UCLA

Novels That Enact: Capitalist Storification and Emerging Forms in Contemporary Fiction examines the contemporary novel form in relation to major historical transformations of managerialism and cybernetics since the 1950s. Tracing the metamorphosis of cybernetics from a war-time computing technology to a dissimulated logic of capitalist operations, this dissertation illuminates how cybernetics has provided not only the technical apparatus but also the essential epistemological frame for many breakthroughs in the recent history of capitalism. Among such breakthroughs, ‘scenario planning,’ a business strategy first developed by leading cybernetician Herman Kahn in the late 60s, is given special attention. As a strategy to manage the increasing complexity and unpredictability in the market, this strange amalgam of computational analysis, future planning, and fiction writing has become a norm in managerialism and has prepared the way for the so-called ‘narrative turn’ in recent business theories and culture. Novels That Enact argues that the unconventional peculiarities found in contemporary novels are part of the novelistic attempt to respond to this capitalist appropriation of narrative. The result is novels that enact the fundamentally cybernetic logics of capital through their literary forms in order to stage and perform the workings of contemporary capitalism.Analyzing our economic present through the lens of cyberneticization and storification, this dissertation engages with the existing criticisms of late-capitalism and the critical impasse they face. Through a historical and theoretical examination of the process of the cybernetic reconfiguration of capital, it demonstrates how capitalism has gradually become a self-regulating, autotropic system that is impervious to the critiques mounted by traditional theoretical frames of political economy. Addressing the complex interplay and reciprocation between literature and managerialism, Novels That Enact also reimagines the relation between novels and economic systems beyond the unidirectional or reflective model. In the process, it reexamines recent critical discussions of the purported crisis of the novel, proposing a new way of understanding emerging forms in the contemporary novel as manifestations of an alternate mode of critique.