Suffering Agency
Imagining Neoliberal Personhood
in North America and Britain
Jane Elliott
At the end of the 1970s, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took
office, two best-­selling books about choice were published in America:
William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) and Milton and Rose Friedman’s
Free to Choose (1979). From one perspective, it is difficult to imagine
two more different versions of choice. The Friedmans offered a popularization of Chicago School neoliberalism in which the free market was
celebrated as a veritable instantiation of democracy and, in both the book
and the accompanying TV documentary — ironically aired on public
television — individual choice among free market options was presented
as the solution to a host of social ills. In Styron’s postwar New York,
choice appears instead as an inescapable catastrophe. The climax of the
novel involves the revelation that, when the eponymous heroine arrived
at Auschwitz during the war, she was forced to choose which one of her
children would be killed immediately and which would have the chance
to live. Sophie’s choice is designed from above, in that her options are set,
but it is still both horrifically consequential and assigned to no one but
herself. The idea of a mother forced to choose death for one of her children offers a vision of choice as simultaneously imposed and profoundly,
even grotesquely, significant — a situation in which the best choice is still
unspeakable, and there is no living with the choice once made.
While Sophie’s Holocaust trauma seems a far cry from the supposed
free-­market bliss described by the Friedmans, it is precisely Sophie’s position as what Chicago School economist Gary Becker calls a “decision unit”
that causes her enormous suffering.1 Like the subjects in Becker’s economic
analyses of human behavior, Sophie is asked to determine her interests,
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DOI 10.1215/01642472-2081139 © 2013 Duke University Press
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evaluate her options, and make her choice accordingly. Although we are
used to the concentration camp functioning as the ultimate example of
oppression, Sophie’s Choice breaks with more familiar representations of
the camps, in which subjects are impelled to stand or march, live or die,
at the will of a giant machine of total domination. In contrast, Sophie’s
domination unfolds not through her transformation into a nonperson
robbed of agency but rather vis-­à-­v is her personhood, as conceived by
neoliberalism — that is, her possession of individual interests and her ability
to rank and decide between them. Like a neoliberal subject forced to choose
between medical care and groceries, Sophie faces a choice that is unfairly
constructed yet still meaningful, imposed upon her yet still hers alone.
In what follows, I argue that we are currently witnessing a growing
cultural fascination in North America and Britain with forms of suffering
that unfold at this intersection of interest, choice, and agential action — a
mode of political experience that I term suffering agency. In contrast to
Sophie’s Choice, which presents torture-­by-­choice as a facet of an evil Nazi
past that is categorically distinct from contemporaneous, free America, the
recent texts I examine here invite the reader to consider suggestive parallels
between the textual worlds they create and current, contextual experiences of the neoliberal subject of interest. Although my examples involve
figures located on the boundary of human existence, including animals,
humans close to death, and clones, I will argue that, rather than signaling
the presence of a “zone of indistinction” inhabited by bare life, this focus
arises because of a deep resonance between the subject’s own interest in
life and neoliberal forms of governance. Not only is self-­preservation a
foundational value for the forms of liberal political theory on which neoliberalism draws, but also, in the inexorability of what is commonly called
the “self-­preservation instinct,” we glimpse something of the imprisoning
nature of suffering agency, the way in which choices made for oneself and
according to one’s own interests can still feel both imposed and appalling.
By examining Yann Martell’s Life of Pi (2001), Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road (2006), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), I argue that
these popular and celebrated novels reconfigure existing genres of survival
and self-­preservation in order to register the peculiar experience of domination that constitutes suffering agency, in which choice is experienced as
a curse without simultaneously becoming a farce.
The Actuality of Agency
This perception of choice as a farce is of course a signature element
of many forms of Left critique. In a reverse image of the Friedmans’
logic, Left thinkers often posit the supposed subject of choice as nothing more than a consumer selecting among countless, superficially dif84
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ferent commodities, all of which reduce to expressions of the uniform
permeation of capital. Such models often rely on an underlying logic in
which domination is measured by the reduction of the subject’s ability
to make meaningful choices on his or her own behalf: either subjects are
physically prevented from making any significant choices by the dearth
of meaningful options, or their subjectivity has already been delimited
by the ideological schemas in which they find themselves, such that their
putative interests are preformed in keeping with structures of domination.
Obviously, this is a model that in many cases still makes sense. When a
significant percentage of Americans associate increased access to health
care with totalitarianism, for example, it seems abundantly clear that the
capacity of ideology to shape people’s understanding of their own best
interests is alive and well in the twenty-­fi rst century. And the images of
prisoners tortured by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib make it equally clear
that such disciplinary models have not displaced more overt modes of
control, in which people are incarcerated, tormented, and forced into
actions against their will.
However, as I have argued elsewhere, this model of domination does
less to elucidate the experience captured in another recent set of high-­
profile images of American disgrace: those of Hurricane Katrina survivors
paddling themselves to safety on improvised floating devices. While the
operation of various disciplinary fields clearly led to this appalling situation, the experience of domination captured in these photos is not one in
which the oppressed are denied the ability to act, but rather one in which
the necessity for action has been foisted upon them. The choice between
drowning in an attic and trying to swim to higher ground is not one anyone
should ever have to make, but that does not mean that the choice between
those options is insignificant or rendered moot by ideological interpellation.
Rather than removing the subject’s ability to act in his or her own interest
through forms of internal or external control, this particular experience
of domination is intrinsically linked to the need for the subject to take
significant action on his or her own behalf. 2
In such a context, even the heroic efforts of those who act to help
others become inextricably intertwined with the operations of oppression,
as the Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water (2008) makes
clear. 3 A central segment of the film focuses on young Lower Ninth Ward
resident Larry Sims as he evacuates his neighbors during the hurricane,
using a punching bag as a life preserver. The film begins with footage
that amply documents the poverty, tedium, and stasis of life in the Lower
Ninth pre-­K atrina — a world in which young men such as Sims are given
scant opportunities for meaningful, positive action in their communities.
In this context, the later scenes of Sims’s dramatic rescues seem to document a striking increase in agency, as Sims suddenly comes to undertake
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actions that literally make the difference between life and death for his
neighbors. Nevertheless, it seems fundamentally misguided to suggest
that such a shift undoes Sims’s interpellation in profound structures of
domination; instead, his intense agential activity is a direct by-­product of
those structural inequities.
For some critics and theorists who have written about the Katrina
event, Giorgio Agamben’s arguments regarding the “abandonment” of
“bare life” have offered a crucial lens through which to view such experiences.4 As is by this point well known, Agamben uses “bare life” to refer
to those stripped of the rights and privileges associated with political
subjectivity, and his analysis of subjects ejected from political structures
and lodged on the boundary of life and death certainly seems particularly
resonant if we remember the experience of those corralled at the Superdome and the Convention Center in the days after the storm, waiting
without food or water while the dead bodies piled up around them. However, Agamben’s analysis is less resonant when considering experiences of
self-­and community-­rescue associated with Katrina. His key examples of
bare life, the Muselmann and the patient in an overcoma, are defined in
relation to their passivity and inertia. Patients in overcomas obviously lack
mental and physical capacities and, while technically still conscious and
ambulatory, the Muselmann is for Agamben “a being from whom humiliation, horror and fear had so taken away all consciousness and personality
as to make him absolutely apathetic,” “[m]ute and absolutely alone . . .
without memory and without grief.”5 The most telling examples of bare
life for Agamben are those that are animate only in the sense of sustaining
biological life.
This focus makes it a challenge for Agamben to register moments in
which individual action and domination coexist, a problem that is particularly clear in his examination of specific medical experiments conducted
by the Nazis on prisoners who were offered remission of the death penalty
should they consent to and survive medical experimentation. Agamben
takes particular issue with those who posit that such experiments are
ethical when consent can be proven and argues that it is “questionable” to
“speak of free will and consent in the case of a person sentenced to death
or a detained person.”6 Agamben suggests that, because these subjects
have entered the state of exception, their “subjection to experimentation
can, like an expiation rite, either return the human body to life (pardon
and the remission of a penalty are . . . manifestations of the sovereign
power over life and death) or definitively consign it to the death to which
it already belongs.” 7 In other words, for Agamben, any actions undertaken
in this situation amount to a reinscription of the sovereign decision. Yet, by
reading the situation only from the perspective of the sovereign, Agamben
erases the fact that the options of execution and experimentation may actu86
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ally be quite distinct from one another, with varying consequences that
the prisoner is compelled to weigh and rank. This is clearly an oppressive
situation, but to insist that the only decision of note involved is that of the
sovereign is to overlook one of the characteristics that makes the situation
oppressive: the individual’s need to choose between two horrifying options.
Domination and decision come together here not through an arbitrary
imposition of the death penalty by the sovereign but rather because prisoners are both reduced to a condition of bare survival and faced with an
atrocious choice from which they cannot escape.
If this combination of domination and decision is rendered invisible
in the terms of Agamben’s analysis, it arguably forms the center of critical
accounts of contemporary neoliberal governance. As the work of many
thinkers has made clear, neoliberal governance operates through rather
than against the agency of its subjects; this form of rule does not “ignore
or attempt to crush the capacity for action” in citizens but rather works “to
recognize that capacity for action and to adjust [itself] to it.” 8 In Michel
Foucault’s words, neoliberalism thus functions not via an “exhaustively
disciplinary society” but instead through “an optimization of systems of
difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes . . . in
which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the
players.” 9 Because neoliberal governmentality functions through a complex
system of incentives and disincentives, it requires that the players in its
game encounter and select between options with perceptibly different and
meaningful consequences — that our choices have significant effects in the
world. Neoliberal governance is obviously not the neutral framework for
free choice it purports to be, but the unacceptability of the choices it offers
does not render them illusory or without import — quite the opposite: the
choices between gas or childcare, illegal immigration or destitution, prostitution or starvation, are so significant and so painful precisely because
they are so unjust.
