Precarity’s Thermo-Economic Mode

Abstract

Introduction: neoliberal energetics

Ten years into Margaret Thatcher’s governance, Janice Galloway published The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989). The novel is focalized by Joy Stone, a 27-year-old Glaswegian schoolteacher who works a second job in a bar on Saturdays. As her employment status might suggest, Joy presents as the ideal neoliberal agent: economically productive, opportunistic, and self-optimizing, all underlined by an understanding that work is where she ‘earn[s] her definition’.¹ But what marks Joy as a paradigmatic example of neoliberal ideology is her ardent commitment to self-reliance. Trick follows Joy as she suffers from severe depression and anxiety following the drowning of her lover, Michael, and her isolation is intensified by society’s reluctance to acknowledge her grief as his ‘mistress’. In the aftermath of Michael’s death, Joy adopts several compulsive behaviours to exert control over her existence, from extensive listing and bathing rituals to alcohol dependency and disordered eating, all of which culminate in her admittance to a psychiatric ward.² Although never formally named, Joy’s anorexic-bulimic tendencies infiltrate all areas of the narrative, seemingly offering stability during a period of wider uncertainty. In an early scene, Joy perceives her ability to ignore her hunger as ‘a strength’ and form of ‘hard won control’, gaining self-affirming pleasure from the belief that she ‘didn’t need to eat’ (original italics, pp. 84–5). Throughout the novel, Joy’s restriction operates in line with a moral framework of individual responsibility. She rationalizes her choices as a commitment to being a ‘good’ citizen – where ‘[good = value for money]’ – performing her economic value by functioning on barely any calories (p. 81). Joy’s anorectic body stands as the ultimate expression of neoliberal ideology: the self-sustaining citizen who does not even depend on food.

This article examines how the conditions of precarity are narrativized energetically in British fiction since 1980. Concentrating on Galloway’s Trick, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019), and Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (2020), I claim that Britain’s ‘neoliberal turn’ has reshaped narrative embodiment in alignment with a market logic that assigns value through ‘productivity’. Extending beyond the workplace, the drive for maximal efficiency is shown to generate unstable forms of narrative subjectivity that are structured around thermodynamics, the body’s use of energy. Published thirty years after Trick, Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Clark’s Boy Parts take forward Galloway’s vision of evaluative embodiment in response to Thatcher’s neoliberal policies, indexing contemporary experiences of precarity to late twentieth-century ideologies of class and work. Evaristo and Clark’s novels indicate a broader wave of ‘millennial’ novels emerging in the 2010s: Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018), Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), Lara Williams’ Supper Club (2018), Jessica Andrews’ Saltwater (2020), and Anna Glendenning’s An Experiment in Leisure (2021) all offer female-centred coming-of-age narratives where an embodied notion of precarity tracks the simultaneous increase in unstable employment alongside the normalization of work as identity. Feminist scholars such as Susan Bordo, Kim Chernin, and Susan Orbach, among others, have pointed out that eating disorders accelerated in the 1980s in tandem with neoliberalism and the post-Fordist labour economy. During this period, the increasing commercialization of the body was overlaid with wider struggles for agency and self-expression.³ However, the body does not just speak symbolically of culture. It is also, as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Nikolas Rose have argued, a material, direct locus of social control.⁴ In the texts discussed, the regulation of bodily energy appears to sustain life within a wider crisis of subjectivity, with precarity imagined as the dominant affective condition of neoliberalism. Together, these novels underline the profound difficulty of stable selfhood under the energetic logic of the British state, which is propelled by the continuous extraction of resources from human bodies.

In Joy, Trick personifies an epoch of neoliberal restructuring in Britain, which was characterized by the exhortation to be productive, entrepreneurial, self-optimizing subjects. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey writes, ‘proposes that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.⁵ At the same time, however, it is widely acknowledged that neoliberalism is not simply an economic or political regime. Rather, neoliberal ideologies infiltrate all areas of public and private life, with a defining objective of British governance in the 1980s being to ‘bring all human action into the domain of the market’.⁶ This period saw the dismantling of the social-democratic state that had been consolidated since 1945, dissolving trade union powers, attacking all forms of social solidarity that hindered competitive flexibility, and contracting welfare provision. Nowhere was this financialization more pervasive than in the concept of citizenship itself. Thatcher’s simultaneous enlargement of ‘active’ citizenship and reduction of state support emphasized individual responsibility for maintaining the economic stability of the nation-state, a double-pronged agenda legitimated via a moral framework that absolved the state of public duty and promoted self-sufficiency in the name of freedom. Consequently, individual successes or failures became entrepreneurial virtues or moral deficiencies, rather than being attributed to any structural inadequacy (such as class exclusions).⁷

