Royal Palms: exploring 1980s neoliberal characterisation through Foucauldian power and discourse
Ben Stone BA, Grad Dip Ed
Principal supervisor: Dr. Rohan Wilson Secondary supervisor: Dr. Linda Graham
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of Master of Philosophy
School of Creative Writing, Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology 2019
1 | Page DECLARATION OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP
The work in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signature: ______QUT Verified Signature ______
Date: 10th August 2019
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A big thanks to my supervisors Dr. Rohan Wilson and Dr. Linda Graham. Thanks also to Dr. Lucie Crawford and Jen Engle, Creative Industries Librarian Ellen Thompson, Dr. Ella Jeffery, my beautiful wife Georgie and our inspiring Sol. As this thesis examines ascendant neoliberalism in terms of discourse and power, I would also like to acknowledge its affiliated leaders gambling our world for short term gain as extinction rates soar and climate-change tipping points near. Clearly, a smarter and more humane discourse and its leaders are needed and fast.
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KEYWORDS AND ABSTRACT
Keywords creative writing, creative practice-led research, literary fiction, neoliberalism, Foucauldian discourse, Royal Palms, Wall Street, American Psycho, blank fiction, 1980s, junket, decentred [decentered] subject, characterisation, Nick Chater, discursive formations, power relations, statements, interpellation, normalisation, poststructuralism, Gold Coast, Australia
Abstract
This practice-led novel and exegesis investigates the characterisations of a 1980s Wall Street junket on Queensland’s Gold Coast in terms of Foucauldian power and discourse. Problematising the subject’s decentred ontology implied by Kahneman (2011), Chater (2018) and Harari (2017), Michel Foucault’s theories are adapted to illustrate characterisation as a site of discursive interpellation and contest in neoliberal fiction. To inform my practice, case studies of American Psycho (Ellis, 1991) and Wall Street (Lipper, 1988; O. Stone & Weiser, 1987) are conducted. Reflecting 1980s literary discourse, Elizabeth Young’s postmodernist concept of ‘blank fiction’ is correlated to Foucault’s theories implying the decentred subject. Decentred, the subject as a scape of discursive practice reveals the struggle between personal discourse and the organisational power of corporations. This has implications not only for character arcs and narrative tension, but provides a space where humanism and organisational agency can be reconciled as the ontology of the self. This poststructural approach to fictionalising 1980s Wall Street subculture constituting and being constituted by neoliberal discourse and individuals is intended as a complementary tool to humanism-centred characterisation, aiming to reconcile the subject between contemporary scientific findings and post-Enlightenment being.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1 EXEGESIS KEYWORDS AND ABSTRACT ...... 4 1.1 INTRODUCTION ...... 7 1.1.1 – Background and context ...... 7 1.1.2 – The posthumanism of decentred subjects ...... 8 1.1.3 – The humanist subject as discursive interpellation? ...... 10 1.1.4 – Theoretical framework and exegetical question ...... 11 1.1.5 – My practice ‘Royal Palms’ ...... 12 1.1.6 – Case-studies of neoliberal fiction set in the 1980s as discourse ...... 14 1.1.7 – Conceptual Framework ...... 16 1.2 METHODOLOGY ...... 17 1.2.1 – Practice-led research as iterative ‘shift in thought’ ...... 17 1.3 LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 18 1.3.1 – Scope and reference criteria ...... 18 1.3.2 – Evidence for the character as decentred subject? ...... 19 1.3.3 – The neoliberal fiction of Wall Street and American Psycho ...... 21 1.3.4 – Literary Foucauldian discourse analysis ...... 23 1.4 CASE STUDIES ...... 25 1.4.1 WALL STREET ...... 25 1.4.1.1 – The abyss of organisational interpellation ...... 25 1.4.1.2 – Normalisation as the organisational power of discourse ...... 25 1.4.1.3 – Narrative tension as personal discourse versus organisational power ...... 27 1.4.1.4 – Subjective conflict within the objectifications of discourse ...... 30 1.4.2 AMERICAN PSYCHO ...... 31 1.4.2.1 – Ellis’ novel in context ...... 31 1.4.2.2 – Foucauldian power as post-truth simulacrum ...... 32 1.4.2.3 – Normalisation to neoliberalism’s postmodernism ...... 33 1.4.2.4 – Postmodern blankness as decentred subjectivity ...... 35 1.4.2.5 – Double-voicing as decentred corporate aphasia ...... 36 1.4.2.6 – The psychopathy of blank statements in decentred subjectification ...... 37 1.5 CONCLUSION ...... 40 1.5.1 – Exegetical questions answered ...... 40 1.5.2 – In summary and future research possibilities ...... 42
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PART 2 PRACTICE 2.1 Royal Palms: a neoliberal novel ...... 45 2.2 Novel reflection ...... 76 2.2.1 – The humanism of discourse ...... 76 2.2.2 – Literary devices centring discourse as contesting subject-positions...... 77 2.2.3 – In summary ...... 78 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 80
PART 3 APPENDIX 3.1 KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS ...... 89 3.2 METHODOLOGY – further discussion ...... 92 3.2.1 – Isolating tools as method from Foucauldian discourse theory ...... 92 3.2.2 – Graham’s Foucauldian discourse method ...... 93 3.3 LITERATURE REVIEW – further discussion ...... 96 3.3.1 – The decentring of the subject-as-schism ...... 96 3.3.2 – Neoliberalism in context ...... 97 3.3.3 – Young’s blank fiction and postmodernism ...... 99 3.3.4 – Foucauldian discourse in context ...... 101 3.3.5 – Foucault’s unlikely neoliberalism as subject-less anti-humanism ...... 102 3.4 WALL STREET CASE STUDY – further analysis ...... 103 3.4.1 – Disciplinary power and biopower in neoliberal Wall Street discourse ...... 103 3.4.2 – Foucauldian statements as the constitution of neoliberal truths and reality ...... 105 3.5 AMERICAN PSYCHO CASE STUDY – further analysis ...... 108 3.5.1 – Statements as incidentally serious speech acts ...... 108 3.5.2 – The failure of subject-less neoliberalism in Marcuse’s Great Refusal ...... 109 3.5.3 – Postmodern blankness as the parrhesia of repressive desublimation ...... 111 3.5.4 – Double-voicing and discursive rules of formation ...... 112
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PART 1 – EXEGESIS
EPIGRAPH: ‘We become the words we use.’ Richard Flanagan (2019)
KEY QUESTION: What does Foucauldian power and discourse reveal about the subjects of neoliberal fiction set in the 1980s? And how can their decentred ontology be used as a tool for characterisation?
1.1 INTRODUCTION
1.1.1 Background and context
This practice-led research project began with an anecdote that led to a novel. An American corporate junket taking over a resort on Australia’s Gold Coast in the mid-1980s with no expenses spared; a luxury yacht craned into the swimming pool and mini ski-slopes snow-machined on the tennis courts. Like an announcement of the globalising neoliberal era in Australia, my practice was attracted to the possibility of describing organisational being in the foundations of neoliberalism’s arc of which we are still traversing. In many ways, ‘Royal Palms’, the practical component here, continues my exploration of neoliberal corporate characterisation I began in my first novel, Sex and Death in Sigatoka (2014). In that story, a finance ‘agent’ on the run in more ways than one during the fallout of the 2007-2009 financial crisis has (perhaps) suffered a psychotic break and ‘interprets’ the world and his dog-whistled nationalism through a corporate subjectivity to devastating ends. While ‘Royal Palms’ is less abstract and poststructural1, the ethical aphasia and wild dialogic-behavioural parameters of apparent 1980s Wall Street standard operating procedure provides me with an opportunity to explore this kind of character in subcultural terms. Furthermore, as I progressed in my practice, I began to realise this story also enables a platform for a little explored moment in Australia and Queensland’s postmodern era that might both complement and contrast localised fiction from the time such as Andrew McGahn’s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995). Retracing this corporate character-type back to the 1980s where it might appear in a raw form post the more Keynesian 1970s but before 1987’s Black Monday Crash, my research centred on seminal fiction from the period like Wall Street (1988; 1987) and American Psycho (1991), the case studies of Part 1.4. Contextualising primary sources like Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker (1989), Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Frank Partnoy’s F.I.A.S.C.O. (2009) also provides a baseline for behavioural and dialogic
1 Poststructural in as far as its narrative and central character-arc relies on reader-interpretation.
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parameters for my characters, while the concept of ‘discourse’ drew me to the power relations and their discursive formations of 1980s neoliberalism in the socio-economics of Reagan, Thatcher and Pinochet, and in turn, the underlying academia of Buchanan (1962, 1975/1999), Friedman (1994) and Hayek (1944/2006), etc, of the Mont Perelin Society (MacLean, 2017, p. 195).
1.1.2 The posthumanism of decentred subjects
While my initial concept of ‘Royal Palms’ seemed straightforward enough, there was a twist in the timing of this novel. As I began to research and write about Wall Street’s 1980s subculture, my wider reading including Kahneman (2011), Chater (2018), Lewis (2013), Tegmark (2017) and Harari (2017) hinted at a growing body of empirical evidence demonstrating that the human subject could, or should, be reconsidered decentred. As an arc of its own extending since at least Nietzsche (1990) and Freud (1917), this is not firstly the post or pre-human decentred subject of ‘the Monstrous, the Uncanny, the Marginal and the Other’ (E. Graham, 2002, p. 59), and neither a primary consequence of ‘how the human shrinks from the…new technocultural order’ (Callus & Herbrechter as cited in Mousely, 2011, p. 149), though such may be inseparable. Rather, ‘decentred’ here indicates that what’s been intuited since the Enlightenment as the ‘transcendental subject’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 55) is in fact discursive construction. Social constructionism as a concept appears relatively friendless in 2019, but as my project evolved and recent developments in science entered my wider reading, I had to wonder if the apparent readymade humanism in my practice – a mode of writing where the hard-problem of conscious agency is not considered a problem, or considered at all – was in fact translatable to Foucault’s concept of ‘discourse’. Interpretable as the organisational or at least interactional process of subject-positioned agents objectifying ‘reality’ in their ‘power’ oriented dealings with it, the implications of discourse theory are unflattering. A particularly uncomfortable all the way to hated possibility is that, not only subjects in the real are decentred – that is, not at the centre of their intentionality – but that writers themselves resemble their characters in acting and being driven by ideas of reality that, like their subjectification, are constituted. But as empirical research is revealing , the replacement of ‘God’ with the ‘recent invention’ of ‘Man’ at the centre of intentionality (Foucault, 1970/2002, p. XXV), appears to have only been a stop along the way towards a feasible ontology of being and its characterisation. This is because, as historian Yuval Harari suggests, the ‘life-sciences’ are finding that the ‘self’ as subject ‘is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money’ (2017, p. 237). But if the subject in the real and corresponding fiction is an ‘imaginary story’ whom, a priori, is unaware of being imagined, who or rather what is doing the imagining? Does a given subject in an organisational setting form and act randomly in the real as much as through authorial intent? Beneath the tropes and genre clichés of evil bankers and psychopathic organisations, what, I started to consider, is the
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dialogic mechanism that underwrites ‘Fuck this and fuck that! Shit here and shit there!’ as ‘the language of Wall Street’? (Belfort, 2013, p. 52). How does a straight-laced discipline like investment banking in the 1970s suddenly become one where ‘virtually every drug imaginable lined the pockets of my young stockbrokers’, whom could be found ‘rutting away under desks, in bathroom stalls, in coat closets, in the underground parking garage, and, of course, the building’s glass elevator’ (ibid 2013, p. 31)? What underwrites socio- psychological observations like ‘many of the attitudes people adopt and the actions they execute when acting as corporate operatives [in the neoliberal era] can be characterized as psychopathic’? (Hare quoted in Bakan, 2004, p. 56, parenthesis mine). Writing subcultural characters in my practice like Paula and her nemesis Ricky, I had to consider: are these people on Wall Street because they are essentially bad or flawed? That is, should psychopathy or other character-disorders be considered the basis of their intentionalities? Such working questions eventually led to the central thesis of this project, where discourse as the mechanism of organisational power can be demonstrated constituting decentred subjects as they constitute their subculture in turn. Discourse as a concept is necessary, I began to realise, because while behaviouralist Nick Chater finds that subjective ‘beliefs, values, emotions and other mental traits are…as tangled, self- contradictory and incompletely spelled out as’ fiction, they’re not deterministic nor random either. Rather, as a response to how in a ‘very concrete sense…characters are all fictional, including our own’, where inconsistency ‘and sparseness are not just characteristics of fiction’ but ‘the hallmarks of mental life’ (2018, p. 34) the concept of discourse, I suggest, bridges the constituting and constituted ontology of the decentred subject as organisational being. While empirical developments in the epistemology and consequent ontology of the subject explored by Chater and others reflect a scientific coming of age2, the decentred subject in literature was anticipated by Silvio Gaggi’s case studies of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1993) in From Text to Hypertext (1997a). Applying the theories of Michel Foucault (1972) and his teacher Louis Althusser (2001a), Gaggi demonstrates how both the subject and reader can be decentred through literary device (Gaggi, 1997b, pp. 35–66). In many ways, Gaggi’s observation of Althusserian interpellation of the subject by ideology – what Foucault extended through his ‘practice turn’3 reframing Marxist ideology as blank power (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014) – now appears in the process of being extrapolated by the empirical sciences to the subject as decentred by default.
2 Though beyond the scope of this project, empirical developments regarding the human subject coincides with the rise of artificial agency and some form of subjectivity-as-interpellation in ‘machine learners’ that we’re beginning to share our practices, organisations, relationships, communities and even arts with. OpenAI’s GPT2 ‘text generator’ is a case in point (Hern, 2019).
3 According to Bacchi and Bonham, ‘practice turn’ is arguably a more accurate description than ‘linguistic turn’ to represent Foucault’s development of his theories of discourse.
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To this end, characterising my protagonist Paula in my practice as a decentred subject required me to consider the ‘rules of formation’ of her discursive practice. As Foucault states, within any subculture ‘everything is never said’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 118). This concept reflects the societal conditions that constitute the formation of organisational ‘statements not with reference to the interiority of an intention, a thought, or a subject, but in accordance with the dispersion of an exteriority’ (ibid 1972, p. 125). Because if subjects are not at the centre of their intentionality4 as humanism suggests (Harari, 2017, p. 255), then what accounts for what they can say and do but not other things? The answer to this deceivingly simple question should not be considered deterministic, misanthropic, nor even reductionist, I have found, but fundamental to writing practice that aims to ‘ring true’ and ‘feel authentic’. In essence, it became me asking in my own work what is true to these ‘Royal Palms’ characters and why, and as a consequence, what do their realities look like that they constitute and are constituted by in return?
1.1.3 The humanist subject as discursive interpellation?
The questions posed above reflect my practice problematising5 decentred subjects as the characterisations of 1980s neoliberal discourse. I am aware, however, that a Foucauldian theoretical framework for literary practice may be going against the grain somewhat in 2019, running the risk of seeming archaic, reductionist and even misanthropic compared to intentional investigations of the subject as identity in gender, culture, relationships, belonging and marginalisation. Illustrating this point was the 1980s Wall Street series Black Monday (Cahan & Caspe, 2018) that appeared during my project, contrasting my approach with its humanist focus (as opposed to a focus on interpellation by discourse) in dramatic relationships. To this end, it is important to make clear that the Foucauldian theoretical framework developed in this project is not an attempt to deny or replace humanism-centred genre-theory and authorial intent as the accepted drivers of characterisation. A mode of practice focused on discourse as organisational power and its discursive functions and the consequent interpellation of constituting decentred subjects cannot be a tool for all aspects of the story-telling process. Authors ultimately maintain control over the process of
4 Intentionality, according to Brentano, refers to the ‘ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: states such as perceiving, remembering, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing’ etc. (Jacob, 2014). In effect, the author provides a proxy intentionality for fiction subjects but which nevertheless can be implied as intrinsic through their discursive practice and consequent interpellation.
5 ‘Problematisation’ is used in this dissertation in two ways. As a general term, it refers to looking past ‘the common knowledge (myth) of a situation’ to reframe ‘that knowledge as a problem, allowing new viewpoints, consciousness, reflection, hope, and action to emerge’ (Wikipedia contributors, 2019b). More specifically though, Foucault used problematisation ‘as an object’ to be ‘studied by…archaeology and genealogy’, not in terms of those ‘whose lives are marginalized’, but as a technology of self for ‘relative freedom and self-creation’ (Gutting, 2005, p. 104).
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characterisation, while readers understand and expect a given character to perform within commercially- driven genre expectations. These realities remain. The argument is rather that it is worth considering, particularly when writing about organisational power, the humanist subject as discursive interpellation. As this project developed, I came to realise in fact that genre theories like feminism (which is relevant to my protagonist Paula resisting Wall Street’s patriarchy) and humanism (identifiable as the individual’s socio-psychological, cultural and interpersonal journeys) as well as tropes like corrupt or evil bankers etc, may in fact be compatible with Foucauldian discourse, since such theories are also discursive constructions of subject-positions. Constructed, I would argue, does not mean in anyway less real, visceral or even human. In fact, it appears to me now that discourse is meaningless without humanism’s rendering. My practice therefore remains a humanist expression of characters navigating context and whom behave in all-too human ways.
1.1.4 Theoretical framework and exegetical question
Arriving at Foucauldian discourse as an epistemological tool to characterise 1980s Wall Street neoliberalism has been an inductive process. An early pathway to this theoretical framework was discounting, or rather reframing, psychopathy as a central trope determining 1980s Wall Street subculture. The Wall Street banker as psychopath is seductive and pervasive. No doubt in cases – here, Gordon Gekko’s said inspiration, Ivan Boesky, comes to mind (Aksoy, 2014, p. 67) – it may even be true. However, as researchers Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare point out, empirical research puts the incidence of corporate (boardroom) psychopathy at around only 3.5% (2007, p. 193). This compares with an estimated 15% of (US) prison inmates and 1% of the general population. In terms of a baseline for characterisation then, corporate psychopathy may be a contributing factor – a correlation extended to corporations as legal entities by Hare in Bakan and Achbar’s The Corporation (2003) – but appeared unlikely as the dominant mechanism driving neoliberal subculture in my practice. In this way, it became clear that if I was in fact writing the characters of ‘Royal Palms’ as decentred subjects qua Foucault (1972) and Chater (2018) etc, then their characterisations constituting subculture (and vice versa) needed to be demonstrated forming beneath their humanist surfaces locatable in genre-theory and psycho-social intentionality. In other words, I needed to look at 1980s neoliberal characterisation as discourse, its practice and the power manifesting it. To this end, I developed a theoretical framework based on Michel Foucault’s (1972, 1979) theories of discursive formations and power relations applicable to my practice. Here, discursive formations refer to networks of ‘statements’ that produce contiguous fields of objects (objectifications) through their enunciative function and which interpellate the practicing agents to the discourse’s ends. A discipline and
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field like 1980s finance can be described as a discursive formation, and a corporation like M&L in my practice can be read as a manifestation. Meanwhile, Foucault’s conceptualisation of power corresponds to organisation and its discursive machinations. Discourse is how power structures itself and operates, it would seem, and as such the two terms are intimately connected. Discourse is not deterministic, but neither is it random. Power, however, as the potential of organisation, appears inescapable. Not only for its affective reach, but constitutive reality. If further information regarding these terms is needed, please refer to Appendix 3.1. This theoretical framework is a problematisation of 1980s neoliberal corporate characters as decentred subjects constituted by their discursive practice. It is intended as a practice-led attempt to reconcile the decentred subject suggested in the research and commentary of Daniel Kahneman (2011), Nick Chater (2018) and Yuval Harari (2017), among others. The aim here is to demonstrate that the heuristically humanist approach of 'feel', 'tone' and 'authenticity' to the characterisation as subculture of 1980s neoliberalism may in fact be incomplete without considering discourse in terms of its decentred subjects. In this way, the question that underpins this exegesis becomes: What does Foucauldian power and discourse reveal about the subjects of neoliberal fiction set in the 1980s? And how can their decentred ontology be used as a tool for characterisation?
1.1.5 My practice ‘Royal Palms’
Set at an Australian Gold Coast resort in early 1986, ‘Royal Palms’ is the story of a Wall Street firm’s junket. Thirty Wall Street ‘Masters of the Universe’ – many with families in tow qua Milken’s Predators’ Ball – battle it out for a Managing Directorship up for grabs. ‘Big Al’ Munk, the president and co-founder of Munk & Leach (M&L), is going to personally pick the winning candidate, and for the aspirants it is Wall Street-style kill or be killed. As a critical problematisation of the era and subculture, my protagonist, Paula, finds herself on a collision-course with Wall Street’s neoliberal discourse of ultimate individualism, a zero-sum game of take- no-prisoners excess and greed. This is personified by her nemesis Ricky, a guy she now suspects may have preyed upon her being so in tune with the ‘eat what you kill’ ethos of 1980s Wall Street that he’s effectively become its psychopathic approach (objectification) to life. Or is it the other way around? Their drunken fling several years ago she never really faced up to now renders her vulnerable on the unlevel playing field of corporate ascendency, and when the only other woman in the top thirty and her new friend slash acquisition, Jane Reeves, is targeted in turn, Paula finds her normalisation by Wall Street’s brutal corporate discourse a high-stakes process of fight or flight.
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The seed of this idea is based on an allegedly true story. Anecdotes from a primary source (a now elderly hospitality staffer) described an American corporation taking over the Royal Pines6 resort in the late 1980s for a junket with no expenses spared. Though uncorroborated, this event parallels primary sources such as The Wolf of Wall Street (Belfort, 2013) and reporting on Enron. As Bethany McLean writes of the energy company’s early Nineties executives, ‘Skilling had led small groups of Enron executives and customers (all male, of course) on daredevil expeditions to the Australian outback; to Baja, Mexico; and to the glaciers of Patagonia. His goal, Ken Rice said later, was to find an adventure “where someone could actually get killed”’ (McLean, 2013, p. 170). Australia and particularly Queensland’s Gold Coast at the time features as a background and contextualising discourse, elements of which I illustrate including globalisation, the influx of Japanese investment and the dissolving of Australia’s ‘tyranny of distance’, the ‘sin city’ nature of Queensland government and police corruption pre-Fitzgerald inquiry, and the creeping fever of money epitomised by home grown tycoons like Bond, Skase and Packer. The characterisation of Wall Street ‘yuppies’ as the voice of 1980s neoliberalism transplanted in a proto-society is seductive in scope. A certain gaudy and unguarded naivety to the era that’s no longer possible looms large. As former broker and author of The Big Short (2010a) Michael Lewis writes, ‘Wall Street people, on the surface at least, were a lot more colorful in 1985 than they were in 2008: decades of trying to disguise offensive financial behavior has made them expert in avoiding offensive behavior of other sorts’ (M. Lewis, 2010b). But with 1980s yuppyism as a kind of pop-up F.I.R.E.7 bourgeois demarcating the more egalitarian if economically turbulent Civil Rights-oriented 1960s and 70s and the end of the line for Keynesianism, the extreme inequality (Lawson et al., 2019) and quite possible environmental collapse (Klein, 2018) that’s resulting from neoliberalism’s ‘economic liberty’ achieved by ‘protecting capitalism from democracy’ is still decades away (MacLean, 2017, pp. 1, 46, 81, 86). To glimpse this demarcation of the 1980s within the subculture of the FIRE industry itself, McKay’s script of Lewis’ text The Big Short explains, ‘In the late seventies banking was not a job you went into to make large sums of money. It was a good stable profession like selling insurance or accounting. And if banking was boring then the bond department at a bank was downright comatose… Yawn. Bonds were for losers. That is, until Lewis Ranieri came on the scene at Solomon Brothers...’ (McKay, 2015). With the rapid deregulation of the F.I.R.E. industries from Reagan and Thatcher’s Mont Perelin Society policies, outrageousness as a kind of ‘Wild West’ come ‘The Art of War’ ethos became normalised on
6 In my novel, the Gold Coast resort Royal Pines becomes ‘Royal Palms’.
7 The F.I.R.E. industries are finance, insurance and real-estate, which, as the 2007-2009 GFC demonstrated, are inextricably linked.
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Wall Street (Aksoy, 2014, pp. 71, 73). Equating ‘political freedom’ with ‘free enterprise’ (ibid 2014, p. 74), this new breed of banker was driven by huge fees from selling complex and unpredictable securities and facilitating corporate acquisitions and takeovers, whether they were productive or would ‘blow-up’8 or not (M. Lewis, 1989, p. 168). This extreme risk-taking culture saw ‘moral hazard’ ignored in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday crash, and which effectively flipped the social contract of the post-New Deal era into corporate welfare via bailouts, handouts and tax loopholes favouring wealthy minorities (Cecchetti & Disyatat, 2010; Stiglitz, 2010, pp. 30, 73). This evidently remained the norm during the financial crisis of 2007-9, and appears likely in 2019 to continue even as the IMF warns of another looming crisis (Partington, 2018). To contextualise neoliberalism’s rise, the discursive objectification of ‘freedom’ as a response to 20th century Fascism and Communism – and ironically then to collective democracy itself – can be consistently traced to Mont Perelin Society and University of Chicago academia (Buchanan & Tullock, 1975/1999b; Friedman, 1962-1994/2017; Hayek, 1944/2006; Mises, 1974). As member James Buchanan wrote, ‘any restriction on…private freedom of action will…impose costs’ (1962/1999a, p. 57). Costs for who though? In hindsight, the freedom that justified outrageous behaviour on 1980s Wall Street masked a darker reality of neoliberalism. Centrally, and as Reagan’s economic advisor Milton Friedman determined, the private concentration of wealth must be protected from democracy’s ‘drift toward centralization and collectivism’ by way of deregulation, de-unionisation and privatisation (Friedman cited in MacLean, 2017, p. 90). In the process, the commodification and righteously unrestrained consumption of everything, including the self and others, became the yardstick of Buchanan’s ‘freedom’. Neoliberalism, Noam Chomsky explains, became ‘capitalism with the gloves off’ (Chomsky, 1999, p. 6).
1.1.6 Case-studies of fiction set in the 1980s as neoliberal discourse
As seminal illustrations of the neoliberal 1980s, American Psycho (1991) and Wall Street (1987, 1988) provide not only a context and characterisation baseline, but hint at neoliberalism’s arc from its initial conditions to the current day. As the New York Times positions Ellis’ text, ‘It’s impossible, in 2016, to talk about “American Psycho” without mentioning Bateman’s hero-worship of another well-tailored suit: Donald Trump. Bateman keeps a copy of Mr. Trump’s magnum opus, “The Art of the Deal,” on his desk. His dream is to be invited on the Trump yacht’ (Garner, 2016). Similarly, Oliver Stone maps neoliberalism’s development in an interview with Michael Lewis, stating, ‘I was shocked, truly shocked, when I went back [to Wall Street (to do a sequel)] … A million dollars had become a billion dollars. They’d replaced people of substance with people who made
8 When a security or other investment product ‘blows up’, its value collapses ‘burning’ the client.
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money…It’s the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society...Our way of life is going to change’ (M. Lewis, 2010b). Although the ‘character of Gordon Gekko doesn’t really even exist anymore’, or ‘rather, he has become so ordinary—the hedge-fund manager—that he blends in with the landscape’ (ibid 2010b), Ellis and Stone’s characterisations of the ‘decade of greed’ have inspired generations of stock brokers (Guerrera, 2016a). Larger than life, unashamedly rich and morally bankrupt, this early postmodern neoliberalism was popularised as a veritable breeding ground of Jordan Belforts [The Wolf of Wall Street, 2007], Sherman McCoys [Bonfire of the Vanities, 1988] and assorted Gordon Gekkos and Patrick Batemans. Interestingly, this characterisation of 1980s F.I.R.E. agents coincided with the emergence of another form of character analysis – corporate psychopathy research led by Robert Hare9, Paul Babiak and Clive Boddy (2007; 2005). With respect to psychopathy as a trope in Ellis’ 1991 text, Elizabeth’s Young’s interpretation of the novel as ‘blank fiction’ provides an interesting way to frame Foucault’s discourse-driven subject. Here, Ellis’ postmodern response to 1980s neoliberalism effectively reveals a rawness to his subjects like Patrick decentred by the discourse they are constituting and being constituted by. This is decentring by literary device qua Gaggi, but also via the ontological subject as their discursive practice. In terms of a Foucauldian framework, literary blankness starkly reveals the functionality of statements that constitute the objects and power relations of neoliberalism and contingent hyper-consumerism. Networked into a momentarily unrelenting set of truths intrinsic to wealth, status and cultural interpellation, they produce a reality that is all-consuming as it is consumed and practiced by its subjects. As a networking formation of statements, the way to wear suspenders, the objectification of Huey Lewis and the News’ oeuvre, a brand-name face- cleansing regime and the informational torture and murder of victims are performed by characters in American Psycho with the blank equivalence of decentred corporate speak. In this way, Patrick’s statements resemble discursive algorithms of 1980s being. They feed on the discursive environment and construct the ‘truths’ of his yuppyism, objectifying 10 the ‘reality’ of a corporate elite whose humanism is as mechanically indifferent towards life as his (implied) Wall Street discourse is to the society it feeds upon. Decentred but interpellated, a normalised character like Patrick can therefore be read in terms of his organisational discourse. This is self-evident to a degree, since the corporation is not ‘out there’, per se, but in the subjectivity and consequent intentionality of its agents. In this way, discourse as the discursive practices of organisational power – and in turn, the subculture that emerges – begins to appear like a meta- character in the feedback-loop of itself.
9 Psychopathy researcher of the Hare Psychopath Checklist PCL-R etc (Babiak & Hare, 2007, p. 24)
10 The terms ‘Objects’ and ‘objectification’ are from Foucault, in which statements by agents with the authority to speak objectify subjects by positioning them within a reality of the discourse of an organisational power.
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To this end, statements are no longer just strings of words, but functions of objectification that incidentally construct subjective truths and reality. But statements more than just objectify reality, they construct and thus objectify subjected characters themselves. As Graham explains, the statement is ‘a discursive junction-box in which words and things intersect…resulting in an interpellative event’ for both the subject and its objectifications (L. J. Graham, 2011, p. 6). Extrapolating this concept in my practice, the intentionality of a decentred subject like Paula can be read as a field of discursive functions where the localised truths and realities of the normalising organisational discourse constitute her as she practices it. In this case, 1980s neoliberalism. As Foucault puts it, ‘(t)he analysis of thought is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what was being said in what was said’, and what did it do? (Foucault, 1972, p. 28).
