Global

histories a student journal

Capitalist Realism, Disappointment, and the History of Sensibilities: A Case for Fiction as Historical Source Dennis Koelling

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/GHSJ.2021.352

Source: Global Histories, Vol. 6, No. 2 (January 2021), pp. 102-120. ISSN: 2366-780X

Copyright © 2021 Dennis Koelling

License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Publisher information: ‘Global Histories: A Student Journal’ is an open-access bi-annual journal founded in 2015 by students of the M.A. program Global History at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. ‘Global Histories’ is published by an editorial board of Global History students in association with the Freie Universität Berlin.

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Contact information: For more information, please consult our website www.globalhistories.com or contact the editor at: [email protected]. Capitalist Realism, Disappointment, and the History of Sensibilities: A Case for Fiction as Historical Source

by DENNIS KOELLING

102 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K ABSTRACT o e l i n g Blending a reflection on the historiography of sensibilities in the

study of the recent past with a discussion on the relationship | between literary criticism and the field of history proper, this C a p i t l s R paper makes a case for a further engagement with fiction as a historical source by cultural historians. Briefly engaging with the evolution of Raymond Williams’ concept of a “structure of e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b feeling” and tracing it to Daniel Wickberg’s call for a new history of sensibilities, the article then engages with the field of what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” as an object of study that can serve as an example on how to apply the study of fiction in recent history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dennis Koelling is currently a PhD-Researcher at the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute. His dissertation examines the emergence of a neoliberal culture of heroic individualism in intellectual discourse and literary prose after the second World War. He holds a Master of Arts in Global History from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in North American Studies from the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. His main research interests include the history of capitalism with a focus on neoliberal subjectivity, the recent history of popular culture(s), and the relationship between fiction and history proper. He is a member of the editorial board of the podcast-webinar "Conversations on New Histories of Capitalism" at the European University Institute.

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 103 ‘Being realistic’ may once have groundwork for the controversial meant coming to terms with of a French author’s oeuvre, modern reality experienced as solid and capitalism succeeds in creating a immovable. Capitalist realism, strong cognitive dissonance between however, entails subordinating ideal and real, between what could oneself to a reality that is be and what is. Put differently, infinitely plastic, capable of capitalism rests on the paradoxical reconfiguring itself at any (re-)invention of infinite forms of moment.1 desire, limiting at the same time the potentiality of possible satisfaction. Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism This dynamic, ultimately erasing the temporal dimension of historical past and privileging recentness in pursuit Compte tenu des of ever-contingent futures, marks

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b caractéristiques de l’époque the center of the study of a cultural moderne, l’amour ne peut malaise, inherent to the sensibilities plus guère se manifester; of life after the ‘end of history.’3 The mais l’idéal de l’Amour n’a pas incommensurability of this dynamic C a p i t l s R | diminué. Étant, comme tout has led to a sensibility of constant idéal, fondamentalement situé disappointment in denial, a state o e l i n g hors du temps, il ne saurait ni that cultural theorist Mark Fisher diminuer ni disparaître. D’où has called “nihilistic hedonism” or 4 D e n i s K une discordance idéal-réel “hedonic depression.” particulièrement criante, source While so far widely under- de souffrances particulièrement researched by historians of emotions riche.2 and cultural historians of the recent past, a number of authors from Michel Houellebecq – Rester varying disciplines have taken Vivant

3 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History INTRODUCTION and the Last Man (New York : Toronto : New York: The Free Press, 1992); For the temporal dimension of financial capitalism Just like ‘modern love’ in see for example Jens Beckert, Imagined Michel Houellebecq’s poetical Futures: Fictional Expectations and manifesto Rester Vivant, laying the Capitalist Dynamics, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Joseph Vogl, Das Gespenst des Kapitals, 3. (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010); For the purpose of this paper, I have worked with 1 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There the German original of Vogl’s text, for the No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero English translation see Joseph Vogl, The Books, 2009), 54. Specter of Capital (Stanford, CA: Stanford 2 Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant (Paris: University Press, 2014). Flammarion, 2001), 13. 4 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 1, 36.

104 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K up the destructive circulatory the economic.”8 Lastly, economist movements inherent in capitalist Philip Mirowski has elaborated on o e l i n g ontology. Mark Fisher has pointed the cognitive grip that neoliberal

