Unwilling Executioner

11. Capitalism as Affective Atmosphere: The Noir Worlds of Massimo Carlotto

“…Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) is its willingness to use an unproblematized Marxian frame to account for the conjoined nature of the legal and illegal worlds and for the effects of a capitalist mode of production on the actions and moral capacities of Carlotto's characters. 5 Whether intended or not, the result is, in effect, a recalibrated ideological critique whereby Carlotto's novels, notably Arrividerci amore, ciao (2000), translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti as The Goodbye Kiss (2006), critically interrogate -and even demystify -the devastating consequences of a generalized "logic of accumulation" and of "the unstoppable march of capitalism in its neoliberal phase." 6 Such an account might capture the extent to which capitalist forms are gradually and increasingly imposed on noncapitalist spheres but it misses the particular ways in which affect enters noir, or is alwaysalready present within noir, as a non-signifying bodily feeling outside of its objectification or object-targeting by power.…”

“…5 Whether intended or not, the result is, in effect, a recalibrated ideological critique whereby Carlotto's novels, notably Arrividerci amore, ciao (2000), translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti as The Goodbye Kiss (2006), critically interrogate -and even demystify -the devastating consequences of a generalized "logic of accumulation" and of "the unstoppable march of capitalism in its neoliberal phase." 6 Such an account might capture the extent to which capitalist forms are gradually and increasingly imposed on noncapitalist spheres but it misses the particular ways in which affect enters noir, or is alwaysalready present within noir, as a non-signifying bodily feeling outside of its objectification or object-targeting by power. If we see noir as a kind of unruly counter-narrative to what Lauren Berlant calls the "good-life fantasies" (which are, in turn, central to her account of "cruel optimism"), then affect, like noir, "enters the description of the dissolution of the good-life fantasies not as a symptom of any mode of production or ideology's damaging imprint".…”

Capitalism as Affective Atmosphere: The Noir Worlds of Massimo Carlotto

“…In one respect, as I have argued elsewhere, it is not entirely wrong to propose Pellegrini and his violence as symptom of the worst tendencies of accumulation (by dispossession), acquisition and competition. 24 But it is the determining aspect of this relationship that is troubling, not least in light of work carried out by Berlant and others on affect that does not want to and indeed cannot treat a subject's affective life as "symptom of any mode of production's or ideology's damaging imprint". 25 At stake is the question of how to treat noir as an affective atmosphere and how to calibrate it to the obvious Marxian overtones of Carlotto's novel (i.e.…”

“…One of the shortcomings of my own account of Carlotto's work in Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) is its willingness to use an unproblematized Marxian frame to account for the conjoined nature of the legal and illegal worlds and for the effects of a capitalist mode of production on the actions and moral capacities of Carlotto's characters. 5 Whether intended or not, the result is, in effect, a recalibrated ideological critique whereby Carlotto's novels, notably Arrividerci amore, ciao (2000), translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti as The Goodbye Kiss (2006), critically interrogate -and even demystify -the devastating consequences of a generalized "logic of accumulation" and of "the unstoppable march of capitalism in its neoliberal phase." 6 Such an account might capture the extent to which capitalist forms are gradually and increasingly imposed on noncapitalist spheres but it misses the particular ways in which affect enters noir, or is alwaysalready present within noir, as a non-signifying bodily feeling outside of its objectification or object-targeting by power.…”

Race, violence and neoliberalism: crime fiction in the era of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter

“…23 But this critique is typically set against an acknowledgement of the public good of an effective judicial system and that, as a result, 'crime fiction tends to produce a contradictory account of the state as both necessary for the creation and maintenance of collective life and central to the reproduction of entrenched socio-economic inequalities.' 24 The notion that crime fiction operates in a field of tension between what we might call liberal and Marxist accounts of the state and of power finds its correlative in Simon's anticapitalist vision of social and political collapse on the one hand, 25 and on the other, his robust defense of both the police and the political process. 'I believe in governance.…”