Transition as Impasse: Critical Neoliberal Realism and the Problem of Agency

Transition as Impasse:Critical Neoliberal Realism and the Problem of Agency Carolyn Veldstra (bio) Between late 2008 and early 2009, political rhetoric in the United States and the United Kingdom emphasized a new spirit of responsibility as essential for citizens concerned to ease the recessions in those countries sparked by the 2008 financial crisis. For instance, in a campaign speech on 26 April 2009, future uk Prime Minister David Cameron warned that "the age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity." The latter era would usher in what Cameron called "responsible politics" that, he specified, would entail a significant burden of "personal responsibility" for citizens. Similarly, on 8 January 2009, in his speech on the economy, then President-elect Barack Obama declared an era of "profound irresponsibility" as at the root of the financial crisis and called for "a new spirit of responsibility" from Americans. As if anticipating the political rhetoric to come, the 2008 animated summer blockbuster WALL-E—which follows an anthropomorphized trash-compacting robot tasked with cleaning up an abandoned Earth overwhelmed by garbage—depicts some futuristic remainder of the human species evacuated to giant starliners sponsored by the megacorporation Buy-N-Large. Having succumbed to the weightlessness of space, their bodies soft, obese, and confined to hovering lounge chairs, humans have become lazy, complacent, and live only to consume. [End Page 33] It is not until humans can, quite literally, stand on their own two feet and regain the value of hard work that they can reclaim Earth and begin the project of renewal. The confluence of political and pop cultural discourses highlighting responsibility speaks to a transitional moment in which the effects of the financial crisis were beginning to be felt and understood. In each case, these narratives claim a certain version of capitalism as at the root of current problems: for Cameron and Obama, the capitalism of "Wall Street wrongdoers," to use Obama's phrasing, and for Pixar, the excess of consumer capitalism, variously construed as the material waste accumulated as trash and the flabby excesses of the consuming subjects' bodies. Each discourse is an oversimplification—to say nothing of WALLE's glib fat phobia—of both the sense of crisis and the availability of transition, particularly in light of the complexity of the financial crisis that in many ways remains ongoing. In their speeches, Obama and Cameron imply hubris not only on the part of banking executives but also among the public, imprudently lured to live beyond their means by promises too good to be true. If capitalism is posed as a problem, then, it is only because we allow it to become a problem by succumbing to the dreams of ease that represent its obscene edges. In this way, each of these texts imagines responsibility as crucial to solving crisis. Individual responsibility is framed as the ground on which a transition out of crisis will be built, and, by contrast, impasse is regarded as a failure of will, giving in to the promised ease of the Buy-N-Large or the mortgage broker, without considering the deleterious effects that will almost inevitably result from such promises. It is not coincidental, then, that the future humans populating WALL-E's starliners live immobilized in self-propelled easy chairs. Transition, responsibility, these entail movement, standing up, taking action, reclaiming Earth from piles of garbage through hard work. Impasse, on the other hand, is prefigured as human stasis. But have impasse and transition remained such clear-cut antonyms in the near-decade that has passed since the onset of the financial crisis? On the one hand, as its seeming opposite, the assumed threat of impasse as stasis lends urgency to transition and justifies an insistence on taking action, staying in motion. As such, one might seek transition to avoid or escape impasse. In a moment of impasse, transition can be a dream, a horizon on which hopes can be placed or dashed, a vague future promise of an exit or escape route. On the other hand, this imagined segue into something else is mirrored by another kind of transition, a perpetual and ongoing transition in a cyclical present in which one...

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