The Market at the End of History: Literary Structuralism and Canadian Infrastructural
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The Market at the End of History: Literary Structuralism and Canadian Infrastructural Aesthetics By Adam Carlson A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta © Adam Carlson, 2020 ii Abstract Two well-worn ideas were resurrected in the months leading up the 2019 federal election: the first was the resurgence of what‘s been called ―Western alienation.‖ The second was imagined as a means by which such alienation and regional division would be both literally and metaphorically fixed—what Andrew Scheer called ―a national energy corridor.‖ Scheer identified Canada‘s national purpose with the exploitation of resources the corridor would make possible: ―Often we say that the world needs more Canadian energy; I believe that‘s true, but I believe Canada needs more Canadian energy, and we will work to make sure that is a reality.‖1 My dissertation examines the origins and trajectories of both ideas, looking first at the historical and material roots of Western alienation as it pertains to both resource development and to the alienation of—the transportation and selling off of—resources outside of the national space. I analyze Western organic intellectual production to foreground how the form of value characteristic of Canada‘s extractive staples economy structures political claims and infrastructure alike. In Part One, I look at the work of the so-called Calgary School of political science, the academic-/activist-/think-tank-ideologues who engineered the rise of both the Reform Party and of Stephen Harper, and who have helped to steer the way Canadian politics have been understood and performed for the last several decades. I show how these Western intellectuals draw on Canadian literary conventions, naturalist aesthetics, and structuralist narratology to disavow the nation state and maintain the objective normativity of settler culture, assimilating Canada‘s particular history of settler colonialism within a universal neoliberal end of history. I trace a particularly Western version of settler colonial historiography that enables the Calgary 1 Scheer, speaking in Edmonton June 4, 2019. https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/watch-canadian- energy-independence-a-key-goal-says-andrew-scheer iii thinkers to construct a universalizing common sense. I then document how this historiography— based on extremely-literal and idealist understandings of private property as fundamentally alienable—is used to posit a neoliberal market ecology, justifying, among many other things, arguments to privatize First Nations‘ reserve lands as well as the extractivist premises underlying the corridor concept. In Part Two, I look at the discourse of Canadian resource development from the 1970s to the present, tracing the energy corridor concept as a periodizing scheme. Originally proposed by eccentric technocrat Richard Rohmer, the early corridor plan is a pristine example of what Maurice Charland calls ―technological nationalism,‖ or a state-led project to build the nation technologically and unite its regions and peoples. I argue that Rohmer‘s technological nationalism aims to produce and reproduce subjects in the image of the social and productive relations belonging to the industrialized nation-state. However, I employ a materialist methodology to show that the West‘s inability to alienate its resources springs from Canada‘s material reality as a mediation economy. Thus the logic behind Rohmer‘s plan requires national subjects to take the form, not of the labour/capital relation of industrial production, but of technocratically-managed human capital. Consequently, the corridor—like all the current fantasies of ―nation-building‖ pipelines—must be rearticulated in the present as a figure of what Timothy Mitchell calls ―carbon democracy.‖ And, indeed, in the past several years the corridor plan has been dusted off and re-presented again and again: by CIRANO, a think tank associated with the University of Calgary‘s School of Public Policy; it‘s been endorsed by the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce; picked up as a cause by many industry associations; and, most notably, Scheer made the corridor plan a significant part of the Conservatives‘ 2019 election platform. iv By periodizing the corridor, I show how the subject interpellated by technological nationalism becomes the carbon-democratic citizen, whose belonging consists of mobility and access to consumer goods. Like the literary-structuralist figures deployed by the Calgary School, the corridor idea acts as an infrastructural frame to position subjects according to their relation to natural resources. As Scheer himself says, ―No concept better illustrates […] how provinces can and should work together than a national energy corridor.