Despite the widespread dissemination of the Foucauldian critique
of neoliberal governance in contemporary cultural studies, the problem
of actual, rather than vanishing, agency remains difficult to keep in view,
because the tradition of political theory that underwrites our reading of
such situations gives us so few conceptual tools for doing so. The positive
connotations of agency attest to our belief that the ability to determine
the course of one’s actions is necessarily an index of the political good — a
model shared by political theorists from Marxists to negative libertarians
to communitarians and beyond.10 Even the poststructuralist critique of
agency that circulated in the 1990s paradoxically preserved agency as a
value at the same time that it demonstrated the necessarily compromised
nature of that value. For feminist theorist Judith Butler, for example, the
key question was how might one “affirm complicity as the basis of politiSocial Text 115 ∙ Summer 2013
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cal agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the
conditions of subordination” — in other words, that agency may do enough
still to qualify as such, rather than being qualified out of existence.11 In
effect, the poststructuralist critique of agency proceeded by comparison
to an ideal version of agency itself: the problem with agency was that,
once its complicity in subjection was fully acknowledged, it was no longer
sufficiently agential. Butler’s famous solution to this problem, gender
performativity, sought to locate positive effects in a repetition of norms
divorced from subjective intent, thereby both acknowledging the foundational constraints of agency and avoiding an overt alignment with them by
circumnavigating the intentional self.12 As the immense energy and debate
that clustered around Butler’s diagnosis and her solution indicate, agency
became the site of tremendous cathexis within Left academic theory in
the 1990s, precisely because its presence seemed both indispensable and
vanishingly small. Endorsed in the same terms by which it was rendered
suspect, agency became through its very critical erasure a utopian marker
for what we could not really have yet could not seem to do without.13
Such associations are so entrenched that the idea of “suffering
agency” may simply appear a contradiction in terms.14 Of course, it is
because the type of choices generated under neoliberal rule — genuine,
individual, self-­d irected, and wrong — are so difficult to map against our
usual political categories that neoliberal governance manages to appear so
transparent and blameless. In such instances, it seems, we need a different imaginative lexicon of political experience, one capable of envisioning
moments in which agential action and domination become intertwined
with one another.15 In what follows, I argue that we are currently witnessing the evolution of such a lexicon in the realm of contemporary culture: a
specific and consistent generic vocabulary of tropes, images, and narrative
arcs whose operations I trace across the field of popular aesthetics. On the
level of form, the texts that populate this lexicon variously highlight their
own function as acts of modeling, in a fashion that reflects the algebraic,
abstracting engine of neoliberal microeconomics itself. They diagram
the way in which neoliberal personhood is constituted by an interlocking
series of seemingly indisputable propositions regarding human behavior.
This chain of assumptions and equivalencies posits interiority as the possession of interests; interests as the motivation for choice; choice as the
engine of action; chosen action as measure of agency; and agency as a sign
of personhood.16 Because each of these propositions circulates on its own
as axiomatic, their linear, additive arrangement in the neoliberal model
of personhood creates a self-­referential, self-­reinforcing logic that seems
indisputable and unstoppable. The texts I examine here map the parameters and costs of this logic by manifesting it via the form and content of
popular narrative genres. In so doing, they demonstrate that this logic can
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be filled to overflowing with seemingly contrary experiences without being
at all destabilized — that agency can remain recognizably agency while
becoming indistinguishable from profound domination.
For reasons I explore in greater detail below, genres of self-­preservation
such as the castaway story and the survival tale offer a crucial avenue for
imagining the inexorability of this logic. When life is reduced to minimal
elements and self-­preservation is at stake, the operations and consequences
of agency become magnified. Not only is the import of human actions
intensified in such situations, but the subject’s interest in preserving his
or her life leads to limit-­case decisions and deeds that would be otherwise unthinkable; the actions that result are both the result of legitimate
individual choice and utterly undesired. Rather than being deflected or
disguised within a field of ideological forces, such actions are accompanied
by a searing perception of the consequences of individual action and the
seemingly inescapable links between cause and effect, interest and choice,
agency and responsibility. These texts, I suggest, generate a web of tropes,
images, and affects that are capable of registering the peculiar experience
of domination that is suffering agency.
Self-­Preservation and the Agonies of Interest
This experience lies at the heart of Yann Martell’s Booker Prize – w inning
best seller, Life of Pi, in which the eponymous young hero is a castaway
trapped on a life raft for over a year with minimal food, a Bengal tiger,
and a handful of other characters. In the account that occupies the vast
majority of the novel, all the characters on the raft except for the boy are
animals, and after a few days, they have all either eaten each other or
been eaten by the tiger. At the end of the novel, however, the boy briefly
retells his story with most of the animals replaced by human beings. In
the first version of the tale, for example, a hyena consumes a dying zebra’s
leg, while in the second, the ship’s cook cuts off the limb of a wounded
sailor, uses it as fish bait, and eventually consumes some of it. By insisting that we shift between its two competing versions of Pi’s story, one
animal, the other human, Life of Pi in effect directs the reader’s attention
to that which makes them so different in their effects and affects: the connection between human action and individual choice. As an animal, the
hyena terrorizes, eats, and kills his fellow animal as a matter of instinct,
but as a human sailor he acts because he has chosen to do so. At issue
in this transformation is not only the specter of cannibalism but, more
crucially, the fact that, even when driven to extremes by the imminent
threat of death, the actions of humans are still perceived to carry an element of decision that the actions of animals do not. In offering this brief
and bleak counternarrative of human self-­preservation at all costs, Life
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of Pi thus throws into stark relief an experience of human action as both
agential and horrific — a horror that is both underscored and displaced
by the sheer bulk of pages the novel devotes to providing an alternate and
less brutal account of Pi’s life.
