ Each of these works performs a version of neoliberal “responsibilization,” a vision in which social relationships are determined by personal choices and values and in which exercise of this responsibility is at once a “social obligation” and a source of “personal fulfillment.”⁷⁰ This characterological focus is not new to American literature, but it takes on new meaning as an explicit response to both postmodernism and free-market politics: the embrace of old-fashioned literary “character” allows these writers to differentiate themselves from their postmodern predecessors, as critic Stephen J. Burn notes, and it allows them to join with their political contemporaries in personalizing structural antagonisms, including new antagonisms created by post–Cold War globalization and financialization.⁷¹

In Chapters 3 and 4, I argue that this kind of logic also shapes novels by Richard Powers and Karen Tei Yamashita, whose aesthetic commitments are often contrasted with neoliberalism precisely because they reject what Powers describes as “self-anchored” fiction.⁷² Instead, they seek to “reconnect representations of character to broader explorations of those selves’ rich and immense environments.”⁷³ The assumption of such post-postmodern “systems novels” – a critical term Powers endorses that applies equally well to Yamashita’s fiction – is that

Thus, whereas “self-anchored” fiction focuses on the interaction between individual selves, these texts focus on the epistemic relationship between individual selves and the “complex network” of forces shaping their lives. Powers’s Gain, for example, examines the relationship between individual consumers and transnational corporations, a relationship characterized by misperception, as characters collectively fail to understand a system in which, as the narrator puts it, “[a]ll mankind became stakeholders” – that is, a system whose ecological contradictions threaten human life itself.⁷⁵ Despite this difference, however, these complexity-minded novels offer a vision compatible with the neoliberal consensus, as they transform society into a collection of structurally equivalent individuals, without the mediating effects of class division, thereby occluding the material and social conflicts that tend to cut across these purely epistemic relationships. Such conflicts cannot be reduced to misunderstandings or (in Yamashita’s case) differences in how well individuals navigate transnational complexity. By imagining a world composed solely of corporate “stakeholders,” for example, Powers symbolically resolves the conflict between stakeholders and shareholders, those for whom benefitting at the expense of mere stakeholders is (often at least) precisely the point. In such an antagonism-free world, the meaning of political engagement is fundamentally reimagined as well, moreover, in a way that accords with how neoliberalism reinvents the meaning of Democratic (and democratic) government: from an intervention designed to protect the victims of capitalism, necessarily an extension of the conflicts of the marketplace, to a technocratic, “‘post-political’ steering of the political process towards less directive, more networked modalities than in the past.”⁷⁶ This “post-political” vision of government will be crucial for thinking about what it means to imagine these texts as “political” gestures in the first place.

From the New Journalism to the New Sincerity

As with the Democratic Party, American literature’s engagement with neoliberalism can be traced back to well before the 1990s. Myka Tucker-Abramson argues, for example, that the “antistatist” roots of this ideology are visible in 1950s novels about urban renewal and racial liberalism, while Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith contend that writers began addressing neoliberalism as such – as “both economic innovation and political policy” – in the 1980s.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, as Huehls and Smith also note, texts like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) “describe the transformation of economic policy into lived political ideology through more conventional narrative forms,” while other novelists who grapple with this transatlantic movement – including William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Thomas Pynchon – “remain committed to the formal experimentation of the 1970s.”⁷⁸ It was not until the 1990s, in the work of “writers who came to adulthood during the late postmodern period,” that neoliberalism’s impact began to extend “beyond representational content to begin influencing literary form”⁷⁹ As Stephen J. Burn notes, the 1990s were also a decade when declarations of the “end” of postmodernism proliferated, and my claim is that these two developments are related.⁸⁰ I argue that these new, centrist forms began to emerge precisely because these younger writers came to believe that postmodernism – an aesthetic “associated with 1960s and 1970s social, political, and avant-garde movements” that “began to find institutional and, at times, commercial success” in the 1980s – was inadequate as a response to, and perhaps even complicit with, the individualizing logic of right-wing neoliberalism.⁸¹

This is why, for example, Powers distinguishes the genre of the “systems novel” – a term originally coined by critic Tom LeClair to describe the work of writers like Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Robert Coover – from “postmodernism,” which Powers summarizes as fiction that calls “attention to itself as an artifice through all sorts of anti-narrational devices,” or simply “metafiction.”⁸² In a 1999 interview with Jeffrey Williams, the novelist clarifies that his resistance is to postmodernism as a broader philosophical perspective: “Those who believe in the postmodern break would find ludicrous the notion that we’re part of any project at all! This is our current malaise: not to believe that we belong to anything larger than ourselves.”⁸³ This belief is a “malaise,” he suggests, because it obscures “the unquestioned ascendancy of the technological world, the tacit assumption that we have to do what our inventions tell us to do, the blind acceptance of market-driven determinism.”⁸⁴ Like Wallace, then, Powers’s impatience with postmodernism is bound up in his sense that it contributes to social atomization and thus prevents us from responding to “market-driven determinism,” or what Wallace describes (with slightly different emphasis) as the “conservative” belief that “the discerning consumer instincts of the little guy would correct all imbalances if only big systems would quit stifling his freedom to choose.”⁸⁵

Not every writer in this study positions themselves in relation to postmodernism as explicitly as Wallace and Powers; Gaitskill, for example, has stated that “I’m not interested in that discussion,” and Yamashita professes to have not understood what postmodernism was until after she started writing Tropic of Orange.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, like Wallace and Powers, each of these writers revise postmodern strategies in important ways, and, just as importantly, each of these interventions can be read as liberal responses to the “conservative” celebration of markets and market logic. At the same time, no matter what stories these authors tell (or don’t tell) about postmodernism, it is important to note that that aesthetic is not simply identical to a free-market ideology, just as this new post-postmodernism is not simply a rejection of it. I suggest we approach the emergence of post-postmodernism as, instead, a shift in how left-leaning writers represent (and resolve) the political antagonisms intrinsic to capitalism.

As a distinct literary aesthetic, postmodern narrative has often been defined by its interest in how reality is “constructed” by impersonal systems of representation, including language, culture, social identity, media technology, and historical narrative.⁸⁷ Postmodern writers tend to represent political conflict as the struggle over and between these discursive systems, and – as historian Terry Anderson has suggested about the post-1968, “second wave” New Left – they tend to represent left politics as the fight for cultural “empowerment” and “liberation.”⁸⁸ Thus, for example, writers like Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison have used “historiographic metafiction” (Linda Hutcheon’s term for writing that blurs fiction and history) to counter racist narratives of Western cultural supremacy, while writers like Pynchon, Coover, and William Burroughs have protested Cold War conformity and social control through texts that draw attention to their own fragmentation and indeterminacy.⁸⁹

As many critics have argued, this postmodern vision – the most important source of innovation in US fiction for most of the postwar era – has helped to disarticulate left politics from anti-capitalist politics.⁹⁰ The struggle for cultural empowerment, for example, does not necessarily translate into opposition to economic exploitation and inequality, especially insofar as “literary thinking after the New Left” is detached from the actual goals of the New Left, whose movements were still concerned with economic as well as cultural issues.⁹¹ The anarchic, libertarian resistance to conformity and control resonates, meanwhile, with the free-market right’s “basic antipathy to big government.”⁹² On a theoretical level, postmodern literature and criticism’s insistence on the constructedness of meaning can serve to disable ideological contestation, in the sense that it transforms ideological disagreements into differences in “subject position” – the subject’s position within these systems of meaning – and thereby makes the concept of “disagreement” incoherent.⁹³ The obvious theoretical disavowal implicit in this argument, which depends on the kind of universalizing truth-claim it seeks to deconstruct, amounts to a political disavowal as well, as it often takes the form of critiques of leftist historical narratives that are perceived as falsely totalizing, like the “solid-as-brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step” beloved by “the bureaucrats of the Old Left.”⁹⁴ As Nicholas Brown notes, this critique of progressive historical narrative “turns out to be a disavowed totalization whose truth only emerges when it is made explicit …. What the rejection of the frame as such produces, paradoxically, is the reliance on one particular unacknowledged frame, namely capitalism as the ahistorical horizon of all history.”⁹⁵

Thus, while postmodernism’s focus on impersonal systems makes it distinct from neoliberalism – which, as we’ve started to see, tends to represent social conflict in terms of differences in personal capacities, choices, and experiences of the truth – postmodernism nevertheless paves the way for neoliberalism, in the sense that it helps create a left less concerned with the material contradictions of capitalism. Of course, critics have long argued that postmodernism serves the needs of capital – that it is, indeed, “the cultural logic of late capitalism” – and some of the writers in this study make versions of that argument themselves.⁹⁶ As I will describe in later chapters, for example, Whitehead, Yamashita, and Foster all allude to how cultural-nationalist and multicultural stands of this aesthetic have been commercialized, de-politicized, and turned into “bullshit” by economic globalization.⁹⁷ The most explicit instance of this critique, however, can be found in Wallace’s essay “E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which argues that postmodern self-referentiality “evolved as an intellectual expression of the ‘rebellious youth culture’ of the sixties and early seventies” but has been co-opted by corporations:

This commodified dissent now serves not only to make companies richer, Wallace suggests, but to further intensify the social decay of American life. To viewers who look to television as the “real authority on a world we now view as constructed”:

As I’ve already noted, Wallace’s response to this spiraling social breakdown is his famous vision of a new generation of “‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.”¹⁰⁰ Wallace does not reject postmodernism, then, because its anti-foundationalism leads to the disavowals described above; indeed, he still seems to view anti-foundationalism as a coherent position, albeit one that now causes more problems than it solves. Rather than a rejection of these political and ideological disavowals, Wallace’s post-postmodernism is better understood as the insistence that these disavowals be performed in a new, more personalized way.

This is part of why the “New Sincerity” practiced and inspired by Wallace has not translated into texts that reject the “insights” of postmodern fiction and contemporary theory in favor of a return to realism but, instead, texts that grapple with the dialectical relationship between sincerity and postmodern self-consciousness.¹⁰¹ “Up, Simba” is just such a text, as it explores the painful conflict between the “passé expression of value” at the heart of McCain’s appeal and the cynical representation of politics by contemporary media.¹⁰² Crucially, this post-ironic vision shapes not just the article’s thematic focus but also its formal logic, including Wallace’s revision of strategies associated with the “New Journalism,” the style of reporting that mixes fact and fictional “speculation” and that often makes the author’s experiences central to the story itself.¹⁰³

In “Up, Simba,” the author is present in the text but only as a minor character, a vehicle by which readers can experience the personality of its real protagonist, John McCain. Unlike other politicians, whose interactions on the campaign trail are carefully scripted, McCain “acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act”:

Reporting on personal interactions with a candidate in order to reveal something about their character is not unusual; in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, for example, Hunter S. Thompson uses an account of a conversation with Richard Nixon about the president’s football obsession in order to speculate (wildly) about his approach to political strategy.¹⁰⁵ Wallace’s coverage, however, is not about what the candidate’s character says about their capacity for leadership or how they would react in certain situations but how that character “makes you feel.”¹⁰⁶ To convey this feeling, and to create a sense of intimacy between McCain, himself, and his reader, Wallace communicates “somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being” would communicate, with – as this passage suggests – appropriately casual, “very cool” diction and syntax. He also transforms the relationship he and the other members of the press have with McCain into a generalized “you,” inviting readers to imagine themselves in this position as well. Wallace must be present in the text to bring “you” into winking distance, so to speak, because physical immediacy is essential to McCain’s ability to create apparently unmediated relationships with audiences: if the “warm pleasant fog suddenly lifts” at the sound of McCain’s “canned and stilted” right-wing speeches, these “doubts” quickly “dissolve” again once McCain starts talking directly to journalists or voters at Town Hall Meetings, where he is “smart and alive and human and seems actually to listen and respond directly to you.”¹⁰⁷

