The Microeconomic Mode

Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics

Jane Elliott

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547512
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From The Road to Game of Thrones, across works as seemingly different as Gone Girl and Saw, literature, film, and television have become obsessed with the intersection of survival and choice. When the trapped rock-climber hero of 127 Hours is confronted with self-amputation or death, it is only a particularly blunt example of an omnipresent set-up. In real-life settings or fantastical games, protagonists find themselves confronting extreme scenarios with life-or-death consequences, forced to make torturous either-or choices in stripped-down, brutally stark environments.

Jane Elliott identifies and analyzes this new and distinctive aesthetic phenomenon, which she calls "the microeconomic mode." Through close readings of its narratives, tropes, and concepts, she traces the implicit theoretical and political claims conveyed by this combination of abstraction and extremity. In the microeconomic mode, humans isolated from any forms of social organization operate within a mini-economy of costs and benefits, gains and losses, measured in the currency of life. Elliott reads the key concepts that emerge from this aesthetic—life-interest, sovereign capture, and binary life—in relation to biopolitics and natural law theory, becoming and the control society, and primitive accumulation in racial capitalism. The microeconomic mode interrogates the destruction of the liberal political subject, but what it leaves in its place is as disturbing as it is radically new. Going beyond the question of neoliberalism in literature, The Microeconomic Mode combines revelatory close readings of key literary and popular texts with significant theoretical interventions to identify how an aesthetics of choice has reshaped our contemporary understanding of what it means to be human.

PART I

Political Subjectivity

Chapter One

LIVE MODELS

In their best-seller SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (2009), Chicago School economist Stephen Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner describe a study that analyzed the way in which young African American women in the poorest part of Chicago conducted the business of prostitution.1 In their account, the very elements that constrain these women’s choices become the means to indicate how cannily they manage to identify and act in their own best interests. We learn that for these young women, the choices for earning money are cutting hair, selling drugs, and selling sex, and we are offered an explanation of why they are right that prostitution is the best option among these—but why they only have these options and how that situation might be altered is a nonissue. The specific elements of their lives that do allow recoding in the register of interest become in the process stripped of their experiential and affective specificity. The question of whether to let men go without condoms in order to make a few more dollars per trick appears as a neutral, quantitative act of cost–benefit analysis—no different from the choice between taking the bus or the subway. Although Levitt and Dubner clearly expect the prostitutes’ milieu to be unfamiliar and exotic to their readers, the point of the story is in fact how inconsequential the specifics of this world really are. What the study actually proves, it turns out, is that pricing structures work in the same predictable, logical way even when created by poor and uneducated prostitutes.

This is obviously a flawed account, ripe for any number of Left critiques, but I want instead to attend to its status as a particular type of representation—extracted from context, stripped down, and distilled. Only the elements that can be registered in the conceptual vocabulary of the microeconomic imagination are included, but this process of abstraction generates a sense that each anecdote reflects universal truths of human behavior. Precisely because the account deliberately excludes some data and reframes the rest in the language of individual interests and choices, it is presented as crystalline and complete, as producing no remainder and requiring no comparison to its denser and more opaque original. And while we might argue that the study ignores crucial processes of social determination, from the perspective of the microeconomic imagination that missing context is simply the product of other vectors of individual choice that happen not to be the subject of study in this instance. That is, the milieu in which the prostitutes encounter these choices appears not a register and effect of structural violence, but rather as the aggregate of an infinite number of individual decisions regarding housing, employment, child-rearing, and so on. From a single toothpaste purchase to large-scale events like presidential elections, the microeconomic imagination can render any event or system in the terms of individual choices based on prospective cost–benefit analysis; the only difference with complex events involving masses of people is the increased difficulty in tracing precisely how the cumulative effects of countless acts of individual choice create a given outcome. Redescribing dynamics large and small in the terms of individual interest in this way creates a peculiar and specific relationship between the description and what is being described. In the microeconomic imagination, representations offer expressly schematic, abstracted accounts of human experience, which always reduce to the same handful of principles but nevertheless purport to leave nothing of significance out.

In this chapter I begin to trace the relationship between this imagination and some of the dominant genres in the present. Each of the texts I examine—Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001); the film 127 Hours (2010); and a 2006 episode of the television series House focused on a Hurricane Katrina survivor—center on a confrontation between the natural environment and the most basic human requirements for self-preservation.2 In foregrounding interests that arise from the sheer fact of embodied consciousness, these works engage the imagination of interest as a facet of our basic existence as living human beings.3 Because characters’ experience of interest unfolds as a result of a direct struggle with the natural environment, these works envision human behavior extracted from the complexity of contemporaneous social existence. Choices unfold within tightly defined spheres of truncated causality that render both personal and collective history inconsequential and irrelevant. Underprovisioning is these texts’ defining formal feature, as well as the primary threat faced by their protagonists. The same paucity of moving parts that activates the characters’ vociferous interest in self-preservation—what I call life-interest—also distills interest, choice, and action into simple, self-evident vectors whose interactions unfold with schematic clarity. The result is a combination of abstraction and extremity on the level of both form and content—that is, the combination that I argue defines the microeconomic mode.