1.1.7 Conceptual framework
To answer the questions of what Foucauldian power and discourse reveal about the subjects of neoliberal fiction set in the 1980s, and how can their decentred ontology be used as a tool for characterisation, a conceptual framework consisting of two parts is presented. In Part 1, this introduction is followed by an outline of my theoretical framework in 1.2 describing my practice-led research. Meanwhile, further discussion of Foucault’s discourse-power toolbox adapted as a method for my practice and case study analysis can be found in Appendix 3.2. The literature review in 1.3 examines gaps in the knowledge relevant to this project, with a focus on the argument for approaching character-agents as decentred subjects and Foucauldian theory applicable for this project. Following the literature review, 1.4 provides case studies of the key texts Wall Street (screenplay: Stone, Weiser, 1987; novel tie-in: Lipper, 1988) and American Psycho (Ellis, 1991) in terms of Foucault’s concepts of discourse. With respect to the Wall Street, the less-recognised novel tie-in is utilised alongside Stone and Weiser’s screenplay, taking advantage of Lipper’s provenance as a Wall Street executive and his relative literary naivety giving the novel’s discursive formation and power relations a certain rawness. In conclusion, 1.5 summarises my findings with respect to what Foucauldian power and discourse reveals about 1980s neoliberalism, and how its decentred subjects are characterised in my practice ‘Royal Palms’. Part 2 consists of the first five chapters and a reflection on my practice ‘Royal Palms’. Narrated by protagonist Paula, the discourse of a 1980s neoliberal Wall Street investment bank plays out as its characters compete for ascendency. Its ‘rules of formation’ and ‘games of truth’ that constitute not only its objects and realities constituted by the agents/characters as they are in turn constituted by it drive the story towards its brutal end. In particular, the organisational process of normalisation qua Wall Street’s Bud Fox is a focal point
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of Paula’s plight, and demonstrates the theory that a given agent-character can be considered as discourse in of themselves as they interpellate (or don’t) with the discourse of the organisation they’re participating in. Though not a core component of this exegesis, further research that extends the contextualisation of my practice and theory but cannot be accommodated in the limited space here is provided as appendices in Part 3. While not fundamental to the project, these notes provide extra depth and discussion for what has turned out to be an under-theorised methodology in fiction practice and analysis.
1.2 METHODOLOGY
1.2.1 Practice-led research as iterative ‘shift in thought’
My central methodology for this project is practice-led research and utilising textual analysis. As academic Graeme Sullivan suggests, practice-led research represents ‘a distinctive trajectory of inquiry’ where ‘conceptions and constructions of new knowledge are framed’ (Sullivan, 2009). This process involves distributing ‘emphasis’ across ‘the artist-practitioner, the creative product and the critical process’, enabling ‘critical reflection and reflexive action’ as an inversion of the traditional ‘clinical’ research process. This moving from the ‘unknown to the known…is purposeful yet open-ended, clear-sighted yet exploratory’, and enables what Barbara Bolt explains as ‘praxical knowledge’: an iterative ‘shift in thought’ through a ‘knowing that arises through handling materials in practice’ (H. Smith & Dean, 2009; Sullivan, 2009). In this way, practice-led research enables a reflective epistemology of my writing process and its framing theory. Established as an overarching theoretical framework, this practice-led research methodology accommodates Foucauldian discourse theory as a form of textual analysis to respond to the problematisation of my fiction. Focussing on the discursive formations of neoliberal power relations, I demonstrate Graham’s identification of Foucauldian ‘objectification’ via ‘performative language’ (2005, p. 6) as the normalisation of characters to organisational power. A further discussion of isolating and adapting Foucauldian tools and Graham’s Foucauldian method can be found in Appendices 3.1 and 3.2.
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1.3 LITERATURE REVIEW
1.3.1 Scope and reference criteria
This practice-led dissertation reflects the process of my practice characterising decentred neoliberal subjects set in the 1980s. As a response to the emerging body of empirical evidence suggesting that the agency and intentionality of the subject requires reconsideration, I have adapted Foucault’s theories of discursive formations and power relations to demonstrate discourse as a driver of organisational characterisation and subculture (Harari, 2017). This process is framed by the question: What does Foucauldian power and discourse reveal about the subjects of neoliberal fiction set in the 1980s? And how can their decentred ontology be used as a tool for characterisation? The scope of the research has been determined by my practice, ‘Royal Palms’. Set at a Japanese- owned resort on 1980s Gold Coast Australia just before the infamous Fitzgerald Inquiry [1987-1989] and Black Monday Wall Street crash [1987], a lavish junket is staged for the top earners of a Wall Street investment bank. In these early days of the postmodern neoliberal era, my characters as agents (character- agents) demonstrate an unguarded naivety about the vector of their discourse, which we now know includes extreme and worsening inequality (Piketty, 2014, p. 303), economic growth proportional to environmental collapse (Klein, 2018), and as revealed by MacLean, Neiwert and other researchers, the undermining of liberal democracy in favour of the economic ‘libertarianism’ of postmodern neoliberalism (MacLean, 2017, p. 213; Wilson, 2019). While an interpellated approach to characterising 1980s Wall Street agents might emphasise neoliberalism’s own focus on the ‘freedom’ of the humanist ultimate-individual qua Thatcher’s assertion that there ‘is no such thing as society, only individual[s]’ (Eagleton-Pierce, 2016), the growing evidence that the organisational subject may be decentred suggests a closer look at discourse to characterise this subculture. Being practice-led, my reference criteria has a wide scope reflecting my fiction. My first preference is peer-reviewed academic texts from journals, books and theses, but I’ve also included relevant novels, autobiographies, news articles and mainstream books by researchers, historians, economists and academics about the various subtopics relating to my theme. Within these practice-led reference parameters, three main areas of research required consideration. These are: the character-agent as decentred subject; Foucauldian discourse analysis adapted for (neoliberal) fiction practice; and case studies of Wall Street (1987, 1988) and American Psycho (1991) as referential neoliberal fiction. Due to word restrictions but reflecting the development of my theoretical framework, further discussion of literature concerning neoliberalism, the case study texts and Foucauldian discourse has been included in Appendices 3.3.
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1.3.2 Evidence for the character as decentred subject?
When I began research for my novel, the characterisation of 1980s Wall Street brokers as psychopathic qua Patrick Bateman (and possibly Gordon Gekko) seemed a likely mechanism underwriting neoliberal subculture. Certainly the dialogic behaviour of real agents such as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Lou Pai documented in the Enron collapse suggested this (McLean, 2013). Furthermore, psychopathy researchers Babiak and Hare point out that the feeding-frenzy of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers that followed in the wake of Thatcher and Reagan’s 1980s neoliberal policies indeed made it easier for psychopathic personalities to enter and rise in corporations (Babiak & Hare, 2007, p. xii). Building on the earlier work of Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity (1941), they began their research in prisons – having the highest concentration of psychopaths – but then branched into the area with the second highest incidence, neoliberal corporate boardrooms (2007, p. 193). Hare even applied his revised psychopathy-checklist to organisations in Bakan’s film The Corporation, demonstrating that it wasn’t agents per se who were psychopathic, but what amounts to the discourse of their corporations (M. Achbar et al., 2003). Interestingly, a point of convergence presents itself between psychopathy research and literary critic Elizabeth Young’s (1994) conceptualisation of Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) as blank (postmodern) fiction. While Young’s blankness describes ‘commodification in late twentieth century society’ (Annesley, 1998, p. 9), Patrick and his friends are correspondingly ‘flat characters’ of ‘monotonously detailed surface description’ who participate in ‘no plot to speak of and endless repetitions’ (Mim Udovitch cited in Young & Caveney, 1994, p. 87). As characterisation, this correlates with Hare and Babiak’s observation that,
the persona of the psychopath—the “personality” the person is bonding with—does not really exist. It was built on lies, carefully woven together to en-trap you. It is a mask, one of many, custom-made by the psychopath to fit your particular psychological needs and expectations. It does not reflect the true personality—the psychopathic personality—that lies beneath. It is a convenient fabrication’ (Babiak & Hare, 2007, p. 78).
In this way, Ellis’ subjects read as the ‘masks’ of discourse. As subjects are their organisation, the above passage can be extrapolated to incorporation as entity, where its ‘personality’ (brand) is built on ‘lies’ (marketing) through the objectification of statements. This corporate mask-as-discourse effectively becomes the character-agent as decentred subject by their normalisation to its truths and consequent reality. In this way, all the colour, glamour, blurbs and model-smiles of a corporate discourse – the ‘mask’ of trappings that its employees and customers constitute as discourse and are constituted by that practice – irretrievably renders its subjects blank by the dislocation of their personal discourses (prior interpellations) it colonises. The corporation is a simulacrum of the discursive self.
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The mechanism for this correlation can perhaps be traced to Foucault’s assertion that discourse as a network of statements qua functions is constituted through ‘a subject’ who is ‘not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the formulation, but a position that may be filled in certain’ organisational ‘conditions’ (1972, p. 115). That is, a decentred subject. Though Foucault’s focus was historical archives and he did not have the benefit of empirical studies in the sciences to confirm the subject as decentred by discourse (1972, p. 122, 1980, p. 58), evidence now appears to support his theories. The decentred subject represents a line of inquiry through Foucault from Nietzsche (1990) and Althusser (2001b). Freud, for example, was ‘a major contributor to the decentering of the modern subject…demonstrating that “the ego is not master in its own house”’ (Freud 1917 p.143 cited in Whitebook, 1992, p. 97). To extrapolate the subject as discursive interpellation in the current day, Daniel Kahneman’s observation of the remembering [narrating]-self and experiencing-self reveals a schism between the subject’s actions and running narrative of such. With further commentary by historian Yuval Harari, a review is provided in appendix 3.3.1. Meanwhile, Nick Chater’s monograph The Mind is Flat (2018) provides not only an interesting correlation between the subject in fiction and the real, but the possibility of describing Foucault’s enunciative function by which subjects constitute discourse and are constituted in return. While no-one would argue that fiction is reality or vice versa, a central implication of Chater’s text suggests that discourse – as the rules of formation of statements, the subjectification of agents and their production of objects – operates in the same way. In the real of agents as in the fiction of characters, ‘both…verbal explanations (the illusion of explanatory depth…) and…sensory experience (the grand illusion…) are vapours, masquerading as solid form. There is no mirror of nature,’ Chater says of the subject, ‘no inner copy of outer reality, no churning unconscious, no unfathomable depths from which our conscious thoughts break through’ (2018, p. 71). But by locating discourse as a common denominator, it becomes possible to see that ‘Foucault’s “rules”’ of discourse as knowledge emerge not as ‘principles of organization or structures, but sets of relationships’. That is, ‘a complex group of relations that function as a rule’ (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 180; Foucault, 1972, p. 48). Applying this to the characterisation of neoliberal discourse in the 1980s, my practice describes ‘the formation of objects of a discourse,’ in as far as the author ‘tries to locate the relations that characterize’ the ‘discursive practice’ of Wall Street neoliberalism (ibid 1972, p. 48). This occurs through ‘how discourse (i.e. knowledge) operates through “rules that are its own”, rules “proper to” or immanent within discursive practice’ (Foucault cited in Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 182). Chater demonstrates this subjective intertextuality by comparing Tolstoy’s fictional character Anna Karenina with ‘a real Anna’ (2018, p. 33). According to Chater, he’s ‘struggled long and hard to swallow’ the ‘troubling truth’ that ‘there is no more hope of finding a real Anna’s “inner feelings”, “deep beliefs” or “true nature” by probing her brain’ than there is of ‘uncovering the inner life of the fictional Anna’ (ibid 2018, p.
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24). But where he suggests that we ‘invent interpretations of ourselves’ and others ‘just as we conjure up interpretations of fictional characters from a flow of written text’ (ibid 2018, p. 10), Foucault’s observation that ‘everything is never said’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 118) suggests that this is different to dialogic and behavioural randomness or determinism. Rather, as in the social and organisational real, the enunciative function of statements by a character like Paula in my practice constitutes the discourse of M&L as it constitutes her as its interpellation. This feedback-loop of constitution and interpellation by 1980s Wall Street discourse, however, involves resistance from the prior interpellations of friends, partners and family that she has by implication undergone. So, are Harari and Chater correct? As researcher Tom Stafford (2019) suggests regarding the continuing debate over Libet’s famous 1983 ‘free-will illusion’ experiment and its implications for the agency of the subject, there is clearly some kind of free-will in subjectivity – as we all would attest to in the real and our practices – but Foucault qua Chater suggests this is free-will from within the subjection of discursive interpellation. A feedback-loop of constituting and being constituted – what Chater observes as the random- generator of discursive invention – emerges from the ‘enunciative function’ of character-agent statements which ‘have a materiality and a specific function in activating an entire field and its relations’ (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 184). These functions of relations of organisational discourse affect a process of interpellation and objectification. A given subject like Paula or Ricky in my practice are neither random nor deterministic, but while there is no physically and chronologically emerged true-self in their readymade subjectivity – or only to the extent of an analogue’s momentary ‘grand illusion’ in the real (D. Lewis, 2013) – this is different from saying there is no subject at all however. Subject-as-illusion – or rather subject as ‘fictional’ construction as Chater implies in both literature and the real – may be rather subject-as-discursive- interpellation.
1.3.3 The neoliberal fiction of Wall Street and American Psycho
While I could not locate any Foucauldian discourse analysis of Stone’s Wall Street (1988; 1987) or Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) per se, various researchers and commentators describing the texts were relevant to this project. Framing New York fiction between 1975 and 1995, Brooker notes that ‘capitalist postmodernism [has] yielded a legacy of increased poverty and social inequality’, where ‘the top 1 per cent of families improved their income by almost 75 per cent, the bottom 20 per cent dropped their income by 4.4 per cent.’ In this way, such ‘prosperity as existed was highly selective. All that trickled down were the effects of the recession’ (Brooker, 1996; Hobsbawm, 1991). Annesley applying Elizabeth Young’s concept of postmodern blankness as a literary response to this period identifies ‘an emphasis on the extreme, the marginal and the violent…There’s a sense of indifference and indolence. The limits of the human body seem indistinct, blurred
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by cosmetics, narcotics, disease…brutality,’ leading to the ‘politics of Reagan, deregulation and the free market’ being ‘neatly reflected in…American Psycho’ (Annesley, 1998, pp. 1, 5). In this way, a correlation exists between the extremism of neoliberalism (Krugman, 2019) and the postmodern fiction that responds to it. While Wall Street and American Psycho are firstly locatable as Wall Street, New York and American fiction, the postmodern neoliberalism they reflect was a globalising phenomenon. In effect, the neoliberal discourses of founding Mont Perelin Society academics and the organisational power they represented normalised politicians and corporate executives around the world to its constructed truths and reality. As a literary response, Gekko’s symbolism ‘teaches us that [the neoliberal] archetype for business culture is a durable part of popular consciousness’ (Aksoy, 2014, p. 69). Our own Gordon Gekkos in the form of Bond, Skase and Kerry Packer would appear to confirm this (Dunn, 2015). Formalistically, La Berge places Stone’s text alongside Tom Wolfe as ‘those who use realism to represent finance’ (La Berge, 2010, p. 5). Explaining this realism was ‘deeply influenced by journalistic representations of finance’, La Berge correlates a 1982 New York Times article identifying the emergence of a ‘new category of businessmen, the corporate raiders,’ who ‘have…developed their own language laced with images of aggression and sexual conquest’ (ibid 2010; Wayne, 1982). In essence, neoliberal freedom was the freedom to conquer. While some FIRE commentators describe Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko as ‘cartoonish’, the character has nevertheless been the reported inspiration for many Wall Street careers (M. Lewis, 2010b; Micklethwait, 2018). Furthermore, locating Stone and Ellis’ fiction alongside not only finance reporting but ‘fraud CEO autobiographies’ (Nocera, 1987), including ‘Ivan Boesky’s Merger Mania, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens’ Boone’, La Berge sees the ‘contest over how to represent finance’ as one between ‘financial masculinity’ and ‘the narrative construction of the financial scandal’ (ibid 2010, p. 6). While Ellis’ American Psycho’s financial masculinity assumes a ‘subject position that moves seamlessly between realism, journalism, and postmodernism’, Stone’s Wall Street – less postmodernist in its morality play realism – scandalises finance through the narrative construction of insider trading. However, a common denominator La Berge identifies is that finance fiction ‘is a world of men’ (ibid 2010). In this way, Wall Street is ‘structured around a melodramatic plot of seduction, romance and betrayal,’ but where the ‘love affair is between Gekko and Bud’ and ‘triangulated through a woman—an unsurprisingly depthless character who traffics as a homoerotic stopgap’ (La Berge, 2008, p. 219). In contrast, Ellis’ text ‘shows us the monstrous heart of masculinity at the outer limits, a frenzied pomophobia[11] that, instead of
11Storey identifies Byer’s concept of “pomophobia” as the fear that ‘old ideas of an essential masculinity may fall away and new constructions of sexuality and gender will replace them’ (Storey, 2005)
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re-establishing Bateman’s identity and sense of order, serves to draw him further into the realm of chaotic unreality’ (Storey, 2005, p. 58). As a sociological illustration, Julian Crockford suggests Stone’s ‘emphasis upon the individual occurs at the expense of a more fully realized description of political reality’ (Crockford, 1999, p. 23). Individualised, J. Emmett Winn reads Bud as one of ‘these characters, from working-class families,’ who ‘cannot successfully integrate the different elements of materialism and moralism that constitute the American Dream’ (Winn, 2003, p. 308). From a Foucauldian perspective, neoliberal discourse objectifies Bud’s ‘personal failures that keep’ him from being normalised and thus ‘achieving the American Dream’ (ibid 2003, p. 311). This reframes Wall Street not as Marxist ‘class warfare’ of which ‘criticisms threaten to reveal the social injustice of the American economic system’ (ibid 2003, p. 317), but as a platform where subjects either successfully normalise to epistemic neoliberal discourse or are crushed in their resistance to it. This plays out through Bud’s personal discourse in the way his father ‘Carl characterizes the working-class life whereas Gekko epitomizes the upper-class life’ (ibid 2003, p. 313). In effect, normalisation to prevailing discourse of the time reveals Bud, Carl and Gekko individuated not so much by class, but by their subjectified alignment and proximity to the organisational power of Wall Street’s neoliberalism.
1.3.4 Literary Foucauldian discourse analysis
Presenting me with both an opportunity and the dilemma of under-theorisation, linguist Dominique Maingueneau explains that ‘literary discourse analysis’ is rarely used and that its practitioners must ‘fight’ on the ‘two fronts’ of ‘traditional literary studies’ and the various kinds of ‘discourse analysis’ of the social sciences (2010, p. 147). Pointing out the methodology ‘is scowled at’ by the ‘traditional “humanities”’ as much as ‘discourse analysts’ who disregard literature for ‘“true”’ discourse akin to ‘everyday conversations’ (ibid 2010, p. 148), Maingueneau suggests that ‘to transform the conditions of research on literature, one needs to open a new space’ (ibid 2010, p. 152). Citing Foucault, Maingueneau suggests this can be done by demonstrating ‘the loosening…embrace…of words and things’ by no longer approaching discourses ‘as groups of signs…but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). As Chater argues however, ‘true’ discourse in the real reflects a decentred subject whose ‘mind’ is ‘just as much a work of fiction as the fictional’ character’s (2018, p. 34). From the perspective of my practice, I would suggest that in terms of Foucault’s theories, it becomes possible to correlate the mind as ‘fiction’ with the mind as ‘discourse’ when the ‘mind’ is subjectified through interpellation. That is, fiction as discourse rings true or not according to the same rules of discursive formation and power relations emerging as objectifying statements which drive organisation. I would further suggest that this is not literary practice as
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determinism or misanthropy, but discourse per the enunciative function of subjectified, organisational power. While my methods in practice and analysis utilise Graham’s approach (2005, 2011), Maingueneau’s emphasis of literary discourse as the ‘scenography’ of reconnected ‘text and context’ (ibid 2010, pp. 150– 155) hints at Foucault’s ‘rules of formation’. Here, 1980s Wall Street as a discourse can be seen forming as the ‘scene’ of surrounding discourses via their functional statements and resulting objects, including developments in technology, media, family values, gender and racial relations, geographies, all of which culminate via organising power into what Foucault explains as the era’s episteme (Taylor, 2014, p. 68). In the way During referring to Foucault’s study of Roussel notes that ‘we live within structures ordered by language’s relation to the world’ (2005, p. 78), it becomes clear that in the scenography of discourse, even the apparently non-discursive, such as fashion and the body itself, becomes integrated as a network of objectifications via the organising subject. Maingueneau’s observation of academic resistance between text and context may go some way to explain the surprising absence of Foucauldian discourse analysis in literary journals and theses. Afterall, the methodology adapted to fiction provides mechanisms and insights to many aspects of story-telling, including characterisation, dialogue and behaviour, context, and the power struggles between characters and organisations. While, as mentioned, no Foucauldian analyses for my case study texts Wall Street (1988; 1987) and American Psycho (1991) were locatable, Foucault’s theories of discourse and power relating to madness as construction have been applied to the 1990’s fiction of Timothy Findley in a thesis by Fiona Vance (2002). Furthermore, Foucauldian readings of A. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) by Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra (2017) and B. Ding’s Chinese Style Secretary 2 (2010) by Shenshen Cai (2012) demonstrate how power manifests itself on bodies subjected by monstrous organisations. Vitally in these examples of Foucauldian theory applied to fiction, discourse is shown to underwrite the subjected humanism of characters in their navigation and resistance to power and its objectifications. For further review of literature concerning Foucault theories, including ‘Foucauldian discourse in context’ [3.3.4] and ‘Foucault’s unlikely neoliberalism as anti-humanism’ [3.3.5], please refer to Appendix 3.3.
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1.4 CASE STUDIES – Wall Street and American Psycho
1.4.1 Wall Street (Lipper, 1988; O. Stone & Weiser, 1987)
1.4.1.1 The abyss of organisational interpellation
The texts Wall Street (Lipper, 1988; O. Stone & Weiser, 1987) illustrate the 1980s as a ‘decade of greed’ (McKenzie, 2004). Ruthless corporate raiders and Gekko-esque insider-traders like Carl Icahn and Ivan Boesky12 were regulars in tabloid news, while Reagan’s ‘voodoo-economics’ unleashed Wall Street from the ‘socioeconomic downturn of the previous decade to launch a campaign that aligned corporate values and priorities to the interests of…Wall Street firms’ (Ho, 2009, p. 133). This campaign is now recognised as neoliberalism and ‘late-capitalism’ (Brooker, 1996). Released only weeks after the Black Monday crash of October 19th 1987, Stone’s film was not initially a box-office hit, but a degree of prophesy in its cautionary tale caught the public’s imagination. In what could be a metaphor intuiting the crash, former mentor Lou Manheim tells protagonist Bud Fox before the latter is arrested near the end of the text for insider trading, ‘Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that time, a man finds his character--and that is what keeps him out of the abyss...’ (O. Stone & Weiser, 1987, p. 168) Beginning with this revealing line, this case study examines how Foucault’s concepts of discourse and power relations characterise agents in neoliberal fiction. Focusing firstly on how organisational power discursively interpellates and thus normalises the main character, Bud Fox, as a decentred subject through his character arc, I then discuss the implications of his resistance in what amounts to the central tension of the narrative. This movement suggests the reframing of his subject as a site of contesting discourses. Bud’s interpellation (L. J. Graham, 2007, p. 275) is then discussed in terms of statements and their networks as discursive formations.
1.4.1.2 Normalisation as the organisational power of discourse
Bud Fox’s character-arc in Wall Street can be nominally read in terms of a traditional three act structure. The journey of a young, ambitious and consequently naïve protagonist pursuing his Cinderella-like dream to make it in the big-time of 1980s Wall Street, Bud’s success becomes an ordeal of conscience before he emerges ethically reorientated in the final act. In terms of discourse however, Bud’s dream itself is a narrative in which
12 Boesky is often cited as the inspiration for Gekko’s character.
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he discursively objectifies Wall Street as his own implied and demonstrated prior interpellation, or personal discourse. As both implied and demonstrated background, this includes family (his father Carl) and community (the union). Bud’s Wall Street dream is a discursive construction with Gordon Gekko as its norm, providing a model for his consequent interpellation via ‘language, scripts, metaphors, talk, stories and narratives not as parts of some putative superstructure erected on top of the material realities of organizations, such as structure, power, technology and so forth, but rather as parts of the very essence of organization’ (Gabriel, 2004, p. 63). Bud looks set to achieve his dream when Gordon Gekko takes him under his wing, but this comes at the cost of his humanist ‘core-self’ with its values of integrity, family, community, and a win-win modality of business13. In the resolution, Bud resists and then rejects Gekko’s Wall Street, betraying him and suffering downfall rather than entirely sacrifice his core values. Within a Foucauldian framework, I read Bud as an organisational subject decentred by the normalising power of his discourses. While it may be possible to say that effectively his agency and intentionality are products of his discourse – here, family interpellation versus encroaching organisational practice – this does not mean character as discourse is structurally deterministic. Even though a priori organisational normalisation via its rewards14 and exclusions (and resistance to it) determines character- agent behaviour within ranges, in my practice I have come to see character as discourse in terms of the chaotic complexity of discursive generation that Chater identifies as the ‘story’ of selves ‘we are inventing moment-by-moment’ (2018, p. 24). That is, that the enunciative function of statements via character-agents like Bud and Gekko operates like a random generator within the rules of formation of the discourse they are being normalised by. In this way, I read Bud and Gekko as not only vehicles for the enunciative functions of interpellating discourses, but importantly sites of struggle between discourses as they compete for the characters’ agencies. By the time Bud encounters Gekko in the story, the latter is fully interpellated by Wall Street and wielded as accordant power characterised by its discursive formation. His former discourse as an Arkansas farmer and family member subsumed, Gekko as discourse has become Wall Street’s truths and reality where the dominant operational modality is zero-sum ultimate individualism. His agency as enunciative function, I don’t read Gekko as evil per se, but an endgame of normalisation by neoliberal power as discourse. This is not power in the traditional Marxist or sovereign conceptualisation, but power ‘employed and exercised through a net-like organisation’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 98). Power, Gekko demonstrates, concentrates
13 Win-win business as opposed to the zero-sum, winner takes all ideology of Wall Street.
14 Organisational rewards for successful normalisation are not just compensation like wealth, but access to knowledge and thus power in more senior positions/functions.
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as organisation via the discursive subjection of its agents. It incites and orients agents like him through discourse that functions to compound itself by the often-brutal means agents adopt as their own. Although character-agents like Gekko clearly wield power through their organisational subject-positions, ‘individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application’ (Foucault, 1980). This is because power is best ‘conceptualised as…a system of relations spread throughout the society, rather than simply as a set of relations between the oppressed and the oppressor’ (Mills, 2005, p. 35). Gekko thus better understood as an apparatus of organisational power. While this reading of Gekko as Wall Street discourse is not intrinsically critical, neither is it to say that as a decentred subject he is exempted from responsibility for his effects on the world. Power is not held responsible for its harm – the agents wielding it are. Bud in his journey of interpellation experiences this inescapability himself. As a decentred subject and thus site of competing discourses, he requires a mechanism for the resistance. To this end, a personal discourse as prior- interpellation can be considered.
1.4.1.3 Narrative conflict as personal discourse versus organisational power
Returning to Lou Manheim’s parable, I read the ‘abyss’ he refers to as subjectification by Wall Street’s neoliberal power via its discourse. As Wall Street normalises Bud to Gekko, his personal discourse is reformed in its discursive likeness. A character’s personal discourse can firstly be described as the subject as discourse, but also as the subject before their interpellation by organisational practice. In my practice, I found personal discourse to be a necessary concept for two central reasons. On one hand, it appears obvious that two given characters – in this case Bud and Gekko – will respond and possibly resist normalisation in different ways. Furthermore, organisational discourse is not ‘out there’ per se, but of the agents who constitute it and are constituted in return. It follows from this line of reasoning that a given character-agent will always find themselves subjectified by at least one discourse, which is to say organisational power15. Further delineating the concept, personal discourse may be thought of as personal ideology qua Althusser (Mills, 2005, p. 5), but where the subject is its discursive formations (network of statements) accumulated through participation in family, community, culture, school, etc. Epistemologically speaking, the subject holds certain truths to be reality because their personal discourse is functionally composed of statements to that effect. In Bud’s case, the first two acts of Wall Street demonstrate his personal (prior) discourse as it is gradually normalised by the ‘abyss’ of the 1980s neoliberal finance industry. This occurs as Bud constitutes its discourse through practice and is constituted as its subject in return. Unlike the heyday of disciplinary
15 Organisation here refers to any consistently interacting group, which includes family and corporations, etc.
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power, Bud is a willing subject. He is not pathologized16 by the organisation as per Foucault’s archival reading on madness (2003) and sexuality (1978), but objectified as a ‘killer’, a ‘terminator’ by Gekko as he describes his agents (and would describe himself if asked). ‘Give me PSHs -- poor, smart and hungry. And no feelings,’ Gekko explains. ‘You don't win 'em all, you don't love 'em all, you keep on fighting, and if you need a friend, get a dog’ (O. Stone & Weiser, 1987). As a willing subject during the orientation of the story, Bud’s pre-normalised subject-position is on the outside looking in. ‘I gotta get out of here, Marv…be on the other side of that phone. I have to do something where individual effort counts, not this perverse bureaucratic bullshit,’ he tells a fellow rookie at Jackson & Steinhem (Lipper, 1988, p. 20). However, this can only be done through the practice of the prevailing discourse at hand. Remembering that discourse ‘refers to knowledge, what is “within the true”, rather than to language’ per se (Foucault quoted in Bacchi & Bonham, 2014), with more access to discourse- as-knowledge via a subject-position in its machinery, access to more power follows. But there’s a price. As the complication of the second act, Bud finds himself gaining the world but betraying his principles, friends and family. This is evident when he manipulates his friend Bill Glass,
“You see, the parties who have been giving me the information want something in return – sure things…like they gave to us. You have the quid pro quo.” “Bud…that’s illegal…unfair to the shareholders who sell to us without the same information. We’ll lose our jobs...go to jail.”
In Bud’s reply, we can see the degree of his Wall Street normalisation.
“Come on, who really gets hurt? It’s ridiculous to have laws that regulate the free market, while muggers waste old ladies in the street. Jackson and Steinhem is our jail right now! We can buy our freedom. There is a justice, higher than the law” (ibid 1988, p. 146).
Heuristically as a humanist trope, it could be said Bud is ‘selling his soul’, or ‘selling out’. Yet in terms of Graham’s Foucauldian methodology identifying the ‘how does it function’ and ‘what does it do’ of such statements (2005, p. 9), Bud can be read objectifying his neoliberal Wall Street practice as its normalised truths and realities. The performative of ‘it’s ridiculous’ objectifies the ‘laws that regulate the free market’. Indicative of the complex global/historical network of statements underpinning the rules of formation demonstrated in Bud’s Wall Street discourse, this statement parallels a fund manager telling sociologist Brooke Harrington that the neoliberal super rich see themselves as “above nationality and laws” (Harrington, 2019). Meanwhile, the intertextuality of ‘muggers’ who ‘waste old ladies in the street’ positions Wall Street’s white collar (non-)crime as less serious.