This displacement is given precise formulation in the plot that occupies the animal version of Pi’s tale, much of which is given over to the
training of the tiger, named Richard Parker. After rescuing Richard Parker
from the shipwreck in a fit of cross-­species identification, Pi suddenly
recognizes his mistake: he has trapped himself on a small boat with a soon-­
to-­be starving Bengal tiger. Pi’s only hope of safety, he decides, is to put
in place the techniques for establishing dominance that he learned at his
father’s zoo. Richard Parker is seasick, hungry, and thirsty, so Pi utilizes
these states to construct effective rewards and punishments that will keep
Richard Parker’s activities within certain bounds. In other words, Pi creates a rational system of incentives and disincentives that allow him to affect
Richard Parker’s behavior based on the tiger’s already existing interests in
stability, food, and water. In this more benign version of his tale, Pi survives
not because his interest in life has driven him to horrific decisions for which
he is still responsible, but because he is able to capitalize on the interests of
an unthinking animal. The extended training plot thus allows the novel to
create a seemingly natural linkage between the possession of human consciousness and the mastery through — rather than mastery by — interest:
as Pi puts it, “[W]hen [Richard Parker] looked beyond the gunnel, he saw
no jungle that he could hunt in and no river from which he could drink
freely. Yet I brought him food and I brought him fresh water. My agency
was pure and miraculous. It conferred power upon me. Proof: I remained
alive day after day, week after week”17 This vision of human survival as arising from “pure and miraculous” agency — of ruling by rather than being
ruled by interest — precisely counters the grim vision of human decision
driven by interest in life offered in the second, darker version of the tale.
This more familiar version of agency as the positive, enabling enactment
of individual capacities substitutes for the experience of suffering agency
that characterizes Pi’s later, human-­centered account — until the final
revelation of the second version of the tale both reverses this comforting
substitution and points to our desire for such comfort.
The survival genre on which Life of Pi draws is suited to this depiction of suffering agency because the subject’s interest in life, or what is
more commonly called the “self-­preservation instinct,” is foundational to
the forms of political thought from which neoliberalism’s model of agency
arises. In the work usually credited with beginning modern political theory,
Thomas Hobbes places self-­preservation at the heart of his conception
of human behavior, such that it becomes the bedrock on which a stable
government can be constructed. Famously, Hobbes argues that the desire
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for self-­preservation is so overriding and intrinsic that it will necessarily
lead men to accept and continue to submit to a sovereign power that protects their lives in a bid to avoid the war of all against all. Even once the
Hobbesian subject has entered into the social contract and submits completely to sovereign power, he retains the right of refusal when commands
are issued that would violate his right to self-­preservation.18 Hobbes’s turn
to self-­preservation as a means of avoiding civil war marked an increased
emphasis on life itself within the modern imagination of politics, a fact
that has made him a key figure within some contemporary discussions of
biopolitics.19 However, whereas for Foucault biopolitical forms of power
operate by protecting and reproducing the life of the species, for Hobbes
it is the subject’s desire to preserve his or her own life that is central, since
it is this desire that motivates his submission to the sovereign. The close
connection between governance and life in Leviathan occurs not only
because governmental power takes life as its object but also because the
subject’s own behavior is shaped by an inner drive for life, which gives that
behavior the measure of comprehensibility and hence predictability that
Hobbes sought. From this perspective, life becomes of interest for politics
because it is the ultimate interest, the one intransigent, overriding concern
that everyone can be assumed to share. As even this brief account may begin to suggest, there are crucial
links between the role of self-­preservation in modern political rubrics and
the neoliberal model of agential action. First, self-­preservation is crucial
to the tradition of modern political theory that bases government on the
subject’s possession of already-­existing interests. 20 Second, and perhaps
more important, interest in life can play this founding role in modern political theory because it is considered an essential and inalienable element of
human existence — and this is much the way neoliberalism conceives of
interest. Whenever a person does something or chooses something, they
are understood to have been motivated by their interests and to have chosen
the path that seems best suited to serving those interests. Yet once every
possible motivation is understood to ultimately reside in an interest, there
seems to be no distinction between action and interested action. From
this perspective, the concept of interest becomes less a way of reading
behavior than a tautological way of restating the fact of behavior. Reasoning along just these lines, Foucault argues that the only thing required for
neoliberalism “to find its points of anchorage and effectiveness” is that the
“individual’s conduct . . . reacts to reality in a non-­random way.”21 From
the egotistical to the absurdly self-­sacrificing to the downright mad, this
logic pertains: if a woman donates a kidney to a stranger, she can still be
argued to do so because of an interest she has — for example, in getting
attention or getting into heaven. Such interest-­based readings are a staple
of the TV show House M.D., for example: the series’s neoliberal hero takes
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particular pride in showing up every form of seemingly self-­sacrificing
behavior as merely a more elaborate expression of people’s sense of what
will best serve their own interests.
Although neoliberal governmentality does not require that there be
a drive for self-­preservation if it is to function, the concept of the subject’s
interest in life thus seems to register something of the seemingly limitless
scope of interest — the despairing perception that we cannot help but be
interested. We undertake self-­preserving actions out of the intensity of
our interest in our own lives, but that very intensity suggests something
of the inescapable, obligatory cast of interest under neoliberalism. The
survival genre, which confronts protagonists with continual threats to life
from privation and the natural environment, serves as an ideal mode for
exploring this perception. 22 As we witness the frenzied, desperate, and
at times appalling actions humans undertake to preserve themselves in
survival tales, we see behavior so driven that it seems on the boundary of
the voluntary and involuntary, as if the desire for life possesses the subject
rather than vice versa. Yet, despite this element of possession, interest in
life does not release the subject from the burden of significant decision any
more than neoliberal domination does. Instead, as the colloquial phrase
implies, decisions are usually considered at their most significant when it
is “a matter of life and death.” As classic survival narratives such as Alive
(1993) make clear, choices become all the more compelling when the
decision is between seemingly unthinkable options and the stakes are life
itself: to have to decide between cannibalism and death is appalling, but
it is not a decision one can imagine facing with indifference. The extreme
options and intense interest in life that characterize survival stories gesture toward one of the cruelest aspects of suffering agency — the fact that
the worse the choices on offer are, the more interested in the decision the
subject will tend to be.