As Adam Kelly suggests, such “direct appeals to the reader” are common in the work of “New Sincerity writers” like Wallace, Dave Eggers (discussed in Chapter 2), and Joshua Ferris (discussed in my Afterword).¹⁰⁸ The use of second person in this text is particular noteworthy because it helps clarify the distinction between Wallace’s writing and a work of New Journalism like The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s nonfiction account of the 1967 antiwar March on the Pentagon. Whereas a postmodern writer like Mailer seeks to dramatize his participation in an impersonal, narratively constructed, “symbolic war” over American history and identity – famously referring to himself in the third person, with titles like “the Novelist” and “the Historian” – Wallace seeks to connect politics with the painful “interior war” between credulity and cynicism, the desire for unmediated personal relationships versus the conviction that such relationships are impossible.¹⁰⁹ This formal logic is clearest when Wallace tries to use second person to convert McCain’s experiences during the Vietnam War into shared emotional experience: “Take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between John McCain’s first getting offered early release and him turning it down. Try to imagine it was you.”¹¹⁰ Wallace proceeds to perform this “creative visualization” himself, offering a long string of rationalizations in which the referent of “you” slips from the reader to the universal “you” of “anyone” to the “you” that is transparently a synonym for “me, John McCain.”¹¹¹ That is, “Try to imagine it was you” becomes, inside McCain’s head, “surely the Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to you if you need a doctor or else you’re going to die,” which becomes, eventually: “Oh Jesus imagine it a real doctor and real surgery with painkillers and clean sheets and a chance to heal and not be in agony and to see your kids again, your wife, to smell your wife’s hair.”¹¹² With this sliding “you,” Wallace captures on a formal level what he imagines to be McCain’s own experience of the “interior war” between, on one side, unmediated selflessness and, on the other, self-interest and self-consciousness. At the end of this passage, Wallace suddenly shifts the referent of “you” back to the reader, interrogating us about our ability to “even imagine the levels of pain and fear and want in that moment,” thereby implicating us in this internal struggle as well. His article concludes by suggesting “the final paradox … is that whether [McCain is] truly ‘for real’ now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.”¹¹³

In this way, Wallace also implicates us in what amounts to a transformation of politics itself. According to this vision, the relationship between a voter and a candidate is no longer understood as an impersonal relationship, defined by the question of whether the candidate will advance a specific social agenda. Nor is it an impersonal relationship in the postmodern sense of being defined by impersonal structures of meaning, a vision in which the candidate’s role is to perform preexisting social discourses or notions of American identity; this vision is articulated, for example, by Coover’s A Political Fable (1968/1980), in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president and his Opponent is revealed, magically, to wear a series of hats, each hat prompting him to vocalize some new political stereotype: “Wearing his familiar small-town brown fedora,” he speaks “of his pioneer grandfathers, one a blacksmith, the other a prairie preacher”; wearing a “banker’s bowler” he speaks about “investment credits, the threat of peace and depression”; wearing a “biretta” he speaks of “‘soldiers of Christ’ and ‘the Prince of Peace’ and the menace of ‘atheistic materialism.’”¹¹⁴

Instead, the relationship between candidate and voter is understood as a personal relationship, a relationship between persons, the dynamics of which “depend way less on political ideology” than on how the candidate’s character relates to each voter’s (and journalist’s) “own little interior battles between cynicism and idealism and marketing and leadership.”¹¹⁵ To be clear, what’s striking about Wallace’s argument is not the commonplace observation that “authenticity” matters to voters or that this quality has become increasingly important in recent elections; what’s striking is his analysis of why this quality has become increasingly important and why he thinks voters should care about authenticity: namely, that it might cure the pain of postmodernism.¹¹⁶ It’s worth nothing, moreover, that – like many of the novelists I explore in Chapter 2 (including Franzen, Marcus, and Jeffrey Eugenides) – Wallace often personalizes the relationship between “fiction writer” and reader as well.¹¹⁷ In his celebrated, self-referential story “Octet” (1999), for example, he dramatizes an author’s emotionally fraught efforts to connect with his readers, and the story’s theme is that there is a “weird ambient sameness” about all “kinds of human relationships,” namely, that they are based on a shared fear and uncertainty “about whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the way you do” – the question of whether others feel our pain and the pain this question causes.¹¹⁸

What “Up, Simba” helps us see is that while this vision of “human relationships” is distinct from the view that “everybody’s ultimately out for himself and that life is about selling and profit” – the “market-conditioned belief” reinforced, in his account, by postmodern irony – it nevertheless has similar political implications.¹¹⁹ In Wallace’s liberal vision, we are driven not by “profit” but by our “deep need to believe”; at the same time, he suggests that the beliefs we do form are purely personal, a matter of the “heart.” This is why the belief Wallace calls for in “E. Unibus Pluram” is a belief “emptied out of specific content”: he isn’t telling us what to believe but asking us to be “believers.”¹²⁰ In Wallace’s rendering, then, our beliefs are sources of personal fulfillment rather than universal truths, and no one belief is better than any other (except for the belief that sincerity is better than cynicism). In this sense, Wallace is asking us to relate to our “single-entendre values” in the same way that, in neoliberal discourse, the entrepreneur of the self relates to their human capital: as a source of psychic “income,” defined, produced, and consumed by the self alone.

