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Dying to be: prefigurative performances of necrontology against neoliberal subjectivity

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Dying to be: prefigurative performances of necrontology against neoliberal subjectivity

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Content DYING TO BE:
PREFIGURATIVE PERFORMANCES OF NECRONTOLOGY
AGAINST NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY
by
Benjamin Ross Nicholson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE))
May 2023
Copyright 2023 Benjamin Ross Nicholson
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As there are several pages of writing ahead, I will try to be brief. To Amelia Jones, I can
only approximate in words the deep appreciation I feel for your engagement with me and my
work, in particular for both suggesting and inhabiting what you call “our relational dependence
on the wellbeing of others”; you made the process of writing this dissertation feel joyful, which
is not what I had been taught to expect from writing a dissertation, and make me excited to
imagine what the academy can be. To Andreas Kratky, thank you for helping me across the
entire five years of my PhD experience; your commitment to the development of my work and
persistent thoughtfulness have been invaluable to my learning and my existence as a part of the
Media Arts + Practice program, as has the suggestion that if all else fails my classmates and I
might try to move to Belgium to survive off their social welfare system. To Vicki Callahan, it’s
been such a pleasure to commiserate with you about the fun of university life and deteriorating
bodies, as well as how affirming study can be when you can share it with people you care for;
also, I’m sorry about the Clippers, maybe Russell Westbrook will remember how to score before
the season is over – as you’ve taught me, all we can do is do the work. To Virginia Kuhn, your
friendship and support have taught me so much about what it means to teach and how important
the classroom is to the wellbeing of students, teachers, and society at large (and how the
classroom has no walls, has no end); I’m looking forward to continuing to learn from you and,
someday, having the chance to share the effects of your pedagogy in a classroom of my own.
And to Mary Sweeney, the way you approach the world with such curiosity, compassion, and
artistry has been profoundly encouraging to me not just as an artist/academic, but as a person
amongst people struggling to make sense of making sense; I can’t wait to see all that you’re
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conjuring and to share with you the things I’m going to make, to share with you the process of
becoming and to openly regard that process with love.
Beyond the support of my committee, I want to thank: Gabby, for your brilliance,
friendship, conscientiousness, love, and smile – I love you and I’m glad I didn’t die before I met
you; Elizabeth, for holding everyone, including me, in MA+P together through your powers of
kindness, incomparable patience, and unmatched institutional savvy; Holly, for your generosity,
insight, and support amidst the generosity, insight, and support you provide for so many others as
well; Fidelia, for being with me on this whole journey and constantly reminding me of the
importance of serious fun (and frogs); Kyle, for always bleedin’; Karen and Dane, for helping
me make a new home in the midst of the most difficult moments of my life (and for dinner[s]!);
Mom, for absolutely everything; and Pilaf, who in many ways literally embodies the spirit (and
smell) of necrontology.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................v
Introduction
Disclosure ................................................................................................................1
Anticipation..............................................................................................................6
Chapter 1 – Bodies Corporate: Neoliberal Subjectivity
Hegemony in Mutation ..........................................................................................16
(Neo)Liberalism as a White Masculine Cultural Formation ..................................21
Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Corporate Body ...................................................35
Disincorporation of the Neoliberal Subject ...........................................................45
Otherwise(s) ...........................................................................................................56
Chapter 2 – Becoming the Corpse: Necrontology
Extruding the Corpse from the Corporation ..........................................................59
Against Corporate Ontology ..................................................................................64
Necrontology as (be)Coming Apart .......................................................................75
Reclaiming Corpsehood .........................................................................................96
Shall We Danse Macabre? ...................................................................................106
Chapter 3 – To Begin: Performance as Prefigurative Praxis
The Story So Far ..................................................................................................109
Performance .........................................................................................................115
Prefiguration ........................................................................................................127
Praxis....................................................................................................................134
Necrontological Performances of Otherwise .......................................................145
Conclusion
Recapitulation ......................................................................................................159
Departure..............................................................................................................165

References ....................................................................................................................................175

v
ABSTRACT
Though neoliberalism prevails in the United States, its capacity to organize the social is
deteriorating. White men of middling wealth, long-time beneficiaries of neoliberal dispossession
and its underlying continuation of generational white supremacy, are coming to recognize
prophecies of their perpetual economic ascent for fictions; the promise of upward mobility (for
the white) is proving a lie as corporations and billionaires snatch every last resource and pull up
the ladder behind them. I argue that the unmooring of neoliberal subjects offers a chance to not
only unravel the systemic harms of neoliberalism, but to further disincorporate white deference
to supremacist narratives of significance. In this dissertation, I first articulate the neoliberal
subject as a white supremacist cultural phenomenon that is encountering a crisis of contradiction:
not all whiteness is created equal, as the wealthy are more than willing collaborators in the
exploitation of not just the poor, but also those who work for their living. I then suggest an
alternative reckoning of being towards which erstwhile neoliberal subjects might turn:
necrontology, the understanding that the affirming shared basis of all things lies not in their
tendency to grow but, rather, to decay in time. I conclude by proposing a research methodology
through which wavering neoliberal subjectivity and necrontology may be put into concentrated
tension: performance as prefigurative praxis, a manner of attempting to enact desires in order to
study the present contours of the world and, when such desires inevitably mutate, to begin again.

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INTRODUCTION
Disclosure
So long as I am speaking, I will try to speak for myself: though you and I are in
circulation, we are recognized as different people, particular selves. Given the normative practice
of the private reading of texts, given the likelihood that I’m not with you in this moment, I regret
to acknowledge that I can’t know much about you and how you are arriving at this writing. That
is to say, I have no sense of how your day may be going, of your needs, of your convictions. That
I don’t know who I’m speaking to is a lonely feature of this sort of communication. However,
insomuch as I harbor a desire to share what I’ve learned with you (perhaps with a hope that such
sharing might effect a cascade of relations and correspondences that would affect me in turn), I
can attempt to disclose my situation; this may give you a sense of “where I’m coming from” as
you encounter these words.
While I do not claim any essential identity, in the cultural context of the United States in
the early 2020’s I tend to be identified with a number of intersecting personal attributes: white,
cis-male, heterosexual, able-bodied, educated, ostensibly middle-class, American citizen. I
provide this demography not to emphasize my belief in its overriding significance, but rather
because this dissertation is explicitly concerned with white supremacy and how such a dominant
social construct instantiates a system of exclusion through the filter of its indentitarian matrix. In
this regard I am cast as a favored subject, seen as being in possession of traits that would grant
me access to the resources and importance necessary to “succeed” in American society, often at
the dispossessive expense of those who are rendered by prevailing institutions as belonging to an
inferior category of person (if a person at all). Further, the relative favor I am granted and the

2
harm levied upon those in the United States who cannot claim my demography are normal and,
for their normalcy, are insidiously accepted by many as justified.
As I will discuss in detail later, the present power of white supremacy, a consequence of
centuries of social effort specifically aimed toward its realization, certainly includes overt and
intended acts of hate. Yet because of the systemic nature of white power, much of its violence
and its ongoing reproduction emerge not from intention but from pervasive tendency; white
supremacy is so deeply embedded in the United States’ laws, governance, cultures, technologies,
geography, economy, education, healthcare, and practices of labor that it can be difficult to
participate in society without functionally furthering white supremacy’s entrenchment. I don’t
offer this bleakness as an excuse for acquiescence, for I believe that white supremacy, like all
organizing narratives, is susceptible to revision, recession, and replacement. Rather, it is
precisely because I believe in an otherwise world that this writing tumbles from my fingers and
summons letters to my screen, though they carry with them a crucial question for both you and
me: can I be trusted to tell tales of alternatives?
While the systemic breadth and critical mass of white supremacy permits contributions
from almost any source, it is ultimately reliant upon adherence from those who it appears to
benefit most. Afterall, white supremacy concentrates its greatest reservoirs of power and
significance beneath the purview of an ever-shrinking cohort of white men. It is this
disproportionate allocation of the resources of (re)production that often stifles attempts to
organize the social per the desires of those rendered as lesser, which would necessarily involve
the dissolution of white masculinity as a marker of inherent superiority. As mentioned, I am a
white man and, though I am not exceedingly wealthy, my intuition for navigating my habitat has
been cultivated through myths of my prospective ascent – in competition with and above others.

3
I have been rewarded with status and economic opportunity by leveraging the advantages of my
identity while, at times, permitting myself to believe that such rewards were solely the result of
my “hard work,” my “work ethic,” my “work product,” deemed superlative by knowing arbiters
of access. I have been primed to further the project of white supremacy for my own attainment
and, should I gain power, to reinscribe pathways to attainment for those seemingly “like me”
while erecting impediments for those who differ. If I carefully insulated myself against critique
(like those developed in Black studies, Indigenous studies, decolonial theory, queer theory, and
feminist theory) only associating and engaging with those who collude (knowingly or without
awareness) to maintain such an insulation, I could pursue this version of myself with a sense of
virtue and dignity. This situation is toxic, both for white men and for everyone else (though in
meaningfully differing manners of experience and effect).
As white supremacy is highly amenable to narcissistic impulses, I admit that a portion of
my disdain for its narrative is self-involved: I feel increasingly harmed by pressures to compete,
individuate, supersede, grow, and produce in the face of a system that, though designed “for me,”
seems to be deepening its discriminations to the extent that I, myself, might be ejected from its
circle of favor. While I possess many of the “right” attributes, my inclusion in white supremacy’s
designs depreciates so long as I continue to fail to become a prolific generator of financial wealth
for myself and would-be employers. In white supremacy’s contemporary form (neoliberalism),
speculative economic potential is given grandiose weight relative to other facets of identity
(though it never completely overrides other markers of dysselection) and, to the extent one is
lacking in this facet, one may be relegated to sub-prime status despite other auspicious qualities.
In an explicitly selfish manner, I feel progressively less significant relative to what I was
enculturated to believe I ought to be; this diminishment hurts.

4
And in what I hope is an unfurling of empathy, I have come to understand that the
expectations I have carried for how my significance should be recognized, those entitlements I
felt owed, were always-already harmful to the majority of others to begin with, were in fact born
of dispossession and the suffering it bestows on those dispossessed. Insofar as my significance
was to be predicated on comparative superiority, I was motivated to assert my capacity for
competitive achievement whenever possible: as a student, as a worker, as a friend and family
member and partner, I sought accolades that would distinguish me as “better-than.” Further,
insofar as my identity conferred upon me systemic advantages, I had access to resources of
attainment not because of any virtues I might have boasted but, rather, because I had already
been selected for achievement from the outset. In brief, by blithely accepting my “good fortune”
as deserved (or even earned), I dissolved the possibility of affinity between me and those who,
from their various vantages outside the locus of white supremacy, knew otherwise.
For those not hailed by white supremacy’s calls to power, I can imagine how I might
appear: aloof, pompous, callous, selfish, duplicitous, sharkish. Further, I recognize how my
internalized prejudices against those unlike me have damaged my ability to be worthy of trust,
for my way of being amongst other people critically contributes to a social system that cruelly
marks so many as “lesser.” Further still, though I can have no memory or intuition of experiences
beyond my own, I can fathom how it might feel to exist outside myself and as someone
persistently harmed by the system of significance that simultaneously elevates me while
undermining them; there is suffering, exhaustion, sadness, trauma, and premature death there,
though I cannot speak of its emotional and psychic contours with any familiarity.
None of this is intended to serve as self-flagellation; I write this to locate the perspective
of my research, to articulate the limitations and desires such a perspective enshrouds. Frankly, I

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do not want to exist this way, atomized and alone, angling to matter by behaving as the
proverbial crab in a bucket of crabs such that my vertical position can only be secured atop the
writhing bodies of others. I desire to feel significant, yes, but not because someone else was cast
down. I would find significance because of relations of affinity, not relations of subordination.
Latent in existence, in ontology, there are shared bases of matter and mattering, endemic to all
forms, recognized and overlooked. Might we turn to such phenomena and reorient the stories we
tell of what we are and who we might be? That is what the writing of this dissertation has meant
to me, the study of how harm presently circulates and the hope to imagine how care might be
coaxed to flow as well, or perhaps instead. In some ways, this is an activist project, a fact which
puts this project in uneasy friction with theories that posit the extraordinarily limited capacity for
people to “intend” a specific desired change into being. For the sake of clarity and your possible
response, I will propose ideas for actions one might take to attempt to instigate certain kinds of
change, though I will do so with an understanding that such proposals can only ever be impulses
towards beginnings with unpredictable effects, never “solutions” that will resolve the “problems”
against which one struggles.
So again: can you trust me? This is not for me or you to “decide,” but rather trust is an
emergent property of time spent in company, of experience and sociality as they are oriented by
the unforeseeable procession of being. Instead, I will only ask that you approach the reading of
this text with curiosity, remain open to the possibility that I have done the same in its writing,
and allow for the imagination that you and I might be mutually (if asymmetrically) affected by
our relation such that we both feel cared-for, supported, loved. I believe that is where we could
begin.

6
Anticipation
Before anticipating the contents of the chapters to come, allow me to clarify my
invocation of white supremacy as I will be referring to it and its derivative elements frequently.
Legal scholar Frances Lee Ansley provides an oft-cited explanation of the term that will serve as
a helpful starting point:
By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious
racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political,
economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control
power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white
superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white
dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad
array of institutions and social settings. (1024)

In Ansley’s account, white supremacy is an historical and ongoing process by which white
people progressively accumulate and protect a position of social and material advantage over
others, particularly through the immiseration of Black people (and, we might add, Indigenous
people as well). Within whiteness, bell hooks argues there is a further degree of gender
subordination that is intended to ensure the “perpetuation of the white race”: “It is in the interest
of continued white racist domination of the planet for white patriarchy to maintain control over
all women's bodies” (53). White supremacy, then, is not solely a system of racial domination but
also one that orders social position through recognition of gender. Because white supremacy has
traditionally been fixated on making its discriminations on the basis of seeming appearances
(Phelan 10-11), I will focus my analysis on how it is expressed culturally in terms of white
masculinity, which itself relates to the ability to successfully present oneself as a white man and,
to the extent such a presentation is broadly recognized, receive benefits from the supremacist
system denied to others.

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However, as I will elaborate in the following two chapters, I do not believe it is sufficient
to limit our understanding of white supremacy/masculinity to interpretive markers of race and
gender alone. Though representation has a heavy symbolic weight in the visually-driven cultures
of the United States, there are less phenotypically-derived aspects of one’s identity that come to
matter in determining competitive standing. Key among these elements are one’s perceived
capacity to generate wealth, one’s demonstrations of “wellness” (an index for able-bodiedness
and lack of illness), one’s officially conferred education, and one’s alignment with notions of
Protestant work ethic and Christian eschatology (the belief that virtuous behavior is to be
rewarded with a deathless afterlife). In legal terms, it is the intersection of such identity
categories that have long determined whether or not a particular entity is granted personhood and
the state protections personhood in said to guarantee. Socially, one’s proximity to whiteness,
masculinity, ability, wealth, education, and Christianity positively correlate with access to
significance and power in American institutions. Therefore, I will use the term “white
masculinity” (for its recognition of the politics of recognition) as a cypher for the implicit
valorizing of property-holding, “healthy”-bodied, educated, Christianity-inclined subjects within
white supremacy’s evident promotion of white men.
This dissertation is broadly a response to my own relationship to white masculinity and
my attempt to not only dissolve its framing of the world within my own thinking, but to share an
imagination for how others might do the same. From this dissolution, space and energy might be
freed to concoct a different prevailing story of the social that attributes significance to co-
constitutive care rather than white masculine domination. While the overwhelming inertia of
white power in the United States may seem inexorable, interventions need not “solve” the
“problem” of white masculinity in a single gesture, but rather might be begun, iterated upon, and

8
mutated in a collaborative and longitudinal effort. Just as the establishment of whiteness as a
narrative of superiority has developed over centuries of struggle, so too might a different
reckoning of relations emerge that excises violent exclusion and elevates sociality (the sense that
wellbeing is founded in cooperation rather than competition). Therefore, I propose: first, an
analysis of the social’s present form and its harms; second, an imagination of an “otherwise”
form of the social that could counter those harms; and third, a concrete means by which to enact
such an otherwise in the present while continually reorienting those analyses and imaginaries
that instigate action.
In the first chapter, “Bodies Corporate: Neoliberal Subjectivity,” I attend to neoliberalism
as not only an economic theory, but further as a contemporary instantiation of white supremacy
that attempts to launder white masculine cultural values in the language of pervasive economic
rationality. The coevolution of liberal humanism and capitalism, steeped as they are in slavery
and genocide and colonial exploitation, are genealogical predecessors to and fundamentally
contiguous with neoliberalism, whose “new” element of codifying all cultural activity in terms of
potential economic value serves largely to exacerbate the dispossessive accumulation already
underway in eras prior, for the benefit of white men. I contend that this preoccupation with
speculative wealth (built upon generational wealth already accrued) yields a “neoliberal
subjectivity,” a genre of the self by which one is made meaningful to the extent that they
demonstrate an endlessly-increasing potential for the realization of economic growth, a
subjectivity that is, in the United States, disproportionately made accessible to white men. Per
neoliberal subjectivity, self-actualization ought to be achieved through success in competition,
the individual acquisition of property, and the rejection of the socialization of any property one
acquires.

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Neoliberal subjectivity finds its basis in the legal form of the corporation, an artificial
person whose material structure permits the possibility of immortality. Should the corporation
gain a monopoly position in a vital societal sector, the social necessity for the corporation’s
ongoing existence, its having become “too big to fail,” can ensure that the corporation will be
given all the resources of the state to enable its survival under any circumstances. Insofar as the
neoliberal subject has as its goal infinite growth forever, the corporation’s access to immortality
becomes the aspirational model for personhood. Under neoliberalism, certain human people
begin to behave like corporate people, viewing their relations with others as opportunities to gain
advantage, extract, subsume. The anti-sociality of neoliberal subjectivity normalizes
immiseration, the process by which the livelihoods of marginalized people are increasingly
squeezed of energy and resources to enhance profitability for an ever-consolidating cabal of
corporate shareholders. This anti-sociality is distributed throughout American culture via the
predominant economic activity known as “work,” where the aggregate of workers battling to
maintain their precarious earnings while being asked to offer escalating productivity leaves a
lessening possibility of regenerative wellbeing in its wake; the teleology of neoliberalism is
increasingly understood to be wholescale burnout.
I argue that neoliberal subjectivity, for its pursuit of immortality, is ironically
coterminous with its own accelerating death and that, despite its persuasions, has already begun
to lose the consent of many of the white men it once seemed to serve. Neoliberalism is in
decline, its imperatives for exponential growth exceeding the Earth’s available resources and
requiring the subsumption of white men who have long been relatively unscathed by its harms.
As white men lose access to the sense that a certain kind of personal immortality might be
attained through economic productivity, there opens the possibility that the hoarded resources

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beneath the purview of white masculinity might be reallocated to peoples and places in
accordance with a different system significance, one that prioritizes the ongoingness of the social
rather than that of the possessive individual (who, on his own and without returning that which
he has taken, cannot reproduce the world of people; for all his possessions, he withholds that
which life requires).
The following chapter, “Becoming the Corpse: Necrontology,” propagates from
neoliberalism’s corpse-to-come and asks that we turn our social attentions towards ontology,
considerations of the terms of existence and what it means to be under those terms. Since at least
the 1980s neoliberalism has promoted a “corporate ontology” in which its subjects are compelled
to pursue exponential growth as the proper mode of materiality. By this ontological standard,
only those things that tend to get more massive with time ought to exist in the long term,
transforming Darwinistic notions of competition and survival from matters of sufficiency into
imperatives to absorb, consolidate, consume, and expand. The corporation, as an entity that is
capable of accumulating resources that would aspirationally challenge even the wealth of nation
states, apparently possesses both the longevity and the (legal) personhood to realize infinite
concentrations of property and, thus, power. Insofar as neoliberal subjects have been taught to
admire and covet the immortality and accumulative capacity of the corporation, they have also
learned to eschew processes of dying and the moment of death as vectors of failure. Within an
ontological system that insists upon accelerating growth in perpetuity, death and dying can only
be aberrations, an excessive penalty for failing to adequately express one’s growth potential.
However, there is a fundamental flaw in corporate ontology’s narrative of the material:
not only do human people die, but in fact all forms are thermodynamically engaged in decay
(though, depending on the form, sometimes at rates that are imperceptible to humans). The