In producing this effect, the texts I analyze here rely on genres that combine an emphasis on threats to life with a focus on distilled, contracted worlds, most crucially the castaway, survival, and postapocalyptic genres. From Survivor (2000 to the present) to Big Brother (2000 to the present), from Lost (2004–2010) to 28 Days Later (2002), revised and recombined versions of these genres have had a striking resurgence in the twenty-first century. I argue that the prominence and prevalence of such works must be understood in relation to an ongoing shift in their generic conventions. Customarily, these genres operate by offering a tellingly minimized model world in place of contemporaneous society as it would ordinarily be experienced; the model’s reduction of complexity and shrinking of scale serves to shed light on the more complicated and variegated social landscape it has replaced. In what I call live models, this implicit comparison to a larger social field disappears, and we are instead asked to imagine that the contemporaneous world we inhabit possesses the reductive qualities of a model. I argue that this shift bestows on the models in question a strange quality of live-ness, a sense of intensified and exceptional immediacy that registers through the contravening of generic expectations. The result of this combination of intensity, immediacy, and relentless threat to life is an aesthetic form that borders on the assaultive. To be inside a live model is to confront the experience of interest in its starkest, most insistent, and least supportable form.

I read the creation and dissemination of the live model as an attempt to think on the level of form an emerging definition of human being, one in which the experience of action in one’s own best interest is an element of life itself. This view of the subject of interest hinges on the conception of humans as inevitably self-preserving entities. Because of our compulsive interest in life, we can be presented as beings who are in essence interested; interest in life becomes indistinguishable from life as a being who acts from interest. In the works I analyze in the following, this conception of self-preservation serves as a means to document the transformation of the subject of interest from an analytic constant into an inescapable form of individual self-understanding. Rather than exposing interest as merely a convenient, discursive construction or as one ideological mystification among many—as one might expect from the previous history of Left aesthetics—these works explore and elaborate the concept of interest as an intrinsic quality of human being itself. They envision what transpires when interest is experienced, consciously and in real time, as the inevitable motivation that the microeconomic imagination understands it to be. I trace this aesthetic form in two directions. First, I map the live model as a genre and consider the account of the subject encoded in its conventions via readings of 127 Hours, The Road, and Life of Pi. Second, I extend this thinking through the House episode to suggest the way in which the live model helps us understand the emergence of a version of political subjectivity in which human life and interest become forcibly fused. Ultimately, I suggest that life-interest requires us to expand our understanding of the contemporary politics of life itself.

Castaway, desert island, and other survival tales are customarily defined by subtraction. Whether characters wash up on a desert island, attempt to crawl down a mountain with a broken leg, or wake to the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, they find themselves stripped of entrenched forms of human collectivity as they would ordinarily experience them.4 In these works, the world is reduced to a subset or remainder of the full range of the behaviors, persons, and objects that would usually make up daily existence for characters or readers as selected by the logic of a realist plot.5 Not only is the world that results bounded by geographic or temporal fissures from the everyday but it also appears as a self-contained stand-in for the full complexity of contemporaneous existence. In Lord of the Flies (1954), we read the events on the island in a particular way because the island has replaced the world as the protagonists would usually experience it. However, precisely because the castaway island constitutes a reduced and abstracted subset of the world at large, it begs comparison with the full-sized version for which it substitutes.6 The island appears as a distilled version—a model—that refers us to that which it has replaced. This reduction process serves as an organizing principle of characters’ experience in a fashion quite distinct from other forms of social allegory. Both Oliver Twist (1839) and Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) feature characters that represent identifiable social types, but only in the latter is this reduction of the world to a minimal collection of people an acknowledged thematic and plot point. In that sense—and in contrast to realist social allegory in general—what these genres allegorize is the process of modeling itself. They dramatize the substitution of a tellingly and overtly simplified copy for an infinitely more complicated original.

When this process emphasizes a pleasingly miniaturized completeness—Swiss Family Robinson (1812) would be the quintessential example here—the model provides a concrete finitude necessarily lacking in the overwhelming complexity of the world at large. This dollhouse effect turns the model into a sort of fetish, a means of covering over any lack in the social reality being modeled. In other cases we find the reverse process, and the model reveals something hidden in and by the persistent facticity and plenitude of the original. In The Road Warrior (1981), for instance, a near-future war of scarcity sheds new light on the present-day oil economy, while in Lord of the Flies young boys’ violent behavior exposes the false promises of civilization. In such models, what is revealed is something about contemporaneous social organization only visible when many of its elements are removed or repurposed; something about human nature masked by or unaccounted for within society as we know it; or, most commonly, some combination of the two. In each case, the distillation of the world illuminates fundamentals invisible in the elaborateness and pressing materiality of ordinary experience. The pedagogical power of the model arises from its difference from the original, but it is because of the immersive intricacy of the original that the model is instructive.

In texts in the microeconomic mode, this dialectic collapses and the model comes to appear complete on its own. We can see this transformation at work if we compare a recent survival tale, the film 127 Hours, to the survival tales that circulated when the form last had its heyday as subgenre of American literary naturalism. Based on a memoir entitled Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004), the film centers on the true tale of rock climber Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), who was trapped in a slot canyon when his arm became wedged between a falling boulder and the canyon wall.7 The significant objects contained in the canyon include only Aron himself, the scanty and insufficient contents of his backpack, and the discrete number of hours that unfold as his body begins to expire. This radically minimal quality made the film appear a virtuoso effort to critics, who celebrated filmmaker Danny Boyle and actor James Franco for making a compelling story out of a man who interacts with no one, can hardly move, and battles an antagonist lodged in his own body.8 What the film manages to do without, in effect, are all the typicalities of individual character and social circumstance that customarily function as the building blocks of mainstream cinema. Some of Aron’s personal history appears in flashbacks, but it isn’t presented as qualifying or shaping the choice that confronts him. The few elements with causal significance in the canyon—the trapped arm, the lack of food and water, the number of hours—concern Aron’s sheer existence as a conscious mind that lives in a body with certain inborn needs and capacities. It is difficult to imagine any human being with this sort of body experiencing Aron’s choice very differently, whatever the specifics of his or her personal psychology or place in the social order.

Yet this vision of pure human will pitched against unyielding natural forces reads very differently than in the survival tales that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. When naturalist texts stage a confrontation between human being and the forces of nature, they do so to interrogate the way in which the relationship between the natural and the social determines an individual’s options and ultimate trajectory—either through a civilization process that has left the human animal unprepared for the extremities of nature or through the interaction of Darwinian social forces that have the force of natural law. Even in the “man versus nature” tales once so ubiquitous in high school English classes, the signal confrontation is triangulated through questions of civilization: what “man” has lost in the process of civilization and what he would need to know in order to correct for absent animal instinct. While we may read Aron’s experience in 127 Hours as revealing something essential about human being, this revelation doesn’t in turn illuminate the key dynamics of any existing forms of social organization or the cost of the civilizing process; there is no sense that someone with better knowledge of the wild or more powerful animal instincts would fare better or differently than Aron. Instead, what is illuminated in the canyon is precisely the irrelevance of any such triangulation. Aron’s action appears detached from any external processes that would render it something more than an expression of sheer individual choice. The knowledge the model provides is by definition inapplicable to any understanding of human behavior as it relates to social embeddedness; in a sense, this inapplicability is exactly what is being modeled.

This shift in the import of the model creates an aesthetic effect in its own right. As I have suggested, modeling genres usually represent a contracted world that in turn represents something submerged in or masked by the concrete totality of daily life.9 In 127 Hours, this second-order effect disappears. The perception of condensation that accompanies the modeling impulse persists, but its sense of standing in for something larger or more elaborate disappears. The canyon has all the bounded simplicity of a model, but it refers to nothing larger than itself. When the model lacks an external referent in this way, it makes the same claims to direct reference as the rest of the character’s represented experience, despite still signifying as unusually restricted and condensed. As a result, the model becomes conspicuous as a realm of extraordinary subtraction and contraction, as a peculiarly compressed and minimal arena in which protagonists find themselves contained. The effect is something akin to witnessing a doll come to life. The model world is still in the shape of a miniature, toy-size version, but it lacks the simplified secondariness that usually defines modeling genres; instead, it hums with the same vitality and presence as everything around it. In fact, given the extremity of Aron’s experiences, we might say the model—like the uncanny doll—conveys an excessive and unsettling degree of live-ness.10 This live-ness makes an implicit argument regarding the triumph of the model, but it is an argument about the shape of reality rather than the power of representation. It’s not that the map mimics the completeness of the territory, in dollhouse fashion, or that its simulated reality takes the place of the territory, in postmodern fashion; rather, we encounter a territory that is itself exactly map-shaped. The result is what I call a live model: a genre whose form encodes a claim about the comprehensive, undeniable reality of a profoundly abstracted world.

In this light, the gradual emergence of the live model since the late 1990s might be read as the formal register of the ongoing ascendancy of the mic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Political Subjectivity
• Part II: Sovereignty
• Part III: Thriving
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index