Note: I received some very constructive (but also chastening) feedback on the below. Ordinarily, I don’t think it is particularly good practice to post a version of an article that has been declined for structural and stylistic reasons. However, I can feel that my enthusiasm for the broader project of outlaw appropriation has begun to change and that I need to take a break from it and this sort of academic-adjacent writing more generally. What follows is a monument to an impasse.
***
In Capital and Ressentiment (2022), Joseph Vogl worries that the finance, information, and platform-based capitalism of today runs on a “pseudological structure.” Adapting the term from late nineteenth century psychiatry but liberating it from its clinical context, pseudological here refers less to individual pathologies and more to the general characteristics of accumulation. Such a structure manifests itself in a “disinhibited” approach to truth claims prevalent among corporations, advertising agencies, and media companies. Playing loose with the facts is no longer the preserve of outliers but integral to the emergent digital and affective infrastructures of value, which are mediated, diffused, and amplified by the “genre of fabulation.” Like its cultural counterparts, this economic genre relies on storytelling: it excites consumer sentiment, stimulates confidence in a stock or product, and encourages early adoption with the promise of tantalizing returns or benefits. The genre is particularly active around initial public offerings, where “product fables” are crucial to securing favorable market opinion and soliciting investor buy-in, regardless of any incongruence between expected and actual earnings.[i] Fabrication and finance are synchronized: credibility is established whilst the grounds from which to verify claims, scrutinize pronunciations, and critically assess records have been dismantled.
To illustrate how these economic fables precipitate demand and overwhelm the capacity for reasoned inquiry, Vogl turns to Herman Melville’s 1857 novel of speculation and swindle, The Confidence Man. Through a detailed close reading, Vogl highlights the epistemological slippages through which the novel converts fiction into money, written reports into banknotes, and anecdotes into share certificates. Feelings of confidence, trust, and belief are produced through encounters with storytellers, artists who turn their command of language into a form of economic activity, a site where value is, if not created, then certainly corralled. Literature, in other words, becomes an instrument for making money. As Vogl observes, the various ruses proceed by short-circuiting the difference between knowledge and non-knowledge, by overwhelming meaning with an effluence of the “meaningful.”[ii] On the one hand, the relentless rhetoric of opportunity agitates, captures, and channels emotional tonalities towards commercial ends. On the other, individuals find themselves without recourse to any independent standard or measure by which they could confirm the provenance of the gadgets, medicines, and investment schemes, by which they have been enticed to part with their savings. Provocatively, the confidence trick is argued to act as a “synecdoche for capitalist transactions.”[iii]
Capital and Ressentiment traces a line of continuity from the confidence artists operating on Melville’s New Orleans bound steamship to the present, to a situation defined by contrepreneurs, influencers, and vibes. The cultural and the economic arguably coincide in the recent glut of scandal to streaming dramas, which has seen the exploits of charismatic hustlers like Adam Neumann, Anna Sorokin, and Elizabeth Holmes serialized for televisual consumption.[iv] In its specifically twenty-first century iteration, the grifter might be considered as both a symptom and a figure for an “age of limits,” at least in the United States.[v] Symptom, in that the hustle dramatizes the inability to produce new value in any sustainable form: its products, habits, and technologies hinge on illusion, on the pretension to a future that remains unsupported, a mirage. Figure, because in an era dominated by bad jobs and casualized working conditions, the grifter identifies storytelling as a means of personal salvation, as a modality through which intellectual and creative labor can be salvaged from their tendential proletarianization. Put simply, the grifter is attached to, and sustains the fantasy of, making a living – and a life – through letters.