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instant that any form, as an organized concentration of energy, comes into proximity with
another form, energy will tend to flow from the highly organized to the disorganized,
disincorporating that which once seemed to be so clearly defined and bounded in its proprietary
shape. Without the continuous application of energy from “outside” itself, any given form will
eventually make its composite of materials available to other forms; while corporate ontologists
would employ dispossession as their core tactic to counter such decay, it is only because decay is
so persistently at work that their dispossessions must accelerate to keep pace with the scale of
their accrued mass. This preoccupation with extracting at careening speeds to meet the demands
of neoliberalism’s institutional heft generates what critical theorist McKenzie Wark calls
“metabolic rift,” the cessation of cycles of renewal instigated by capitalist expropriation and
hoarding (xiii). Such a rift, perpetrated under the auspices of “plenty,” yields tremendous
ecological and social calamity (climate change, famine, drought, pandemic, war, genocide),
effects that ultimately tend to increase the moment-to-moment likelihood of death for the
majority of the world’s peoples.
Perhaps counterintuitively, as neoliberalism’s death spiral begins to increasingly foist its
dispossessions upon the poorer of those white masculine subjects who it once offered to
protect, I propose a reorientation of the prevailing white-masculine story of ontology that
could recast death and dying, not as humiliating signs of defeat, but as the grounds upon
which difference can find affinity and from which pervasive wellbeing can be discovered.
This rewriting, which I name necrontology, is a call to recognize, understand, and accept
the thermodynamism of form and to cultivate relations of mutual care in the face of the
vulnerability and precarity brought on by decay. As a direct response to the psychological
makeup of the neoliberal subject, necrontology is not intended to establish death and

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dying as joyful, for there is much sadness in the passing of those people and things that
provide comfort, elation, and love. Rather, necrontology involves a refusal to deny death
as a vital facet of being, as the wellspring from which all that is once emerged. Instead of
gazing at the corporation with anxious envy (for the human person can never achieve the
immortality the corporation promises), erstwhile neoliberal subjects might offer their
courtesies to that form we all share in our inevitable becoming: the corpse, that version of
the self that totally forfeits consciousness and self-possession so that new forms might
cohere and, in doing so, usher in the arrival of otherwise.
In the final chapter, “To Begin: Performance as Prefigurative Praxis,” I propose a method
of research through which neoliberal subjectivity and necrontology may be positioned in direct
tension; practitioners understand their study to include both material-cultural analysis and active
participation in the affecting of that material-cultural content. This method, performance as
prefigurative praxis (PPP), incorporates queer notions of performance, the sociological concept
of prefiguration, and a synthesis of Hannah Arendt and Sylvia Wynter’s respective
understandings of praxis. It provides an iterative, collaborative, and concrete framework for
troubling ways of being and doing that would reinscribe neoliberal logics and emphasize the
generative capacities of decay. In practicing PPP, it is assumed that there is no teleological
outcome to be achieved if only the proper steps are followed, no ideal system of social
organization that might be realized. Rather, PPP is premised on the necrontological insistence
that dissipation’s persistence will consistently produce the need for responsive and mutational
reckonings of relation. There is no resolution to ultimately become, only acts of becoming.
Drawing from the scholarship of performance studies theorists Amelia Jones, José
Esteban Muñoz, and Jon McKenzie (as well as sociologist Erving Goffman), I situate

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“performance” as witnessed doing that, with or without intention, articulates relational being,
perceived action that affects and effects both what it means and what it’s like to be “us” (and,
crucially, the psychic, social, and material stakes for those who “us” omits). The ontological
conflation of doing and being diminishes narratives of essence, stories in which there is a proper
and true form that determines the total territory of personal possibility, and “open[s] all
identifications and meanings to relational exchanges” (Jones xvi). That is to say, it is through
performance that the self is not only disclosed, but produced, again and again; the self is changed
by encounters (with other “selves,” with one’s habitat, with discourse) as it does not proceed
such encounters, but rather is constituted by them.
Given that change is implicated in performance (even if certain performances are
activated with an aim of stifling change), how might one reconcile their performances with the
desires they hold for “otherwise,” alternative social formations that offer wisdom not held in the
“common sense” of prevailing cultural narratives? One tactic involves attempting to perform
prefiguration, “concrete processes of anticipating a better future in the present, in heterotopic
spaces created to that end” (Dinerstein 2). While PPP does not proclaim the pursuit of any
specific future to be its single-minded purpose, it can be helpful for practitioners to have a
provisional milepost in mind to orient their experimentation. Prefiguration provides a basis for
collaborators to suggest the sort of world they might like to inhabit and, in contrast to such a
world, identify those features of the prevailing world which differ from that which is desired.
The enunciation of desires (those that are shared and those that are in friction), when taken to
only ever be partially comprehended by those who hold them, lends specificity to concerns and
hopes held by collaborators and allows for the ideation of performances that might be “tried out,”

14
performances that depart from those that reproduce the status quo and might generate new and
surprising effects (in the world and in practitioners themselves).
Key to PPP, however, is the understanding that no prefiguration ought to be
determinative of one’s performances in perpetuity. As practitioners attempt to instantiate
otherwise, it is accepted that the experience of their performances will imbue them with an
evolving sense not only of prevailing systems of social organization, but also of what they desire
– and what sort of otherwise would accommodate those desires. In resistance to urges to ossify
and foreclose (to fix forms in place once and for all), I turn to praxis as both the social
phenomenon by which every action introduces a new “beginning” from which established
circumstances may depart (Arendt 178) and the idea that to be “human” is to be always-already
entangled with praxis (Wynter and McKittrick 23). When prefigurative performances are
reckoned as praxis, there can be no zealotry for a singular acceptable outcome as each foray
towards otherwise opens unanticipated avenues for further exploration. Accordingly, the designs
of one’s prefigurative performances must be ongoingly reimagined anew.
I terminate this final chapter with a set of specific prefigurative performances of
necrontology (against neoliberal subjectivity) that would benefit from praxis-based iteration,
including the collection and redistribution of shed hair as a source of horticultural nutrition, a
manner of introducing oneself that forefronts what it might mean to “inhabit one’s dying” rather
than one’s professional occupation, and a ritual by which one’s prospective date of death is
tabulated and made known (in a similar fashion to one’s date of birth). While each of these
performances is highly context dependent and particular to my own experiences and social
situations, I hope that such particularity will permit readers to gain a sense of how PPP might be

15
applied to their local environments, on the terms of their social relations as they happen to
perceive them.
I conclude this dissertation with a brief rumination on neoliberalized academia and how
the urgent efforts towards care and wellbeing taken under its banner may be more
necrontologically socialized, shared, and extended – beyond the boundaries that would
encourage scholars to turn forever inward, back towards the academy for its approval and insular
status-granting. As expressed earlier in this introduction, though I cannot and would not demand
trust in my work and my word, I desire to be in circulation with others who are likewise
compelled by sociality and are curious about that which is beyond their present estimation of the
world. In so many ways, I’m dying to be in affinity with you, to be told your stories of what it
means to matter and to permit such stories to affect those that I would tell. What follows, this
performance of scholarship, is my effort to offer the same to you.

16
CHAPTER 1
BODIES CORPORATE: NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY
Hegemony in Mutation
At the moment of this writing, the prevailing hegemonic order within the United States of
America is steeped in neoliberalism, a term whose meaning appears to be as evasive as the
unending growth its proponents would guarantee (for the deserving). For some, neoliberalism is
a “regime of [political] truth” that posits the following: “the individual’s freedom to choose in
the market is the highest, and in fact the only, form of freedom”; “market competition is the best
way to order and govern society’; and “individuals are personally responsible for their lives and
outcomes, not the powerful structures that govern them” (Wilson 52). For others, it is “a creed
that prizes free trade and the free movement of capital, goods, and people… [that] celebrates
deregulation as an economic good that results when governments can no longer interfere with
the operation of markets… [and that] valorizes cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the
product of open borders and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse
peoples” (Gerstle 5). For others still, it is “from the very beginning a project to achieve the
restoration of class power” (Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism 15). Amidst these various
stories of neoliberalism and its significance, I argue that neoliberalism is fundamentally a
deception, the laundering of a certain desire for domination in the costume of universal economic
rationality. Further, I argue that this costume has become so threadbare that the audience it once
enchanted can no longer suspend their disbelief; as a narrative for organizing the social
imaginary of a significant population of US citizens (including a sense of what it means to
“matter” and what sorts of performances might cast one as “mattering”), neoliberalism is
unraveling, revealing the violent impulse that spurred its origins and leaving its favored subjects
to reckon with systems of exploitation they have long been enabled to disregard.

17
Before addressing neoliberalism’s underlying impulse and naming it, it will be helpful to
first account for my understanding of the concept of hegemony, the social phenomenon by which
the prevalence and influence of specific meaning making systems are continuously and
contentiously negotiated. Though hegemony is often associated with the notion of a political
“center” which holds society in its gravity, I prefer the more complicated rendering of the
premise offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their influential 1985 text Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy. For Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is not an immutable imposition of
what the social must be but an iterative unfolding of relational differences:
Hegemony is, quite simply, a political type of relation, a form, if one so
wishes, of politics; but not a determinable location within a topography of
the social. In a given social formation, there can be a variety of hegemonic
nodal points. Evidently some of them may be highly overdetermined: they
may constitute points of condensation of a number of social relations and,
thus, become the focal point of a multiplicity of totalizing effects. But
insofar as the social is an infinitude not reducible to any underlying
unitary principle, the mere idea of a centre of the social has no meaning at
all. (139)

Hegemony is not a dominant ideology imposed upon the social, but rather hegemony emerges
from the social as an expression of differential (and sometimes contradictory) desires, needs, and
systems of significance that are held, simultaneously, amongst different people in cultural
proximity. To the extent that there appears to be a prevailing hegemonic order (political relations
that dictate how a society ought to be organized), such an order must be actively reproduced in
the behaviors, beliefs, and material circumstances of a critical mass of people in that society.
Further, such an order can only ever be a temporary “hegemonic articulation” of the differences
among people, as those very differences produce “the presence of antagonistic forces and the
instability of the frontiers that separate them” (Laclau and Mouffe 136). If neoliberalism is a
prevailing hegemonic order, then we ought to be curious about which desires, needs, and modes

18
of meaning making it privileges and why. And if neoliberalism is dying (though certainly far
from dead), we should investigate what sort of hegemonic articulations are forming amidst its
rot.
It is in the throes of this present hegemonic mutation that many are coming to recognize
that which has been apparent to some since the practical inception of neoliberalism in the 1970s:
neoliberalism is not predominantly orientated towards the possibility of total human
emancipation through egalitarian (if brutal) free market principles, but rather exists as a
continuation of the United States’ tradition of masculine white supremacy, rooted in in the dual
legal concepts of personhood and property (and, thus, the ability to gain and hold wealth).
Despite neoliberalism’s narratives of “colorblindness” and “Lean-In feminism,” white
supremacy has always been behind the curtain of its hegemonic order. Recognizing that explicit
appeals to white supremacy had limited currency for winning democratic consent following the
civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1960s, centers of white masculine power made
strategic political and corporate investments that would see a furthering of their wealth and
influence, which they explicitly viewed as being under threat (Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism). By routing dispossessive oppression away from its more overt and interpersonal
forms and towards seemingly diffused and pervasive systemic forms, the project of neoliberalism
yielded (for many white Americans) the appearance of social progress while letting loose the
reality of accelerating flows of inequality and wealth concentration. For a time, these flows
largely benefitted those within the matrix of white masculine identity and either bypassed or
actively harmed those who fell outside it.
Following the subprime mortgage crisis and the resulting collapse of the global economy
in 2008, systems of exploitation long targeted towards America’s non-white-masculine

19
population were revealed for the harm they could levee on certain white men as well. As
neoliberalism began to lose its capacity to organize white identity due to its internal
contradictions (a promise of perpetual and generation growth belied by a perceived reduction in
economic [and, thus, cultural] standing), its hegemonic viability entered a death spiral that
continues to this day. The diminishment of a persuasive narrative to guide white social
organization in the United States has set in motion the present battle for a succeeding hegemonic
order: on the one hand, a resurgence of the explicitly white supremacist political ideology that
had been suppressed (though absolutely not eradicated) in previous decades and, on the other, an
ideology that identifies oppression along lines of economic inequality and calls for the
redistribute of concentrated wealth as its remedy.
The former ideology, an authoritarian ethnonationalism popularly represented by the
figure of Donald Trump, faults neoliberalism for its supposed cosmopolitan/elitist qualities,
qualities that would deprive resources and opportunities from “deserving” individuals (e.g.,
white men) of resources and opportunities in favor of cultivating a collectivized society
dependent on an empowered, global cabal of bureaucrats. The latter ideology, which has
alignments with democratic socialism and is most prominently associated with Bernie Sanders,
attempts to account for the immiseration of “99%” of those inhabiting the United States in terms
of corporate and financial greed enabled by a collusive government. While the Trumpist
hegemonic front embraces white supremacy as the “greatness” with which America might be
“made again,” the Sanders front frames its project through a lens of electoral politics that might
bring “the 1%” to heel via regulation of economic activity and the provisioning of a more
expansive social welfare system. Though they vociferously reject the racial and misogynistic
aspersions fomented by Trumpists, white Sanders supporters do not popularly recognize the

20
masculine white supremacy in their own cultural practices as a site for intervention, perhaps
because in many instances such cultural practices contribute to systems of white supremacy
despite the interpersonal intentions of their practitioners. For completely different reasons, both
ascendent hegemonic fronts in American politics fail to contend with the damaging tendencies of
white supremacy in their prospective rewriting of the social order and, thus, both are likely to
further the concentrations of power and influence that have so marked the neoliberal age (though
the Trumpist front would do so with an intensity and malice that radically outpaces the program
offered by Sanders).
In this chapter, I first articulate some of the key concepts in American legal and
philosophical history that contributed to the establishment of neoliberalism as the prevailing
hegemonic order in the United States. These concepts were developed in service of the
preservation and expansion of masculine white supremacy. I then describe the neoliberal subject
as reckoned in neoliberalism’s waning days, modelled on the form of the legal (ostensibly
raceless and genderless) person known as the corporation, an entity that, in order to secure its
sustenance in the form of financing, must claim that its body will grow at an exponential rate,
indefinitely, so as to deliver “value” to shareholders. This alignment with the corporate form of
personhood ultimately normalizes dispossession as a virtue, if not the virtue, of white masculine
culture in America. I further discuss how neoliberalism has become ontologically unviable as a
means to achieve the aims of masculine white supremacy, its imperatives for endless
accumulation cannibalizing the neoliberal subjects required to reproduce its systems in the first
place. Finally, in that these circumstances are creating a vacuum for white identity, I conclude
with some considerations as to what sort of “otherwise(s)” might be possible for those unmoored
subjects floating in the wake of neoliberalism’s corpse to come.

21
(Neo)Liberalism as a White Masculine Cultural Formation
Centuries prior to the onset of neoliberalism, the United States was established on
principles of personhood and property, with persons being those capable of asserting rights
(protected by the authority of a government) and the ability to possess property being one such
right, a legal determination of who could own and dispose of a given “thing” in accordance with
their will. Such principles are central to liberalism, a philosophical outgrowth of the eighteenth-
century European Enlightenment, which proposes a certain model of “the human” as an agent of
“possessive individualism” and where to be a coherent subject is to be in “possession of private
property and individual rights” (Wilson 64). With such property and rights on hand, the human,
per C.B. Macpherson in his 1962 text The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, is
“essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them”
such that “human essence is freedom from the wills of others, and freedom is a function of
possession" (qtd. in Hayles 3). Liberalism’s ratification of the human had limited applicability
from the outset given that only a narrow contingent of people were eligible to hold possessions
under the protection of Western law: with few exceptions, landed white men. Therefore,
liberalism was formed in its recognition that it was white men and only white men who were
imbued with the natural ability, the inalienable right, to shape (acquire and dispose of) the world
in accordance with their knowing intentions.
In a white supremacist hegemonic order, to be outside the category of white masculinity
is to be relegated to only partial or negated subjecthood, an “other” always in relative
subordination to the proper human. Given liberalism’s casting of all others as naturally marginal
it follows that, pending some sort of incorporation into the body of what cultural theorist Sylvia
Wynter refers to as “Man” (the “selected” genre of person whose very being emerges from his

22
contrast to those who have been “dysselected” (10)), those others can be assumed not only to be
bereft of the ability to possess, but can be further reduced to objects of possession (evident in the
structures of chattel slavery and the prior legal dependence of wives upon their husbands). In
such a system, race and gender become the apparent visual markers by which Man can be
recognized. To be perceived as white and masculine permits a level of access to the domain of
Man and its accompanying freedoms and capacities for significance, while to be seen as anything
else is to be routed towards subjugation and meaninglessness. This is the foundation of white
supremacy as a cultural formation.
In invoking the term “cultural formation,” I draw from cultural studies pioneer Stuart
Hall’s troubling of the concept of culture. He describes culture as being neither “the sum of the
available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common
experiences,” nor a set of “social practices” (59), nor an ideology the generates “unconscious
categories through which conditions are represented and lived” (66), but instead an ongoing
clash of appearances, behaviors, experiences, ideas, unconscious inclinations, and established
systems of social organization that produce tensions and contradictions in a particular place and
time. For Hall, culture is “a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations
are both established and potentially unsettled” (Procter 2). Thus, liberalism, as a white
supremacist cultural formation, offers a contestation of the supremacy of white masculinity
against conditions that might suggest its illegitimacy. In this way, liberalism holds a history that
is not only predicated on the idea of the elevated status of white masculine identity, but also the
actions undertaken to prohibit diminishment of that status in order to preserve the relative
superiority of white men and inferiority of others.

23
With the establishment of liberalism, the boundaries confining Man become fortifications
to be defended – for if more people were permitted to be human, then there would be a double
threat to the perceived significance of those who benefit from Manhood:
—Given that liberalism promises rewards for those who accumulate the most under the
purview of “the self,” having more selves (humans) capable of achieving possession
creates additional pressures of competition, making it more difficult to secure
significance vis-à-vis possession (it becomes tendentially harder to possess in competition
against others).
—Further, given that the social construction of Man is conjoined to the countervailing
construction of “the other,” any reduction in the distinction between Man and non-Man
proceeds to eliminate the subjective category of Man, along with its guarantees of rights
and property as a marker of superior significance.
Black studies scholar Alexander Weheliye emphasizes that it is the conservation of the
supremacy afforded by white masculinity that motivates the comprehensive political project of
anti-Black racism: “I construe race, racialization, and racial identities as ongoing sets of political
relations that require, through constant perpetuation via institutions, discourses, practices,
desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural
artifacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in
the modern west” (3). Liberalism’s affinity with white supremacy is a mutually reinforcing affair
that requires active reproduction in order to be maintained. This means that insistences
concerning any “essential” qualities of racial difference are effortful endeavors, that “race” must
be erected over and over again in order to secure the privileges/exploitations conferred by
liberalism’s legacy of racial categorization. Liberalism’s aim to establish “Man as master-

24
subject” (Weheliye 8) has only ever been steeped in hypocrisy, as claims to the universal
category of Man have always been predicated on the material, psychic, and emotional
exploitation of “the other,” those who are barred from the category of “the human” (again,
Wynter’s “dysselected”).
Though there are aspects of liberal discourse that appear amenable to a recognition of the
plural (abstract overtures to democratic social organization [so long as the “wrong people” don’t
get the vote], abstract guarantees of freedom [so long as some freedoms are “freer” than others],
abstract emphases on the significance of each “life” [so long as there are stipulations as to who
may possess a “life”]), the potentially plural aspects of the liberal project have always been far
more rhetorical than actually enacted. Such overtures to egalitarianism function as conceptual
armor that protects against the undermining of that same rhetoric on grounds of de facto
hypocrisy; justice is always on the way, though it never arrives. As we continue to discuss the
putative “economic rationality” of neoliberalism, we must remember that its foundational
liberalism was inaugurated in and advanced through a culture of slavery, apartheid, imperialism,
colonialism, genocide, and holocaust. Neoliberalism in the contemporary United States does not
depart from this history.
Beyond its notion of personhood as ensconced in Man, liberalism also promotes a highly
particular premise of property, a premise whose practical consequences ensure wealth and power
are, first, concentrated in the hands of white men and, second, are exponentially proliferated in
their mass across generational inheritance. This sort of property is based on the notion of
“improvement,” a concept that has long mobilized liberalism’s moral justifications and was
critical to the development of nascent forms of capitalism. Though in quotidian speech to
improve something is to make it “better” (and that, in general, this a good thing to do), political

25
historian Ellen Meiksins Wood explains that the term has an explicitly economic origin: “The
word ‘improve’ itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just ‘make better’ in a general sense
but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land for profit”
(106). Profit for whom?; likely he (Man) who possesses the material to be cultivated. And how
does one come to possess something that, prior to such possession, could not be claimed by any
individual? It is here where we receive the circular logic of the “labour theory of property.” As
ordained by one of liberalism’s lauded founders, John Locke, in his seminal 1689 Second
Treatise of Government: “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use
the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the
common.” “Virtuous” labor begets ownership and, consequently, any recognition of property
carries with it the assumption of some preceding virtuous labor on the part of the owner. In other
words, baked into the rationality of liberalism is the economic principle that ownership is just to
the extent that law codifies any particular instance of ownership.
What happens when a property claim is not recognized or a particular material relation is
not conceived of in terms of liberal property? In the United States, where the twin specters of
Indigenous genocide/dispossession and Black slavery coincide with the nation’s founding, the
liberal theory of property and its recasting as capital proceeds like so: in the case of Indigenous
genocide/dispossession, Indigenous studies scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson identifies the
discursive-linguistic trick by which Man avails himself of the ability to take what apparently
belongs to others: the categorizing of those others as “incommensurable savages” (49). To
construct Indigenous peoples as inherently “savage” is to create a foil against which Man may
come to recognize himself as fully human, capable of possession. Likewise, to cast the
Indigenous as “non-people” eliminates, for them, the very possibility of liberal possession,

