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Social Text 115 Vol. 31, No. 2 Summer 2013

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2081139 2013 Duke University Press

At the end o the 1970s, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took

oce, two best-selling books about choice were published in America:

William Styrons Sophies Choice (1979) and Milton and Rose Friedmans

Free to Choose (1979). From one perspective, it is difcult to imagine

two more dierent versions o choice. The Friedmans oered a popu-

larization o Chicago School neoliberalism in which the ree market was

celebrated as a veritable instantiation o democracy and, in both the book

and the accompanying TV documentary ironically aired on publictelevision individual choice among ree market options was presented

as the solution to a host o social ills. In Styrons postwar New York,

choice appears instead as an inescapable catastrophe. The climax o the

novel involves the revelation that, when the eponymous heroine arrived

at Auschwitz during the war, she was orced to choose which one o her

children would be killed immediately and which would have the chance

to live. Sophies choice is designed rom above, in that her options are set,

but it is still both horrically consequential and assigned to no one but

hersel. The idea o a mother orced to choose death or one o her chil-

dren oers a vision o choice as simultaneously imposed and prooundly,

even grotesquely, signicant a situation in which the best choice is stil l

unspeakable, and there is no living with the choice once made.

While Sophies Holocaust trauma seems a ar cry rom the supposed

ree-market bliss described by the Friedmans, it is precisely Sophies posi-

tion as what Chicago School economist Gary Becker calls a decision unit

that causes her enormous suering.1 Like the subjects in Beckers economic

analyses o human behavior, Sophie is asked to determine her interests,

Suffering AgencyImagining Neoliberal Personhood

in North America and Britain

Jane Elliott

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8 5Soci al Text 115 Summer 2013

erent commodities, all o which reduce to expressions o the uniorm

permeation o capital. Such models oten rely on an underlying logic in

which domination is measured by the reduction o the subjects ability

to make meaningul choices on his or her own behal: either subjects are

physically prevented rom making any signicant choices by the dearth

o meaningul options, or their subjectivity has already been delimited

by the ideological schemas in which they nd themselves, such that their

putative interests are preormed in keeping with structures o domination.

Obviously, this is a model that in many cases still makes sense. When a

signicant percentage o Americans associate increased access to health

care with totalitarianism, or example, it seems abundantly clear that the

capacity o ideology to shape peoples understanding o their own best

interests is alive and well in the twenty-rst century. And the images o

prisoners tortured by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib make it equally clear

that such disciplinary models have not displaced more overt modes o

control, in which people are incarcerated, tormented, and orced intoactions against their will.

However, as I have argued elsewhere, this model o dominat ion does

less to elucidate the experience captured in another recent set o high-

prole images o American disgrace: those o Hurricane Katrina survivors

paddling themselves to saety on improvised foating devices. While the

operation o various disciplinary elds clearly led to this appalling situa-

tion, the experience o 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 or action has been oisted 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 insignicant or rendered moot by ideological interpellation.

Rather than removing the subjects ability to act in his or her own interest

through orms o internal or external control, this particular experience

o domination is intrinsically linked to the need or the subject to take

signicant action on his or her own behal.2

In such a context, even the heroic eorts o those who act to help

others become inextricably intertwined with the operations o oppression,

as the Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water(2008) makesclear.3 A central segment o the lm ocuses on young Lower Ninth Ward

resident Larry Sims as he evacuates his neighbors during the hurricane,

using a punching bag as a lie preserver. The lm begins with ootage

that amply documents the poverty, tedium, and stasis o lie in the Lower

Ninth pre-Katrina a world in which young men such as Sims are given

scant opportunities or meaningul, positive action in their communities.

In this context, the later scenes o Simss dramatic rescues seem to docu-

ment a striking increase in agency, as Sims suddenly comes to undertake

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8 6 Ell iott Suffering Agency

actions that literally make the dierence between lie and death or his

neighbors. Nevertheless, it seems undamentally misguided to suggest

that such a shit undoes Simss interpellation in proound structures o

domination; instead, his intense agential activity is a direct by-product o

those structural inequities.

For some critics and theorists who have written about the Katrina

event, Giorgio Agambens arguments regarding the abandonment o

bare lie have oered a crucial lens through which to view such experi-

ences.4 As is by this point well known, Agamben uses bare lie to reer

to those stripped o the rights and privileges associated with political

subjectivity, and his analysis o subjects ejected rom political structures

and lodged on the boundary o lie and death certainly seems particularly

resonant i we remember the experience o those corralled at the Super-

dome and the Convention Center in the days ater the storm, waiting

without ood or water while the dead bodies piled up around them. How-

ever, Agambens analysis is less resonant when considering experiences osel- and community-rescue associated with Katrina. His key examples o

bare lie, the Muselmann and the patient in an overcoma, are dened in

relation to their passivity and inertia. Patients in overcomas obviously lack

mental and physical capacities and, while technically still conscious and

ambulatory, theMuselmann is or Agamben a being rom whom humili-

ation, horror and ear had so taken away all consciousness and personality

as to make him absolutely apathetic, [m]ute and absolutely alone . . .

without memory and without grie.5 The most telling examples o bare

lie or Agamben are those that are animate only in the sense o sustaining

biological lie.