This framing – political disagreements as the search for personal psychic “relief” – is, however, also a way of denying the very possibility of political disagreements, which depend on claims understood as irreducible to the person making them.¹²¹ Like the neoliberal vision of the marketplace, then, Wallace’s vision of electoral politics amounts to a disavowal of the very antagonism that makes this form of competition possible. Such disavowals obviously only work in theory; even in the age of irony’s so-called tyranny, real political disagreements – like being for or against the war in Vietnam (McCain entered the Naval Academy and volunteered for combat) or being for or against the George W. Bush tax cuts (McCain voted for them after voting against them) – never went away.¹²² This structural similarity between how Wallace represents politics and how neoliberals represent capitalism is more than just a structural similarity, moreover. Part of the force of neoliberalism is its “extension of economic analysis to domains previously considered to be non-economic,” and influential discourses like “public choice theory” have extended “economic analysis” into the political domain, with the basic assumption that government policy is motivated less by political beliefs than by the economic self-interest of individual political actors.¹²³ Meanwhile, scholars like Francis Fukuyama became prominent in the post–Cold War 1990s, especially among literary critics, for arguments echoing Wallace’s comment that contemporary politics “depend way less on political ideology” than on other concerns – concerns like, in Fukuyama’s account, “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”¹²⁴ Indeed, one of the assumptions of this book is that representations of ideology, economy, and the narrowly political are fundamentally intertwined – that while one element may be foregrounded in a particular text, its treatment of one struggle inevitably implies something about how it understands other kinds of struggles as well. In this way, I read both with and against the grain of neoliberal discourse, which represents politics as a marketplace even while seeking to deny the political basis of the market itself.

Neoliberalism as We Know It

As a lens for thinking about American literature, “neoliberalism” emerged in the early 2000s (a decade after it did in Latin American studies) in the work of critics like Walter Benn Michaels, who has argued that its impact is clearest in the contemporary proliferation of novels about “racial, cultural, and sexual difference,” or what he calls the “the novel of identity.”¹²⁵ Drawing on an archive that includes books by writers like Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Art Spiegelman (as well as younger writers like Whitehead, Michael Chabon, Chang-Rae Lee, and Demetria Martinez), Michaels contends that such texts actively substitute “problems of prejudice, both personal and structural,” for problems like capitalist exploitation, therefore making economic inequality, or the kind of economic inequality not attributable to prejudice, seem irrelevant, inevitable, or even morally justified.¹²⁶ These claims have been controversial, but they have helped foreground crucial questions about the relationship between the contemporary politics of social identity, or “recognition” (to use Nancy Fraser‘s famous phrasing) and the politics of economic class, or “redistribution.”¹²⁷

To be clear, I share the assumption implicit in Michaels’s account that the best way to think about a novel’s relationship to neoliberalism is to think about how it represents (or fails to represent or misrepresents) the structures and politics of economic inequality. However, whereas Michaels sees a strong internal connection between novels of identity and the cultural logic of neoliberalism, I see a historical inflection, the same distinction between postmodernism and contemporary fiction described above. Indeed, in some cases the historical differences I track are visible as the personalization of identity structures, like the way that (as I explore in Chapter 1) Mary Gaitskill strives to disentangle sexual relationships from what her feminist predecessors viewed as the structural imbalance between men and women. Of course, as Michaels has noted, both the “personal and structural” views of identity can function as a way of ignoring class (or, in Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin, class politics), but the point is that the older mode imagines the world in terms of the relationship between identity groups, while the newer mode imagines the world in terms of the relationship between persons.¹²⁸

This distinction is worth underscoring because critical theory has passed through a roughly analogous sequence, I argue, a shift that has influenced how literary critics have represented the concept of “neoliberalism” itself. Summarizing the priorities embodied by Foucault’s lectures and other comments on neoliberalism, Daniel Zamora notes that by the 1970s, radical political critique had undergone a transformation: “A broad conception of identity … came to replace the problem of exploitation. As the concept of ‘social class’ disappeared from political analysis, the struggle against capitalism was gradually replaced by a struggle against normalization of behaviors and identities imposed on subjects, as well as against Marxism and ‘social Statism.’”¹²⁹ Just as postmodern novelists from Roth and Morrison’s generation continued to publish books throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this vision of political struggle has persisted in the form of critical paradigms like transnationalism and masculinity studies, paradigms that have tended to dominate the analysis of the texts explored in this book. As Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski note in their introduction to the collection Critique and Postcritique (2017), however, the last two decades have also seen the rise of literary-critical methods that typically distinguish themselves from both Marxist ideology critique and the “antiessentialisms, antibiologisms, and antinaturalisms that define much theory after poststructuralism, with its emphasis on the social construction of subjectivity.”¹³⁰ Like post-postmodern fiction, this new “postcritique” – an umbrella term that includes affect theory, surface reading, literary “actor-network” theory, and other approaches – tends to represent social relationships in terms of affective and networked relationships.¹³¹ Like post-postmodern fiction, moreover, postcritique can be understood as a complex reaction to neoliberalism, including its “assault on the autonomy of universities: a growing emphasis on profit and utility at the expense of humanistic inquiry, declining state support for the liberal arts, the adjunctification of the professoriate, and the quantification of scholarly thought and research.”¹³²

In their “tentative taxonomy of [the] various objections to critique,” Anker and Felski suggest that many critics have come to believe that Marxist and New Historicist approaches are insufficient for responding to this neoliberal “assault,” which has made it increasingly urgent “to articulate more compelling accounts of why the humanities matter and to clarify to larger audiences why anyone should care about literature, art, or philosophy”¹³³ This has meant, specifically, coming up with new ways to describe literature’s social and political relevance – as critique itself appears to have been “normalized, domesticated, or defanged” – while also remedying critique’s “neglect of the formal qualities of art,” “the sensual dimension of aesthetic experience,” and “the creative, innovative, world-making aspects of literature and criticism.” ¹³⁴ Thus, as Michael Clune puts it, criticism in the twenty-first century has faced “intellectual and institutional pressures” to “come up with an account of literature’s distinctive relation to social context” and thereby respond to naysayers who wonder: “If there is nothing special about literature, why should we study it?”¹³⁵

In his own book, American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (2010), Clune tries to answer this question by tracing the emergence of “economic fictions,” a set of postwar poems, novels, films, and songs that “might make a social difference by being different from the social.”¹³⁶ In these works, he argues, the free market is figured as “a self-organizing system that links every object of an individual’s experience to every object of everyone’s experience. One sees things through price. In these [texts], the price system structures subjectivity.”¹³⁷ Like the neoliberal economic and political writings of Friedrich Hayek, Clune suggests, these works thereby disembed the market from social relationships; at the same time, they do not therefore “perform the ideological function of concealing actual inequality,” as they do “not present an image of economic reality, but a space in which the economic undergoes a change.”¹³⁸ In other words, the basis for his claim that these fictions are “different from the social” is that they are not mimetic but transformative, reimagining the market as “a structure of radical subjectivity,” an “objectless,” collective subjectivity in which the gap between individual subjects is erased, thus erasing the intersubjective conflict that makes inequality an important source of social distinction.¹³⁹ Thus, “the economic fiction makes economic inequality invisible,” in the sense that it makes economic inequality “irrelevant.”¹⁴⁰

As Jasper Bernes notes, in this account of the market – both “fictive and real” – there are no “capitalists,” subjects compelled by capitalism’s intrinsic requirement for never-ending accumulation, and “no workers,” the people who, under the distinctive conditions of capitalism, “are compelled to sell their labor, because they can find the necessities of life nowhere but the market.”¹⁴¹ Instead, there are “just people with desires and the market that constitutes them.”¹⁴² Indeed, it is only by virtue of this elision of class conflict – along with an apparent misreading of Marx’s statements on “equality” and “distribution” in “A Critique of the Gotha Program” – that Clune is able to parallel the transformative vision in economic fictions with “the radical transformation that inaugurates communism in Marx.”¹⁴³ The more fundamental problem with Clune’s account, however, is that his attempt to strike a new balance between politics and form leads instead to a contradiction. If, as he insists, these economic fictions are relevant to a world of ideological conflict – if they can have “important social consequences” and “social effects” – then we must be allowed to evaluate them, as Bernes does, in light of what we know about “actually existing capitalism.”¹⁴⁴ If, as Clune also insists, they represent a “a category outside the social,” and therefore we are not allowed to evaluate them in light of what we know about actually existing capitalism (or consider that there might be “a possible ideological relation between these works and social forces”) then critiques such as Bernes’s are irrelevant – but so are economic fictions.¹⁴⁵ In other words, Clune’s argument seems to depend on the very thing he seeks to transcend, namely, “ideological” content: if economic fictions might “make a social difference,” as he claims, then they cannot also be “different from the social” in the way he describes.¹⁴⁶

In my view, such contradictions are the defining feature of post-critical accounts of neoliberalism, which, like Clune’s book, tend to reimagine literary and theoretical “politics” in a way that makes actual politics, the kind defined by competition and conflict, untenable. For an affective version of this dynamic, we can look, for example, at Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (2015), which – like this book – explores how neoliberal personalization works in contemporary texts. Though Smith’s analysis is incisive, she also contends that writers like Powers, Yamashita, and Marcus are able to challenge this logic by mobilizing “impersonal feelings” that work in a “preconscious,” pre-ideological way.¹⁴⁷ Smith thereby recapitulates the claim of neurological affect theory – as summarized by Ruth Leys in a well-known critique – that “ideology … intentions, meanings, reasons and beliefs” are separate from and covertly determined by affects, understood as “nonsignifying, automatic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning.”¹⁴⁸ As Leys writes, in suggesting that our responses to cultural objects happen prior to our intentional, “conscious,” reactions, affect theory asks us to imagine that our responses function in a “self-rewarding or self-punishing manner without regard to the objects that elicit them.”¹⁴⁹ That is, by this logic, cultural objects are really “nothing more than tripwires for an inbuilt behavioral-physiological response” – a response more like laughing while being tickled than laughing at a funny joke, to use Leys’s analogy – even if, after the fact, we describe that response as an intentional reaction.¹⁵⁰ In this sense, the actual “objects” themselves, whether political beliefs or literary texts, are irrelevant, and therefore affect theory serves “to make disagreement about meaning, or ideological dispute, irrelevant to cultural analysis.”¹⁵¹ You cannot disagree with someone for laughing when they are tickled, just as – to return to the point made by “Up, Simba” – you cannot disagree with a voter for feeling happy or sad about a politician, as that affective response reflects “a self-rewarding or self-punishing” relationship between the individual voter and what’s in their own “heart.” Ironically, then, Affect and American Literature’s commitment to the power of “impersonal feelings” winds up reproducing the very personalizing logic it seeks – laudably – to contest.

Smith also cites the work of Bruno Latour to explain her interest in post-critical interpretive methods, and an even clearer example of this Latourian (rather than affective) version of postcritique can be found in Mitchum Huehls’s After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (2016).¹⁵² Huehls argues that normative critiques of neoliberalism are inevitably complicit with this ideology, because, whether “we imagine ourselves as free individuals or as components in a larger system, neoliberalism’s laissez-faire principles are reiterated.”¹⁵³ Nevertheless, contemporary writers can still “challenge neoliberalism’s dominance” through the production of “non-referential,” “post-normative” meaning.¹⁵⁴ This “non-representational, ontological politics” functions not by “showing and revealing the world to us” but by “being in the world with us,” through “transmissions which move, change, and reconfigure the world,” in a way akin to how on social media, “the meaning and value of one’s words have little to do with their representational content and everything to do with who sees them, where they go, and how algorithms transform them into marketing data.”¹⁵⁵ It seems, then, that the kind of “change” Huehls has in mind is the change in which you become part of a network, like the moment you hit “follow” on a page or a post. This invocation of social media is telling because it reflects what Jodi Dean has argued is a “fantasy” common to twenty-first-century neoliberalism: the tendency to redefine political action as participation in networks, where the content and outcome of one’s words are rendered irrelevant – not simply because “follows” do not necessarily translate into “votes,” but because “follows,” unlike votes, do not necessarily produce winners and losers.¹⁵⁶ When political action is defined in terms of participation in networks, one can “win” (by contributing or by being included) even while “losing” (by continuing to be exploited or by contributing in a way that generates no response and no real change).