The Argentinian novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia was similarly drawn to the tradition of bandit literature and its outlaw forms of appropriation. In Piglia’s reading, outlaw fiction originates from a distinction between earning money and making money, a distinction which has significant implications for the imagination, affect, and labor. Whereas Vogl is primarily concerned with the viral proliferation of signifiers and the detachment of language from institutions of reference, Piglia emphasizes literature’s productive capacities, its omnipotence. Although stick-up artists, counterfeiters, and thieves might be felt to prey parasitically on the social, Piglia insists on a metaphorical connection between the forms of creativity that constitute outlaw appropriation and the value forming labor otherwise erased by capitalist social relations. Without wanting to trivialize the social harms issuing from malicious falsification, which ranges from phishing scams to deepfake exploitation videos, I would nonetheless like to make a pitch for the ongoing relevance of Piglia’s theorization of outlaws and their imaginary labor. Crucially, outlaws both engage in a refusal of work, as codified by the wage, but transform work too, altering the conditions of its activities. It is through this dialectic of refusal and remythologization that I would now like to reprise Piglia’s account.
Part One
As with Melville’s mid-nineteenth century masquerade, Piglia identifies a relationship between money and storytelling. Money, Piglia remarks, is a “machine for producing fictions”: “firstly, because to have money one has to invent, falsify, con, ‘make believe’; and secondly, because getting rich is the illusion … that is always built on what one might have in money.” In this regard, money is both “the cause and the effect of fiction.” Cause, because to obtain it, characters must lie, fabricate, “make up pretty stories” – that is to say, they “find literature” and its forms. Effect, because “the repeated postponement of the illusion of becoming wealthy feeds – with words – the story of all that may be had with money.”[vi] Storytelling is both the precondition for outlaw appropriation – it metastasizes affects into acts – but it also structures and organizes these actions into a project, horizon, or goal. Fancy and industriousness combine in these fictions of money, fictions which legislate an “economy of passions,” setting bodies and minds in motion, producing and circulating stories from which infinite riches can be won and fantasized.[vii]
The bond between money, storytelling, and labor, however, is not universal. As Piglia bluntly notes, “it is pointless to write about work, because work only produces poverty, that is, a poverty of signs of narrative.”[viii] Those who work for wages, Piglia continues, “do not have a story to tell, except the story of the money they have earned” – they can only talk shop.[ix] Inscribed within the ideals of an employer, workplace stories are derived from the shifts endured, the tasks completed mechanically, the inane management practices internalized. Predicated on adaption, imitation, and the execution of the company’s plan, these grammars of activity struggle to make connections, sense patterns, collate multiple voices. Work produces content without narrative form. As a regime, work proves inadequate for storytelling because its causes originate outside of the individual and its effects impoverish the imagination. With body and soul subsumed by the wage, workers are left only with the story of the corporation’s mission, its values and model behaviors – which is no story at all.[x]
Interpreted as narrative lack, the problem with work is displaced from its familiar economic theorization as the appropriation of surplus value and re-conceptualized as one of political capture. There is a striking resonance here with the work of Frédéric Lordon, who argues that what is ensnared the employment relation is “the power of acting.” Employees, in Lordon’s account, are enlisted into the service of a master-desire, a boss who dispossesses them monetarily but also symbolically. Employment enacts a “dispossession of creative labor.” In one sense, the “symbolic profits” of an enterprise are monopolized by the boss, whose personal association with the project eclipses the contributions of collective labor, which are relegated below-the-line, where they wane unrecognized. In another, the very division of labor which rivets employees to limited domains of action, which fragments and renders their energies partial, equally dispossess them of “authorship.”[xi] Their gestures, acts, and ideas are scripted for them. Whilst Lordon remains sensitive to passionate attachments to work, Piglia views this encounter solely through its sad affects. Money received in exchange for the use of one’s creative capacities is “vile and abominable,” the token of a humiliating servitude and passive obedience.[xii] Hated because it diminishes the power of acting: it suppresses the capacity to script new actions, imagine different scenarios for the body, new challenges for the intellect. Work is a crisis for narrative because it reproduces rather than transforms underlying relations: it represents time without structural change.