This ocus makes it a challenge or Agamben to register moments in

which individual action and domination coexist, a problem that is part icu-

larly clear in his examination o specic medical experiments conducted

by the Nazis on prisoners who were oered remission o 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 o ree will and consent in the case o a person sentenced to death

or a detained person.6

Agamben suggests that, because these subjectshave entered the state o exception, their subjection to experimentation

can, like an expiation rite, either return the human body to lie (pardon

and the remission o a penalty are . . . maniestations o the sovereign

power over lie and death) or denitively consign it to the death to which

it already belongs.7 In other words, or Agamben, any actions undertaken

in this situation amount to a reinscription o the sovereign decision. Yet, by

reading the situation only rom the perspective o the sovereign, Agamben

erases the act that the options o execution and experimentation may actu-

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87Soci al Text 115 Summer 2013

ally be quite distinct rom 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 o note involved is that o the

sovereign is to overlook one o the characteristics that makes the situation

oppressive: the individuals need to choose between two horriying options.

Domination and decision come together here not through an arbitrary

imposition o the death penalty by the sovereign but rather because pris-

oners are both reduced to a condition o bare survival andaced with an

atrocious choice rom which they cannot escape.

I this combination o domination and decision is rendered invisible

in the terms o Agambens analysis, it arguably orms the center o critical

accounts o contemporary neoliberal governance. As the work o many

thinkers has made clear, neoliberal governance operates through rather

than against the agency o its subjects; this orm o rule does not ignore

or attempt to crush the capacity or action in citizens but rather works to

recognize that capacity or action and to adjust [itsel] to it.8

In MichelFoucaults words, neoliberalism thus unctions not via an exhaustively

disciplinary society but instead through an optimization o systems o

dierence, in which the eld is let open to fuctuating processes . . . in

which action is brought to bear on the rules o the game rather than on the

players.9 Because neoliberal governmentality unctions through a complex

system o incentives and disincentives, it requires that the players in its

game encounter and select between options with perceptibly dierent and

meaningul consequences that our choices have signicant eects in the

world. Neoliberal governance is obviously not the neutral ramework or

ree choice it purports to be, but the unacceptabil ity o the choices it oers

does not render them illusory or without import quite the opposite: the

choices between gas or childcare, il legal immigration or destitution, pros-

titution or starvation, are so signicant and so painul precisely because

they are so unjust.

Despite the widespread dissemination o the Foucauldian critique

o neoliberal governance in contemporary cultural studies, the problem

o actual, rather than vanishing, agency remains dicult to keep in view,

because the tradition o political theory that underwrites our reading o

such situations gives us so ew conceptual tools or doing so. The positiveconnotations o agency attest to our belie that the ability to determine

the course o ones actions is necessarily an index o the polit ical good a

model shared by political theorists rom Marxists to negative libertarians

to communitarians and beyond.10 Even the poststructuralist critique o

agency that circulated in the 1990s paradoxically preserved agency as a

value at the same time that it demonstrated the necessarily compromised

nature o that value. For eminist theorist Judith Butler, or example, the

key question was how might one arm complicity as the basis o politi-

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cal agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the

conditions o subordination in other words, that agency may do enough

still to qualiy as such, rather than being qualied out o existence.11 In

eect, the poststructuralist critique o agency proceeded by comparison

to an ideal version o agency itsel: the problem with agency was that,

once its complicity in subjection was ully acknowledged, it was no longer

sufciently agential. Butlers amous solution to this problem, gender

perormativity, sought to locate positive eects in a repetition o norms

divorced rom subjective intent, thereby both acknowledging the ounda-

tional constraints o agency and avoiding an overt alignment with them by

circumnavigating the intentional sel.12 As the immense energy and debate

that clustered around Butlers diagnosis and her solution indicate, agency

became the site o tremendous cathexis within Let 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 markeror what we could not really have yet could not seem to do without.13

Such associations are so entrenched that the idea o suering

agency may simply appear a contradiction in terms.14 O course, it is

because the type o choices generated under neoliberal rule genuine,

individual, sel-directed, and wrong are so dicult 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 dier-

ent imaginative lexicon o political experience, one capable o envisioning

moments in which agential action and domination become intertwined

with one another.15 In what ollows, I argue that we are currently witness-

ing the evolution o such a lexicon in the realm o contemporary culture: a

specic and consistent generic vocabulary o tropes, images, and narrative

arcs whose operations I trace across the eld o popular aesthetics. On the

level o orm, the texts that populate this lexicon variously highlight their

own unction as acts of modeling, in a ashion that refects the algebraic,

abstracting engine o neoliberal microeconomics itsel. They diagram

the way in which neoliberal personhood is constituted by an interlocking

series o seemingly indisputable propositions regarding human behavior.