While Thatcherism effectively legislated economic citizenship, metrics for evaluating human productivity have a long history. Evolving in step with industrial development, quantitative efficiency measures are attributed to the Taylorites auditing the assembly lines of factories. Frederick Taylor advocated using a stopwatch to time workers in the completion of tasks, which, alongside Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s Motion Study, provided a template for industrial performance.⁸ A key tenet of the 1950s state rebuilding, Time-and-Motion aimed to improve the efficiency of Britain’s industrial output by matching the movement of the worker’s body with market demands. In the 1970s and 1980s, Time-and-Motion principles were applied beyond the factory gates, with economic efficiency emerging as a moral ideology for both public and private life. Thatcherism thus represents an intensification of a longer trajectory of the British state’s development, the bedrock of which is the self-regulating worker. In the post-Fordist labour economy of the twenty-first century, ‘the productivity imperative’ continues to provide an economic framework for citizenship.⁹ Neoliberalism’s broader demands for deregulation, flexibilization, depersonalized time, individualism, and the need to optimize all areas of life normalized class competition, producing widespread social insecurity along with a professionalized mental health crisis.¹⁰ In this way, neoliberalism reshaped precarity from being an economic condition to ‘the general form of social existence’ during its early phase and consolidation within twenty-first-century cognitive capitalism.¹¹

As the title indicates, The Trick is to Keep Breathing is preoccupied with strategies for sustaining life. The novel follows Joy as she occupies the brink of a psychological breakdown that is never fully realized, leaving her in a chronic condition of instability. Trick’s experimental typography and fragmentary narration formally encode both Joy’s psychological and physiological precarity, emerging in an overarching sense of detachment: Joy’s self-reflections, partial memories, and dreams comprise much of the narrative, punctuated by her paranoia and half-verbalized phrases that run across off the page into the margin. Accentuating Joy’s fragmentary consciousness are excerpts from magazine articles, horoscopes, and self-help books, and transactional exchanges between ‘BOSS’ and ‘EMPLOYEE’ and ‘HEALTH VISITOR’ and ‘PATIENT’, tracking Joy’s psychological breakdown (pp. 48–9, 52–3). Most notably, Trick’s detached narration communicates Joy’s heightened ability to extricate her psyche from her corporeal body, inviting parallels between her fragmentary embodiment and the disjointed body of the text itself. Joy’s attempts to physically erase her body are pervasive: she describes herself as ‘floating’ and ‘weightless’ defining her corporeality as a kind of ‘non-existence’ or ‘empty space’ (pp. 106, 79, 146). Leslie Heywood and Susan Bordo both characterize ‘non-existence’ as the ultimate goal of anorexia, linking this to the contradictory requirements of capitalism.¹² One such paradox is the imperative to define oneself through consumer choices, all the while demonstrating high levels of discipline, efficiency, and calculation as moral qualities associated with productive selfhood. By trying to exterminate the body as ‘other’, reducing it to a minimum until it vanishes, the anorectic becomes pure self and will. Joy’s preoccupation with corporeal erasure might thus be read as a form of economic self-enterprise in which the body is turned into yet another project to be ‘planned, managed and regulated in a way that is calculative and seemingly self-directed’.¹³