‖ Both the work of the Calgary School and the political-economic functions of technological-nationalist state projects effect the transition to carbon democracy, concluding in the fantasy of a ―market ecology‖ that fulfills the neoliberal idealist premises of overcoming material production and of governments vanishing into governmentality. That is, the Calgary brand of historiography and the idea of the corridor each mediate literal and figural alienation, imaginarily uniting the nation by way of ecological markets and smooth flows of goods, consumers, and energy. v Acknowledgements Thank you so much to Imre Szeman, who, in addition to being a generous, patient teacher and a wonderful friend, has helped me to better understand the academic‘s responsibility to be clear, as well as the imperative to take seriously common sense notions that are all too easy for grad students to dismiss. Thank you also to my dear friend Sheena Wilson: I‘ve learned such a great deal under your mentorship, perhaps most importantly how teaching is above all a practice of translating theory or criticism into action, and of reconfiguring the boundaries of the classroom, the community, and the planet. Mike O‘Driscoll was the first instructor I had when I arrived at U of A, and I‘m thrilled that he was a part of my final stage as well. The generous respect he shows in conversation is something I keep in mind and strive to emulate whenever I speak with my students—or with anyone else for that matter. Thank you to Lynette Schultz for providing helpful criticism to make my project better. I am truly lucky to have been able to work with brilliant instructors like Sourayan Mookerjea and Mark Simpson; and I‘m very grateful to Patrick McCurdy for his attentive reading of my thesis. I owe so much to my fantastic friends and comrades Brent Bellamy, Shama Rangwala, and Jordan Kinder, as well as to Jessie Beier, Alex Caruthers, Marija Cetinic, Amy De‘Ath, Jeff Diamanti, Jon Dyck, Dan Harvey, David Houseman, Rob Jackson, David Jansen, Dani Jorgensen Skakum, Marcelle Kosman, Ariel Kroon, Brad Lafortune, Kate Lawless, Tom Laughlin, Natalie Loveless, Graeme Macdonald, Norman Mack, Danijela Majstorovic, Sean O‘Brien, Valérie Savard, Conrad Scott, David Thomas, Michael Truscello, and Zoran Vuckovac. I am thankful for support from Killam Trusts, SSHRC, Alberta Justice/Alberta Human Rights Commission, and the Department of English and Film Studies, especially Corrinne Harol. I‘d like to warmly thank Kim Brown, Mary Marshall Durrell, as well as Cecily Devereux, Karyn vi Ball, Elizabeth Czach, Carolyn Sale, Julie Rak, Terri Tomsky, Eddy Kent, Teresa Zackodnik, Jaimie Baron, and Robert Merrett. Among those to whom I will be eternally appreciative are Shawn Malley, Nicola Nixon, Marci Frank, Andre Furlani, Mary Esteve, Paul Illidge, Susan Humphrey, Claude Picard, and Linda Lilge. My deepest thanks and love go to my partner and best friend Katie Lewandowski, as well as to my mother, Karen Carlson, my brother Jesse Carlson, to Anne Latour, Bob Lewandowski, and Eric Lewandowski, and also to Dan Pinese, Jani Krulc, Tom Mullins, Oliver Kollar, Stefania Mustillo, Nick Stoneman, and Bryan Burke. vii Table of Contents List of Figures ix Methodological Prologue 1 Introduction: The Market at the End of History 16 I. The Calgary School: Western Canada‘s Organic Intellectuals 23 II. Structuralism and Rhetoric: The Method of Taking the Literary Literally 28 III. The Rhetoric of Settler-Colonial Historiography: Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark 34 IV. Retroactive Continuity: How to Colonize History 41 V. The Market Ecology as Nomos of the Camp: The War Between Us 43 VI. The Political Economy of Retcon 48 VII. The Biopolitics of Retcon: Production and Social Reproduction 50 VIII. The Biopolitical Subtext of Form, or, the Bioform 53 IX. From George Lucas to Georg Lukács: Necessary Anachronism 57 Part One: Structuralism Chapter 1 The End of History 1.1 Introduction: On the Way to Calgary via Paris and Chicago 66 1.2 On Cooper‘s Theoretical Background 68 1.3 Bloom‘s Socrates: The Rhetorical Containment of Political Economy 73 1.4 The Biopolitical Naturalism of Social Class 78 1.5 Literality and Indigeneity: The Mythographic Structure of the Universal State 82 1.6 Bloom‘s Introduction to Kojève‘s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 86 1.7 Barry Cooper and The End of History 91 1.8 The Gulag and Technology: from the Camp to the Corridor 103 Chapter 2 Barry Cooper: the Myth of Western Alienation 2.1 Myth as Method 109 2.2 Taking the Literal Literally 123 2.3 Myth and Western Historiography: The Market Ecology 130 2.4 On Alienation 140 Chapter 3 Tom Flanagan as Sage, or, the Pot Telling the Kettle Joke