It is this combination of ineradicable interest and unacceptable
choices that makes life such a torment for the hero of the novel The Road. 23
By combining the survival tale with other popular generic forms, particularly horror and the postapocalyptic, The Road depicts a nightmarish
near-­f uture in which a father and son walk on foot across a land that seems
to have once been the United States, in conditions that seem to be akin
to nuclear winter. Starving, freezing, constantly under threat of attack by
roving bands of rapists and cannibals, the father and son continue down
the titular road toward what the father hopes will be a warmer climate
in the southwest. Through its unrelenting depiction of a life of unremitting horror, The Road continually goads the father (and by extension the
reader) to consider what actually seems to be the best option available for
the characters: death at the father’s hand rather eventual rape, torture, and
death at the hand of another. This is precisely the path that was taken by
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the boy’s mother, and her suicide serves to highlight the only thing that
prevents the father from following her out of this miserable and comfortless
existence: his overriding interest in the life of his son. The only seeming
escape from interest in life, the ability not to care if one lives or dies, is
revealed as yet another point of reentry into the agonies of interest for the
father: he only cares about his son’s life, not his own, but that fact simply
makes the father hostage to an even greater interest in self-­preservation.
As The Road confronts its reader and viewer over and over with the
desperate attempts of the father to find a way to preserve a life that seems
clearly not worth living, it provides a striking vision of the impossibility of
escaping from confines of neoliberal governance through interest, when its
founding premise is a motivation that originates not from external governing power but from within the individual himself. The father’s love for his
son continually results in nightmarish choices the father can neither escape
nor endorse, a fact that becomes clear when he and his son are hiding from
bandits who seem likely to find them. If they do, the boy will be tortured,
enslaved, raped, and likely eaten in the end, and the father debates with
himself the devil’s choice between his desire to preserve his son’s life and his
desire to spare him extreme pain: “Can you do it? When the time comes?
When the time comes, there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God
and die. What if it [the rifle] doesnt [sic] fire? Could you crush that beloved
skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be?”24 In contrast to an alien, imported “being within you,”
the father’s drive to keep his son alive is inalienable and intrinsic — but so is
his interest in sparing him pain. In this moment, we are offered an excruciating portrayal of the way in which suffering agency is forged from the
apparently unbreakable links between interest and choice and choice and
agency. The father’s overriding interest in his son’s life renders the unendurable choice he faces here of riveting urgency and consequence, while
the choice itself generates an overwhelming sense of personal agency, since
the outcome will determine the life or death of his son. In its portrayal of
interest as a goad that drives the father down the road even when he is so
ill that he can barely stand, the novel depicts suffering agency as intolerable
and inescapable for even the most selfless among us — as a mode of existence
defined by anguish, revulsion, and despair.
In their generic focus on the extremities that accompany the subject’s
interest in life, castaway and survival genres provide the means to make
manifest such agonized experiences of suffering agency. As Life of Pi and its
many precursors suggest, the castaway story also foregrounds the process
of modeling itself: castaway rafts and desert-­island settlements are societies
in miniature, capsule worlds that model the principles of individual subjectivity and society at large. In Life of Pi, the stripped-­down, miniaturized
qualities of Pi’s little raft-­world resonate with the text’s engagement with
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neoliberal subjecthood as a logical model, as a set of propositions according
to which behavior unfolds. While survival stories can also offer accounts of
society writ small, The Road’s combination of sci-­fi dystopia and survival
tale creates a dynamic of generalization rather than encapsulation. As
they travel through unnamed states after an unspecified catastrophe, the
anonymous man and boy seem to invoke an all-­purpose human remainder
of any number of possible apocalypses. We can read this nonspecificity
as an invitation to allegorical readings, as a call to fill in the gaps with the
content of an ecocatastrophe or the aftermath of 9/11. But we can also read
it as nonspecificity, full stop. From this perspective, I would argue, the
minimal characterization, setting, and historical context in The Road can
be seen to distill human behavior to the seemingly irreducible elements
of interest, choice, and agential action, in much the same way that micro­
economic models of human behavior do. Because it eschews particularities,
the novel foregrounds the propositions that constitute the neoliberal model
of agency — and the result should they be taken to their logical conclusion.
What The Road pours into its model is not the specifics of historical or
personal detail but the usually invisible suffering that now accompanies
the unfolding of this logic.
Not Interested
In order to consider the desperate measures that might be required to
escape linked propositions that constitute suffering agency, I want to
turn to a text that draws on a very different set of popular generic conventions, Kazuo Ishiguro’s sci-­fi clone novel, Never Let Me Go. 25 The
novel is narrated by Kathy, a clone and former student of Hailsham, a
“privileged estate” and social experiment in which clones are reared in a
pastoral coed boarding-­school atmosphere. Kathy narrates from a present designated by a frontispiece as “England in the Late 1990s,” in which
Hailsham has been shut down and she is an adult “carer” for other clones
who have already become “donors,” the stage at which their organs are
harvested until they “complete” — that is, die. The novel takes its title
from a song that Kathy plays over and over while at Hailsham because
she is taken by its chorus: “Baby, baby, baby, never let me go.” As Mark
Currie notes, the song registers an intense longing for captivity that is also
given form in the clones’ deep attachment to Hailsham. 26 Although the
boarding school has made the clones into docile bodies in just the fashion
that one would expect from such a disciplinary institution, Kathy in particular experiences the school as a site of intense nostalgia, as a cozy and
protected haven to which she constantly returns in her mind.
