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Published by Columbia UP in 2018. Download the Introduction
“The Microeconomic Mode is a searing investigation of the dominant imagination of life stealthily unfolding across genres of contemporary literature and popular media. With great finesse and rigor, Elliott details the new subjective protocols that aim to reconcile us to a world where life can only exist at the expense of other lives, offering us indispensable critical terms for understanding the perniciousness of this emergent mode of being human. A precise, illuminating, damning reading of our times.”—Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Columbia University
“What if the stark ‘bare life’ plots and post-apocalyptic narratives proliferating in contemporary United States fiction were less reflections of posthumanist thought than of microeconomics—representations in which worlds become reduced to models and individuals to cost/benefit decisions rendered inseparable from the issue of survival? In this provocative book, Jane Elliott brings her incisiveness and originality as a feminist theorist of the contemporary to shed light on why this at once radically abstract and visceral aesthetic and the image of ‘suffering agency’ it implies has become so portable across political perspectives. The Microeconomic Mode is an outstanding work of literary and cultural theory.”—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago
“This book offers a bold new paradigm that grasps what is so ungraspable about the contemporary moment. Novels in ‘the microeconomic mode’ reduce experience to an operative model that requires individuals to perform cold-blooded cost-benefit analyses and choose between two equally horrific options. The pervasiveness of fiction that hews to this model provides the basis for Elliott’s groundbreaking claim—namely, that the intense suffering accompanying these decisions relocates the liberal individual within a zero-sum game where we find ourselves calculating our life interest in relation to the cost of someone else’s life.”—Nancy Armstrong, Duke University
The Microeconomic Mode identifies a distinct political and aesthetic formation that is currently playing out across a range of popular literary, cinematic, and televisual works in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century Anglophone West. It traces the emergence of that formation from its origins in eighteenth-century liberal political theory to the contemporary neoliberal context, and describes its many iterations. Elliott's analysis of this terrifying aesthetic mode promises nothing less than a new understanding of our political present.
—Timothy Bewes, Brown University
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.
The Microeconomic Mode has been awarded the 2018 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize.