Neoliberal Nonfictions by Worden Daniel;

Author:Worden, Daniel; [Worden, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Thompson’s adopted role—Raoul Duke, the cartoonish drug- and alcohol-fueled prophet of doom and despair—functions as a formal device for registering the displacement of political aspirations onto neoliberal style. It is an inversion of the handshake in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that never happens—a formal placeholder that marks the gap, ever widening, between personal experience and material conditions. That gap and its ever-widening expanse is the cultural force of neoliberalism, a force made visible through documentary.

When read as neoliberal stylists, Haley and Thompson document how personal experience and charismatic personae become the source of our political investments, just at the historical moment when entrepreneurial individualism emerges as the ideal subject of neoliberalism. Evident in the hustler trope ubiquitous in rap music, neoliberal style has also shaped the documentary aesthetic more generally: in the memoir boom starting in the early 1990s, in the “new sincerity” of contemporary writers, in the way that Errol Morris’s Interrotron presents interview subjects as speaking directly to the viewer, and in the focus on “presence” in performance art by Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, and others. It is also evident how racial differences in the United States have been the site both of fantasy projection for someone like Thompson, who finds in Oscar Zeta Acosta his rampaging, drug-fueled id, and of personal empowerment for writers like Haley and Jay-Z, for whom documenting the history of Black activism and art creates a path for future generations to follow. In neoliberal culture, these racialized modes become individualized even when they address or exploit collective experiences. Naming neoliberal style as a style and tracing its emergence in documentary narratives about countercultures is one way to begin charting the promises and the limits of entrepreneurial individualism and to become more attentive to modes of representation that cast neoliberal subjecthood against the exploitative structures that produce it.

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