@article{LetdownAesthetics:EconomicWithdrawalintheLongDownturn:3406,
      recid = {3406},
      author = {Yang, Shirl},
      title = {Letdown Aesthetics: Economic Withdrawal in the Long  Downturn, 1970 to the Present},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {225},
      abstract = {This dissertation argues that representations of economic  experience as epitomized by heightened states of  feeling—the despair following a bad day at the stock  market, the panic set off by reports of an impending  bubble, the excitement around rapid gains in a company’s  valuation—tell only part of the story of economic feeling  in the US and UK after 1973. Such inflationary narratives  of economic behavior, which posit the drastic highs and  lows of avid participation, fail to account for the lurking  forms of non-participation that haunt the period. Guided by  affect theory’s turn to what Lauren Berlant calls “reticent  action,” “Letdown Aesthetics: Economic Withdrawal from 1970  to the Present” argues for the undertheorized centrality of  withdrawal and withholding to 20th and 21st century notions  of economic life and citizenship. Turning to scenes of not  working, not investing, and not consuming, along with the  genres that house them in literature, film, and television,  I argue that critical focus on intensified states like  runaway speculation and entrepreneurial hyperactivity  cannot, on their own, account for the present’s affective  structures. The aesthetic and practical strategies of  withholding that become manifest in slacking on the job,  declining to invest in one’s home, and turning away from  commodities believed to degrade sociality capture the vast  fallout of financialization, precarious employment, and  overconsumption that characterize capitalistic development  in the latter half of the 20th century to the present. By  centering scenes of economic withdrawal, which emerge in  conjunction with the transition from relative postwar  prosperity in western industrialized economies to a crisis  in profitability that continues into the present day,  “Letdown Aesthetics” foregrounds both the seething  discontent and minor pleasures of opting out precisely when  one is expected to buy in. My case studies build new  readings of convergences of affective and economic activity  to offer a more nuanced account of the evolving connections  between feeling and economic value that continue to shape  contemporary life under capitalism. 

Letdown Aesthetics  opens with the question of changing attitudes about  compulsory (but increasingly insecure) work, focusing on  through those who aren’t doing said work properly. Chapter  One, “Suspense, Suspension, and Slackers in the Office,”  follows historical transformations in white-collar worker  unease with office life in order to understand what it has  meant—historically, socially, affective—to work in the  office. Suspense is this chapter’s term for aesthetic and  existential states of suspension that surface in recent  office novels such as Ed Park’s Personal Days, Ling Ma’s  Severance, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, in which the  office becomes a space of uncertainty and precarity rather  than drudgery. I argue that suspense and its new, deflated  form in these novels, arises in response to the relatively  fresh precarity that affects white-collar work as postwar  prosperity begins to run out in the US…},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3406},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3406},
}