What is this book about?
Send in the Clowns! Popular Politics after Neoliberalism is a close reading of the film Joker from 2019 as an allegory of the disintegration of the social contract in the wake of neoliberalism. Anyone who wants to understand what neoliberalism is, how it has operated in political and economic policy, and the devastating impact it has produced on vulnerable populations, would benefit from reading it. As literary scholars, James and I we're very keen to theorize neoliberalism as a literary genre, specifically melodrama, which reduces complex processes to reductive moral binaries, such as good and evil. On the one hand, this allows for devastating and somewhat clueless political initiatives, such as the Iraq war; on the other hand, it demeans the very basis of democracy as a complex and ongoing attempt to identify, honor and inform the preferences of a majority of the people in any political society.
Why should we read this book?
I think the book offers vivid illustrations of the multifaceted disaster of neoliberalism as a dominant political mode. A main argument of the book is that neoliberalism depoliticizes people, turning them from citizens into consumers, for example. Neoliberalism has been around for a long time now, long enough for a number of younger generations to have no historical sense of it: it appears in some sense inevitable, as background noise, or ‘things as they are’. This book will help them to understand its historical remit. The hope too is that it will offer meaningful solutions for anyone looking to change how our societies function. It is also meant to be entertaining, and I think it is important to remember that pleasure can be political, and not just in mindless or merely hedonistic ways.
What made you decide to write this book?
Send in the Clowns was born of a conversation that I had with my co-author, James McNaughton, in 2019. We were discussing the challenges of living in America, of raising a daughter there, and I suggested we try to metabolise the experience by writing about it. I had just watched Joker (2019), the blockbuster directed by Todd Phillips, and understood it as an allegory of the disintegration of the social contract under neoliberalism. It seemed to me a fun place to focus a conversation about the death of 1000 cuts that is neoliberal governmentality. And so, we did. We wrote a book, a close reading of the film. It was initially called The Wound; then it became Clown for President; and, finally, is due to be published as Send in The Clowns: Popular Politics after Neoliberalism.
We wanted the book to diagnose problems and offer solutions in close readings of selected scenes from the film, and we're delighted that O/R books in New York picked it up.
You are a scholar who works in interdisciplinary ways, would you agree? How did your background in literature, literary methods and literary history help you with this project?
Yes. At least, I would hope so. Interdisciplinarity matters to me as a method because it denies the final word to any one method or perspective. If the object of our analysis is complex and multifaceted, then our methods of studying it ought to be as well.
One obvious way that our background in literature helped, as I have suggested, was the focus in our book on genre—melodrama, tragedy, comedy—we wanted people to understand that the ubiquity of superheroes in popular culture reflects the melodramatic bent of a neoliberal culture which tends to say, for example, that history is made by exceptional individuals rather than the agitation of the masses. This, in itself, is a hugely political claim, and a hugely depoliticizing frame, one that is often taken for granted.
Another way that our training helped I feel was our close reading of the film. We really did stay with one text and look at it repeatedly, refracting it through different perspectives, noticing incidental details and reading them as symptoms of broader currents. I'm not sure we could have done that without our literary training.
What was it like collaborating on a project of this length?
Challenging certainly. Both of us are intensely committed. We both care deeply and think deeply about these issues and it's not always easy to find, in the first place, solutions that you can entirely agree on. It is also difficult, in the second place, to express those solutions in ways that you can agree on. And there were tense moments. It was an extremely exacting and humbling and educational experience, and we both would say, I feel, that it changed both the way we think about writing and the task of academia generally. The book is different from anything either of us would have written alone, and better than anything either of us would have written alone. And, at the same time, there are things that we collectively failed to grasp. It's not easy to use one film to talk about an entire political and social dynamic. We did what we could, and we're proud.
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