16 This may not be the full story, however, as being poor is pathologized, by both Gekko and Belfort.
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As a decentred subject in an organisational discourse, it is not so much that Bud’s would-be humanist- self is changing or being corrupted, but that his subject-position is being normalised by new statements that he is discursively practicing. In a moment of reflexivity, Lipper illustrates Bud’s transition.
Bud was in awe of Darien in his apartment, but uncomfortable with both. He turned toward the night, New York with all of its glittering promise. Bud looked vacantly into himself. “Who am I?” (Lipper, 1988, p. 180)
At this stage, Bud doesn’t realise the extent of his corruption/normalisation as per the decentred ontology of his subjectivity. As a device for characterisation as much as sociological observation, this state of agent-automata explains generally how otherwise ‘normal’ people can continue to kill, torture, imprison, or destroy the biosphere in the practice of a discourse they’re constituting as they’re constituted by the truths of it in return. Noam Chomsky notes this on Bakan’s The Corporation as former Chairman Mark Moody-Stuart is profiled regarding Shell’s atrocities in Nigeria. ‘When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So, slavery, for example or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous, but the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you could imagine – benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything. But in their institutional role they’re monsters because the institution is monstrous’ (2006, p. 14). Here, ‘institution’ is synonymous with discourse as organisational power. Epistemologically, the possibility of describing a character-agent as discourse themselves reflects Kahneman’s (2011) empirical observation of the decentred subject’s ‘narrating/remembering-self’. To this end, the subject as a site of discursively-formed agency enacts a constant flow of statements objectifying the self, others and the world. This narration is not the ‘inner oracle’ of true-self as humanism intuits, but the ongoing formulation of statements that define one’s subjective agency moment to moment. Being decentred, a subject cannot define their intentionality outside of the discourse they are constituting and being constituted by. This problematisation of the decentred subject as a site of contesting discourses may have its origins in Althusser’s influence on Foucault, who theorised that ‘the individual becomes an ideological subject through a process of interpellation whereby discourses appeal to the individual as a subject’ (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 15). Foucault’s theory of power relations as ‘microphysics’ follows this line, explaining that where ‘there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978, p. 95). In Bud’s case, he can only say why it is OK to break the law in terms of neoliberal Wall Street’s discourse he’s practicing. Importantly, the ‘truth’ of Wall Street’s discourse and thus Bud’s justification for what he does in its practice cannot be a core subjective agency beneath that discourse, since as Jorgensen and Phillips observe, ‘it is not possible to gain access to universal truth since it
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is impossible to talk from a position outside discourse; there is no escape from representation. “Truth effects” are created within discourses’ (Foucault quoted in Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 14).
1.4.1.4 Subjective conflict within the objectifications of discourse
Approaching Bud’s characterisation as a personal discourse undergoing normalisation also reveals why he’s there in the first place. When Bud tells his original girlfriend as the mogul passes them waiting in line at a club, “Gekko’s got it all! Money and power, that’s all there is!” (O. Stone & Weiser, 1987), we can see his pre- normalised objectification of Wall Street via Gekko as part of his personal discourse. Once Bud’s normalisation with Gekko is underway, former Wall Street investment bank chairman Kenneth Lipper writes in the novel tie-in, ‘It was apparent that more than a client-moneymaking relationship was at stake, for Buddy Fox had surrendered his soul to a man that he had seen only once. He wanted to crawl under Gekko’s skin. Buddy Fox wanted to be Gordon Gekko’ (Lipper, 1988, p. 42). This can be explained by Mills observation that ‘discourse should be seen as a system which structures the way that we perceive reality’ (2005, p. 55). Interestingly, the objectification of Gekko as a normalising force functions similarly in both the real and the fiction. Recalling Stone’s film, former Morgan Stanley broker Frank Partnoy reveals, ‘I was naive but it actually inspired me. It made Wall Street seem exotic and alluring…If you are a math major at the University of Kansas and you see a cheque with six zeroes, it is going to get your attention’ (Guerrera, 2016b). While fiction is not the real, it would seem discourse shared by the two follows similar rules of formation and normalisation to organisational power. A central tension of Bud’s characterisation exists therefore not only between his personal discourse of family values and his discursive practice on neoliberal Wall Street, but his objectification of Wall Street prior to his full interperlation. This can be reduced to a contest of statements. While Bud’s personal discourse at the beginning of his character-arc idolises Gekko, his father as much as ‘old pros’ like Lou Manheim counter, ‘If you mix up fantasy with reality, you’ll be paralysed’. Dan Hickey in another scene warns, ‘Without a dream, you’ll invent one. Then, watch out! You’re a believer and that’s dangerous.’ And revealing Bud’s arc to come, ‘Everyday is a blank sheet of paper. You’ll always be too anxious about tomorrow to be able to enjoy today’s success. You’re a sales machine – you produce until you can’t anymore, then they junk you’ (ibid 1988, pp. 13, 65). Bud is unmoved at this stage however, and the complication is set in motion. Concluding Lou’s statement, we can consider its qualification once Bud has looked ‘into the abyss’ of his normalised Wall Street discourse at the end of his character-arc. As a decentred subject of contesting discourses, ‘a man finds his character’ reads as ‘finds his personal discourse’ survived the attempted normalisation by the organisation. In my practice, this device of personal discourse versus organisational normalisation is central to Paula’s character-arc. At the beginning of ‘Royal Palms’, Paula’s personal discourse
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objectifies power, wealth, status, access, etc, in the process of advancement to a senior position. However, advancement becomes a matter of her personal discourse subjectively holding out against the subsuming organisation where she is expected to ‘rip his face off’ and ‘eat what you kill’.
1.4.2 American Psycho (Ellis, 1991)
1.4.2.1 Ellis’ novel in context
Bret E. Ellis’17 novel American Psycho (1991) follows the narration of Patrick Bateman, a wealthy young Wall Street executive, as he moves through a seemingly never-ending series of Manhattan restaurants, clubs, infidelities and yuppy bromances, graduating to emotionlessly detailed torture and murders as his grip of reality decays. Ellis writes Patrick’s present tense narration as possibly unreliable with areas of flowing text and intertextual pop-cultural, corporate and criminology appropriations as a postmodern response to the hyperreality of 1980s being (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 47). Poststructurally, the ‘alternative facts’ of Patrick’s reality require interpretation from the reader and continue to divide readers. On one hand, the ‘furore that surrounded the release of American Psycho is well documented,’ Peter Ferry writes, ‘so there is no need to cover old ground here.’ And yet, ‘Attempts to ground the novel within its wider social and cultural context have been markedly few’ (Ferry, 2015, p. 92). New York Times reviewer Rosenblatt dismissed the novel at the time as ‘the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore,’ and that ‘you will be stunned to learn that the book goes nowhere. Characters do not exist, therefore do not develop’ (Rosenblatt, 1990). LA’s National Organization for Women meanwhile called for a boycott of the eventual publisher, Vintage, citing the book as ‘a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women,’ adding this ‘is not art’ (McDowell, 1990). Rather, ‘Mr. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck’ (Cohen, 1991). These responses are justified, I believe, and are discussed in Appendix 3.3.3. More recently and effectively tracing neoliberalism’s arc, the right-wing media website Breitbart claimed during the 2016 US election that Patrick ‘would admire Trump’s outspokenness, and would ultimately support his bid for the White House’. Linking the character to the questionable 45th president to- be, they add that ‘Patrick Bateman admires Trump, and even attends a U2 concert after he learns Trump is a
17 I would like to stress that using Ellis’ text American Psycho (1991) for a case study of neoliberal fiction in the 1980s is not an endorsement or defence of him or his text.
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fan’. Later, ‘Bateman recommends’ a detective investigating one of his murders ‘read [Trump’s] The Art of the Deal’. Quoting Ellis: ‘“I think Trump would be a father figure for him. He would see a kindred spirit in the Donald Trump of today”’ (Jones, 2016). In this case study of Ellis’ novel, I add to American Psycho’s context by analysing how its discursive formations of power relations characterise the neoliberalism of decentred subjects in the 1980s. This is done by examining how epistemic discourse normalises characters like Patrick, and how Ellis’ use of what Elizabeth Young described as ‘blank fiction’ effectively renders neoliberal statements in action as they objectify the truths and reality of Patrick and his peers. Though not able to be accommodated here, Appendix 3.5 extends the discussion framing Georgina Colby’s identification of Marcuse’s repressive desublimation and double-voicing in Ellis’ text as a form of parrhesia.
1.4.2.2 Foucauldian power as post-truth simulacrum
While Wall Street’s Bud Fox demonstrates how normalisation to the corrosive discursive practices of 1980s Wall Street can be resisted through a character’s (implied and demonstrated) prior interpellation of existing/personal discourse – mainly family and community – American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman in contrast reads terminally lost in the discourse of postmodern neoliberalism. Ellis makes this apparent in several scenes. Although the people Patrick interacts with – particularly women, including his girlfriends Evelyn and Courtney – do not appear to like him per se, Ellis consistently illustrates a grudging acceptance and attraction of, and to, him by others. But are they attracted to him in a humanist sense person to person, or by the organisational power of his subjectification as a Wall Street banker? In the chapter Detective, Patrick is interviewed in his office by investigator Donald Kimball hired to find Paul Owen whom Patrick has already described murdering. Ellis makes a point of likening Patrick and Kimball, who is ‘surprisingly young, maybe my age, wearing a linen Armani suit not unlike mine, though his is slightly disheveled (sic) in a hip way, which worries me’ (1991, p. 267). This likeness of humanist surface effectively provides a space for their differentiation in terms of discourses and accordant power. Since Patrick attended ‘Harvard Business School’ and lives in the same building as ‘Tom Cruise’, Kimball knows ‘how busy you guys can get’ because he is ‘just a private investigator’ (1991, pp. 268–270). Ellis creates tension here through Patrick fearing Kimball will see him as the psychopathic murderer he narrates himself to be, but he needn’t have worried. In effect, the detective can’t see past the interpellative ‘truths’ and ‘reality’ of Patrick’s status and wealth qua his Wall Street discursive practice.
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In another scene, a model called Daisy consents to sex with Patrick even after he tells her he ‘beat the living shit out of’ a homeless woman with child who was ‘lost in New York’ and ‘had misspelled disabled’ on her sign, but who ‘was too ugly to rape’ (1991, p. 213). Soon after, a woman Patrick dated at Harvard, Bethany, reads a disturbingly racist poem he wrote, and yet still follows him home and is subsequently murdered (1991, p. 233). Similarly, the infamous business card scene (p. 44) demonstrates knowledge of corporate discourse as power that trumps all else. While this is indicative of satire and double-voicing identified by Colby (2011, p. 4) – including playing on the unreliable narrator which Ellis may have poststructurally hedged Patrick to be – in Foucauldian terms, the power of Patrick’s corporate and thus social subject-position is used as a literary device that blinds other characters to his danger. Effectively, Ellis only allows them to perceive Patrick’s corporate subjectification as organisational power. Taking the concept to its extreme, Ellis even has Patrick reveal his crimes and mania to others on several occasions (1991, p. 352), but no-one sees past his idealised Master of the Universe18 surface. This grudging acceptance of the yuppy’s privileged surface as the constructed truths and reality of its discourse vetos any possible deeper observation of Patrick. A consequence of this blanked post-truth subject-position is that there can be no redemption for him or the reader. In Wall Street, Bud’s character-arc reveals the power of neoliberal discourse as contestable normalisation. For Patrick though, organisational power as corporate discourse-knowledge has consolidated as him. His agency, effectively, has been reduced to the occupation of a subject-position in a discursive machinery of power that occupies him as its objectification in return. Foucauldian power in American Psycho is not its traditional conception of power over others – though of course that’s the result as Patrick brutally demonstrates – but the power of functional knowledge as subject-position in a dominating discourse he gives agency to.
1.4.2.3 Normalisation to neoliberalism’s postmodernism
Contextualising postmodernism’s relevance in neoliberal discourse, it is worth noting that some now see the ascendancy of Patrick’s idol, Donald Trump, via ‘alternative facts’ as an inevitable consequence (Hanlon, 2018). As literary critic Michiko Kakutani writes, ‘the postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective)’ has ‘led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event’ (Kakutani, 2018). While a positive effect of postmodernism may be that it ‘encouraged a more egalitarian discourse’ by making it ‘possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised
18 This phenomenon of discursive blindness to power may go some way to explain the era of silence of celebrity and institutional abuses now being overturned by the ascendant discourse of #MeToo.
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to be heard’, the Derrida-esque (2005) deconstruction of intertextualized reality also appears to have greenlighted its reconstitution as propaganda for the purposes of political and economic manipulation. As Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, explains in a rolling attempt to mitigate his client’s apparently pathological warping of reality and its consequences, “truth isn’t truth” (Hanlon, 2018). To this extent, American Psycho demonstrates the postmodern ‘alternative facts’ of the 1980s via the interpellation of neoliberal agents as, empowered by wealth and status, they objectify the world around them.
"Christ, twenty dollars for a fucking egg roll?" I mutter, studying the menu. “It's a moo shu custard, lightly grilled," she says. "It's a fucking egg roll," I protest. To which Evelyn replies, "You're so cultivated, Patrick." (Ellis, 1991, p. 335)
While innocuous on the surface, these kinds of incidental statements which, in terms of blank fiction, make up a great deal of the text, are nevertheless contiguous in their functioning of the neoliberal discursive formation normalising its subjects. Mainly, ‘freedom’ as a privileged subject-position in the commodification of all. In another scene, Patrick’s secretary Jean can be seen in this process of normalisation to the reality of neoliberalism’s post-truth discourse.
"Patrick," she says. "I wouldn't lie." "No, of course you wouldn't… but I think that…" My turn to sigh, contemplatively. "I think… you know how they say no two snowflakes are ever alike?" She nods. "Well, I don't think that's true. I think a lot of snowflakes are alike… and I think a lot of people are alike too." She nods again, though I can tell she's very confused. "Appearances can be deceiving," I admit carefully. "No," she says, shaking her head, sure of herself for the first time. "I don't think they are deceiving. They're not." "Sometimes, Jean," I explain, "the lines separating appearance what you see - and reality - what you don't - become, well, blurred." "That's not true," she insists. "'That's simply not true." "Really?" I ask, smiling. "I didn't use to think so," she says. "Maybe ten years ago I didn't. But I do now." (Ellis, 1991, p. 378)
Here, Jean’s characterisation as a process of interpellation reveals her decentred subjectivity. This reflects Foucauldian theory that ‘no individual should be understood to be inherently or intrinsically him or herself. We become subjects as a result of the various networks of relationships and discourses in which we grow up and live…Human beings-as-subjects are therefore contingent, rather than innate or natural’ (Schirato, Danaher, & Webb, 2012, p. 168).
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1.4.2.4 Postmodern blankness as decentred subjectivity
Read as disaffected satire, American Psycho has proved problematic for critics and academics since its troubled publication in 1991 (Young & Caveney, 1994, pp. 85–90). To this end, Ellis’ apparently aphasiac text can be contextualised by Elizabeth Young’s (1994) term ‘blank fiction’19 to describe its flat prose, neoliberal hyperrealism and depersonalising superficiality of 1980s mass-media and consumerism. Emotions and dialogue in the text are robotic, surface is everything, and the only way out is more of the same, which, as the text’s conclusion indicates, is no exit at all (Ellis, 1991, p. 399). The resulting lack of a clear or at least traditional plot (Rosenblatt, 1990) and the way Ellis characterises Patrick – a young, rich, 1980s Wall Street yuppie – emotionlessly murdering unsuspecting friends and strangers, and then in the next breath, explicating hi-fidelity of stereo equipment or the discography of pop-stars (Ellis, 1991, pp. 307, 352–360), effectively disorients the reader, rendering any response as fragmented as Patrick’s reality. This fractured humanism, however, provides a depersonalised space to read Patrick’s subject-position as a field of corporatized statements. Consequently, his neoliberal objectifications construct an incidental reality of commodified freedom – ‘we need to promote economic growth and business expansion and hold the line against federal income taxes’ (1991, p. 15) – including the freedom to inflict suffering since it costs nothing.
"A toast?" I suggest. "Oh? To what?" she murmurs uninterestedly, craning her neck, looking around the stark, dimly lit, very white room. "Freedom?" I ask tiredly.
However, freedom as neoliberal object is ironic in its ultimate individualism, because as Patrick explains, more than anything he just wants to ‘fit in’. To this end, ‘[i]s evil something you are?’ he asks himself towards the end of the text, ‘[o]r is it something you do?’ (ibid 1991, pp. 237, 377). Reflecting Foucault’s assertion that since the ‘enunciative domain is identical with its own surface’ and as such there can be ‘no sub-text’, Patrick’s discourse is likewise inseparable from his intentionality ‘lost’ in his ‘own private maze’ of neoliberal ‘surface, surface, surface’ (Ellis, 1991, p. 342; Foucault, 1972, p. 119). This, however, is not to say that there is no subterfuge in such surface. As historian Nancy Maclean reveals (2017, pp. 45–60), the term ‘neoliberalism’ adopted by the Mont Perelin Society to describe their ideology, and even James Buchanan’s naming of his school at the University of Virginia as the ‘Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy’, was, he described privately, ‘an innocuous name that would not draw
19 Other ‘Blank Fiction’ writers of 1980s New York’s ‘Brat Pack’ include Janowitz (1987) and McInerney (1986) etc.
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attention to it’s members’ “extreme views…no matter how relevant they might be to the real purpose of the program”’ (Buchanan quoted in MacLean, 2017, p. 48).
1.4.2.5 Double-voicing as decentred corporate aphasia
Considering his possible unreliable narration (Blazer, 2002), Patrick’s double-voicing as authorial intent (Colby, 2011, p. 36) requires poststructural interpretation to establish the text as satirical commentary. When, for example, Patrick asks his peers at a restaurant, ‘Has anyone ever played around with a TEC nine- millimeter Uzi? It's a gun. No? They're particularly useful because this model has a threaded barrel for attaching silencers and barrel extensions,’ and is answered with the incongruity of ‘Furs shouldn't be intimidating’ (1991, p. 204), the reader is forced to try and locate the reality of Patrick’s discourse. As dada- esque satire, this works as a dislocating motif reflective of the postmodern era, but does Ellis intend him to actually say these things as opposed to imagining them per his narration? Asking such questions through the traditional lens of genre theory, it is not hard to see why some critics felt that Ellis’ novel was ‘so pointless, so themeless, so everythingless…except in stupefying details about expensive clothing, food and bath products’ (Rosenblatt, 1990). However, rereading this same passage in terms of Young’s concept of blankness, it becomes possible to grasp its dialogic aphasia as the objectifications of 1980s neoliberalism itself. As Alex Blazer observes, postmodernist ‘culture, habituated to the velocity of life, takes emptiness as its foundation and its origin…Below the mask is simply another mask, another media. Depth is an image, an image of an illusion’ (Blazer, 2002). Characters have become simulacrums of the epistemic statements normalising them. Dialogically, Patrick’s conversation above may be incongruous and psychopathic, but it remains contiguous with the wider discursive formations constituting them. Die Hard (1988) intertextualising a Lonely Planet guide (1981—) intertextualising Iran Contra intertextualising the industrial military complex come consumerism. And while the sheer randomness and incidentality of such incongruity is a satirical device that Ellis seems to relish, it is also symptomatic of a world that’s become its relentless information, and which is consequently indigestible by its overloaded subjects. Ellis’ characters like Patrick, in this way, resemble discursive calculators that with too much input keep outputting error messages. Young’s postmodern blankness enables Ellis’ text to be read not as an absence of structure and substance, but a scape of corporatized discourse and its objects as raw characterisation. When at lunch Patrick asks a colleague ‘How about sightseeing?’, even though he’s actually focused ‘on the blackened chilies, the yellowish marmalade circling the plate in an artful octagon, cilantro leaves circling the marmalade, chili seeds circling the cilantro leaves’, the answer he receives reads like a statement from a brochure. ‘Sightseeing is highlighted by the European culture which established many of the islands as regional
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fortresses in the seventeen hundreds. Visitors can see the various spots where Columbus landed and as we near the three hundredth anniversary of his first sailing in 1590 there is a heightened awareness in the islands as to the history and culture that is an integral part of island life…’ (Ellis, 1991, p. 140). As Ellis confirms, many sections of the novel are indeed intertextual appropriations from commercial and industry documents (Grow, 2016). While Rosenblatt and Wolf (Wolf, 1991, pp. 33–34 cited in Ettler 2014) read such postmodern appropriation as ‘baffling’ and ‘boring’, Young suggests that such ‘brochure-speak…demands the very closest of readings’. This is because by saturating ‘a serious novel’ with appropriated consumerism, ‘Ellis destabilizes genres and suggests that, in general, a close study of our cultural debris might reveal clues’ (Young & Caveney, 1994, p. 101). While on the one hand Ellis’ double-voicing allows him to underwrite social critique (Colby, 2011), it is also the dislocation and isolation of neoliberal discourse colonising its subjects with objects of ultimate-individual ‘freedom’.
1.4.2.6 The psychopathy of blank statements in decentred subjectification
Ellis’ authorial decision to enmesh neoliberal yuppyism with Patrick’s personal discourse of uncontrolled psychopathy demonstrates their symmetry. This is evident in Patrick’s corporatized statements, which as objectifications of transactional commodities – including people – consistently mirror the psychopath’s emotionless view of life behind the mask. To this effect, Patrick early in the story lectures Evelyn’s hipster friends with Reagan-esque motherhood statements such as, ‘We have to find a way to hold down the inflation rate and reduce the deficit. We also need to provide training and jobs for the unemployed’. Later however, he reflects Buchanan’s underlying neoliberal response to the ‘Samaritan dilemma’ (1975), demanding of a homeless man, ‘“Why don't you get a job?” I ask, the bill still held in my hand but not within the bum's reach. “If you're so hungry, why don't you get a job?”’ (Ellis, 1991, pp. 15, 129). Patrick’s psychopathic statements share a modality of objectification consistent with neoliberal discourse in that its double-voicing of policies does not reflect actual practice. This is evident in, for example, Buchanan and Nutter’s 1959 report to Virginia’s legislature – later endorsed by Milton Friedman – encouraging via ‘economic arguments’ freedom from the ‘monopoly’ of public schools by privatising them with public subsidies, when the real goal was for the continued “freedom” to discriminate (MacLean, 2017, p. 66). Patrick in a similar way double-voices the need to ‘strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs’ (Ellis, 1991, p. 15), implying through his drug-fuelled crimes a police focus only on the disenfranchised ‘other’. Like the normalisation of moral hazard on Wall Street post 1987 and neoliberalism in general, the only consequence of Patrick’s blanked duplicity is but more of the same. For Patrick as much as the merciless
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machine his society has become, there’s not even real pleasure or triumph in their horrors inflicted on commodities, just as there can be no end nor satisfaction in wealth that is never enough. Ellis situating neoliberalism with psychopathic blankness is written as Patrick’s blank operating- manual being, his emotional vacancy and predatory gaze. Like neoliberalism, the wealthy ‘freedom’ of his surface is an empty deception. ‘He's the boy next door,’ his partner Evelyn earnestly perceives (Ellis, 1991, p. 18). Ellis having Patrick constantly mistaken for others demonstrates he’s literally interchangeable with his peers, leaving us to reconsider their discourse of 1980s neoliberalism as the real source of horror. Effectively, writing character as discourse blanks organisational subjectivity. This is both ontological commentary and socio-political underwriting. Discourse as a character’s objectified reality is contiguous, and once normalised, invisible as construction. To this end, the Wall Street refrain ‘eat what you kill’ (Altucher, 2014) and Partnoy’s Morgan Stanley lesson on ‘ripping his face off’ (Partnoy, 2009, p. 50) bely an uncomfortable symmetry with Ellis’ chapter, ‘Tries to Eat and Cook Girl’ (Ellis, 1991, p. 343). As Partnoy explains the statement that helped make them ‘fees of about $1 billion’ between 1993 and 1995, standard operating procedure was you ‘grabbed the client under the neck, pinched a fold of skin, and yanked hard, tearing as much flesh as you could’ (ibid 2009, pp. vii, 50). Contextualising its horrific immorality, a cooked ‘girl’ in Patrick’s decentred discourse is similarly a victim on the other end of a trade. This authorial feel and perspective of discourse as subjectivity became central in my practice. Certainly the above workplace metaphor of ripping someone’s face off and the physical act of doing so are different. However, in ‘Royal Palms’ I began to discover that, as discourse, the interpellating function of predation effectively shares a subject-position between different kinds of decentred agents. In my case, Ricky as a Wall Street broker and the corrupt Queensland cop lieutenant Jones; in American Psycho, Patrick as investment banker and psychopath. Extrapolating the functional mobility of statements, it is possible to see that discourse objectifying clients or consumers as targets implies they may be targeted differently as the organisation evolves. That is, what’s determined a ‘commodity’ or ‘fee’ to be ‘ripped’ from a resource or client may alter as the business model does, but the intent remains the same. As a device for anticipating the extremes of character behaviour in certain organisational settings, the extent agents will go to fulfil the accordant truths as reality of their discourse cannot be underestimated. As analyst Stan Grant quotes Robert Jay Lifton to illustrate the ongoing arbitrary detention, torture, murders and indoctrination of ‘up to two million ethnic Uyghurs’ by the Chinese dictatorship, ‘anything done to anyone in the name of this purity is ultimately moral’ (Grant, 2019; Lifton, 1961/1989, p. 423). Here, ‘purity’ refers to the truths and reality, no matter how abhorrent, constructed by the feedback-loop of an organisational discourse. In this way, Ellis’ choice of Patrick as a psychopath can be read both as incidental – where a psychopath just happens to work on Wall Street – as well as a blank subject interpellated by discourse. Like Patrick, Wall Street wears a double-voicing mask of sanity and glamour, while beneath lurks a ruthless
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predator. As a mask, his neoliberal corporate agency fits his psychopathic surface so perfectly it is indistinguishable. As researchers Babiak and Hare illustrate,
the persona of the psychopath—the “personality” the person is bonding with—does not really exist. It was built on lies, carefully woven together to en-trap you. It is a mask, one of many, custom-made by the psychopath to fit your particular psychological needs and expectations. It does not reflect the true personality—the psychopathic personality—that lies beneath. It is a convenient fabrication. (Babiak & Hare, 2007, p. 79)
Flattening characters to discursive subject-positions of the organisation M&L in my practice, I interpret ‘the “personality” the person is bonding with’ as ‘the “corporate reality” the agent is being normalised to’. Like Patrick, Ricky in my practice is indistinguishable from the organisation as discursive formation. His possible psychopathy [up to 3.5% chance (Babiak & Hare, 2007, p. 193)] assumes a corporate subjectivity that targets Paula and Jane. His personal discourse is predatory by nature, and therefore dovetails with the organisation’s statements, truths and reality.
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1.5 CONCLUSION
1.5.1 Exegetical questions answered
I started this project wanting a method to help characterise 1980s neoliberal corporate subculture in my practice ‘Royal Palms’. Adapting Foucault’s theories of discourse as a theoretical framework, I was able to formulate the question: What does Foucauldian power and discourse reveal about the subjects of neoliberal fiction set in the 1980s? And how can their decentred ontology be used as a tool for characterisation? What I found in this inductive process has been revealing. Discourse constitutes subjective reality. More than just social reality, discourse as a network of interpellating statements – a discursive formation of junction-boxes where ‘words and things intersect’ (L. J. Graham, 2011, p. 6) – constitutes contiguous fields of objects, including the enunciator. This became apparent in my practice as statements of predatory practices in the investment bank M&L (as outlined by Seppi, for example, in his welcome speech) dispersed aligned objects across its field of organisation. Furthermore, it correlates the enunciative function of statements commodifying assets as objects of wealth and power with the commodification of women like Paula and Jane by the male dominated group. The ‘freedom’ to commodify is the neoliberal freedom of unchained private wealth. The exact words of statements may differ, particularly when the double-speak of subterfuge is seamlessly integrated, but the discursive formation’s objects are contiguous and indicate the organisational power of neoliberalism. Another finding is that the discursive practice of agents forming objects such as commodities, targets, what’s in or out, hip or square, Wall Street or Main Street, includes their own objectification as a process of subjective interpellation. Crucially, interpellation and consequent normalisation is possible because, as Chater and Kahneman, etc, demonstrate, it appears the subject decentred by default cannot avoid being discursively constructed. While researchers like Tom Stafford continue the debate about subjective free-will with counterpoints to Libet’s 1980s experiments questioning such (Klemm, 2016; 2019), my practice characterising neoliberal agents in ‘Royal Palms’ suggests subjective freedom may exist largely in terms of interpellation. That is, that inevitably interpellated by exposure to organisational power, ‘everything is never said’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 118) by a subject, because within a discourse, only certain things can be said. Discourse, furthermore, appears inseparable from what Foucault calls ‘power’. Discourse in my practice is how M&L’s power as an organisation structures, functions, subjectifies and constructs its objects, truths and reality. Organisational power is not possessed as in the Marxist model, but appears to wield its interpellated agents as a discursive formation – an affecting reality – as they wield it in return. Neoliberalism appeared to Foucault in the early 1980s as a manifestation of biopower – a benevolent, subject-less power
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that does not focus on and reconstruct the individual qua Eighteenth and Nineteenth century disciplinary power, but provides a space for ‘technologies of the self’ (Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988). Four Foucault, power through the individualising freedom of remote and reduced governmentality held promise. This point regarding neoliberalism’s arc remains debatable, but it would appear its Mont Perelin Society ‘freedom’ of ungoverned ultimate individuals has not resulted in unsubjected citizens, but if anything, the intensifying subjection by, ironically, totalising corporations. Further irony can be found in 33rd US Vice President (1941- 1945) Henry A. Wallace’s warning that ‘corporatism’ in the state and media – where the ‘method’ of control ‘is to poison the channels of public information’ by way of using ‘the news to deceive the public into giving [the leaders of corporatism]…more money or more power’ (H. A. Wallace as quoted in Y. Smith, 2019, paras. 13–14) – was itself definable as ‘fascism’, supposedly what Mont Perelin Society neoliberalism was designed to mitigate (Caster, 2013; MacLean, 2017; Wallace, 2017). Importantly however, Foucault suggests power always accompanies resistance, and which I’ve found describable in terms of a subject’s ‘personal discourse’ of prior interpellation by family, community etc. This renders characters like Paula in my practice as sites of discursive contest, where tension in the form of resistance to organisational normalisation can be illustrated. To this end, more research is required to integrate, for example, Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ (McCallum, 2002, pp. 12, 67) with this contemporary adaptation of Foucauldian discourse into an ontology of the subject as organisational agent. While organisation and its power may be inevitable, the form discourse takes is not deterministic. Rather, in the case of 1980s neoliberalism and consistent with Chater’s construction of the ‘fictional self’, the extreme scope of discursive behaviour in fiction like American Psycho (1991) and primary sources like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) reflects emergent ‘rules of formation’ by external conditions. Remembering that discursive objects are relational functions in their statements, the externalities that appear to form 1980s neoliberalism are its surrounding discourses as objects in and of themselves. These include firstly the dispersion and diffusion through society of neoliberal theory by Mont Perelin Society academics such as von Mises, Hayek, Buchanan and Friedman – representing the funding of wealthy patrons such as Charles and David Koch and The Cato Institute – in the name of ‘freedom’ via laissez-faire ‘economic libertarianism’ (MacLean, 2017, pp. 140–143, 234). In the way discursively constructed objects ricochet through society and time, this academia appears a manifestation of pre-Civil War property rights ideology (including slavery) emerged as an extreme counterpoint to the discourses of Twentieth century totalitarianism such as Fascism, Communism and then, according to the neoliberals, the democratic collectivism in the remnants of Roosevelt’s New Deal (ibid 2017, p. 39). Through money, influence and subterfuge, Buchanan and Friedman’s neoliberalism captured 1980s political discourse in the form of Reagan, Thatcher and Pinochet, etc, its anti- government (and therefore anti-collective democracy) ultimate individualism replacing Keynesianism undermined by the social and economic shocks of the 1960s and Seventies. Civil rights despite the relentless
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efforts of proto-neoliberals like Vice President John C. Calhoun (1825-1832) and Senator Harry Byrd (1933- 1965) accompanied the liberalisation of youth-focused pop-culture into the 1980s, accelerated by the transition to services and consumer-based economies including the commodification of information, the arts, pharmaceuticals, emerging technologies like communications and computing, etc, resulting in a mass-media- driven, corporatized-celebrity populism that as culture became the simulacrum of new-belonging. ‘Freedom’ as a function of postmodern being underpinned these societal discourses, and yet as we have seen, discursively appropriated by neoliberalism’s organisational power, it was and is not freedom from corporate interpellation. Rather, surging wealth as capital in the globalising economies of the 1980s – the true target of neoliberal ‘freedom’ via interpellated political discourse (Monbiot, 2019) – was freed through deregulation from unionised labour, environmental ‘externalities’ and collective democracy, driving inequality and hollowing-out the middle-classes to the point where, somewhat ironically, ‘freedom’ as economic libertarianism approaches kleptocratic ‘plutocracy’ that threatens societal and environmental collapse (Paul Volcker quoted in Collins, 2018, para. 6; Reich, 2018). Culturally, it becomes possible to conclude that the organisational power of neoliberalism constructs objects through discursive formations of statements centred on ‘freedom’. But as a function where ‘words and things intersect’, this is freedom via capital, and as such, proportional to one’s relational proximity to its power. In this freedom of economic power, wealth interpellates free behaviour. This is the zero-sum freedom of the economic jungle; the freedom to ‘rip his face off’ and ‘eat what you kill’ (Altucher, 2014; Partnoy, 2009, p. 50). Because ‘there can only be an illusion of self-creation’, as Gary Gutting writes of Foucault’s theories, what we ‘think is our freedom is…only an internalization of the constraints of power relations’ (2005, p. 102,103). In the end, Paula and Ricky’s 1980s ‘freedom’ is not that of unsubjected citizens of benevolent and remote power, as Foucault had hoped of neoliberalism, but corporate interpellation to Gordon Gekko’s infamous objectification that ‘Greed is good’ (O. Stone & Weiser, 1987, p. 103,104).