Piglia’s point of reference for the literary prowess of money is the work of Roberto Arlt. Money, in Arlt’s fiction, cajoles, teases, and provokes characters into appropriating it directly for themselves. For example, Silvio Astier, the delinquent narrator of The Mad Toy, recalls that the money acquired through theft “had a special value for us and even seemed to speak its own lively idiom.” Such banknotes “seemed to have some kind of maximum value, seemed to whisper in our ears with smiling praise and enticing mischief.” This is a money giddy on the exploits of those who have to come to possess it: it is “jocular,” dances, and intoxicates – it elicits a jubilant excess of feeling in contrast to the silent sobriety and dour demeanor of cash “earned by hard work.”[xiii] Impish in temperament, the money made through criminal escapades mesmerizes its adventures with the imminence of good times, with payoffs which will fundamentally alter their social position. But this sonorous and irrepressible money also seems to affirm a joy in one’s capacity to act autonomously, in a capacity to transform the conditions of activity. Outlaws are rewarded not only with ends – the swag, the loot, the booty – but also through the means themselves, the intellectual and physical maneuvers which pull the job off. Jason Read refers to this capacity to create new norms, to be the cause of one’s own increase in power, as a type of “active joy.”[xiv] It is to the transformation of activity by imaginary labor that the essay turns to next.
Part Two
The transformation of a political economy of gestures structured around indifference, repetition, and standardization begins with a refusal of sorts. Piglia glosses that for money “to acquire expressivity and become the language – the sign – of fiction,” it must “record the history of an acquisition based on crime and transgression.”[xv] On the one hand, the quotidian metamorphoses, movements, and transfers of value lack fictional intrigue because they do not interrupt the reproduction of a social formation that mandates those processes as natural. Even in periods of systemic crisis, the underlying tenets of an economy predicated on private ownership remain unchallenged. On the other, the subjective internalization of the structural imperative to work, its “mute compulsion,” consents to a regime of labor whose performances, languages, and knowledges are impoverished – existentially but also aesthetically.[xvi] Work can still inform drama: negatively, through practices of clock-watching; or, more positively, by virtuoso efforts to transform its practices.[xvii] In either mode, abstract labor nonetheless remains bound in place and cannot will itself into wealth. Money’s expressive affiliation with fiction is instead precipitated by encounters that are unnatural or unholy, aleatory breaks with the history of order. Springing forth from “theft, invention, falsification, [and] blackmail,” “to become rich,” Piglia explains, “is always an imaginary adventure, the epic of a magical and outlawed appropriation.”[xviii] To free themselves from the monotonous prose of everyday life, individuals search out the romance of the outlaw.
This is certainly the case for Silvio Astier, who is “initiated” into “the delights and thrills of outlaw literature” by a neighborhood elder.[xix] Silvio’s youthful attention is captured by the picaresque and serialized tales of bandits, pirates, and Mohawks, by heroes who refuse to submit to the civilizing mission of the church, the market, and the nation-state. The pulp novels avidly consumed by Silvio and his peers draw on the iconography of the social bandit, a composite figure of history and folklore who typically embodies plebeian desires for wealth redistribution.[xx] Silvio’s appetite, however, is not simply satisfied with reading adventure narratives and interpreting the world accordingly: he sets out to imagine his existence in terms of myth too. Literature acts as a gateway to crime. Popular fiction supplies Silvio and his co-conspirators in “The Club of Midnight Gentlemen” with a set of behaviors to imitate, ideas to adapt, weapons to invent. For the poor of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, a dignified life, it seems, can only be lived through a conscious refusal of masters and police, through a rejection of all forms of authority that would otherwise conscript intelligence, spirit, and the body into programs of national development.[xxi]
Provisionally, then, part of the appeal of outlaw literature lies precisely in its dis-identification of the objects of desire from the relations of employment. Outlaws like Silvio Astier attribute the cause of their unhappiness to the banalities of work, to its degradations, its lousy pay that conspires to forever hold them captive. For Spinozist thinkers like Lordon and Read, one of the pressing questions of the contemporary era is to ask why it is that people fight for their servitude as if it were salvation. One response is that desire is produced by narratives which channel its objectives through work exclusively, narratives which nudge, prompt, and remind individuals that dreams can be fulfilled, but only for those who strive hardest, who grind absolutely. Outlaw films like Emily the Criminal and Hell or High Water (dir. David Mackenzie, 2016)confront this imaginary of work, presenting situations of indebtedness which no amount of honest labor could credibly make good. Work is experienced and lived as an obstacle to joy, forcing characters to modify their conduct, enabling them to realize capacities they were previously unaware of. Outlaws do not stick to the script. Instead, they write their own stories and invent new mythologies which re-imagine and restructure the relationship between desire, striving, and power.