Joy’s anorexia energetically articulates the precarious subjectivities generated by Thatcherite neoliberalism. No longer menstruating (amenorrhoeic) and therefore unable to reproduce, her body expresses values of discipline and self-sufficiency while, paradoxically, devoid of its (re)productive capabilities. Joy herself narrates the loss of her menstrual cycle as a cost-saving exercise. Before being admitted to a psychiatric ward, she informs her gynaecologist, ‘I don’t menstruate. I gave it up to save money’, dismissing her ill health and harnessing the rhetoric of free choice (p. 140). Joy’s quip betrays an evaluative inner logic in which the energy required for biological reproduction and state resources exist in conflict. Indeed, Joy’s economic construction of her infertility is analogous to the government’s stigmatization of welfare dependency in the 1980s, particularly Thatcher’s ‘neoliberal ideology on childbearing’ which framed women’s reproductive rights as issues of welfare dependency and associated single-parent families with a rise in public costs.¹⁴ Upon the gynaecologist’s suggestion that Joy might be pregnant, it is the prospect of single parenthood that makes her ‘sober up fast’ rather than the health implications of her condition (p. 140). Likewise, Joy counterbalances her lack of reproductive potential with other forms of bodily self-harm; relentlessly entrepreneurial, she reassures the doctor that she ‘bleeds in other ways’, where blood from ‘half-hearted’ suicide attempts stands in for her menstruation (p. 92). The lengths to which Joy will go to demonstrate bodily independence suggest the competing notions of productivity and reproduction structuring embodiment, as well as the implications of neoliberalism’s evolution from an economic ideology to a framework for citizenship. Equating individual and national resources, Joy’s inner consciousness anticipates a prevailing and highly moralizing governmental ideology underpinned by ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’, from Thatcher’s economic citizenship to David Cameron’s ‘war on welfare’. This self-responsibilizing rhetoric developed a distinctly energetic register during the Covid-19 pandemic. The UK government promoted weight loss as a civic act, firmly shouldering responsibility for the public healthcare away from the state and on to the citizen.¹⁵

Fit for work

Trick provides an early example of the reproductive body’s contradictory position within a state-led discourse of economic citizenship. Thirty years later, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other explores competing notions of (re)productivity under cognitive capitalism, which restructured the conditions of industrial production with an emphasis on abstracted, immaterial labour. As Yann Moulier Boutang explains, cognitive capitalism is founded on the virtualization of the economy, where immaterial labour becomes flexibilized in order to facilitate competition in both public and domestic arenas.¹⁶ Tracing the interconnected lives of twelve women from 1905 to 2019, parts of the novel dedicated to the twenty-first century return to principles of self-enterprise and optimization as frameworks for female embodiment. One of the novel’s earliest vignettes depicts a young female professional contemplating a ‘tactical hysterectomy’.¹⁷ For Carole – Black, upwardly mobile, and employed within London’s finance industry – eliminating her menstrual cycle would be her ‘greatest possible career move’ (p. 62). Crucially, Carole’s equation between her biological and economic (re)productive capabilities is driven not by a medical condition, but by a desire to boost her workplace efficiency. A product of Britain’s post-war meritocratic education, Carole internalizes the values of competition that cultural critics like Richard Hoggart attribute to upward social mobility: she views life as a ‘constant examination’, overcoming multiple hurdles ‘like a circus horse, for scholarship winning’.¹⁸ When the novel rewinds to Carole’s childhood, she presents as the paradigmatic ‘scholarship girl’. Excelling at state school against the odds, she studies Mathematics at Oxford and later takes up a job in London’s finance district. But this work ethic appears less about class competition than a response to trauma. At fourteen, Carole is raped at a party by a group of men, and this seems to prompt her relentless pursuit of social mobility as a means of securing geographic and psychological distance from her childhood. The opposition of Carole’s corporate identity and her childhood vulnerability is foregrounded in the account of her rape as it occurs. She forces herself to think of her favourite number, ‘1729’, and relays a series of numerical equations as a form of distraction that takes her out of her body (p. 126). Mitigating against the debilitating loss of control Carole endures in her abuse – which went ‘onanonandonandonandon’ – here, numerical absolutes signify certainty and stability (p. 126).

