publications
In Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (2021), DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2021.1905679
This essay examines longstanding, widely circulated arguments regarding blocked futurity in relation to emerging forms of temporal experience associated with financialization. From ambivalent conservative accounts of the ‘end of history’ to the grim repetition diagnosed on the Left as ‘capitalist realism’, divergent accounts of post-1960s culture have focused on what I call ‘static time’, or an experience of time in which human agency is no longer operative because meaningful change cannot be created. Although versions of static time continue to proliferate in academic discourse, liquidity and financialization produce forms of individual temporality that operate very differently. When we make the conceptual parameters of static time explicit, I suggest, it becomes more possible to read for the forms of temporalized human action that these parameters may prevent us from noticing. These forms include what I call suffering agency, or the experience of individually chosen, consequential human action as horrific and unwelcome, and life-interest, or the production of individual binary decisions made in relation to survival. Rather than being inaccessible or unshaped by human efficacy, the future here bears down in the form of negative results directly caused and deliberately chosen by the individual in question. In this form of ‘punitive futurity’, individuals experience temporalized forms of distress keyed to the willed unfolding of their own choices over time. By reading punitive futurity in relation to what Lisa Adkins calls ‘speculation as a rationality’, I argue that this temporal form serves as an increasingly crucial means by which individuals experience their subjection within contemporary capital.
Available for open-access download
A review of Lisa Adkins’s excellent Time of Money in the Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 October 2019.
DO YOU BELIEVE in life after work? At the start of a four-week academic strike in the United Kingdom in 2018, a union activist paired this question with graphics referencing Cher’s 1990s mega-hit “Believe” and shared the image with a few friends over email. By the end of the first week, their creation had spread to become the defining meme of the strike. From Facebook and Twitter, it migrated to IRL signs and could soon be glimpsed in news photos of pickets and marches up and down the country. On its face, the question pointed toward the threat to pensions at the heart of the dispute, by asking members to consider whether they still expected to be able to retire and what they would risk to protect that future. On a more utopian reading, the question also invited strikers — many of them temporary lecturers with no expectation of a pension even should the industrial action succeed — to look beyond the immediate concerns of the dispute and toward more radically open futures, including the possibility of a life after waged labor itself. [read more]
In the special issue ‘The Novel and Neoliberalism’ in Novel: A Forum on Fiction
This essay examines Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and the ticking-time-bomb terror scenario as exemplars the survival game, one of the key sub-genres of the aesthetic formation that I call the microeconomic mode. I argue that the survival game models a form of political interiority I call 'life-interest'. I read life-interest in relation to the history of interest as a political category and Deleuzian arguments regarding gamification and the control society. I posit that the agonised, embodied subject of life-interest emerges alongside and operates as a corollary to the more familiar, diffuse informatic subject of control.
Download publication or author's final accepted MS draft
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.
Essay reprinted in Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, edited by Rachel Greenwald-Smith and Mitchum Huehls, John Hopkins UP 2017.
Social Text 31 2.115 (2013): 83-101
Abstract: Jane Elliott examines the way in which twenty-first-century fiction imagines what she terms suffering agency, or the experience of agency as an omnipresent and overriding burden for the neoliberal subject. By focusing on the high-profile and acclaimed novels Life of Pi (2001), Never Let Me Go (2005), and The Road (2006), Elliott explores the contemporary fixation on the subject’s interest in life, a trend that she locates across a range of prominent subgenres, from survival tales to literary sci-fi. The poetics of what is commonly called the self-preservation instinct has become a matter of widespread cultural concern, she argues, because it has both a historical and an analogical resonance with neoliberal forms of governance: as various political theories beginning with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan have made clear, feats of self-preservation intertwine highly significant action in one’s own best interest with a sense of intense, even desperate compulsion. Through a complex combination of threats to life and abstract modelling, these texts portray both the logical propositions that structure neoliberal personhood and the experience of suffering agency that accompanies life lived inside this model. Elliott argues that these novels are particularly visible proponents of a widespread struggle across the field of popular genres to offer an imaginative lexicon capable of engaging the problem of suffering agency.
co-authored with Gillian Harkins
Social Text 31 2.115 (2013): 1-17
This essay introduces the Social Text special issue “Genres of Neoliberalism,” which considers the relationship between neoliberalism and aesthetic formations across a range of sites, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, England, Hong Kong, Kenya, Mali, the Philippines, and the United States. While the term “neoliberalism” has become so evacuated of specificity that some argue it should be abandoned, we suggest instead that problematizing the term makes visible pressing problems of periodization in the twenty-first century. As it currently circulates, neoliberalism is often used to synthesize or even resolve the conflicting conceptual apparatuses of postmodernism (a term derived from aesthetic, humanistic, and cultural methodological questions) and globalization (a term derived from political economic, social, and cultural methodological questions). By attending to the way in which culture functions as hinge between these two intellectual formations, we draw on the literary-historical terminology of genre in order to posit a humanities-based approach that is capable of attending the relations among aesthetic form, formations of capital, and institutionally sedimented forms of reading. We situate this intervention first in relation to long-standing debates within the humanities regarding Marxism, modernism, and the aesthetic, and second in relation to the recent “descriptive turn” or reaction against “symptomatic reading,” suggesting that it is difficult to assess this latter debate outside of the questions of periodization that we raise here. Finally, we provide an overview of the work in the issue, by Matthew J. Christensen, Jane Elliott, Gabriel Giorgi, Gillian Harkins, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Alys Eve Weinbaum, and Carey Young.
Essay in Old and New Media After Katrina. Ed. Diane Negra (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 89-112. Honorable mention for the Best Essay in an Edited Collection, Society of Cinema and Media Studies, 2010.
This essay offers a critical analysis and overview of American feminist fiction from 1945 to the present. Published in The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, edited by John Duvall (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011 (142-53).
co-edited with Derek Attridge
This volume argues that theory, far from being dead, has undergone major shifts in order to come to terms with the most urgent cultural and political questions of today. Offering an overview of theory’s new directions, this groundbreaking collection includes essays on affect, biopolitics, biophilosophy, the aesthetic, and neoliberalism, as well as examinations of established areas such as subaltern studies, the postcolonial, and ethics.
Influential figures such as Agamben, Badiou, Arendt, Deleuze, Derrida and Meillassoux are examined in a range of contexts. Gathering together some of the top thinkers in the field, this volume not only speculates on the fate of theory but shows its current diversity, encouraging conversation between divergent strands. Each section places the essays in their contexts and stages a comparison between different but ultimately related ways in which key thinkers are moving beyond poststructuralism.
Contributors: Amanda Anderson, Ray Brassier, Adriana Cavarero, Eva Cherniavsky, Rey Chow, Claire Colebrook, Laurent Dubreuil, Roberto Esposito, Simon Gikandi, Martin Hagglünd, Peter Hallward, Brian Massumi, Peter Osborne, Elizabeth Povinelli, William Rasch, Henry Staten, Bernard Stiegler, Eugene Thacker, Cary Wolfe, Linda Zerilli.
in Novel 42.2 (Summer 2009): 349-354
Chapter 1 in Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time, (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 29-46.
in Cultural Critique, Vol. 70, 2008.
In Modern Fiction Studies, 52.1 (2005): 143-168.