out in his groundbreaking essay ideology has manifested in an | C a p i t l s R Capitalist Realism that capitalism has ontological dimension, enabling its succeeded in creating an integrative epistemological edifice to survive ‘realist’ ontology and that its subjects and thrive even throughout the 2008 are involved in a Lacanian struggle of global financial crisis.9 e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b dissonance between this realism and Surveying the treatment of the underlying Real(s) of capitalist psychocapitalist dimensions in the exploitation.5 In a similar direction, realm of history proper, however, literature theorist and economist reveals scarce scholarly engagement. Joseph Vogl has theorized an Notable exceptions here include ‘oikodicy,’ questioning how capitalism the inquiries conducted by the DFG- succeeds in portraying itself as research cluster “Nach dem Boom” the best possible of all worlds, led by German historians Anselm while at the same time suffering Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael. from inherent contradictions and In their eponymous essay, Doering- outraging levels of inequality.6 Manteuffel and Raphael have German-Korean philosopher Byung- introduced a way of reforming recent Chul Han has throughout his work Western European histories of ideas engaged with the intverrelationship to acknowledge the emergence of between capitalist expectations a neoliberal “structural fracture,” and rising rates in mental illnesses reshaping the way historians engage in capitalist societies around the with the history of subjectivity world.7 Critical theorist Wendy Brown after the end of Keynesianism and has, furthermore, argued that the political consensus-culture.10 In the ontological dimension of capitalism United States, intellectual historian has brought along an emptying of Daniel T. Rodgers has worked on a political space, “transmogrif[ying] comparable hypothesis in his book every human domain and endeavor, Age of Fracture, emphasizing the along with humans themselves, fluidification of identities and the according to a specific image of

8 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: 5 Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New 6 Vogl, Das Gespenst des Kapitals. York: MIT Press, 2015), 9–10. 7 See for example Byung-Chul Han, 9 Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 1st ed. (Berlin: Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2010); Building the Financial Meltdown (London ; New upon Michel Foucault’s concept of York: Verso, 2013). biopolitics, Han has coined the term of 10 Lutz Raphael and Anselm Doering- neoliberal psychopolitics, see Byung- Manteuffel, Nach dem Boom: Chul Han, Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte und die neuen Machttechniken, 5th ed. seit 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & (Frankfurt am Main: S. FISCHER, 2014). Ruprecht, 2008).

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 105 fracturing of consensus as part of be applied by recent historians, as the neoliberal order.11 Exploring a it provides an invaluable archive broader idea of liberal psychopolitics to contextualize recent economic and the construction of a liberal and social developments. The realism, Amanda Anderson has struggle between realism and the made a related case for the history Real as proclaimed by Mark Fisher, of modernity (centered mostly in the manifests nowhere as explicit as nineteenth and twentieth century) in in the literature of disappointment, her monograph Bleak Liberalism.12 in the genre cultural theorist Ben While Anderson’s book provides Jeffery has described as “depressive an important insight into the mental realism.”14 Michel Houellebecq, who mapping of liberal capitalist society, a has structured his oeuvre around the comparable study for recent history is idea of ‘writing to stay alive (rester still missing. vivant)’ in the ‘life as supermarket

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b Why then have historians and derision (le monde comme of the recent past largely shied supermarché et comme derision)’ away from interacting with a form serves as the most prominent of psychological and emotional example here.15 While Houellebecq C a p i t l s R | capitalism, that seems so prevalent has most clearly elaborated on the in other academic disciplines?13 capitalist dynamic of unfulfillable o e l i n g One apparent obstacle seems to desires by mapping his poetical be the limited availability of sources theory on Arthur Schopenhauer’s

D e n i s K necessary to get to the cognitive philosophy of Die Welt als Wille und structures of (neo-)liberal capitalism, Vorstellung, numerous other authors underlying the psychopolitical have engaged with similar dynamics dynamics of ‘capitalist realism’ and of desire and disappointment in the emotion of disappointment they recent literature. Comparable motifs produce. My argument in this essay is can be found in the ultra-violent that Anderson’s approach of mapping feminist gore of Virginie Despentes the discontent with liberalism in the in France, the post-Soviet fantasies nineteenth and twentieth century, in writers such as Juli Zeh or Olga by engaging mostly with fictional Tokarczuk, hyperreal consumer literature, can and indeed should fiction by Bret Easton Ellis or David Foster Wallace in the US, and the Japanese strand of Freeter-literature 11 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture represented by writers such as (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). Kanehara Hitomi or Ryū Murakami. 12 Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 13 For the term “Emotional Capitalism” see sociologist Eva Illouz’s monograph on 14 Ben Jeffery, Anti-Matter: Michel online dating: Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: Houellebecq and Depressive Realism The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Winchester, UK: John Hunt, 2011). (Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 15 Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant et 2006). autres textes (Paris: J’ai lu, 2015).

106 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K A serious engagement with sources, it is within the framework fictional sources then can help of Wickberg’s History of Sensibilities o e l i n g cultural historians to construct as a holistic approach that fiction

a history of sensibilities of the can flourish as an innovative source | C a p i t l s R neoliberal order, questioning the for the historian of neoliberalism cognitive structure at work as concerned with the (de-)construction described by theorists like Mark of a capitalist realism.

Fisher. Cultural historian Daniel In this essay, I make the case e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b Wickberg has long called for a for a serious integration of fiction readjustment of how to write the into the study of the recent past and history of sensibilities after the point out the relationship between emotional turn in his groundbreaking ‘depressive realism’ and ‘capitalist essay “What is the History of realism,’ which, as I will show, function Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, as quasi-opposed iconographies. I Old and New.”16 It is no coincidence begin by briefly elaborating on Mark that his essay interacts with the Fisher’s important essay, sketching concept of structure of feeling, the outline for ‘capitalist realism’ and devised by cultural and literary its cognitive implications in recent theorist Raymond Williams, largely history. Following this, I show how the built around fiction. Williams paradox of desire and non-fulfilment understood that fictional sources has been approached across various could be at the core of exploring disciplines concerned with post- the mental state of a given historical modern fiction and how this aspect period. Wickberg, however, cautions has appeared in the study of what the cultural historian to take Williams’ Ben Jeffery has called ‘depressive concept at face value as it still plays realism.’ Then I briefly discuss how ‘formal’ or ‘intellectual’ thought literary studies have made an attempt against ‘lived’ experience. Wickberg’s to integrate the study of fiction with theory of sensibilities, on the recent economic history, exemplified other hand, is constructed without in my essay by the treatment of “respect of invidious distinctions Japanese Freeter-literature and the between practice and theory, low discourse on precarity. Finally, I argue and high, informal and formal, art and how literature should become an philosophy; all embody sensibilities.”17 important cornerstone of building a While Williams’ theory serves as history of sensibilities of the recent a great entrance point for cultural neoliberal order. historians to work with fictional

16 Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 661–84, https:// doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.3.661. 17 Wickberg, 671–72.

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 107 CAPITALIST REALISM only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but Since its publication in also that it is now impossible even 2009, Mark Fisher’s essay Capitalist to imagine a coherent alternative Realism – Is There no Alternative? to it.”19 In other words, “[c]apitalism has become a widely influential text seamlessly occupies the horizons of read across academic disciplines the thinkable.”20 and the blogosphere, pushing His general argument then readers to critically engage with first and foremost is of cognitive ergo issues of popular culture and psychological nature: “Capitalist neoliberalism. Fisher’s innovative realism as I understand it cannot merger of economic theory, Lacanian be confined to art or to the quasi- psychology, and cultural criticism propagandistic way in which provides a unique theoretical advertising functions. It is more like a

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b framework to study recent cultural pervasive atmosphere, conditioning history through an economic lens. not only the production of culture Engaging with critical theorists but also the regulation of work and such as Fredric Jameson and education, and acting as a kind of C a p i t l s R | Slavoj Žižek, Fisher explores how invisible barrier constraining thought neoliberal capitalism has developed and action.”21 Later in his essay, o e l i n g a pervasive worldview, which he frames his claim in explicitly suppresses the possibility of change Lacanian terms, posing capitalist

D e n i s K or even the conceptualization of ‘reality’ against an underlying ‘Real’: any other system of thought. He “For Lacan, the Real is what any begins his argumentation with the ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, statement, attributed to both Žižek reality constitutes itself through and Jameson, that “it is easier to just this repression. The Real is an imagine the end of the world than it unrepresentable X, a traumatic void is to imagine the end of capitalism.”18 that can only be glimpsed in the Partially leaving the dystopian/ fractures and inconsistencies in the utopian-dichotomy of that statement field of apparent reality.”22 behind, Fisher goes on to define While Fisher structures a lot his concept of ‘capitalist realism’ of his initial argument around fictional as “the widespread sense that not sources and cultural products, he largely neglects the possibility that these artifacts can play a substantive role in subverting capitalist realism: 18 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2; It’s unclear where the phrase actually originates from. In 2003 Jameson attributes it to “someone,” while Žižek indeed referred 19 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2. to Jameson when he used it in 1994. See 20 Fisher, 8. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left 21 Fisher, 16. Review no. 21, May-June (2003): 65–79; 22 Fisher, 18 Fisher is paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology arguments from both Žižek and Lacanian (London: Verso, 1994). theorist Alenka Zupancic here.

108 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K “What we are dealing with now is reality it produces. As Fisher put not the incorporation of materials it, “on strategy against capitalist o e l i n g that previously seemed to possess realism could involve invoking the

subversive potentials, but instead, Real(s) underlying the reality that | C a p i t l s R their precorporation: the pre-emptive capitalism presents to us.”26 It is the formatting and shaping of desires, task of critical historians, then, to aspirations and hopes by capitalist historicize these Real(s) and connect culture.”23 In fact, he sees it as an them to the history of capitalism, e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b inherent feature of capitalist realism be it in the form of climate change, to integrate materials that might be workers’ exploitation, or patriarchal considered “anti-capitalist” or have gender relations. Cultural historians historically carried revolutionary can contribute by uncovering ways potential. He claims this is “one in which the representations of effect of [capitalism’s] ‘system of capitalist reality are challenged equivalence’ which can assign all by representing the underlying cultural objects, whether they are Real(s). Fisher hints at one way religious iconography, pornography, cultural history can critique capitalist or Das Kapital, a monetary value.”24 realism, by exposing the way the Seemingly subversive works of contemporary historical sensibility popular culture can then become a is related to the development of a quasi-outsourced performance of neoliberal form of capitalism: “To anti-capitalism, allowing consumers reclaim a real political agency means to feel righteous and keep first of all accepting our insertion at consuming in the same fashion as the level of desire in the remorseless usual.25 meat-grinder of Capital.”27 Here he If Mark Fisher neglects the points at the necessity to mapping subversive potential of all popular out what Raymond Williams calls a culture (or more generally fiction), ‘structure of feeling’ of capitalism, a how can recent cultural historians still task destined for cultural historians integrate his widely useful framework concerned with fiction and in the study of the recent past, and emotions.28 specifically the rise of neoliberalism? Again, the answer can be found in Fisher’s Lacanian framing of his 26 Fisher, 18. theory: any possible critique of 27 Fisher, 15. capitalist realism, must necessarily 28 For Raymond Williams’ definition of begin with the destabilizing of the “Structure of Feeling” see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Cardigan, UK: Parthian Books, 2011); Eva Illouz also elaborates on the concept and its use for a sociology of emotional capitalism; see 23 Fisher, 9. Illouz, Cold Intimacies, 50. In addition, 24 Fisher, 4. Daniel Wickberg has argued for a history 25 Cf. Fisher’s discussion of ecological of sensibilities, basically evolving from critique in the Disney movie Wall-E. See Williams’ concept; see Wickberg, “What Is Fisher, 12. the History of Sensibilities?”

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 109 A second challenge to economic world be ‘the best of capitalist realism comes from appeals all possible worlds’?.30 to its (in)coherence as a system of thought and more important belief. Vogl’s analogy to the theodicy As Fisher argues, “[c]apitalist realism makes clear that one challenge can only be threatened if it is shown to capitalist realism can come to be in some way inconsistent from the uncovering of its or untenable; if, that is to say, inherent contradictoriness and the capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns destabilization of capitalism as a out to be nothing of the sort.”29 Here, system of belief. Fisher’s argument is very close to In the remainder of this essay, that of literary theorist and economist I describe how competing forms Joseph Vogl, who coined the of realism(s) have been claimed question of a post-modern ‘oikodicy.’ by various scholars engaged with

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b In his monograph Das Gespenst popular literature, challenging the des Kapitals, Vogl has elaborately ontological hegemony of neoliberal transferred Gottfried Wilhelm capitalist worldmaking as proposed Leibniz’s ‘theodicy’ to the realm of by Fisher. I briefly discuss the works C a p i t l s R | capitalist realism: of controversial French author Michel Houellebecq, embodying what Ben o e l i n g Given that the capitalist Jeffery has termed ‘depressive economy has become our realism,’ toppling the neoliberal

D e n i s K fate, given too our propensity belief-system by claiming visibility for to look to profit and economic the Real(s) of mental health and social growth to satisfy some isolation obscured by the capitalist remnant of the old hope narrative. for an earthly Providence, modern financial theory also cannot avoid confronting the DEPRESSIVE REALISM baffling question of how, if at all, apparent irregularities and One of the Real(s) of anomalies can exist in a system underlying capitalist realism that Mark supposedly based on reason. Fisher identifies in his essay is the In Leibniz’s terms: Which events rising rates of psychological illnesses appear to be compatible (and and their depoliticization in capitalist hence ‘compossible’) with which societies. He argues — echoing other events? Are relations Foucault’s theory of modernity — that between these events law- under capitalism, mental health is governed and if so, by which laws? And how can the existing

30 Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 29 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 16. 2015), 44.

110 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K being individualized, making every was introduced by Ben Jeffery in his person to blame for their condition study on the French bestselling (yet o e l i n g and foreclosing any systematic highly controversial) writer Michel

approach to the problem at hand. Houllebecq. In his essay Anti-Matter, | C a p i t l s R Fisher sees this as symptomatic for Jeffery claims that the late 1980s and the inherent inconsistency of the early 1990s saw the emergence of system: a ‘depressive realism,’ channeling

the mental disenchantment or e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b Instead of treating it as Entzauberung (to borrow a term incumbent on individuals to from Max Weber) with neoliberal resolve their own psychological capitalism. His text is concerned distress, instead, that is, of primarily with the pessimism of accepting the vast privatization Houellebecq’s literature of the ‘world of stress that has taken place as supermarket.’ This pessimism over the last thirty years, he connects directly with a loss of we need to ask: how has it belief in the value of a ruling system become acceptable that so of thought: “What all varieties of many people, and especially pessimism have in common is the so many young people, are principle that the truth is undesirable ill? The ‘mental health plague’ – that unhappiness coincides with the in capitalist societies would loss of illusions, and that, conversely, suggest that, instead of being happiness is a type of fantasy or the only social system that ignorance.”32 works, capitalism is inherently While he treats Houllebecq’s dysfunctional, and the cost of it writing first and foremost as appearing to work is very high.31 philosophical pamphlets, he does acknowledge that this unsilencing Following Fisher’s of an underlying depressive approach, cultural historians aimed current in contemporary society at destabilizing the narrative of produces a large part of the appeal capitalist realism should then occupy that Houellebecq’s novels have themselves with researching the for readers across the world. For representations of this underlying Jeffery, “it’s hard, finally, to evade the common structure of feeling, conclusion that one big reason for uncovering how and where Houellebecq’s success is that enough depression, mental health, and other people really do identify with these related phenomena are narrated books; that they put into words things in contemporary history. One that people think and want to hear, innovative concept from cultural but are either unable to articulate criticism that aims in this direction, or unwilling to admit to. It’s not a

31 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 19. 32 Jeffery, Anti-Matter, 1.

