Capitalism’s Long Spiral: Periodicity, Temporality and the Global Contemporary in World Literature

Abstract

This chapter examines representations of the temporality of historical change and the periodicity of capitalist crisis and anti-capitalist resistance in contemporary world literature. I argue that the aesthetics of globalist literatures such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Simon Ings’ Dead Water, which embody paralyzing neoliberal conceptions of empty time or determinist causality, should be read as symptomatic. In contrast, I contend that counter-hegemonic works of “world literature,” generated in proximity to struggle, deploy formal strategies insistent on the possibility of apprehending the uneven synchronicity of time—space sensoriums produced by capitalist development as well as anti-capitalist resistance. Using examples from Rita Wong, Lindsey Collen and Subcomandante Marcos, I demonstrate how counter-hegemonic texts evoke the periodicity of capitalist crisis and of revolution, but avoid the pitfalls of false universality and determinism, attempting to revitalize the possibilities for positive freedom through struggle in the present. Saturated with apprehension of a “signal crisis” of neoliberal capitalism, they imagine the contemporary as a spectrum that may or may not be a transit point to some new mode of production, but which is certainly no end of history.