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University of California Riverside UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Managing Power: Heroism in the Age of Speculative Capital A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Joshua Danley Pearson September 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson Dr. Tamara Ho Dr. Stephen Sohn Copyright by Joshua Danley Pearson 2018 The Dissertation of Joshua Danley Pearson is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements First, I am deeply indebted to my chair, Dr. Sherryl Vint, whose generosity, patience, insight, and rigor have contributed to this project in innumerable ways. I am also indebted to my committee members Dr. Tamara Ho and Dr. Stephen Sohn for their feedback and support. Dr. Joseph Childers provided vital insight in the early stages of the project, helping me to articulate key aspects of my theoretical framework. I would also like to thank the many scholars who have helped me hone these ideas over the last six years. I am thankful to my colleagues at UC Riverside, on whose companionship, commiseration, and insight I have relied throughout this process: including Stina Attebery, Ezekiel Crago, Taylor Evans, Jeff Hicks, Michael Jarvis, Sarah Laiola, Sean Matharoo, Aaron Roberts, Brittany Roberts, Lorenzo Servitje, and Anne Sullivan. In the wider community of science fiction scholarship, I am grateful for the friendship, feedback, and support of Katherine Bishop, Mark Bould, Simone Caroti, Grant Dempsey, Paweł Frelik, David Higgins, Hugh O’Connell, John Rieder, Valérie Savard, and Patrick Sharp. Several institutions have generously supported this project. The Graduate Division of the University of California, Riverside provided a fellowship quarter to focus on my writing. Key concepts benefitted from feedback received at the 2015 Bern Winter School, which I was able to attend thanks to funding provided by the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. The archival research presented in Chapter Five was made possible by an RD Mullen PhD Research Fellowship awarded by Science Fiction Studies. iv Finally, I want to thank my family and my friends for their love, encouragement, and patience throughout this process. Many of the ideas here had their genesis in long walks and longer talks with my comrades in the Iowa City Adventuring Society. Thank you, brothers, it’s come a long way. To my parents, Deb and Michael, and my siblings Kate and Aric, and the extended fam of Peggy, Sherm, and Anna, Elio, and Joe, I could not have done it without your inspiration, love, and laughter. And lastly, my loving thanks to Stina, my partner, friend, careful reader and tireless cheerleader. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Managing Power: Heroism in the Age of Speculative Capital by Joshua Danley Pearson Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, September 2018 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson This project identifies a recurring figure in late 20th century popular culture, the power manager, who is distinguished by a specific conjunction of “cool” sociopathic affect, “hollowed-out” interiority, and specialization in the immaterial labor of speculation and manipulation. This figure’s emergence and diffusion across Anglophone popular media is intimately connected to the intertwined ascendancies of speculative finance and neoliberal governance as the organizing forces of society. The power manager operates as an idealized model for the financialized subjectivity that neoliberal rationality assumes, whose power over others derives from his early adaptation to the demands of new economic structures. Drawing on theorizations of neoliberal governance and financial discourse by Wendy Brown, Mark Fisher, and Randy Martin, Managing Power interrogates popular narratives in order to trace finance capital’s influence on our capacity to imagine social power and agency, looking beyond popular representations of the business world to examine instead how neoliberal and financial logics have seeped into the structure of popular heroism and adventure narratives. By clearly articulating power management as a distinct neoliberal fantasy of masculine power and tracing its vi cultural history, Managing Power enables us to better diagnose this fantasy’s influence on our imagination of social interaction, social power, and social change. These fantasies of financialized power reinforce the message that, as Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal status quo. As a figure of elite cognitive labor, the power manager serves an important ideological role as a figure of male dominance able to navigate the shifts from productive to service/finance capitalism, as well as providing scripts of dominance that retrench white privilege in a time of growing diversity in both the workplace and popular culture. Managing