Читать книгу Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction - Annika Gonnermann - Страница 19

Eggers’ The Circle seems to resonate intensively with classical dystopian fiction, above all with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Virginia Pignagnoli, for instance, claims that Eggers constructs his narrative in “plain Orwellian fashion” (“Surveillance” 151), while Joseph A. Domino claims that Eggers’ novel “is a version of Orwell’s 1984 [sic!]” (“Privacy”). At first glance, these observations seem valid: insisting on being called “Uncle Eamon” (TC 25), the CEO Eamon Bailey taps into the same family discourse as Big Brother; besides, the companies’ maxims, “Secrets are Lies,” “Sharing is Caring,” and “Privacy is Theft” (ibid. 305), are stylistically and structurally reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s party slogans, “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORACNE IS STRENGTH” (31, emphasis in the original), inviting a direct comparison between the two novels (cf. also Galant). Yet to evaluate Eggers in terms of the standards set by Orwell et al. alone would deeply wrong both him and his novel. While The Circle is arguably the novel closest to traditional dystopian structures of all those discussed in this analysis, comparisons focused purely on the close textual and structural proximity between the novel and classical dystopian fiction do not do justice to Eggers’ text since they ignore the substantial differences between the two novels in both content, narrative structure, and type of criticism employed.

As Andreas Bernard has already pointed out in his FAZ review “Der Dritte Kreis der Hölle” (2018)1, many aspects of the novel differ significantly from the tropes and topoi prevalent in classical dystopian fiction. For example, while the traditional dystopian novel as popularised by Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin constructs an estranged, authoritarian world state, Eggers describes a fictive tech company in an all too familiar contemporary world, which slowly but steadily supplants the state as the prime engine of social reform.2 Indeed, The Circle narrates the success story of a shiny, super-hip corporation, constantly highlighting the fact that in a capitalist and globalised world state structures have served their time. As Tom Moylan diagnosed, “[i]n many works of the dystopian turn […] portrayals of the state disappear” (“Moment” 138), until eventually “the power of the authoritarian state gives way to the more pervasive tyranny of the corporation” (ibid. 135). Emphasising “the complex interconnections between corporations and government” (Galow 123), the novel thus partakes in the ongoing discussion about the influence of the economy on politics. For instance, when Mae arrives on the campus and reads through the schedule of Circle activities for the day, she discovers that a “congressman [she] hadn’t heard of, grey-haired but young, was holding a town hall at six thirty” (TC 6). His speech is advertised on the elevator doors and Mae watches him “talking at a podium, somewhere else, flags rippling behind him, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his hands shaped into earnest fists” (ibid.). Yet the staged election campaign performance displayed by the US politician comes to an abrupt end: “[t]he doors opened, splitting the congressman in two” (ibid.). Not only the apparent disinterest with which Mae registers the politician (she had never heard of him), but also the fact that his image is split in two by the company’s elevator doors, foreshadows the minor role politics and its representatives will play in Eggers’ novel. This section at the very beginning of the text paves the way for a narrative centring around the slow descent of political power into irrelevance, and the concomitant ascent of corpocratic power. As Darko Suvin has commented in a different context, “the partnership and collusion between the capitalist global corporations and the nation-States [sic!] seems […] finally [be] dominated by the former” (“Reflections” 73). In Eggers’ world, chances are that eventually states will be bereft of all power.

The novel regularly features examples that remind the readers of the dominance of capital and companies, establishing neoliberal capitalism as the sole paradigm that governs both politics and business as well as any other aspect of human life. “There were notices about each day’s campus visits: a pet adoption agency, a state senator, a Congressman from Tennessee, the director of Médecins Sans Frontières” (TC 102). The senator’s position on the list of people to visit the campus is paradigmatic of the insignificance and low status of representatives of the state. Listed next to a pet adoption agency and the CEO of an NGO, two organisations that cannot rival the Circle neither with respect to money nor influence, politicians seem to occupy a similar position of minor importance only, if any at all. Indeed, the novel downgrades the importance of politicians in comparison to the company CEOs on multiple occasions, for example, when introducing Tom Stenton, the CEO and one of the Three Wise Men, the Founders of the Circle.

To the lower left […] was Tom Stenton, the world-striding CEO and self-described Capitalist Prime – he loved the Transformers – wearing an Italian suit and grinning like the wolf that ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. […] He was more in the mold of the eighties Wall Street Traders, unabashed about being wealthy, about being single and aggressive and possibly dangerous. He was a free-spending global titan in his early fifties who seemed stronger every year, who threw his money and influence around without fear. He was unafraid of presidents. He was not daunted by lawsuits from the European Union or threats from state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Nothing was worrisome, nothing was unattainable, nothing was beyond his pay grade. (ibid. 23f., emphasis in the original)

Described as “dangerous,” “wolf,” and “aggressive,” that is to say, as a character outside of accepted social behaviour delineated by society and state, Tom Stenton acts as the poster boy of unleashed neoliberal power. Although his preferred nickname ‘Capitalist Prime’ alludes to the fictional leader of the alien race which features in the Japanese comic book series Transformers (humanoid robots with the ability to turn into cars, lorries, or planes, which are usually described as morally impeccable and socially committed), Stenton is nothing like the heroic Optimus Prime. While Stenton admires the physical strength and leadership qualities associated with Optimus Prime, the substitution of “optimus” by “capitalist” suggests that Stenton prioritises money over ethics: his name translates as ‘capitalism first.’ With literally “nothing beyond his pay grade,” again an allusion to the influence of money, the lingua franca of free-market capitalism, Stenton has managed to withdraw himself from the power of states and thus serves as a symbol for the entire company. Moreover, his characterisation reads like the rhetoric employed by Thomas Hobbes in his thought experiment Leviathan (1651), which describes the natural state of war individuals find themselves in before agreeing on the state monopoly on legitimate violence (‘homo homini lupus’). Characterised as a “global titan” – a mythological association that, like the descriptors “wolf” and “dangerous,” catapults him beyond man-made rules and thus society – in his function as CEO, Tom Stenton has surpassed not only single states, like China, currently one of the big players in the global market: he floats on top of multiple nations, the European Union, which, despite the combined powers of more than two dozen states, cannot threaten him. In fact, the example suggests that “the state does not represent even the smallest of hurdles to the Circle’s efforts” (Martin 61). Stenton and the corporation “seemed stronger by the year” (TC 23), foreshadowing its dominating role by the end of the novel.

Having established the setting as decidedly capitalist, the novel presents its readers with the consequences of modelling all social interactions according to the rules of business transactions: The Circle criticises the overwhelming power of corporations in particular and the capitalist paradigm more generally by presenting the Circle and its employees as pseudo-eutopians whose real interests lie in the erection of a system that commodifies life, a “monetized […] [e]utopia” (TC 489). The novel deconstructs the company’s marketed self-image (seemingly dedicated to the ideals of sharing, community, and stabilising democracy) by highlighting that the Circle is actually all about earning money and generating profit (cf. Lascalles): for instance, the company encourages its employees to foster an atmosphere of consumerism, advertising certain products on their social media channels. Their work performance is also evaluated and assessed in terms of their ‘Retail Raw,’ a scale that indicates how much money they encouraged their followers to spend:

So every purchase initiated or prompted by a recommendation you make raises your Conversion Rate. If your purchase or recommendation spurs fifty others to take the same action, then your CR is x50. […] Okay, so your average Conversion Rate so far has been x119. Not bad. But on a scale of 1 to 1,000, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Below the Conversion Rate is your Retail Raw, the total gross purchase price of recommended products. So let’s say you recommend a certain keychain, and 1,000 people take your recommendation; then those 1,000 keychains, priced at $ 4 each, bring your Retail Raw to $ 4,000. It’s just the gross retail price of the commerce you’ve stoked. Fun, right? (TC 252)

As Mae soon learns, “the minimum expectation for high-functioning Circlers is a conversion rate of x250, and a weekly Retail Raw of $ 45,000” (ibid. 252f., my emphasis), meaning that the employees of the Circle are expected to stimulate consumption and function as a vehicle for advertising.3 Algorithm-based tracking programmes control whether the employees fulfil their quota. This marketing strategy, which anticipates the methods employed by contemporary influencers and Instagram stars, is an integral aspect of their job, proving the Circle to be not a humanitarian project for achieving eutopia but a hipster marketplace for collecting customer data and selling goods to users (cf. Halfmann 275). Examples like these demask the company as a generator for profit which reduces its employees to online peddlers.

Understanding and processing life as a single cost-benefit-analysis, the majority of characters exemplify how familiar neoliberal thinking has become. Regina Martin labels this logic Stenton’s ‘economic efficiency argument’ (cf. 62), thereby commenting on the state of mind necessary to express value solely in economic terms. Based freely on Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism that these days people “know[…] the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Lady Windermere’s Fan 82), Eggers’ novel illustrates the inhuman consequences of thinking only in economic terms. In the words of The Guardian journalist Ben Tarnoff, The Circle shows how “[d]ecades of neoliberalism have corroded our capacity to think in non-economic terms” (“Privatization”). The characters are firmly situated within the paradigm of capitalist realism, having been taught “that all fields of human life should be organized as markets” (ibid.). All decisions made at the Circle are legitimised by economic deliberations, for example, by referencing the savings incurred by introducing this change or that initiative. For instance, health insurance and health care are primarily thought of as initiatives to save money, rather than as a measure to save human life. When asked why the Circle is providing free but extensive health care for its employees, the chief physician, Dr Villalobos, explains, “prevention is cheap. Especially compared to finding some Stage-4 lump when we could have found it at Stage 1” (TC 154). Treating its employees as a resource, the Circle shows how cost-benefit-analyses can permeate various discourses.

The insignificance of individual human lives, already suggested in the example of Dr Villalobos, becomes painfully clear in the next example, which marks a caesura in Mae’s development as a character. Crashing off a bridge after being chased by high-efficiency drones working with geolocation, Mercer, Mae’s ex-boyfriend, becomes the object of a discussion in which both Bailey and Mae demonstrate how much their way of thinking and processing of the world has been colonised by neoliberal ideas of profit maximisation and cost reduction. Having staged his grief for Mae and “her twenty-eight million” watchers (TC 466), Bailey changes the subject of the conversation, exclaiming “not that it’s about money, but do you know how much it’ll cost to repair that bridge? And what it already cost to clean up the whole mess down below? You put him in a self-driving car, and there’s no option for self-destruction” (ibid. 467). Although Bailey states that this is not “about money,” it is obvious that it is all about money indeed. The CEO successfully turns Mercer’s suicide/death into a benefit-cost analysis, circling around the maintenance of infrastructure. Wasting this opportunity to critically reflect on the reasons for Mercer’s actions, both Bailey and Mae deteriorate further, legitimising another company innovation, self-driving cars, by re-introducing a neoliberal cost-efficiency argument to open up new markets. This direct comparison is explicit, opening the readers’ eyes to the fact that the company is not about establishing eutopia but rather about marketing goods.

As already hinted at, The Circle describes the slow descent of the nation state and democracy as we understand it and substitutes the former with the corporation. Concomitantly, the plot climaxes with the idea that “[c]ost effectiveness becomes the measure of a good democratic process” (Martin 63). It suggests that a private organisation could run the task of a government more effectively and economically – even core functions of democracy like voting:

Washington is trying to save money […] Right now it costs the government about ten dollars to facilitate every vote. Two hundred million people vote, and it costs the feds two billion to run the presidential election every four years. […] If we provide these services for free, we’re saving the government billions of dollars. (TC 394)

Mae’s proposition to conduct elections via the Circle’s channels is more than welcomed by its CEOs, since it requires “100 percent of the citizenry” to possess a Circle account: an influential step towards monopoly and a guarantee for stable revenue. In fact, as David Lascalles argues, the Circle’s power is founded on providing a single financial identity for its users “through which people can transact and lead their entire lives” (45), meaning that every bank account is connected to one Circle profile. The company is primarily interested in making money of their users. The Circlers thus expose themselves as failed idealists, upholding eutopian notions superficially but seeking true inspiration from the free-market paradigm of commodification. As Ben Tarnoff continues, “[n]owhere is the neoliberal faith […] more deeply felt than in Silicon Valley. Tech entrepreneurs work tirelessly to turn more of our lives into markets and devote enormous resources towards ‘disrupting’ government by privatizing its functions” (“Privatisation”).4 The maxim that money becomes the decisive criterion in legitimising any decision is reinforced by Mae, who states that “[t]here had been some concern […] about a private company taking over a very public act like voting. But the logic of it, the savings inherent, was winning the day” (TC 395, my emphasis). With the help of the Circle’s neoliberal think tank, stressing the “savings inherent,” democracy is “transformed from a political process […] into a consumer product to be marketed” (Martin 64). By supporting and championing this logic, the Circlers ignore that not all material and immaterial goods should be commodified and marketed in a capitalist world – a questionable process that reduces inalienable human rights to commodities. Equating citizens with consumers and vice versa negates and eradicates the categorical differences between the two concepts. As Martin writes, “[t]he government traditionally provides goods and services to groups and individuals based on a perceived social need. […] When a company worries about customer satisfaction, it is concerned that the individual will continue to purchase a product or a service, not that the product or the service meets a social need” (62).5 Eggers makes this discourse explicit, as his characters vocalise similar positions in all detail, thus tapping into a contemporary controversy surrounding the legitimisation of neoliberal discourses.