Understanding neoliberalism as a political formation – rather than an ontological condition – is to insist, by contrast, that there is no winning in losing and that therefore the “neoliberal status quo” can be challenged only by turning the status quo’s winners into losers, through redistribution or through the abolition of the system that produces winners and losers in the first place.¹⁵⁷ As with Clune’s book, however, this kind of political critique is secondary to what seems to be a more fundamental problem with Smith and Huehls’s account: in making the case that certain types of literature can have an impact categorically distinct from, yet somehow still relevant to, political ideology, post-critical texts like these leave us, once again, with an irresolvable tension. If these “impersonal” feelings and “ontological” meanings truly cannot be reduced to ideological propositions about neoliberalism, it’s hard to see how they could “suggest alternatives” to it.¹⁵⁸ If, conversely, they can “move, change, and reconfigure the world” in this way, then it’s hard to see why these interventions cannot simply be described as versions of ideological critique, albeit critiques that seem to overlook the power and potential of class struggle, the dialectical option omitted from Huehl’s account of the “neoliberal circle.”¹⁵⁹

In short, if postcritique can be understood as an “active and purposeful response” to the “increasingly pervasive influence of neoliberalism and economic rationality in recent decades,” as Anker and Felski argue, it can nevertheless also be understood as a “symptom” of that influence, and not because of its “apolitical formalism,” as some critics have suggested, but because of the very way it expresses its “continuing concern with the social and political work of both literature and criticism.”¹⁶⁰ In seeking to “challenge neoliberalism’s dominance” while also embracing (implicitly or explicitly) “post-ideological thought,” these texts end up reproducing neoliberalism’s disavowal of economic and ideological antagonism, including the ideological antagonism implicit in their own provocative efforts to find literary alternatives to “neoliberalism as we know it.”¹⁶¹

I believe such contradictions are worth exploring precisely because I share this goal, as well as the methodological goal of describing “what is special about literature without losing its social and historical dimensions.”¹⁶² Examining “what is special about literature” means, in my account, attending to the unique forms produced by contemporary literary culture, which includes both literature and literary criticism, as well as attending to how these forms emerge in dialogue with previous generations of literary artists and critics. Examining its “social and historical dimensions” means attending to the fact that these dialogues are inevitably bound up with broader developments like the emergence of the neoliberal consensus. Some critics might object, however, that by analyzing literary and critical texts in this way, I am approaching them “in a spirit of … dissection and diagnosis” rather than “dialogue and constructiveness,” and therefore failing to treat them with “respect, care and attention.”¹⁶³ This is, in fact, another common objection to critique itself, a concern based on the assumption that its “paranoid” tone can make both aesthetics and political engagement seem trivial or naïve, undercutting, once again, any attempt to “clarify to larger audiences why anyone should care about literature, art, or philosophy”¹⁶⁴ I find such claims frustrating because they themselves seem contradictory, entangling arguments about “tone,” method, and ideology in a way that makes it possible for critics to express their ideological objections to critique while simultaneously asserting that these objections aren’t simply “critiques of critique.”¹⁶⁵

Still, it’s obviously true that critique’s “ethos, mood, or disposition” can be alienating for some readers and can create the impression that materialist critics sneer at the power of the humanities, at “piecemeal political change,” and at “a willingness to work within, while striving to modify, institutional structures both inside and outside the university.”¹⁶⁶ The best evidence, however, that this impression is mistaken – but also, perhaps, that such critics have made an effort to meet postcritique halfway – can be found in recent defenses of the project of ideological critique by scholars like Crystal Bartolovich, Musa Gurnis, Anna Kornbluh, and George Porter Thomas.¹⁶⁷ Notwithstanding important differences, each of these critics makes a case for the continued relevance of humanities scholarship, and each approaches postcritique in what seems to me to be a non-paranoid “spirit of dialogue and constructiveness.”¹⁶⁸ In his review of Felski’s The Limits of Critique, for example, Thomas notes how her “postcritical reading, with its emphasis on non-human actors acting through transtemporal social networks” is “a problem, because [actor-network theory], like the rest of the current vogue for things, always runs a substantial risk of sliding into reification.”¹⁶⁹ Nevertheless, he concludes by adopting the “generous posture toward the text” advocated by postcritique, writing that “the most powerful thing about The Limits of Critique is Felski’s stinging diagnosis of diagnosis itself. She is right: critique has become reified.”¹⁷⁰ What’s missing, Thomas suggests,

A revitalized, labor-focused version of critique can, in this reading, return “us” to ourselves, as it would reveal what “the simulacrum of radical politics” practiced by most academics merely “occludes”: our own positions “in a discipline increasingly organized as a brutal neoliberal learning factory staffed by impoverished adjuncts and graduate students.”¹⁷² For this reason, a revitalized critique can also help us think about the relationship between academic labor and the labor of those workers, “both inside and outside the university,” who have begun to fight back against neoliberal exploitation and impoverishment.¹⁷³ This is important because, as Anker and Felski write, “scholars have much to learn from engagement with nonacademics,” including the nonacademics (or not-yet academics) who have led these contemporary working-class political movements, from the Fight for $15 among the nation’s fast-food and campus workers; to the 2018 teachers’ strikes in red states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona; to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.¹⁷⁴ The latter, for example, offers a rhetorically powerful “moral vision” of economic justice and an analysis that – while striking some Marxist critics as reductive or naïve – has the benefit of being true: “The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.”¹⁷⁵