This chain o assumptions and equivalencies posits interiority as the pos-session o interests; interests as the motivation or choice; choice as the

engine o action; chosen action as measure o agency; and agency as a sign

o personhood.16 Because each o these propositions circulates on its own

as axiomatic, their linear, additive arrangement in the neoliberal model

o personhood creates a sel-reerential, sel-reinorcing logic that seems

indisputable and unstoppable. The texts I examine here map the param-

eters and costs o this logic by maniesting it via the orm and content o

popular narrative genres. In so doing, they demonstrate that this logic can

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be lled to overfowing with seemingly contrary experiences without being

at all destabilized that agency can remain recognizably agency while

becoming indistinguishable rom proound domination.

For reasons I explore in greater detail below, genres o sel-preservation

such as the castaway story and the survival tale oer a crucial avenue or

imagining the inexorability o this logic. When lie is reduced to minimal

elements and sel-preservation is at stake, the operations and consequences

o agency become magnied. Not only is the import o human actions

intensied in such situations, but the subjects interest in preserving his

or her lie leads to limit-case decisions and deeds that would be other-

wise unthinkable; the actions that result are both the result o legitimate

individual choice and utterly undesired. Rather than being defected or

disguised within a eld o ideological orces, such actions are accompanied

by a searing perception o the consequences o individual action and the

seemingly inescapable links between cause and eect, interest and choice,

agency and responsibil ity. These texts, I suggest, generate a web o tropes,images, and aects that are capable o registering the peculiar experience

o domination that is suering agency.

Self-Preservation and the Agonies of Interest

This experience l ies at the heart o Yann Martells Booker Prize winning

best seller, Life of Pi, in which the eponymous young hero is a castaway

trapped on a lie rat or over a year with minimal ood, a Bengal tiger,

and a handul o other characters. In the account that occupies the vast

majority o the novel, all the characters on the rat except or the boy areanimals, and ater a ew days, they have all either eaten each other or

been eaten by the tiger. At the end o the novel, however, the boy briefy

retells his story with most o the animals replaced by human beings. In

the rst version o the tale, or example, a hyena consumes a dying zebras

leg, while in the second, the ships cook cuts o the limb o a wounded

sailor, uses it as sh bait, and eventually consumes some o it. By insist-

ing that we shit between its two competing versions o Pis story, one

animal, the other human, Life of Piin eect directs the readers attention

to that which makes them so dierent in their eects and aects: the con-

nection between human action and individual choice. As an animal, the

hyena terrorizes, eats, and kills his ellow animal as a matter o instinct,

but as a human sailor he acts because he has chosen to do so. At issue

in this transormation is not only the specter o cannibalism but, more

crucially, the act that, even when driven to extremes by the imminent

threat o death, the actions o humans are stil l perceived to carry an ele-

ment o decision that the actions o animals do not. In oering this brie

and bleak counternarrative o human sel-preservation at all costs, Life

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of Pithus throws into stark relie an experience o human action as both

agential and horric a horror that is both underscored and displaced

by the sheer bulk o pages the novel devotes to providing an alternate and

less brutal account o Pis lie.

This displacement is given precise ormulation in the plot that occu-

pies the animal version o Pis tale, much o which is given over to the

training o the tiger, named Richard Parker.Ater rescuing Richard Parker

rom the shipwreck in a t o cross-species identication, Pi suddenly

recognizes his mistake: he has trapped himsel on a small boat with a soon-

to-be starving Bengal tiger. Pis only hope o saety, he decides, is to put

in place the techniques or establishing dominance that he learned at his

athers zoo. Richard Parker is seasick, hungry, and thirsty, so Pi uti lizes

these states to construct eective rewards and punishments that will keep

Richard Parkers activities within certain bounds. In other words, Pi cre-

ates a rational system o incentives and disincentives that allow him to aect

Richard Parkers behavior based on the tigers already existing interests instability, ood, and water. In this more benign version o his tale, Pi survives

not because his interest in lie has driven him to horric decisions or which

he is stil l responsible, but because he is able to capitalize on the interests o

an unthinking animal. The extended training plot thus allows the novel to

create a seemingly natural linkage between the possession o human con-

sciousness 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 rom which he could drink

reely. Yet I brought him ood and I brought him resh water. My agency

was pure and miraculous. It conerred power upon me. Proo: I remained

alive day ater day, week ater week17 This vision o human survival as ar is-

ing rom pure and miraculous agency o ruling by rather than being

ruled by interest precisely counters the grim vision o human decision

driven by interest in lie oered in the second, darker version o the tale.

