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 Styrons Sophies Choice (1979) and Milton and Rose Friedmans 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 Styrons 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. Sophies 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, significanta situation in which the best choice is still unspeakable, and there is no living with the choice once made. While Sophies Holocaust trauma seems a far cry from the supposed free- market bliss described by the Friedmans, it is precisely Sophies position as what Chicago School economist Gary Becker calls a decision unit that causes her enormous suffering.1 Like the subjects in Beckers economic analyses of human behavior, Sophie is asked to determine her interests,
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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, Sophies 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, Sophies domination unfolds not through her transformation into a nonperson robbed of agency but rather vis- - v is her personhood, as conceived by neoliberalismthat 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 actiona mode of political experience that I term suffering agency. In contrast to Sophies 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 subjects 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 ones own interests can still feel both imposed and appalling. By examining Yann Martells Life of Pi (2001), Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006), and Kazuo Ishiguros 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 subjects 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 peoples 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 subjects 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 atrinaa 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 Simss 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 Simss 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 Agambens 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, Agambens 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 individuals 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 Agambens 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 Foucaults 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 consequencesthat 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 importquite 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 ones actions is necessarily an index of the political gooda 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 subordinationin 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. Butlers 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 Butlers 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 wrongare 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 subjects 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 Martells 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 zebras leg, while in the second, the ships 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 Pis story, one animal, the other human, Life of Pi in effect directs the readers 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 Pis life. This displacement is given precise formulation in the plot that occupies the animal version of Pis 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. Pis only hope of safety, he decides, is to put in place the techniques for establishing dominance that he learned at his fathers zoo. Richard Parker is seasick, hungry, and thirsty, so Pi utilizes these states to construct effective rewards and punishments that will keep Richard Parkers activities within certain bounds. In other words, Pi creates a rational system of incentives and disincentives that allow him to affect Richard Parkers behavior based on the tigers 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 throughrather than mastery byinterest: 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 week17 This vision of human survival as arising from pure and miraculous agencyof ruling by rather than being ruled by interestprecisely 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 Pis 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 subjects interest in life, or what is more commonly called the self- preservation instinct, is foundational to the forms of political thought from which neoliberalisms 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 Hobbess 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 subjects 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 subjects 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 subjects 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 individuals 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 hasfor 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 seriess 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 peoples 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 subjects interest in life thus seems to register something of the seemingly limitless scope of interestthe 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 agencythe 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 fathers 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 boys 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 sons 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 fathers 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 devils choice between his desire to preserve his sons 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 fathers drive to keep his son alive is inalienable and intrinsicbut 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 fathers overriding interest in his sons 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 usas a mode of existence defined by anguish, revulsion, and despair. In their generic focus on the extremities that accompany the subjects 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 Pis little raft- world resonate with the texts 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 agencyand 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 Ishiguros 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 novels counterfactual 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 offers readers a highly familiar sci- fi story of ideological domination, hyper- i nstrumentality, 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 novels own focus on a scenario of ideological control that is out of synch with the realas 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 Kathys 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, Kathys 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 Kathys gaze to the approaching threat she refuses to examine. As a result, the novel insistently points beyond the parameters of Kathys 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 Ive tried to leave Hailsham behind, when Ive told myself I shouldnt look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting.27 In a sense, Kathys 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 novels 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 Kathys 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 Kathys 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 Kathys 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- i nterest. 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 doesnt work but because, compared to rule through agential choice, the veiling of ones own best interest or what we usually term false consciousnessmay 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 novels 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 Kathys understanding of the world is through its organization of space, particularly landscape and social space, and this practice comes to a climax near the novels 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 hadnt really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods wed 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 novels focus on ideological controland 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 ones 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 weve seen it now.30 These final lines seem to gesture toward the readers own chilling brush with the reality of outside the clones muted experience of interest, glimpsed briefly behind the novels own counterfactual veila 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 ones own interest in life is serving someone elses, 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 doesnt simply go somewhere else. Our enclosure within Kathys 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, cant see beyond the terms of the logic in which we are embeddedin our case, the logic that links self- preservation to action in ones own best interest, to agency, to personhood. While Life of Pi figures this imaginative struggle in Pis 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 sons 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.
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), 89112. 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 Collge de France, 19781979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 25060. The chronological and conceptual relationships among sovereignty, disciplinarity, biopower, and governmentality in Foucaults 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): 1742. 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 h e e

, d

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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 Zerillis brilliant account of the way in which Butlers commitment to agency necessarily embroils her in an unsolvable dilemma regarding the epistemological foundations of political action. See Zerilli, Abyss of Freedom, 336 6. 13. Compare also Saidiya Hartmans 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). Roses 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 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 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 Berlants account of cruel optimism. While the enforced, exhausting aspects of what Berlant terms sovereign agency resonate with my account of suffering agency, Berlants 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): 75480. 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 Hobbess importance to the genealogy of 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 of biopolitics, see Agamben, Homo Sacer ; and Roberto Esposito, Bos: 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 Hobbess 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 Hobbess political model and contemporary neoliberal governmentality, most notably Hobbess 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 Defoes 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 environmentthough other threats may accompany these, as in The Roadand 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 films 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 Im 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 weve
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lived through, or feel 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 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 Curries 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 novels 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 Pizzinos persuasive argument that the novel subtly critiques the fathers choices and advocates that the reader instead accept the sons position, which privileges trust over suspicion. See Christopher Pizzino, Utopia at Last: Cormac McCarthys The Road as Science Fiction, Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 51, no. 3 (2011): 358 75.

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