Capitalist Writing and Its Underside

"Capitalist culture is peculiar to the occident…it is at the same time — in the Western tradition — universalist, even totalistic in its unending and thus impossible drive to absorb the world in its agency or performance. It excludes and includes: exclusion is a strategy to insure social consolidation."

Summary

Written in 2011 and the last work in the oeuvre, Capitalist Writing and Its Underside is Finkenstaedt's final and most comprehensive literary study — a panoramic survey of postwar American literature from the late 1940s through the end of the twentieth century. Its ten chapters move through the full range of postwar writing: the Southern perspective, Jewish intellectuals, homosexual writing, the mainstream, the aesthetics of performance, literary and sexual politics, adaptation, and — in a concluding chapter titled "Breaches" — the ruptures and moments of genuine resistance that the dominant culture could not fully absorb.

The book's central argument is consistent with the entire oeuvre: that postwar American writers — however dissident in appearance — reproduced and rationalized the performative ethos of the capitalist culture they inhabited. This ethos, rooted in the culture's European Renaissance origins and extended through capitalism's global expansion, demanded performance, achievement, and success as the measures of human worth, and consigned those who could not perform — the poor, Black Americans, women, the colonized world — to permanent sub-class status.

Finkenstaedt moves through an exceptionally wide cast of writers: Saul Bellow, John Updike, William Styron, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and many others. In each case she asks the same question: what does this work serve? Whose freedom does it protect? What does it refuse to see?

Some of her most searching readings concern the representation of Black Americans and women in the white literary mainstream — and, conversely, the achievement of Black and women writers who were forced by their historical position into a confrontation with reality that their white male contemporaries consistently evaded. Morrison, in particular, is shown to occupy a unique position: her writing does not merely protest the dominant culture but constructs an alternative epistemology — a way of knowing that affirms what Western rationalism has always suppressed.

The concluding chapter — "Breaches" — is the most hopeful in the book. The cracks in the capitalist cultural edifice — Third World immigration, hybridization, the affirmation of non-Western ways of knowing — are identified as potential forces for genuine disruption. "American blacks like postcolonial hybrids hold a position whereby they could mediate between conflicting tendencies and undermine the capitalist hegemony." It is a guardedly optimistic ending for a body of work that has spent fifty years documenting the system's capacity for absorption.

Key Quotes

"The poor remained on the cultural periphery doubly rejected as a non-consuming, non-performing and therefore reprehensible out-class."

"'No capitalist society today may reasonably be called democratic in the…sense of securing personal liberty and rendering the exercise of power socially accountable.'"

"Whiteness, the indefinite colorlessness translated into sameness, could be specified only in contrast to blackness or color — which it abstracted, essentialized and stereotyped."

"American writers, enclosed in a world of their own, have been unable to comprehend the disruptions that have so profoundly affected the world outside them."

Key Themes

The performative ethos — The distinctly American belief that identity is enacted, success is achieved, and failure is therefore deserved — shown to be the cultural expression of capitalism's demand for constant productivity and consumption.

The literary mainstream as ideology — The postwar American literary establishment is examined not as a realm of individual creative genius but as a social institution that reproduced the ideological framework of the culture that produced it.

The underside — The book's title refers to the hidden reality beneath the capitalist mainstream: the poor, the excluded, the non-white, the non-performing — whose existence the literature repeatedly acknowledges and just as repeatedly displaces.

Black and women's writing as counter-culture — Morrison, Plath, Baldwin, and other writers who worked from positions of structural exclusion are shown to have produced the only genuine alternatives to the dominant literary paradigm.

Hybridization as disruption — The final argument of the book — and in some sense of the entire oeuvre — is that the hybridity produced by Third World immigration and the survival of non-Western cultures within the Western system offers the most credible challenge yet to the totalizing logic of capitalist culture.

In the Context of the Oeuvre

Capitalist Writing and Its Underside is the last work Finkenstaedt completed, and it reads as a summation — bringing together the philosophical framework of Slaves of Freedom, the theological and historical arguments of The Christian Roots of Racism and the American Idealism volumes, and the literary analyses of Capitalist Totalism, Between-War Writing, and Intellectual Elitism into a single, final close reading of American literary culture. Read after the other nine studies, it acquires the weight of a lifetime's reckoning.