Reading Capitalist Realism the New American Canon the Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Reading Capitalist Realism The New American Canon The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture samuel cohen , series editor Reading Capitalist Realism Edited by alison shonkwiler & leigh claire la berge University of Iowa Press Iowa City University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2014 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in the United States of America Design by Omega Clay No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-60938-234-6, 1-60938-234-X (pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-60938-263-6, 1-60938-263-3 (ebk.) LCCN: 2013952707 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii alison shonkwiler & leigh claire la berge Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism 1 jodi dean and mark fisher We Can’t Afford to Be Realists: A Conversation 26 Part I Novelistic Realisms andrew hoberek Adultery, Crisis, Contract 41 alissa g. karl Things Break Apart: James Kelman, Ali Smith, and the Neoliberal Novel 64 phillip e. wegner Things As They Were or Are: On Russell Banks’s Global Realisms 89 Part II Genres of Mediation leigh claire la berge Capitalist Realism and Serial Form: The Fifth Season of The Wire 115 j. d. connor Like Some Dummy Corporation You Just Move around the Board: Contemporary Hollywood Production in Virtual Time and Space 140 c a r e n i r r Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Realism in William T. Vollmann’s Poor People 177 Part III After and Against Representation michael w. clune Beyond Realism 195 timothy bewes Capitalism and Reification: The Logic of the Instance 213 joshua clover Communist Realism 242 richard dienst Afterword: Unreal Criticism 248 Contributors 255 Index 259 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank A. K. Summers for wit and argument, Franklin Summers for the point of view of Franklin Summers, Elizabeth Free- man for unstinting intellectual generosity, series editor Samuel Cohen for enthusiasm and early support, Andrew Hoberek for timely coun- sel, two manuscript readers for key interventions, and editor Elisabeth Chretien for her patient assistance in guiding this book through publi- cation. —A. S. Like my co-editor, and for identical reasons, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers from the University of Iowa Press, together with Samuel Cohen and Elisabeth Chretien. I would also like to thank the Affective Publics group at The University of Chicago, my wonderful New Faculty Speaker Series colleagues at Saint Mary’s University and Dalhousie University, and finally, Dehlia Hannah, for using the phrase “capitalist realism” in jest before I knew it was real. —L. C. L. Reading Capitalist Realism Introduction A Theory of Capitalist Realism alison shonkwiler & leigh claire la berge Capitalist realism is both an old and a new concept for literary stud- ies. Realism, after all, has long been considered the aesthetic mode most intimate to capitalism. It is this intimacy that in the view of its admirers generates realism’s depth and incisiveness of critique. It is what in the equally compelling view of its detractors fatally compro- mises the realist project, producing the very subjects and objects that the mode claims to document. Where literary critics on both sides would most likely agree, however, is on the redundancy of the prefix “capitalist.” All realism is already capitalist. Meanwhile, in the political and economic realm the term “realism” has had an altogether different career. The exhortation to “be realistic” is now part of the ideological enforcement process of neo- liberalism. The appeal to the logic of fiscal “common sense,” has been amplified into the moral urgency of reducing spending and trimming deficits for entire economies. As politicians pursue austerity in the name of getting one’s household in order, “realism” becomes a one- sided moral regime that focuses on reduction on the social side of the ledger while ignoring excesses of growth on the corporate and military side. Given that the realist imperative ignores precisely the debt expansion and financial machinations on which the past four decades of capitalist accumulation have depended, one could not be blamed for the suspicion that any political call to fiscal realism is an ideologically dubious one. Slavoj Žižek once quipped that the fan- tasy of every capitalist is to have capitalism without capitalism: For me, monopoly control of territory! For everyone else, free trade and open markets. For me, guaranteed profits! For everyone else, the as- sumption of risk.1 And yet the presence of a realistic common sense 2 alison shonkwiler & leigh claire la berge remains powerful and for many, including on the left, politically diffi- cult to resist, even if the result were to be the veritable collapse of the social sphere. Whenever “realism” is defined as that which is measurable within a system of capitalist equivalence, then everything not measurable according to this standard becomes, by simple definition, unaffordable and unrealistic. The term “capitalist realism” has been used to describe the contemporary condition in which all social and political possibility is seemingly bound up in the economic status quo. Mark Fisher, in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, uses the term to characterize “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”2 Fisher’s claim that “capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself” (4), thus refers to the abovementioned expansion of realism beyond any particular ideological precinct to become, es- sentially, the sum of all ideology of the present. Realism, as described by Fisher, is not a representational mode or aesthetic. It is instead a general ideological formation in which capitalism is the most real of our horizons, the market-dominant present that forms the limits of our imaginaries. Thus Fisher argues, echoing similar statements from Fredric Jameson and Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Capitalist realism, in our view, is a theoretical concept that de- mands further elaboration. The concept’s potential lies in its ability both to address the limitations of postmodernism and to connect the postmodern (or post-postmodern, such as it may be) more powerfully to the features of our contemporary political economic moment. The aim of this volume is to open up the term in its political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions while accepting the larger intention of Fish- er’s project: to provide a language and terminology for what comes after a Jamesonian critique at its most totalizing, suffocating, and yet unassailably correct. One example suffices to remind us of the tone and sense of finality of Jameson’s 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”: “The new expansion of multina- tional capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapi- introduction 3 talist enclaves, Nature and the Unconscious, which offered footholds for critical effectivity. This whole extraordinarily demoralizing and depressing global space is the “moment of truth” of postmodernism.”3 Capitalist realism presumes that things have gotten worse. A quarter of a century further into the dialectic of financialization and commodification, capitalism has intensified its claim on its estab- lished terrain and further foreclosed upon imaginable alternatives. A full tour through the history of the term would include stops in art and literary criticism as well as through the Cold War discourse of Realpolitik and the ways in which international political pragma- tism has been used to justify the domestic neoliberal “practicalities” of fiscal austerity, pension restructuring, privatization, and union suppression.4 We focus here on the most contemporary resonances. We write this Introduction in the wake of the most substantial economic crisis to visit the capitalist world-system in some eighty years. Even before the subprime mortgage crisis, the bank bailouts, and the rise of protest movements on the right and left, critics and journal- ists were calling attention to the inequities and unevennesses of the global neoliberal regime.5 We are now witnessing a flourishing across different media of realisms attentive to these conditions: in literature, in television and film, and in the vast amount of reportage and documentary work produced in response to the financial crisis itself. Perhaps the most basic question we begin with is whether our current forms of representation are equipped to comprehend and historicize what Ernst Mandel was one of the first to call late capitalism and what David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, among others, have argued is a new historical phase of accumulation: the roughly forty-year period in which, as Arrighi claims, “something fundamental seems to have changed in the way capitalism works.”6 Harvey and Arrighi both date this change to the early 1970s. Har- vey argues that the “crisis” of overaccumulation of this period was never resolved but instead displaced through financial reorganization in a series of temporal

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