Ghosts Amid the Gears: Neoliberal Subjectivity in 21st Century Chinese and American Fiction

Abstract

This thesis investigates patterns of contemporary Chinese and American fiction reflecting and refracting neoliberal subjectivity. This essay adopts David Foster Wallace’s disapproving motif of ‘gears’ as an organising metaphor for neoliberal reductions of subjectivity, forcing eruption of potentialities as literal and figurative ‘ghosts’ seeking escape from diegetic worlds. The Cartesian dichotomy (ghosts/gears), derived from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s notion of the “ghost in the machine,” is balanced in strangely consistent yet contrasting ways by all characters who synthesise entrepreneurialism with spirituality, communalism, ecology, and ethnicity. American Wallace’s The Pale King reveals a gentle, spiritual rebellion against neoliberal hegemony wherein characters protest the existential paucity of bureaucratic labour, instead seeking monastic, hedonistic transcendence. In Paul Beatty’s The Sellout impoverished African-Americans are estranged from racially-striated, capitalist ‘machinery,’ pioneering liminal neo-economic spaces and rejuvenating industry through a radical return to ‘magical’ ethno-subjectivity. The Chinese novels display both cosmopolitan and rural capitalism, sounding alarmist timbres in tracing work’s transnational, technological, ecological and eschatological dangers. In Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, capitalist overdeterminations augment worker flesh and selfhood, disrupting feng shui and precipitating cataclysm. Likewise, Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died shows mercantilism as antagonistic to spiritual-temporal ontologies. The comparative study reveals American admonitions of neoliberalism as parochial, compared with panoramic, macrocosmic concerns in Chinese fictive violence, cognisant of globalisation. Despite continental distance, all texts imagine spectral, subjective potentiality in pneumatic tension with neoliberal demands. These trans-Pacific, bi-national texts resist economic totalitarianism, imagining alternative ontologies.