1.5.2 In summary and future research possibilities
Though discourse is not the whole story of subjects, I’ve come to feel that, as an ontology of the decentred subject and mode of fiction practice, it explains a great deal about the intentionality of organisational characters like Paula and Ricky. I accept that Foucault’s conception of discourse ‘which aims to dispense with the subject is at odds with much critical thinking and, indeed, with much commonsense thinking’ that is rather ‘naturally…focused on the individual and identity’ (Mills, 2005, p. 107), and which may be unpalatable to some creative writers and readers. However, I would argue that the subject need not be conceptually discarded, but rather reconsidered in its feedback loop with and as discourse.
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While Foucault’s concern appears to have been the epistemology of ‘Man’ between the Enlightenment and our ongoing objectification within the social sciences – the problematisation of the ‘empirical-transcendental doublet’ (Gutting, 2005, p. 65) – my focus here has been narrower and practice- led. While Sara Mills writes that Foucault’s ‘aim is to develop a form of analysis which does not focus on the subject at all, but which focuses on the discursive processes which brought it into being’ (Mills, 2005, p. 107), mine, in contrast, has been to develop a method where discourse can be seen orienting the humanism of characters in their organisational contexts. In terms of authorial intent in my practice, such humanism feels like a process of rendering ‘anonymous thought…in God’s place’ (Foucault quoted in Eribon, 1991, p. 161). Decentring the subject as the organisational agency of neoliberal power, characterisation becomes a process of discursive practice where ‘truth, subjects and relations between subjects are created’, and as such ‘there is no possibility of getting behind the discourse to a ‘truer truth’ dispensing with the need of ideology’ (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 18). There is, however, clearly more to do to describe a workable ontology of the ‘self’ of the decentred subject interpellated by organisational power, in large part to account for the often incredibly nuanced and personalised individualisation of characters’ dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981). As mentioned, M. M. Bakhtin’s theories are expected play part, and at some point, the humanism of identity in fiction may require epistemological extension to reconsider its discourse as an expression of information integration such as is being developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (Mørch, 2017). While this project has significantly altered my approach to characterisation and organisational being, a part of me, however, remains reluctant to automatically place discourse before its humanism. Perhaps they cannot ultimately be separated: in literature as in life, we can only discover what it is to be human through discursively constructing perceptions and feelings. Even authorial intent behind characters, narratives, aesthetics and themes are constructions of subjectified perception in this way of thinking, and hence discourse. And yet the line between discourse as cause or effect appears unstable, or maybe there is no line. Are we inevitably individualised variations of the organisations that interpellate and normalise us as we directly or not interpellate others to our realities? Will discursive interpellation and accordant objectified reality equally apply to artificial agents? What is the relationship between the physical, real and implied, and organisational discourse? Is the debatable autonomy of organisational power and its discursive mechanisms observable in Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (Robson, 2019)? Is organisational power ultimately predatory in its objectifications and competitive growth? Reflective of these questions for possible future research, Shoshana Zuboff explains in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that one of ‘the oldest political questions’ regarding organisational developments is are we ‘Lord or subject? Master or slave?’ (Zuboff, 2019, p. 2). At the end of this project, it would appear I have unwittingly found my discourse-centred practice intuiting behaviouralists like Meyers and Skinner – leading via neoliberalism to the ‘instrumentarians’ Zuckerberg, Page, Bezos and Gates etc (ibid 2019, p. 504)
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– who view ‘freedom, will, autonomy, purpose and agency’ as discursive ‘defence mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance’ of our selves (ibid 2019, pp. 364, 365). With the decentred subject approached as an ‘organism amongst organisms’ (Meyer, 1921, p. 404), Ricky and Paula in my ‘Royal Palms’ began to appear as discourses amongst discourses. The implications may not be flattering, but that’s not the same as saying they’re untrue. Ethical or not, the instrumentarians’ use of de-humanising behaviouralism is utilitarian at heart, I suggest, because it works. Effectively this leads me to ask then: in terms of fiction practice as in the Chater-esque real, is there a line between the discourses we practice and our humanist selves, or are we in fact the same thing? While these are theoretical questions for both literature and the real, they are also practical ones where I as a fiction writer enact an ontology of characters and their stories as they emerge. The subject as discourse is a mode of writing therefore, ironically not reducing the humanism of characters to ultimately ‘true’ selves, but writing them as individuations of interacting and competing discourses. To this end, such a modality of fiction may eventually lead to a practice where the organisation is no longer ontologically ‘out there’, but rather manifests as the discursively interpellated agencies of its subjects. However, such a mode of practice may not be without its risks. In an era where the humanist subject encounters increasing existential threats such as workplace automation and conformity as ‘professionalisation’, simultaneous social isolation and surveillance driven by the ‘Big Other’ of digital platforms (Zuboff, 2019, p. 43), the erosion of identity by mass consumerism and environmental decimation, there may well be little appetite for the apparent misanthropy of the decentred subject as discourse. To this degree, I correspond with Nick Chater who has ‘struggled’ with the ‘troubling truth’ about decentred subjectivity, but ‘somewhat reluctantly’ has ‘come to the conclusion that almost everything we think we know about our own minds is a hoax, played on us by our own brains’ (2018, p. 25). From the point of view of my practice, however, it would seem that rather than illustrating a ‘hoax’, subjects and organisations as discourses may represent something approaching Foucault’s notion of ‘problematisation’. This practice of moving from the epistemically ‘marginalized’ to ‘lives of relative freedom and self-creation’ (Gutting, 2005, p. 104) includes, I suggest, the possibility of underwriting organisational power as redressable objects of humanism before irretrievable corporate subjection.
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PART 2 – PRACTICE
2.1 Royal Palms by Ben Stone 2019
1. JFK to Honolulu
Robinson’s red Panasonic RX-4930 dual-tape boombox blasting Mick Smiley’s Magic, it’s January fifth, 1986, and we’re flying to Australia. Not Austria, not Mozart and Hayek; Seppi’s memo said Mad Max’s Thunderdome. Somewhere over the Pacific and my hair’s killing me, I’m thinking: Mel’s cute, but why stop there? What about the fricken moon? At least people know where that is. Radek O Krasky over Ghostbusters: “You can take your thumb out of my ass any time now, Burdi.” Burdi I Salam on the synth attack: “Three aces and a f-f-fuck you.” Even upstairs in First with the island bar and lounge, thirty hours in Wall Street’s Animal House is hard on a broad. Right now, I should be getting a massage in the Hampton’s after the year I had. Because blood doesn’t spill itself, I should be on a yacht in the Caribbean spending time with real human beings. You know, ones who don’t rip faces off and eat what they kill. Marty M Dillenger: “A black beauty and two benzos for some reds and a lude.” Stevie P Chalmers back to Dillenger: “No can go for that, el Dillerino.” Robinson clacks out the tape and there’s soft engine whine in the endless afternoon we’re following. In this big comfy chair up front: bubbles sparkle in my Cristal; the Pacific’s dreamy blue across Jerry’s empty seat. In next week’s Vogue, I skim an article about men who say celebrity names in their sleep. “You’re a fuck, you know that?” “I do.” Smoothing my white Prada stockings, the golden shower in Trump Tower’s presidential suite is worth more than ten people’s homes. “Alright you prick. The black and three bennies and that’s my final offer.” On another page, Reagan’s official dog walker says efficiency is its own dividend. “Throw in your wife and you’re on.” In the assorted fuck yous, I bet yous, a you wouldn’t know if it fucked you of the boiler room at thirty thousand feet, I read a woman’s guide to choosing a Corey that’s both useful and marketing. “Do you want your MTV, gentlemen?” Robinson finally asks the cabin. The ‘Fuck yeah!’ roar and clinking flutes is the men at the wheel of our fortune. Looking a Valentino funeral slash cocktail dress up and down, you realise this is what passes for the smartest guys in the room. Then Ricky starts to shout, “Ro-bbie, Ro-bbie!”
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Mark Knopfler’s falsetto rising, an aping chorus breaks out and goosebumps shiver down my legs. “Ro-bbie, Ro-bbie, Ro-bbie—” After a lull for lunch, three Robbies with an open bar and lude market means you’ve got a mob on your hands. Also: Ricky and I have some history. Nothing serious I assure you, but not the good goose-bumps type either. “Apple, Arnolds,” Chalmers drunksplains somewhere nearby, “is like your sister. Wear protection or get burnt. Isn’t that right Paula?” Also in next week’s Vogue: the uncomfortable fact AIDS is sexually transmitted and comes from monkeys. “Daan nannn, nan nan nan nan,” the mob air-guitars Knopfler, “na na, na na, na nah–” In an exclusive, Kate Bush’s family, the Bushs, grew a fifteen foot cannabis plant in a short Irish summer before she was famous. They made cookies and her mom in the kitchen couldn’t stop laughing. Jennings wide-eyed staggers past me from the head. “Damn boys! You know what?” Burdi slapping down cards, “Damn good ephs son and three kings.” “Mother-fucking-good-to-go!” the Business Class-escapee lets it out. “I could skewer three of these JAL babes in some fricken turbulence—” Concerned glances by said babes and a snort that’s Farris’. “Skewer.” In the row ahead and also escaped from Business, he accepts a martini from one of the would-be skewerees and takes hold of her sleeve. “But is it actually Louis Vuitton?” Page flick at the connotation of ‘it’. Page flick Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator versus Harrison Ford’s Solo versus Gremlins versus Killer Tomatoes. In another exclusive, Bon Jovi discusses a pet rabbit called Bojo that likes to watch cartoons. In particular, the Jetsons. “It’s like this,” Jared T McDaniels intervenes like some kind of authority. “As long as the bodies are hard, gentlemen, I’ll accept Pierre Cardin.” I look over a Hermes endangered Eastern epaulette shark skin handbag as a hand slaps a butt like to test the merchandise. “Oh yeah?” Regi L.L. Mason baritones. “What about your wife?” On the next page, Madonna’s confident Japanese male-grooming is the new black. “Motherfuck my wife—” slurs a reply. In the guitar section, I’m staring at Bono from U2 holding a rose when Andreas J Berganhoff asks, “How much?” You sip your Cristal. You wonder if Jane Fonda, profiled, has regrets. Soft porthole sunlight illuminating Fortune and The Economist in my magazine pocket, how many times a woman can hear yuppies sing “Money for nothing and your tits for free” remains unclear.
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“Well that’s what I heard,” Krasky says. “She eats it, no questions asked.” In the health section: new research finds sperm is good for your skin. Keeping your tan in a fallout shelter is also helpful, but if you think sleeping around these guys is an option, you’re nuts. Roby Patton had too many Old Fashioneds and pink-ladies that Lewisham fed him and will wake up in ten hours with no eyebrows or pants back in Business. First’s only twenty, so that’s where the last ten on earnings are. Back behind the iron curtain with the other nobodies bitching about the noise. How that feels and what you’re going to do about it is how Monk and Leach works. You going to steal a seat up front like Reynolds and party with the crème, or sulk back in Shitsville with the stiff and the bored? Krasky adds, “Yep. Just gobbled it up.” Lips smacking, then louder over Jenning’s howling laughter, “Choking—ggghhhh-gggghhhh—” You might be surprised what I’ve done to be here. Not just because as a woman there’s a wolfpack of cashed up yuppies circling, but because in my experience, people get what they got coming. “That’s the way we do it!” Planter and Lewisham lead the pack, “Your bitches real dumb and your coke for free—” At least it’s not downstairs in Coach I point out to Farris also made the leap when Tony J Olsen forgot to stay awake on ludes. That’s where these guys’ families are. That’s right, as in wives and kids. Like Milken’s Predator’s Ball, you’re probably wondering why they brought the families too this year? We’ll get to that. Meanwhile, in my compact as they drag now Jameson past the bar: cattle I’m thinking; actual cattle screaming brat fights as mom’s legs go numb. Aha’s Take On Me synth-steps over English guitar rock and Milton Friedman hints Buchanan’s Public Choice Theory proves why most coloureds are poor. “Hey Oldfield, you bum,” I ask the pig snuffling up front for pills. “Nancy and your punk kids are losing circulation downstairs and you’re one nembie away from sucking your own dick? Where’s the chivalry man?” Eyes wired, Perry Ellis tie loose at the neck, he just shrugs Mel Brooks in History of the World, “But it’s good to be the king.” "You're not too smart, are you?” I give him Body Heat’s Kathleen Turner. The Cristal loosening me up I add, “I like that in a man.” “Hey everybody!” but he goes nuclear with Caddyshack’s Rodney Dangerfield. “We’re all gonna get laid!” The whole cabin cheers and I touché his yuppie ass.
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Pretty much, this is what passes for conversation at M&L. Film quotes, song lyrics, TV bites translating the big swinging dicks on the Quotron screens, it sounds harmless enough, but you don’t know your shit you get your face ripped off. “Do you take drugs, Danny?” Ricky apes Chevy Chase like right behind me. Not flinching, I hear Jake Johnson’s Danny sidekick, “Every day.” “So what’s the problem?” Caddyshack, 1982, is the gold standard at the moment. No announcement; the market just forms to the rules that make sense. Probably because the resort we’re headed for has a golf course we have to play, even you can’t like Smails’ grandson Spalding swearing “Turds!...Double-turds!” every ten feet? Regardless, you better know your Willie the slid-jaw groundskeeper telling Chevy Chase’s playboy you can play thirty-six holes on it in the morning and then just get stoned to the be-Jesus belt or you’re dead meat. Krasky: “What the fuck are you talking about? Boesky’s my goddamned father!” “Nooo!” cries Chalmer’s Skywalker. “That’s impossible!” The way things are going, Dangerfield looks hard to beat, but Judge Smails has his moments. “McFiddish,” I gruff a business suit as it stumbles towards me on the swell. “Do you know what I just saw?” Berganhoff gives my Honor a cynical ‘you suck’ look. He grinds a hapless JAL attendant attempting to serve me canapes and says, “A golfer?” “A gopher, ya great git!” I chop and change. Then, “Do you know what gophers can do to a golf course?” The Berg’s vodka grin goes lewd like when he’s telling hookers-in-my-Ferrari exploits. “Hey Whitey,” he snarls triumphantly, “where's your HAT?” Dangerfield’s Al Czervik re Judge Smails is an F-you across my bow at this early stage. “Not bad,” I patronise the prick. “But you know,” I go Chase’s Ty Webb and suck lobster legs as the stewardess escapes, “that's what they said about Son of Sam.” Just in case you’re wondering, I don’t feel bad. Not about Berganhoff – he’s slime in Ralph Lauren – I mean the wives in Cattle. Some broads suck dick for a living is a fact, but I worked my friggen ass off in ’85 to be up here in First. In this brave new world of women on The Street, success is not a sin is the first rule you learn. The next is fairness is communism burning the only black lace Gucci bra you brought. You want equality, girlfriend? You’re going to get taken advantage of. That's it. Until then, the smartest bird makes the top twenty in First. “Motherfuck Indiana Jones,” Burdi’s voice rises over Bananarama. “The Terminator’d rip his asshole off and five minutes later make more money than you ever goddamned dreamed of!”
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My point is, even in seating you got to let the market decide. Freedom from the tyranny of equally shitty seats and Buchanan’s ‘predators’ insisting you share is a right worth fighting for. And besides, not that it would be, but if it was me married to one of these Masters of the fricken Universe and I was stuck down in Coach dying a slow hair-death, I’d be like: “You know what hon? How about you play UN with the kids while I sit upstairs with a cocktail and some fricken legroom?” But whether it’s ethical to distort the market like that, you tell me. “I would eat shit at Dorsia before Ronachelli’s caviar,” Oldfield explains over Duran Duran’s Wild Boys. I turn the page and this thing called the ozone layer is being killed by hairspray and refrigerators; Hulk Hogan’s new Gulf Stream has leopard print seats. Mason: “Like fuck you could get your stripper girlfriend past the maître ‘d—” Oldfield: “Bald as an eagle, Regi boy, she’s got a ticket to ride!” In the memo, Seppi said the seating arrangements were for conferencing. As in work. Seated next to Jerry the would-be adulterer, I’m supposed to say, “I want meat, Jerry. Feed me.” Jerry, an insatiable gossip who sells corporates bonds but who’s really looking clients up and down mentally dotting lines of what can be carved off would tell me in this scenario, “Well Paula, even I’m not really looking at your legs, Harrison QL Logistics’ shareholders are baying for blood and I think I can bend them over for you.” In reality however, the only conferencing I can see right now is McDaniels arbitraging benzos and Newman’s little tent harassing JAL skirts past to the galley. But is that my fault? Blondie’s Call Me suddenly cuts in on Tape B and the mob’s evolving into a huddle. “I love you man!” I look back a moment. “Man, I fucking love you too!” Actual grown men hugging. Men in advanced states of pharmaceutical retardation like some underwater cave creature that’s evolved to hold their appendaged flutes out as the other males of the male- only species bonding with them do the same. Robinson the self-appointed stereo-Nazi clicks out Blondie. For another precious moment, there’s the soft whine of the engines and the benzo market reaching equilibrium. Then the huddle swaying drunk in turbulence tells itself, “I fricken love you guys!” and, “We’re fucking rich!” as Men at Work’s hit from ’83, Down Under, fills the cabin to drunken applause. Staring at the earnestness of Simply Red, eyes calmly closed in a shower of money, I tell myself whatever this is, this is it. “More sham-pain?” a cute little Japanese voice asks me. I exchange the flute and force a smile. “Thanks, sweety.”
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She grins sadly like ‘I now go. Back to grope and mile-high club trying.’ I raise my brow like ‘Jeez, I don’t know; get a brokerage licence?’ At least then you get rich copping feels and dodging dicks. The yuppy huddle excited about the difference between escorts and hookers in terms of Ferraris and Lamboes breaks into chorus. “Can you hear, can you hear the plun-der?!” the WASPs massacre. “You better hedge, you better take out cov-er-er-” Don’t get me wrong; normally that’s me. In the scrum, lost in the thrill of mastery of the universe, breaking wayward fingers as they come. But the fact is, even 1986 is the future, only two broads made the top thirty this year. Go figure. The junket from ‘84’s earnings was in Miami last January and there were five of us, a record for M&L. But since then, Jan, Shirl, Sharma and Tammy got better offers, or were harassed out – take your pick – and I’m back to drowning in Old Spice and hooker stories. “Personally,” Jameson back from the dead is telling Jennings in the seats behind, “I avoid Tunnel Club sluts.” “Interesting. Not enough hardbodies?” “He just smiled,” the chorus mashes, “and sold me an arbi-trage, sand-wich–” “Not enough straight teeth,” Jameson punchlines. “I for one am not risking permanent damage getting head from the female equivalent of Jaws.” Jennings considers this. “James Bond or the fish?” Not nearly drunk enough, I look around for the other woman on the list. Being on different desks and a rookie at that, I’ve seen mousey Jane Reeves around the floor but never bothered. But when I looked up her figures – you know, to know your competition before you eviscerate her – it was mostly Junk MBSs and CDO homeruns. No normal human being understands that crap, so I started to get interested. In August, for example, Reeves designed a CDO that effectively arbitraged Venezuelan and Mexican junk against the floating average of Brazilian and US currencies. Max Lewisham who was in on it told me it was so complicated they weren’t sure it would even function, but in-house sales made eighteen percent in two months and the SEC waved it through. It would blow up of course – they all do eventually – but the fees were locked in and here she is. As you’d expect, Seppi put at us at opposite ends of the cabin, like to spread out the mission meat, so I flew out of JFK stuck between Jerry Hacking on the window and Vern across the aisle. Back from the bar, Jerry’s still whining about the SEC’s recent whack-a-mole drive. “Insider-trading only became a crime in ’85, and already they’re putting actual people in jail?” Trying to read about the preferred eye-shadow of Twisted Sister, what he means is opposed to the non-people of Main Street who are the only ones supposed to suffer such indignities. “One of them was a broker in, get this, Paula,” Vernon sneers tapping me on the sleeve, “Dallas.”
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“Wow,” I say wondering about the front-man’s lipstick brand. “Real big time,” Jerry snorts. “Real class-y.” “Basically shooting a hedgehog with an elephant gun.” Jerry: “Or a rat with B.B.s” More snorts. “And get this, get this,” Vern lubes the joke. “The loser had to pay a whole five grand in fines.” Cue Wall Street yuppie sniggering, then, “Five!” “What next?” Jerry does aristocratic indignation. “Prosecute our Jamaican maid because she overheard us doing Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth into Enron?” “Your maid had stocks in HNG?” Vern asks impressed. “Didn’t yours?” Cue those two Muppets laughing from the theatre booth; cue my eyes rolling aren’t you just so fricken clever? The fact is, Jerry knew InterNorth would pay forty percent over market price for HNG and made three hundred large down a rat-hole. Who was probably the maid in question. Even he knows I know, he also knows I myself made a tidy sum facilitating Beatrice Companies snapping up Esmark in September. Pretty much, this is what power in terms of knowledge looks like. Like with Ronnie and Gorbo’s fingers on respective buttons, if they never get pressed, we all get rich and grow old together. But if one of us gets caught with our pants down, well then, all bets are off. “What a bunch of AIDS victims,” Jerry sneers re the SEC’s catch. “Total losers,” Vern agrees. “Totally roadkill-” The urge to find this Jane chick becomes overwhelming so I go to the bathroom and threaten my hair. I smooth down my pastel Chanel executive skirt and pop a Black Beauty. On the way back past, Jerry actually winks at me. “Go get ‘em, tiger.” “Go fuck yourself, Jerry.” I near the huddle. “Hey Krasky, listen—” “You know, Jennings,” Krasky seeing me coming shows off his pained look at the younger man, “if I wanted an opinion from an asshole, I’d ask one of the hostesses. Right, Paula?” “What are you fucking dyslexic?” is also for my benefit. Arnolds glances at me diverted to them and considers Ricky question. “What do you mean, dyslexic exactly?”
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“Like you’re reading with your asshole, you dumb mo,” Ricky puts his arm around the bean pole’s shoulders as I stand there and watch. “What do you think it means?” “But I—” “Everybody knows you don’t read the reports,” Ricky eyes me. He even winks like we’re in on some big joke. “That’s what the VP peasantry’s for, isn’t that so Paula?” Arnolds not long with his Senior prefix straightens mock indignant. “That’s a vicious slur, sir, and I suggest you retract it.” “I’ll retract your balls, you piece of shit,” he says and actually blows me a little kiss. “You’re such a motherfucker, Ricky.” I tell him. Robinson playing the Flashdance soundtrack, Krasky leans in with his Jack-Nicolson-thinking-about- it grin like I was talking to him. “So are we, ah, talking teen moms here then, Paula? Now look,” he waits for what passes as laughter. “I just want you to know that if you have trouble with anything when we’re Down Under, like-any-thing-what-so-ever, well, I give excellent ass-sistance.” Knowing Judge Smails chuckles I wait to pass. “That’s because, Krasky,” I tease drawing them in, “you’ll always be an assistant.” Since Ricky’s watching me like that, I take The Shining’s Cristal and give it a tiny sip. A slap down, but also would-be contact. To a rock ape, that’s barely one step removed from his ape lips and fluids contacting me. “Well,” he grins that put-on grin and looks it around. “It’s my pleasure, dear.” Then I spray the sip in his face. “What’d you soak your balls in this? Jesus! Gimme that—” I take a fresh flute off the bar and give him his ball-bath back. It’s the funniest thing the apes have seen in the last ten minutes and yuk it up. Wiping at his face, Krasky keeps his cool. “Actually, Paula, it was my dick.” “There is no God,” I’m ready with the Caddyshack priest after missing his course-record putt. Knowing quality when he’s been fucked by it, Krasky’s impressed. “Well gunga-galunga to you too, sweetheart.” “Jesus, Krasky,” Ricky dabs the broker’s dripping face with a silk white kerchief. “You’re such a lady’s man.” “Awe, are they teasing you, Paula?” Jerry is looking back from our seats. “Guys!” he shouts over Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take It. “She’s just a woman, OK?” Not even bothering to roll my eyes, I scan past the boys for this Jane Reeves chick but she’s not there. Interesting. Ignoring the jokes peppering me like a nice juicy steak, I sip champagne and consider the rear bathrooms and which one of these pricks is also missing? With most of them out of their seats and more back past the curtains, it’s not clear.
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Returning up front, I take my seat as Jerry says, “Don’t worry about them, sweety. I got your back.” “Thanks Jerry,” I reopen next week’s Vogue to how Shih Tzus are the new Gucci handbags. “But fuck you too.”
2. Somewhere over the Pacific
I wake up with a start to laughter. “Well hello there sleeping beauty,” Krasky grins over me. The sight of his weaselly middle-aged face straight out of William Burroughs’s Junky is horrifying and cracks Jerry up. “You were ah, you were making this ‘O’ shape with your mouth,” he grins over me. What the fuck? Vern imitates sucking a dick and McDaniels, Oldfield and Krasky huddling in the aisle think it’s hilarious. Then I hear the engines whining under the music and realise this flight is never going to end. “What he’s trying to say,” Krasky plays concerned, “is we thought you were too ‘hot’.” “Hot?” I try compute. Trapped in this groundhog-day twilight-zone sperm driven nightmare, the laughter and eyes is me realising the top two buttons of my blouse are open. “Oh that’s funny.” I button my breasts back out of sight which is even funnier, then add, “Payback’s a bitch, don’t you know boys?” “Oh we know, Paula,” Krasky grins as I get up. “I just don’t think we give a fuck.” Snatching a champagne from a stewardess tray, I ease through the biofilm of Gucci and Brooks Brothers business shirts, Rolexs and Raybans as they sing along to Robinson’s boombox blasting Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World like they really mean it. Reece Planter on day leave from Business: “Heh Paula, what are you in the market for?” “Three fuck yous and a go fuck yourself.” “Gunga, galunga..” he pivots Bill Murray’s Willie. Then faster, “Gunga galunga.” Benji Matsuda nods at me ‘I got this’. “That’s goon-ga galoonga, you little mo.” Giving Benji a little smile ‘Thanks’ like a kick in Planter’s balls, I lean into my fellow M&A SVP and whisper in his ear, “Total loser.” “Totally,” he agrees. Working on the same desk, Benji has the decency not to lust after me or make ‘good natured’ barbs like the guys who know they don’t stand a chance. Finally, I spy the mysterious Jane Reeves fielding three of the pricks down the back. “Hey hey,” Gary Bradshaw turns his drooled-streaked chin at me. “If it isn’t Paula fuckin A.” Hanging over the back of his big First Class chair from where her stockinged legs cannot hide, he refocuses them and says, “Your friend here’s had a quite a year. What’s your name again, sweetie?”