26
including the possession of “life,” for to possess is the purview of persons. Upon this racial basis
alone, Man imagines he may partake of his “primitive accumulation” (Harvey, The New
Imperialism 149) and, when desirable, put the Indigenous to death to assist in that accumulation.
If that were not ample justification for dispossession, there is the further economic
premise that “[e]ven if land is occupied by Indigenous peoples, and even if they make use of the
land themselves, their land is still open to legitimate colonial expropriation… [because] the
creation of value, from ‘improvement’ that enhances exchange value, implies not only that mere
occupancy is not enough to establish property rights… but also that insufficiently productive and
profitable agriculture… effectively constitutes waste” (Wood 158). In other words, so long as a
(non-)people are not sufficiently improving the market value of the matter that surrounds them, it
is the prerogative of others who might better capitalize that matter to claim it and properly
introduce it to the market. The Indigenous peoples of North America (and elsewhere), by virtue
of neither existing as people nor as agents within European market relations, had no legal
property rights to their land and, thus, settler-colonists had a moral obligation to take that land,
occupy it, and improve it.
In the case of Black slavery, Black studies theorist Cedric Robinson argues that the very
possibility of a global capitalist order emerged only when “African labor power as slave labor
was integrated into the organic composition of nineteenth-century manufacturing and industrial
capitalism,” with states and businesses becoming “entirely dependent on the existence of slavery
and long-distance trade” for the maintenance of economic growth (113-114). In establishing
slave labor as the engine for the proliferation of global capitalism, the logics of liberal possession
had to provide a moral justification for denying certain people (Black slaves) the rights to
possess themselves. Through her analysis of archival accounts of slavery in the United States,

27
Saidiya Hartman stresses the role slavery played in establishing, in the minds of white men, both
Black and white subjectivities in North America and examines how such whiteness relied on the
form of the commodified slave to secure its own significance: “the fungibility of the commodity
makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’
feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the
surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the
sign of his power and domination” (21).
Within the reckonings of slavery, we observe economic, legal, and affective predicates
for the instantiation of the (white male) liberal subject, allowing for “enjoyment” to be won in
exchange for harm so long as that harmed other exists in a subordinate property relation. As
Hartman notes in citing Black’s Law Dictionary, the standard “definitional” text in US law first
published in 1891, this enjoyment confers “[c]omfort, consolation, contentment, ease, happiness,
pleasure and satisfaction. Such includes the beneficial use, interest, and purpose to which
property may be put, and implies rights to profits and incomes therefrom” (qtd. in Hartman 23).
Enjoyment, that happiness which each Man has an inalienable right to “pursue,” permits not only
juridically condoned pleasure from the systemic suffering enacted upon those excluded from the
category of Man, but also asserts that such suffering may be leveraged for profit, for
improvement, enhancing the social significance of Man in inverse correlation to the relative
significance of those rendered as not persons but property.
These histories of denied sovereignty erect a world in which anything that is of value
(and has ever been of value) following originary capitalism is “understood” (per the logic of
jurisprudential liberalism) to predominantly be the product of white masculine efforts towards
improvement. There is, in the foundational presumption of the categorical superiority of Man

28
over other “less human” entities, an a priori moral justification for the inordinately
disproportionate distribution of possession we continue to see to the present. This is to say, when
the idea of a “free market” of fair competition is invoked in defense of capitalism – to the extent
that those who are not white men might be now be permitted to participate in such a market in
limited ways – the obliterating mass of what was accumulated during centuries of exclusion
provides what seems to be an insurmountable advantage in the tendency for possession to beget
more possession (exacerbated by the late-capitalistic compulsion to consume); Man goes on
through capitalism, despite attempts to dissolve him through struggles for social justice,
decolonization, feminism, abolition, redistribution, and reparation.
If originary liberalism and its culture of white supremacist property relations are co-
constitutive hegemonic fronts that run through the history of the United States, what is “new”
about neoliberalism and what effect has this had on white identity? Without attributing the rise of
neoliberalism to a single source, Marxist geographer David Harvey nonetheless points to the
clandestine 1971 “Powell Memo” as a key moment of consolidation in neoliberal thinking in the
United States, a time when the increasing prevalence of social justice and socialist discourses,
decreasing corporate rates of profit, and the horrific incoherence of the war in Vietnam were
threatening to undermine capitalism’s persuasive hold over meaningful swaths of the United
States populace. Per Harvey:
In the US case I begin with a confidential memo sent by Lewis Powell to
the US Chamber of Commerce in August 1971. Powell, about to be
elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, argued that criticism of
and opposition to the US free enterprise system had gone too far and that
“the time had come – indeed it is long overdue – for the wisdom,
ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against
those who would destroy it.” Powell argued that individual action was
insufficient. “Strength,” he wrote, “lies in organization, in careful long-
range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an
indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through

29
joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action
and national organizations.” The National Chamber of Commerce, he
argued, should lead an assault upon the major institutions – universities,
schools, the media, publishing, the courts – in order to change how
individuals think “about the corporation, the law, culture, and the
individual.” US businesses did not lack resources for such an effort,
particularly when pooled. (A Brief History of Neoliberalism 43)

In Harvey’s narrative of liberalism’s shift into its “new” form, there is an embedded sense that in
the United States corporations and financial institutions began to collectively recognize both
their tremendous resource advantage over other prevalent social forms in the West (unions,
coalitional civil rights movements, universities, mass media, democracy, and so on) as well as
the potential that increased and popular affinity with these social forms was poised to slow, if not
redirect, flows of profit and benefit that up to that point had secured the ability to “make the
world” in accordance with the desires of white men. This is to say that neoliberalism, like
liberalism itself, is not some “natural” extension of human tendency but rather an acute response
to historical circumstances: “neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve
the restoration of class power” (Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism 15). By the
calculations of those who were of the belief that something was being unjustly “taken away from
them,” the installation of neoliberalism would require longitudinal and pervasive coordination in
order to set things right.
Though Harvey, Gary Gerstle, and others have written extensively about the moments
that comprise neoliberalism’s history (the assembling of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, the
imperial US interventions in Latin America in the 1970s [as a testing ground for Chicago School
economic theories], Reagan and Thatcher’s promulgation of neoliberal morality and “trickle
down” economics in the 1980s and Clinton and Blair’s exacerbation of the resulting policies into
the 1990s, and the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision), I will not

30
recapitulate the full story here other than to say that, as of this writing, neoliberalism has
proceeded to subsume almost all aspects of American being. While neoliberalism, like liberalism
before it, is largely concerned with adjudicating who ought to possess and to what degree, the
main innovation of neoliberalism is to expand the realm of what may be possessed to literally
everything, what Jean Baudrillard describes as capitalism’s “hyperreality” in which all
significance is ultimately reduced to “a radical law of equivalence and exchange” (43). Further,
neoliberalism seeks to cultivate a narrative justification for how the supposed universality of the
possessive individual (as the great equalizer of our differences) yields such a consistently white
and masculine cadre of “winners.” What we are consistently told, when we look upon the Jobses,
Gateses, Zuckerbergs, Musks, Thiels, and Bezoses (Bezi?) of our popular narratives concerning
“success” with skepticism, is that they, like all of us, are nothing more than neoliberal subjects,
subject to the same realm of the possible as “everyone else” – and that we can be just like them if
only we learn to invest as wisely as they did in work.
The impact of the neoliberal turn upon white masculine identity is perhaps most notable
in the cultural realm of one’s work (or career) and what sort of behaviors one most affirms in the
pursuit of a career. Under neoliberalism, where work has become contiguous with normative
identity (in addition to one’s name, one’s occupation ought to be disclosed upon meeting another
for the first time), employment grants access to significance for all but the most wealthy.
Feminist scholar Kathi Weeks explains the social stakes of working as follows:
Waged work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic
systems; it is, of course, the way most people acquire access to the
necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. It is not only the primary
mechanism by which income is distributed, it is also the basic means by
which status is allocated, and by which most people gain access to
healthcare and retirement. After the family, waged work is often the most
important, if not sole, source of sociality for millions. Raising children
with attributes that will secure them forms of employment that can match

31
if not surpass the class standing of their parents is the gold standard of
parenting. (6-7)

Yet despite work functioning as a gateway to sociality, that sociality is competitive. Even when
framed in terms of “collaboration,” work is deeply situated in paranoid comparison. To the
extent that one “works with” others it ought to be to leverage their capabilities for one’s own
advancement, a transaction in which each atomized side hopes that they’ve gotten the better of
the deal. Italian philosopher Franco Berardi describes the antisocial qualities of contemporary
work as “a systematic transformation of the other into a competitor and therefore an enemy”
(80), adversarial circumstances that often drive the neoliberal worker towards “panic” and
“depression”: “Once the organism realizes that it is unable to sustain further competitive tension,
that it is a loser in the relation that was absorbing all of its motivations… the world doesn’t make
sense any more” (101-102)).
Berardi explains that depression is the named symptom that results from a socially
enforced possessive individualism that is frequently stifled by the implausibility of “winning,”
which in neoliberalism means possessing a greater claim to future value than can be made by
others:
Depression is deeply connected to the ideology of self-realization and the
happiness imperative… Competition implies a risky narcissistic
stimulation, because in a highly competitive context, like that of a
capitalistic economy and specifically of the new economy, many are called
but only a few are chosen. Social norms do not acknowledge the
possibility of failure, since this failure would be assigned to a psycho-
pathological context. There is no competition without failure and defeat,
but the social norm cannot acknowledge the norm of failure without
questioning its own ideological fundaments, and even its own economic
efficiency. (99-100)

This is to say that to participate in neoliberalism’s regime of work is to be psycho-pathologized
as a matter of principle. It requires encountering the inevitability of failure, to always-already be

32
lacking the psychic fortitude and material capacity to contend with the demands of market life.
Because of this pervasive and enduring deficiency, the self can be universally reckoned as a
project for improvement. Work, then, is not only about some kind of productive output for one’s
employer, but also an increasingly frustrated grasping for self-actualization that cannot be
achieved.
This paradox of a manufactured desire for “success” through work (which must
necessarily include the realization of unencumbered growth that surpasses that of others, yielding
recognizable “winners” by virtue of a comparison to those who have lost) and the very
impossibility of that success (given that, at any strata of wealth and power, one will always
discover another who has some advantage yet to be dispossessed) is not a defect for
neoliberalism, but a vital component of its ability to persist. For this mode of working acutely
targets and eradicates any optimistic possibility that another genre of social organization might
be possible; should one deign to suggest such a fantasy, should one cede an inch of competitive
ground in an effort to question whether work should have such damaging qualities, someone else
will be glad to incorporate into their enterprising “self” that which one seemed willing to
abandon. American political theorist Wendy Brown suggests that inasmuch as the neoliberal
subject is “construed on the model of the contemporary firm,” to eschew the primacy of work, to
abdicate the responsibility to “maximize [one’s] capital value in the present and enhance [one’s]
future value,” is to be pseudo-suicidal: “any individual who veers into other pursuits risks
impoverishment and a loss of esteem and creditworthiness at the least, survival at the extreme”
(22). So long as there is an expectation of harmful social repercussions, attempting to opt out of
neoliberal work relations will be a fearful premise (as always, with greater risk for those who
have benefitted least from the historical dispossessions associated with white supremacy).

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In addition to this proverbial “stick,” there is also the “carrot” modeled by the presence of
the successful white masculine capitalists and their biographical narratives. Epitomized under the
nomenclature of “the self-made Man,” the most publicly visible of these men circa the third
decade of this century (the aforementioned Musk et al.) offer stories of single-minded, pious
willing-into-being of significance through indomitable work ethic. While neoliberal workers are
not so naïve as to believe that just anyone can become a billionaire, the tale of the rogue CEO
whose insistence on the superiority of his possessive “vision” that “revolutionizes the world”
(always in relation to some kind of product “innovation”), despite those foolish enough to doubt
him, prevails to a far greater extent than the multifold tragedies of entrepreneurs whose efforts
peter out in anonymity and leave workers in turmoil. However rare, neoliberal work also
provides an “affirming” path away from the abjection and humiliation of competitive loss: to
serve the imperatives of speculative value in every moment of your behavior, to be the CEO that
you would become, cannot guarantee your success but, at the very least, is the prerequisite to
success – to choose the “rise and grind” lifestyle is the only way to claim a lottery ticket.
Neoliberalism fosters its subjects to believe in an unmitigated work ethic, what Jonathan
Crary calls “24/7” (“the idea of working without pause, without limits” (9-10)) and proposes a
system in which the labor of work ought to be miserable. Work becomes a self-flagellating
drama of paying dues to earn one’s right to successive misery of higher regard, what we might
call “climbing the ladder” – the “improved” fruit of the possessive liberal germ. So long as each
neoliberal subject is pressured to imagine that executive status is attainable for oneself and not
for others through such a system, hordes of exhausted workers will grind themselves out of
existence to both maintain that system and, despite all odds, become one of the selected and
“destined” few for whom that system is thought to be flattering, dignified, and congratulatory.

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In summary, neoliberalism inherits liberalism’s white supremacist structure along lines of
personhood and property. It leverages the generationally accumulated wealth held by white men
to propose a society in which all social relations become cast as market relations, conferring the
greatest significance upon those best able to succeed in growing their wealth within the
ostensibly depersonalized system of the market (growth which is disproportionately aided by
having wealth to begin with). For the majority of white men (who, unlike the investor class,
make their living through labor), such success is most recognizable in the cultural expression of
one’s work, the grounds upon which one might prove one’s competitive superiority in a “fair
fight” of individual self-making and accomplishment via one’s career (a fight that must deny
acknowledgment of the systemic advantages offered to white men in terms of hiring, promotion,
compensation, and workplace treatment). This amounts to a hegemonic order that tends to
concentrate power and resources beneath the purview of white male possession while,
conversely, claiming to offer universal access to “free markets” to any with the determination to
fully invest in market principles. To the extent one fails to succeed under neoliberalism, it is not
the result of a system that favors certain categories of people, but instead a personal deficiency.
And yet, despite one’s commitment to neoliberal culture, there is an inevitable
phenomenon that knocks even the most vicious player out of market competition: all human
persons die, marking the end of one’s capacity to compete and accumulate. Enter the
corporation, the legal person whose access to immortality through exponential market growth
has come to serve as the aspiration model for the neoliberal subject, the dispossessive individual.

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Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Corporate Body
What does it mean to be a subject? In his book, Subjectivity (which surveys a genealogy
of Western renderings of the self), philosopher Nick Mansfield provides this working definition:
[The] subject is always linked to something outside of it – an idea or
principle or the society of other subjects. It is this linkage that the word
“subject” insists upon. Etymologically, to be subject means to be “placed
(or even thrown) under”. One is always subject to or of something. The
word subject, therefore, proposes that the self is not a separated and
isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of general truths
and shared principles. (3)

It is in these “shared principles” and “general truths” where we should take issue with any sort of
understanding of what it’s like to be a subject in general; while there may exist, in any time and
place, a sense of how one ought to feel about oneself as a “self,” the actual effects of these
normative (perhaps hegemonic) framings are differentially distributed along culturally-cultivated
fissures of “identity.” Per French philosopher Louis Althusser, there are those who claim that to
have an identity is to be “always-already interpellated” as a subject in subordinate relation to the
“Absolute Subject” of ideology, that entity that centers “the infinity of individuals as subjects…
such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject” (195, 197). In the United States, subjectivity is
haunted by the Subject of the straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied, propertied, Christian,
American man. There are those, a significant majority in fact (white men account for only
roughly 30% of the US population (Srikanth)), who are not hailed favorably by this ghost.
It is for this relation of subjugation that cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, when
examining neoliberal psychology, echoes Mansfield’s etymological description of subjectivity
with greater vehemence: “the subject; literally, the ‘one who has been cast down’” – subjectivity
as violence (1). Depending on one’s relations to the Subject’s “general truths” (and who gets to
participate in and benefit from the formulation of those truths), intersubjectivity, which may at

36
times be experienced as “love,” is also inclusive of torment, exploitation, and annihilation. This
is to emphasize that, though we may be constituted relationally, not all company is kindness.
Neoliberal subjectivity, though born of white masculinity, is not located “within” white
men; neoliberal subjectivity is a mapping of social principles and an articulation of what kind of
relationships one ought to have with others. Further, it is a system whose construction renders
white masculine ways of being as superlatively meaningful and asks of those who cannot claim
white masculine identity to accept positions of inferior social significance – with the incentive
that those outside of the favored identity matrix may gain social status by hewing to and
proliferating the imperatives of neoliberal subjectivity. This model of the subject, the offspring
of liberalism’s possessive individual, is essentially antisocial. Neoliberalism is predicated on the
insistence of an essence, a metaphysical truth underpinning all other considerations. This essence
includes rejecting the necessity of and desire for sociality, what performance studies scholar
Amelia Jones (in personal conversation) refers to as our “relational dependence on the wellbeing
of others” in order for us to emerge as distinct selves. For the purposes of neoliberalism’s
proposed mode of subjectification, this rejection of the social is vital in the establishment of the
self as a monadic, competitive, entrepreneurial enterprise. It permits all manners of violence to
be visited upon other subjects in order to fortify the predatory self, whose significance and
existence is centered on the ability to claim superiority.
Death, however, makes of a mockery of the white supremacist notion of inherent
exceptionalism manifest in the recognizability of certain bodily traits (whiteness, maleness): for
every birth, regardless of identity, there is a corresponding death (though the temporal distance
between birth and death, one’s longevity, is positively correlated with one’s access to white
identity, yet, ironically, women tend to live longer than men). Within the logics of white

37
masculinity, such an equivalence in outcome is unacceptable; in lieu of eliminating the biological
inevitability of death, white men have sought other routes to permanence. Cultural anthropologist
Ernest Becker, in his posthumously published analysis of Sigmund Freud’s relationship to the
cultivation and dissemination of psychoanalysis, notes of Freud: “He yearned for fame,
anticipated it, hoped that through it he could create his own immortality: ‘Immortality means
being loved by many anonymous people.’ This definition is the Enlightenment view of
immortality: living in the esteem of men yet unborn, for the works that you have contributed to
their life and betterment” (120-121). In connecting the possibility of “immortality” to the
recognition of one’s “work,” Becker suggests that, at least circa 1973 (when The Denial of Death
was originally published, a couple of years after the circulation of the Powell memo), the
imagined stakes of work for white men were access to or rejection from the secular pantheon of
history. That is to say, if one’s efforts could be codified and circulated in such a way to be
understood as improving the lives of “men” and if said efforts were iteratively tied to one’s
name, one could imagine – in life – one’s ever-extensive presence beyond the hiccup of death.
In keeping with liberal humanism’s emphasis on possession as the primary social
arrangement through which meaning and significance are conferred, N. Katherine Hayles
remarks that, in analyzing a 1991 study on anorexia’s relationship to humanism, “the body is
understood as an object for control and mastery rather than an intrinsic part of self” (5). This
separation of the body from the “self” enables that self to imagine that the body, as a vessel of the
self, can be enhanced to better succeed in its function: the material conveyance of an always-
separate selfhood. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley becomes eager to offer a techno-scientific
solution to the problem of the neoliberal subject’s grievous loss of foreverness: instead of
symbolic and vicarious immortality, why not “disrupt” senescence and offer bodies that don’t

38
die? Abou Farman, whose research interrogates responses to the inevitability of death in secular
societies (societies that do not guarantee an “afterlife” beyond death), notes that one technical
proposal for bodily immortality, cryogenics (the freezing of the dying body for future
revivification), is premised on the idea of “suspension” as a solution for negotiating imperatives
for progressive growth and the desire for the fixed permanence of the self:
[I]n suspension, the frozen body emerges as meaningful through the
broader historical and cultural relation to finitude and infinitude, to secular
eschatologies that on the one hand confined time to the body and on the
other expanded the time of the world in which the body finds itself
thrown. The secular immortality regime culturally eliminates the
possibility of an afterlife, thereby rendering final the end of the person at a
certain point in the trajectory of the body… Suspension is the secular
space in which the promise of the unfolding future can assume material
embodiment and in scientific garb negate the absurdities of individual
death. (40)

What Farman refers to as suspension suggests that the perpetual securing of the body in the
present is only ever intended to allow the neoliberal subject to speculate on future value, to
consider “the promise of the unfolding future”; a body is only worth suspending in time insofar
as it offers scaffolding for the person that it “houses” to continue the project of corporo-financial
expansion and consolidation. Farman calls those who doggedly pursue the fixing of the body so
as to further the story of neoliberal ascent “immortalists,” noting that they are particularly
fascinated by the notion that the “self” is located in the bodily material of the brain as data: “in
immortalism, the precise pattern of atoms in the brain (the information) essentially constitutes
the self” (3). Farman ties together in immortalism the long-unfolding history of liberal
philosophy and recent tech-world overtures towards the infinite and the cosmic:
I present immortalists as among the new mythmakers of secular progress,
themselves necessary to the wider view of civilizational progress that
upholds Silicon Valley as a whole… [T]hey reproduce continuity as a
Western, mostly American, and mostly white project of extreme