This more amiliar version o agency as the positive, enabling enactment

o individual capacities substitutes or the experience o suering agency

that characterizes Pis later, human-centered account until the fnal

revelation o the second version o the tale both reverses this comorting

substitution and points to our desire or such comort.The survival genre on which Life of Pidraws is suited to this depic-

tion o suering agency because the subjects interest in lie, or what is

more commonly called the sel-preservation inst inct, is oundational to

the orms o political thought rom which neoliberalisms model o agency

arises. In the work usually credited with beginning modern political theory,

Thomas Hobbes places sel-preservation at the heart o his conception

o 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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or sel-preservation is so overriding and intrinsic that it will necessarily

lead men to accept and continue to submit to a sovereign power that pro-

tects their lives in a bid to avoid the war o all against all. Even once the

Hobbesian subject has entered into the social contract and submits com-

pletely to sovereign power, he retains the right o reusal when commands

are issued that would violate his right to sel-preservation.18 Hobbess turn

to sel-preservation as a means o avoiding civil war marked an increased

emphasis on lie itsel within the modern imagination o politics, a act

that has made him a key gure within some contemporary discussions o

biopolitics.19 However, whereas or Foucault biopolitical orms o power

operate by protecting and reproducing the lie o the species, or Hobbes

it is the subjects desire to preserve his or her own lie that is central, since

it is this desire that motivates his submission to the sovereign. The close

connection between governance and lie in Leviathan occurs not only

because governmental power takes lie as its object but also because the

subjects own behavior is shaped by an inner drive or lie, which gives thatbehavior the measure o comprehensibility and hence predictability that

Hobbes sought. From this perspect ive, lie becomes o interest or politics

because it is the ultimate interest, the one intransigent, overriding concern

that everyone can be assumed to share.

As even this brie account may begin to suggest, there are crucial

links between the role o sel-preservation in modern political rubrics and

the neoliberal model o agential action. First, sel-preservation is crucial

to the tradition o modern political theory that bases government on the

subjects possession o already-existing interests.20 Second, and perhaps

more important, interest in lie can play this ounding role in modern politi-

cal theory because it is considered an essential and inalienable element o

human existence and this is much the way neoliberalism conceives o

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 o interest becomes less a way o reading

behavior than a tautological way o restating thefacto behavior. Reason-ing along just these lines, Foucault argues that the only thing required or

neoliberalism to nd its points o anchorage and eectiveness is that the

individuals conduct . . . reacts to reality in a non-random way.21 From

the egotistical to the absurdly sel-sacricing to the downright mad, this

logic pertains: i a woman donates a kidney to a stranger, she can stil l be

argued to do so because o an interest she has or example, in getting

attention or getting into heaven. Such interest-based readings are a staple

o the TV show House M.D., or example: the seriess neoliberal hero takes

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92 Ell iott Suffering Agency

particular pride in showing up every orm o seemingly sel- sacricing

behavior as merely a more elaborate expression o peoples sense o what

will best serve their own interests.

Although neoliberal governmentality does not require that there be

a drive or sel-preservation i it is to unct ion, the concept o the subjects

interest in lie thus seems to register something o the seemingly limitless

scope o interest the despairing perception that we cannot help but be

interested. We undertake sel-preserving actions out o the intensity o

our interest in our own lives, but that very intensity suggests something

o the inescapable, obligatory cast o interest under neoliberalism. The

survival genre, which conronts protagonists with continual threats to lie

rom privation and the natural environment, serves as an ideal mode or

exploring this perception.22 As we witness the renzied, 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 o

the voluntary and involuntary, as i the desire or lie possesses the subjectrather than vice versa. Yet, despite this element o possession, interest in

lie does not release the subject rom the burden o signicant decision any

more than neoliberal domination does. Instead, as the colloquial phrase

implies, decisions are usually considered at their most signicant when it

is a matter o lie and death. As classic survival narratives such asAlive

(1993) make clear, choices become all the more compelling when the

decision is between seemingly unthinkable options and the stakes are lie

itsel: to have to decide between cannibalism and death is appalling, but

it is not a decision one can imagine acing with indierence. The extreme

options and intense interest in lie that characterize survival stories ges-

ture toward one o the cruelest aspects o suering agency the act that

the worse the choices on oer are, the more interested in the decision the

subject will tend to be.