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“I told you,” she smiles all girly-like. “Jane.” I do my eyes thing. Not just cause how dumb cute is around vampires, but how they think since Jane and I are both women, ipso fricken facto, we must be friends. “Alright bozo,” I tell Milner boxing Jane into the window. “Move it or lose it.” “But this is my-“ “Fricken now, numb-nuts!” When the Yuppie prick grumbles he needs another drink anyway, I sit down and take aim at Statler and Waldorf hanging over us. “So Paula,” Bradshaw goes to fuck me with. “Did you know Janey’s only twenty four?” “Twenty three,” she corrects him with a please-put-your-dick-in-my-mouth smile. “Twenty three,” the prick clucks while Browning salivates. Even it makes me kind of hate her being I turn twenty eight in May, Jane isn’t the problem here. “You know what else?” I grin up at Bradshaw. “What’s that sweet lips?” I wait on Mike Browning’s giggle, then say, “I was talking to your wife, Susie, in the airport lounge.” “Oh yeah?” he asks. “She give you some beauty tips?” “Oh that’s funny,” I agree as Browning does that falsetto giggle he does on ephies. “In fact, she wanted to know if I’ve heard about any IPOs for dick enlargement companies. You know, like are they for real or what?” Browning shucks that up too like I’m kinda funny for a blonde, but Bradshaw goes pale as I add, “’Gee, I don’t know, Susie,’” I quote myself, “‘but maybe if you cut it off in a moment of jealous rage, like, you know, if you found out he was cheating on you – screwing hookers in strip-club bathrooms, for example – well, maybe they could like sew on a proper-sized one from a car crash or something.’” Browning is going to wet himself. “Oh my gods oh my gods-” “Franken-dick,” I put the icing on. “You know what, Paula? You’re a real fucking comedian.” He pushes Browning howling out into the aisle. “I’m gonna tell Ricky that one.” “Hmm,” I proffer. “Not sure he’ll be that big on it either.” “Oh my gods oh my gods—” As we watch them go, Jane says, “They’re really sweet, aint they?” It’s my turn to laugh until I realise she’s serious. “It’s on the Street!” the choir shouts with Glenn Freys’ The Heat is On and Browning gets water- boarded with a bottle of Cristal. A roar goes up when he actually pisses himself and I say, “OK, what have they given you so far?”
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“Oh you know,” Jane goes drugged-up whimsical. “A little white one, a red one, um—” As it becomes clear I’m the only thing standing between her and a line out the mile-high club lavatory’s door, she adds, “They told me to look at HTN-2 futures maturing next month. What do you think, Paula?” What I think is how does a broad sitting in First believe anything that comes out of these assholes’ mouths? Her first year on the Street and she makes the top thirty at M&L? Something isn’t right. Basically a quant dressed by Sears mail-order who writes junk bond algorithms no-one understands, it turns out she’s one of the new breed of Ivy league brainiacs who didn’t grow-up with a silver spoon. I mean, I went to Dartmouth on a scholarship even my dad was making good money in Brooklyn developments by then, but Jane’s not even from New York. A New England girl, her parents have a hardware store. That’s it. Obviously clueless with clothes in that bargain-bin skirt, she doesn’t make eye contact as she tells me her life story and doesn’t mind the jokes the guys drop by to make at her expense. Shy but cutting at times, smart with numbers but dumb as tree-bark with men, she’s a strange one. Not strange strange – no broad from New England’s getting in the door unless she’s fuckable – but not your killer-type or hardbody either. Worse is she doesn’t seem to realise she’s only a few drinks away from getting stuck in a bathroom on high rotation. “When I was a girl,” she tells me dreamily as the champagne mounts those pills, “I wanted to be a horse. Did you know that?” I’m not really staring at tiny Pacific islands drifting past her window as I think: Are you fucking kidding me? “And now I drive a Honda.” Jesus F Christ. Anything less than a Porsche and she’s going to get eaten alive. “I want you to be a horse too, Jane,” Tommy Milner drools on his big return. Swigging from a bottle of duty-free black label inflating his balls, he adds, “In fact, I’ll ride both of you bareback, all, day, fricken long.” “Are we talking to you, dickless?” I warn him. “Take a hike.” Those balls hesitating, he does the smart thing and makes light. “I love you too, Paula.” “Love my foot up your ass.” “And that’s my fucking seat, OK?” he turns back. “Don’t forget that.” I tell Jane, “I’ve been on the Street nearly five years now, so I know my way around a pack of hyenas.” “But Tommy’s really–” “And don’t think just ‘cause they’re wearing Brooks Brothers they’re not mentally putting dicks up your ass.” The quant blushes amateur-hour, so I rationalise for her. “Being a woman in this game, OK sweetheart, you got to give them something else to think about.” Janes struggles past dicks. “Like football?” I wait in case she’s joking. “Like your foot at ten feet per second into their balls sack.”
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“Ouch,” she giggles. “Or better yet, their bank accounts. Listen,” I get down to business. “The first thing you’ve got to grasp is the fact they don’t respect you.” Bewilderment. “They don’t?” “What they respect is how much money you made last quarter. I mean,” I check my lipstick in my compact mirror, “everything’s amplified on the Street. The more you know, the more money you make. Your money goes up and so does what you know.” She sips her Cristal, grimaces. “OK—” “Learn you’re here to.” “Huh?” “Yoda.” “Right right,” Jane’s nodding. “You know I even burned a bra at college? It was really–” “No-one gives a shit about your rights, Jane. What they care about is how exposed your ass is. And by extension, theirs.” She frowns. “Oh.” “Does it matter at the end of the day if you, say, design a bond that blows up once certain macro perimeters are tripped that leads to a certain boardroom vote is acquired to do Paul Volcker’s bidding to ‘break unions and empty factories’?” Her eyes look at me but she’s seeing something else. “Do you have a certain boardroom in mind?” “Maybe,” I tease. “So people lose their jobs and we make a killing on fees; big deal. There’s predators and there’s prey is what you end up realising, and your only choice is which one do you want to be?” “Hey Paula,” Newman slides his little tent past. Trying some Rodney Dangerfield on, he says, “You're a lot of woman, you know that? Wanna make 14 dollars the hard way?” “Go fuck yourself, Newman.” “Yeah Newman,” Jane has a go backing me up. Thinking about it a second, she adds, “Like in the lavatory. Not here.” “Don’t mind if I do,” the degenerate says and blows us kisses. “Thinking of you two.” Jane giggles re the lesbian fantasy that doesn’t take a genius to realise will dog us the whole trip. Drunk and stoned on pills or not, the way she blushes as he winks like he’s cute in a sweaty, unfit, unattractive collegial kind of way makes me want to slap her again. “OK. Tell me the truth. Have any of these animals, you know—?” Jane just gives me that blank mousey secretary look like she forgot to book my lunch reservations. “‘You know’ what?”
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I sigh. “You better listen to me, sweetheart. This is the lion’s den. There’s no such thing here as mutual. Everything, everything,” I emphasise, “is zero sum.” Instead of listening but she pats me and giggles. “Oh, Paula—” “Ipso fucking facto, Princess Leah, out of two rootees, there’s only gonna be one winner.” Jane watching me wavers and her eyes get seasick. Then she clucks like the chicken that’s never seen the axe and says, “Don’t you think you’re, you know, exaggerating just a little?” And right then, speak of the devil, Ricky Peterson and Jake fricken Johnson swagger out of the pack towards us. “Exaggerating, huh?” “You give g-o-o-o-o-d he-a-d,” the two massacre Whitney Houston through shit-eating grins. “Just a little?” Jane coaches. She does this intoxicated half-wave at them and says, “They’re pretty much just like us on the inside.” Thinking my god, how do you even exist?, Ricky pretends to be nice. “Hi Paula.” Doing the standard legs inspection as he takes up position in his Armani pin stripe slacks and off-white Felix Bellamy shirt rolled at the sleeves, he says, “I see you made it into First Class this year.” “Hi Ricky,” I mock him, “so big of you to notice.” “Oh that's right,” he grins. “Bradshaw was telling me about your little jokes.” “They were tiny.” I make a little pinch with my thumb and fore-finger and squint, “Teensy wincy—” But Ricky just smiles. It’s been nearly four years after all and he doesn’t normally hear that from women. “So who's this?” “Oh I'm sorry,” I pretend to be sorry. “Jane, meet Ricky Peterson. Securities, energy in particular, he gets lucky with other people’s numbers and has redefined the term ‘male slut’.” “Damn, girl,” he glows. “My new Ferrari has better manners than you.” Then he leans over me to Jane and says confidential-like, “She's just pissed off I made number one.” Jake WASP-whistles and burns a finger on his friend. “Damn, Ricky. You're hot, man!” As they high-five, Jane sees stars. “You were the top earner for 1985? Wow, Ricky!” “Believe it, sweetheart,” he flirts shamelessly. Then turning his James Dean looks at the other oxygen thief, he adds, “And Jake my well-dressed GQ friend here was number three.” “At your service,” the wolf-in-Louis V bows. Jane giggles again and again slapping comes to mind. She doesn’t know what I know, that Ricky’s a thief who’ll steal the air right out of your lungs and drop you like he never knew you. “But wait a second,” Jane suddenly realises. “Who was number two?” Ricky glances at Jake and they grin. “You're sitting next to her.” “Paula?” Jane gushes like I just won lotto by pure luck. “Oh my gosh, I had no idea—”
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“Because I'm a woman or because you are?” Jane suddenly doesn't know what to say. “No I–” “But you know Paula,” Ricky tells me sadly, “don't think number two’s going to be worth shit when I get the job.” Feeling at a disadvantage caught between Conan the Ferrari-driving Barbarian and Bambi-on-ether by the window, I force a smile. Even these guys are what some women – mainly prostitutes – consider hot being rich, fit and handsome in their late twenties, all I can say is, “What job?” Jake and Ricky share another glance and start grinning. “She doesn't even know,” Jake high school-like can't believe it. “Know what, dip shit?” “Is this one of those knowledge is power things?” Jane asks innocently. “You could say that,” Ricky looks down at us. Jake enjoys a few more moments, then he tells us, “Hartcher's out.” A moment as I try recall the managing director in the hectic weeks leading up to Christmas. “What do you mean, ‘out’?” “Waited for his bonus,” Jake explains, “then flew the coup.” “Pull!” Ricky shouts making Jane jump. He pretends to shoot the clay MD Jake launches, then laughing they high-five. Chris P. Hartcher, or Chrispy Creme as me and several of us fondly knew him, is one of the four MDs and more than my immediate boss in A&M, he’s someone I considered a mentor an ally. “To be more precise,” Ricky tells us confidential-like, “he had a complete fucking breakdown and bought a fallout bunker in Montana.” I look between them for a hint of the joke. “Bullshit.” Jake: “Said the big one's coming and literally went to ground.” “Yeah,” Ricky laughs. “Like fucking underground.” “Wait,” I tell them. “You know this how?” Ricky does wait, as in relishing the moment, then says, “Seppi told me.” D’Angelo P Seppi is another of the four managing directors we call the Four Amigos. Or make that three it sounds like now. Both being womanising drug pigs, he and Ricky being the latter’s supe hang out a lot. Clubs, strip-clubs, restaurants and industry events, noses to the grindstone they follow the white lines interconnecting Manhattan’s financial district. It’s not surprising he’s taken a younger version of himself under his wing, because power blocks is how this works. “I assumed Hartcher was flying out on the corporate jet with the others.” “No can do,” Ricky grins knowingly. “It’s just Seppi, Rey, John J and Big Al.”
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For a moment I’m not hearing the drunken chorus singing Out of Touch by Hall and Oates. “Big Al’s coming out?” “She really doesn’t have a clue,” Jake clucks. “The Big Al,” Jane wants to know. “As in your god,” Ricky tells her bluntly. Then enjoying my push-pull Hitchcockian moment where I’m watching a crow digging out someone’s eyeball, Richie Rich says, “And that’s not all I know.” The pills and champagne conspiring, Jane’s breathless. “What else do you know?” “Big Al’s going to personally choose a new Managing Director,” Ricky explains. The crow eating the eyeball zooms to me down the rabbit-hole trying on the Red Queen’s crown. Managing Director means getting out of the boiler room swamp to your own suite in the ivory tower. Power lunches, squash with the group heads, dick teasing clients powerless to resist my leverage. “How?” “See this,” Ricky indicates me to Jake. “You see what I’m talking about?” “Pretty sharp for a blonde.” “Why is she sharp for a blonde?” Jane wants to know. Ricky’s grin widens. “Because Paula here knows there must be some sort of process. Like a set of endurance tests, events you might even call them, designed by the Amigos to weed out the weak, pathetic and poorly dressed.” I look at Jane to see if she understands zero-sum yet. A traumatised attendant made it past the island bar scrum tries to smile topping up my flute. Leaning between Burt and Ernie, they don’t give her an inch. “And because you and Seppi share hookers,” I tell Ricky, “he’s told you what they are.” “Wow,” Jake puts a finger out, “I’m gonna cut myself.” “Touch me and I’ll break your fricken arm.” “She could do it,” Ricky concedes. “Paula’s a black belt in Ice-Queen-chi.” I sip the cold Cristal. “That doesn’t even make sense.” “Ice-cream kimchi?” Jane asks and skulls her drink. “Oh my God I’m so thirsty–” “And is Seppi going to hold your hand in these ‘special events’?” “You know Paula,” Ricky tells me, “if I was you, I’d start working for me, not against me.” For a moment, our eye contact is the artefact of that drunken after-party four years ago. Or was it an after-party of an after-party? Even the details aren’t clear, it was pretty heated. Up against the wall with my legs wrapped around his hardbody kind of heated. Tequila, cocaine, youth and sudden riches like pouring fuel on a fire, we went over the line. It’s probably the main reason I moved into acquisitions and mergers from equities where I started. Regardless we occupy different parts of the floor now, zero-sum means any woman would have to assume all the others know too. Even I pretend there’s nothing to. What we both do know in that look between us, however, is that there’s unresolved business.
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“In a fair fight, Ricky,” I look deep into eyes, “I’ll destroy you.” Ricky holds my gaze. And in that look, suddenly I’m seeing something. Something cold in that memory of us. Something— “That’s the spirit!” he laughs. As I recover from whatever I was just seeing, he tells Jane across me, “No-one wants to fuck a corpse, right? Where’s the fun in that?” Jane agrees then goes pale. “Wait. You don’t mean me. Do you?” The Paula Atkins patented up and down eyeroll ensues. “Except maybe Newman,” Jake tells his would-be boss. Ricky clicks his tongue. “I stand corrected.” Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing kicks back in for the fricken nth time and the Two Stooges slink away to rejoin the fray. “You’ve been warned,” Ricky cocks a finger-gun back at me. I look at him with clear eyes. “I’ll see you on the field, you little mo.” “Wow, Paula,” Jane’s concerned, “are you really going to fight with Ricky?” My Black Beauty coming on nice, I just smile at my funny little mousey Golden Goose with the secretary glasses. I feed us both more of the little black bombshells, then tell her, “Come on.” Pulling her into the sweaty mix and singing along now with Duran Duran’s A View to a Kill, I imagine looking out over Manhattan from Hartcher’s corner MD office. I picture his clients, powerful men in their forty and fifties, bored with their ball-breaking wives as I hold their eyes and cut deals. Also, I think about what an iron fist feels like. Sure Ricky’s a tricky prick, but from that corner office, he’s going to show me some respect finally or I’ll crush him. Looking around is I’m going to need some of these guys, and in this way, all the little half-assed gropes and feels and whispers in my ears just so they can smell my hair and get close to my neck are down-payments. By the time I drop a couple of bennies from McDaniels and get them moving with a dab of white Arnolds put under my nose, I’m ready to help drink this goddamned plane dry. The pilot tells us we’re descending to Hawaii for fuel, but really it’s to restock the booze. And clean the restrooms. Sheesh. Piss, shit, cum, vomit – you want to be a chick on Wall Street, sister? Get used to the smell.
3. Brisbane International Airport
Fiji a dark blob out the window, Oldfield throws up in an ice-bucket. Over Noumea, the captain and two attendants try talk down Berganhoff, plane phone in hand, from a suicidal ten million put on SRXH. There’s
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more music, booze, more pills and dirty dancing as I cap the feels per minute Jane’s fielding, then they’re wrestling McDaniels into his chair and walking the aisle smoke-machining bug-gas out of cans in each hand. We land in this town called Brisbane. It’s late and my hair’s a mess. I’m talkin Cindy friggen Lauper struck by lightning disaster, and even the hyenas know better than to say a goddamn thing as we stagger through the accordion. The first thing I notice is the air. It’s hot, thick and wet, like Platoon. Wheeling my carry-on on the little wire fold up Sammy got me, I ask Jane, “Is this place in the fricken jungle or what?” Bleary-eyed, she tells me, “Capital of Queensland.” “As in Flash Gordon?” I quip the English rock group. Passing a big blue flag painted on the wall with white stars and the Union Jack, Jane replies, “As in little Britain in the Southern Hemisphere.” Hungover as fuck and looking like Rocky’s wife before the make-over, I can tell Jane’s starting to feel what it really means to be on the Street. At immigration there’s going to be trouble as uniforms don’t like the rowdy behaviour and start pulling on rubber gloves. Without the execs, we realise rich or not we’re vulnerable. “Touch me and I’ll sue your fricken shrimp off the barby!” Jennings threatens held back by Robinson and Lewisham. Robbie Patton is particularly fired up or drunk, take your pick, and demands, “I met Olivia fricken Newton John, and she loved it!” Arnolds, meanwhile, is pale and sweating. The confrontation attracts these guys in cheap suits. “What’s the story morning glory?” asks the older one. He’s tan but grizzled like old leather. A thin fuzz of hair burned away down the middle of his head, he looks around us making eyes drop. The younger one with him is all muscle with a full head of hair. “Looks like the yank women’s cricket team’s here to face Lillie, boss.” He looks Chalmers up and down like trying on his clothes and adds, “Mate, I thought only poofters wore gold watches.” Chalmers drunk-grins. “You know what? That’s a real nice suit.” He brushes some non-existent fluff from punchy’s lapel and asks, “Don’t tell me. Crocodile Dundee, Saville Row?” I remember in the inflight magazine a film called that. Coming out later this year, it’s about a guy who talks to crocodiles and meets a sexy reporter from New York. The plain-clothes have never heard of it but look at each other like they’ve got a live one here. “Don’t mind him,” Ricky steps in. He actually puts an arm around the shoulders of the older guy’s brown suit and with his other shakes his hand. Nodding back at Chalmers, “He thinks Madonna’s Like a Virgin is about him.”
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Laughs from the apes which diffuses things a little. “Is that so?” “Michael Jackson wrote Beat It after watching him play with himself at Donald Trump’s Christmas party.” More laughter, then Ricky adds, “I was like, Stevie, goddamn it! Put that toy away and suck harder man!” Chalmers shakes his head but takes the laughs. The wiry guy releases Ricky’s handshake and puts the hundreds in his pocket. He says, “You the boss here, sport?” Ricky winks at me. “You could say that. Ricky Peterson, acting Managing Director at Wall Street’s Munk and Leach, at your service.” Even though they just shook, Ricky’s hand is back in the plain-clothes’ grip where another hundred or two is exchanged. “Wall Street, huh?” the cop looks around us again. Eyes resting on me, he asks Ricky, “This shelia your secretary?” Ricky laughs. “That’s what I keep trying to tell her.” Despite the way the men are all suddenly looking at me, I can’t stop my eyes doing that up down thing. “Gimme a break.” “I’m lieutenant Jones,” the prick tells my would-be boss, “and this here’s senior detective sergeant Savage.” Chalmers almost laughs but thinks better of it. “Something funny, mate?” The trader shakes his head. “No sir.” “What’s your business here?” the lieutenant wants to know. Ignoring some of the kids up the back crying for bed, Ricky says, “Well sir, we’ve booked out your Royal Palms resort on your Gold Coast for a chin-wag and vegemite sandwich.” There’s a look between detectives that could be interpreted as predatory. “Is that a fact?” “No expenses spared,” Ricky confirms. Then his own grin widening as he leans in, “If you know what I mean.” The wily old crow in his cheap suit does and looks around the group. “Well in that case then, welcome to Queensland, ladies.” “Thanks, sirs!” Jane says, but then looks around when no-one else says anything. “But just remember this,” the lieutenant warns. Putting hands on hips so his jacket spread reveals the butt of a holstered cannon, he adds, “You’re not in Kansas anymore kids, and you better believe that
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here, we make the rules. I don’t care who you are, or what you’re worth,” looking specifically at Chalmers. “You do what we say, when we say it, and we’ll all be friends. You ladies got that?” “Yes sir!” Jane answers again and everyone groans. The lieutenant looks at her and then at his sidekick like is she taking the piss? Unsure, he tells the rubber gloves, “Alright lads, let ‘em through.” It’s our first victory on Aussie soil and the apes cheer as they push through. Jane and I following, the one called Jones winks at me and says, “G’day, darl.” Unsure what that means, I tell him, “OK.” “You’re not packing a snag in your Esky, are ya?” Jane and I look at each other like what the hell? Then the MBS alchemist says, “She’ll be right, mate,” and then, “Good’onya.” The cops watching us go, I hear the lieutenant say, “Stone the crows, look at that would ya?” “Nice bit of crumpet boss.” I cringe not looking back. “Yep,” Jones agrees. “But like the great Bazza once said, if it’s raining yank virgins mate, we’ll be flushed down the gutter with poofters for sure.” “Where’d you learn to speak Australian?” I ask Jane and sneak a look back. Grinning, the lieutenant winks at me. Jane staggers on. “Norman Gunston on cable.”
*
Outside, the air’s an even warmer bath and my hair’s homicidal. Some Japanese guys in nice suits guide us to charter buses, but when Jay Farris slaps me on the butt as his wife’s busy herding their screaming kids onto the ‘family one’ and says we can sit up the back on the ‘men’s one’ with him and Arnolds, whom he keeps calling ‘The Man’, as in, “The Man has spoken!” and, “Don’t ask me Whitby, ask The Man,” I tell him to go fuck himself and catch a cab with Jane. The cabbie’s Fred Flintstone after Wilma left him for Barnie cause the place’s a fricken hour away. But instead of suggesting he call one-three-hundred-shut-the-fuck-up-and-drive, I tell him the firm’s paying so double it. In the backseats of his boxy yellow Ford station-wagon, Jane and I sleep on each other’s shoulders and try not to cry. I overheard Verne telling Oldfield the Amigos are flying in with Big Al on a chopper to the eighteenth fairway, so, you know, I don’t think they’ll notice a hundred bucks.
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Outside the windows, deep pools of darkness are broken now and then by outcrops of town lights. At one point we pass a billboard I swear is a giant grim reaper with a bowling ball. Jane developing a little whistle as she lightly snores, I think about how ‘85 was a big year, sure, but that’s ancient history. Instead, I need fresh blood to get my numbers up. Like Mirage Point One moving on Klaxton-Murton Holdings I spotted before Christmas. Lights arcing across the black windows like passing us one to another, they’re in fact a perfect fit I decide. Even they don’t know it yet. Even I have to make them know it through whatever means possible. But more than a perfect fit, they’re perfect for me. The fees alone based on market caps would be out of the ballpark, and the vision merging them – a business services platform on this thing called the internet taking-off and an old school national distribution network going nowhere with a geriatric board – it’s practically a redefinition of the fast-changing business environment. Sure it’s just a feeling at this stage, but it’s my feeling and like Hartcher used to tell me, reality is what you say it is. So tired I feel like Dick Dastardly with Muttley at the end of a Wacky Races holiday marathon, finally we’re winding through a big gate and lush gardens to this hotel tower when Jane sits bolt upright and points at something outside the black windows. “Oh my gods! Is that a real kangaroo?” The cabbie up front sighs. “It’s a golf-course, darl,” he says like that explains everything.
4. Royal Palms resort
Pulling up to the big lobby, there’s lots of flowers, lots of light. Lots of Japanese standing around waiting despite the hour. The air’s like Hawaii was, and looking around, it’s more modern than I thought. The Japanese bowing like Louis Vuitton dominos, we make our way to the desk. Are their Japs like our Puerto Ricans? I can’t figure it out. We check in before the buses arrive; I’m on fourteen and Jane’s on ten. Her hair’s even worse than mine, so I leave her to it. My bags already in the room, I turn on the lights and look around. Not bad. Queen bed, paisley sofa, faded portrait of some stiff with a crown. Even I’m cross-eyed with fatigue, I kick off my Hermes and crack a Fosters from the mini-bar. There’s an old wired brick on the beside-table, but then I have to get up to turn on the 36 inch JVC tube manually. Test patterns and static as I punch through the buttons. No cable, no Letterman or Patty Winters repeats and the honeymoon is over. I kill the tube and find a guest folder on the writing desk by the windows. There’s a message from the owner who’s this wily looking old Japanese guy I thought at first was Big Al, then another from a white
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grandpa straight out of the Muppet Show. The ‘honourable premier of Queensland’, B’Jesus Peterson I read cross-eyed with fatigue – please gods not a relation of Ricky’s – he wants me to have a good time in the Queen’s land but to remember it’s a strictly law-abiding state. Flanking him are some cops smiling like gators, and I get a shiver remember the plain-clothes Jones and Savage at the airport. The next pages explain Royal Palms, which I suppose means the Queen being this is her land’n all, is only ten minutes cab ride to where the beaches are. The hotel’s kind of triangular with a big pool and tennis courts in the middle of a golf-course, and yeah, there’s kangaroos as a broad takes what I think’s a putt. The beaches are called Surfers Paradise, and looking at the pictures it is. I don’t surf of course – whata ya think I’m crazy? I’m from goddamned Brooklyn – but the beaches are straight outa Hawaii or California where a girl can get a winter tan and admire some bronzed hardbodies. Exhausted, I dim the lights and look out the big windows. The golf course below darkly knotted with trees disappears towards a few I won’t say skyscrapers, and there’s a silver smudge of what must be moonlight on the ocean. Thinking of Sammy back home, he’d like this place. A Queens boy, which has nothing to do with England let me tell you, his idea of paradise is Coney Island in July. And you know what? This’d be a good place for kids even I get a bit weird. Without all the stinking garbage on the sidewalks and fricken crackheads everywhere, it’s a country town with tall buildings. Too bad about the pinko socialist government of this guy Hawke Vern was telling me about. Apparently he’s got the world record for drinking beer. Go figure. But you know, maybe if I beat Ricky to the job, like maybe if I get some big scores on the board like Mirage-Klaxton and set us up in a fund, then who knows? No-one lasts on the Street. Not if they don’t want to lose their soul and burn up like they’re saying Hartcher did. Funny, but he always told me get a plan. Which if you know anything, means an exit strategy. I never believed he said it’s just money, but looking now at that ocean glimmering moonlight... I’m about to take a shower and crawl into bed when there’s a knock at the door. I open it in a bathrobe and say, “This better be fricken good.” Far from good, it’s Jerry “Wack-a-mole” Hacking. “Jesus,” he recoils. “You look like shit.” I have to breathe a moment so I don’t go for his throat. Grown men run past shouting and flicking each other’s bare asses with towels. “What the fuck do you want, Jerry?” “Big Al’s downstairs in the bar drinking with the troops. Also, what drugs you got?” I close the door on his face and almost cry. Un-fucking believable. Here I am, hungover in the middle of nowhere with psycho hair, and now I’ve got to put my face back on dodge pricks on the dancefloor? But you know what? I didn’t make number two last year from wimping out when there’s ass to kick. Because if these little pricks think just because I’m a broad—
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So I pop an ephy and eat the chocolate in the mini-bar. I take that goddamn life-saving shower and masturbate thinking of the real James Dean Ricky imitates. No, actually he’ a black and white dumb-shit. Rather, it’s my very own Sammy, the trainee doctor listening to my heartbeat as his fingers caress, caress, who gets me over the line. A new woman, I blow-dry my hair Flash Dance big. I rub L’Oseane revitaliser gently into my cheeks and neck; I do Maddison Vinchi number four foundation and notice my fingers slightly shaking. “What are you, a fricken lightweight?” I tease my eye-lashes black and remind my reflection, “You made the top thirty, girl, at M and fucking L, for the second year running.” When that doesn’t seem enough, I add, “For Christ’s sake, you’re a Senior Vice President at twenty- seven.” I pencil my brows I just had done before we left and say, “And not just the top thirty, OK, number fricken two for 1985.” But as I brush on some number five around my cheeks, it’s clear there’s something else and I down my tools. “OK. What?” I want to know. Then my throat tightens and my skin gets clammy. For a moment I’m falling away inside myself and can’t stop. My eyes are a deer’s caught in the headlights of something monstrous, something I can’t see behind its glare but know it’s coming right for me. For some reason, I think of that office party four years ago. Tequila, coke, money, kissing as we stumbled into an office. “Fucking Ricky?” I want to know. “Seriously?” In the mirror, I don’t answer but recall shuttered blinds, it’s dark, my clothing coming off, his hands on me like fragments the blackout missed. For some reason, I can’t breathe. “But why now?” I want to know. But instead of an answer, what I get is suffocating darkness. It’s everywhere; there’s no boundary as my mind’s filling in hot kisses on my neck, hands everywhere. ‘You’re so hot’ I try to remember whispered in my ear, but in my blue eyes, it’s not like that at all. What instead it’s like is Ricky is the darkness. His kisses are actually a hand around my throat, his heavy breathing: ‘Shut the fuck up.’ “And this is real?” I want to know. Like an explanation, his face resolves out of the darkness. His eyes are dangerous. Brutal like I’ve never seen them before. “Jesus,” I sit back in the chair. The vision receding, I’m not sure I didn’t just make that up. Ricky’s just another prick even he’s on a lucky streak right now. Right? And besides, what’s memory anyway I start thinking? Because once you factor in several pills, champagne and the fricken ridiculous flight halfway around the world as I style my hair big, it’s hard to understand what that just was. We were good
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back then but. You could even say Ricky got me my start before I moved over to Hartcher in M and A. Maybe it’s just that to get this MD position if it’s true, I’m gonna have to destroy him. I finish my hair and crawl into my new Chanel black cocktail dress to make dicks ache. Then I return to the bathroom to put on lipstick. While my fingers and lips do their thing, a second take of those blue eyes in the mirror does not lie. “Jesus fricken Christ,” I’m actually annoyed. “It is fucking Ricky.” But that was four years ago, I remind myself. “Why now?” Why now, girlfriend, is hiding in plain sight. So I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but as the guys say, he had me. And having, it would seem, never ends. Sure I had him too in a perfect world, but this aint perfect: this is fricken Wall Street. A guy fucks around and he’s a hero. You fuck around and you’re a slut. And even I thought those sleeping dogs were let lie, now we’re older, one of us is going to be the other’s boss. You don’t know even know what the other guys know, I remind myself, which shouldn’t matter but it does. Am I their best kept secret? Ricky’s got no mercy; I see it all the time. He’s a natural born killer and feels zilch for his victims. “Is that all you are?” I ask the mirror. “Just another victim?” I respond by putting on the twenty-four karat gold hoops earrings Sammy got me from Bloomingdales for Christmas. Ready, I lean forward and look myself hard in the eyes. “If one of us has to be the victim,” I lay it on the line, “it sure as shit isn’t going to be you, girl.” I lock my door and go and wake Jane.