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 111 pleasant thought.” 33 It should be like the only real problems noted that Jeffery’s essay appeared there are, being the only eight years before Houellebecq’s issues we experience directly latest novel Sérotonine (2019), or exercise any real degree of which most explicitly describes the control over. You end up with struggle with depression, following the weird feeling that your own an administrative employee addicted private concerns are both the to anti-depressant medication. most important things and not Just like Mark Fisher, important at all – an echo of the Ben Jeffery sees the roots clinical depressive paradox.36 of the depressive struggle of Houellebecq’s characters mostly Accordingly, it is the in their embeddedness in a world inconsistent pressure of of individual responsibility and total individualism and vast

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b privatized pressure. It is a toxic form overconnectedness existing in of individualism, the pressure to act global financial capitalism that drive as ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ that the depressive ontology of the drive those characters to the brink of characters under discussion here. C a p i t l s R | madness.34 Jeffery alleges that, “[d] It is important to note that epression is the pathological frontier when talking about representations o e l i n g of individualism – the point at which of concepts from the perspective of the whole world is eaten up by the cultural historians, Jeffery’s essay 35 D e n i s K self.” He then contrasts this over- misses a number of important individualistic point of view with the aspects of Michel Houellebecq’s vastness of globalization, inherent to oeuvre. Most importantly, he capitalism as a polar opposite: completely ignores Houellebecq’s religious dimension and the way his A well-known irony of interaction with texts by religious globalization is that the thinkers such as Blaise Pascal or incredible expanse of activity Joris-Karl Huysmans directly engages and interconnection it reveals the question of a contemporary to us inspires nothing, on a ‘oikodicy.’ An important corrective to personal level, so much as this blindspot is provided by Louis feelings of isolation, impotence Betty’s monograph Without God. and insignificance. But then Michel Houellebecq and Materialist again, in another way, it also Horror, who reads Houellebecq makes everyday problems feel basically as a religious writer.37 Jeffery

33 Jeffery, 11. 34 Cf. Ulrich Bröckling, Das 36 Jeffery, 56. unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer 37 Louis Betty, Without God: Michel Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Houellebecq and Materialist Horror Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007). (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State 35 Jeffery, Anti-Matter, 54. University Press, 2016).

112 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K also largely forgoes interacting beyond the work of a single author, with the actual depictions of clinical and at the same time examine if a o e l i n g depression, found in many characters structure of feeling exists in a wider

across all of Houellebecq’s novels. corpus of texts. Jeffery already hints | C a p i t l s R Lastly, he neglects to elaborate on at further subjects of investigation, the fact that Houellebecq openly when he claims that “[f]rom the 1950s stylized himself as a successor onwards a family of American authors of nineteenth century realism, – including William Burroughs, Robert e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b by interacting to a large degree Coover and Thomas Pynchon, among with motifs and texts from writers others were united […] by the use such as Balzac, Zola, Mann, and of cynicism, irony and irreverence Dostoyevsky.38 as tools to expose the distance While Jeffery might be adding they perceived between the myths little to the literary scholarship on of the American Dream and the Michel Houellebecq, his essay realities of consumer capitalism.”39 can nevertheless provide an Ultimately, this dissonance between important starting point for the ideal and real is also what drives contemporary cultural historian. the depression of Houellebecq’s Reading depressive realism as an novels, exhibiting “the gap between iconoclastic challenge to capitalist real life and life-as-advertised, and realism, the essay acknowledges how the sense of disappointment it that there are representations in generates has perversely become post-modern literature which go a bit of a cultural norm.”40 To show beyond the constant ironizing how pervasive this feeling of derided by many critics and actually disappointment has become in the aim at constructing a different form recent history of capitalist realism, of ‘realism’ primarily occupied with I turn now to a group of writers exposing the depressive structures on the opposite side of the globe, capitalist ontology fosters. The interacting with the lost promises of a challenge for historians then is to post-boom Japan and the culture of connect the dots and trace the precarity it generated. concepts discussed by Jeffery

38 Houellebecq’s intertextual relationship to Zola has been researched fairly well, see for example Rita Schober and Winfried Engler, Auf dem Prüfstand: Zola - Houellebecq - Klemperer (Berlin: Frey, Walter, 2003); Houellebecq’s fascination with Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoyevsky plays a large role in Denis Demonpion’s unauthorized biography, see Denis Demonpion, Houellebecq non autorisé : Enquête sur un phénomène 39 Jeffery, Anti-Matter, 47. (Paris: Libella Maren Sell, 2005). 40 Jeffery, 28.