To paraphrase the late Mario Tronti, outlaws say no to the commodification of their labor-power into labor. However, they do not fold this withdrawal into militant solidarity, but flee organized workplaces altogether, abandoning whatever limited social-democratic protections remain to chance their luck on the black market. Social bandits they are not.
For Yves Citton, an economy of affects – the impressions, perceptions, pressures through which individuals relate to their environments – are given structure and causal explanation through storytelling.[xxii] Right-wing mythologies capitalize on despair and exacerbate ressentiment, establishing narratives in which personal insecurity and loss of status are attributed to the malevolent designs of the political other – the migrant, the woke, the globalist. Centrist mythologies, on the other hand, could be said to induce political passivity through an unflagging belief in incremental reform, expressed electorally, as the lesser of two evils, and economically, by prioritizing business consortia ahead of constituents. As a counter-mythology, outlaws transform unconscious gestures into consciously performed actions, integrating these bodily and intellectual movements into operations that reject patient council. At the same time, whilst the behaviors exhibited undoubtedly deviate from social norms, their motivations nonetheless betray a certain conservative inclination. Outlaws’ ambitions are not infrequently indexed to either the preservation of previously accrued social privileges or their ascension into these privileges. The protagonists of outlaw texts symbolically identity with capital. As a consequence, they do not produce desire differently.
Conceptualized as refusals of work, outlaw epics flee both the enslavement of concrete labor but also the social subjection of abstract labor too. Relieved of ethical duties, subjectivity is produced in a manner radically at odds with its ideological constitution and enclosure as a wage-earning citizen. Yet for Piglia, this flight from citizenship is only half the story. For money to become truly mythic and “speak its ‘expressive language’ … it is necessary to conquer it … the relations of production money conceals become the site of a heroic struggle which turn the economy into a personal war.”[xxiii] Outlaw cultural texts might be said to retain a certain faithfulness to Marx after all, who similarly invites readers to leave the “realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham” and to enter the “hidden abode of production.”[xxiv] In contrast to the political scene, where individuals are legally recognized and sell their labor-power freely, the economic scene is one of exploitation, where workers are broken into muscles and brains, rendered into replaceable parts, into “body-men” who are “fragmented and dominated, used to perform one isolated function or gesture.”[xxv] The fictions of outlaw appropriation short-circuit this separation and re-imagine the economy as a site where the creators of gestures compete and produce the world intelligently through their striving. What most intrigues Piglia, though, is the extent to which the commodities that are manufactured, produced, and pumped out of these underground workshops are works of literature, products imbued with guile and tact, which dissemble, persuade, and inspire false confidence.