It is this combination o ineradicable interest and unacceptable

choices that makes li e such a torment or the hero o the novel The Road.23

By combining the survival tale with other popular generic orms, par-

ticularly horror and the postapocalyptic, The Roaddepicts a nightmarish

near-uture in which a ather and son walk on oot across a land that seems

to have once been the United States, in conditions that seem to be akinto nuclear winter. Starving, reezing, constantly under threat o attack by

roving bands o rapists and cannibals, the ather and son continue down

the titular road toward what the ather hopes will be a warmer climate

in the southwest. Through its unrelenting depiction o a lie o unremit-

ting horror, The Roadcontinually goads the ather (and by extension the

reader) to consider what actually seems to be the best option available or

the characters: death at the athers hand rather eventual rape, torture, and

death at the hand o another. This is precisely the path that was taken by

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the boys mother, and her suicide serves to highlight the only thing that

prevents the ather rom ollowing her out o this miserable and comortless

existence: his overriding interest in the l ie o his son. The only seeming

escape rom interest in lie, the ability not to care i one lives or dies, is

revealed as yet another point o reentry into the agonies o interest or the

ather: he only cares about his sons lie, not his own, but that act simply

makes the ather hostage to an even greater interest in sel-preservation.

As The Roadconronts its reader and viewer over and over with the

desperate attempts o the ather to nd a way to preserve a lie that seems

clearly not worth living, it provides a striking vision o the impossibility o

escaping rom connes o neoliberal governance through interest, when its

ounding premise is a motivation that originates not rom external govern-

ing power but rom within the individual himsel. The athers love or his

son continually results in nightmarish choices the ather can neither escape

nor endorse, a act that becomes clear when he and his son are hiding rom

bandits who seem likely to nd them. I they do, the boy will be tortured,enslaved, raped, and likely eaten in the end, and the ather debates with

himsel the devils choice between his desire to preserve his sons lie 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 i it [the rife] doesnt [sic] re? Could you crush that beloved

skul l with a rock? Is there such a being within you o which you know noth-

ing? Can there be?24 In contrast to an alien, imported being within you,

the athers drive to keep his son alive is inalienable and intrinsic but so is

his interest in sparing him pain. In this moment, we are oered an excru-

ciating portrayal o the way in which suering agency is orged rom the

apparently unbreakable links between interest and choice and choice and

agency. The athers overriding interest in his sons lie renders the unen-

durable choice he aces here o riveting urgency and consequence, while

the choice itsel generates an overwhelming sense o personal agency, since

the outcome will determine the lie or death o his son. In its portrayal o

interest as a goad that drives the ather down the road even when he is so

ill that he can barely stand, the novel depicts suering agency as intolerable

and inescapable or even the most selfess among us as a mode o existence

dened by anguish, revulsion, and despair.In their generic ocus on the extremities that accompany the subjects

interest in lie, castaway and survival genres provide the means to make

maniest such agonized experiences o suering agency. As Life of Piand its

many precursors suggest, the castaway story also oregrounds the process

o modeling itsel: castaway rats and desert-island settlements are societies

in miniature, capsule worlds that model the principles o individual sub-

jectivity and society at large. In Life of Pi, the stripped-down, miniaturized

qualities o Pis little rat-world resonate with the texts engagement with

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neoliberal subjecthood as a logical model, as a set o propositions according

to which behavior unolds. While survival stories can also oer accounts o

society writ small, The Roadscombination o sci- dystopia and survival

tale creates a dynamic o generalization rather than encapsulation. As

they travel through unnamed states ater an unspecied catastrophe, the

anonymous man and boy seem to invoke an all-purpose human remainder

o any number o possible apocalypses. We can read this nonspecicity

as an invitation to allegorical readings, as a call to l l in the gaps with the

content o an ecocatastrophe or the atermath o 9/11. But we can also read

it as nonspecicity, ull stop. From this perspective, I would argue, the

minimal characterization, setting, and historical context in The Roadcan

be seen to distill human behavior to the seemingly irreducible elements

o interest, choice, and agential action, in much the same way that micro-

economic models o human behavior do. Because it eschews part icularities,

the novel oregrounds the propositions that constitute the neoliberal model

o agency and the result should they be taken to their logical conclusion.What The Roadpours into its model is not the specics o historical or

personal detail but the usually invisible suering that now accompanies

the unolding o this logic.

Not Interested

In order to consider the desperate measures that might be required to

escape linked propositions that constitute suering agency, I want to

turn to a text that draws on a very dierent set o popular generic con-

ventions, Kazuo Ishiguros sci-f clone novel, Never Let Me Go.25 Thenovel is narrated by Kathy, a clone and ormer student o Hailsham, a

privileged estate and social experiment in which clones are reared in a

pastoral coed boarding-school atmosphere. Kathy narrates rom a pres-

ent designated by a rontispiece as England in the Late 1990s, in which

Hailsham has been shut down and she is an adult carer or 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

rom 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 or captivity that is also

given orm in the clones deep attachment to Hailsham.26 Although the

boarding school has made the clones into docile bodies in just the ashion

that one would expect rom such a disciplinary inst itution, Kathy in par-

ticular experiences the school as a site o intense nostalgia, as a cozy and

protected haven to which she constantly returns in her mind.