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individuation, where immortalism and transhumanism become the form
whiteness takes as it makes new claims on the future. (41-42)

Yet amidst overt efforts to achieve immortality (in the case of cryogenics) and more
metaphorical projections of the self into perpetuity through legacy projects, there is a formulation
of “personhood” that has captured the imaginary of the neoliberal subject and mitigated fears of
demise: the publicly traded corporation.
What is the corporation? We likely have anecdotal associations with its form: the
corporation as business, the corporation as brand, the corporation as top priority of state policy,
the corporation as “job provider,” the corporation as “too big to fail.” All of these associations
are not only germane to our prevailing discourses, but also crucial to the reproduction of the
corporate imaginary. Yet the corporation also possesses a well-documented genealogy, one that
parallels the colonial and imperial violence of the establishment and expansion of the United
States. The corporation as we reckon it in the United States in the 2020’s is not the invention of
Reagan’s deregulatory 1980’s, but actually extends as far back as 1607 when the Virginia
Company of London staked its claim on the New World in Jamestown, Virginia, as England’s
first permanent colony in North America. As told by constitutional law specialist Adam Winkler
(whose 2018 book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
provides an exhaustive history of the corporation’s legal evolution in the United States), “[t]he
tale of the Pilgrims… easily obscures the truth about America’s beginning. This land was first
colonized not by religious dissenters but by a business corporation… [t]hirteen years before” (6).
This is to say that corporate imperatives have been at play in the in the United States since its
dispossessive founding. The Virginia Company did not approach the Americas with facile
notions of “freedom” in mind, but literally “sold shares of stock to investors, who were lured by
the promise of dividends expected to come from exploitation of New World resources and trade”

40
(Winkler 7). Here is the basic financial premise of the corporation (specifically the publicly-
traded sort that we might recognize in the United States as listed on the canonical Dow Jones
Industrial Average, NASDAQ, or S&P 500):
—A group of initial shareholders, human people with some business purpose in mind,
incorporate under articles (or a charter) particular to and recognized by a given
government, allowing the formed corporation to legally act on behalf of the shareholders
(who are respectively part owners of the corporation by virtue of their possession of
stock; the proportional ownership of the corporation by each shareholder is the amount of
shares they own as a percentage of the total shares established during incorporation).
—Once a corporation legally exists, it becomes possible for those not initially involved in
its founding to become invested, to acquire shares of stock and become partial owners of
the corporation; going public, in theory, allows the corporation’s shares to potentially
become more valuable more rapidly given the expansive pool of potential investors
(“everyone”); when the corporation’s business activities are “doing well,” partial
ownership of the business becomes more desirable, more in-demand, and thus the cost of
buying shares increases (or, to put it another way, the worth of already owned shares
increases).
—The effective purpose of investment is the potential of return, the enhancement of
wealth via the improved value of shares (and dividends paid out) over time, the profitable
realization (and affirmation) of speculation; while the ostensible product/service the
corporation offers and the corporation’s relative prestige may be of partial interest, the
engine for corporate investment is the desire for not only a profitable return, but recurrent
returns that compound exponentially; whichever corporation(s) can persuasively assert

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that their value will grow at an exponential rate are most likely to attract investment, the
so called “blue chip” corporations that have a historical record of growth that would
implicate continued growth into the future.
To speak of futurity, there remains one further foundational feature of the corporation that
directly foments the possibility of endless growth that is so central to neoliberal subjectivity. As
articulated in William Blackstone’s jurisprudentially revered 1758 text, Commentaries on the
Law of England, and summarized by Winkler:
[Blackstone] began his explanation by describing the corporation as an
“artificial person.” By this Blackstone meant two things. First, the
corporation was an independent legal entity in the eyes of the law,
separate and distinct from the people who formed it. Second, as an
independent legal entity, it had certain legally enforceable rights similar to
those of a natural person. An individual’s “personal rights die with the
person,” Blackstone wrote. So “it has been found necessary, when it is for
the advantage of the public to have any particular rights kept on foot and
continued, to constitute artificial persons.” Called “bodies corporate, or
corporations,” these artificial persons “may maintain a perpetual
succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality.” (Winkler 47,
emphasis added)

Since the eighteenth century, the corporation has not only registered as a bodied person with
rights under the law, but one that has access to immortality. This is because of the peculiar
composition of the corporation person’s body, which as understood by Blackstone would have
included the bodies of “human” (propertied white male) people. So long as there remains a
procession of human people invested in the corporation (phasing into and out of existence in
turn), it may persist indefinitely, surpassing the spans of time that would constitute what we
might call a “life.” So long as the ultimate realization of investment is always deferred to the
future, having potentially unmitigated access to those moments when compounding wealth
approaches infinity makes the corporate person enviable – and a model for the neoliberal
subject’s aspirations of immortality.

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Given the presumed duration of its “life” (forever, so long as its financial value persists)
and its central aim of securing investment away from all would-be competition (monopoly), the
corporation offers to neoliberal subjects a narrative of uncontestable significance, the “American
success story” of singular dominance at the end of competition. In the United States,
corporations demonstrate bodily persons who might achieve a near monopoly of their domain
and, if so, can absorb any competition through acquisition. Corporations are recognized for their
accrual of such mass that their gravity becomes inescapable, superimposing their image upon the
world. Corporations serve as examples to emulate.
Thus, the neoliberal subject does not engage primarily in biopolitics (as derived from
Michel Foucault’s “biopower”: a politics that aims to “exert… a positive influence on life, that
endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations” (137)). Nor does the neoliberal subject prefer Achille Mbembe’s
sovereign model of eliminatory necropolitics (in which states exercise “the capacity to define
who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not,” and, per said definitions, put
peoples to death (27)). Rather, the neoliberal subject engages in what I think of as a sort of
“corporopolitics” (from the Latin corporō, which simultaneously indicates the formation of
bodies and their dismemberment), the high-stakes and (putatively) self-determined gamble of
individuals attempting to antisocially secure the perpetuation of their private bodies in
competition against/at the cost of/through the instrumentalization of the bodies of others.
This is a gamble whose odds inordinately favor those who are already “winning,”
cultivating a white masculine hegemonic order predicated on a procession towards a singular
immortal absolute possessor and, thus, the undoing of the relational (and the political) as such. In
this regime of corporopolitics, possession and dispossession become a unified gesture: to possess

43
ought to always imply dispossession, lest one’s possession fail to optimally procure an advantage
over others. To dispossess has the twofold function of enhancing the significance and presence of
the dispossessor while cumulatively erasing from existence the dispossessed (and, thus,
lessening the tactical/competitive possibilities that could threaten the further amassing of wealth
by the most well-endowed). The neoliberal subject pursues its growth project in terms of the
corporate strategy of mergers and acquisitions, the consumption and integration of other forms:
to exist becomes a conquest, a feasting.
What of those who are dispossessed by the neoliberal subject in its exercise of
corporopolitics? Here I’d like to further explore Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “dysselection,” the
inversion of Darwinistic evolution (natural selection) by which certain types of bodies/lifeforms
are driven to extinction (Wynter and McKittrick 17). For Wynter, the project of neoliberalism is
not solely concerned with its superficial claims of competitive growth but is intrinsically realized
(like cancer) as a growth that kills. Wynter relates this in terms of “wealth” and “poverty,”
though we can extrapolate from her words that it is the life and death of bodies that is at stake,
bodies that are either promoted to wellness along lines of possession or relegated to illness along
lines of being dispossessed:
In effect, wealth, no longer in its traditional, inherited freehold
landowning form, but in its now unceasingly capital-accumulating, global
form, is itself the sole macro-signifier of ultimate symbolic life. Symbolic
death, therefore, is that of having been naturally dysselected and
mastered… as are the globally homogenized dysgenic non-breadwinning
jobless poor/the pauper/homeless/the welfare queens. Poverty itself,
therefore, is the “significant ill” signifier of ultimate symbolic death and,
consequently, capital accumulation, and therefore symbolic life signifies
and narrates a plan of salvation that will cure the dysselected significant
ill! (37)

As Wynter explains, to be “human” in accord with the regime of neoliberalism involves the
sustained revocation of human status from the bodies of others as a core feature of profiting,

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analogous to living. When a person is rendered as less-than-human, that person can be more
optimally integrated into the logistics/algorithmics of wealth creation as yet another fungible
vector, susceptible to whatever modulations are forecast to maximize revenues in a given quarter
– the mechanism by which meaningful life is sustained. This is how dysselected people, when
understood as an asset class, can be bundled into byzantine financial products, the disintegration
of those people serving as a prerequisite for massive upward redistributions of wealth, sanctioned
and protected by states (as in the subprime mortgage schemes that became evident circa 2008).
This is how dysselected people, when registered as inputs, can be corralled towards incarceration
through legislation in order to fill lucrative rent extracting sites (prison cells) to capacity (as in
mandatory sentencing for drug possession in the United States prison industrial complex). This is
how dysselected people, when forced into precarity by automation, downsizing, and outsourcing,
can be exploited into performing “independent” full-time labor that comes with none of the
privileges (predictable pay, health insurance, social significance) of being formally employed (as
with rideshare/food delivery drivers, adjunct faculty, Taskrabbits, and other gig workers).
Given the overwhelming pressures mounted upon the bodies of those who suffer under
dysselection and the egregious disproportionality of advantage conferred upon those bodies who
benefit from their integration into neoliberal subjecthood (most prolifically, able-bodied white
men), neoliberalism offers its assurances to shareholders that conditions such as those we
encounter now (the rampant immiseration and high rates of death for the poor, for the racially
marginalized, for those who suffer under authoritarian regimes), as with biological evolution, are
the output of nature’s inevitable trajectory and, thus, are just. However, this belief in the
possibility of symbolic and corporeal immortality for the neoliberal subject, available to the
beneficiaries of corporopolitics as its debtors dissolve into so much raw material, is not without

45
its own carefully cultivated history, its own fiction of what it means to be not human but instead
a legal person – a possessor of rights whose protections are guaranteed by the potential violence
of the state.
And as we have discussed, there is one form of person in particular, whose rights have
been progressively enhanced and then secured in United States jurisprudence as a “primary
beneficiary” of civil rights efforts (Winkler xviii), whose body appears to be so pervasive (if
consolidating), ascendant, enduring, speculative, and significant as to approximate the
“immortality” that neoliberal subjects would realize in themselves. We may recognize such a
person and their “personality” under the sign of their brand – whether it be an irreverently bitten
apple, a pair of golden arches under which we might attain sustenance, or a motive swoosh
inducing us to action: these people are corporations, my friend, and it is from them the neoliberal
subject’s sense of virtue and significance trickles down, even as that trickle reveals itself to be a
toxin.

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Disincorporation of the Neoliberal Subject
The corporate person upon whom the neoliberal subject models its antisociality is not and
never has been what it claims to be. While this has always been apparent to the United States’
most violently dispossessed (notably, Black and Indigenous peoples), recent events have caused
the white masculine neoliberal subject to take notice as well; the neoliberal subject’s system of
signification and meaning, attached to the corporation and its promulgation of a doctrine of
endless growth (for the deserving), is falling apart. While the subprime mortgage crisis and its
subsequent bank bailouts broadly exposed the parasitism of the corporate person, we can look to
the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects to better understand why American white
masculine identity is turning against neoliberal cultural principles.
One core cultural principle within neoliberal subjectivity that has become significantly
contested following the onset of COVID is careerism, the ongoing demonstration of the
willingness to prioritize one’s career above all else. Under the orthodoxy of careerism, to the
extent that any concessions are made in how one allocates one’s time (for family, for hobbies, for
the “life” of the work/life balance duality), such concessions ought to be pursued in terms of
competitive improvement. For example: the neoliberal subject’s comparative status as a parent is
measured by the production of “children with attributes that will secure them forms of
employment that can match if not surpass” those of their parents (Weeks 6); enjoyment of any
activity outside of one’s career ought to follow logics of “gamification,” whereby “games rapidly
deliver a sense of success and reward… result[ing in] higher performance and greater yield”
(Han 49) in the activity at hand, training for when the neoliberal subject returns to their career
project; the “balancing” of one’s work and life becomes a method to minimize risks to
productivity, a necessary leveraging of “the capitalist benefits of biopower without the bad press

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that follows when an employee jumps out of the headquarters office block” (Fleming, The
Mythology of Work 121). This amounts to Adam Smith’s old chestnut applied to all aspects of
being, which under neoliberalism are codified as market relations: “It is not from the
benevolence (kindness) of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their own interest… [w]e address ourselves not to their humanity but to their
self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages" (16). A
propensity to compete, to outdo one another, is what yields a culture of “moral” behavior at the
level of the individual and a “prosperous” growth-based society at the level of the nation.
With the ascendance of the corporate person and its story, the neoliberal subject is given
a model of excellence and a rogue’s gallery of associated CEOs to emulate. If a propensity for
exponential growth by any technically-legal means (profit, worker exploitation, interpersonal
sabotage, acquisition, “primitive accumulation”) is rendered as the ultimate indicator of
importance, do we not have in the corporation the ideal self-actualized possessive individual, an
immortal entity that can only ever accumulate influence? The contemporary stature of Elon
Musk and his retinue of brand extensions (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, The Boring Company,
Neuralink, and, long ago, PayPal) is expressed in superlative terms: Musk, the so-called richest
person in the world with an estimated net worth of $306.4 billion as of November 2, 2021
(Haverstock), was selected as TIME ’s 2021 person of the year as “few individuals have had
more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too” (Felsenthal). When
it comes to descriptions of Musk, they are almost always prefaced by the latest figure of his
wealth and the corporations (chiefly Tesla) whose values have inflated it.
Many in the United States tech press have been observed breathlessly admiring Musk’s
greatest advance in fortune, which occurred during 2020 and 2021 when COVID-19 was

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thoroughly decimating the economic wellbeing of workers. During the year of 2020 in particular,
Musk’s worth increased from roughly $27 billion to $188 billion due to his 20% ownership of
Tesla stock (O’Kane) and the generally spectacular performance of financial markets during the
aforementioned global pandemic (in 2020 and 2021, the total global market rose in value by $14
trillion, 40% of which was gained by twenty-five companies, including Alphabet [owner of
Google], Apple, then Facebook [now Meta], Amazon, and Microsoft (Bradley and Stumpner)).
In contrast, waged work hours (which, we may recall, provide not only livelihood but
also social significance under neoliberalism) decreased by roughly 4.7% between the end of
2019 and the latter half of 2021, equivalent to the loss of about 137 million jobs globally
(International 1). Not only were the greatest economic losses levied on those already in positions
of precarity (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), but replacement jobs following the onset of
COVID-19 have accelerated the stratification between “service” workers and information
industry workers. As the pandemic eliminated the financial viability of many service businesses
that were barely making ends meet (restaurants, retail stores, hotels, and so on) and as jobs that
could be done remotely were largely able to transition to telepresence (Zoom being another of
those corporations in the top twenty-five of COVID-19 winners), a new speculation is emerging
concerning the future of work:
Before the pandemic, net job losses were concentrated in middle-wage
occupations in manufacturing and some office work, reflecting
automation, and low- and high-wage jobs continued to grow. Nearly all
low-wage workers who lost jobs could move into other low-wage
occupations—for instance, a data entry worker could move into retail or
home healthcare. Because of the pandemic’s impact on low-wage jobs, we
now estimate that almost all growth in labor demand will occur in high-
wage jobs. Going forward, more than half of displaced low-wage workers
may need to shift to occupations in higher wage brackets and requiring
different skills to remain employed. (Lund et al.)

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As if the corporation didn’t loom large enough over the scraps left for the immiserated,
precarious workers now “may need to shift to occupations in higher wage brackets” in order to
survive – more individuals “must” become further neoliberalized as information workers or face
social ejection (dysselection). If only employment were a matter of “personal choice”; in light of
this requirement to earn more from fewer available jobs (in addition to pervasive inflation
making the materials of survival come at a dearer cost), anti-work sentiments, unionization
drives, and demands for social services have exploded into mainstream discourse to the chagrin
of the corporation (O’Connor).
For many white masculine neoliberal subjects, the doctrines of work ethic and careerism
have proven insufficient to realize the wealth to which those subjects feel entitled. With the
accelerating egregiousness of worker cost-of-living caused by corporate profiteering (Bivens),
the neoliberal subject is increasingly unable to suppress its awareness that it and the corporation
are not the same sort of person. That is, the neoliberal subject cannot achieve the personhood
claimed by the corporation for its personhood is a façade. What has the corporate person’s body
been hiding from view? There was once a moment in which the corporation, at least nominally,
could only possess its personhood so long as the corporation broadly benefitted human people. In
the eighteenth century, while “[t]hey had unambiguously private aspects, in that they were
financed and managed by private parties,” corporations could not be granted a charter unless
their “ultimate mission… [was] to be in service of the public” (Winkler 48). Perhaps
unintuitively, given twenty-first century critiques of corporate personhood, the eighteenth-
century intention of defining corporations as legal persons was actually to provide a system of
legal accountability for their behaviors (while also providing protections for those who operated
on the corporation’s behalf).

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In its original Blakestonian articulation as an “artificial person,” the corporation was able
to function as its own legal entity, distinct from its shareholders, when it came time to potentially
adjudicate its limited set of rights: the corporation could own property, make contracts, and sue
or be sued in disputes concerning said property and contracts. This protected the members of the
corporation from being held personally accountable for the corporation’s actions: if a corporation
reneged on a contract, the wounded party could sue the corporation for recompense, which
would be extracted from the corporation’s assets rather than those of shareholders. While
corporations had rights, they were intended to be strictly regulated by the government such that
“corporations could be ‘visited’ by authorities, who were allowed to ‘inquire into, and correct all
irregularities that arise’ should the corporations ‘deviate from the end of their institution’”
(Winkler 51). In brief, the corporate person’s legal construction subjected it to the advantage of
the public (with “the public,” however, consisting of white propertied men). Yet those white
propertied men discovered a feature of the corporate structure that was not as sacrosanct as the
law would suggest: the “corporate veil,” that strict legal separation between the person of the
corporation and the persons of its members, could be “pierced,” meaning that certain judges were
amenable to the assertion of the shareholders’ rights in matters of corporate litigation. While this
should not be legally permissible, the ability to pierce the corporate veil has become a juridical
cheat code, one that has historically allowed the project of white supremacy to utilize the
corporation as a vehicle to secure formal rights that uniquely benefit those with ostentatious
wealth, allowing that wealth to be laundered (through corporate action) into various kinds of
power and influence for the wealthy.
Much has been attributed to the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the case of
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court justices

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determined that a law that had been enacted in 2002, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, was
unconstitutional. This law had stipulated that no corporation, non-profit, or union could
participate in spending money that would promote or discourage voting for a given candidate in
any federal, state, or local election. The decision to nullify the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act
was portrayed as a political coup for corporations with a popular narrative that Citizens United
recast the spending of money as a form of protected speech, which in turn led to the proliferation
of “Super PACs,” political action committees that can spend indefinite sums of money
promoting or denigrating candidates so long as they do not directly coordinate with politicians or
their campaigns. While there is an entirely legitimate critique that the consequences of this
judicial decision handed over the financing of public elections in the United States to the whims
of the wealthiest, those same consequences obscure that dedicated legal strategy by which the
case prevailed (and its broader significance for what the corporate person actually represents).
For the Court nullified that law not on the grounds that it violated the rights of corporations, but
that the prohibition of spending money on political campaigns through corporations was a
violation of the free speech rights of the corporation’s members. According to Winkler:
Corporations and unions, [Justice] Kennedy explained, had a First
Amendment right to make expenditures in elections for candidates for
political office. The corporate spending restrictions of the Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act, by burdening this right, were unconstitutional in
their entirety… [A]s Kennedy read out loud from his opinion, not once did
he mention corporate personhood. He never said that corporations are
people, and nothing in his opinion turned on the notion. Corporate
personhood – the idea that a corporation is an entity with rights and
obligations separate and distinct from the rights and obligations of its
members – is entirely missing from the court’s opinion. The court afforded
broad free speech rights to corporations, but not because they were people.
Instead, like many of the earlier corporate rights cases, the Citizens United
decision obscured the corporate entity and emphasized the rights of others,
like shareholders and listeners. Citizens United repeatedly described the
corporation as “an association that has taken on the corporate form.” “If
the First Amendment has any force,” Kennedy read out loud from the

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opinion, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or
associations of citizens for simply engaging in political speech.” (Winkler
363-364)

Beyond this piercing of the corporate veil, Justice Kennedy further cast those who
“take on the corporate form” as an oppressed minority in the United States,
deserving of redress for their unjust disenfranchisement:
Not only were corporations associations of citizens rather than
independent legal persons, the Supreme Court in Citizens United
suggested these associations were being persecuted. The court described
corporations as “disfavored speakers” and criticized the Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act for threatening to penalize “disfavored associations
of citizens – those that have taken on the corporate form” for making
political expenditures. (Winkler 364-365)

This implementation of anti-oppression rhetoric for the benefit of the most powerful is not an
anomaly in the legal history of the corporation (nor in the history of rightwing politics), rather it
is the primary means by which corporations (and those “associations of citizens” that constitute
them) have advanced state protection for the corporate form and its behaviors. To offer one more
bewildering example, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which
broadly states that all US citizens (including, specifically at the time of its authoring, former
slaves) are entitled to due legal process, ended up being used predominantly for the advancement
of corporate power following its ratification:
Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, when a
scholar set out to identify every Fourteenth Amendment case heard by the
Supreme Court, the justices decided 28 cases dealing with the rights of
African Americans – and an astonishing 312 cases dealing with the rights
of corporations… The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted to shield the
former slaves from discrimination, had been transformed into a sword
used by corporations to strike at unwanted regulation. (Winkler xv)

The corporation modulates between being a person unto itself and an association of citizens
depending on which legal status confers the greatest advantage to the white, male, and wealthy.