Part Three
Outlaw appropriation takes place through the work of “imaginary labor.” As a category, imaginary labor is not intended to cover labor that is hallucinated or dreamt up by the cracked out, the washed up, the paranoid workers who have become the playthings of their own private phantasmagorias. Rather, imaginary labor conceptualizes concrete practices which work on and through fantasy, which inject the imagination with social substance. Piglia’s examples include counterfeiting, forgery, falsification, alchemy, fraud, deception, and invention. What is notable, is that this list motions towards a revision within the dominant concepts, images, and interpretations of outlaw appropriation as a genre. Social banditry in its classic articulation is intimately associated with coercion and physical intimidation, with armed gangs and posses, with the theft of livestock, merchandise, and gold ingots. If the threat of extra-economic force is not entirely absent from Piglia’s taxonomy, acts of appropriation appear to have been displaced from the sphere of circulation and are now located within the sphere of production; or, more precisely, to types of production in which literature, impersonation, and emotional intelligence are combined creatively. “Hard power” cedes to “soft power,” to a power that, as Citton notes, “insinuates, stimulates, suggests” more than it censures, a power that is diffused through the capillaries of communication, which acts on the imagination and its affectation of the body.[xxvi]
In the previous section, soft power was presented in terms of ideology, of the imagination of power and the forms of subjection it produces. The imaginary was considered through the ways in which narrative constitutes and directs subjectivity, how it shapes our understanding of the world and models how we as subjects are to conduct ourselves socially. Viewed through the lens of imaginary labor, it is evident that soft power has an economic dimension too, that stories produce value and instantiate a political economy of signs, citations, and references – or, at least, the simulation of one. There is money to be made in telling stories.
There is a dialectic at work in the concept of imaginary labor. Piglia:
In a society that sustains the illusion of becoming wealthy on the myth of making money, falsification presents itself as the very metaphor of productive labor. Indeed it is the workers who produce value, but because the relations of production are dissimulated by and in money, inequality does not appear anchored in property, in the means of production but rather in the magical object that signifies all possession.[xxvii]
Whilst commodity fetishism erases and effaces all trace of social labor, the falsehoods, frauds, and fabrications of outlaw appropriators re-asserts the power of labor-power, establishing scenes of transformation, staging forms of cooperation in which individuals and collectives once again realize their capacities to produce things and effect change. Making money through imaginary labor insists that the world is produced collaboratively and imagines ways in which groups can produce the world and its relations differently. If the proletariat is spectrally present in these cultural forms, it can equally be observed that the fantasy of the self-made entrepreneur confronts its doppelganger too. Outlaws take hold of the transcendental myth of making money through abstinence and patient dedication and render it immanent and impulsive.
As fictions of work, or, more accurately, fictions of fiction at work, outlaw appropriation supplies representational consistency to the value-creating capacities of labor-power that are otherwise repressed or denied form. Fixated by schemes which would “create money from nothingness” and transform a “vacuum into cash,” outlaw appropriators, Piglia repeats, turn to magic, “the ‘theosophical arts’ and alchemy,” as well as more familiar methods like blackmail. Devoted to a “sublimated, alchemic form of capitalist processing,” they work less with concrete goods and more with the “ideas of goods,” with formulas and “abstract objects” from which they strive “to extract everything from nothing.”[xxviii] Alchemy plays a crucial role in Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole, an historical novel about a gang of coin clippers, their legendary king, David Hartley, and the men sent to pacify and eliminate forms of social reproduction which take place outside of the wage relation. Similarly, money is pulled out from information and data in Emily the Criminal. Emily is set up with a machine for manufacturing credit cards and a list of stolen bank details from which these cards can be synchronized, charging the inanimate with life. Through the manipulation of code and the imitation of character, Emily is able to make real money by selling fraudulently purchased consumer goods second hand.
Core to the concept of imaginary labor is the reclaiming of authorship, of the power to script one’s own actions. Authorship can be understood both narrowly, as the falsification of documents, but also more expansively, as the production of magical commodities, like narcotics. As the generators of texts, signs, and products, outlaws bring the execution and conceptualization of labor back under individual control, directing their gestures, performances, and ideas to gain maximal advantage. What Citton calls the “power of scripting,” not only affects the way outlaws interpret the connection between their acts and the world, but also becomes a conduit through which their stories influence the behavior of others – be they marks, accomplices, or addicts. Where the economic division of labor breaks down the bodily and mental integrity of the individual, turning them into a replaceable part, the cultural imagining of outlaw appropriation repairs being into a fractured whole.
