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ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ famously calls for new forms of representation that can provide a better notion of the sublime world space of multinational capital. Jameson states that such aesthetic scale models are yet unrealised, but this essay argues that a number of contemporary novels, including Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Ben Lerner's 10:04 and works by Matias Faldbakken, Sally Rooney and William Gibson, present us with global figurations that are both more banal and more sublime than Jameson could have imagined. These novels all contain scenes where ordinary commodities are turned inside out in staggering leaps of scale, which constitute original figurations of the global infrastructures of late capitalism. Drawing on Bill Brown’s thing theory, Jennifer Wenzel’s notion of commodity biographies, and different theories of scale in the Anthropocene, I analyse different examples of this figure, which I term transparent commodities. In the concluding section, I show how these figurations prefigure the current global supply chain crisis, and I return to Jameson’s original demand for representations of the global totality, which I discuss in dialogue with my analyses as well as theories of planetarity by Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 53–92.
2 Ibid., pp. 84, 92.
3 Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 347–60, 350; and Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in A Universal History of Infamy (London: Penguin Books, 1975).
4 Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Knopf, 2014); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006).
5 For an analysis of the green nostalgia in The Road, see Laura Gruber Godfrey, ‘“The World He’d Lost”: Geography and “Green” Memory in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Critique, 51.2 (2011), pp. 163–75. For analyses of the novel’s critique of capitalism and technology, see Casey Jergenson, ‘“In What Direction Did Lost Men Veer?” Late Capitalism and Utopia in The Road’, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 14.1 (2016), pp. 117–32; and Jordan J. Dominy, ‘Cannibalism, Consumerism, and Profanation: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the End of Capitalism’, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 13 (2015), pp. 143–58.
6 See for instance Matthew Leggatt: ‘Another World Just Out of Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven’, Open Library of the Humanities 4.2 (2018), pp. 1–23; and Carmen M. Mendéz-Garcia, ‘Postapocalyptic Curating: Cultural Crises and the Permanence of Art in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 50.1 (2017), pp. 111–30. Mendéz-Garcia is particularly critical of the novel’s conservative techno-nostalgia.
7 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2009).
8 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), pp. 1–22, 4.
9 Mandel, Station Eleven, p. 255.
10 Pieter Vermeulen also singles out the snow globe in his fine reading of Station Eleven, but he devotes more attention to the beautiful object itself than to the underlying infrastructure, arguing that the separation of objects ‘from the forms of life that used to organize their production, circulation, and consumption’ is the very reason for their beauty. Pieter Vermeulen, ‘Beauty That Must Die: Station Eleven, Climate Change Fiction, and the Life of Form’, Studies in the Novel, 50.1 (2018), pp. 9–25, 18.
11 For a different reading of the snow globe, see Paul Martin Eve, ‘Reading Very Well for Our Age: Hyperobject Metadata and Global Warming in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven’, Open Library of the Humanities, 4.1 (2018), pp. 1–27. Focusing on the suspended storm inside, Eve considers the snow globe to be an ominous image of global warming, but his analysis is marred by the fact that he confuses the snow globe from the airport with a paperweight of glass that Kirsten receives in a roundabout way. That paperweight does have storm clouds in it, but it is only the size of a plum (Station Eleven, p. 66), and elsewhere in the novel we learn that Clark originally bought it in ‘a museum gift shop in Rome’ (ibid., p. 93). Mendéz-Garcia likewise confuses the snow globe with the paperweight.
12 Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (1972), quoted in Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, p. 4. Nabokov’s and my own notion of transparency is of course to some extent metaphorical, since the gaze through the transparent things and commodities involves a certain amount of fabrication and phantasmagorical projection.
13 The term hyperobject is Timothy Morton’s and denotes objects that – like Jameson’s world space of multinational capitalism – surpass our capacities to perceive them. Morton himself has described capitalism as a hyperobject. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 112.
14 Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
15 Ibid., p. 51. Marx writes that commodity fetishism arises when things are severed from their use-value and transformed into commodities, which are treated as if their value is inherent in the thing itself rather than in the amount of labour that went into its production. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 163–65.
16 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, p. 55.
17 Matias Faldbakken, The Waiter (London: Black Swan, 2018) (translated from the Norwegian original The Hills, 2017, by Alice Menzies).