The basic premise of this book is that attending to the fact that these conditions have been “formed of and by human action through time” (and can thus be formed differently as well) is crucial to the labor of contemporary literary criticism.¹⁷⁶ That is, if the analysis here is correct, then understanding the literature of neoliberalism requires attending to the different ways that contemporary writers have expressed their conviction, more or less ambivalently, that this dismal neoliberal reality is “not a thing,” but instead a social matrix that can and must be made otherwise.¹⁷⁷ Several of these writers suggest, indeed, that new forms of economic deprivation – from the interventions of the “workfare” state to neoliberal strategies of “accumulation by dispossession” – can also make possible new forms of solidarity, uniting (or potentially uniting): cops, criminals, and the working poor (Richard Price’s Clockers); city employees and welfare-recipients (Sapphire’s Push); and various types of “node”-workers (a student-debt driven cyberwriter, a drone pilot, and a virtual maquiladora worker) on either side of the US-Mexico border (Rivera’s Sleep Dealer).¹⁷⁸ In this sense, paying attention to how these writers represent labor and labor struggle is crucial not just for historicizing these texts but for learning from them as well.

The Chapters

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era begins by exploring texts that articulate the differences, continuities, and historical transition between Reaganite neoliberalism and Clintonian neoliberalism. In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, we are presented with a parody of the rational economic subject, Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street “yuppie” whose violent indifference to the feelings of others serves as a figure for the economic violence of Reaganism.¹⁷⁹ This image of Reagan is diametrically opposed to the image of Clinton created in his speeches and in texts like Joe Klein’s Primary Colors: if Reagan, like Bateman, is unfeeling, Clinton can famously “feel your pain.”¹⁸⁰ And yet, though these texts suggest that the two presidents’ affective relations to the poor are completely different, their policy recommendations turned out to be remarkably similar. Clinton didn’t demonize “welfare queens,” as Reagan did, but he kept his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” granting millions of poor people “structure, meaning, and dignity” by demanding that, in the words of the psycho, they “get a goddamn job.”¹⁸¹

This Clintonian logic, which attaches a therapeutic rationale to right-wing ideals like “personal responsibility” and “choice,” is contested by novels like Richard Price’s Clockers (1992) and Sapphire’s Push (1996), both of which seek to demystify the “workfare” state’s idealization of legal, low-wage work.¹⁸² My main focus in Chapter 1, however, is on Ellis’s “transgressive” contemporary, Mary Gaitskill, whose work underscores the impact of this therapeutic view of social relationships.¹⁸³ Situating her writing in the context of contemporary debates about female masochism, sexual harassment, and campus sex codes, I show how Gaitskill positions herself between those who argue that women’s sexual consent should be understood as coerced, because of gendered asymmetries of power, and those who argue that this consent should be considered free and rational. Gaitskill suggests instead that young women often make irrational choices because they don’t value their own “internal experience of the world.”¹⁸⁴ Such statements reflect the influence of the self-esteem movements that blossomed in the 1980s and ’90s, movements that were controversial to some feminists precisely because they seemed to direct attention to personal development rather than to collective action. We can see how this personalizing logic resolves political conflict in Gaitskill’s novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, in which what could be understood as an ideological disagreement about capitalism – the tension between a left-leaning journalist and a follower of a thinly veiled version of Ayn Rand – proves to be a product of the two women’s failure to come to terms with their emotional experiences.

Chapter 2 begins with a comparison of Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, two writers who embody what – throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s – were competing aesthetic positions, the “realists” versus the “experimentalists.”¹⁸⁵ Focusing on their work and their high-profile debate about literary difficulty, I argue that their mutual commitment to their “community of readers” (as Franzen puts it) and to narratives of “the family gone wrong” (as Marcus puts it) actually points to a shared social vision, a vision in which “community” and “family” values are more important than aesthetic and political antagonisms.¹⁸⁶ Indeed, despite his avowed opposition to literary tradition, Marcus joins Franzen in putting the family, what he calls the “foremost subject matter” in American fiction, at the heart of his work. This focus on the family will also cut across the oppositions central to contemporary American politics, according to which the economic vision in Democrat Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village (1996) should be an alternative to the economic vision in Republican Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family (2005).¹⁸⁷ In both politicians’ books, however, society is constituted by bearers of human capital, which is “replenished” through policies designed not to redistribute wealth but to, in Clinton’s words, “strengthen families.”¹⁸⁸

This same logic, I show, informs the fiction and criticism of writers like Franzen, Marcus, Jeffrey Eugenides, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders, who tend to imagine social relations – including the relationship between authors and their readers – in terms of the family or in terms of collectives that function like families, held together by emotional and ethical bonds, what politicians call “family values.” This domestic turn is figured, in several of these texts, as a revision of both American individualism and postmodern impersonality. I make the case that this triangulating impulse generates a range of formal innovations, from Eugenides’s re-invention of “the marriage plot” (in the 2011 novel by that name) to Marcus’s self-reflexive blending of experimental impersonality and post-postmodern “emotionality” in Notable American Women (2002).¹⁸⁹ By way of contrast, I also show how a very different social vision underwrites the invocation of family in texts by Helena María Viramontes, Sapphire, and Dennis Cooper, who all challenge not only the social conservatism of family-values discourse but also the neoliberal vision of a world of without structural antagonism.