As this brie description suggests, Never Let Me Go in many ways

replicates the conventional association o clone stories with ideologically

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controlled populations, in which humans lack individuation and are instru-

mentalized or hidden, malevolent purposes. IThe Roads dystopia is one

in which all social controls have been removed, Never Let Me Go seems at

rst glance to oer an opposing vision, one in which disciplinary mecha-

nisms have become hypostasized in a creepy, biopolitical uture that no

longer seems particularly distant. Yet such a reading ails to attend to an

element o the novel that is clearly and seemingly deliberately called out

or the reader: its position as a counteractual history o the period rom

the 1970s through the 1990s. While the novel draws on classic sci-f

scenarios o ideological control in order to recount events that took place

during this era, the novels counteractual status seems simultaneously

to cast doubt on this conjunction, associating such scenarios with what

didnt happen during that period rather than with what did. Never Let Me

Go oers readers a highly amiliar sci- story o ideological domination,

hyper-instrumentality, and the ailure o individuation, but this story is

simultaneously cast as counter to reality, as an alternate version out okeeping with actual historical events.

We are used to the idea that ideology structures our experience o

reality, but in this case it seems to be the novels own ocus on a scenario o

ideological control that is out o synch with the real as i the sci- tropes

o ideological manipulation oer less an allegory or the present than a

distraction rom it. This perception o misplaced attention is underscored

in various ways in the novel, most noticeably through Kathys intense

retrospective ocus on her days at Hailsham, which displaces any detailed

account o her present unless it involves her old school riends. While she

ocuses on that past experience, however, Kathys coming death seems to

loom just ostage like a horror-movie vil lain only the audience knows is

there, and the reader increasingly desires to redirect Kathys gaze to the

approaching threat she reuses to examine. As a result, the novel insistently

points beyond the parameters o Kathys story, generating in its readers a

largely rustrated desire to see the larger world hidden rom her, and rom

us, by her constant nostalgic returns to Hailsham. As she puts it, There

have been times over the years when Ive tried to leave Hailsham behind,

when Ive told mysel I shouldnt look back so much. But then there came

a point when I just stopped resisting.27

In a sense, Kathys own narrativecomes to seem almost counteractual in its own right, not only because she

misreads various situations in it, but also because it encloses our attention

within an account o the past that appears to be a rejection o the reality o

the present. Just as the novels own sci- story o ideological interpellation

oers an alternative to a actual account o recent history, Kathy substitutes

her antasies o lie at Hailsham or an acknowledgment o the threat that

surrounds her. In creating this parallel, the novel seems to suggest that,

or readers, the obsession with ideological control embedded in the sci-

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genre may be as misleading, and as comorting, as Kathys own nostalgic

xation on Hailsham.

As I have suggested, the novel provides the reader with ew glimpses

o the world beyond this nostalgic ocus. Yet, in light o the close connec-

tion I have been positing between sel-preservation narratives and the

hegemony o neoliberal rule through interest, it seems particularly tell-

ing that the only thing we know or sure about lie outside Kathys clone

enclave is that it involves an elaborate and horric system o slavery and

murder driven by individuals desire or sel-preservation. I ideological

subjectivation oers a counteractual alternative to an external reality,

then the reality in question here is one ruled by untrammeled and naked

interest in lie. And Kathys escape rom that reality is signaled by what

is or many readers the most inuriating eature o the novel: the act that

Kathy is in eect tone-dea to sel-interest. She is unable either to notice

it in the selsh manipulations o her riend Ruth or to muster enough o

it to undertake seemingly obvious actions that might preserve her ownlie or example, attempting to fee the country. In a world driven by

naked interest in sel-preservation, the novel implies, the sort o ideologi-

cal interpellation undertaken at Hailsham, which eradicates the ability to

want what is best or onesel, might very well come to seem an object o

nostalgia in its own right. Ideological hail ing is a sham in Never Let Me Go,

not because it doesnt work but because, compared to rule through agential

choice, the veiling o ones own best interest or what we usually term

alse consciousness may come to look a lot more like a sanctuary than

a prison. It is precisely the longing or such a paradoxical orm o reuge,

I would argue, that is captured by the plaintive demand or connement

that constitutes the novels tit le.

