The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics

Awarded the 2019 MLA Matei Calinescu Prize for a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth or twenty-first century literature and thought and the 2018 Best Monograph Prize from the British Association of Contemporary for Contemporary Studies.

Columbia UP 2018.

In this book, Jane Elliott argues that a new and distinctive aesthetic phenomenon has come to dominate contemporary American culture since the late 1990s: what she calls the microeconomic mode. From Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated novel The Road to the Game of Thrones franchise, from real-life survival scenarios to fantastical survival games, this cultural formation combines extreme, life-or-death scenarios with schematic, torturous either-or choices. Through close readings of the subgenres that make up this mode, Elliott traces the implicit theoretical and political claims conveyed by this combination of abstraction and extremity. Across the microeconomic mode, she suggests, humans operate as choosing subjects with an overriding interest in life: they approach this compulsive attachment as a mini-economy of costs and benefits, gains and losses, measured in the currency of life. In three stand-alone chapters focused on contemporary theory, Elliott reads the key concepts that emerge from this aesthetic—life-interest, sovereign capture and binary life—in relation to influential arguments regarding biopolitics and natural law theory, becoming and the control society, and primitive accumulation in racial capitalism. The conception of human being that emerges from this mode, she argues, resonates with but dramatically deviates from these critical ways of mapping the human; like Left critique, the microeconomic mode interrogates the destruction of the liberal political subject, but what it leaves in its place is as disturbing as it is radically new. Attending to the microeconomic mode, Elliott argues, is crucial to identifying this emergent, insistent and influential conception of what it means to be human in the present.

Download the Introduction. For essays related to this project, see Social Text, Novel and the edited collection Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.