As I suggested above, Richard Powers’s 1998 novel Gain – the main focus of Chapter 3 – symbolically resolves the conflict between transnational corporate “stakeholders” and shareholders.¹⁹⁰ This logic is also key to the novel’s narrative architecture, which puts the reader in the position to see not only the company’s impact on human life but also that no character fully understands this impact. In this way, I argue, the novel reveals what is already implicit in such “non-governmental” movements as “stakeholder activism,” which flourished during the 1990s in response to the rise of transnational corporations and right-wing critiques of the state. These nongovernmental movements imagine a political field structured not by antagonism but by a plurality of interests, whose goals should be to make their needs visible, with the assumption that these needs can be recognized and coordinated in a mutually beneficial way by a government (elected or corporate) that can somehow stand outside this realm of interests. I conclude this chapter by contrasting Gain’s post-political vision, as I call it, with that of Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a novel about a “nomenclature consultant” – a branding expert who comes up with names for new products – hired to rename a small town.¹⁹¹ The novel’s resolution stages a rejection of the impulse to allow profitability to drive governance, and the discordant historical name selected by the protagonist – “Struggle,” the forgotten suggestion of an ex-slave who founded the town – also names the very thing hidden by corporate governance and nongovernmental politics.¹⁹²

In Chapter 4, I shift my focus from the debate over transnational governance to the intertwining debates over free trade and transnational labor. These debates intensified in 1993, when Bill Clinton’s support for the North American Free Trade Agreement put him at odds with American unions and critics concerned about NAFTA’s effects on Mexican farmers, workers, and indigenous populations. Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) seems to participate in this anti-NAFTA discourse, as it depicts a huge wave of Mexican migrants displaced by trade liberalization and driven to southern California in search of work.¹⁹³ Yamashita’s novel explicitly parodies NAFTA, but it nevertheless characterizes the fight over free trade in the same terms as liberal supporters of the agreement, including Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who represents the conflict as a struggle between “zero-sum nationalism” and an emerging network of transnational “enterprise-webs.”¹⁹⁴ Making self-conscious use of the techniques of Latin American magic realism, Yamashita envisions the proliferation of such webs, an “expanding symphony” of those sensitive to transnational complexity.¹⁹⁵ Just as Reich imagines a global free market made up solely of “human capital,” Yamashita imagines a symphony made up solely of conductors, a vision that – like Reich’s – depends on a disavowal of the structural differences (performer vs. conductor, labor vs. capital) that seem to make these collectives possible.¹⁹⁶

Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), meanwhile, suggests that framing the conflicts faced by Mexican migrants as epistemic conflicts is a mistake. His novel imagines an alternative history in which the “Aztex” defeated the Spanish and non-Western cultural and epistemic values have triumphed, but the violence of exploitation remains. However, even as the novel dispels the utopian potential of this new world, it also creates a different type of alternative timeline, a disruption of the linear narrative that opens up precisely because the main character rejects his vision of an alternative history and decides instead to lead a unionization drive with his fellow workers. Thus – like Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008), another speculative borderland text explored in this chapter – Foster’s novel ultimately suggests that the migrant can create the possibility of an “alternative future” by embracing a vision of a world defined by class antagonisms rather than by epistemic conflicts.¹⁹⁷

Finally, in the book’s Afterword, I suggest that the period studied in this book has drawn to a close, as literary liberals have become both less interested in responding to postmodernism and more interested in responding to free-market politics, including the centrist, communitarian version of this politics. To illustrate this shift, I compare texts published on either side of the 2008 financial crisis, the event that helped return the problem of economic inequality to the center of American political discourse. In Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris experiments with a collective first-person narrator, “we,” in order to dramatize the tensions of office life at a struggling advertising agency, tensions that he figures in terms of the oppositions between elitism and egalitarianism and between sincerity and irony.¹⁹⁸ Ferris thematizes, in the novel itself, how he decided against writing an “angry book about work,” and his self-reflexive interest in forging empathetic connections between workers, bosses, readers, and writers makes his novel a quintessential post-postmodern text.¹⁹⁹ Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), by contrast, are precisely the kind of “angry” books about work that Ferris rejects.²⁰⁰ In formally distinct ways, both novels offer a political vision skeptical of centrist liberalism and committed to the irreducibility of class as a source of political and economic conflict.

In this sense, we can say that these and other contemporary writers have reached a conclusion similar to that of Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis (2017), a report published by progressive activists to explain Hillary Clinton‘s defeat in the 2016 presidential election:

From this perspective, then, “the mainstream Democratic storyline of victims without victimizers lacks both plausibility and passion.”²⁰² This convergence – this shared sense among authors and activists that the Clintonian “storyline” no longer resonates – is important precisely because storytelling has always been crucial to the neoliberal project. As Janice Peck argues, neoliberal policies could never have been “imposed unilaterally by the capitalist class”: “Whether in its ‘monetarist’ guise under Ronald Reagan or its ‘New Liberal’ incarnation under Bill Clinton,” this political project has always depended on crafting a compelling “narrative” of US economic decline and rebirth and “ideological practices that legitimize a specific system of social relations and the forms of subjectivity amenable to it.”²⁰³ Thus, as the mainstream neoliberal narrative has lost credibility, American voters have turned increasingly to new storylines and new social visions, including Donald J. Trump‘s race-baiting, faux-populist, “neoliberalism on steroids.”²⁰⁴ This development (and this analysis of it) has made creating a “clear alternative to the ideological rot of Trumpism” seem urgent, but it has also made it possible to imagine an electorally significant “alternative” that is not simply yet another version of pro-business liberalism.²⁰⁵

As of December 2020, it appears that the Democratic Party is still not yet ready to offer a “racially diverse and morally robust,” “progressive populism.”²⁰⁶ Joe Biden’s primary and general election victories suggest that the “obituary” for “unambitious corporate centrism … has been written too soon,” and political scientists like Michael Lind have cast doubt on the more recent progressive hope that “the Great Pandemic is likely to lead to a new era of pro-worker policy.”²⁰⁷ Meanwhile, writing in the wake of the nationwide protests touched off by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes that

Whether or not these allegiances to the past actually translate into the left’s gloomiest prophecies about the future – namely, that a Biden presidency “will produce the rise of someone much worse” than Trump – it seems likely that the gap “between working-class Americans and the rich and powerful” will continue to increase.²⁰⁹ If that is true, however, it seems just as likely that contemporary writers and activists will continue to respond with stories of working-class solidarity and agency, ideological narratives and forms of subjectivity that will resonate – culturally and perhaps even politically – in ways they haven’t in decades.