Mathematical equations not only facilitate Carole’s disembodiment during trauma, they also underwrite her approach to social mobility as a dissociative tactic. Specifically, the cold, clean abstraction of mathematics negates the vulnerability signified both by her working-class femininity and her Blackness. At Oxford, Carole removes all markers of her former identity. Having ‘counted on one hand the number of brown skinned people in her college’, Carole scrapes off her ‘concrete’ foundation, removes her ‘giraffe-esque eyelashes’, straightens her hair, peels off her false nails and eyelashes, and moulds her accent to emulate the Received Pronunciation of her peers (pp. 131, 137). The stylization is distinctly racialized, necessitating a negation of ‘Blackness’ which has long been figured in mass culture as messy, unpredictable, and linked to bodily ‘excess’ or ‘abundance’.¹⁹ The racialized and classed fabrication of the self is particularly conspicuous upon Carole’s return home for the holidays. Her mother, Bummi, describes her as ‘looking all English’, with her coat ‘tied tightly to show off her reduced waist’ and her hair neatly ‘clipped back into a bun’ a distance which is reinforced upon Carole’s rejection of the now ‘inedible’ breakfast of her childhood, forgoing Bummi’s homemade yam porridge in favour of black coffee (pp. 157, 152). Carole’s new feminine aesthetic is consciously minimal. Exemplifying the neoliberal ideal, her body is ‘absolutely tight, contained, “bolted down”’, and consequently ‘protected against eruption from within’.²⁰ Outwardly performing a commitment to efficiency, Carole’s newly shrunk body signifies both her entry into the traditionally masculine workplace and her rejection of her mother’s racialized and classed femininity.²¹

Yet, Carole’s professional credibility is shown to be precarious. Susan Bordo notes that the degree that ‘the professional arena’ is open to women is ‘predicated on their ability to embody the “masculine” language and values of that arena: self-control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery, and so on. Female bodies now speak symbolically of this necessity in their slender spare shape’.²² In the office, Carole adopts a pliable femininity which occupies the intersection of sexualized passivity and corporate confidence.²³ Upon meeting a male client, she ‘will shake his hand firmly (yet femininely) while looking at him warmly (yet confidently) all the while showing off her pretty (thank-god-they’re-not-too-thick) lips, coated in a discreet shade of pink’ (p. 177). Carole responds to her discriminatory workplace culture by essentializing such issues as her own and pursuing neoliberal solutions; she tells herself that she is ‘highly presentable, likeable, clubbable, relatable, promotable, successful’ in the bathroom mirror every morning, an entrepreneurial script which is repeated several times across the page (p. 140). Carole’s domestic routine provides a recognizable template of the contemporary workplace with its contradictory demands of overtime, flexibility, and self-care. Carole’s ‘daily lexicon revolves around the orbit of equities, figures, and financial modelling’ (p. 115), while her idea of bedtime reading is ‘to scrutinize the profitability of businesses and overseas investment plans’, her face ‘bathing in the blue light of her hypnotically addictive 24-inch mac’ (p. 115). Concentrated in the spaces of the bedroom and the bathroom – both associated with the private, inner self – this scene registers precisely the kind of twenty-four-hour work that demands increased depersonalized time and makes labour increasingly unchecked and unmanageable.

The interconnection between the private shaping of the self and work-place productivity is most conspicuous in the novel’s approach to exercise as evidence of self-optimization. Moving from the performance of Oxbridge cultural capital to London’s masculinist finance economy, Carole equates physical activity with her corporate value. On the way to work, she ‘takes the long way around to get a little more exercise in’, a detour she rationalizes due to her sedentary office job (p. 139). But the extension of her route is less health-driven than it is a more moral commitment to maximal efficiency – to be the professional adept at disciplining both mind and body. Crucially, Carole ‘already went for her daily jog as she does every day’ (p. 139). Her regimented approach to exercise evokes ‘managerial athleticism’, a contemporary workplace ethos which associates managerial traits with idealized performativities like sportiness, health-mindedness, and fitness.²⁴ Managerial athleticism is just one tenet of a larger ‘Quantified Self’ movement, which primarily targets the aspirational professional class. With the tagline ‘self-knowledge through numbers’, the Quantified Self movement represents a distinctly neoliberal evolution of Taylorism which liberates the individual to take control over the efficiency of their own body by tracking a range of biodata (including sleep, heart rate, daily step count, and fitness age).²⁵ Take, for example, Carole’s run from Fulham to Hammersmith every morning,

along with all the other fitness freaks in their bright designer jogging gear and pedometer and wrist straps that measure everything from their blood pressure and heart rate to see how far and how fast they’re running […] some like her even pound the pavement in the winter. (p. 139)

Alongside her muted Blackness and femininity, Carole’s daily exercise habits serve as a kind of embodied self-branding through which the disciplined, physically ‘fit’ body signifies (through muscularity and leanness, for example) workplace competence. Complete with its requisite fitness aesthetic, Carole’s conspicuously tracked exercise serves a similar function to her domestic routine, where being ‘fit for work’ is to quantify bodily productivity beyond the workplace.

In Carole, then, Girl, Woman, Other articulates the ‘affective dimensions of self-tracking’ as coping strategy for greater individual or collective uncertainty.²⁶ It is widely acknowledged that self-tracking is often a counterproductive ‘management of precarity’, which typically magnifies ‘what is essentially a crisis of subjectivity’.²⁷ Echoing this tendency, Carole’s inner consciousness is shot through with flashbacks to her childhood trauma: she runs ‘for her life’ because ‘to slip up is to begin descending the slippery slope into failure, to inertia, to feeling sorry about that moment in her life when she least expects it’ (p. 139). Set against the vulnerability of Carole’s adolescence, bio-tracking gives her older, professionalized self a sense of machine-like control. The psychological threat posed by these memories is coded both in Carole’s internal psyche and typographically on the page.

[Carole]

knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying

just one leap away (p. 144)

Far distant to her performances of hard-headed professionalism, Carole’s inner self appears suspended at the intersection of normalcy and despair. Running, therefore, distances Carole from her body and her ongoing trauma, counterintuitively functioning both as a display of professional capability and what Mark Grief describes as ‘mechanical annihilation’.²⁸ Mitigating against a state of psychological precariousness, Carole’s quantifiable embodiment provides stability in numerical absolutes.

While Carole typifies neoliberalism’s productivity principle, attempts to reject economic embodiment inevitably fall under market principles elsewhere in the novel. Spirit Moon, Girl, Woman, Other’s self-consciously parodical eco-feminist retreat, satirizes the fetishization of pre-modern lifestyles as a rejection of capitalism’s social, economic, and environmental uncertainty. Ben Pitcher has recently examined the increasing prominence of what he calls the ‘prehistoric imagination’, suggesting that pre-modern ways of living – such as veganism, the paleo diet, mindfulness, meditation, and adventure sports – serve as an imaginative resource ‘strategically deployed in consumer culture to help us confront anxieties about capitalism, technology, and the environment’.²⁹ Spirit Moon functions in precisely this way in the novel, introduced via Dominique and her relationship with Nzinga, the camp’s unofficial matriarch. Dominique, a struggling theatre producer in London, focalizes her relationship with Nzinga as one of self-actualization. For Dominique, Nzinga is a ‘statuesque’ opposite to London’s ‘steam rolling commuters’, a ‘fairy angel sent to help her become a better version of herself’, while Spirit Moon’s rural landscape offers an antidote to London’s ‘metropolitan maelstrom’, where she spends most of her time on the ‘conveyor belt’ of writing unsuccessful grant applications (pp. 75, 79, 85–6). Before arriving at the camp, Dominique romanticizes the self-actualizing properties of embodied labour, imagining ‘her lean, long much admired body becoming even more toned, supple and strong, through using it as nature intended’ (p. 94). Neatly aligning with contemporary workplace expectations, Spirit Moon’s requirement of physical labour recalls Carole’s stringent exercise routine as well as the ongoing fetishization of Xtreme sports and outdoor adventure activity in popular culture, which perpetuate ‘the embodiment of neoliberal and social Darwinistic assumptions as expressed through the body and performance’.³⁰ Spirit Moon’s eco-feminism is premised on a form of physical labour, where prehistoric activities become self-actualizing tactics for inscribing the body in alignment with the requirements of capitalism. The camp is premised on ‘reclaiming the Feminine Divine’ and ‘protecting Mother Earth’, and, in turn, ‘self-healing the female body and psyche with yoga, martial arts, walking, running, meditation and spiritual practice’ (p. 89). This ideology neatly replicates the neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurship via self-improvement, including popular wellness pursuits which are frequently hailed as tactics for the reclamation of women’s bodies.

Dietary asceticism similarly appears as a resilience-building project, complementing the physical rigours of Spirit Moon’s earth-bound practices. Take, for example, Dominique and Nzinga’s initial encounter in Victoria Street Station:

they sat opposite each other in the station café as Nzinga sipped a glass of hot water with a slice of lemon in it, the only hot drink she allowed to pass her lips, she said, I don’t abuse my body

meanwhile

Dominique, drinking a cup of granulated coffee into which she dissolved two sugars and was dunking a succession of digestive biscuits (a packet of Maltesers at the side for desert), felt guilty about the rubbish she was unthinkingly putting into her body – abusing it, yes, abusing it. (p. 77)

Refracted through Nzinga’s moralizing discourse, choices about food are a way to optimize an already disciplined body, alluding to a wider ‘healthism’ rhetoric in which ‘clean eating’ goes hand-in-hand with an increasingly prevalent orthorexia.³¹ This moral economy of health is a significant aspect of Dominique’s relationship with Nzinga, who insists on doing all the cooking because ‘she understood how to formulate the right nutritional balance to sustain perfect health’ (p. 96). Nzinga’s control of Dominique’s diet tracks the loss of Dominique’s selfhood, and notably, it is only upon escaping Nzinga and Spirit Moon that she feels herself ‘surging with energy’ (p. 108). The paradoxes of managing precarity through embodied ‘wellness’ – whose target demographic are almost exclusively white, and middle-class – are thus satirized and critiqued through the restriction Dominique endures in her relationship with Nzinga, a militaristic matriarch of Spirit Moon’s distorted eco-feminism.

(Dis)embodiment and disposability

If Girl, Woman, Other imagines precarity as an affective condition of upwardly mobile professionals, the psychological correlates of precarity are intensified in Boy Parts’ vision of the creative economy. The novel follows a recently graduated photographer, Irina, and her attempts to revive her popularity in London’s art scene. Comprising email chains, instant messages, blog posts, and Irina’s internal monologue, the narrative form firmly situates Boy Parts within a hyper-transactionalized social environment facilitated by technologization. Irina holds down a bar job serving a demeaning, predominantly male, professional clientele, paralleling Trick’s dual employment landscape in the 1980s. But unlike Joy, service work constitutes Irina’s primary source of income, supplemented at various intervals by the sale of her art. Irina scouts for models on the streets of Newcastle in her spare time, cognizant of how everyday tasks present entrepreneurial opportunity, she locates her most promising candidate, known as ‘Eddie from Tesco’, in a supermarket.³² Indeed, what most roots Boy Parts in the twenty-first century is its employment landscape of disposability, comprised, on the one hand, of unfulfilling service work, and, on the other, of temporary contracts. This wider background of precarious labour is formally embodied in the novel’s timeline, which spans a 6-week sabbatical Irina is granted following her assault on shift. Beyond bar work, Boy Parts’ employment context is, to use Irina’s terms, ‘full of miscellaneous artsy people’, a competition-based gig-economy associated with the ‘creative class’.³³ According to Richard Florida, this group emerged from post-industrial capitalism’s demand for knowledge and creativity and are typically employed insecurely in the arts sector. Boy Parts illuminates a creative strand of what Guy Standing calls ‘the precariat’.³⁴ Mostly in their twenties and thirties, this demographic is ‘plunged into a precarious existence’, despite being promised ‘a bright career of personal development and satisfaction’.³⁵ Focussing on this generation Boy Parts connects insecure employment to unstable forms of embodiment, a psychopathological condition characterized by a feeling of having no future.

The evolving requirements of post-industrial labour are visibly played out in Boy Parts’ core focus on fetish photography. As both a creative practice and form of employment, the novel’s approach to art is premised upon an energetic economic exchange model, where the subjugation of male subjects suggests the ongoing economic value of the human body as an extractive resource. In contrast to the female-body as the controlled and observed in Trick and Girl, Woman, Other, Irina’s photographs feature masked male models, focussing on isolated bodily features. This process is analogous to post-Fordism’s simultaneous depersonalization and sectorial specialization, where industrial labour is ‘abstracted’ and reduced to a series of individualized repeated tasks.³⁶ Crucially, the male subjects of Irina’s photographs are incongruent with dominant images of post-war working-class masculinity, which were typified by physical prowess – especially visible muscle size and definition – due to the rigours of industrial work. Men’s bodies were often the ‘tools of their trade’ as well as visible markers of social division between the middle and working classes in the post-war decades.³⁷ Counter to this ‘hardened’ industrial masculinity, Irina’s artwork prizes ‘responsive, engaged, [and] compliant’ men, whose bodies are ‘chubby’ with ‘thick thighs’, and a ‘soft stomach’, suggesting post-industrial economic restructuring (pp. 127, 134). The 1980s and 1990s saw ‘the rise of the detached male workforce’, whose work-related skills, experiences, and understanding of masculinity were ‘redundant’ in an increasingly service-based economy.³⁸ In Irina’s photography, fleshiness correlates to a surplus of bodily energy which is imbued with economic value, commodified, and exchanged in return for her own cultural and economic capital.

The excess or ‘redundant’ energy of Irina’s models offers an equilibrating counterpart to her own depleted resources, correlating to a kind of narrative homeostasis. Unlike the men she photographs, Irina’s artistic credibility is secured by her ongoing performance of ‘aesthetic labour’ that signifies her productive value and imbues the body with a specific form of cultural capital.³⁹ Her exterior is the product of ‘years of waist training’ and avoiding carbohydrates, fortified by a daily routine including sit ups, press ups, and Pilates (p. 120). This aesthetic labour has a dual function in the creative economy, evidencing both the asceticism of the self-disciplined, productive citizen and knowledge of the industry’s evolving expectations of women’s bodies. Irina’s style icons are a range of female ‘pin up’ figures, from Tolkein’s mythical Galadriel and her goddess like power over men to Pamela Anderson and Jane Fonda as Barbarella, whose curvaceous figures appeared to reject domesticated post-war femininity while simultaneously adhering to normative beauty standards for women. Although Fonda’s filmic characters are generally read as ‘rebellious’, the popularization of her athletic body indicates one of the central contradictions of feminine consumer culture, in which feminine agency operates squarely within a dominant heterosexist paradigm.⁴⁰ Unlike the curvaceous bodies of Anderson and Fonda, however, Irina’s equation of thinness with a kind of ‘rebellious’ bodily agency more closely recalls heroin chic. Heroin chic appropriated imagery of gaunt, emaciated bodies into fashion photography, widely popularized by Kate Moss, Gia Carangi, and Jaime King. The popularity of heroin chic’s grungy aesthetic was paralleled by the receding of a stable future for the generation growing up in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s, later developing as a retro-aesthetic in which ‘subcultural politics – however nihilistic and pathological – provide a new frontier for making profits’.⁴¹ As such, Boy Parts’ aesthetic of thinness underscores the way in which forms of embodiment, including those purported to be ‘radical’, remain subjugated by the logic of capital.

Irina’s disembodied state neatly expresses the interrelation between capitalism and thinness. In the opening scene, Irina is hungover, ‘wobbling on her heels’ as she tries to make herself fall over on the pavement to avoid working in the bar: she ‘imagines herself going over on her ankle, the bone snapping and breaking the skin’, but cannot force her body down (p. 9). Attempting to gain agency over her body, Irina’s early characterization mirrors the dishevelled, ‘wobbly’ bodies of heroin chic as well as the ‘swaying’ subject of Girl, Woman, Other’s finance district. But the corporeal materiality of Irina’s body is pathologized as a threat to workplace productivity. Irina routinely ignores her biological signals, especially those pertaining to sex and food, viewing her body as an externality in need of control:

I can only ever ignore my stomach growling for so long before I have to eat something. I want bread, grease, red meat, but I can ease that off with a bag salad and teaspoon of olive oil, half a tin of tuna. If my twat is my stomach, and Eddie from Tesco is a cheeseburger, I’ll go get a salad. (p. 129)

Equating sexual desire and hunger as prohibited modes of consumption, Irina’s psyche frames restriction from bodily pleasure as a condition of workplace integrity. This value system enacts Franco Berardi’s diagnosis of the precarious cognitariat, a group that views work as identity so completely that ‘desiring energy is trapped in the trick of self-enterprise, libidinal investments are regulated according to economic rules [and] every fragment of mental activity must be transformed into capital’.⁴² With all of its ‘desiring’ and ‘libidinal’ energies, the biological fact of Irina’s body is figured as a threat to her economic productivity and sense of control.

Irina’s quest for disembodiment is equally pervasive in the novel’s focalization, which tracks her preoccupation with extricating herself from her body. Irina relays dissociative tactics that counter her biochemical signals. She takes a cold shower and ‘ignore[s] the drooling hole’ in her stomach in the same way that she ignores her ‘aching thighs a mile into a run’ (p. 128). These practices result in disassociation from the corporeal self, necessitating a separation of mind and body analogous to how anorectics experience hunger as an ‘alien invader […] disconnected from any normal self-regulating mechanisms’.⁴³ Consequently, Irina’s body becomes that of a ‘stranger’s in a gym changing room’ when she catches her reflection in a mirror (p. 128), a disfigurement which is coded in a temporary switch from first-to-second person narrative: ‘She’s wet concrete gone hard, reshaped into this thing, which […] has to be washed and fed and fucked. I […] think: who the fuck is that?’ (p. 137). Despite Irina’s achieved disassociation, the visible proof of her material body and its basic needs for survival mark her ‘dependent’, suggesting an entrepreneurial deficit.