5. Seppi makes the welcome speech
Downstairs in the big ballroom, it’s pushing three as Jane and I sip Irish coffees and Michael Jackson’s Thriller blasts shards of disco-ball up the thirty-foot glass panelling. Jesus F. It’s only the first night and already things are out of control. Entropy stripping away Armani tuxes, Dol laVita cocktail dresses and Gucci heels from the fifty odd New York Yuppies swirling to the music, the dancing is dirty heading for swinging. An endless stream of Japs in penguin suits weave the human asteroid field making sure no-one’s sober, and little cliques of conspiracy form and plot. Past this Hieronymus Bosch musical on acid, the black glass grids an illuminated pond diagonaling the Eighteenth fairway. Above it, what looks like a doll’s house for distance is a Mexican chapel spot-lit in trees. Our backs to the bar, Jane eyes wide on nembies keeps oscillating between joining in and running for her room. “That’s Tony D Olsen,” I point out the fat fuck Flash-dancing past so high on Bennies he’s got the bear rug out. “Securities, wife and kids sleeping upstairs, allied to John J. He made the top five in ’83 and will grab your ass even sober so don’t turn your back.”
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“I’ll grab his freakin ass,” Jane defiantly takes another sip. “Right spirit, wrong action,” I tell her. “He knows people at Goldman with good info. Tease him for leads then swing to another guy right in front of his face.” Jake sails by with a beautiful dark-skinned woman in the long silver Elizabeth Finerelli dress Sigourney Weaver wore to the Oscars. “You see that? That’s Burdi’s wife, Shiri.” Jane sips her Irish single malt espresso. “Isn’t it Siri?” “Whatever. The fact is she’s a babe, and Burdi’s over there in the booth next to Big Al’s telling war stories instead.” Jane in some kind of Best Buy sequined cocktail dress sips, grimaces. Sips, grimaces. “But who knows, right?” I watch Jake spin her around and then pull her tight a moment. “Getting overheard pissing on Lehman victims trying to put their guts back in is probably worth a second wife.” Sip and grimace. “He’s not as big as I thought.” I scoff. “Jake’s got the brain of a mouse, sweetie.” “I mean Big Al.” It’s true. Through the zombie apocalypse writhing to the opening chord of I Wear My Sunglasses at Night by Corey Hart, Big Al sits in the big corner booth watching like something’s about to happen. He’s with the old guy in the guest book, Nakajima, whose resort it is, and they’re just sitting there watching like mafia godfathers or something. “He rarely comes to the junkets,” I tell Jane. “He wasn’t in Miami last year.” Jane sips, grimaces. “What’s he looking at?” Not talking, faces dour, both of them are just slowly looking around proceedings flanked by the MDs and their Japanese equivalents like someone’s about to die. I gulp a sip and tell her, “Us.” Watching Nakajima’s army running back and forth from the bar like their lives depend on it – mainly broads but young studs taking care of the wives too – I realise he must’ve also had some kinda deal with the airline. Maybe that’s why none of the boys got arrested on the stopover like they shoulda if it was American women. Maybe he even owns it too. But not all the help are Japs. There’s a few token whites since it’s the Queen’s land after all, and a few minutes ago, I maybe even saw what they call an Aboriginal pass by with a drinks tray. Young, black hair that doesn’t look like Regi’s, we caught each other’s eyes a moment and he smiled. Not a pretend smile servants give you at uptown restaurants – more like we’re some kind of circus come to town and he’s bemused.
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Not really looking around even I’m curious I suppose, Arnolds ‘The Man’ swoons by with a Japanese waitress he’s caught and an entourage of hangers-on. Eyes like he’s just seen the unseeable, he taps his nose at me and laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever done. “Nathan R Arnolds,” I tell Jane. “About your age with half the IQ.” “I know Nathan,” she tells me. “Wow, he really seems to love Australia.” Suddenly Krasky charges across the dancefloor and pushes into Arnolds’ circle like it’s an emergency. He puts the younger man in a headlock, which looks friendly but knowing Krasky, it’s not. Berganhoff who thought he had Arnold’s ear tries to get Krasky off him, and failing, makes it a group hug. “Arnolds’ has form,” I tell her. “Last year, he smuggled five grams of coke up his ass to the junket in Miami.” She can’t believe it. “As in cocaine?” “Which is ironic, right, since it’s like the biggest coke capital in the world outside of Wall Street?” Jane tuts. “Well, that just silly if you ask me.” I sip my drink as Krasky’s Jack Nicholson out of The Shining looks around before snorting a finger he’s emerged from Arnolds’ with. “I suppose he just likes the thrill of being this young rich guy in a designer suit that gets away with it.” “But how can he do his job properly?” I just look at her. If I hadn’t spent the last fifteen hours watching this rolling personification of Bambi crossed with Snow fucking White, I’d assume she was joking. “See Ricky there?” I nod past her. We both watch the broker clenching a red curtesy phone to his ear as he bends over its little bureau with flowers. Suddenly he stands bolt upright with a rolled note in his hand and looks at the high ceiling. “He’s talking to a client back in New York right now. Look at him. He’s got the guy by the balls and playing them like castanets.” As we watch, Ricky barks something into the receiver then goes back down for another hit. “Oh my gosh, I think you might be right.” “If you took away coke away from brokers like Ricky, you’d be left with snivelling nobodies barely able to spell their names let alone top earnings in 1985.” Like to back me up, Ricky screams into the phone, “FUCK YOU, GONZO!” and takes a beer off a passing waitress without skipping a beat. “He’s kind of handsome, don’t you think?” Jane comments. “He looks like that actor–” I snort. “Lex Luther?” “You know,” she says. “He fought the Terminator with Sarah.” Spotting us watching him, Ricky puts up a middle finger and I blow a kiss. “Stallions are handsome,” I correct Bambi. “Ricky’s a VD-ridden slut.”
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The high-fidelity stereo-system kicks into The Divinyls Boys in Town and we resume watching nudity takes its toll. As the men dance with their friends’ wives who aren’t in bed and others claw at Jap waitresses not fast enough to get away, I keep my eye on Big Al and Nakajima as they sit there watching, not even talking. “You see that woman in the dark blue Cassonova FIorentini dress dancing with Gary Bradshaw?” “I think so,” Jane says. Then as we sip our Irish coffees, Gary saying something in her ear is kissing her neck. “But wait. That’s not–” “You’re damned right it’s not,” I agree. “That’s Jerry Jameson’s wife, Rachael.” Jerry, however, is oblivious deep in the huddle with Arnolds. “What I don’t get,” Jane waxes lyrical, “is why invite the families too if this is business?” As I order two more coffees from a passing penguin suit who’s kinda cute, she wants to know, “And why have all these pretty Japanese women waiting hand and foot on them if they can’t keep their hands to themselves?” Jane’s learning quick, because with the wives here there’s going to be trouble. “You ever watch David Attenborough on cable?” “The BBC naturalist?” she asks. “Sure.” Gravely affecting British-voice: “With this much pussy on the hoof, the Manhattan wild-pigs will rut their balls off or die tryin.” Jane giggles and has a go herself. “Many will not survive, killed by their wives when their escapades are discovered–” “But nature,” I continue, “is a cruel mistress, and maybe it’s part of the test.” Laughing, we high five as Ricky several feet away holds the phone out before him and demands, “Whata ya think happened when I took that asshole on his word that he wasn’t selling me a dog that would chew my nuts off?” “Woof woof?” I proffer and Jane laughs. Suddenly the music stops and Ricky screams, “THE FUCKING ARGENTINIAN PESO SHAT IT’S FUCKING PANTS AND SUCKED ITS OWN HEAD DOWN ITS ASSHOLE UNTIL IT WAS A GODDAMNED INVERTED FUCKING NEGATIVE OF A STRIP!” Everyone laughs. “You hear that?” a voice booms over the P.A. turning heads turn back front. “That is exactly the kind of fire we want, people. Ricky,” he says and we all turn back to him, “you fuck that asshole until it bleeds! You hear me?” Instead of embarrassment or outrage or annoyance at bad taste, I see yuppies clapping, cheering, wolf whistling as D’Angelo Seppi, MD, stalks before Big Al’s booth mic in hand. “Here we go,” I whisper to Jane. “Listen and learn, honey.”
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“I hear this place is restricted, Wang,” Seppi apes Rodney Dangerfield’s Al Czervik to his Asian companion on Caddyshack. “So don't tell 'em you're Jewish, okay?” Laughs breaking the ice, he continues, “On behalf of Big Al, our leader, our god,” gesturing behind him and giving the troops time to adore The Godfather just sitting there, impassive, watching us, “and our most gracious host for the week, Mr. Nakajima, a good friend and business partner of Al’s,” more clapping and some whistling in what passes for respectful acknowledgment as the old guy next to Al barely nods, “let me say: Welcome to the future!” Wolf-whistling, hooting and cheering ricochet around the big room. The classic definition of ‘smooth operator’ in his Roman Beluchi pin stripe suit pants and Spencer and Rockford business shirt open at his bulging pecs, Seppi agrees, “That’s right, that’s right people. You know it, baby–” Jane gasps in my ear, “He’s like a movie star–” “That’s just the pills talking, hun.” When she doesn’t seem convinced, I add, “I watched him and Ricky eat steaks off naked strippers at a party once.” “His hair,” she can’t get past. “I just want to pat it.” Not sure if she’s being cynical, I grin, “Watch out or you’ll be meat too.” “And you know,” Seppi continues, “you’re probably wondering, ‘What do you mean by ‘the future’, Seppi? As in we’re fourteen hours ahead of New York like in Back to the Future?” Shrugging pause for more laughter, wolf-whistles, then, “Michael J Fox is his own fag dad?” Literally barking and whoops of uninhibited masculinity, “No, ladies and drug pigs. When I say welcome to the future, what I mean is welcome to a new age of cooperation between two great firms.” Acknowledging the two older men in the booth behind him again, “Because as we conference like it’s 1999, a deal is being forged between two great financial warriors that will see us combine our ruthless expertise with the newest and fastest computer trading platforms the world has ever freaking seen!” Delirious applause; apoplectic money craving exploding like a storm front. Even Jane infected by the promise of riches tries to whistle through her thumb and index finger, making a kind of wheezing noise it’s lucky no-one hears. “Because everyone knows Japanese tech cannot be beaten, people. It’s not some accident they own half of New York by now. And Queensland,” he adds to laughs. “And if you can’t beat them, then we’re going to join them and takeover the world!” Shrieks of money-lust ring out; random women get grabbed and kissed like it’s the end of World War Two. Or maybe the beginning as I laugh and clap along.
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“Because making money has never been easier people. Thanks to Ronnie, we’ve got low interest rates, low inflation, there’s takeovers left right and fucking center we’re killing fees on, and the Dow’s up nearly twenty eight percent and M&L’s position over thirty since Miami last year!” Jane gives a shrieking woohoo! over the noise and I show her how to whistle like a New Yorker. “That’s right, Seppi,” Ricky shouts and wipes white powder off his nose. “In the last year, we’ve led the market through the biggest gains since 1975. Thirty-two record highs were set, and winners outstripped losers by more than five to fricken one. And it wasn’t just us. Our friends here in their operations in Tokyo saw similar gains, as did our branch in London. Which all adds up to the fact that if you can’t make fricken money in Ronnie’s land of the free, then get the fuck out before we fucking throw you out!” Mass hysteria I’m adding to rings out, even I’m wondering if this is what an 1850’s lynching or Hitler Youth parade felt like. “Over the next week, my beautiful young and rich people,” (pause as he points at the front row), “not you, Olsen. You’re a used-up bum,” (hilarity as the older man pirouettes a middle finger above the crowd), “But the rest of you, you are going to show us what you’re really made of.” Claps, whistles, Fuck Yeahs! “But have no fucking doubts,” Seppi raises the temperature, “if you’re made of pussy, if you get fucked rather than fuck, then I’m here to tell you to pack your fucking bags right now, and get on the next fucking flight home! Because we don’t wanna fucking want you!” Hitler Youth slash Beatles-mania derangement reaching a new level, I can’t help roll my eyes. “Are you made of pussy, Jane?” Her clapping, however, doesn’t skip a beat. “I’m one hundred percent vagina!” “If you’re made of ‘I can’t make it, this isn’t fair, boo fucking hoo,’” Seppi builds in the speakers, “then call a fucking cab, and just fuck off!” Krasky shouts over the applause, “Fuck yeah!” “Right fucking now!” Jake still standing next to Siri before us pumps a fist. “You fucking tell us, Seppi!” “Because if you’re not fighting to win, if you’re not ready to go beyond what a normal human fucking being can take, then you don’t deserve to be standing here breathing the same air as Big Al Munk, at his own fucking junket!” I watch the grinning MD pace the mob of howling wolves. With his Don Johnson haircut and manicured two-day growth some women, mainly strippers, find hard to resist, owns this wave and fucking knows it.
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“Three events, ladies and killers,” he explains, “designed exclusively by myself, Rey and John J. Three chances to show us who you really are. Are you the new Managing Director Big Al’s looking for, or are you an also-ran going to eat the shit of those standing on your goddamned head, because that’s where you belong?” The cheering and shouts turn aggressive. Fuck yeah!s turn to I’ll fucking kill you!s, and Show me the money becomes Show me the blood! Dog whistling to wolves, you could call it. And I should know, because I’m one of them. “Make no mistake,” he booms over the mayhem. “You are the crème, people. The top thirty earners for Munk and Leach, you’re feared on the Street. Everybody knows you play to win, and you don’t care what it costs.” En masse whistling; ear piercing Fuck yeahs!; rapid-fire dog howling. “You’re the goddamn storm-troopers of Wall Street. The shock-troops. You are the zero-sum game, where winning means someone else loses. Who are they, these losers, some ask? Who gives a fuck is what you tell them!” Drunken laughter; someone to our left actually vomits. A cacophony of wolf-whistles in the dark forest full of prey washes over us and Jane is lost in it. “Like me, like Big Al,” Seppi steers the mob, “all you know is you love that feeling of sticking the knife in and watching their face as you twist it. This week isn’t about who dares wins, people. This is get the fuck out my way or I’ll rip your goddamn face off where you stand!” And the crowd goes wild. “Fuck me!” Jane squeals and laughs. Clapping with the gormless abandon of a hillbilly at a lynching, she doesn’t seem to realise what she just said or the looks back from Bradshaw and Browning in front of us. “You fucking tell us, Seppi!” “Easy there cow-girl,” I take her coffee splashing both of us. “Just remember what this is, OK?” Lost in the noise, Jane ignores me. “Three special events,” Seppi reminds us. “Three chances to show us it should be you as the new MD.” As everyone assures everyone else that it’s going to be them, Miami Vice’s Wall Street rep says, “Chris Hartcher’s shoes are big ones to fill, but he cracked. He cracked like a fucking egg. Are you going to crack?” “Fuck Crispy Crème!” shouts ring out. “Fucking pussy!” Satisfied, Seppi continues. “There’s eighteen holes of golf you’ve got to play every day, in foursomes we decide.” He pauses at the oohs and ahhs like it’s a sexual thing, and quips, “No fuckin in the bunkers, OK Regi?” He points to the only black trader here, “Just cause you got a five-foot cock, they’ve got rules here.” He waits for the laughter and backslaps on Regi grinning ear to ear to subside, then, “There’ll be time to hit the beaches and some luxury shopping, thanks to our Japanese friends here civilising the place. There’s also
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desk meetings where your new scripts get rolled out. As you know, we’re moving downstream trades as fast as we can into highspeed automation, which is being helped by our Japanese friends here, but we’ve still got to harpoon the goddamned whales first before Goldman or those other pricks do.” Seppi pauses for a round of more sombre clapping and whistling. “Now, you’re not expected to trade while we’re here, but if you’ve got tickets going, our hosts have assured us that arrangements have been made.” Murmuring and speculation about who knows what and how much it could be worth. “Finally,” Seppi talks over it, “there’s no cable TV, but there is a library with multiple copies of some books and videos we expect you to be familiar with. I know I know,” he heads off the groans, ‘but Caddyshack in there, and if you don’t know your Caddyshack after playing eighteen goddamned holes of golf a day for a week, then you deserve to get voted the Dunce next weekend and the punishment that entails.” A pause while the mob eyes potential victims. “Another item in the library, I’m excited to say, is an early draft we’ve managed to procure of a book that will soon be coming out by – you ready for it? – Donald Trump. That’s right!” he booms at us. “The king with the golden shower himself is writing a tome called The Art of the Deal, and we’ve got some bound print- ups to show you how it’s done on top of the mountain.” Seppi pauses for gasps of amazement, and Jane and I look at each other like Moses just handed down the gospel. “Finally, there’s also seven copies of that book by Edward de Bono called Six Thinking Hats that just came out. Maybe you already bought a copy at Barnes and Noble. It’s a good book for our game, thinking outside the box and all, but there’s a problem.” Seppi waits for the requisite WTFs, then explains, “The problem is, people, it’s missing a hat. That’s right, the Orange Hat is not there. So we’ve included some blank pages at the end of each copy that I want written by you guys. Every fricken name in this room who matters should be included at the end of one of those copies,” he warns us. “‘But Seppi,’ I hear some of you mokes asking, ‘What the fuck is the Orange Hat? Orange is kind of intense; a bit crazy even, isn’t it; like fricken rabies or something?’ Well, let me tell you, ladies and vampires, the Orange Hat is freedom. The freedom to want more; the freedom to be greedy. The freedom to never stop because no amount of money is enough. Freedom is intense. It’s crazed, not crazy; it hijacks your fricken brain and gives a greed for life. And when you’ve got your freedom hat on, people, nothing will stand in your way of making yourselves and us more and more fucking money!” And the crowd goes fricken wild. In fact, wild doesn’t even begin to cover it. The talk of unquenchable freedom to take for more than you could ever dream of, the Orange Hat in other words, is intoxicating. Better than the best coke you’ve ever had; better than Ferraris and hookers. Even Jane and I want to have his baby right this fricken moment in front of everyone.
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“That’s right, people!” he booms. “You put on the Orange Hat, you free to be greedy motherfuckers, and you fucking wear it with pride!” Drunk, stoned, fatigued beyond human limits, mass hugging and singing breaks out as Survivor’s 1982 hit Eye of the Tiger fills the hall. Overcome by the planets lining me up for Hartcher’s job and a golden goose to boot, I pull her into a hug. “Come here you.” Jane’s crying, sobbing in fact. “Are you alright?” I want to know. “What’s the matter?” “He’s just so beautiful,” she chokes out. “Seppi? I’m confused. “Darling, he’s just a pimp and gold Rolex.” “Donald Trump,” she breaks down further. Then almost collapsing as the emotion gushes out of her: “I wanna have his orange freaking baby!” “Oh, Janey,” I hug her. “I know darlin. I know. We’re going to be rich.” “l loved my Honda,” she chokes tears. “But it’s over!” Jane howling orange-fever into my cocktail dress, Seppi moves through the crowd high-fiving maniacal yuppies and downing group shots from trays penguins follow with. As for me, I’m left standing there, watching over her shoulder as Ricky bumps heads with someone’s wife on her knees. Not sure at first what I’m looking at in the mirror ball rainbows and blasting music, I eventually make out they’re licking the little phone bureau against the wall with what could be described as sheer abandon. That’s right: licking it. Like they’ve got diabetes and the rose wood parquet is fricken insulin. Their noses dotted white as they go for it, all sense of personal space abandoned, I realise I saw her at JFK herding two kids to the boarding gate. Something Reynolds? Or it’s Jenning’s wife? Whatever, when Ricky still holding that red phone sees me watching them, he starts to grin, then licks her face slow with this big long lick. From chin to hairline, and she doesn’t even seem to notice. White powder splotches all over his handsome face, his grin widens into a laugh that barbwires down my spine.
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2.2 NOVEL REFLECTION
2.2.1 The humanism of discourse
Writing ‘Royal Palms’ with Foucauldian power and its discourse in mind, my approach to characterising 1980s Wall Street employees as decentred subjects constituting and being constituted by discourse can be framed as a mode of practice. In humanism mode, the story follows Paula trying to find her way through a Wall Street career that she’s good at. Working in Mergers and Acquisitions at investment bank M&L, she’s been effective in her five years at the firm ‘because blood doesn’t spill itself’, and as a consequence, was the second highest earning SVP in ’85. However, to continue climbing the corporate ladder and land the Managing Directorship up for grabs, tension arises between her subject-positions as a Wall Street ‘killer’ – normalised by her nemesis, Ricky and his crew – and her personal values of family and partner. These positions are brought into conflict by her new friend and foil Jane, but also Paula’s boyfriend, Sammy, who as a trainee doctor back in New York, works in a discipline diametrically opposed to the predatory nature of her job. Paula demonstrates feminist and multicultural tropes as she develops relationships with Jane, Benji and the young Aboriginal resort waiter, Tyler, which both define her humanism and constitute a strategy to survive and succeed Ricky. Ricky embodies the patriarchal organisation, and in resisting him, she’s effectively resisting it. She suspects he may be psychopathic, but it may be simply the culture of their organisation he illustrates so well. After being taken advantage of herself some years ago by him, Paula tries unsuccessfully to stop the same happening to Jane, who is particularly vulnerable due to what is implied as Asperger’s Syndrome. In the process, Paula learns who she is and what’s important to her. Which ultimately is not the job. This contrast between her job, typified by Ricky, and her ‘self’ outside the firm is illustrated by the pop songs on the mixed tape of 80’s music that she finds Sammy packed as a present. As a subcultural foil, and distilled by their separation, they become the soundtrack of her difference and thus liberation as a self. However, by focusing on Foucauldian discourse theory as a mode of practice, I found myself writing Paula as a decentred subject and thus site of contest between the normalising discourse of her neoliberal Wall Street organisation, M&L, and the resistance of her prior interpellation – her personal discourse. Crucially, and as a summation of this project, I discovered that her humanism reflects her discursive changes and vice versa. There is a feedback-loop between saying and being. Saying, I realised, can never just be saying, even when it’s double-voicing as subterfuge since that still involves the discursive functions of objectification and consequent interpellation according to a formation. In this way, discourse as subject-position doesn’t feel reductionist or misanthropic, since even a character’s most human qualities such as personality, belief,
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emotions, belonging, etc, have correlating functions per their discourse. There is a feedback loop between being and saying and vice versa. It remains unclear, however, where the line is between constituting and being constituted by discourse – that is, what in terms of intentionality can’t be interpellated in a given subject – but increasingly I suspect that there may be no line. To this end, the question of where does the self begin and the organisation end within a subject-position of corporate agency may, in fact, be better framed as what is the self if not its competing discourses? Certainly there is the human subject as biology, and Foucault and others suggest non-discursive practices, but through my practice, I have come to feel that, as things stand in 2019, a given subject cannot not interact with others, the world and even themselves outside of discourse’s objectifications and interpellations. As researcher Michael Graziano suggests, ‘The brain is a model builder’ that models the minds of others ‘so that it can interact socially’ (Deleniv, 2018). As an epistemology of characterisation, the way it does this appears to be through discourse. If Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory proves accurate, then the process of a self developing a ‘personal discourse’ and an organisation developing a culture of those interpellated selves may be a matter of fractal-like scale. In the discursive contest of the subject as self and organisational agent, I began to feel in Paula and Ricky’s conflict the intimate connection between discourse and what Foucault theorised as power. Foucauldian power appears not to be some mystical or magical force, nor is it solely held by a Marxist described bourgeois in a top down distribution. Rather, it feels in text like a kind of socio-discursive gravity that gives weight to subject-positioned characters, causing, facilitating and expressing organisation and its affect of the world. Power, as Foucault suggests, is not held as much as wielded through organisational subject-positions. It’s proportional to knowledge as discourse, which is in turn proportional to organisational subject-positions. Organisational power is fascinating because character-agents like Ricky and Seppi appear to wield it as themselves through their intentionality. While that may be true, it’s also that they are merely functions of power. They could be discarded and replaced at any moment, and the organisation would barely skip a beat.
2.2.2 Literary devices centring discourse as contesting subject-positions
To emphasise my characters as the enunciative functions of discursive statements, I utilised Elizabeth’s Young’s conceptualisation of postmodern ‘blank fiction’ in several ways. At the beginning of the story, for example, I exaggerated the length of the plane flight as a kind of dialogic scape, a ‘mall speak’ vignette reflecting what Rosenblatt described as ‘plotlessness’ in Ellis’ 1991 text. This is also a nod to a time where intercontinental flight was less common and Australia, beyond Men At Work (1982) and Mad Max Thunderdome (1985), seemed endlessly far away from the centre of the world on Wall Street. I was aiming for a sense of totality with Paula trapped on the plane, where incidentally serious speech delineates not only
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the scope of characterisation – of what can be said by who – but discourse as contiguous function demonstrating the truths and reality of organisational subjectification. Qua Ellis’ American Psycho, I appropriated20 and invented pop-culture memes and infotainment to reflect their discourse’s rules of formation. The plane scenes also breaks with convention introducing more characters than the reader can process comfortably, and with no backgrounding ala Ellis’ American Psycho, this flattens them from Paula’s perspective into a field of WASP male-yuppyism. As with the form of American Psycho, I wanted to the enunciative function of the statements by these characters to feature before their humanism. Weighing up the authorial choice to write my protagonist as a female, I considered the legitimate concern about using literature to ‘culturally appropriate’ the voices of those different from myself. As journalist and author Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett warns, many even lauded male writers such as ‘Haruki Murakami’ and ‘Jonathan Franzen’ write women badly as ‘masturbatory’ fantasies, whereas female authors like Elena Ferrante reveal how ‘so much of femininity is unspoken’ (2018, para. 8). Writing from Paula’s POV in ‘Royal Palms’ risked therefore not only failing to portray the ‘subtleties and complexities’ of moving her ‘through the world as a woman’ (ibid 2018), but as Lionel Shriver points out, ‘straight, white fiction writers’ like myself ‘whose characters’ ethnicity, race, disability, sexual identity, religion or class differs from their own can expect their work to be subjected to forensic examination’ (Flood, 2018). However, Shriver also adds that, ‘preventing writers from conjuring lives different from their own would spell the end of fiction’. To this end, Zadie Smith laments the ‘huge pain in the arse’ of ‘identity politics’, suggesting that ‘it assumes the possibility of total knowledge’, contradicting how ‘fiction is fundamentally irresponsible’ (Armitstead, 2019). But in this project, I felt the potential benefits outweighed these risks. Primarily, Paula as my protagonist allowed me to investigate the topic and context in a critical way, demonstrating resistance to the normalisation of 1980s Wall Street neoliberalism where Patrick Bateman, Gordon Gekko, and Paula’s nemesis, Ricky, are the dominant subject-positions. This is not a comment that women can’t succeed in the aggressive patriarchy of Wall Street – Paula as the number two earner from 1985 is good at her job and her ascension is likely, after all – but as a woman, her subjectivity in the organisation’s discourse is ‘other’.
2.2.3 In summary
‘Royal Palms’ represents a continuation of my interest in fictionalising organisational being. It’s an obvious statement to say that people become their jobs, where they do and say things they otherwise might not, and
20 I understand that copyright issues in commercial publishing arise having characters quote lines from films like Caddy Shack etc. However, in this educational context, I have used appropriation according to Fair Use.
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yet it’s less clear how and why. One answer appears to be that the truths that a normalised organisational character-agent holds and the consequent reality they perceive change according to their subject-position. When author Will Storr asked historian Laurence Rees how do otherwise normal people in certain jobs commit ‘acts of evil’, Rees explains, ‘We massively underestimate the power of the culture that we are in to shape us’ (2013, p. 385). But this is answering one question with another. What is the mechanism of ‘culture’ that, like the humanist subject, renders it as if readymade, unquestionable and indivisible? The question of who a character such as Paula is in an organisational context where ‘everything is never said’ drives my practice, but with evidence emerging that the humanist-self as subject may need to be considered decentred by default, I’ve come to realise this question cannot be answered only in humanist terms. Rather, in my practice I have begun to see humanism manifest as a feedback-loop with discourse. Enacted by what Foucault described as statements and which Graham elaborated as discursive junction- boxes where ‘things and words’ intersect as functions, characters as agents of organisation from family to culture to corporation are constituted as interpellations as they practice and thus constitute those discourses. They do this because power draws us into organisation where it manifests and wields its agents they wield it in return. Crucially, being decentred we do not seem to ‘see’ the discourse we adopt for what it is until it clashes with prior interpellation. We are not, this suggests, inside discourse looking out. Rather, we are discourse itself.
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Venugopal, R. (2015). Neoliberalism as concept. Economy and Society, 44(2), 165–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2015.1013356 Wallace, H. S. (2017, May 12). American Fascism, in 1944 and Today. The New York Times, pp. 1–3. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/opinion/american-fascism-trump.html Wayne, L. (1982, July 18). The Corporate Raiders. The New York Times, p. 006074. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/22/magazine/l-the-corporate-raiders-100913.html Whitebook, J. (1992). Reflections on the Autonomous Individual and the Decentred Subject. American Imago, 49(1), 97–116. Whiteford, P. (2013). Australia: Inequality and prosperity and their impacts in a radical welfare state. Canberra: Australian National University. Retrieved from https://crawford.anu.edu.au/pdf/events/2013/8801/Whiteford-Australia-Inequality-and-Prosperity- final.pdf Wikipedia contributors. (2019a). Berserker. Retrieved February 28, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker Wikipedia contributors. (2019b). Problematization. Retrieved April 21, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematization Wilson, J. (2019, January 28). ‘We’ve dug ourselves a really deep hole’ - David Neiwert on the rise of the far right. The Guardian, pp. 1–6. Winn, J. E. (2003). Every dream has its price: Personal failure and the american dream in Wall Street and The Firm. Southern Communication Journal, 68(4), 307–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/10417940309373269 Wolf, N. (1991). The animals speak. New Statesman and Society, (12 April), 33–34. Young, E., & Caveney, G. (1994). Shopping In Space. New York: Grove Press/Serpent’s Tail. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (1st ed.). London: Profile Books Ltd.
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PART 3 – APPENDIX
3.1 Key terms and definitions
Foremost amongst the terms I’ve utilised in this project is Foucault’s concept of ‘discourse’. This refers to ‘a certain “way of speaking”’ and defines ‘the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation [as knowledge]’ (Foucault cited in O’Farrell, 2005b). Discourse is ‘central to the social construction of reality’ (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004, p. 23) within a field and subsequent organisation like my 1980s investment bank M&L. Carol Bacchi and Jennifer Bonham explain that, for Foucault, discourse ‘refers to knowledge, what is “within the true”, rather than to language’ per se (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014). Within my fiction practice, I have come to see discourse as the mechanism constructing contextual ‘truths’ and ‘reality’ via characterisations. While Chater etc appear to confirm Foucault was correct differentiating Enlightenment humanism’s transcendental subject from discourse, my practice seems to indicate the humanism of characters and authorial intent are themselves manifestations of discourse and thus inseparable from it. Even apparently non-discursive aspects of being like the body, genes, psychology etc, can only be identified and thus interpellated through discourse it would seem, hinting at the unavoidable construction of truths and realities for the perceived within various formations of organisational power. In Foucault’s theoretical framework, discourse occurs via the discursive practice of agents (his term was ‘actors’) constituting and being constituted by statements as functions organising power. Statements here are discursive ‘functions’ that produce objects (objectify) and accumulate as networks Foucault describes as discursive formations. In this way, the ‘statement always has borders peopled by other statements’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 97). Statements function moment to moment in the operations of a discourse, but can also be ‘recognized as artefacts that are formed through…subjects and places…and that form objects,’ (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014). From this Foucauldian perspective, the ‘language’ of my practice ‘exists only as a system for constructing possible statements’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 85). Furthermore, statements ‘are of interest, not because of their meaning or content, but because of the role they play in installing networks of relations, which are necessarily political as they affect every dimension of how lives are lived’ (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014). Graham suggests therefore interpreting ‘the statement as an articulation that functions with constitutive effects’, and to this end, writing or analysing a text in terms of networked statements provides an opportunity to focus not only on ‘what they say but what they do; that is…what the constitutive or political effects of saying this instead of that might be?’ (L. J. Graham, 2005, 2011). In my practice ‘Royal Palms’, the 1980s Wall Street investment bank M&L that Paula and Ricky work for what I consider is a manifestation of a discursive formation. That is, a network of contingent and
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functional21 statements organising as power that subjects agents and constitutes objects through ‘serious speech acts’. As a schema integrating these terms, Foucault explains,
We shall call discourse a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation’ (1972, p. 117). That is, that whenever ‘one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation’ (ibid 1972, p. 38).
I read Foucault’s ‘regularity’ above as relatable functions that produce contiguous objects. The ‘enunciative function’ of statements operates as an intentional subject-position. As Foucault describes, ‘the subject of the statement should not be regarded as identical with the author of the formulation - either in substance, or in function. He is not in fact the cause, origin, or starting point of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence’, but rather ‘a dimension that characterizes a whole formulation qua statement. It is one of the characteristics proper to the enunciative function and enables one to describe it’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 95). As Foucault suggests, the constructed objects of a discourse reside in its discursive functions simultaneous to the character-agents constituting them.
..the organization is a socially constructed product, but “the product acts back upon the producer” and is experienced as something other than a human creation (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 61). Thus, the socially constructed organization appears objective and independent of its creators. Actors [character-agents] orient to organizations through their language use and treat them as objects with realities of their own. These discourses then reconstitute the object, a theme developed by Foucault (1972). (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004)
A statement’s enunciative function reflects poststructural ‘rules of formation’. As Bacchi and Bonham explain,
it is in this space between what can be said (grammatically or logically) and what is (actually) said that mechanisms, procedures and processes are at work. Foucault’s target consists of those mechanisms, procedures and processes, which he calls “rules of formation”. These rules “at a given period and for a given society define … the limits and forms of the sayable” (Foucault cited in Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 179 italics theirs).
Importantly, rules of formation ‘are not principles of organization or structures, but sets of relationships, “a complex group of relations that function as a rule”’, and as such ‘do not stand outside
21 Statements in a Foucauldian context are functions that objectify and can be differentiated from propositions and other grammatical features of language.
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discursive practice,’ but ‘are “immanent” in the practice of what people say (discursive practice), not “extrinsic” to discourse’ (Foucault quoted in Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 180). In this way, one element of the discourse analysis of fiction is investigating the social ‘conditions to which…elements…(objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected,’ and which amount to its ‘rules of formation’. They are the ‘conditions of existence…in a given discursive division’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 38, italics his). In ‘Royal Palms’, I highlight the rules of formation of the characters’ discourse through references to popular culture and political rhetoric. Foucault’s term power also requires determination. For the French theorist, power is not described in Marxist terms, and not only constrains and limits but produces (Gutting, 2005, p. 51). Power, it would seem, is inevitable as organisation. It is expressed and concentrated by discourse, where it plays out between subjects via their objectifications, which is also the organisation as discourse normalising its agents through their relations. To this end, Foucault suggests ‘power and knowledge directly imply one another’ in as far as ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’ (Foucault, 1979). As Jorgenson and Phillips write, ‘power provides the conditions of possibility for the social. It is in power that our social world is produced and objects are separated from one another and thus attain their individual characteristics and relationships to one another’ (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 13). Tracing how epistemic power in European cultures shifted from the sovereign until the 17th century to one of disciplinary power developed in prisons, schools, and militaries – a revealing trilogy culminating in ‘panoptic power’22 where the individual ‘becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Behrent, 2009; Foucault, 1979, p. 203) – Foucault describes the rise of biopower in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. His initial hope as a social activist for neoliberalism relates to biopower’s ‘economic liberalism’ – a progenitor of contemporary neoliberalism – since it was not, he thought, ‘primarily concerned with individuals’, and in this way ‘paradoxically…offers individual freedom greater scope’ (Behrent, 2009, p. 558). This is power as the management of life – citizens, employees, etc – directed not at the individual level creating subjects of discipline23, but populations (ibid 2009, p. 557). It’s important to emphasise, however, that Foucault’s descriptions of power are not absolute and continue to overlap in varying degrees according to organisational
22 With the culmination of the internet, smartphones and (AI) algorithmic data-harvesting, it could be argued that we have entered a new era of de-individualized biopower (mass data for the management of life) crossed with personalising panoptic power (personalised data profiles and trails) where freedom is illusory since ‘under discipline’ – now the constant measurement of the self and its conformity through social media, surveillance and workplace monitoring – it ‘is not the real thing’ because it is only an impression of liberty (Behrent, 2009).
23 Though that is of course still the case in as far as the subject is increasingly identifiable data and subjected by participation in organisational disciplines and social being.
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context. In this way, Foucault theorised that biopower may ‘envelop’ disciplinary power, which is the stance I take in depicting organisation in my practice. Foucault (1979) argued that normalisation is the process of a disciplinary institution / organisation / field constituting its subjects. As Gary Gutting explains, in ‘modern disciplinary control…[i]ndividuals are judged not by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts but by where their actions place them on a ranked scale that compares them to’ their peers (2005, p. 84). In my fiction practice and analysis, this becomes normalisation as characterisation of the decentred subject by the discourse of organisational power. Furthermore, to become a ‘normal’ subject like Ricky in an organisation like a Wall Street investment bank, a process of discursive interpellation takes place. A term used by Althusser (2001a) to explain discursively acquired ideology, it suggests that the subject and thus character is a construction of discourse. Foucault’s conceptualisation of discourse appears to differ from ideology in as far as it ‘locates power outside conscious or intentional decision’. Discourse is not ‘representations of power’, but the ‘terrain’ of its mechanisms (McHoul & Grace, 1998, pp. 21, 87).
3.2 METHODOLOGY – further discussion
3.2.1 Isolating tools as method from Foucauldian discourse theory
Researcher Linda Graham writes that it ‘appears that many scholars using discourse analysis within a Foucauldian framework have adopted a ‘“Foucauldianistic” reticence to declare method,’ as the French theorist appears to have himself in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Cheek, 2012, p. 356; 1972). In this way, Graham states, ‘it is quite difficult to find coherent descriptions of how one might go about “Foucauldian” discourse analysis, but perhaps the difficulty in locating concise descriptions is because there is no such thing?’ (2011, p. 1). With this in mind, Foucault’s advice that he intended his ‘books to be a kind of tool box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area’ (1974e: 523–4) suggested developing a method for fiction practice and analysis centred on a fundamental element, such as characterisation. Qualifying Foucault’s assertion however, Clare O’Farrell’s warns that, ‘When it is a question of using merely one or two tools from Foucault's work the process remains relatively straightforward, but as soon as any attempt is made to carry off the whole tool box, the entire kit seems to fall apart at the seams’ (O’Farrell, 2005a, p. 50). Rummaging then to isolate ‘one or two tools’ to describe decentred subjects in a 1980s neoliberal setting, my qualitative method concentrates on the analysis of statements by Wall Street agents in my
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practice and case studies, and how they characterise the organisational power relations of 1980s Wall Street. Discursive formations of statements, I demonstrate, are power’s way of organising and thus constituting decentred subjects via their discursive practices. In this way, discourse as organisational knowledge is revealed as the process of power interpellating decentred subjects via their normalisation and resistance to such.
3.2.2 Graham’s Foucauldian discourse method
In Schooling and ‘disorderly' objects: doing discourse analysis using Foucault, researcher Linda Graham identifies the functional effects of educational agents’ disciplinary statements. Through her Foucauldian method, Graham demonstrates how ‘the statement as an articulation that functions with constitutive effects’ produces student ‘objects’ that are recognisable and therefore able to be acted upon by the constituting discourse (L. J. Graham, 2005, p. 4). This is the ‘doing’ nature of statements – a process of objectifying subjects as normal or ‘disorderly’ within the institutional discourse which then has the power to ‘normalise’ them. This is more than mapping a population that possess inherent self-truths – in Graham’s case: school students; in 1980s Wall Street’s: money, clients, peers, management and the public ‘other’ – but the production of subjects as objects in terms of the truths and ‘reality’ of the discourse. In Schooling and ‘disorderly’ objects, Graham’s Foucauldian methodology effectively reveals how teacher statements constitute non-compliant students as pathological objects. Firstly, an objectifying statement is identified as what Rabinow and Dreyfus would call a ‘serious speech act’ as part of the practice of the agent, here a teacher at Swaynesville State School. As agent of organisational power, the teacher is not considered a pathological object themselves or discursively engaged outside of the educational discourse at hand, but a normalised agent whose knowledge gives them power to create statements-as-truth in their discursive practice. This construction of truth ‘identifies’ a given subject in order to ‘divide’ them as a deviant object from other ‘normalised’ subjects. It should be noted that the ‘normal’ (compliant) students are also constituted objects, whose normalisation is rewarded rather pathologized. Graham then identifies ‘how’ the enunciative function24 of the statement ‘does’ the objectifying through ‘performative’ verbs and adjectives and intertextuality. The use of performative language in statements ‘tell[s] a story by evoking imagery’, and can be seen as a process of division from the normal through exaggeration. Meanwhile, intertextuality ‘is an inventive technique that calls up other texts to help
24 Bacchi and Bonham explain ‘statements have a materiality and a specific function in activating an entire field and its relations’, which Foucault describe as their ‘enunciative function’ (Foucault quoted in Bacchi & Bonham, 2014)
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the interpretive process’ (ibid 2005, p. 8). This corresponds to Foucault’s observation of statements as networks that only acquire meaning and thus produce objects through their functional relativity. In this way, Graham’s method is valuable for not only reducing Foucault’s sprawling concepts to a concise formula for analysis, but demonstrates linguistically how statements of discursive formations like schools produce objects from its subjects25. However, while explaining how ‘disorderly’ children are pathologized by schools in their quest to normalise them, the assertion that it ‘matters little why the Swayneville State School behaviour management policy made such a statement’, because as Althusser suggested, ‘there is no point in distinguishing between the different types of intentionality’ (Althusser quoted in L. J. Graham, 2005) overlooks an opportunity to understand why the teacher’s statement formed in the first place. That is, by refraining ‘from asking why the author wrote this and what their intentions may have been’ to ‘instead pose what is arguably a more important question; what does this statement do and how?’ (ibid 2005, p. 12), the archaeologically discoverable ‘rules that determine which statements are accepted as meaningful and true’ remain unaddressed (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 12). To reveal the rules of formation here, it becomes necessary to consider that the teacher who practiced this objectification of the ‘disorderly’ student through their constituting statement was themselves in the process of being constituted by underlying statements. Graham hints at these by implying that the teacher operates within ‘the Queensland Government’s intention to establish a central database that tracks not only student academic history but behavioural “history” as well’ (ibid 2005, p. 5). This reflects Foucault’s statement that ‘discourse has not only a meaning or a truth, but a history, and a specific history that does not refer it back to the laws of an alien development’ (Foucault, 1972). As a former teacher myself, I know from experience that school managements respond to ‘disorderly’ students resisting normalisation by an antiquated and failing system, varying in dysfunction by post-code, by actively encouraging their pathologizing through incident reports and punitive responses. The more the better, we were often told in meetings, since it effectively paints a consistent picture of the student. In essence, they are objectified as deviant and strategies are constructed to normalise them. Meanwhile, there seemed little to no thought by management that perhaps it was the redundant system that students are forced to try and learn in that may be the real pathology. Even for so-called ‘good’ students, the teacher- centred model that inevitably favours content memorisation that many students rightly feel is irrelevant to them at that stage of their lives, rather than the focus on the skills to acquire first-hand that content as mandated by syllabi, the system is often inefficient and dull. Teachers as entertainers, I suggest, is not a
25 It should also be considered that the teacher in Graham’s study, as a normalised subject themselves, is also objectified by their process of discursive practice. This is because through their normalising practice they are being constituted as much as they are constituting.
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realistic remedy for students disengaged by an archaic education system. Worse than inefficient and dull, however, the many students who can’t or won’t normalise to systemic failings accumulate often vast trails of incident reports that are not firstly used as an opportunity to help them, but as grounds for punishment and their objectification as delinquent. To this end, it can be seen that for the Swayneville incident report to be written as normalised practice, a cascade of preceding statements and their objectifications from academics, consultants, government bureaucrats, school management and fellow frontline teachers must be assumed. This is not a case of ‘statements…being in the place of other statements that have fallen below the line of possible emergence,’ but the statement as a networking function that occupies ‘a space’ at various levels of a system that is ‘entirely deployed and involves no reduplication’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 119). At each level of organisational agency constituted through the subjects’ practice of it, there ‘is no subtext’ of ‘the unsaid whose place it occupies’, only the functionality of statements. Rather than hierarchical, statements therefore may be more accurately observed as simultaneous networks of a discursive formation that contribute to their statements’ rules of formation collectively as they operate a system. In this way, how the teacher involved in Graham’s study ‘incidentally’ discussed the incident with her superiors, colleagues, partner, and even the student later themselves become statements of interest. For the focused statement to remain ‘truthful’ within the teacher’s discursive formation, it would have to continue its functional networking across all involved. In fact, how vast and non-linear a statement’s network actually may be could prove surprising. That the teacher’s statement objectifying the Swayneville student is locatable within the disciplinary model Foucault demonstrated arose in prisons, militaries, schools and workplaces in the eighteenth century suggests its network may extend through time, subculture and place. What seems like a straightforward observation on the agent’s part, may in fact be the latest manifestation of a network of statements that only appears to restrict its context when observed. With the insight that Foucauldian discourse analysis provides for such institutions, it becomes possible to question the system as the true source of pathology. Indeed, it could be assumed that until an intervention occurs at the root of the managerial statements that normalise the pathologizing of resistant students, our effectively Nineteenth century disciplinary power education system will continue to produce a disproportional number of disaffected and deviant students rather knowledgeable and intelligent citizens ready for adulthood and informed democratic participation.
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3.3 LITERATURE REVIEW – further discussion
3.3.1 The decentring of the subject-as-schism
Behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman’s ‘remembering [narrating26] self’ provides further evidence of the subject as decentred. His Nobel Prize winning discovery of an experiencing-self and narrating-self schism in the subject – System 1 and 2, as he describes them – describes the narrating-self as a process that ‘composes stories and keeps them for future reference’ (Kahneman, 2011, pp. 383, 387). It forms a narrative, a network of statements as the interpellation of experience. To understand the statement as function, Graham observes that it’s not necessarily ‘a linguistic unit like the sentence’, such as a proposition, but ‘a discursive junction- box in which words and things intersect…resulting in an interpellative event (L. J. Graham, 2011). This interpellation in turn forms the discursive practices and objects of the subject’s reality. As Kahneman concludes, ‘Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.’ Furthermore, these selves ‘do not have the same interests’ (Kahneman, 2011, p. 14), leading to a situation where for ‘some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know,’ about who or what we really are, he explains, let alone the world around us, ‘the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential’ (ibid 2011, p. 103). In the place of a subject’s humanist intentionality, therefore, runs a process of ‘biases, effects, illusions, fallacies, and heuristics’ that constitute our words and behaviour (Allan, 2017). Referring to Kahneman’s ‘cold water experiment’ underwriting these observations, historian Yuval Harari extrapolates that such science now ‘undermines not only the liberal belief in free will, but also the belief in individualism’ (Harari, 2017, pp. 227, 230). The implication follows that the ‘single authentic self is as real as the eternal Christian soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.’ Because if ‘you look really deep within yourself,’ he suggests, ‘the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. Humans aren’t individuals,’ he concludes, we ‘are ‘dividuals’.’ With the humanist-self beginning to empirically appear as a phenomenological ‘grand illusion’ (D. Lewis, 2013), the epistemology of what drives organisational characters in my practice requires attention. In what capacity are Ricky and Paula talking and acting if they’re to be considered decentred subjects? Their individual quirks implies they’re not simply blank slates for generic and therefore deterministic discourse to interpellate, and yet neither are completely random formations. Furthermore, if via my intent as their author
26 Harari refers to Kahneman’s ‘remembering-self’ as the ‘narrating-self’ (Harari, 2017, p. 230) and the latter will be used here.
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I must also be considered decentred as I disappear into ‘the function…to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 211), what qualifies the heuristic of ‘feeling’ that my characters are ‘ringing true’ to their context and contests or not? As Simon During points out with respect to Foucault and literature, ‘Language is delirium in that…cannot account for itself’ (2005, p. 68), and as such the mechanisms of our discourses must follow some underwriting calculus.
3.3.2 Neoliberalism in context
Economist Dani Rodrik points out that as ‘even its harshest critics concede, neoliberalism is hard to pin down’ (Rodrik, 2017). To this effect, it is ‘now widely acknowledged…as a controversial, incoherent and crisis-ridden term, even by many of its most influential deployers’ (Venugopal, 2015, p. 166). This is because ‘the terminological proliferation of neoliberalism’ is now ‘shared by a confusing array of hypothesized real-world processes that are not just different, but stand in contradiction to one another’(ibid 2015, p. 178). To this end, ‘neoliberalism is judged as technically inadequate and also over-technocratic, de-politicized and deeply political, obsessed by economic growth and responsible for the lack thereof.’ The discursive formation of 1980s neoliberalism includes concepts like deregulation27, laissez-faire economics28 and voodoo economics (also known as trickle-down economics29). Globalisation, free-trade, privatisation, consumerism and rising inequality as a consequence of business-focused politics indicate some of its mechanisms and effects. remain hallmarks. Much of neoliberalism’s contentiousness lay in its social benefits versus harms – literally billions of people lifted out of extreme poverty by globalisation versus globalisation’s hollowing out of working class jobs and wages in the West; cheaper prices for consumers versus stagnant or falling real wages, job losses to automation and the dangers of deregulation and homogenisation of industries; (espoused at least) industry efficiencies through privatisation versus the loss of the public’s assets to private hands for short term gain. Economist Joseph Stiglitz explains that in ‘many parts of the world, global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neo-liberalism,” it was often called), a notion Americans idealized as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization.’ (Stiglitz, 2010, p. 99).
27 The removal of laws curtailing usually risky behaviour by corporations; the selling of public utilities and assets.
28 Laisse faire economics means business practice where anything goes; unrestrained by regulations.
29 Currently witnessing a revival in at least the USA and Australia via respective right-wing governments cutting corporate taxes and regulations and suggesting flat taxes, which disproportionately benefit higher earners.
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These mechanisms are firstly discursive and were consolidated as discourse by the Mont-Perelin academics such as Hayek, von Mises, Friedman and Buchanan. Demonstrating the web-like nature of discourse, these academics were in turn building on concepts of the Ordo Liberals, Adam Smith, and pre-Civil War property rights. Via wealthy political donors like Charles Kock and right-wing media, neoliberal discourse interpellated accommodating politicians like Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet. As a central object in neoliberal discourse, ‘freedom’ became a defining motif. This was about economics, in particular the economic ‘liberty’ of individual with property rights versus the collective society [CITE]. Promoted as a response the totalitarianism of 20th Century Fascism and Russian and Chinese Communism, proponents like Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz ‘fostered suspicion of the ever-expanding state and created the intellectual climate in which the conservative revolution of 1979–1980 became possible’ (Piketty, 2014). As much a response to the Cold War however, neoliberalism’s rejection of any remaining Keynes-like government intervention in collective society led to democracy itself being targeted (MacLean, 2017, pp. 53, 233). Explaining the arc of neoliberalism to 2019, Zuboff observes that,
Surveillance Capitalism’s origins in a neoliberal creed conceived 60 years ago as a reaction to the collectivist totalitarian nightmares of the mid-Twentieth Century. Later, with the demise of the fascist and socialist threats, neoliberal ideology cunningly succeeded in redefining the modern democratic state as a fresh source of collectivism to be resisted by any and all means. Indeed, the evisceration of the double movement has been prosecuted in the name of defeating the supposed collectivist hazards of “too much democracy”. Now the [Google, Facebook, etc] hive emulates the “termite state”, which even the democracy-despising Hayek derided as incompatible with human freedom. (Crozier et al., Hayek quoted in Zuboff, 2019, pp. 504, 505)
While early advocates of what would become neoliberalism championed their ‘political realignment’ as a battle of ‘collectivism and slavery versus capitalism and freedom’ (T. Coleman Andrews quoted in MacLean, 2017, p. 53), author Susan George observes that a ‘structural feature of neo-liberalism consists in remunerating capital to the detriment of labour and thus moving wealth from the bottom of society to the top. If you are, roughly, in the top 20 percent of the income scale, you are likely to gain something from neo- liberalism and the higher you are up the ladder, the more you gain. Conversely, the bottom 80 percent all lose and the lower they are to begin with, the more they lose proportionally’ (George, 1999) This transfer of wealth in western neoliberal societies is clearly visible in income and wealth-growth (Mishel, Gould, & Bivens, 2015; Piketty, 2014; Whiteford, 2013). Somewhat ironically, neoliberalism’s emphasis on the removal of government ‘interference’ from financial industries and its retreat from the provision of public services was supposed to result in purely balanced markets that could not by definition crash. In a fully privatised world, it was argued, markets would
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dictate public policy since everything would have a price and prices would bestow a natural equilibrium upon societies (Hayek, 1944/2006). Not only weren’t the roughly ten global economic crashes30 of varying sizes between 1987 and 2018 prevented by this neoliberal ‘market fundamentalism’, but government interventionism was to have its exceptions too. Despite neoliberals arguing against any government assistance for mortgagees and small businesses on the grounds of moral hazard, when the ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash decimated the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and spread immediately around globalised world markets, many of the large financial institutions culpable for the carnage were bailed out with public money by the Federal Reserve’s newly appointed chief, Alan Greenspan. Though a factor in possibly avoiding another Great Depression, this blatant hypocrisy ironically initiated a trend of ‘exacerbating moral hazard’ for the larger end of town through bailouts and government guarantees, which, as a signature of the neoliberal episteme, was on full display during the recent GFC of 2007-2009.
3.3.3 Young’s blank fiction and postmodernism
One of the first critical voices to interpellate the ‘blank’ form and confronting content of American Psycho within the postmodern context was Elizabeth Young (Young & Caveney, 1994). ‘These new Lower East Side of “Downtown” writers’ Young describes Ellis, ‘wrote in a flat affectless prose which dealt with all aspects of contemporary urban life: crime, drugs, sexual excess, media overload, consumer madness, inner-city decay and fashion-crazed nightlife.’ (1994, p. ii). Citing the editors of literary magazine Between C & D, Ellis and his peers ‘owe…more to Burroughs, Miller, Genet or Celine, or even to Barthes and Foucault or JG Ballard than they do to Updike or Cheever’. Noting Siegle’s observation that these ‘Downtown’ writers ‘corrode rather than conform to the commodity formulae towards which latter-day modernist fiction tends, just as the writers who have created them have chosen not to live in the more comfortable academic and professional worlds in which late-modernist fiction still prevails’, Young observes that this ‘anti-academicism is correct; most of the writers we look at have an obvious distaste for the tired experimental strategies and resulting stasis of late, high postmodernist writing. They even have little patience with the writing that would seem to oppose all this, the “Dirty Realism” newly beloved of Establishment critics’ (note the capital E) ‘who find hope in its drab, white male, “writerly” qualities, so redolent of the Creative Writing Workshop’ (ibid 1994, p. 11). Moore points out that within ‘academia, the graphic excerpts fuelled early arguments that American Psycho was not “real literature,” as in anything that could be evaluated or debated within the academic literary community’ (Moore, 2012). Still sold shrink-wrapped with a restricted R label in Australian book
30 Sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_and_bear_markets
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stores – and technically illegal in Queensland – academic Justine Ettler argues that ‘the novel's pornographic elements become fused with its horrific elements’, and as such, her ‘study aims to arrest the current trend whereby scholars gloss over the extremity of the sexualised hatred of women depicted in Ellis's novel’ (Ettler, 2014). Referring to early criticism, Ettler adds that writer Naomi ‘Wolf ultimately objects to American Psycho because it legitimates misogynistic violent behaviour by eroticising it for the reader’. In this way, the novel ‘is actually a struggle over the proper gender of literary authority. The issue raised by these book(s’) critical reception is this: who gets to tell the story of sexual violence against women, the hunter or the prey? Who gets, textually, to bash women, with what pleasure, and to what end?’ (Wolf, 1991, pp. 33–34 cited in Ettler 2014). Poststructurally, Ellis’ American Psycho both ‘reinforces patriarchal societal norms’ and aides ‘feminism as the exposure of patriarchal practices,’ (Ettler, 2012, pp. 59, 77). In terms of authorial intent, Ellis’ portrayal of violence in American Psycho reflects the patriarchal Wall Street discourse of the 1980s through the postmodern device of intertextual appropriation.
I waited to write those scenes because I didn't know how to write them. I got a hold of this big FBI criminology forensics textbook, and there were descriptions of murders in it. I would just go through it and think, "What would Patrick do?" Then I realized because of the aesthetics of the novel, "Oh, he's describing everything." So how do I detail this? What does he do to a woman? Or how do you blind a beggar? What happens when the knife goes in? So it was really all about collecting details. And then, because of three years of being with Patrick Bateman, I kind of took off from his rage and his pathology, and the things fused themselves. It was all kind of depressing and gross to write, but at the same time, exciting because I realized this was aesthetically working for the novel. Even though, again, my editor wanted all of it cut out (Ellis cited in Grow, 2016).
Regardless of Ellis’ process however, Ettler is correct that the text’s violence, particularly against women, cannot and should not be ‘glossed over’. Rather, it can be contextualised as an objectification of 1980s Wall Street neoliberalism, where in terms of Ellis’ intent, ‘it is power/knowledge which produces facts and the individual scholars [as much as fiction authors] are simply the vehicles or the sites where this knowledge is produced’ (Mills, 2005, p. 70, parenthesis mine). Ellis however cannot disown the violence he depicts, but from a Foucauldian perspective, he rather shares custody of it with the society (epistemic discourse) that forms him in turn. In terms of a social commentary and a modern form of parrhesia, Young locates American Psycho as the ‘postmodern form in literature [which] has come to challenge the truths about fiction and about reality in response to the flow of images from this capitalist spectacle’ (1994, p. 13). Citing Jameson, Ellis’ novel represents ‘the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order’. Unlike the catharsis of punk however, postmodern writers like Ellis produced fiction that bridged the establishment concepts of high and low art, because as Young describes, ‘many of the younger urban writers genuinely cannot see such a gap’ ( 1994, p. 14).
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Young’s blankness can be placed in Lyotard’s monograph The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1979) as the reification of post-industrial citizens into individualised media simulacrums, information processors and corporatized consumers. Corresponding tropes utilised by Ellis and Stone include a return the real but as Baudrillardian simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994), cynicism as humour, satire as reverse social-conscience, anti- heroes as the self-defeating amorality of ultimate-individualism, and art as the failure of ‘repressive desublimation’ identified by Colby (Colby, 2012). With the Disney-ism of neoliberalism’s socio-corporate interface becoming a mass-marketing simulacrum of Western humanism, irony, satire and cynicism contextualised the schizophrenic culture that craved what was making it sick. Through blankness, postmodern writers could reveal the discursive machinery of neoliberalism’s gilded glamour in terms of the horrific natural cost that underwrites it.
3.3.4 Foucauldian discourse in context
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) is identified by Paul Rabinow and Robert Dreyfus as a monograph representing Foucault’s archaeological-structuralist phase where a counterpoint to Kant’s phenomenological humanism was theorized (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983). Foucault’s conception of discursive formations shaped by power composed of statements qua practice-based functions that organise via subjection and objectification follows a line of inquiry via Freud, Nietzsche and Althusser, and was an attempt to navigate the ‘two extreme methodological reactions to phenomenology’ of structuralism and hermeneutics (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983). While structuralism as pioneered by de Saussure (1916) and Levi Strauss (1964) attempted to detach linguistics from the readymade subject, and hermeneutics which ‘gives up the phenomenologist’s attempt to understand man as a meaning-giving subject’, preserving meaning then ‘by locating it in the social practices and literary texts which man produces’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983), Foucault’s archaeology demonstrates ‘the system of unwritten rules which produces, organises and distributes the “statement” (that, is the authorised utterance) as it occurs in a discursive formation’ (Mills, 2005, p. 24). Recalling Graham, the statement is a networked function qua ‘junction-box’ where words and things meet as objectifications of truths and reality, constituting via interpellation subjects in the process (2005, 2011). Foucault was only one contributor to discourse theory it is important to remember, and can be placed on a schema between ‘discourse is constitutive’ (qua Laclau and Mouffe) and ‘discourse is constituted’ (qua Althusser) relatively centrally (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 20). Though Dreyfus and Rabinow were critical of Foucault’s radicalisation of human sciences and social organisation as ‘autonomous discourse’ – fearing it amounted to ‘the despair of nihilism’ in its ‘end of meaningful action’ by the subject (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983) – advances in ‘the life sciences’ appear to be
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going even further by 2019 having ‘concluded that’ humans as ‘organisms’ may be understood as ‘algorithms’ (Harari, 2017, p. 267). If this is so, should we also then think of discourse as an emergent algorithm? What about stories themselves? Here, Foucault’s poststructural ‘rules of formation’ come to mind (1972, pp. 21– 71). Though the subject as discursive process, algorithm or not, may be decentred by default, it became clear in my practice that Foucauldian discourse does not equal no meaning for the irretrievable ‘meaning-giving subject’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983) that had displaced gods, but now, indicated by the life sciences, is itself being displaced by discourse. This is because Foucauldian discourse inevitably constructs the humanism of the writer and reader via the character as interpellated subject. That is, there is as much meaning for subjects as there ever was, only now it is meaning in terms of discursive interpellation constructing subjectivity.