As this brief description suggests, Never Let Me Go in many ways
replicates the conventional association of clone stories with ideologically
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controlled populations, in which humans lack individuation and are instrumentalized for hidden, malevolent purposes. If The Road’s dystopia is one
in which all social controls have been removed, Never Let Me Go seems at
first glance to offer an opposing vision, one in which disciplinary mechanisms have become hypostasized in a creepy, biopolitical future that no
longer seems particularly distant. Yet such a reading fails to attend to an
element of the novel that is clearly and seemingly deliberately called out
for the reader: its position as a counterfactual history of the period from
the 1970s through the 1990s. While the novel draws on classic sci-­fi
scenarios of ideological control in order to recount events that took place
during this era, the novel’s counterfactual status seems simultaneously
to cast doubt on this conjunction, associating such scenarios with what
didn’t happen during that period rather than with what did. Never Let Me
Go offers readers a highly familiar sci-­fi story of ideological domination,
hyper-­instrumentality, and the failure of individuation, but this story is
simultaneously cast as counter to reality, as an alternate version out of
keeping with actual historical events.
We are used to the idea that ideology structures our experience of
reality, but in this case it seems to be the novel’s own focus on a scenario of
ideological control that is out of synch with the real — as if the sci-­fi tropes
of ideological manipulation offer less an allegory for the present than a
distraction from it. This perception of misplaced attention is underscored
in various ways in the novel, most noticeably through Kathy’s intense
retrospective focus on her days at Hailsham, which displaces any detailed
account of her present unless it involves her old school friends. While she
focuses on that past experience, however, Kathy’s coming death seems to
loom just offstage like a horror-­movie villain only the audience knows is
there, and the reader increasingly desires to redirect Kathy’s gaze to the
approaching threat she refuses to examine. As a result, the novel insistently
points beyond the parameters of Kathy’s story, generating in its readers a
largely frustrated desire to see the larger world hidden from her, and from
us, by her constant nostalgic returns to Hailsham. As she puts it, “There
have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind,
when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came
a point when I just stopped resisting.”27 In a sense, Kathy’s own narrative
comes to seem almost counterfactual in its own right, not only because she
misreads various situations in it, but also because it encloses our attention
within an account of the past that appears to be a rejection of the reality of
the present. Just as the novel’s own sci-­fi story of ideological interpellation
offers an alternative to a factual account of recent history, Kathy substitutes
her fantasies of life at Hailsham for an acknowledgment of the threat that
surrounds her. In creating this parallel, the novel seems to suggest that,
for readers, the obsession with ideological control embedded in the sci-­fi
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genre may be as misleading, and as comforting, as Kathy’s own nostalgic
fixation on Hailsham.
As I have suggested, the novel provides the reader with few glimpses
of the world beyond this nostalgic focus. Yet, in light of the close connection I have been positing between self-­preservation narratives and the
hegemony of neoliberal rule through interest, it seems particularly telling that the only thing we know for sure about life outside Kathy’s clone
enclave is that it involves an elaborate and horrific system of slavery and
murder driven by individuals’ desire for self-­preservation. If ideological
subjectivation offers a counterfactual alternative to an external reality,
then the reality in question here is one ruled by untrammeled and naked
interest in life. And Kathy’s escape from that reality is signaled by what
is for many readers the most infuriating feature of the novel: the fact that
Kathy is in effect tone-­deaf to self-­interest. She is unable either to notice
it in the selfish manipulations of her friend Ruth or to muster enough of
it to undertake seemingly obvious actions that might preserve her own
life — for example, attempting to flee the country. In a world driven by
naked interest in self-­preservation, the novel implies, the sort of ideological interpellation undertaken at Hailsham, which eradicates the ability to
want what is best for oneself, might very well come to seem an object of
nostalgia in its own right. Ideological hailing is a sham in Never Let Me Go,
not because it doesn’t work but because, compared to rule through agential
choice, the veiling of one’s own best interest — or what we usually term
“false consciousness” — may come to look a lot more like a sanctuary than
a prison. It is precisely the longing for such a paradoxical form of refuge,
I would argue, that is captured by the plaintive demand for confinement
that constitutes the novel’s title.
This longing to remain within the confines of ideological enclosure
is ratified by one of the few moments in the novel in which the nostalgic blinkers appear to be briefly removed. One of the ways in which the
novel gestures toward an outside to Kathy’s understanding of the world is
through its organization of space, particularly landscape and social space,
and this practice comes to a climax near the novel’s conclusion. In this
passage, Kathy and her friends Tom and Ruth travel to a marsh to visit a
beached boat that Ruth, now very close to her final donation, passionately
and inexplicably desires to see. Kathy describes the site in this way:
[W]e hadn’t really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods
we’d come through had ended, and now in front of us there was open marshland as far as we could see. . . . Not so long ago, the woods must have
extended further, because you could see here and there ghostly dead trunks
poking out of the soil, most of them broken off only a few feet up. And
beyond the dead trunks . . . was the boat, sitting beached in the marshes
under the weak sun. 28
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As they stand on the edge of the boggy clearing, Tommy incongruously
links this bleak landscape to the closing of Hailsham, saying, “I always
see Hailsham looking like this now.”29 Although the women point out that
there is absolutely no similarity between this landscape and the building
and grounds at Hailsham, Ruth in the end agrees with Tommy, saying
that the sight reminds her of a dream she had of Hailsham washing away
in a flood. If this desolate landscape is what the erasure of Hailsham looks
like, then this is also a vision of what lays outside the novel’s focus on
ideological control — and it is a landscape that might have been borrowed
directly from The Road. Like the woods that once “extended further,”
the world signaled by Hailsham has retreated, leaving a “ghostly dead”
world behind in which the ground is literally uncertain beneath one’s
feet. At the end of the scene, a chilly wind comes up, prompting Ruth to
ask to leave, and as they walk away, Tommy says, “At least we’ve seen it
now.”30 These final lines seem to gesture toward the reader’s own chilling
brush with the reality of outside the clones’ muted experience of interest,
glimpsed briefly behind the novel’s own counterfactual veil — a reality in
which the old ways of understanding, and narrating, domination seem to
have about as much use as a boat beached on dry land.