This longing to remain within the connes o ideological enclosure

is ratied by one o the ew moments in the novel in which the nostal-

gic blinkers appear to be briefy removed. One o the ways in which the

novel gestures toward an outside to Kathys understanding o the world is

through its organization o space, particularly landscape and social space,

and this practice comes to a climax near the novels conclusion. In this

passage, Kathy and her riends Tom and Ruth travel to a marsh to visit a

beached boat that Ruth, now very close to her nal donation, passionatelyand inexplicably desires to see. Kathy describes the site in this way:

[W]e hadnt really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods

wed come through had ended, and now in ront o us there was open marsh-

land as ar as we could see. . . . Not so long ago, the woods must have

extended urther, because you could see here and there ghostly dead trunks

poking out o the soil, most o them broken o only a ew eet 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 o the boggy clearing, Tommy incongruously

links this bleak landscape to the closing o 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 o a dream she had o Hailsham washing away

in a food. I this desolate landscape is what the erasure o Hailsham looks

like, then this is also a vision o what lays outside the novels ocus on

ideological control and it is a landscape that might have been borrowed

directly rom The Road. Like the woods that once extended urther,

the world signaled by Hailsham has retreated, leaving a ghostly dead

world behind in which the ground is literally uncertain beneath ones

eet. At the end o the scene, a chilly wind comes up, prompting Ruth to

ask to leave, and as they walk away, Tommy says, At least weve seen it

now.30 These nal lines seem to gesture toward the readers own chilling

brush with the reality o outside the clones muted experience o interest,glimpsed briefy behind the novels own counteractual veil a reality in

which the old ways o 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

suering that accompanies a lie governed by interest but also the ongoing

struggle to nd a means o escape rom such an experience. In Never Let

Me Go, the retreat into ideological interpellation appears as the only reuge

rom interest run amok, but this retreat also leads Kathy to accept being

sacriced in the interests o another. I the only alternative to acting at the

behest o ones own interest in lie is serving someone elses, it is then no

surprise that the other two texts I examine here contain examples o 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 doesnt simply

go somewhere else. Our enclosure within Kathys consciousness, and her

ailure to imagine an escape route, stage on the level o orm the inability to

think past the terms o neoliberal personhood. When we as readers assume

that lie-saving action on her own behal is the necessary solution to her

dilemma, we demonstrate that we, like Kathy, cant see beyond the terms o

the logic in which we are embedded in our case, the logic that links sel-preservation to action in ones own best interest, to agency, to personhood.

While Life of Pigures this imaginative struggle in Pis own retelling o his

story in its more benign animal orm, The Roadalso gestures toward an

exit that remains out o reach, through the characterization o the son: the

boy appears miraculously ree rom the rampant drive or lie that shapes

the only world he has ever known, but, trapped in the consciousness o the

survival-obsessed ather, the reader gains no opportunity to investigate the

sons perspective urther.31 Ultimately, by rendering the suering agency

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in the generic language o sel-preservation, these texts model this logic

in a ashion that demonstrates both the experiences it instantiates and the

proound diculty involved in destabilizing its axiomatic unolding. Yet

the narrative energy these texts expend on this attempt suggests something

o the depth o their engagement with the agonies o interest, the intensity

o the desire they express or an escape rom suering agency.

Notes

1. Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior(Chicago: Uni-

versity o Chicago Press, 1976), 7.

2. See my essay, Jane Elliott, Lie Preservers: The Neoliberal Enterprise o

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, or 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(Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 1998), 185.

6. Ibid., 157.

7. Ibid., 159.

8. Nikolas S. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. Rose reserves the term neo-liberal

or the thought o canonical gures such as Friedrich von Hayek and uses the term

advanced liberalto indicate the orm o government that shar[es] many o the prem-

ises o neo-liberalism that have arisen in the last our decades (139). My usage o

neoliberalencompasses both these categories.

9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France,19781979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),

25060. The chronological and conceptual relationships among sovereignty, disci-

plinarity, biopower, and governmentality in Foucaults thought is inconsistent and

has thus created substantial debate among his readers. I ollow Rose in treating

disciplinarity and biopolitics as dierent orms o governmentality that may coexist

in the same historical moment, though I suggest that in the texts I examine gover-

nance through choice is presented as distinct rom and a substitute or disciplinarity.

For numerous contemporary examples o 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 o the relationship between American popular culture,

neoliberalism, and the suering that inheres in sel-responsibilization in particular,

see Anna McCarthy, Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater o Suering, Social

Text25 (2007): 17 42.

10. As Linda Zerilli has argued, Hannah Arendt is one o the ew dissenters

rom this view in modern political theory. Zerilli points out that or Arendt, reedom

and what we call agency are i anything opposed. See Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism

and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2005), 1 20.

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11. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanord,

CA: Stanord University Press, 1997), 29 30.

12. I am indebted here to Linda Zerill is brilliant account o the way in which

Butlers commitment to agency necessarily embroils her in an unsolvable dilemma

regarding the epistemological oundations o political action. See Zerilli, Abyss of

Freedom, 33 66.