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The corporation fails honor its own narrative of what it means to be a neoliberal subject precisely
because the corporation is not a possessive individual, but an appropriative collective. The
corporation is not the “person” that United States law specifies, but rather a rarefied assemblage
of largely white masculine wealth holders who leverage the corporate body to ensure their
property is systemically protected by the state (through bailouts, tax cuts, financial incentives for
opening corporate offices in particular geographies, and so on). Though the corporation would
make promises, there is no exponential expansion forever for white workers, no amount or
trajectory of “hard work” that might open the gates of the social wall that separates
neoliberalism’s ultimate dispossesors and those targeted for dispossession; the way has been
sealed shut such that to be in the top tier of wealth is to be so at the permanent expense and to
the detriment of the wellbeing of others, including less wealthy white people. To amend a
comment from earlier, neoliberalism is essentially antisocial for those selves subject to its ruling
principles. For those most-wealthy who would augment their generational wealth, there is a tacit
sociality, fraternal affinity, and perceived mutual benefit in manipulating the machinery of the
corporation-as-godhead, in exerting coercive forces upon the atomized bodies of workers and the
dysselected in the interest of oligarchy.
Yet there is a fundamental defect obscured by the confidence of the oligarchs’ design of
corporopolitics: the oligarchs’ hands do not touch the materials they would shape. For them, the
imposed threat of socioeconomic ejection is taken for granted as a stick that will drive labor ever
on, while the cultivated myth of attainable corporate ascension for possessive individuals offers
an ever-receding carrot. But even workers, as immiserated and emaciated as they may be, need to
eat – and they can only sustain themselves for so long through the cannibalism of competition;
what happens when workers cease to exist? Though the corporation may persuade the neoliberal

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subject to “make its living” via the dispossession of others, it does not produce the conditions
that would allow such “others” to come into being in the first place (so as to be dispossessed). As
neoliberalism’s rate of consumption surpasses the rate of social reproduction, the necessary
supply of labor becomes ontologically impossible and the corporation grinds to a halt. In these
moments, it becomes apparent that the workers were essential and those hidden behind the
corporate façade, though engorged, were only ever parasites dependent on the ongoingness of
those they would suck dry.
The paradox at the bloodless heart of neoliberalism is that to achieve possession of
everything would signal the end of eternal exponential expansion. The corporation, so fixated on
what can be consumed in the 3-month cycle of a fiscal quarter, lacks the foresight to recognize
there are fewer and fewer available veins to mine, lacks the speculative imagination that its
supply of victims could run out. The accelerationist nature of the corporation’s responsibility to
shareholders (to yield exponential growth) makes this failure of imagination all the more lethal to
the corporation: the rapidity with which the availability of the resources (required to maintain a
compounding rate of expansion) moves from abundant to scarce asymptotically approaches the
instantaneous. However immaterial the corporation might fancy its finances, its form is
ultimately only ever brought into being by the ongoing presence of human bodies that perform
labor.
Though white supremacy asserts superiority along lines of race, gender, ability, and
sexuality, it does not confer an equivalence among all white men: it can discriminate against,
subjugate, and oppress white men as well. The ontological needs of neoliberalism’s system of
growth (endless and exponential) will necessarily require immiseration of more white men in
order to “keep pace” with its runaway projections. Black and Indigenous peoples in the United

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States, as well as women and other groups dysslected from hegemonic centers of power, don’t
need to have the falsity of individualized immortality, the hypocrisies of liberal humanism, and
the paradoxes of limitless corporate amplification explained to them: these human people are
fully aware of and awake to the origins and beneficiaries of such mythologies, as well as to
whom the supposed privilege of unbridled speculation is granted. The reproduction of neoliberal
subjectivity is only possible with the pervasive and ironic participation of the critical mass of
white masculine workers who will never achieve the superlative status they feel entitled to by
virtue of their work. Once the faith of such men begins to falter, as they begin to recognize the
corporation for its ontological unviability, so too does the neoliberal hegemonic order; the
neoliberal subject has begun to disincorporate.

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Otherwise(s)
It is at this juncture where some “otherwise” may come into provisional form. Otherwise,
by my reckoning, is an alternative hegemonic formation that offers wisdom not held in the
“common sense” of prevailing cultural narratives. As mentioned previously, there are two
prominent overtures towards otherwise that have captured the attention of erstwhile neoliberal
subjects in the United States: the populist authoritarianism of Donald Trump and the social
democratism of Bernie Sanders. As Gary Gerstle writes in his analysis of neoliberalism’s
“coming apart”: “The size and success of Sanders’s and Trump’s insurgencies signified how
much the neoliberal order [is] unraveling” (255). Yet neither proposal for otherwise makes its
focus the harms that radiate from the foundational premise of liberalism in America, that casting
of the “human” as a possessive individual, an amalgam of property and personhood that was
once the sole purview of landed white men and, only later, made partially available to others
after disproportionate advantages in wealth and power had already been amassed. If there is a
desire for an otherwise that doesn’t tend to reproduce white supremacy, it will likely require a
non-liberal humanist reckoning of what it means to be “human.”
Sylvia Wynter offers a reparative notion of the human that literally moves us beyond the
possessive individual of liberal humanism: “humanness is no longer a noun… [b]eing human is a
praxis” (23). Such an estimation of the human is not a categorical distinction designed for the
application of law, but rather an active movement and permutation expressed in those fleshy
forms we associate with our species. We (us humans) are not afforded our humanity by virtue of
a tag affixed to our collars by some governing authority so much as we actively perform
humanness in an iterative intertwinement of propagation (biology) and proclamation (narrative),
both of which are necessarily social (Wynter and McKittrick 25).

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This is not the case for the corporation, which cannot tell tales of itself in accordance
with its encounters because it is not human; to the extent that tales exist implicating the
personhood of the corporation, we are their authors and, consciously or not, we participate in
their retelling. That is to say the human person and the corporate person are not ontologically
congruent: the human person exists as a process of coming into being through hybrid labors of
social/biological reproduction and storytelling while the corporate person persists in its being
solely as a fiction told by human people to human people. The corporate person, though it would
claim total emancipation, self-sufficiency, and preemption of human sociality, has no existence
outside of the psychic presence human people provide to it, codified in law. That the neoliberal
subject can sense it as an embodied and motive entity, a person, one that imagines a sublime
form of personhood for itself that excludes human people, is no trivial feat of human narrative
capacities. And as the neoliberal subject enters a period of deneoliberalization, different stories
will emerge to give an accounting of what humanness might mean.
In neoliberalism’s wake, what role will white masculine subjects take in the authoring of
a hegemonic otherwise and the genre of human it discloses? Likely a significant one in the
United States, given the continued disproportionality of white men in positions of power and
authority across the horizon of culture. Can white masculinity be reoriented away from the lure
of white supremacy and towards something else, something that does not require oppression,
domination, dispossession, competition, and a desire for immortality to permit white men to
experience a sense of meaningfulness? From what remains of neoliberal subjectivity, we need to
cultivate a story of the self that is radically counter to the speculative “rationality” of
neoliberalism, a story that can evade neoliberal subjectivity’s capture and cooptation while

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simultaneously permitting retellings that imbue recipients with pleasure, meaning, and affinity
for one another.
The possibility of beginning such a longitudinal commitment to mutation, particularly in
white masculine subjects, is an aim of the discourse of necrontology, which takes on the
ontological suppositions of white supremacist liberal humanism’s contemporary form and offers
a different tale of human being. Necrontology would assist in constituting an always-
recombinant and shared humanness that departs from the accumulative “I” of possessive
individualism and, in doing so, generate a context in which whiteness might slough off its
paranoid dreams of conquest via the exclusion of those it has deemed dysselected. As we will
see, disincorporating the faux permanence proffered by the corporation will involve a return to
the site of the body and an inquiry into the normatively (and narratively) unimaginable: can
subjects, including those of the white masculine sort, find compassion and collaboration amidst
the fluid attenuation of the corpse?

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CHAPTER 2
BECOMING THE CORPSE: NECRONTOLOGY
Extruding the Corpse from the Corporation
The corporation is coming apart – it is disincorporating. By this I don’t mean to say that
the corporation is “in the red” or that it has elected to file for bankruptcy, but rather that the
claims upon which its being are based, the metaphysics of its perpetual exponential growth, are
disclosing their impossibility. If the United States corporation is a person (as has been legally
stipulated (Winkler) and discussed at length in the previous chapter), it appears that it can’t
escape the same caloric constraints within which human persons toil; once you’ve eaten your
cake, it’s no longer yours to have. Corporate profits and the aggregation of material wealth come
at a cost: once matter has been possessed, it can no longer be additively possessed again so as to
move the needle of the rate of profit. And capital optimization has its diminishing returns, for
you can only harvest so much corn from an acre of Iowan soil and, at that, there are only so
many mouths into which kernels may be force-fed. Despite its vehemence that the world
emerges from speculation of an (economically) improved world, the corporate person is
increasingly confounded by what McKenzie Wark calls “metabolic rift,” the desolation that
hoarding makes of the world that would be possessed: “Labor pounds and wheedles rocks and
soil, plants and animals, extracting the molecular flows out of which our shared life is made and
remade. But those molecular flows do not return from whence they came. The waters diverted
from the Aral Sea to the cotton fields [do] not come back… [A]griculture is a maker of deserts”
(Wark xiii). So long as the corporation must, in the long run, acquire everything, it is loath to
release any of the resources it has secured; it demands of its world a life without metabolism and
its world, in return, delivers flooding, fire, drought, pandemic, famine, and mass extinction.

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Under neoliberalism, the corporation’s white masculine beneficiaries have become
increasingly infatuated with the idea that they have no metabolism, that through the corporation
they may proliferate their ever-expanding presence by sole virtue of speculative declarations and,
thus, human people (beyond those administrators and executives who would make such
declarations) are not essential to the corporation’s reproduction. Neoliberalism’s “winners”
believe that their imaginary projections of future ascent are sufficient to guarantee the
corporation’s ongoingness (and, thus, their own). The working human person, then, is being
rendered superfluous, a temporary inconvenience under the sign of “labor” whose obsolescence
is on the cusp of being realized. Whether it be automation, artificial intelligence, or the
purportedly unstoppable momentum (manifest destiny) of financial markets, the aspirational
vectors of future value all flow in the same direction – towards the consolidation of all matter
and matterings beneath the purview of some eventual (inevitable) singular Corporation, whose
ideal form is that of a petroleum powered stock ticker that displays no numbers but instead reads
“MORE, FASTER, FOREVER,” transcendentally coterminous with the universe itself.
So as the corporate person further demands of its world/cosmos profit without human
people, the subsequent return on such an investment becomes all too familiar to too many:
layoffs, downsizing, inflation, medical debt, student loan debt, credit card debt, food deserts,
carceral profiteering, poverty wages, houselessness, toxic water, toxic air, toxic work
environments, redlining, gentrification, hiring discrimination, policing discrimination, predatory
loans, collusive short selling, price gouging, user fees, abolition of social services, punitive credit
reports, part-time work (with no benefits), gig work (with no benefits), unpaid work (with no
benefits), and premature death of endless variety, all those mechanisms by which the extraction
of livelihood can be transubstantiated into black ink on the corporations’ quarterly earnings

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reports (livelihood that is jealously withheld from circulating back to those from whom it was
extracted). In short, the corporation inhales human wellbeing and exhales immiseration, never
fathoming in wellbeing’s absence that immiseration can hardly fill its lungs (or, to push the
bodily/metabolic metaphor further, never fathoming that it has lungs in the first place).
This brings us to the heart of the matter: the corporation literally has no heart. To the
extent that neoliberal subjectivity is modeled on the ontology of the corporation, to the extent
that hegemonic white masculinity instructs subjects to establish themselves as competitive
publicly traded firms, there is a coercive pressure to neglect the material, biological, psychic, and
social context of human emergence in favor of a fictive legal entity whose constitutive parts (its
workers) are increasingly relegated to dysselected status. The human person and the corporate
person are incongruous; they perform their worlds under different material premises. The human
person knows this inasmuch as it is understood that those hearts that circulate blood must always
someday end their work; human people are metabolic, they decompose, their existence is not
purely additive, they give back fully as a condition of their selfhood, as eventual corpses.
However, United States neoliberalism offers its own ontology – modeled on the legal
fiction of the corporation – as a powerful and pervasive story of the universality of a certain kind
of existing, a story that proposes human people may take some part of the corporation’s
endlessness into themselves (so long as those human people are aligned with the superiority of
able-bodied white American men of wealth). Though the neoliberal subject has developed
serious doubts concerning corporate ontology (there is too much evidence to the contrary of its
claims, on the one hand, and there are too many whose full access to neoliberal subjectivity is
implicitly denied at birth, on the other), it is the prevailing brand of ontology on offer from
institutions that would produce the human person for the furthering of corporate profit. Corporate

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ontology demands that human people engage the world as gaslit paradoxes, simultaneously
persuaded that there is virtue and significance for them in the furtherance of corporate and
executive immortality while encountering and intuiting the accelerating decay and precarity of
the resources from which corporate immortality is produced – namely, human people and their
capacity for “productive” (exploited) labor.
Ironically, despite assurances that corporate ontology is that of a line that can only go up
even as the human person’s significance is erased, human people cannot forget that they have
witnessed the corporation’s reliance on human presence: whether it be tax payer funded bailouts,
the sacrificing of public services (enacted by democratically elected public servants) to subsidize
corporate revenues, the need to hike wages to secure employment in the wake of worker self-
consciousness following the onset of the most recent pandemic, or rare yet notable acquiescence
to union demands, the corporation has been forced to grapple with the conditions of its mortality;
the corporation has only continued to exist because of its extraction from human people, without
whom the corporation dies. Though it would declare transcendental emancipation, the corporate
person is actually the dependent of human people (though best of luck to any human persons
attempting to claim such dependence on your tax returns).
In this chapter, amidst the vacuum in the United States hegemonic order generated by the
decline of neoliberalism’s narrative, I call for the enunciation of an ontology that is inclusive of
(though not centered upon) human being, an ontology that not only refers to human materiality
with conscientiousness (in anti-racist, non-patriarchal, non-ableist, non-Eurocentric terms) but
also targets the ontological assumptions underpinning neoliberal subjectivity and its figurehead,
the corporation. I first discuss what is at stake when invoking the term “ontology,” particularly
when it comes to an accounting of matter and how the purported immateriality of the world as

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imagined under neoliberalism proves to be a dishonest metaphysics (predicated upon the desire
for immortality as opposed to being reflective of encounters with/as material). Next, I propose a
counter-ontology to that which is given by the corporation: necrontology, the study of existing in
terms of how seemingly discrete forms, when situated in relation to other forms and subjected to
time, tend towards coming apart, disaggregation, decay, dying. Given the liberal humanist
rendering of “the body” as the integral site for possessive individualism, I then introduce the
premise that, from a necrontological perspective, human people do not have (corporate) bodies
so much as they become corpses. That is, human ways of being are not localizable to a static
manifestation of self-possession but instead can be appreciated as dynamic, continuous
wellsprings of mutation. Human people are never so stable, bounded, or construable as the fixity
of their taxonomy (Homo sapiens) suggests – rather they are a procession of reconfigurations
that both precede and follow that moment we might call “death.” I conclude with a consideration
of how necrontology might persuasively offer a sense meaning for erstwhile neoliberal subjects
searching for a system of significance as neoliberalism deteriorates. I suggest that such a system,
rooted in the messiness of human encounters with/as material, cannot be given as a prefabricated
mandate but must be actively enacted through iterative performances of desires for otherwise, a
method of research that I call performance as prefigurative praxis.

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Against Corporate Ontology
“To be, or not to be” has been asked, as if it were a matter of choosing. What does it
mean to “be” something? Such a question is a concern of “ontology,” what we might call the
discourse of what constitutes existing. Considerations of ontology are likely to include an
analysis of the material properties of a given “thing” and how, in relation to such materiality, a
thing might to said to “exist.” Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, whose work critiques
Western (i.e., white masculine) objectivity and its separation of the material and the ideational,
provides a brief and narrow definition of the term as it is often used: “ontology, the substance,
structure, and forms of the world” (1). Substance, structure, and form, as a collection of nouns,
seem to suggest coordinated accretion as the basis for residing in the realm of being, implying
that to exist has something to do with an ascertainable presence, an appearance, a bounded
differentiation from other “things”; existence is a measure and expression of recognizability.
Given this understanding of ontology, in order for something to be a substance, structure, or
form, it must provide a witness with some way to perceive it as such, for that witness to be made
aware of its substance, structure, or form via some apparatus of recognition (the canonical
human “senses,” telescopes, linguistic descriptions, diagrams, chemical composition tests, legal
categories of personhood, and so on). In any attempt to gain access to the breadth and depth of
the ontological, what some might refer to as “reality,” one must make discriminations as to what
constitutes the threshold condition for difference: where does one thing “end” and another
“begin” such that it can be said that there are two things instead of one (or one instead of none)?
This sort of ontology is about boundaries and the means by which we adjudicate the
sovereign territories of forms (in social terms, where I end and you begin; in liberal humanist
terms, what I possess and you do not). Implicit in such an ontology is that there are discernable

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thresholds by which we can categorize things by their separateness. This is not to say that such
an ontology provides no concept of “mixing,” but rather the very idea of mixing suggests that
there exist entities that are normatively and essentially isolated from one another and come into
solution only via interaction. In other words, the baseline of this sort of thingness is to be
uncontaminated by difference. While a given thing may have heterogeneous regions, those
regions are proper to that thing and allow it to be named (a corporation, a corpse, a crop of corn).
These assumptions, these notions of a monadic materialism where to be a thing is to be discrete
and self-possessive, are amongst the prevailing hegemonic conventions against which
philosophies of “new materialism” are positioned.
In their 2019 survey of new materialism (titled, aptly, “What Is New Materialism?”),
Chirstopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail describe the “common motivation”
for new materialism’s various strains as being “a perceived neglect or diminishment of matter…
as a passive substance intrinsically devoid of meaning. In what has become a kind of de facto
motto, new materialists routinely emphasize how matter is ‘alive,’ ‘lively,’ ‘vibrant,’ ‘dynamic,’
‘agentive,’ and thus active” (111). In particular, they advocate for an understanding of ontology
in terms of what they call “pedesis,” where the “movements of performative matter… ceaselessly
(re)articulate their own limits and boundaries, without ever permanently fixing or standardizing
the meaning of what falls on either side,” adding that “while no boundary or limit is absolute,
this does not lead to a world of radical contingency and caprice” but rather “matter always
remains radically entangled and therefore also always partly indeterminate and improvisational”
(126). This pedetic reckoning of matter is antagonistic to neoliberalism’s corporate ontology in
that it undermines the metaphysics of possession, the assurance that an object can be identified
and confined in its entirety and, by writ of improvement/inheritance/acquisition, become the

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legally protected property of an individual. Without “fixed” or “standardized” boundaries to
demarcate the extent of an object, it can hardly be possessed without ambiguity.
Gamble et al. champion what they coin “performative new materialism” (an elaboration
of Karen Barad’s “agential realism”) while identifying what they consider to be significant flaws
in the more well-known “vital new materialism” (which they associate with Jane Bennett and
Elizabeth Grosz). Though I am most deeply compelled by Barad’s discourse of ontology (I will
discuss her work later in this chapter), I contend that there are provocative premises in those
“problematic” veins of new materialist study worth considering for how they might inform
necrontology, even if vital materialism “cannot avoid the historically rooted privileging of life
over non-life and the implications this privileging has had on the exploitation and expropriation
of human and non-human bodies associated with non-life” (Gamble et al. 120).
Political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett, responding to the harms of Western
philosophy’s anthropo-/androcentric biases, describes what I refer to as “corporate ontology” as
follows: “American materialism, which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products
purchased in ever shorter cycles, is antimateriality. The sheer volume of commodities, and the
hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of
matter” (5). By virtue of the enforced disposability (planned obsolescence) of consumer
products, the neoliberal subject might be seduced into making inferences concerning their
longevity (or prospective immortality); per sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, “[l]ength of life is a
comparative notion, and the mortal body is now perhaps the longest-living entity around” (183).
For Bennett, however, it is a mistake to position the specifically human instantiation of matter as
markedly distinct from other forms (non-anthropic and, more crucially, non-living). Her
evocation of “vitality” indicates “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals –

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not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or
forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii); to exist is to be vital, to
be in possession of such forces that would perpetuate a thing’s existing, that would affect other
beings, and that would open all things to affectation. Vitality is not monopolized by the
biological but is present in all matter and, thus, there is a political necessity for human people to
engage with matter on the terms of its ability to make or unmake human ways of being (for
ignoring the force of non-human matter does not insulate the human from said force’s effects).
That one might imagine all matter (that stuff of forms) as capable of exerting its own
“conatus,” its own “trending tendency to persist” (Bennett 2), radically diminishes the
metaphysical certainties that energize corporate ontology: legal possession does not totally
subject matter to the will of the possessor; not all matter is amenable to performing as a
commodity; assertions of the inevitability of perpetual growth do not guarantee that matter will
cooperate. In fact, Bennett goes so far as to suggest, following literary theoretician John Frow, a
relatively “flat” ontology across all those things we would call by different names:
There are of course differences between the knife that impales and the
man impaled, between the technician who dabs the sampler and the
sampler, between the array of items in the gutter of Cold Spring Lane and
me, the narrator of their vitality. But I agree with John Frow that these
differences need “to be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition
rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being. It’s a feature of our world
that we can and do distinguish . . . things from persons. But the sort of
world we live in makes it constantly possible for these two sets of
kinds to exchange properties.” (9-10)

This non-anthropocentric turn in the imaginary of what persons might be brings every sort of
matter into contiguous relation, inaugurating a recurrent question that would drag at the coattails
of the neoliberal subject, interrupting their blithe trek up growth’s infinite slope: “Does a person
always matter more than a non-person?” While corporate ontology must always answer “yes”

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with great emphasis, vital materialism introduces an alternative response: “it depends.” The
consideration of such dependence, the future that might emerge in accord with such
considerations, is the basis of Elizabeth Grosz’s “ontoethics.”
Grosz is explicit that her ontoethics “never addresses morality, the question of what is to
be done” (1), but rather focuses on her understanding of ethics as “necessarily link[ed]… with a
politics, how collectives, and their constituents, are to live and act together within what
protective and limiting parameters” (2). This ethics is predicated on the qualities of being that
permit the present to disclose the future without presupposing that things ought to be a certain
way (or that we can design such a moral world by force of will). Per Grosz: “This is an
ontoethics, without any recourse to a concept like ‘should,’ but always embedded in and
dependent on what is and what will be” (128). As with Bennett, Grosz is insistent that we
recognize “not just human life in its interhuman relations, but relations between the human and
an entire world, both organic and inorganic” (1). However, Grosz further contributes the notion
of “the incorporeal,” “the subsistence of the ideal in the material or corporeal,” the inseparable
connection between “ideas” (knowledge) and the bodies and forms in which they accrete,
circulate, communicate, and mutate (5). This is to say, what corporate ontology might suggest is
metaphysically immaterial (the corporation) and, thus, capable of superseding the inconvenient
requirements of material finitude, is re-recognized as being necessarily materially instantiated in
Grosz’s ontoethics. Ideality and materiality cannot be separated – despite its protestations, the
corporation person’s ontology and the human person’s ontology emerge from the same ethics.
Grosz’s ontoethics sites being not as a terminal process whose ongoing activities can only
ever serve to reaffirm forms as they already are, but instead as the motile conditions from which
relative difference tends to unfurl in time (an unfurling that is inherently nondeterministic):

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It is only rarely that ontology is addressed not only in terms of what is but
also in terms of how what is may enable what might be. Ontology has
been increasingly directed toward explaining scientific and mathematical
models, for which ethical considerations seem conceptually extrinsic. Yet
an ontology entails a consideration of the future, not only of what we can
guarantee or be certain but above all what virtualities in the present may
enable in the future. (2)

Though at stake in a given culture’s dominant ontological story is an account of what constitutes
a “thing,” ontoethics implicates the preceding coming-into-being by which such things appear in
the moment of their witnessing and, further, implies the ever-present, ineradicable possibility of
different becomings beyond the present (what I refer to as “otherwise”). Ontologies that would
promise an “end of history,” the impossibility of future forms that meaningfully differ from those
we observe in the present, would have us turn away from the very processes by which yesterday
became today; such ontologies reject process as such in favor of essential stasis, a lack of vitality.
Yet vital materialism, despite its affirmation of non-living matter, appears to maintain a
preference for that which is “lively” over that which is ostensibly “inert.” In fact, its core claim is
that all matter matters because matter is inherently vivacious, vivified, vibrant – in short,
“everything is, in a sense, alive” (Bennett 117). At the level of language, vital materialism
suggests the biologization of all things, elevating the significance of all things on the literal terms
of life, and denies the alterity of forms that are not like “the living”; vital materialism would de-
signify that which is coded as “non-organic,” in turn relegating death and dying to a
comparatively lesser facet of being. This diminishment of “the dead” is exactly the criticism that
Gamble and his cohorts levy at vital materialists and that critical theorist and anthropologist
Elizabeth Povinelli attempts to reconcile in her elaboration of “geontology.”
Povinelli, working in collaboration with the Indigenous people of Belyuen in northern
Australia, develops a theory of ontology that tries to specifically account for the value of the

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Life/Nonlife binary (her capitalizations) for the benefit of late liberalism (Povinelli reckons
neoliberalism as contiguous with late liberalism, with neoliberalism referring to “the governance
of markets” and late liberalism referring to a more abstract “governance of difference” in which
markets are situated (168)). Geontology and its attendant “geontopower” are the systemic
ideation/implementation of a theory of being which requires the ongoing maintenance of the
category of Nonlife (as so many forms of carbon: fossil fuel, forests, and those routed into
dysselection) so that Life may be justified in extracting it. More specifically, geontology is the
discourse that would attempt to convince us that Life will go on regardless of its treatment of
Nonlife in a context where such a premise seems increasingly implausible. Geontology is what
goes “on offer” once the prevailing ontology (that which proposes the possibility of unending
exponential material expansion) begins to appear ridiculous. It is the endeavor to reproduce the
social significance of power as it presently performs, indifferent to the climate, willfully ignorant
concerning the prospects of unlimited resource extraction, deluded into believing its
technological solutions can overcome or reverse any harmful externality eventuated by its
violence, while the world literally burns and floods at once. As Povinelli articulates:
[I]t is increasingly clear that the anthropos remains an element in the set
of life only insofar as Life can maintain is distinction from
Death/Extinction and Nonlife. It is also clear that late liberal strategies for
governing difference and markets only work insofar as these distinctions
are maintained. And it is exactly because we can hear “insofar” that we
know that these brackets are now visible, debatable, fraught, and anxious.
It is certainly the case that the statement “clearly, x humans are more
important than y rocks” continues to be made, persuade, stop political
discourse. But what interests me… is the slight hesitation, the pause, the
intake of breath that now can interrupt an immediate assent. (9)

Povinelli is not suggesting the horizontal ontology of the vital materialists (the elimination of
Nonlife as a category in favor of pervasive Life in all directions, a theoretical maneuver that
must constantly reaffirm the notion of Nonlife as an excluded category in order to counter it), but

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rather is challenging the very premise of the Life/Nonlife ontological distinction insofar as it
drives the harms of neoliberal capitalism. This is a subtle difference but an important one:
“[g]eontology is not a crisis of life (bios) and death (thanatos) at a species level (extinction), or
merely a crisis between Life (bios) and Nonlife (geos, meteoros). Geontopower is a mode of late
liberal governance. And it is this mode of governance that is trembling” (Povinelli 16). Like the
emergence of neoliberalism as a reactionary and historically-specific strategy (to reaffirm and
strengthen the benefits of generational wealth and white supremacy for the “selected”) rather
than any sort of inevitable evolution of social organization, geontology is not a model for the
“truth” of our existence. Rather, gerontology serves as a model for the ontological assumptions
that have been leveraged to make the prevailing order and its behaviors seem sensible. These are
the assumptions that are presently being exposed in a crisis of paradox: growing exponentially
forever incurs a greater cost with time; with enough time (forever), the cost becomes infinite; a
corporation must be profitable (exponentially-so) to further is existence (attract investors); no
corporation can front an infinite cost and still be profitable (what’s left to claim as profit after an
infinite expense?). In brief, the supposedly tireless flow of Nonlife towards Life has become
exhausted and exposed for its falsity.
For Povinelli, there is an imperative to imagine the otherwise that late liberalism’s
Life/Nonlife ontology forecloses. Povinelli offers us the figure of the Virus (her capitalization) as
a concrete example of what it means to be neither evidently Living nor Nonliving, to confound
the easy dichotomy of “alive” and “dead.” By scientific description, viruses are “obligate
intracellular parasites, acellular infectious agents that require the presence of a host cell in order
to multiply” (Bruslind 8.1). To translate, a virus is “inert,” subject to the active whims of its
environment, until such a time that it comes in contact with “living” tissue with which it is

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parasitically compatible (often determined at a species and even organ level), at which point it
“hijacks” the replicative machinery of the infected cell. It its dormant state (prior to infection),
viruses can “survive” for an arbitrary amount of time particular to the virus in its present
environment. Further complicating viral “life/death” considerations is the propensity for many
viruses to lyse, or kill, their host cells so as to release the replicated viral matter into the
environment to infect new hosts.
There is no scientific consensus as to whether or not a virus meets criteria for being
“alive.” Writing for Scientific American in 2008, molecular biologist Luis P. Villarreal asks:
What exactly defines “life?” A precise scientific definition of life is an
elusive thing, but most observers would agree that life includes certain
qualities in addition to an ability to replicate… Living organisms also are
thought to require a degree of biochemical autonomy, carrying on the
metabolic activities that produce the molecules and energy needed to
sustain the organism… Viruses, however, parasitize essentially all
biomolecular aspects of life. That is, they depend on the host cell for the
raw materials and energy… [and therefore] a spectrum may exist between
what is certainly alive and what is not.

Povinelli takes this gray discourse of the Virus and identifies its particular mode of emergence as
a social phenomenon in late liberalism. It is because of the cultivated belief in the Life/Nonlife
binary that COVID-19 was so poorly anticipated by neoliberal subjects, for the Virus does not
participate in the prevailing ontological mandates by which all matter is assumed to be under the
compulsion of a self-sufficient (individual-possessive) expansion of its purview while
maintaining a coherent, persistent, ossified “essence,” the failure to do so being marked by the
finality of death. The Virus has no faculties by which to participate in discussions of Life/Nonlife
distinctions and its existence is not limited by periods of stagnation, notions of competition,
whether it kills its host, or the possible extinction of its mutational variants; it merely seeks
propagation, not necessarily of the same. Per Povinelli, as “the division of Life and Nonlife does

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not define or contain the Virus, it can use and ignore this division for the sole purpose of
diverting the energies of arrangements of existence in order to extend itself’ (19). The Virus has
no attachment to the signification of identity, for it always relies on the body of another to
“extend itself” in the first place. It is not its own “lifeform,” yet is always rendered in relation to
that which would be named Life.
In the midst of neoliberalism’s decline, corporations are actively weaponizing the social
illegibility of viral existence as they panic in the shadow of a crumbling geontology, seeking to
infect any and every possible site of reproduction, unconcerned if their hosts are killed in the
process. If corporations as cast as psychopathic, it is because they simultaneously barter in
shared notions of the value of Life while disregarding such Life when it is advantageous for their
sole viral purpose: diverting the energies of arrangements of existence in order to generate profit.
Inasmuch as a corporation is a person, psychopathy is horrific precisely because it suggests a
lack of reverence for the category of Life and, thus, demonstrates a capacity to treat Life as
though it were Nonlife. In this way, violence becomes a corporate imperative (so as to
extract/consume/reconfigure the required mass of material that would keep pace with
shareholder expectations for exponential growth) and is legally justifiable so long as whatever
may be putatively considered Life can be cast as its inverse.
In proposing a necrontology that would position itself against the corporation and its
geontopower, then, I borrow from vital materialism the general sensibility that what is
normatively categorized as “non-human” does not have any inherent hierarchical inferiority to
that which is considered “human.” Further, I welcome the premise of an ontology that refuses to
accept an explanation for what is while neglecting the material/political performances by which
things come to be; there is no form that precedes and follows itself – forms change across their

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generations. However, I leave behind both vital materialism’s “vitality,” its diminution of death
and dying in favor of a material world that is essentially “alive,” as well as its flattening of
difference into potential insignificance. The extreme specificity and idiosyncrasy of particular
instantiations of matter are meaningful, even when a given instantiation of matter appears to be
fading, wavering, receding, ceasing. Without either the competitive comparison of corporate
ontology or the universal horizontality of vital materialism to provide a basis for relation
between forms, we are invited to wonder: what shared ontology might exist that would permit
affinity across differences? And if such an affinity could be recognized, how would it effect and
affect the arrangements of our being?

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Necrontology as (be)Coming Apart
There is an inconvenient rebuttal to corporate growth imperatives in the very tendency of
matter, of which corporate and human people are both composed. One articulation of this
tendency, the science of thermodynamics, reckons the universe to be exactly the opposite sort of
place proposed by corporate ontology; matter does not inhabit an ontology that tends towards
permanent accumulation, but rather an ontology that tends towards transient dispersal. As
neoliberalism forfeits its hegemonic hold on its subjects (particularly those of the white
masculine sort), intuitions developed from a lifetime of encounters with decay may orient those
subjects away from aspirations of immortality and towards an otherwise story of how one might
become significant, a story with its roots grounded in what is shared by all those things that can
be said to exist.
Let’s consider thermodynamics as a general science before we apply its implicit framing
of ontology to the experience of human being. At its most reduced, physical chemist R. Stephen
Berry defines thermodynamics as “a science of the rules and properties of change… provid[ing]
strict rules about what changes can occur and what changes are not allowed by nature” (4). The
science of thermodynamics began to be developed in the early nineteenth century so as to assist
in optimizing the real-world productive capacity of steam engines, the cornerstone technology of
the factory system of early industrial capitalism (with the accompanying extraction and
combustion of coal to heat the steam necessary to drive factory engines) (Malm). In narrating the
historical emergence of thermodynamics, Berry credits French mechanical engineer Sadi Carnot
as its originary thinker for his efforts to articulate the hypothetical “ideal” engine in which
efficiency, the amount of “useful work” produced by a given engine per the “amount of heat”
supplied to it, is perfect – no heat is lost to friction within the engine or to interactions with the

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world outside of the engine but, rather, all of the heat is converted to work (which, in the factory,
would mean greater profit in relation to the cost of fuel) (69-72).
Thermodynamics augmented what we now think of as Newtonian or “classical”
mechanics. Though English polymath Sir Isaac Newton is most closely associated with the
“discovery” of gravity, it is difficult to overstate the impact of Newton’s framing of the physical
world on Western ontology. With his emphasis that all purportedly natural phenomenon could be
represented in the language of mathematics, a sensibility emerged of “a world in which every
event was determined by initial conditions that were, at least in principle, determinable with
precision” (Toffler xiii). By the early eighteenth century, Newton was regarded in England not
only as the Enlightenment scientist par excellence but also as a kind of prophet, with
contemporary poet Alexander Pope writing “God said, let Newton be! and all was light”
(Prigogine and Stengers 27). Per Newton’s model, “time” was to be regarded as nothing more
than a generic unit of measurement, one that did little to elucidate any essential understanding of
how the universe functioned:
In the world model constructed by Newton and his followers, time was an
afterthought. A moment, whether in the present, past, or future, was
assumed to be exactly like any other moment. The endless cycling of the
planets – indeed, operations of a clock or a simple machine – can, in
principle, go either backward or forward in time without altering the
basics of the system. For this reason, scientists refer to time in Newtonian
systems as “reversible.” (Toffler xix)

Classical mechanics suggest the workings of the material world can be determined in advance, if
only the right equations are discovered and applied to the realm of human affairs. This is not
unlike the pretense of omniscience of those who traffic in “big data” and the “algorithmization”
of human productivity, behavior, and exploitability; Newton helped to affirm that there is an

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ontological essence to be found in all forms (including people) and that its finding could be
achieved through the rational explication of mechanical movement.
Thermodynamics, though also based on principles of mathematics and the scientific
method, discloses a different conclusion from its observations of matter, opting for an insistence
that at certain sizes of space and scales of time the changes in matter are stochastic (probabilistic
but not knowable) rather than deterministic and that those changes can often be irreversible; time
and the changes it confers have crucial effects on matter. Though thermodynamics has become
integral to physical sciences (with Albert Einstein himself going so far as to say that “it is the
only physical theory of universal content, which I am convinced, that within the framework of
applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown” (Ben-Naim 1)), its scientific
acceptance has not guaranteed that its reckonings of ontology be included in the hegemonic
narratives of “progress.”
Before Sadi Carnot succumbed to cholera in 1832 at the age of thirty-six, he determined
that no matter how efficiently a real-world engine might convert heat to work, there is a hard
limit to the amount of work that can be produced by a given amount of heat; you can’t get more
work energy out of a system than the heat energy you put in. If this weren’t the case, Carnot
postulated that we would see “perpetual motion machine[s]” that were so efficient that they
could create excess energy by which to drive their own functioning, emitting energy infinitely
without a compensatory cost, surpassing the efficiency of the ideal engine by making
“something” out of “nothing.” Ultimately, Carnot determined that such perpetual motion is not
possible, a premise that would later be codified by William Macquorn Rankine in 1857 as the
“first law of thermodynamics,” which one might recall from high school physics as the
“conservation of energy,” or the axiom “energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only

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transferred.” Or to put it another way, “the energy of the universe is constant” (Berry 87),
implying that whenever we observe some phenomenon that we would claim in the name of
“growth,” there must always be accompanying phenomena, however hidden, that are
dispossessive, resulting in the loss of one form to expand or sustain another. Along these lines,
ours is a metabolic universe.
Yet even if there is a limit to how much energy exists, with enough dispossession it can
still apparently (at least with only the first law of thermodynamics in play) be totally
concentrated and held as the property of a single legally immortal entity – the first law only
stipulates that possession is a zero-sum game (which is largely consistent with [neo]liberal
property relations). When this effort towards total rivalrous accumulation is cast as the ultimate
cultural virtue (as in the white masculine-dominated United States), there are those willing to
work themselves (or, more likely, others they employ) to the grave in the quest towards universal
monopoly. However, this is not the whole story: the second law of thermodynamics scuttles
corporate ontology’s basis by undermining the sanctity of possession. If thermodynamics is “a
science of the rules and properties of change” and the first law articulates what cannot change in
the material universe (the amount of energy), the second law introduces the complicated but
crucial concept of entropy, which governs not only the tendency of change (in the distribution of
energy and, thus, the solvency of material forms) but also what changes are impossible or
irreversible; entropy produces the directionality of time – and the time it orients is disintegrative.
Entropy is often discussed as “chaos,” which gives a misleading impression of what the
concept portends: “chaos” invites the imagination to consider a slapdash series of novel and
alarming events that tend to overwhelm the senses. In actuality, the chaos at stake in entropy is
of quite a different kind, the dissolution of form such that the fabric of the universe would appear

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completely devoid of features, a homogenous scrim of minimally related particles that cease to
aggregate and generate anything that we might recognize as a thing; chaos is a tendency towards
the heat death of the universe, where, in the words of Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine and
his collaborator, philosopher Isabelle Stengers, “the world uses up its differences as it goes from
one conversion to another and tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium… in the end
there will no longer be any differences” (115-116). Chaos is not an abundance of activity, but a
trajectory towards activity’s total cessation.
Here it will be helpful to provide a definition of the second law of thermodynamics and a
concrete example of what it indicates for our ontology. Per Berry, the second law claims
“systems evolve naturally from states of lower probability to states of higher probability” (42).
Without further elaboration, this seems like a rather benign statement, so it is important to
understand what is meant with the evocation of “states.” We can refer to an imaginary shoebox
that contains an equal number of red and blue ping pong balls. Consider this:
—The relative distribution of ping pong balls in the shoebox (the number of red
and blue balls on each side, left and right, of the box) constitute its state.
—When we only have two ping pong balls, one of each color, and begin with the
blue ball on the left and the red ball on the right, we might close the box, shake it,
and open it again to discover that roughly half of the time either given ball is
either on the left or the right side; this is a relatively low complexity system so it
would not be totally unexpected, on occasion, to find the blue ball to the left and
the red to the right when we open the box, in the same locations they began.
—However, let’s say we add nine blue and nine red balls to their respective
starting sides; how likely will we be to find, after closing, shaking, and reopening