Taken as a whole, the texts I have surveyed stage not only the deep
suffering that accompanies a life governed by interest but also the ongoing
struggle to find a means of escape from such an experience. In Never Let
Me Go, the retreat into ideological interpellation appears as the only refuge
from interest run amok, but this retreat also leads Kathy to accept being
sacrificed in the interests of another. If the only alternative to acting at the
behest of one’s own interest in life is serving someone else’s, it is then no
surprise that the other two texts I examine here contain examples of literal
cannibalism. Never Let Me Go gestures toward the need to exceed this logic
when it drives readers to wonder, over and over, why Kathy doesn’t simply
go somewhere else. Our enclosure within Kathy’s consciousness, and her
failure to imagine an escape route, stage on the level of form the inability to
think past the terms of neoliberal personhood. When we as readers assume
that life-­saving action on her own behalf is the necessary solution to her
dilemma, we demonstrate that we, like Kathy, can’t see beyond the terms of
the logic in which we are embedded — in our case, the logic that links self-­
preservation to action in one’s own best interest, to agency, to personhood.
While Life of Pi figures this imaginative struggle in Pi’s own retelling of his
story in its more benign animal form, The Road also gestures toward an
exit that remains out of reach, through the characterization of the son: the
boy appears miraculously free from the rampant drive for life that shapes
the only world he has ever known, but, trapped in the consciousness of the
survival-­obsessed father, the reader gains no opportunity to investigate the
son’s perspective further. 31 Ultimately, by rendering the suffering agency
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in the generic language of self-­preservation, these texts model this logic
in a fashion that demonstrates both the experiences it instantiates and the
profound difficulty involved in destabilizing its axiomatic unfolding. Yet
the narrative energy these texts expend on this attempt suggests something
of the depth of their engagement with the agonies of interest, the intensity
of the desire they express for an escape from suffering agency.
e
y
Notes
1. Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 7.
2. See my essay, Jane Elliott, “Life Preservers: The Neoliberal Enterprise of
Hurricane Katrina Survival in Trouble the Water, House M.D., and When the Levees
Broke,” in Old and New Media after Katrina, ed. Diane Negra (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 89 – 112.
3. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, Trouble the Water (Zeitgeist Films, 2008).
4. See, for example, Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics
of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006).
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. David
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 185.
6. Ibid., 157.
7. Ibid., 159.
8. Nikolas S. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. Rose reserves the term neo-liberal
for the thought of canonical figures such as Friedrich von Hayek and uses the term
advanced liberal to indicate the form of government that “shar[es] many of the premises of neo-liberalism” that have arisen in the last four decades (139). My usage of
neoliberal encompasses both these categories.
9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
250–60. The chronological and conceptual relationships among sovereignty, disciplinarity, biopower, and governmentality in Foucault’s thought is inconsistent and
has thus created substantial debate among his readers. I follow Rose in treating
disciplinarity and biopolitics as different forms of governmentality that may coexist
in the same historical moment, though I suggest that in the texts I examine governance through choice is presented as distinct from and a substitute for disciplinarity.
For numerous contemporary examples of neoliberal governmentality in practice,
see Rose, Powers of Freedom; Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in
Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999); and Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?
Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press,
2003). For a crucial reading of the relationship between American popular culture,
neoliberalism, and the suffering that inheres in self-­responsibilization in particular,
see Anna McCarthy, “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering,” Social
Text 25 (2007): 17 – 42.
10. As Linda Zerilli has argued, Hannah Arendt is one of the few dissenters
from this view in modern political theory. Zerilli points out that for Arendt, freedom
and what we call agency are if anything opposed. See Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism
and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1 – 20.
l
e
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,
d
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Elliot t ∙ Suffering Agency
11. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 29 – 30.
12. I am indebted here to Linda Zerilli’s brilliant account of the way in which
Butler’s commitment to agency necessarily embroils her in an unsolvable dilemma
regarding the epistemological foundations of political action. See Zerilli, Abyss of
Freedom, 33 – 6 6.
13. Compare also Saidiya Hartman’s Foucauldian examination of what she
calls the “burdened individuality” of former slaves in the American postbellum
era. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in
Nineteenth- ­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Although
Hartman examines the “simulation of agency” under slavery, she also argues that
the “enduring legacy of slavery was readily discernable in the travestied liberation,
castigated agency, and blameworthiness of the free individual” (6 – 7 ). That is, for
Hartman, agency is problematic not only when it is simulated but also when it is
genuinely operational.