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 113 DISAPPOINTMENT AND One of the results of the bursting PRECARITY IN JAPANESE of this economic bubble was a turn FREETER LITERATURE in cultural representations towards a new sensibility focusing on the Far from being a “feeling of entrapment experienced phenomenon strictly related to the by Japan’s youth” and the “extremely transatlantic realm, the Western emotional” narration of a “gap- European post-war economic widening society” in popular culture, recovery, and the capitalist revival and especially the post-modern of the American Dream, the Japanese novel.43 disenchantment with capitalist realist Numerous popular authors— expectations also took a prominent at the forefront Ryū Murakami, place in Japanese popular culture Kanehara Hitomi, and Haruki from the 1990s onwards. The second Murakami—have interacted in recent

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b half of the twentieth century in works with the resulting phenomena Japan has been characterized by an of a flexibilization of the workforce, unprecedented degree of economic the precarity of means of living, growth, leading to a wide expansion and feelings of social isolation and C a p i t l s R | of the Japanese middle-class and withdrawal in the newly emerging the introduction of a ‘western’-style competitive neoliberal mindset. o e l i n g consumer culture, centered around Most prominent among ‘Western’ prosperity and individualism.41 Not readers are the concepts of Freeter-

D e n i s K unlike the description of post-war authors, describing the precarity of Western Europe until the 1970s as a especially the female workforce in society ‘Nach dem Boom’ mentioned Japan, and of hikikomori, teenagers above, Japanese society was in and young adults who choose to large parts signified by a culture withdraw from social interaction of ‘boom’ and social consensus. altogether.44 For cultural historians, However, many authors have argued the field of Japanese post-modern that this culture largely fell apart with literature presents an ideal entrance the “reorganization of the industrial point to the study of capitalist structure and the evolution of the information society, amidst the deepening of the recession that Routledge Contemporary Japan Series resulted from the collapse of the (London ; New York: Routledge, 2015), xv. bubble economy in the 1990s[.]”42 43 Iwata-Weickgenannt and Rosenbaum, xii. 44 Iwata-Weickgenannt and Rosenbaum, 4–5; See also Lisette Gebhardt, Nach Einbruch der Dunkelheit: Zeitgenössische 41 Mark Driscoll, “Debt and Denunciation in japanische Literatur im Zeichen des Post-Bubble Japan,” Cultural Critique 65 Prekären, 1st ed. (Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2010); (December 1, 2007): 164–87, https://doi. William Kremer and Claudia Hammond, org/10.1353/cul.2007.0004. “Why Are so Many Japanese Men 42 Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Roman Refusing to Leave Their Rooms?,” BBC Rosenbaum, eds., Visions of Precarity in News, July 5, 2013, sec. Magazine, https:// Japanese Popular Culture and Literature, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23182523.

114 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K realism, and the underlying Real(s) within it.”46 Disappointment as a of disappointment resulting from sensibility of post-modern Japanese o e l i n g unstable living conditions, a culture of literature is here read with a double

hyperindividualism, and the constant meaning: first, as a reaction to the | C a p i t l s R dialectic between the creation of distance between economic ideal desires and the impossibility of their and real, and second, as reflecting fulfilment. the reactionary regression of gender

While the field of Freeter- roles under the neoliberal order. e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b literature has been widely researched Holloway claims that by literary studies scholars and traditional gender roles are critical theorist — the edited volume reintroduced into contemporary Visions of Precarity in Japanese Japanese society as a reaction to the Popular Culture and Literature country’s falling birthrates, while at by Kristina Iwata-Weickgennant the same time an economic culture and Roman Rosenbaum presents of self-expression and flexibility a comprehensive overview — for puts further pressure on women. He reasons of scope, I concentrate on asserts that one particular case in this paper. In an extensive analysis of two novels [t]oday, in light of Japan’s falling of author and pop-cultural icon birthrate, childbearing and Kanehara Hitomi, literary scholar motherhood are once again David Holloway has examined the important political slogans representations of both economic reminding women of the proper precarity and performative gender in shape of femininity, citizenship, recent Japanese fiction. and morality. Terms such as Mirroring Jeffery’s ‘depressive ‘parasite single’ have been realism,’ Holloway explains that used by the political right to “Kanehara has used fiction to engage pathologize those who choose with issues of crisis, self-harm, not to marry, for example. At and the inequity in contemporary the same time, however, ‘state gender roles.”45 Importantly, policies since the 1980s have Holloway detects a “discourse also encourage the trend of disappointment, a teleology toward self-realization […] and lamenting the necessity for and diverse lifestyles […].’ Women’s persistence of, a gendered means fiction and women’s magazines, of sustaining; in other words, a kind too, regularly disavow the old of passive-aggressive acceptance of orthodoxies in the name of the status quo and women’s place freedom of expression and individuality.47

45 David Holloway, “Gender, Body, and Disappointment in Kanehara Hitomi’s Fiction,” Japanese Language and 46 Holloway, 75–76. Literature 50, no. 1 (2016): 75. 47 Holloway, 75–76.