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the shoebox, that all of the blue balls are on the left side and all of the red balls are
on the right? Such an outcome is highly improbable; it is likely is that there will
be some blue and some red balls on each side of the box.
—Let’s add a million more ping pong balls of each color to our shoebox (which,
apparently, has become quite large); close, shake, reopen and, if we observe from
a great enough distance, we will witness a purple mass – the ping pong balls will
have tended towards being distributed in the highest probability state, which finds
about as many blue and red ping pong balls in any isolated volume of the
shoebox.
—Of course, it’s possible that there may be regions of the shoebox that contain
disproportionate collections of blue or red ping pong balls; yet in general, looking
at the entire shoebox of a couple million ping pong balls (the state of the system),
these pockets will be so infrequent as to be overwhelmed by the purple field of
color.
Now, in a step beyond our admittedly huge shoebox filled with ping pong balls, let’s imagine
any thing that appears to have a recognizable form, at the scale of our bodies; we can substitute
the system of the shoebox for the system of the body and its seven octillion atoms (Clegg). If the
second law of thermodynamics tells us that the tendency of all forms is to degenerate into
disordered states, why don’t our bodies collapse into some kind of fleshy sludge? Why don’t we
merge with the surface of the Earth and truly become “one with Gaia”? Why is there difference
at all? Here, a caveat: in order to maintain any form and its specific, intricate, complex, and
distinctive structures, “we must provide energy and do work to make that happen” (Berry 43).
Entropy is instantaneous and the moment that a system can increase its entropy, it automatically

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and immediately does so unless some other source of energy intervenes. In the case of our
shoebox, we might imagine a corps of laborers rushing to carry ping pong balls to the proper side
of the box before some giant entity opens its lid to peer inside. In the case of our bodies, we eat
and drink and hope the millennia of genetic evolution that has birthed our “species” is up to the
task of making use of our meals.
Human forms aren’t given, but rather are constantly being reproduced so long as we
exist. When a human person “dies,” the decomposition observed is not some additive affliction
that the body becomes subject to, but rather the result of the termination of the ongoing “work”
that had been making the maintenance of the body’s form “happen” up until that point. If energy
is the ability to do work and is stored in any number of ways that might lead to its transfer (in the
bonds between molecules, in the flux of particle motions whose collisions produce heat, in the
nuclei of individual atoms, and so on), it follows that whenever work is done, there must be some
initial difference in states between which energy moves, from an ordered concentration to a
relative lack – change in time always favors increased entropy, a reduction in order, the inverse
of a hypothetical ontology in which the “nature of things” is to become increasingly organized,
concentrated, coherent, solvent, massive.
With the introduction of the second law of thermodynamics, the corporate person’s
immortality via dispossession becomes an impossible feat: the work of neoliberalism (its
“productivity” as well as its consumption), despite automation and the denigration of the
wellbeing of workers, ultimately always emerges from the forms of human people; without
sustenance, human people cease; with the cessation of human people, the work required to
reproduce the market atrophies; without the myth of the market, profit and its growth meet the
moment of their death. The insistence on the preservation of the corporate person at the energetic

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expense of the critical mass of human people necessary for the corporation’s reproduction is
ontologically futile, if the intent is to exist at an ever-increasing scale and intensity forever.
It is at this point where necrontology, an ontology predicated on the recognition and
appreciation of disincorporation instead of its feverish denial, begins. It is a story of our being, a
direct response to the fallacious corruption of ontology as it has been given by the corporation,
that would reorient its prospective audience away from competitive immortal supremacy and into
material alignment with the effects of change in time. To attend to the prior half of its
portmanteau, the “necro-” of necrontology is the Anglicization of the Greek nekrós, which
generally signifies “dead” or, more intimately, “dead person” – corpse. By this reckoning,
necrontology is particularly concerned with how narratives of human death (even in their
obfuscation) act as engines for our sense of the significance of being. Necrontology is intended
neither as a totalizing truth that would fix some essence of our existing in place nor as a
“solution” to the “problems” of neoliberalism, white supremacy, and violence. It is, rather, an
attempt to intervene in those hegemonic stories that over-determine the realm of the possible to
always favor immortalist white masculinity while eliminating the imaginary of otherwise.
I am developing this discourse of necrontology in an attempt to offer a persuasive and
accessible counternarrative for those who have been most thoroughly hailed as neoliberal
subjects (including but not limited to able-bodied white American men), a story of otherwise that
could contaminate those same people and lessen their participation in the reproduction of
neoliberalism and white supremacy. With its corporate ontology, neoliberalism requires a focus
on a speculative future where one always defers one’s existing as a sort of actualization to come,
never placing a serious significance in processes of becoming that are presently in play; per
Zygmunt Bauman, “[n]eeding to become what one is is the feature of modern living” (31-32).

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This sort of ontology often makes experienced encounters with one’s milieu (including the
happenings of one’s body) incoherent, for there is rarely an obvious rationale for how such
encounters will lead to “improvement”; how does an itchy scalp generate profit?; how does a
cloud sliding over the sun, noticeably darkening the light, guarantee career advancement?; how
does laughing at an amusing animal (a dog rolling in the grass, tongue lolling wildly, say) deliver
value for shareholders? Asking neoliberal subjects to attend to those moments of encounter
which comprise the vast majority of their existing is not difficult (“mindfulness,” after all, has
already been incorporated into the fold of neoliberal wellness), but insisting that such subjects
prioritize the narrative significance of such encounters over the teleology of improvement is
where a radical shift may emerge. We will discuss what sorts of insistent social performances
might instigate this shift in the next chapter, but for the moment let’s dismiss neoliberalism’s
assurances of the impossibility of alternatives and entertain the idea that change can (and does)
occur, thermodynamically across the differences and distances between forms.
The “necro-,” then, is the provocation that transforms ontological curiosity into material,
psychic, and social urgency, a compulsion of conscientiousness to combat the coercions of
market competition. Neoliberalism implicitly and explicitly repudiates what we understand with
some certainty (in addition to the worker’s tax burden): every human person will die. Death is
the event in which a “lifeform” ceases to be capable of maintaining its form and wastes away.
And though any certainty is likely to be troubled if held long enough, for the time being we have
little reason to reject that the thermodynamic procession towards cellular senescence has always
yielded one death for each birth. This is all to say that in relation to a social story that would
eliminate the necessity of death (for an extremely rarefied cohort of competitively “superior”
people), the present facticity of predetermined death provokes an involuntary repugnance.

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Inserting the specter of death into the explicit parameters of ontology muddles any coherence
that neoliberalism might offer its would-be subjects, disrupting their blithe pursuit of
“happiness” (property) and reminding them of the material circumstances which not only limit
such a pursuit but also constitute the entirety of its content.
This memory of death-to-come, what feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti characterizes as
“a constitutive event [that] is behind us; it has already taken place as a virtual potential that
constructs everything we are” (132), tends to cultivate a tenderness, even a wistfulness, in those
who remember. When contrasted to narratives that permit access to permanence, acknowledging
death invites an accompanying sense of loss. When situated against narratives that cast loss as
failure, death offers more than grief: it is a shameful moral abdication. Yet as with biblical
“original sin,” it is not necessary to shoulder guilt and shame for that which is unchosen and
unavoidable; where neoliberalism would have its subjects foment (self-)hatred towards those
who fail (die), the recognition of one’s own upcoming death often has the opposite effect: when I
acknowledge the fragile ephemerality of my own being, my desire to be cared for inspires care
for others who face the same perceived “ends.” This empathy is one of the social consequences
of a turn towards necrontology and it is a direct threat to the sociopathy that undergirds and
sustains corporate ontology’s immortal victors.
However, necrontology, though it extends thermodynamic principles as a “rational” tactic
to remind neoliberal subjects of the inevitability of their deaths, does not aim to offer just another
teleology (e.g., all events occur to justify the terminus of death) to replace the prevailing one (all
events occur to justify the terminus of the infinite concentration of property [as the ultimate
measure of significance]). While “death” is a useful provocation given its alarming associations
within a social regime that finds it to be unacceptable, its coterminousness with “the end” is as

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mythical as neoliberalism’s promise of exponential expansion. Death is no end, but rather a
necessary condition of the emergence of difference, that which is other than – otherwise. For if
the thermodynamic march towards heat death is a universal constraint, why do we ever witness
anything that appears to proliferate in its complexity? That is, how does that thing we might call
“the human” come into being when, once, there were not even single-celled prokaryotes?
From Prigogine and Stengers we receive a theory of emergent order that relies on the
thermodynamic dissolution of that order which exists. Prigogine’s 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry
was awarded for his work with “dissipative structures,” which can be understood as follows:
[A]ll systems contain subsystems, which are continually “fluctuating.” At
times, a single fluctuation or a combination of them may become so
powerful, as a result of positive feedback, that is shatters the preexisting
organization. At this revolutionary moment… it is inherently impossible to
determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the
system will disintegrate into “chaos” or leap to a new, more differentiated,
higher level of “order” or organization, which they call a “dissipative
structure.” (Such physical or chemical structures are termed dissipative
because, compared to the simpler structures they replace, they require
more energy to sustain them.) (Toffler xv)

This model of dissipative structures, the very possibility of not only complexity and order but
also evolution, is not the deterministic ascent of corporate ontology but, again, is a stochastic
process: given the probabilistic tendency of energy’s movement in time, though in the vast
majority of instances (at a macroscopic level) energy will flow from where it is most
concentrated to where it is least, there will be the rare occasion in which an accretion of energy
and matter will yield a “form” more ordered than that which surrounds it. Should such a
structural system come into its form simultaneously with a compensatory mechanism by which
to offset its dissipation (should its becoming have a metabolic capacity), that system of structure
may both preserve its form and augment it through mutative iteration. While this “offsetting of
dissipation” is by no means trivial and becomes more demanding as the complexity of a given

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structure compounds, it is clearly possible (if improbable) within an ontology affected by the
second law of thermodynamics.
For Prigogine and Stengers, the seemingly-stable material codification of complexity in
time requires “equilibrium,” with rapid and radical change being observed in only those systems
that are “far from equilibrium.” Once a structure exists, in order to continue existing “as itself,” a
regular circulation of energy and material must flow into and out of the system in a “‘repetitive’
way” (Prigogine and Stengers 13). This sentiment is echoed in Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela’s influential philosophical-biological text Autopoiesis and Cognition: The
Realization of the Living, where they define a particular kind of material organization, “life,” in
terms of “autopoiesis,” the ability for living systems to “subordinate all [systemic] changes to the
maintenance of their own organization” (80) such that it is a “unity,” “that which is
distinguishable from a background, the sole condition necessary for existence in a given domain”
(138). In other words, the kind of order that we associate with an ontological form (a “thing”) is
predicated on a provisional separation of that form that which is “outside” of it.
However, given the thermodynamic tendency of entropy (which tends to increase
spontaneously whenever different orders of energetic organization enter into proximity) and the
hard limit on energy’s conservation (which indicates that the energy required to stave off
dissipation cannot be “recycled” but must always be sought anew), even the most stable
structures will eventually concede their form because their flows of equilibrium can never be
fully isolated from the differing states of energy and matter they collide with; no system can ever
be so ontologically isolated as to be unaffected by its relations to that which is not “itself.” This
is suggestive of the greatest theoretical mistake enunciated in corporate ontology, the monad of

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the possessive individual Man who, given the proper gumption, is unaffected by all phenomena
beyond his own speculative will; even Man is relational.
Therefore, any system which may approximate equilibrium now will not be able to do so
indefinitely. As reservoirs of energy and the necessary work to secure them shift in affinity with
entropy, each system will eventually come to inhabit conditions that are what Prigogine and
Stengers call “far-from-equilibrium”: whether it be a smartphone whose battery expires in cold
weather, automobiles whose engines have burned off their lubricating oil and have seized against
the subsequent friction, or that system we call “climate” under the disregulation of atmospheric
carbon and methane, all systems tend towards instability and the potential for total collapse, like
a spinning top tilting frantically around its vertical axis. Yet it is in those far-from-equilibrium
moments where collapse seems so likely that Prigogine and Stengers propose a critical
necrontological notion, the unanticipatable dissipative structure whose complexity shifts towards
a new articulation in direct response to the specificity of local and present material
circumstances, away from the preceding structure whose way of being has become energetically
unviable. Per Prigogine and Stengers:
We now know that far from equilibrium, new types of structures may
originate spontaneously. In far-from-equilibrium conditions we may have
transformation from disorder, from thermal chaos, into order. New
dynamic states of matter may originate, states that reflect the interaction
of the given system with its surroundings… We begin to see how, starting
from chemistry, we may build complex structures, complex forms, some
of which have been the precursors of life… To use somewhat
anthropomorphic language: in equilibrium matter is “blind,” but in far-
from-equilibrium conditions it begins to be able to perceive, to “take into
account,” in its way of functioning, differences in the external world…
(12-14, emphasis added)

While in many cases a system reeling out of equilibrium broadly disincorporates, this is not the
only possible outcome of a thermodynamic universe. While there is no “new” energy to be

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found, the permutations of energy’s organization are inexhaustible. The potential of the
idiosyncratic and the particular (the dissipative) to surface from the entropic ought to be
considered with the same fervency with which death is recalled – after all, those brainy organs
which contribute to our remembering are potent dissipative structures in their own right (some
would even say the most complex ever encountered (Bartucca)).
Necrontology, then, suggests a different sort of death than that which the corporation
combats, a death that not an affront to immortality but that nullifies the premise of immortality
outright. If death is what we might call a system’s inability to continue to propagate itself, then it
is only because of death and its resulting release of concentrated energy that any system might
exist in the first place. We know this on some level from the fact that we must eat to survive;
plants “know” this in that the sun’s ejection of nourishing photons is an expression of its
dissipation. In antagonism to corporate ontology, where death serves as a stick to beat neoliberal
subjects towards labor, necrontology’s story of death is ongoingly inconclusive, a process of
dying that more closely approximates a shared ontological condition than does the compulsion
towards competition. In this way, necrontology has affinities with understandings of death long
held within American Indigenous cultures.
For Indigenous peoples in the Americas subject to colonial incursion, “broken treaties,
loss of land and cultural rights, genocide, and breaches of fiduciary duty” (Moreton-Robinson
55) are synonymous with white masculine behavior. The systematic (and ongoing) attempts by
white settlers to eradicate Indigenous populations so as to steal the lands and resources they
nurtured has generated a story of near extinction, indeed inspiring Indigenous survivors of
colonialism to tell “a story about Indigenous resurgence and living rather than a story about
Indigenous inauthenticity, disappearance, or death” (Teves 138). Yet along with the urgency

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with which diverse Indigenous peoples must fight to be acknowledged by and “granted rights”
from states and corporations that have insinuated themselves as arbiters of Indigenous existence,
there persist cultural modes of dying that view the “world” not as a pool of speculative
possessions but rather a responsive patchwork of cohabitations.
In their analysis of North American Indigenous understandings of death and dying in
urban contexts, medical doctor Michael Anderson (of Mohawk descent) and public health
researcher Gemma Woticky assert that while “[t]he colonial worldview frames death through a
linear, biomedical, and physical lens,” a problem to be mitigated or “solved,” Indigenous peoples
worldwide, “[d]espite being a very heterogeneous group,” perceive death as just one necessary
component of the continuity of being: “Indigenous people view themselves as a spirit having a
human experience… [where b]irth and death are inextricably linked as a transition of the spirit
through this world. Thus, the end-of-life is a transition of the spirit rather than solely the end of
the body” (51). This suggests a cyclical rather than exponential ontology where intensities and
concentrations of form alternately strengthen and wither as the basis for existence as such. The
Western narrative of an oppositional life/death binary provokes a radical misunderstanding of
what existence entails. While the American synthesis of Christianity renders the sequence of
human being as teleological (all one’s moments of “living” merely contribute to some terminal
tabulation by which one is either granted or denied an immortal [after]life), Indigenous
knowledges are steeped in the belief that being is not bookended by measurable “beginnings”
and “endings” but, instead, all being (human or not), is “circular, wholistic, relational”
(Anderson and Woticky 53); there is no conclusive score to achieve by which a victor can be
announced, only a transition in how one might contribute to and be nourished by the continuous

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flow of relations that constitute one’s milieu, one’s land (as a human person, a propagator of
stories; as soil, a bed for the sharing of energy).
Indigenous Studies scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson suggests that with Indigeneity
comes a sense of the material self and the environment as a maternal relation: “Our ontological
relationship to land is a condition of our embodied subjectivity. The Indigenous body signifies
our title to land, and our death reintegrates our body with that of our mother, the earth” (15,
emphasis added). This is not the obliterating death of liberal humanism that might only be offset
by overtures to possessive individual immortality, but instead a dying that bequeaths a world
which may foster life, that same conservation of energy explicated in the first law of
thermodynamics. And with the reallocation and synthesis of concentrated form from the
disparate material of food, air, and human genetic material, one may also recognize the
implications of the second law within the tendency towards formlessness, the breakdown of
complexity such that, with ample care and “work,” the reservoir of conserved energy may be
drawn from to temporarily hold forms in their organization (though never without return). This is
not the settler colonial ontology of exponential white masculine bodies that contrast to the
“terminal” bodies of Indigenous peoples as an indication of inherent superiority (Moreton-
Robinson 37). This is an ontology of relation where no given form supersedes its dependence on
the forfeiture of previous forms’ structures, where no given form may elude its responsibility to
forfeit its structure in turn in accord with the entropic direction of time.
Elizabeth Povinelli characterizes Northern Australian Indigenous ontology in terms of
“turning towards” and “turning away,” processes that continually yield “existence” yet cannot
determine a priori the specificity of relations, which forms will persist and which will be made
material for otherwise:

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1. Things exist through an effort of mutual attention. This effort is not in
the mind but in the activity of endurance.

2. Things are neither born nor die, though they can turn away from each
other and change states.

3. In turning away from each other, entities withdraw care for each other.
Thus the earth is not dying. But the earth may be turning away from
certain forms of existence. In this way of thinking the Desert is not that in
which life does not exist. A Desert is where a series of entities have
withdrawn care for the kinds of entities humans are and thus has made
humans into another form of existence: bone, mummy, ash, soil. (28)

Indigenous insistence on “care” and “attentiveness” as the grounds of being (rather than singular
presence, isolated mass) are denigrated in capitalism as “carework” rather than self-aggrandizing
“breadwinning,” permitting the too-neat bifurcation of social gestures towards “well-being”
away from that which is considered the white masculine territory of improvement and progress
(Fraser 8-9, 114). This is to say, it appears that neoliberalism owes its material existence to entire
categories of labor and energetic effort that are systematically excluded from being considered
wageable “work.” Neoliberalism ascribes to this sociality not critical significance for its
generative necessity but, instead, a kind of feminized and racialized deathliness for the lack of
compensation and domination it commands.
Indigenous Studies discourses offer an ontology of dying that differs markedly from the
infernal moment of death that the white masculine neoliberal subject shuns in repugnance: in this
discursive field, the adversarial boundary between dying and living, one’s “own” death and
oppositional life as discrete and measurable values, dissolves into always-relational continuities
and discontinuities of being as becoming. With all of this in mind, how might necrontology
orient its witnesses towards the “necro-” of being and becoming as an affirmation that might
challenge the ontologies of white supremacy and neoliberalism, so contingent of the rejection of
what those ontologies reckon as “the end”? How might the recognition of entropy and

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contingency disclose ongoingness to the neoliberalized in the face of the “threat” of death’s
ostensible finality? In Claire Colebrook’s critical posthumanism, a highly counterintuitive
proposal is offered that attaches human wellbeing to the acceptance of eventual species
extinction, what Colebrook alludes to as “extinct theory” (29). She asks her readers to indulge in
a “thought experiment” so as to bring thought itself into alignment with change’s procession as
disincorporation rather than progressive growth – thought as entropic anti-teleology instead of
the fixing of certainty:
Life occurs not with ongoing self-sameness but with an experimental
variation that could be construed as risk, except that risk implies betting,
strategy or even the venturing of some being, whereas it is only after
variation that one might refer ex post facto to a mutation that is interpreted
as good for some being or some environmental fit. And this is also why
environment (like climate in its narrow meteorological sense) is not such a
helpful term, given the notion of surrounding or environing – as though
beings varied to fit a world. Extinction – as thought experiment – destroys
such notions; there is just variation that is not variation of any being. So if
extinction is thought experiment, it is because the process of extinction is
a variation without a given end determined in advance; thinking possesses
an annihilating power. (27)

Colebrook’s thought experiment, the acceptance of the inevitability of human extinction, seems
to comport with the tendencies of genetic mutation and thermodynamics. While we clearly
witness the existence of beings, forms that we might name (“human,” “cat,” “dog,” “manatee,”
and so on), to interpret that which we witness as the effect of some targeted causal design defies
liberal humanism’s own sciences – thermodynamically speaking, it is far more likely that
whatever we might identify as a “species” is both an emergent phenomenon of coincidence and a
provisional form that ceases to be “what it is” as soon as we slot it into a Latinate taxonomy
(after all, “of the four billion species estimated to have evolved on the Earth over the last 3.5
billion years, some 99% are gone” (Barnosky et al. 51)).