14. Rose makes a similar point in Powers of Freedom when he argues that “to
be governed through our freedom . . . seems paradoxical. Freedom appears, almost
by definition, to be the antithesis of government” (62). Rose’s Powers of Freedom
informs my own investigations, but I focus on agency rather than freedom in order
to highlight the specific confluence of choice, action in one’s own best interest, and
domination in the texts I examine. For Rose, to dominate “is to ignore or to attempt
to crush the capacity for action in the dominated,” whereas to govern through freedom is to encourage and act upon action (4). In contrast, I suggest that, in the
popular political imagination of the present, the conceptual and affective qualities
of domination (the ideas and sensations of constriction, entrapment, and suffering)
may now be associated with the capacity for action that Rose opposes to domination.
That is, to be “obliged to be free,” as Rose puts it, may now be experienced as a form
of domination, understood here as unwilling containment within a way of life based
on freedom and choice (87, original italics).
15. In the realm of contemporary cultural theory, we might identify one
such lexicon in Lauren Berlant’s account of “cruel optimism.” While the enforced,
exhausting aspects of what Berlant terms sovereign agency resonate with my account
of suffering agency, Berlant’s focus is on the complex affects produced in relation
to what have become unrealizable models of living “the good life” in a post-Fordist
political and economic landscape. In contrast, I am tracing the emergence of an
imaginative lexicon that directly engages the model of neoliberal personhood itself:
a body of texts that offers a vision of what the world looks like when the microeconomic model of human experience is realized and its axioms made flesh. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Lauren
Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33,
no. 4 (2007): 754–80.
16. The principles of this axiom are shared across the key forms of neoliberal
social theory, including neoliberal microeconomics, rational choice theory, game theory, and choice theory. While elements of this logic can of course be found in many
Enlightenment models of the self, the neoliberal version is specific in emphasizing
interests as necessarily the foundation of all decisions and actions and the individual
as the indisputable authority when it comes to identifying his or her interests.
17. Yann Martell, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001), 223.
18. For example, Hobbes argues that “no man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himself, or any other man” and “if a man be held in person, or
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bounds, or is not trusted with the liberty of his body, he cannot be understood to
bound by covenant to subjection, and therefore may, if he can, make his escape by
any means whatsoever.” See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 197, 200.
19. Although Hobbes has been central to some discussions of biopolitics,
Foucault dismissed Hobbes’s importance to the genealogy of biopower he traces in
Society Must Be Defended. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1975 – 1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003),
90 – 100. For recent work that argues that Hobbes made a crucial contribution to
the genesis of biopolitics, see Agamben, Homo Sacer; and Roberto Esposito, Bíos:
Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008). Esposito focuses on uncovering the relationship between
biopolitics and self-­preservation as an example of what he terms the immunitary
dispositif.
20. On the turn to interest as a form of stable political motivation, see Albert
O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before
Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Perceived similarities between Hobbes’s Leviathan and contemporary neoliberal theory are reflected
in widespread efforts to explicate Leviathan through the methodologies of rational
choice theory, which serves as the political-­science arm of neoliberal philosophy.
See, for example, Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1986). There are of course many significant differences
between Hobbes’s political model and contemporary neoliberal governmentality,
most notably Hobbes’s rejection of the rationality assumption. On this and other
distinctions between Hobbesian interest and neoliberal interest, see Stephen G.
Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 22 – 26.
21. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 269.
22. As countless Hobbesian readings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe make
clear, the survival genre has long operated as a key means of exploring the links
between self-­preservation and modern political structures. See, for example, Stuart
Sim and David Walker, The Discourse of Sovereignty, Hobbes to Fielding: The State of
Nature and the Nature of the State (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 139. There
is little critical work on survival narratives as a genre, but for related discussions,
see Rebecca Weaver-­H ightower, “Cast Away and Survivor: The Surviving Castaway
and the Rebirth of Empire,” Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 2 (2006): 294 – 317;
and Rebecca Weaver-­H ightower, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies
of Conquest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). I define survival
narratives as those that focus on threats to life caused by privation and/or the natural
environment — though other threats may accompany these, as in The Road — and in
which protagonists are responsible for obtaining their own resources and maintaining their own safety, either as isolated individuals or within small groups that manage
to combine aims and resources.
23. There are important differences between the novel and the film, particularly the film’s emphasis on Christian themes. I focus here on the novel.
24. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), 120.
25. My reading here is specifically geared to the novel rather than the film,
which offers an interpretation of the novel that turns on an analogy between the lives
of the clones and those of ordinary humans. As the character Kathy puts it in the
film, “What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of
the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve
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lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.” In the novel, however, this speech
does not appear, and, in general, Kathy never considers this parallel or wonders
about the interior lives of nonclones, who seem to be scarcely real to her.
26. Mark Currie, “Controlling Time: Never Let Me Go,” in Kazuo Ishiguro:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009), 91 – 103. I am indebted to Currie’s insight that the novel
turns on the question of “why we might not only accept but actually beseech our
own confinement” (91), but my sense of the novel’s answer to this question differs
from his.
27. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (New York: Vintage International,
2005), 5.
28. Ibid., 224.
29. Ibid., 225.
30. Ibid., 227.
31. I am indebted here to Christopher Pizzino’s persuasive argument that
the novel subtly critiques the father’s choices and advocates that the reader instead
accept the son’s position, which privileges trust over suspicion. See Christopher Pizzino, “Utopia at Last: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Science Fiction,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 51, no. 3 (2011): 358 – 75.
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