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 115 His essay analyzes onto the development of a neoliberal Kanehara’s debut novel Hebi ni piasu realism, at the core of Japan’s (2003, trans. Snakes and Earrings, contemporary cultural malaise. 2005) and Haidora (2007, Hydra; Cultural scholar Marc Driscoll untranslated), both of which deal goes a bit further in his reading of with female characters trying to Kanehara, linking it directly to a escape oppressive gender roles by culture of precarity so prominent engaging in various practices of body in recent Japanese history. In his modification and flight to the fringes article “Debt and Denunciation in of society. In both cases, however, Post-Bubble Japan,” he engages with the protagonists find themselves in cultural representations of un- and a depressive cycle of precarity, loss underemployed Japanese youth, of social interaction, and violence. linking this phenomenon directly to In the end, Lui, the protagonist of the bursting of the economic bubble

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b Hebi ni piasu, even retreats to marry in the 1990s. However, he ultimately the tattoo artist who has practically fails to acknowledge Kanehara’s raped her in the first part of the book, fiction as a sort-of competitive realism in search of sense and stability. to capitalist reality, deriding her C a p i t l s R | Holloway explains, debut novel as a covert “neoliberal utopia” finally reaffirming nationalist o e l i n g [t]he prominence of values.49 While only providing a disappointment in these texts brief insight into the possibilities of

D e n i s K agitates our understanding using fiction as a source to further of contemporary feminist and contextualize cultural history, the sexual politics. Judith Butler studies on Kanehara show how has taught us that causing fictional narratives interact with trouble affords an opportunity to economic structures, providing a trouble convention. But, at least base for a much broader study of the for Kanehara’s protagonists, sensibilities of neoliberal capitalism. trouble might also remind us of the troubling state of contemporary life for women caught in a confusing moment in which new freedoms clash with the persistence of old expectations.48

Holloway brilliantly manages to untangle the gender relations of Kanehara’s novels and map them

49 Mark Driscoll, “Debt and Denunciation in Post-Bubble Japan,” Cultural Critique 65 48 Holloway, 93. Emphasis added. (December 1, 2007): 164–87.

116 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K CONCLUSION – TOWARDS A My largely historiographical HISTORY OF SENSIBILITIES OF engagement with various scholars o e l i n g NEOLIBERALISM from cultural and literature studies

throughout this essay has shown | C a p i t l s R The examples of the the importance of adopting a treatment of Japanese Freeter- truly interdisciplinary stance for literature and the ‘depressive realism’ approaching these various modes of in the works of Michel Houellebecq perception and the methodological e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b saliently show off the gap that should shift from content to form by way be addressed by recent cultural of fiction. In these concluding and intellectual historians in writing paragraphs, I look more closely the history of capitalist realism and at how the methods proposed by challenging the dominant narrative Wickberg can be concretely applied imposed by it. To write a true history by cultural historians and give a of sensibilities, as advocated by few examples of areas of study Daniel Wickberg in his influential that would benefit from such an essay on the future of the history of approach. In practical terms then, emotions, historians need not shy historians of neoliberalism (and, more away from engaging in a far broader, broadly speaking, capitalism) wishing more structural way with fictional to further engage with fictional sources and the representations they sources could do so by critically carry. Wickberg advocates moving interacting with three different stages beyond extracting just a structure of ‘capitalist realism’, on which I of feeling from fictional sources, elaborate further below: first, its towards a broader understanding of creation; second, the repressed “the primacy of […] various modes Real(s) underlying its existence; and of perception and feeling, the third, its challenge through other terms and forms in which objects forms of realism. were conceived, experienced, and Neoliberal ideology and represented in the past.”50 Fiction the capitalist realism it propagates can provide an extensive archive consist of discourses that were for historians to engage with the created intentionally in a historical way different realisms are narrated, process, as opaque as this process and can thereby truly help cultural might seem when looking at it historians to shift the focus from “the with more than half a century of content of thought, [to] the forms hindsight. The first field to benefit in which that content is perceived, widely from an engagement given, and expressed.”51 with fictional sources then is that concerned with neoliberalism’s birthplace. Controversially debated by intellectual and cultural historians 50 Wickberg, “What Is the History of alike, the birth of neoliberalism now Sensibilities?,” 662. is often located in the founding of 51 Wickberg, 664.