Power exposes the pathologies of this fantasy of financialized neoliberal subjectivity, trace its influence, and so undermine the ideological justifications it continues to provide for inequality and privilege in contemporary literature and culture. vii Table of Contents Introduction Unmasking the Fantasy of Neoliberal Subjectivity 1 Chapter One Prototyping Power Management: Frank Herbert's Dune and the Financialization of Heroic Masculinity 34 Chapter Two Managing Superpowers: Popular Fantasies for a Neoliberal Present Pt. 1: Batman and the Justice League in the Wake of Reagan 1983-1996 73 Chapter Three Managing Superpowers: Popular Fantasies for a Neoliberal Present, Part 2: Batman as the Normative Ideal of Neoliberal Governance 1997-2001 147 Chapter Four “I put up a front so the world won’t see how vulnerable I’m not”: Awkwardness, Sociopathy, and the Power Management of Everyday Life in Dexter 219 Chapter Five Queering Speculation: Contesting Neoliberalism by Accelerating Hetero-Masculinity in Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games 288 Coda Cultivating Hope 387 Works Cited 389 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Floating (Dexter S1E02 “Crocodile” 4:09) 229 Figure 2: Deb’s “front” (Dexter S1E02 “Crocodile” 41:49-42:00) 231 Figure 3: Dexter’s “front” (Dexter S1E02 “Crocodile” 42:05-42:08) 233 Figure 4: Angel’s “front” (Dexter S1E02 “Crocodile” 43:45) 235 Figure 5: Office spaces (Office Space 3:47 and American Beauty 4:23) 241 Figure 6: Managerial Cajoling in Office Space (Office Space 45:47) 242 Figure 7: American Beauty’s Liberated Child-Man (American Beauty 1:14:55) 243 Figure 8: Dexter at work, Dexter at play (Dexter S1E10 “Seeing Red” 37:01, S1E02 “Crocodile” 51:01) 243 Figure 9: Doakes is not fooled by the doughnuts (Dexter S7E12 “Surprise Motherfucker” 42:55) 247 Figure 10: The interpassive doughnut ritual (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 14:10-14:33) 264 Figure 11: Doughnut redux (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 14:50, 15:21, 16:11) 265 Figure 12: “Bronco” (Dexter S1E03 “Popping Cherry” 9:48-10:30) 267 Figure 13: Winks and Wishes (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 13:44, 13:45) 269 Figure 14: Doakes can see (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 17:52) 270 ix Figure 15: Portfolio theory at work (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 35:42-35:49) 271 Fig 16: Advice (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 10:33) 273 Fig 17: Arrested Development (Arrested Development S3E01 “The Cabin Show” 3:30) 280 Fig 18: More advice (Dexter S1E01 “Dexter” 10:49) 280 Figure 19: Doakes Imprisoned (Dexter S2E10 “There’s Something about Harry” 53:00) 284 x Introduction Unmasking the Fantasy of Neoliberal Subjectivity This project identifies a recurring figure in late 20th century popular culture, the power manager, who is distinguished by a specific conjunction of “cool” sociopathic affect, “hollowed-out” interiority, and specialization in the immaterial labor of speculation and manipulation. I argue that this figure’s emergence and diffusion across Anglophone popular media, from science fiction literature, to superhero comics, to dramatic television, is intimately connected to the intertwined ascendancies of speculative finance and neoliberal governance as the organizing forces of society. The power manager operates as an idealized model for the financialized subjectivity that neoliberal rationality assumes, whose power over others derives from early adaptation to the demands of the new socioeconomic reality. By clearly articulating power management as a distinct neoliberal fantasy of masculine power and tracing its cultural history, Managing Power enables us to better diagnose this fantasy’s influence on our imagination of social interaction, social power, and social change. These fantasies of financialized power reinforce the message that, as Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal status quo. As a figure of elite cognitive labor, the power manager serves an important ideological role as a figure of male dominance able to navigate the shifts from productive to service/finance capitalism, as well as providing scripts of dominance that retrench white privilege in a time of growing diversity in both the workplace and popular culture. Managing Power seeks to expose the pathologies of this fantasy of financialized 1 neoliberal subjectivity, tracing out its influence, to undermine the ideological justifications it continues to provide for inequality and privilege in contemporary literature and culture. 0.1 Political Context The crisis of 2008 brought finance capital and its volatile culture of speculative risk to the forefront of public consciousness and civic discourse. Pundits, scholars, and concerned citizens alike were outraged
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