To frame imaginary labor as the self-discovery of the individual, of their signature traits and talents, is not without tension. Ideological recuperation could be said to manifest itself across two registers, the generic and the singular, a split which recalls the dual character of labor as both abstract and concrete. Piglia’s identification of a “puritanical ethic of effort” among Arlt’s characters is certainly shared and embraced by many latter-day outlaws.[xxix] Outlaw appropriation is connected to situations that demand absolute commitment, require intense dedication, and which constantly threaten to bleed back into and cannibalize private life. Permanently open to opportunity and vigilantly aware of the competition, outlaw appropriation can at times feel like an extension of hustle culture, a milieu from which it recruits characters, content, and idioms. Concretely, as the creators of gestures, ideas, and desires, outlaws are frequently distinguished as geniuses, individuals blessed with preternatural abilities. The outlaw becomes synonymous with the virtuoso, a producer whose skills cannot be replicated or copied, and whose practice of “capitalist magic” acquires a cult following. The mutation of the citizen into the outlaw potentially flows into and amplifies what Jed Esty has diagnosed as a “weak-state mythology,” a set of cultural narratives in which private individuals must heroically compensate for the inadequacies of public institutions.[xxx] Rather than simply liberate individuals from wage labor, the epics of outlaw appropriation stage and ambivalently endorse the transformation of human capital into worker-entrepreneurs, the fabled wealth-creators feted by free market fundamentalists.
But perhaps these cultural forms can offer an alternative ending too. Outlaw appropriators retain an absolute faith in the omnipotence of literature, in the power of writing to affect and reorder relations. Writing, Piglia cites approvingly, “has the efficacy of a right hook to the jaw.” The rhetoric, devices, and ploys which take the imaginary production of wealth as their objects rely on the manipulation of signs, on falsified signatures, on the stylistic arrangement of letters, voice, and emotion. As Piglia observes, “the ultimate metaphor” of the dream of imaginary wealth “is writing itself.” The dreamers of outlaw appropriation are writers of sorts, sometimes through passion, other times circumstances, all drawn to the “magical power” of storytelling, to its miraculous transformation of language into money, words into sustenance.[xxxi]
As a genre, outlaw epics make a surprising defense of writing, interpretation, and mediation from below, a defense all the more welcome as it counters the prevailing cultural and economic attitudes which are overwhelmingly intent on the degradation, dismissal, and dismantling of the humanities, that consider the arts as elitist, trivial, and lacking value or social impact. Yet they are more than stoic supporters of the imagination, fancy, and fantasy. They actively and defiantly delight in and elicit joy from the possibility of making a living through words, performance, and teamwork. Imaginary labor perhaps even extends beyond the text and speaks to the aspirations of the poet, the critic, the blogger, to all who place their hopes in one day being free to live and flourish from the basis of their writing alone.
Conclusion
The politics of imaginary labor and the identities it instantiates remains ambiguous. Refusing to align their desires with hired work, outlaw appropriators nonetheless re-enter the hidden abode of production, drawing on the resources of the imagination and the intellect to maximize their striving, provoking fierce political repression in the process. Magical appropriation pushes against the artificial constraints capital imposes: it vehemently rejects austerity, cancels debt, delights in the senses. Through command of the soft power of storytelling, it also pushes back against the deskilling, outsourcing, and proletarianization experienced in work, affirming the power of labor-power, of a labor that creates new norms. Outlaw appropriation reacts violently against the impersonal domination of workers who have otherwise learned to control themselves, and breaks with the traditions, education, and habits, which preach the virtues of modesty. On the other hand, the very inventive intellectual and physical activities from which they script independence often constitute hypertrophied fantasies of work in its purest form. The economy is presented as an arena where individuals exhibit their skills, showcase their knowledge, display their creativity, a zone of combat where only the strongest survive. The re-mythologization of gestures, actions, and narratives as having the capacity to transform situations, coalesces into a strategy of containment, one which entertains change but only on the condition that the rewards it confers are privatized. In this, outlaws seem no less inflected by the prevalent structures of feeling that animate the culture and economics of the hustle. The non-identity of desire, the dream of better days, needs instead to be connected to a mythology that imagines transformation as collective, that invites us to contribute our bodies, ideas, and passions to its making as comrades.
