The supply‐chain sublime: Spectacles of unagency in fictions of planetary economy

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is about the literary representation of supply chains: the political‐material pathways by which goods are produced and delivered to consumers. It considers the ethical and aesthetic problems posed by the fact that the daily lives of people living in consumer societies in the Global North are deeply dependent on material networks that sustain violent relations between people and with earth’s ecologies. How can we be ethical global citizens when we are already material global subjects? The paper considers how literature confronts this ethical‐representational challenge, and asks whether literature might help us take responsibility over the material economic networks that structure our everyday lives. I examine two novels that make use of strikingly similar techniques for narrating their characters’ immersion in globalized economies: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Both novels strive to represent the incomprehensible global economy by calling attention to their inability to represent it. I argue that this technique—which I call the “supply chain sublime”—ultimately reflects the incapacity of current forms of collective political agency to manage our material lives.