18 Ibid., pp. 61–63.
19 In that sense, the novel has important precursors in both Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, which both evince a similar awareness of the colonialist plunder that lies behind our whalebone corsets and piano keys.
20 William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Putnam’s, 2003), p. 12.
21 Alex Link, ‘Global War, Global Capital, and the Work of Art in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition’, Contemporary Literature, 49.2 (2008), pp. 209–31. Gibson’s reflections on the sometimes tenuous relationship between the refined work of branding and the dirty work of production closely recall Naomi Klein’s No Logo (London: Verso, 2000), an important source for Pattern Recognition.
22 Elsewhere in the novel, Cayce reflects that she is ‘[c]omplicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other’ – complicit in the levelling effects of globalisation, in other words. Gibson, Pattern Recognition, p. 194.
23 Station Eleven, p. 28. In a note at the end of the novel (p. 335), Mandel states that the story of this ghost fleet was inspired by a 2009 newspaper article in Daily Mail.
24 Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Faber and Faber).
25 Ibid., pp. 32, 66, 107, 153, 164, 213 and 231.
26 Ibid., pp. 16 and 213.
27 Ibid., p. 213. For a fine reading of these unusual weather events, see Caleb Klaces, ‘Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Climate Change’, Textual Practice, 35.7 (2021), pp. 1109–23.
28 Station Eleven, pp. 21–26.
29 Ben Lerner, 10:04, p. 19.
30 Ben De Bruyn presents a very similar reading of this scene, which he sees as an instance of a ‘circulation narrative’ that prompts a ‘panorama of the global market by imaginatively tracing the route of a single object’. Ben De Bruyn, ‘Realism 4°. Objects, Weather and Infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10:04’, Textual Practice, 31.5 (2017), pp. 951–71, 958.
31 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History, 43.1 (2012), pp. 1–18.
32 Timothy Clark, ‘Scale’, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Telemorphosis: Theory in the Age of Climate Change Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 148–66, 149.
33 Derek Woods, ‘Scale Critique for the Anthropocene’, Minnesota Review, 83 (2014), pp. 133–42, 134.
34 Lerner’s description of the ‘majesty and murderous stupidity’ of global capitalism is another instance of the novel’s many refrains, appearing on pp. 19, 47, 156.
35 For a rich discussion of plastic as the ultimate symbol of linear, nonsustainable processes, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
36 Ben De Bruyn likewise argues that the impending catastrophe is what makes the capitalist system and its fragility visible. Ben De Bruyn, ‘Realism 4°’, p. 958.
37 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 155. Despite the Japanese brand name, DeLillo’s description of postmodern consumer culture does not have the same global scope as Mandel and Lerner.
38 Latching onto Lerner’s use of the word ‘aura’, Reuben Martens and Pieter Vermeulen present a slightly more positive reading of the instant coffee scene, arguing that Lerner’s description of the underlying infrastructure reveals ‘latent sources of potentiality by making carbon histories legible – potentiality that can be mobilized to less destructive ends’. Reuben Martens and Pieter Vermeulen, ‘Infrastructural Prolepsis: Contemporary American Literature and the Future Anterior’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 8.3 (2021), pp. 15–39, 33.
39 Ben Lerner, 10:04, p. 3.
40 Ibid., p. 153.
41 Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You? (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), pp. 17–18.
42 The emphasis on sugar and coffee is of course far from coincidental. Rather, it points to a long, colonial history of extracting just these substances from the Third World. Note that coffee is also at the centre of the scenes in Faldbakken and Lerner, and that Alice’s feelings of illness mirrors the narrator’s feelings in The Waiter. One of the commodity biographies analysed by Wenzel likewise traces the history of coffee.
43 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. xii.
44 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, p. 74.
45 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 86.
46 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 72–73.
47 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), p. 4. Derek Woods’s argument that the true subject of the Anthropocene is not humanity, but large-scale terraforming assemblages consisting of both humans, nonhuman beings and technics, can also be seen as an attempt to decentre the human from the story of the planet. It is not unreasonable to ask, however, whether the nonhuman (in the form of domestic animals) and technological components of these assemblages would have existed if humans had not assembled them in the first place.
48 Ben De Bruyn, ‘Realism 4°’, p. 960.
49 This argument has also motivated Andreas Malm’s and Jason W. Moore’s concept ‘the Capitalocene’. See, for instance, Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).