13. Compare also Saidiya Hartmans Foucauldian examination o what she

calls the burdened individuality o ormer slaves in the American postbellum

era. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in

Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxord University Press, 1997). Although

Hartman examines the simulation o agency under slavery, she also argues that

the enduring legacy o slavery was readily discernable in the travestied liberation,

castigated agency, and blameworthiness o the ree individual (6 7). That is, or

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 reedom . . . seems paradoxical. Freedom appears, almost

by denition, to be the antithesis o government (62). Roses Powers of Freedom

inorms my own investigations, but I ocus on agency rather than reedom in orderto highlight the specic confuence o choice, action in ones own best interest, and

domination in the texts I examine. For Rose, to dominate is to ignore or to attempt

to crush the capacity or action in the dominated, whereas to govern through ree-

dom is to encourage and act upon action (4). In contrast, I suggest that, in the

popular political imagination o the present, the conceptual and aective qualities

o domination (the ideas and sensations o constriction, entrapment, and suering)

may now be associated with the capacity or action that Rose opposes to domination.

That is, to be obligedto be ree, as Rose puts it, may now be experienced as a orm

o domination, understood here as unwilling containment within a way o lie based

on reedom and choice (87, original italics).

15. In the realm o contemporary cultural theory, we might identiy onesuch lexicon in Lauren Berlants account o cruel optimism. While the enorced,

exhausting aspects o what Berlant terms sovereign agency resonate with my account

o suering agency, Berlants ocus is on the complex aects produced in relation

to what have become unrealizable models o living the good lie in a post-Fordist

political and economic landscape. In contrast, I am tracing the emergence o an

imaginative lexicon that directly engages the model o neoliberal personhood itsel:

a body o texts that oers a vision o what the world looks like when the microeco-

nomic model o human experience is realized and its axioms made fesh. See Lau-

ren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Lauren

Berlant, Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency), Critical Inquiry 33,

no. 4 (2007): 75480.

16. The principles o this axiom are shared across the key orms o neoliberal

social theory, including neoliberal microeconomics, rational choice theory, game the-

ory, and choice theory. While elements o this logic can o course be ound in many

Enlightenment models o the sel, the neoliberal version is specic in emphasizing

interests as necessarily the oundation o all decisions and actions and the individual

as the indisputable authority when it comes to identiying 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 them-

selves, either to kill himsel, or any other man and i a man be held in person, or

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bounds, or is not trusted with the liberty o his body, he cannot be understood to

bound by covenant to subjection, and thereore may, i he can, make his escape by

any means whatsoever. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxord: Oxord University

Press, 1996), 197, 200.

19. Although Hobbes has been central to some discussions o biopolitics,

Foucault dismissed Hobbess importance to the genealogy o biopower he traces in

Society Must Be Defended. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures

at the Collge 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 o biopolitics, see Agamben, Homo Sacer; and Roberto Esposito, Bos:

Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University o

Minnesota Press, 2008). Esposito ocuses on uncovering the relationship between

biopolitics and sel-preservation as an example o what he terms the immunitary

dispositif.

20. On the turn to interest as a orm o 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 similari-

ties between Hobbess Leviathan and contemporary neoliberal theory are refected

in widespread eorts to explicate Leviathan through the methodologies o rationalchoice theory, which serves as the political-science arm o neoliberal philosophy.

See, or example, Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1986). There are o course many signicant dierences

between Hobbess political model and contemporary neoliberal governmentality,

most notably Hobbess rejection o 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, Birthof Biopolitics, 269.

22. As countless Hobbesian readings o Daniel Deoes Robinson Crusoe make

clear, the survival genre has long operated as a key means o exploring the linksbetween sel-preservation and modern political structures. See, or 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 or related discussions,

see Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Cast Away and Survivor: The Surviving Castaway

and the Rebirth o Empire, Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 2 (2006): 294 317;

and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies

of Conquest(Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2007). I dene survival

narratives as those that ocus on threats to lie caused by privation and/or the natural

environment though other threats may accompany these, as in The Road and in

which protagonists are responsible or obtaining their own resources and maintain-

ing their own saety, either as isolated individuals or within small groups that manage

to combine aims and resources.

23. There are important dierences between the novel and the lm, particu-

larly the lms emphasis on Christian themes. I ocus here on the novel.

24. Cormac McCarthy, The Road(London: Picador, 2006), 120.

25. My reading here is specically geared to the novel rather than the lm,

which oers an interpretation o the novel that turns on an analogy between the lives

o the clones and those o ordinary humans. As the character Kathy puts it in the

lm, What Im not sure about, is i our lives have been so dierent rom the lives o

the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none o us really understand what weve

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lived through, or eel weve 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 o 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 (Lon-

don: Continuum, 2009), 91 103. I am indebted to Curries insight that the novel

turns on the question o why we might not only accept but actually beseech our

own connement (91), but my sense o the novels answer to this question diers

rom 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 Pizzinos persuasive argument that

the novel subtly critiques the athers choices and advocates that the reader instead

accept the sons position, which privileges trust over suspicion. See Christopher Piz-

zino, Utopia at Last: Cormac McCarthys The Roadas Science Fiction, Extrapola-

tion: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 51, no. 3 (2011): 358 75.

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