The Circle insists that too much wealth in the hands of the few can eventually corrupt people and therefore cannot be seen as a neutral means to an end but must be considered as inherently dangerous and immoral. As Kalden, the IT-wunderkind and founder of the Circle, recounts the history of the company, “[t]here was Bailey and Stenton and the IPO. And then it was just too fast, and there was enough money to make any dumb idea real” (TC 487). Too much money, according to the novel, may shift ethical and moral boundaries. As Kalden suggests, readily available funds eradicate the reflection time necessary to digest project proposals. Consequently, any number of “dumb idea[s]” are financed by the Circle, the “plan to count the grains of sand in the Sahara” (ibid. 160) being one of the most ludicrous projects. At the Circle, ideas are neither limited by financial resources nor by moral and ethical deliberations; since the former are inexhaustible, the latter shrink into irrelevance. As the novel suggests, money has successfully replaced morality and – for that matter – common sense. The text identifies the economic power of the Circle as corrupting and thus highly problematic, criticising the company for circumventing democratic decisions and destabilising entire political systems of various countries.

Eggers’ metaphor of choice to express this financial “deterritorialized power is captured in oceanic terms” (Masterson 732): The Circle employs all sorts of water imagery, symbols and associations to convey the destabilising power of the company, thereby drawing also on the symbolism of a liquid economic system as introduced by Zygmunt Bauman in his Liquid Modernity (2000):6 TruYou, for instance, one of the programmes the company sells successfully to the public, is described as a “tidal wave” that “crushed all meaningful opposition” (TC 22). Furthermore, the company’s power and influence are expressed by different sea creatures. Most often, the Circle is equated to a whale, alluding to its sheer size and importance in the economic pecking order. Other, smaller companies, hoping that they might be bought by the company, are measured accordingly: “[i]t’s plankton-inspection time. […] You know, little startups hoping the big whale—that’s us—will find them tasty enough to eat” (ibid. 28). Initiating a discourse of consumption, the simile reduces the corporate world to an almost Darwinian state of ‘eat or be eaten.’7 While the metaphor of the whale triggers associations of a peaceful, slow giant benignly ruling the sea, the shark Stenton brings back from his voyages to the Marianas Trench highlights the Darwinian associations: “[i]t was a bizarre creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away. […] It was certainly a shark, it had its distinctive shape, its malevolent stare, but this was a new species, omnivorous and blind” (ibid. 309). Interestingly, the animal is “omnivorous and blind,” thereby foreshadowing the Circle’s exorbitant hunger, with which it is about to incorporate everyone and everything into its system. The novel introduces an obvious symbolism, conceptualising the Circle as this omnivorous shark (thereby altering the associations connected to the company rather drastically), by commenting on the obvious link between Stenton and his new pet established by gazes:

Stenton was staring at the shark, […]. The shark’s nose was deep in the coral now, attacking it with a brutal force. […] The coral soon split open and the shark plunged in, coming away, instantaneously, with the octopus, which it dragged into the open area of the tank, as if to give everyone – Mae and her watchers and the Wise Men – a better view as it tore the animal apart. […] The shark ripped off an arm, then seemed to get a mouthful of the octopus’s head, only to find, seconds later, that the octopus was still alive and largely intact, behind him. But not for long. […] The shark took the rest of it in two snatches of its mouth, and the octopus was no more. […] Then like a machine going about its work, the shark circled and stabbed until he had devoured the thousand [baby seahorses], and the seaweed, and the coral, and the anemones. It ate everything […]. (ibid. 480f., my emphases)

The explicit language of this quotation mirrors the brutal proceedings inside the tank. “Circling” inside the aquarium (cf. ibid. 319, my emphasis), the omnivore rips apart other animals, creating a metaphorical template of the Circle’s own business model; no creature survives the encounter with the shark, but ends up as ash-grey “flakes that fell ponderously to the aquarium floor, joining, and indistinguishable from, those that had come before” (ibid. 320). Moreover, Stenton, initially characterised as an aggressive wolf, finds a further animal equal in the omnivorous shark, a creature that mercilessly incorporates – in the literal sense of the word – everything into its system. The Circle has become “[t]he fucking shark that eats the world” (ibid. 484). The company’s success is presented as an impersonal force of nature that literally washes away “all meaningful opposition” such as human protestors and legal barriers.