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 117 the ‘neoliberal thought collective,’ individual entrepreneurialism as institutionalized in such organizations the highest possible value and as the Colloque Walter Lippmann making her up until today the patron and later the Mont Pelerin Society.52 saint of the American right.53 In While these histories brilliantly lay her correspondence, Rand was out neoliberalism’s long ascendency very vocal about not wanting to be through institutional structures considered an economist, but rather towards being the hegemonic choosing the method of narration politico-economic model of the post- as a way to reach the hearts and boom era, they say relatively little minds of the common people and about the simultaneous construction instill them with a faith in a truly of a neoliberal culture, a capitalist capitalist culture. Critically assessing realism structured around hardcore Rand’s fiction, historians can trace individualism and the spread of how she uses narration and certain

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b market liberalism as an aspirational characterologies—especially in her ideal for everyone and everything. quest to write “the ideal man”—to Here, a critical study of fiction can propagate a new capitalist realism, provide fruitful insight into how this often constructed directly in C a p i t l s R | cultural hegemony was constructed. opposition to the Soviet socialist Historians of culture can look into realism she fled from in her youth.54 A o e l i n g how fictional narratives transport this more extended study could then read new culture of competition in the these narratological examinations

D e n i s K market and how characters embody a in the wider context of 1940s and form of neoliberal individualism. 1950s anti-totalitarian discourses and An interesting object of study popular literature, to interrogate the for historians of early neoliberal existence of a certain anti-totalitarian, culture can be found in the novels of pro-capitalist structure of feeling. Russian-American philosopher Ayn For more recent historians Rand. Rand, publishing various rather of neoliberalism, an engagement unknown science fiction novels with the fictional representations of and plays in the 1930s and 1940s, the repressed Real(s) of capitalist reached widespread fame with her realism seems most fruitful. For novel The Fountainhead (1943) and this, a reading of fictional sources Atlas Shrugged (1957), preaching informed by the concept of ‘visibility’ as theorized in visual culture studies serves as a useful approach. Visual 52 See for example Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: 53 See for example Jennifer Burns, Goddess Harvard University Press, 2009); Mirowski, of the Market: Ayn Rand and the Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste; American Right (Oxford, UK ; New York: Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Oxford University Press, 2009). Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism 54 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead , ed. Leonard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Peikoff, Centennial Edition (New York: 2018). Signet, 1996), vii.

118 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 D e n i s K culture scholar Erin Y. Huang has and countervisuality, and claiming the demonstrated the usefulness of this right to look in this context becomes o e l i n g approach in her monograph Urban a potentially revolutionary act.56

Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism Starting from this premise, historians | C a p i t l s R and the Limits of Visibility by showing interested in the resistance to the emergence of ‘urban horror’—a neoliberal hegemony can interrogate feeling of discomfort exceeding fiction as a field of the emergence of comprehension, analogue to Engels’ ‘countervisualities’, of different forms e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b ‘industrial horror’—as a sociopolitical of realisms that are in competition affect in the works of Sinospheric with the dominant capitalist realism. filmmakers between the 1990s Ben Jeffery’s ‘depressive realism’ and the present.55 While Huang’s described below is an attempt at work is largely theoretical and such a competing realism. Certain aimed more at film studies readers, forms of an ‘eco-futurism,’ described historians can gain from this focus as early as in Frank Herbert’s on visibility by asking how fictional Dune-Saga in the 1960s and more sources attempt to make visible what recently in Olga Tokarczuk’s post- neoliberal ideology tries to render anthropocentric novels, might invisible. More concretely, historians provide fertile ground for study here. can look at fiction and explain how The task for cultural historians then phenomena of workplace culture, is to contextualize these speculative gender roles, and psychocapitalist fictions in the intellectual contexts of aspects such as the invisibility of their authors and their time, while at depression are taking the center the same time interrogating the form stage in fictional narratives. of their object of studies to uncover Ultimately, a focus on visibility how narrative and characterology is does not only benefit the relationship used to construct realisms differing to between the hegemonic realism that of neoliberal capitalism. and the underlying Real(s), but also In this essay, I have can interrogate the multiplicity provided an overview of the current of the ideal, the construction of research in various disciplines of a differing could-be as the site of the pervasive belief-system that resistance to neoliberal capitalist has been formed as an ontological realism. As Nicholas Mirzoeff has aspect of the neoliberal order. shown in his influential book The Furthermore, I have shown how Right to Look: A Counterhistory of competing realisms have aimed to Visuality, modernity presents an destabilize this ‘reality’ in various continued contest between visuality forms of fictional sources. It is up to cultural historians of neoliberalism

55 Erin Y. Huang, Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility, 56 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Sinotheory (Durham, NC: Duke University Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Press, 2020). Duke University Press, 2011).

Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020 119 to critically analyze these structures of consciousness and to provide the necessary nuances. Their task is to show that indeed an alternative to neoliberal capitalism can and has been imagined, and moreover that the underlying Real(s) of exploitation, depression, and more general incoherence, deserves to be studied by scholars across disciplines. Only history as a discipline, however, allows academics to approach these processes from the dispassionate perspective of an outside observer,

e a l i s m , D p o n t d h H r y f S b mapping streams of consciousness and structures of feeling that should be at the center of any true history of sensibilities. In other words, C a p i t l s R | historians of culture could and should gain solid insights from engaging with o e l i n g fictional sources across disciplinary boarders, to detect possible

D e n i s K structures of thought and nuance the often-particular studies conducted by cultural theorists and literary scholars as presented in this essay do.

120 Global Histories: a student journal | VI - 2 - 2020