The Revolution Will [Not] Be Commodified: Anti-Capitalism Goes Pop

As a popular culture scholar, I’ve noticed an uptick of narrative texts engaging in anti-capitalist thematizing over the past fifteen years. An example explains the genesis of this project - the Netflix television series, “Squid Game.” This text is unabashedly anti-capitalist, and was celebrated by a broad audience and by Hollywood’s award system, seized by audiences both popularly (viewership) and canonically (awards). The goal of this project is to examine exemplary texts of this trend, and consider what they (and their producers) communicate in terms of radical politics. My methodological approach draws from popular culture studies, narrative theory (rhetorical narratology), Marxist criticism and critical theory. My guiding question is, if these texts are so popular, why have we not had revolution in the streets? The answer – and core concept of my project – is recuperation, the process through which capitalism absorbs, nullifies and even commodifies radical discourse, regardless of its form, and turns it into something that reenergizes capitalism itself. In other words, In the post-2008 pop culture landscape, audience desire to explore the end of capitalism has been met by the pop culture industry with efforts to shore up capitalism under the guise of anti-capitalism. What audiences want and believe they are getting is in fact the very opposite.Much of this paradox has to do with what I’m calling the supranarrative, the non-academic discourse related to narratives that circulates in mass media – reviews, thinkpieces, news stories, celebrity interviews, etc. We make sense of the world around us through the stories we tell, so when we are confronted with narratives that are incongruous – stories that suggest an end to capitalism, against a reality where that end seems impossible – we engage in discourse around them as we struggle to make sense of this discrepancy. The role of the supranarrative is often to act as a framework for engaging with this discrepancy, but it largely results in a reading of the text that circles back to the inevitability of capitalism. In this way, apparently anti-capitalist narrative gets recuperated for capitalism. More specifically, I contend that, due to the all-pervading influence of hegemony and false consciousness, the supranarrative lacks the proper ideological and rhetorical tools to read anti-capitalist texts. Instead, these texts are read through a neoliberal ideoframe, wherein the economic bases of society – and the values they project – are “common sense” (to use Gramsci’s phrase) and therefore infallible and/or taken for granted. Supranarrative largely ends up functioning as a tool of recuperation in its efforts to reconcile anti-capitalist sentiments with the supposed inevitability of capitalism, distorting the text and leading back to capitalist values under the guise of radical politics. In other words, the supranarrative ends up reading anti-capitalist texts against themselves. Each chapter of this dissertation is centered on reading such texts ‘against the grain’ in the context of the supranarrative, and ‘with the grain’ of anti-capitalism to better understand what these texts are trying to communicate, as well as what audiences can use them for.