3.3.5 Foucault’s unlikely neoliberalism as subject-less anti-humanism
In a similar way that Foucault’s anti-humanism as ‘the leitmotif’ of his ‘entire intellectual enterprise’ does not mean anti-human – Foucault was a social-activist and champion of human-rights – the French theorist’s interest neoliberalism via biopower is often wilfully overlooked and/or misinterpreted (Behrent, 2009, p. 542). Complicating matters, Foucault’s ‘assault on humanism, “man,” and the human subject’, as Michael Behrent points out, appears to be incompatible with any form of liberalism. In this way, to understand Foucault’s “neoliberal moment”, fears of totalitarian ‘statism’ spreading from the USSR and the social and economic upheavals in French society during the 1960s and seventies must be taken into account. Foucault framed neoliberalism in terms of his conception of biopower as ‘the emergence of a “nondisciplinary” technology of power’ that was not ‘directed at individuals’ since it ‘can expand almost ad infinitum’. Rather, biopower and its economic liberalism initially appeared to Foucault as a ‘power aimed at populations’ that by definition learns to ‘limit itself’ (ibid 2009, p. 547). While Foucault shared with Hayek Kant’s disdain for the paternalistic, police state of disciplinary regimes (Audier, 2015), it now appears clear that Hayek and his fellow Mont Perelin Society academics, unlike Foucault, intended such freedom primarily for their rich benefactors like the Koch brothers to escape taxes, regulation and limitations to inequality (MacLean, 2017, p. 134). Some forty years later now, it would appear that the “let things be” laissez faire of neoliberalism as freedom from the subjecting power of the state does not in fact ‘trickle down’ qua the Reaganomics and Thatcherism still resonating in Western policy circles, and as such, applies only to transnational corporations beyond the reach of localised laws. Effectively, it would seem that the remote governmentality of the biopowered state has not enabled an unsubjected ultimate individualism to arise in neoliberal societies, but rather provided a space where corporations can encapsulate citizens as employee-consumers within disciplinary powered regimes. Certainly the brutality of the military, school and prison has been gentrified to social access, status, mobility and likes,
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but totalisation through discursive interpellation of the subject corresponds. The neoliberal individualising of the subject to reduce statism has ironically resulted in a totalitarianism of corporate culture. Arguably, this encapsulation increasingly extends to employee-consumers as voters as political donations from industry as well the revolving door of executive agents between those corporations and political parties becomes seamless. Through neoliberalism, societies have been reduced to corporatized economies. This dissonance between biopower’s would-be ultimate individualism of the subjectless-subject – that is, where the conceptualisation of the individualised subject overlaps between Foucault and what now appears to be the corporate-backed subterfuge of Mont Perelin academia (Behrent, 2009; MacLean, 2017) – and neoliberalism’s evolution into disciplinary powered surveillance-capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), appears to provide a rich seam of inquiry for fiction writers. Mainly, that taken at its discursive face-value, the rhetoric of neoliberal discourse de-subjectifying the individual can be reimagined from resistance of the totalising state to resistance of totalising corporations as privatised governmentality. As the subject appears to be decentred, however, a priori this resistance as a process of anti-statism via individualisation might be pursued through what has been conceptualised here as ‘personal discourse’, or what Foucault suggests qua ancient Greco-Roman philosophy as ‘technologies of the self’ (Ball, 2016; Martin et al., 1988). That is, the constitution of the self as subject through a personalised ‘humanist’ discursive practice.
3.4 CASE STUDIES: Wall Street (Lipper, 1988; O. Stone & Weiser, 1987) – further analysis
3.4.1 Disciplinary power and biopower in neoliberal Wall Street discourse
Set in the mid-1980s, Wall Street’s neoliberal discourse does not organise by the sovereign power Foucault describes dominating European society until the 17th century in Discipline and Punish (1979). Rather, 1980s neoliberalism demonstrates elements of both disciplinary power, with its view of the subject as cellular machine, and biopower, the informational management of life. As Foucault observed archival accounts of the former in the late eighteenth century, ‘the soldier [here, read broker] has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 135). Gekko, the instrument of Bud’s normalisation, takes him on in the story’s orientation as a ‘body’ that is already somewhat ‘docile’ in as far as the rookie’s personal discourse – Kahneman’s narrating-self – is aligned to Wall Street through his ambition. This allows him to ‘be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (ibid 1979, p. 136). Subjectively, Bud is expected to be the ‘celebrated automata’ as he carries out Gekko come Wall Street’s discursive practices, which is ‘not only a way of illustrating an organism,’ but also transforms
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Bud into one of neoliberalism’s ‘political puppets,’ one of its ‘small-scale models of power’. As Foucault explains,
..discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination. (Foucault, 1979)
This docility of the normalised neoliberal body is anchored by individualising greed and written onto the subject’s time. This can be seen in Karen Ho’s Wall Street ethnography, where she describes a typical broker who ‘worked ‘‘all day; all night; every day; every night,’’’ and as inspiration ‘relished [the] investment banker’s ‘‘secret love affair with Gordon Gekko’’’ (Ho, 2009, p. 88). In Stone’s Wall Street, disciplinary power is written into the subject’s appearance, where Gekko normalising Bud instructs him to ‘buy yourself a decent suit. You can't come in here looking like that’ (O. Stone & Weiser, 1987). While reductive – the removal of time for anything else than Wall Street practice and the removal of other/former clothing identifiable as non-Wall Street – the goal is for the addition of Wall Street discourse as the colonisation of subjectivity. However, the neoliberal Wall Street agent is an unusual ‘machine’. In my practice and research, one of their most fascinating and seductive aspects is the wild scope of their behaviour. Unlike other regimes31 of the 1980s, risky outrageousness was linked to profitability, and the more sex, drugs and wild behaviour, the fiercer their performance in the boiler room. As Jordan Belfort recounts his first Wall Street boss Mark Hanna instructing him, ‘Jerking off is key. And I also strongly recommend the use of drugs, especially cocaine, because that’ll make you dial faster…’ (Belfort, 2017, p. 11). In fact, I began to think of brokers’ incidental practice of partying and the serious practice of making money as a correlate to the adrenalin and drug-fuelled Nordic Berserkers. Certainly their inclination to be intoxicated and ‘cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe’ (Wikipedia contributors, 2019a) rings true. However, the ‘liberalism’ part of neoliberalism also indicates the subjectification of 1980s Wall Street character-agents as laissez-faire objects of Mont Perelin Society ‘freedom’ (Mises, 1974). As Behrent identifies, ‘economic liberalism is a paradigmatic form of biopower’, which ‘is not primarily concerned with individuals’ and so ‘paradoxically…offers individual freedom greater scope’ (Behrent, 2009, p. 558). Put simply, ‘biopower in the form of economic liberalism demonstrates that liberty is power’s necessary
31 Though not a military, prison or school in restrictions of personal freedoms, a corporate organisation can still be considered disciplinary because of the normalising force it exerts on its subjects.
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correlate—its very condition of possibility’ (ibid 2009, p. 559). Furthermore, and reflective of ‘one of Foucault’s deepest concerns…American neoliberalism’s nondisciplinary’ system of governmentality mitigates ‘crime and punishment’. This is because ‘neoliberalism jettisons the oppressive moral categories characteristic of discourses on crime’ (Behrent, 2009, p. 566). This certainly seems to explain the lawlessness and extremes depicted by Gekko and real agents such as Partnoy and Belfort. But as the 1980s and Nineties also saw massive crime and punishment crackdowns by neoliberal governments on the poor and minorities – particularly African Americans and ironically in the name of the War on Drugs (Bobo & Thompson, 2010, p. 325) – it is clear that any increases in actual liberty were confined to the ruling FIRE class. Moreover, by 2019 it would seem neoliberalism has reframed ‘oppressive moral categories’ to demonise those opposed to its agenda of unrestrained capitalism, such as unions, climate scientists, conservationists and the unemployed.
3.4.2 Foucauldian statements as the constitution of neoliberal truths and reality
Having elaborated how organisational power exerts discourse to subject character-agents, some examples of statements that do this in the Wall Street texts can be examined. In this establishing scene early in the screenplay, Stone and Weiser demonstrate the discursive practice of the boiler room.
BROKERS Here's a hot lead... Have I got one for you.... sell ... dump it all!! ... 500 at an eighth, an eighth!... July fifties. April thirties...how bout those Decembers? You see where they're going? ... Morgan is selling a billion one at the close. Yeah. That's right, they're selling all over the place... we're still long on the treasuries -- $110 million. What about the Japs? ...Where am I? (confused at all the phone lights) We gotta lot of lights here! Let's pick 'em up.” (O. Stone & Weiser, 1987).
Such discursive practice characterises brokers and subjectifies them as organisational apparatus. However, simply equating discourse with certain words or language (langue, as Foucault used the term) neglects to recognise the functional nature of statements. As Foucault suggests, ‘Discourse … is not a language (langue), plus a subject to speak it. It is a practice that has its own forms of sequence and succession’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 169). Statements therefore are not a feature of language per se, but functions in the discursive constitution of organisational systems. As Graham puts it,
Foucault extracts the statement from “the simple inscription of what is said” (Deleuze 1988, p. 15) describing it, not as a linguistic unit like the sentence, but as “a function” (Foucault 1972, p. 98). The statement as ‘function’ can be theorised as a discursive junction-box in which words and things intersect and become invested with particular relations of power, resulting in an interpellative event (Althusser 1971;
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Butler 1990) in which one can “recognize and isolate an act of formulation” (Foucault 1972, p. 93). (Graham, 2011, p. 6)32.
Analysing this passage from Wall Street then is no longer ‘treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech’ (Foucault, 1972). Extrapolating these views, one could argue that although Wall Street’s authors don’t reveal it for the most part in the above passage, the discourse as a network makes implicit objects. In this way, the brokers could further objectify those ‘Decembers’ and ‘Japs’ if called upon to do so. Perhaps the former are ‘dogs with fleas’ as Gekko would say later about Bud’s suggestion of Tarafly, and the latter predators or prey. But as Chater (2018) suggests, even though these characters not unlike agents in the real would be able to objectify their subjects if prompted, and then explain those objectifications with still more, it could only be explanation in terms of a network of statements as a discursive formation. This is not so much a matter of metaphor or subtext then, but one of function as discursive practice. Foucault’s emphasis on discourse as event reveals the centrality of practice here, since before ‘approaching, with any degree of certainty, a science, or novels, or political speeches…the material with which one is dealing is, in its raw, neutral state, a population of events in the space of discourse in general. One is led therefore to the project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it. This description is easily distinguishable from an analysis of the language’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 27). In this way, I argue that, as with Graham and her school teacher, the why of statements – and that is the rules of their formation in the practices of discursive formations – can be significantly traced to what can be called primary or foundational statements33. While not Foucauldian genealogy34 per se, in effect such statements appear to act like common denominators and contribute to the rules of formation of the practical statements that cascade after them. We can see an example of such primary statements in perhaps Wall Street’s most famous passage.
32 To this end, Graham’s observation that statements are not a linguistic unit is interesting, because as networks of relational apparatus that occur in language, statements constituting discourse may be realisable in other language-like media, such as binary, for example, used by artificial agents in our organisational settings and beyond.
33 ‘Primary’ or ‘foundational’ is inexact in description, however, as such statements themselves owe their formation to yet earlier permutations.
34 Foucauldian genealogy is understood to demonstrate how power changes its objectification of subjects during different eras. Here, however, I am more interested in how preceding or central statements become an aspect of the rules of formation for later ones.
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GEKKO (continued..) The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be 'survival of the unfittest'. Well in my book, you either do it right or you get eliminated … the bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, as you very well know, is the only way to stay strong is to create value, that's why you buy stock, to have it go up. If there's any other reason, I've never heard it. (laughter) That's all I'm saying...it's you people who own this company, not them, they work for you and they've done a lousy job of it. Get rid of them fast, before you all get sick and die. I may be an opportunist, but if these clowns did a better job, I'd be out of work … I am not a destroyer of companies, I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind -- and greed, mark my words -- will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA...(O. Stone & Weiser, 1987, p. 103,104)
Here, Gekko’s objectification of greed as something ‘good’ is foundational to the statements his own agents – employees like Bud – consequently form in their practices. It relies heavily on intertextualisation to naturalise neoliberalism’s ‘freedom’ of ‘greed’ within a network of other objectified practices – greed for ‘life’, ‘love’, knowledge’, even ‘evolutionary spirit’ – and as a dominant network, its interpellating truths and reality appear incontrovertible. In this way, an implied discursive formation like Bud’s investment bank Jackson & Steinhem or Gekko’s private equity firm can be recognised as networked stratifications of functioning statements. Logically speaking, an organisation as discursive formation can only be its constituting statements and their practice in much the same way as a decentred character-agent is what they say and do (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2004, p. 154). This becomes a fundamental question for the writer fictionalising corporations, because in terms of a given character, where does the organisation as power begin and end in the agency of the self? As Lipper demonstrates in Wall Street’s novel tie-in, this stratification of statements that constitute corporate characters includes: ‘Time sheets, hierarchical structures, budget projections, circulars on dress and demeanour, employee fraternization rules, expense reports, transportation forms, restraining manuals, and sales quotas’, which become ‘the fare of a bureaucracy exploding in size and power’ (1988, p. 17). The expectations and perceptions of clients and public, implied if unwritten in the text, would also serve to constitute statements of these agent-characters as they reverberate further constitution through the discursive network. The authors of Wall Street don’t delineate these for the most part – the above Teldar Paper scene being an exception – so the reader as much as characters heuristically implicates the cascading statements and their objects as a network. Yet, qua Chater, they could be written according to the rules of formation of the discursive formation if the author so intended. Statements in this way appear then to be self-guiding and self-fulfilling, as they are contingent on one another as a functional network which is the
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constantly constituted and constituting discourse of the organisation. As a network, they consolidate as truths and subjective reality. Thus from a Foucauldian perspective, the 1980s Wall Street characters in my practice as much as in Stone’s text can be read as mediums or apparatus for the operations of their constituting discourses before humanism ultimately separate to its subjectification. In this way, neoliberal discourse is not a readymade language imposed complete upon centred subjects – it is a series of statements as functions that form as a system of truths and realities that constitute agents-characters as they constitute it through their practice. However, it is clear that the terms ‘primary’ or ‘foundational’ as descriptors for denominating statements are misleading to some degree. This is because as statements they appear in turn to be objects themselves from yet deeper, earlier statements. In this way, an aspect of the rules of formation of statements and their objects must be previous statements, where the poststructural discontinuity that Foucault observed (O’Farrell, 2005b, p. 76) is indicative of their interpretation/implementation via the ever changing mix of interacting discourses that societies demonstrate at a given time. This is not linear continuity per se, as Foucault emphasized (1972), but the affective functions of statements arising in new context. In the context of 1980s neoliberalism, foundational statements emphasizing ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ of the ‘individual’ over the ‘collective’ and its representational government can be traced to the discourses of academics like Friedman, Buchanan, Hayek, von Mises, etc. In turn, these discourses were objectifications of preceding discourses from the likes of the Ordo liberals, Calhoun, Adam Smith and the American pre-Civil War southern state patriarchy/tyranny, etc (MacLean, 2017). In this way, discourses appear not as linear progressions from the historic to the ontology of the present, but neither are they completely random in their emergence.
3.5 CASE STUDIES: American Psycho (Ellis, 1991) – further analysis
3.5.1 Statements as incidentally serious speech acts
One striking element of Ellis’ American Psycho with respect to the discourse of 1980s Wall Street is its near complete absence of actual Wall Street discursive practices. Besides discussing fashion and sex while lunching, dining and taking drugs in nightclubs, there is very little text regarding what Patrick or his colleagues actually do as Wall Street Bankers. This is not only an element of the satire employed by Ellis, but an invitation to read characters like Patrick as the totalising interpellation of neoliberal discourse qua subjective reality. Statements about the way to wear a suit or suspenders, what kind of water is best, the qualitative discographies of pop-stars, social status relative to restaurant accessibility, accumulate and network like a list of algorithmic functions in neoliberalism’s recipe according to its rules of formation. Orienting subjects
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like Patrick with accordant intentionality in a feedback-loop of constituting and being constituted, this incidentality is not superfluous but implies the network of statements that form Wall Street’s practices. Rather than indicating ‘plotlessness’ (Rosenblatt, 1990), Ellis’ incidental speech acts regarding fashion, drugs, travel, etc that make up great deal of the novel proved a central attraction for me. Framed blankly by Ellis in Wall Street’s context, they hint at a system of statements that socially constructs the neoliberal truths and reality of the 1980s. As decentred subjects fully normalised to neoliberal Wall Street discourse, Ellis’ characters reveal the statements that interpellate them with every word. This effectively blurs the line between the serious and the incidental, the on and off of interpellating discourse. While Dreyfus and Rabinow describe how the ‘discursive practices are distinguished from the speech acts of everyday life’ in as far as ‘Foucault is interested only in…what experts say when they are speaking as experts’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983), Ellis’ endless dialogic incidentality in American Psycho suggests his characters are never off – they have subjectively become the statements interpellating them. This echoes Dreyfus and Rabinow’s qualification that any ‘speech act can be serious if one sets up the necessary validation procedures’, which represents ‘according to Foucault, the manifestation of a will to truth, which "daily grows in strength, in depth and implacability"’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983). Importantly, this will to truth by Ellis’ characters is not practice towards a universal truth or even humanist one, but the truth of their normalising discourse, here 1980s neoliberalism. In this way, what can be considered an incidental speech act sits within discursive practice as simultaneously the ‘things said’ and ‘the rules that explain how it becomes possible to say (or know) certain things—“the rules governing a knowledge”’ (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 180; Foucault, 1972, pp. 48, 182). The incidentally serious speech acts of Ellis’ characters can thus be ‘construed as having intelligibility and influence only insofar as they fit in with the reigning epistemic rules’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983). They function as areas of the relevant discursive map (or as another metaphor, an engine diagram) that seemingly do not hold any significant landmarks (or key components), but which are nevertheless contiguous with the discursive formation that could not exist in its final form without such incidentality included.
3.5.2 The failure of subject-less neoliberalism in Marcuse’s Great Refusal
Georgina Colby locates Ellis’ intent in American Psycho through Slavoj Zizek’s reframing of Herbert Marcuse’s theory of repressive desublimation (Colby, 2012). Marcuse developed the term to describe the commodification and thus neutering of art as resistance to the ‘one-dimensionality’ of ‘the apparently impregnable fortress of corporate capitalism’ (Colby, 2012; Marcuse, 1969). In ‘line with Marcuse’s theory’, Colby employs Zizek to describe Patrick and his peers not as ‘effectively subjects “condemned to freedom”’, but ‘atoms at the mercy of quasi-‘natural’ forces’ who are in ‘no position to “mediate”…or make any sense
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of them’ (Colby, 2012). With respect to a Foucauldian framework, I read this ‘quasi-natural’ force as the organisational power of neoliberal discourse that the naturally decentred subject once interpellated is unable to rationalise or resist. Recalling that Foucault suggests resistance is an inevitable feature of power (Mills, 2005, p. 44), the narrative tension in American Psycho is therefore not only Patrick’s irretrievable interpellation, but Ellis’ attempt at Marcuse’s ‘Great Refusal’ to mitigate repressive desublimation. Colby explains to this end that Ellis’ text ‘not only represents the alienating effects of the forces of advanced capitalism at work today, but, through his critique of the individual in contemporary “affluent society,” effectively creates a dialectical discourse between domination and liberation’ (Colby, 2011, p. 13). Within a discursive framework, this domination reads as the epistemic repression of neoliberalism inciting transgression via Patrick’s violence as an attempt at liberation via assimilation. Patrick fails to escape of course, as does Ellis’ attempt to liberate his novel from corporatized commodification. This failure appears to reflect Foucault’s hope that the biopower of neoliberalism – as he theorised it in the 1970s and Eighties – was a way out of the potential totalitarianism of disciplinary subjection, since power as biopower’s remote management-of-life targeted statistical populations rather than individuals. As Behrent describes the period, Foucault and neoliberalism both ‘shared suspicion of the state’, where the former saw the ‘economic liberalism’ of neoliberalism as ‘a practice that arises when power realizes that it has an interest as power in limiting’ itself (Behrent, 2009, pp. 545, 546). Regardless of whatever else has eventuated in our neoliberal era however, subjection via interpellation appears to remain unavoidable. In this era of biopower, subjection in the West is not directly by sovereigns or centralised totalitarian state regimes, but rather by corporations, industry-focused bureaucracies and institutions which concentrate power through their data-driven goods and services and the relentless technologies of management and production that accelerate such. As Colby writes, Patrick and his peers ‘are, in Althusser’s analysis, “agents of exploitation”’, who are in turn ‘exploited by the silent ISA35 to which they have a relationship of servitude’ (Althusser cited in Colby, 2011, p. 72). On the humanist surface then, Wall Street employees like Tim and Patrick of Pierce and Pierce appear to be free individuals who simply work certain jobs, but from a discursive practice point of view, they are subjectified interpellations of neoliberal reality intrinsically involved in the objectification of the world through their proximity to power. Corporate performing through conformation (normalisation through discursive practice), while measured differently than in a disciplinary power formation like a prison, school or barracks, I suggest is nevertheless just as subjugating and transformative.
35 ISA (ideological state apparatus) is read here as the epistemic discourse of neoliberalism.
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3.5.3 Postmodern blankness as the parrhesia of repressive desublimation
Colby’s reading of Ellis’ American Psycho as an attempt to refuse the repressive desublimation of its commodification correlates to a modern day parrhesia. Foucault describes the ancient Greek practice as an almost involuntary speaking of ‘truth’ from those ‘below’ to those ‘above’. Such truth is ‘criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker himself’, and ‘is regarded as a duty’ (Foucault, 2001, p. 19). Parrhesia is dangerous in as far as the ‘said truth is capable of hurting or angering the interlocutor’, and is ‘always a "game" between the one who speaks the truth’ and the spoken to. The ‘parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk’, in as far as risking the ‘privilege to speak freely’ when he or she ‘discloses a truth which threatens the majority’ (ibid 2001, pp. 16, 18). In this way, Ellis choosing to represent the neoliberal 1980s with a brutal psychopath who naturally fits Wall Street ‘merits consideration as a parrhesiastes’, as there ‘is a risk or danger’ of the author ‘in telling the truth’ (Foucault, 2001, p. 16). While the novel was in fact a commercial success confirming Marcuse’s fears of repressive desublimation, the legitimate outrage it generated risked both failure and personal harm to the author (Ettler, 2014, p. 2). Reading Ellis’ American Psycho as parrhesia, the authorial intent of Patrick illustrates a subjectivity to a world out of control and which cannot be escaped. Why, after all, would one wish to escape privilege and wealth like Price seems to in the novel’s orientation (Ellis, 1991, p. 4)? Like his discursive practice, Patrick’s animalistic violence is involuntary, reactive to his reality and his interpellation within it. Patrick even appears to take the risk of a parrhesiastes voluntarily confessing his crimes on his lawyer’s answering machine like a summation of his neoliberal being (Ellis, 1991, p. 352). And yet even then, there is no escape. Like for Ellis perhaps, no amount of ‘truth’, no matter how ugly, seems to matter. Like everything else in this postmodern, post-truth world, this is because it is truth as simulacrum – a version of a version of itself. Consider the mentioned passage of Patrick’s friend, Tim Price, early in Ellis’ text.
“baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots dropping like flies in the streets, surrogate mothers, the cancellation of a soap opera, kids who broke into a zoo and tortured and burned various animals alive, more Nazis… and the joke is, the punch line is, it's all in this city nowhere else, just here, it sucks, whoa wait, more Nazis, gridlock, gridlock, baby-sellers, black-market babies, AIDS babies, baby junkies, building collapses on baby, maniac baby, gridlock, bridge collapses-" His voice stops, he takes in a breath and then quietly says, his eyes fixed on a beggar at the corner of Second and Fifth, "That's the twenty-fourth one I've seen today. I've kept count." Then asks without looking over, "Why aren't you wearing the worsted navy blue blazer with the gray pants?" Price is wearing a six-button wool and silk suit by Ermenegildo Zegna, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar, a Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rossetti. Pan down to the Post. (Ellis, 1991, p. 4)
This shopping-list of statements as blankness is satirical but also true. As agents who deal in information for a living, Tim and Patrick cannot help but process the world in terms of its biopower-oriented
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management. As a parrhesiaste, Price in this case risks losing the postmodern ‘cool’ of would-be indifference. Like Ellis himself, his characters’ recognition of the horror of the world is the extent of their intervention. Tim and Patrick’s inescapable if gilded hell is in fact not just the author’s, but the reader’s too. Engaging in a modern day parrhesia as the discursive illustration of a world that others would rather not see, Ellis seems to relish pushing the blank horror of the 1980s into focus. This incidentally serious speech act of Price’s reads like the automatic regurgitation of corporatized statements. A meaningful but ultimately meaningless barrage of being, as if in its purge, the entrapment and crushing saturation of organisational power and its discursive formations – corporate and cultural – can be exorcised. Decentred, these blank statements read like animal’s reaction to pain, the calling out through the demonstration of the discourses entrapping us so thoroughly. Rather, through their lifestyles, work and Patrick’s violence, they add to it.
3.5.4 Double-voicing and discursive rules of formation
Colby also identifies Ellis’ ‘strategy of double-voicing’ in American Psycho. As a tool critiquing repressive desublimation in Western culture, it complicates the novel’s reading as ‘straightforward satire’ by ‘underwriting’ the ‘duplicity’ of the text as resistance to its cultural ‘assimilation’. (2011, pp. 10, 20) Similarly, locating double-voicing as a strategy of neoliberal power within Patrick’s corporate interpellation, an ironic earnestness becomes apparent.
“Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense [sic], prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that's not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees." (Ellis, 1991, p. 15)
Like Ellis’ appropriations of style magazine fashion statements, pop-star discographies and FBI homicide reports, these statements objectifying social issues reflect the rules of formation of Patrick’s 1980s neoliberalism. As statements qua Foucault are best understood as functions rather than linguistic units per se, their rules of formation govern ‘what it is possible to know’ (McHoul & Grace, 1998, p. 38).
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However, juxtaposed against his later violence, Patrick’s globalised concerns ultimately read more like must-have fashion accessories for the well-off consumer rather than empathetic humanity. A moralised grasp of global issues does not function as empathy or concordant action, but is contiguous with the right way to wear suspenders or what colour shoes go with what suit. As a consequence, an ironic inverse proportionality emerges between the encompassing scope of mass production, marketing and consumption, and the ultimate individuality of the neoliberal agent and consumer. Personality itself is commodified and individuated through combinations of mass-market branding; the ultimate individual must firstly be socially knowledgeable in order to simultaneously be of it and separate in it as an exemplar, not a nobody. In a perverse outcome of the intergenerational Cold War against the totalitarian statism of Russian Communism about to be won, the freedom of the West’s ultimate individuals like Bud Fox and Patrick Bateman is to be measured in terms of their normalisation to corporate interpellation. In other words, total subjection and consequent definition not by a totalitarian state like the USSR, but by neoliberal discursive formations and their smothering corporate objects. Ellis’ text relentlessly demonstrates this individual-as-consumer irony through scathing satire that eventually coincides with the shocking brutality that underlies laissez-faire neoliberalism. As Patrick demonstrates, the colonisation as normalisation of the individual by overwhelming market forces is a necessity ‘Because…I…want…to…fit...in’ (Ellis, 1991, p. 237). The rules of formation of neoliberal statements as contiguous function can be seen in the double- voicing of its architects such as James Buchanan. Assertions such as that which is ‘“good”…“tends to emerge” from the free choices of the individuals who are involved’ sound admirable (1975/1999b, p. 9), until and as Nancy Maclean points out, ‘good’ reflects the extreme wealth of a tiny minority whose ‘free choice’ is to ensure government does not tax them (MacLean, 2017, p. 6). Similarly, the moralised double-voicing of Patrick’s pathologically drawn character reads somewhat sincere.
"Oh I forgot. Bateman's dating someone from the ACLU," Price says. "What bothers you about that?" "It's not funny," I say. "It's racist." (Ellis, 1991, p. 38)
This is Patrick unironically speaking out against racism before later racially disparaging victims he’s attacking (ibid 1991, p. 212). Read as a psychopath, Patrick may be deceptive of his own feelings. But with his friends showing an acceptance of racism, it is hard to see what Patrick could gain from such deception besides irony. Read as subjectively blank however, his statement takes on a corporate sensibility. The green- washing through clever advertising of oil companies comes to mind, as does religious dogma whose statements may include, for example, that murder is a sin, but whose normalised agents murder prolifically as ways are found for it be ‘right’ within their discourse. Double-voiced statements are satirical jabs on Ellis’ part, but also evidence of statements as functional subterfuge.
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In another example below, Patrick defends Jews, before acting out oppositely.
"You spin a dreidel, Preston," I say calmly, "not a menorah. You spin a dreidel." "Oh my god, Bateman, do you want me to go over to the bar and ask Freddy to fry you up some fucking potato pancakes?" Preston asks, truly alarmed. "Some… latkes?" "No," I say. "Just cool it with the anti-Semitic remarks." (Ellis, 1991, p. 37)
She walks away to get the manager and when I see him approaching, a bald carbon copy of the waitress, I get up and scream, "Fuck yourself you retarded cocksucking kike," (Ellis, 1991, p. 152)
Such double-voicing may reflect the rules of formation of multiple discourses – for example, neoliberalism and racism – and yet the objectifications that constitute the cultural reality of the former may be all that’s required. Double-voicing in neoliberalism appears to be a common device, which according to Buchanan and his benefactor Charles Koch, was necessarily built on discursive deceptions such as ‘freedom’ and ‘economic liberty’ (MacLean, 2017, pp. 140, 166). Consider this passage below where Patrick is taunting a homeless man before murdering him.
"I'm hungry," he repeats. "Listen. Do you think it's fair to take money from people who do have jobs? Who do work?" (Ellis, 1991, p. 130)
With neoliberalism’s rules of formation a priori constituted by the overlapping networks of past and surrounding discourses, Patrick’s intentionality as expression of their functions can be traced to preceding statements of Buchanan’s, who likened the unemployed and poor as ‘predators’ preying on the rich through ‘free-riding’ and taxes (Buchanan & Tullock, 1975/1999b, p. 33; MacLean, 2017, p. 142). This is not implying that Ellis at the time happened to be reading academics from the Mont Perelin Society – though that is of course possible – rather, it is indicative of how the rules of a discourse’s formation ‘always turn to specific historical conditions’ (McHoul & Grace, 1998, p. 39). As Graham points out, it is not so much a matter of what Buchanan etc said per se, but the functions of that saying that interpellate a ‘reality’ of objects via subjectified agents like Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet and Patrick.
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