[i] Joseph Vogl, Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2022), 104.
[ii] Vogl, Capital and Ressentiment, 112.
[iii] Ibid., 111.
[iv] For a recent cinematic variant, see Pain Hustlers (dir. David Yates, 2023).
[v] I take this periodizing formulation from Jed Esty, The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits (Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, 2022).
[vi] Ricardo Piglia, “Roberto Arlt and the Fiction of Money,” trans. John Kraniauskas, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 8.1, (1999), 13-16 (13). Scott Monahan’s Anchorage (2021) would be an example of a film almost exclusively about money as an effect, an illusion that motivates brothers Jacob and John to set out for Alaska with the idea of setting up a traphouse. Their journey is fueled both by the stories about what they will do with money, but also by drugs, which work their own molecular transformations on the body. Their journey is ultimately about the undoing of the American dream – at the level of the imaginary but also materially: they drive through an economy in ruins, one that has been decimated by underinvestment and speculation.
[vii] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 13.
[viii] Marx similarly remarks that: “the worker cannot become rich in this exchange, since, in exchange for his labor capacity as a fixed, available magnitude, he surrenders its creative power, like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself … because the creative power of his labor establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 307.
[ix] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 13.
[x] Even dramas ostensibly about work require a supplement of fantasy, like Don Draper’s stolen identity in Mad Men (Matthew Weiner, 2007 – 2015).
[xi] Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, trans. Gabriel Ash (London and New York: Verso, 2014), 118.
[xii] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 13. But as John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal (2022) highlights, there is an even more contemptible relation: the internship, the work completed not for pay but for the sheer opportunity of being exploited by a prestigious master-desire.
[xiii] Roberto Arlt, The Mad Toy, trans. James Womack (London: Hesperus Press, 2013), 20.
[xiv] Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 160.
[xv] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 13.
[xvi] For an extensive treatment of the silent pressures of economic relations, see Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2023).
[xvii] Examples of these polarities include Clockwatchers (dir. Jill Sprecher, 1997)and The Bear (cr. Christopher Storer, 2022 – present). It is increasingly evident that as work threatens to saturate the entirety of private existence, its transformations, pressures, and hopes are confronted by cultural forms, which indicates a need to revise some of Piglia’s claims.
[xviii] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 13.
[xix] Arlt, The Mad Toy, 3.
[xx] For an account of social banditry, see Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Abacus, 2001).
[xxi] Whilst “The Club of Midnight Gentlemen” remain transfixed by a nihilistic form of anarchism, the history of outlaw literature also points to broader projects of politicization. In Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang, subaltern refusal threatens to spread to full-blown anti-colonial insurrection, as the Kelly’s muster a spectral army of the forsaken.
[xxii] For an elaboration, see Yves Citton, “Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths,” Open, No. 20, The Populist Imagination (2010), 61 – 69.
[xxiii] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 14.
[xxiv] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans, Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 280, 279.
[xxv] Étienne Balibar, ‘Class Racism’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso,, 1991), 211.
[xxvi] Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et Imaginarie de Gauche, [unofficial] trans, Jason Read.
[xxvii] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 14.
[xxviii] Ibid., 15.
[xxix] Ibid., 15.
[xxx] Esty, The Future of Decline.
[xxxi] Piglia, “Fiction of Money,” 15. Even seemingly ‘unwriterly’ examples like Hell or Highwater, still find practical use for writing and derive pleasure from its effects. The brothers launder the money they have stolen through casinos, having their winnings written out to the banks from whom the money was stolen in the first place – and to whom their family property is mortgaged.
Thomas Travers 