Drug consumption complements Irina’s restrictive diet and exercise habits, extending disembodiment outwards from an interiorized subjectivity to a defining feature of social interaction. Irina regularly takes cocaine and disassociatives, simulating euphoria and hallucinogenic detachment respectively, which operate within a cultural history of subcultural politics in Britain. While at a party, Irina attempts to remember a quote from Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting (1993), the one ‘from the posters’, the line from ‘everyone’s room when they’re sixteen, Choose Life, Choose a Job, and all that shit’ (p. 77). Irina’s mis-quoting of Renton’s anti-establishment rant (popularized by Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation) indicates metafictional awareness of both the precarious subjectivities generated by neoliberalism and the futility of addiction as a mode of anti-capitalist embodiment.⁴⁴ Paralleling Welsh’s self-interested opioid users, Irina’s drug and alcohol consumption normalizes transactional social relationships; her social group comprises ‘a rotation of background extras’ or ‘various hangers-on’ from university while her only loosely meaningful attachment is her devoted friend, Flo, whose subservience she manipulates (pp. 80, 37). The novel’s social landscape is also highly medicalized, with references to Xanax, Codeine, Mephedrone, Dioralyte, and Imodium, as well as borderline personality disorder and disordered eating (despite Irina rejecting her diagnosis of the latter). More explicit is the novel’s neurochemical characterization. Irina’s exhibition at a coveted London gallery is orchestrated by an acquaintance named ‘Seratonin’, a process suggestive of the temporary uplift in mood generated by serotonin reuptake inhibitors, increasingly prescribed as part of a broader medicalization of precarity.

Boy Parts’ fatalistic ending reiterates the decline of affective stability when work becomes the uncontested site of narcissistic investment. The final scenes chart Irina’s psychological collapse during a dinner with a wealthy, but intensely arrogant, professional contact that she hopes will secure her an exhibition at the Tate Modern. Throughout their dinner, Irina responds to the contact’s self-interested monologue with a series of self-sabotaging provocations that bear little consequence; she admits that she ‘killed a boy once’, but her attempts at exerting agency are dismissed as working-class quirks or ‘dark northern humour’ (pp. 289, 294). This exchange prompts the disintegration of Irina’s narration into incoherent reflections that blend paranoia and reality, crystalized in a final scene that echoes Trainspotting’s chaotic rebellion. After attacking her date, Irina abandons the restaurant and walks naked into the middle of a park pond to ‘cleanse’ herself (p. 296). She spots the head of a boy she murdered ‘bobbing to the surface of the water’, but upon reaching out her hand to grasp it, realizes that it’s just ‘knot of plastic bags and pond weed’ (p. 296). The concluding image of Irina, standing alone in a park pond, clutching a fistful of debris that she believes to be a human head, is a markedly pessimistic expression of disembodiment devoid of any subcultural potential. Despite having internalized the logic of disposability so completely – both in murdering the boy and the ongoing subjugation of her body – the agency Irina associates with ‘productive’ citizenship remains out of reach.

Though these three case studies appear thematically disparate, they all indicate that the British novel since 1980 has been animated by precarity as the lived condition of neoliberalism. Their distinctive thermo-economic narrative modes express the difficulty of subjectivity outside of the British state’s energetic logic, which is propelled by the continuous extraction of resources from human bodies. As we have seen, the exhortation to view the body as an economic resource has been intensified by evaluative metrics of bodily efficiency, leading to several pathologies – from eating disorders and compulsive exercise to alcohol and drug addiction – which all provide a counterproductive self-management of internal crises. The status of precarity in recent British fiction, then, bears out the contradictions of the neoliberal state itself. One the one hand, precarity is explored as a natural condition of productive citizenship, and on the other, as a mitigated psychological fragility, one step away from complete collapse.

Footnotes