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It is as though by trying to cling to the “what is” of corporate ontology, to perpetually
resist becoming otherwise, the neoliberal subject is set at a greater and greater remove from its
own structural viability as its intransigence demands ever-increasing inputs of energy without
any concessions to a reciprocal return of that same energy. Neoliberalism claims to entitle its
selected subjects to life, life, and more life – never processes of dying and most certainly never
death. Ironically, inasmuch as extinction (of the corporate person) is that which neoliberalism
most ferociously forecloses, the neoliberal subject finds itself increasingly backed into a corner
as it would claim immortal possession over an “individual” body that cannot help but to divide
and release itself to other forms. Per Colebrook, we need to be able to think our dying, to admit
to the necrontological imaginary that we will not be here, in order to continue existing –
extinction, rather than a fixation on survival, becomes the possibility of our ongoingness: “if we
accept life-potentials that are not self-maintaining but that operate as nothing more than mutant
encounters, then we move beyond a politics of negotiation among bodies to a politics devoid of
survival. Perhaps it is only in our abandonment of ownness, meaning, mindfulness and the world
of the body that life, for whatever it is worth, has a chance” (138). While futurity and speculation
are not abolished via the acceptance of extinction, they no longer proceed as a teleology towards
supreme actualization but, instead, are wildly unknowable.
More intimately, Rosi Braidotti invites us to think our “becoming-imperceptible” as a
“desire to self-fashion our own death” (135-136). While not totally abandoning subjective
possession (the idea that death can be one’s “own”), Braidotti imagines a social narrative in
which “[w]hat we humans truly yearn for is to disappear by merging into th[e] generative flow of
becoming, the precondition for which is the loss, disappearance and disruption of the atomized,
individual self” (136). To transform the inevitability of the event of death from an insulting

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excess into a celebration of the possibility of possibility itself is not a trivial undertaking,
particularly for those whose entire system of significance is predicated on the dangling carrot of
possessive individualism. Yet this is what must occur if neoliberalism and white supremacy are
to give way to a sociality in which the prospects of human ongoingness are not compromised
from the start by a doomed ontology of perpetuity; to go on, the human requires a corpus of
persons for whom to care and to be cared for involves coinciding with dying, sharing dying, and
not inflicting it on one another in an effort to gain some competitive advantage, not casting death
as that which happens only to non-people.
Necrontology, then, can be understood to extend from the following premises: death is
neither surprising nor novel, but the tendential inflection point of processes of dying that are
always-already underway – from the moment any form rises to recognizeability. The science of
thermodynamics offers a critical discursive framework for necrontology in that it provides a
targeted rebuttal to the contemporary claims of neoliberalism’s infinite growth – claims that have
traditionally kept white people (and men in particular) in their thrall. Indigenous Studies
scholarship offers extensive histories of thought concerning the fallaciousness of white
supremacist capitalism, providing radically divergent reckonings of death and dying to those
championed in corporate ontology. In the absence of beneficent narratives of and entitlements to
“improvement,” such discourses acknowledge the material consequences of death and dying and
disclose ways of being, caring, and encountering joy that neoliberalism cannot fathom. Certain
facets of posthumanist and vital materialist scholarship orient us away from all-encompassing
andro-/antropocentrism and make imaginable the pervasiveness of (human) relations with those
things that have been rendered as “not us.” The maintenance of the category of “the human”

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recedes from anxious grasping and is replaced with an appreciation of and desire for mutation,
for futures that can only unfold through difference.
In brief, necrontology proposes that existence is a non-teleological, contingent, and
dissipative process in direct contrast to stories that would claim existence to be a fixture of
masterful intention, permanence, and unending growth. And as its provocative socio-narrative
strategy, necrontology insists on a turning away from possessive individual being-as-living and
towards relational being-as-dying – from solid self to fluid selves. Accordingly, I propose a
necrontological tale in which the lifeform of the body, that object of liberal humanist possession,
is recast in such a way as to unsettle neoliberal and white masculine sensibilities and cultivate
conscientiousness in the wake. Let us consider what it might mean to become, in our mutational
and mutual becoming, the deathform of the corpse.

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Reclaiming Corpsehood
The corporate body, like other sorts of “bodies,” is an object of propriety; there are
boundaries, demarcations, behaviors, and trajectories proper to the object of the corporation that
permit its bodily recognition. The corporate body is recognizable by its legal incorporation, its
capital and financial assets, its brandmark, its production of goods and/or services, and its
ostensible tendency to become increasingly massive and influential over time. To the extent the
neoliberal subject is instructed to model itself per the corporation’s ontology (its “body”), the
neoliberal subject is invited to assume that its body ought to exhibit the same capabilities as the
corporation’s. The neoliberal subject is encouraged to “incorporate” (make itself a viable market
actor), acquire, self-promote, produce, and endlessly “self-actualize” in a pursuit of superiority.
Yet, as has been discussed, the body of the neoliberal subject appears to be far less endless than
the body of the corporation; there’s an ontological difference between human and corporate
bodies that defies the possibility of congruence. I contend that, at least at the scale of human
lifetimes, that ontological difference is the evident procession towards corpsehood that undoes
the human body while leaving the imaginary of the corporate body intact. Such a procession
severs any hope of the human body inheriting the corporation’s promise of immortality, inviting
the neoliberal subject to look elsewhere for a story of its materiality.
Beginning with “the body,” white masculine liberalism imbricates the biological form of
the human into its discourse of property; per Katherine Hayles in the previous chapter: “the body
is understood as an object for control and mastery rather than an intrinsic part of self” (5). That
is, the body is yet another circumscribed aggregation of matter to be possessed by the always-
separate person, that category of human legally capable of and entitled to ownership (again,
originally only landed white men). Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler troubles the

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facile logic by which the human body can be reckoned as a static object of possession, noting
that “not only [do] bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond
their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appear[s] to be quite central to what bodies
‘are’” (viii). One might be familiar with such a premise from the hair found in the drain of the
shower, the “dust” of skin particles coating the shelves, the shadow cast against the ground
during a walk, the proprioception of driving a car, the prosthetic sense of the smartphone nearby,
or the interleaving of mouths during a kiss. While there may be a notion of the body’s propriety,
its singular wholeness, such a notion is perpetually confounded by the body’s ongoing
fragmentation and recombination; at a molecular level, we are all Ships of Theseus.
To maintain a concept of a coherent and stable body is not as obvious as prevailing
narratives suggest, but rather these narratives require continual reproduction, reproduction that
further reproduces specific repudiations. Butler elaborates that “bodies only appear, only endure,
only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas… such
constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of
unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (x). White masculinity seeks in the corporation that which
would reinforce its centuries-long cultivation of the white male body as potentially transcendent
over those other bodies whose relative inferiority and subordination serve as a critical contrast.
Writing on early European reckonings of the Black body, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that
“the black body’s fleshiness was aligned with that of the animal and set in opposition to
European mind and spirit,” consigned to the same sort of bestial deathliness of ostensibly
unthinking livestock (6). The conflation of Black bodies with those of non-human animals
emerged not from any sort of biological analysis, but from the “regulatory schemas” of white
European men encountering unfamiliar societal constructions of the body:

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Africans and apes were linked through physiognomic comparison and
sexuality… Though Africans were rarely perceived as a kind of ape, it was
more commonly suggested that Africans and apes shared libidinous sexual
characteristics or were sexually linked... For the English, sex was barbaric,
as the body was host to sin; and when they did not perceive Africans as
observing the same Christian worldview, they evaluated them
negatively… Africans were linked with sins of the body, and their
blackness was believed to testify to their unlawful and ungodly nature.
(Jackson 6).

The perceived “immorality” of bodies whose appearance or behaviors seem unintelligible to
normative cultural discourse is a recurring pretext for white supremacist dysselection (the
systemic prohibition of certain categories of people being granted the status of “human” and,
thus, the entitlements of legal personhood). Insofar as hegemonic white masculinity is bound to
the ontology of the corporation, however, the corporate body’s tendency towards consolidation
progressively extrudes those white men whose relative lack of generational wealth and
incapacity to contribute sufficiently to corporate profits renders them, at best, as temporary sites
of material extraction (as consumers of cheap products and sellers of cheap labor) and, at worst,
as a pure waste product destined for liquidation. Given that poor whites and poor Blacks might
recognize commonalities in how they are regarded by the corporation and, with such a
recognition, act in concert to dismantle corporate control, substantial political efforts have been
undertaken in the United States to wedge whites away from solidarity with Blacks. As President
Lyndon B. Johnson is said to have opined in 1960: “If you can convince the lowest white man
he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him
somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you" (Moyers).
Still, poor(er) white masculinity beneath a dissolving neoliberalism is becoming
increasingly exposed to its own categories of bodily unlivability through the corporation’s
negligence and/or active derision. Such a decline in fortune appears to be a betrayal of

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neoliberalism’s essential promise to white men, the notion that they would not only see the value
(most readily measured by wealth) of each white masculine life increase in time, but that such
advances would always outpace those of the dysselected. According to the Board of Governors
Federal Reserve System in its 2019 analysis of rates of wealth growth following the Great
Recession of 2008, “growth rates [in median wealth] for the 2016–19 period were faster for
Black and Hispanic families, rising 33 and 65 percent, respectively, compared to White families,
whose wealth rose 3 percent” while “over the entire 2007-2019 period, wealth fell by 11 percent
for the typical White family and by 7 percent for the typical Black family… [while o]nly the
typical Hispanic family has seen an increase in wealth relative to before the Great Recession,
rising by about 39 percent” (Bhutta et al.). Further, as those who identify as women are now
significantly overrepresented in college enrollment (“At the close of the 2020-21 academic year,
women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%”), there are
rumblings that the prospects for future wealth accumulation are starting to tilt away from men
(Belkin). While these data do little to parse how intersections of identity impact the generation of
wealth (again, a critical index of significance under neoliberalism), they do tend to be leveraged
to enunciate what seem to be new set of social conditions: the runaway advantages of being a
white man in the United States are, some say, decelerating.
Of course, United States wealth inequality still heavily favors white men: median net
wealth for white families as of 2019 amounted to roughly $188,200 and only $24,100 and
$36,100 for Black and Hispanic families respectively (Bhutta et al.); women earn 84% of what
men earn for the same work (Barroso and Brown). But it is the perceived decline of white
masculine superiority that is at odds with corporate ontology and white supremacist systems of
significance. And this diminishment in access to superior rates of accumulation, however unjust

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and oppressive to begin with, has yielded tangible deleterious effects in the bodies of white men.
Whether it be opioid addiction, suicide, or liver disease, economic downturn has coincided with
a rising rates of morbidity for white men in place of financial improvement (Case and Deaton).
Further, insofar as many white men have not been traditionally required to develop resilience in
the face of systemic immiseration (as has been the case, across generations, for those rendered as
dysselected), the expedience of violence to maintain a hold on power and significance has
surfaced in the form of militant organizing amongst some white men (Clark). Despite their
protestations, the belief among white men that they can no longer achieve a proper body, one
capable of endless exponential expansion, leaves them, along with all those who have long been
excluded from white supremacy’s protections, to contend more concretely with the specter that
damns all ambitions for immortality: the corpse.
With the liberal humanist notion of one’s body as an “object for control and mastery” in
the constitution of the self, it is little wonder that the corpse, what remains of the human body
beyond the moment of death, is abhorred as a threat. With the emergence of the corpse comes the
corresponding cessation of the (neo)liberal subject. Philosopher Julia Kristeva, whose
commentary on the body stems from masculine revulsion towards the vaginal interiority of the
feminine, casts the revulsion for encounters with the corpse in terms of “abjection,” the
overwhelming sense of unease that accompanies exposure to and contemplation of the lightless
fluidity “inside” one’s body and the horror of its inevitable surfacing:
[R]efuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to
live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands,
hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border
of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive,
from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to
loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit –
cadere, cadaver. (3)

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Once the human body dies, once it loses its faculties for taking in new energies in resistance to
the tendencies of entropy, what was formerly “inside” leaks outward, revealing the falsity of self-
possession as the body’s materials are redistributed to insects, bacteria, the air, the ground. For
Kristeva, if abjection is that which undoes the stable binding of self to form, if abjection is “that
of being opposed to I” (1), then the corpse is the enemy of immortalist ontology: “the corpse,
seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection” (4). Accordingly, white
masculinity has traditionally been rife with impulses towards to avoidance of that death which
would disclose the corpse (as discussed in the previous chapter’s section “Neoliberal Subjectivity
and the Corporate Body”). And this distaste for that which is thermodynamically inevitable (the
disincorporation of the human body and the consequent eradication of the self) has historically
spurred white men to pursue overwhelming degrees of possession as a warding off of the
undoing of their personhoods, leading to accelerated corpse-making in realms inhabited by those
outside of the white masculine identity matrix. In the spirit of this attitude, German-American
billionaire Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) says of death:
It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight
death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do
something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because
they’ve made their peace with death. In some ways it’s a microcosm of the
whole complacency of the Western world. I do think there is this danger
that our society has made its peace with decline. I’d like to jolt them out of
their complacency a little bit. (M. Brown)

Why do I turn towards the corpse in seeking relief from neoliberal subjectivity? It is not
because I would completely collapse the distinction between “life” and “death” that permits me
to recognize that a person only exists as a self for so long; it is not to claim that I am always-
already the corpse I will become. I turn towards the corpse because its material inevitability is
what sets me in continuity, in relation, to all those things I construe to be outside of myself. That

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I came from materials that were “not me,” that I sustain my body by consuming materials that
are “not me,” and that I will, at death, eventuate a reservoir of materials that are “not me” (and
will never be again) is the ontological honesty that neoliberalism so despises – when applied to
the bodies of wealthy white men. To forefront the universality of the corpse is to promote an
ontology that does not attempt to elude death and, therefore, makes the persistence of each
person’s dying available for the application of conscientious care. With necrontology, the corpse
is recast as the metaphysics of human being, a metaphysics that has affinities with the
disincorporation of all forms and, thus, reintroduces the human into the material continuum of
the universe away from which it had been cleaved by narratives of white supremacy.
Acknowledging the negative valence of the corpse is a necessary starting point for
imagining the corpse otherwise (and for what “imagining the corpse otherwise” might enable for
a post-neoliberal sociality). By understanding the corpse as threatening on the grounds that it
undoes liberal humanist doctrines of personhood and/as property, one recognizes other grounds
over and into which the human might pass. Such grounds could accommodate thinking and
becoming the corpse differently, countering the assumptions and effects of corporate ontology in
the process (which require the corpse to operate as the ultimate symbol of dispossession). As
white masculinity is brought into closer proximity to its corpse (in the midst of the hegemonic
mutation ushered by the faltering of neoliberalism), there is an opportunity for white men and
women to reorient their story of ontology away from competitive dispossessive individualism
and towards less harmful genres of being, to explore their necrontology and cultivate an
otherwise system of significance. Latent in the corpse is not merely a new metaphor for
personhood but a shared basis of human and inhuman materiality, one that is amenable to an
expansion of who is permitted to be recognized as human and, thus, capable of opening

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possibilities for social collaboration across differences – collaborations that are presently
foreclosed by white supremacy.
In addition to her reckoning of the human as co-constitutively biological and
mythological (homo narrans (25)), Sylvia Wynter presents the twin concepts of “cosmogony”
(“representations of origin, which we ourselves invent, [and] are then retroactively projected
onto an imagined past” (34)) and “cognitive closure” (20), the potentially overdetermining
impact of cosmogonic origin stories on the social imaginary of possible futures. The cosmogony
attendant to corporate ontology would suggest that the present superlative capacity for corporate
wealth accumulation (that would, given that virtuousness of wealth accumulation, cast certain
white male CEOs as individual “winners”) must follow from a past of proper neoliberal behavior
(domineering competition as a possessive individual) and, therefore, any future of meaning and
significance must in turn follow from a present devotion to the same neoliberal propriety (which
necessarily involves reviling both one’s death as an individual and death’s avatar, the corpse).
This is to say, the story of corporate ontology has tended to produce, at least in the white
masculine mind, a lack of availability to other accounts of what (and who) the human could be
and how the human might matter, particularly in relation to material processes of decay. Yet if
corporate cosmogony appears to no longer provide an accurate estimation of present conditions
for erstwhile neoliberal subjects, I propose a necrontological cosmogony the redeems the corpse
as a site for wellbeing and sociality while putting to rest the accumulative and solipsistic body of
liberal humanism.
With the corpse comes an admission: the human body cannot comply with the propriety
of property. This is to say that, insomuch as liberal property extends from the essentialist notion
that “every man has a [God given] property in his own person: this no body has any right to but

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himself” (Locke), the corpse reveals the human body to exceed the confines of property. It would
require a bizarre anthromorphization of thermodynamics to claim that entropy “steals the body
away” from the “self” and leaves a corpse in the pilfered body’s stead. Rather, despite the
protestations of property holders, all bodies (human and otherwise), whether by God or by
entropy, return to dust. Bodies do not properly belong to other bodies and, thus, if a failing
cosmogony relies upon a conflation of “the body” and property, it would better to recognize that
form of the human under a different name. While I prefer “the corpse” for its alignment with
necrontological tendency and its direct agitation of the (neo)liberal metaphysics of “the
individual,” French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari offer an
elaboration of Antonin Artaud’s “body without organs.”
For Deleuze and Guattari, while the body without organs (often shortened to “BwO”)
points to many divergent theoretical “lines of flight,” one of its key features is that it undoes the
belief in a stable and fixed human organism encased in a body:
The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its “true
organs,” which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the
organism, the organic organization of the organs… The organism is not at
all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a
phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in
order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms,
functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized
transcendences… [T]he BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions,
sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an
organism – and also a signification and a subject – occur… It is in the
BwO that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the
organism. (158-159)

The organs are not proper to the body as liberal humanist possessions, but instead are an enacted
(“composed and positioned”) system of relations that, in their collective and ongoing mutations,
constitute a provisional form, a body without organs (of its own). The organism (the neoliberal
body) cannot be said to exist as an indivisible foundational ontological unit as the corpse-ness,

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the deathform, of the body is always immanent, even when it appears to liberal humanist
common sense under the auspices of “life.”
This is all to say that whereas the corporate body is often legally rendered as a figuration
of ontological propriety, the corpse is a realization of necrontological disincorporation and
reformation that rebuffs the corporate body in every instant. To be human is to be in an ongoing
performance of material circulation where everything ultimately escapes capture. A social
endeavor in which neoliberal subjects and those able to claim white masculine identities begin to
recognize and appreciate their always-already active corpsehoods (as they turn away from the
seductive fiction of the immortal corporate body, itself in the throes of decay) would lend energy
to an otherwise story, an otherwise hegemonic articulation, an otherwise cosmogony. Amidst
such an otherwise, the compulsion of dispossessive competition and an ever-tightening ring of
exclusion would no longer be operative, their futility evident from the start (as no body can
persist so long as to acquire everything). With alternative necrontological assumptions and a
reckoning of the thermodynamic affinities between accretions and secretions of matter,
alternative manners of doing and being might flow between bodies and corpses of all kinds, in all
probable and improbable states of organization.

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Shall We Danse Macabre?
What are the stakes of the neoliberal subject coming to recognize its necrontology? What
worlds become available to the white masculine imaginary when its fevered dream of
immortality dissipates and reveals the corpse – in all its ambivalent meanings? Do such people
begin to feel called to ameliorate the harms of the metabolic rift that they once celebrated as
emblems of their superior significance? Or do such people yearn for their familiar dispossessive
individualism to be reinscribed elsewhere, if not upon the body of the corporation than within the
fortified enclaves of ethnonationalism, fascism, militarism, apocalyptic Christianity, and high
control cults? It is in this moment of hegemonic mutation where those who have long felt entitled
to a belief in their exceptionalism (and the hoarding of the materials of wellbeing) are
experiencing what seems, to them, to be an ontological crisis. The stakes of this moment, so far
from equilibrium, are rapid rupture and change, the exacerbation of the harms of already-
overwhelming configurations of white supremacy or an impulse toward their decomposition and
détournement. In other words: the meaningful realization of otherwise in our lifetimes.
Physicist-philosopher Karen Barad, whose “agential realist” account of ontology
exemplifies what Gamble, Hanan, and Nail call “performative new materialism,” argues that
being is far more contingent, relational, and indeterminate than liberal humanist notions of the
“individual” would assume. According to Barad, all forms (including but not limited to those that
might be called “human”) are entangled: “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with
another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained
existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions;
rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (ix). Barad’s
concept of “intra-action” instantiates a stark ontological corrective to the “interactive” world that

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presupposes “that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction” (33),
suggesting instead that any thing that can be said to exist only does so by virtue of its relations,
not as an atomized unit of self-sufficiency but as co-constitutive part of phenomena:
[T]he primary ontological unit is not independent objects with inherent
boundaries and properties but rather phenomena… That is, phenomena are
ontologically primitive relations without preexisting relata. The notion of
intra-action (in contrast to the usual "interaction, " which presumes the
prior existence of independent entities or relata) represents a profound
conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the
boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena become
determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular material
articulations of the world) become meaningful… ln other words, relata do
not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through
specific intra-actions. (140)

In such a phenomenal world, Barad asks: “What would it mean to deny one' s responsibility to
the other once there is a recognition that one's very embodiment is integrally entangled with the
other?” (158). This is the consideration invited by the invocation of the corpse in contrast to the
corporate body, the material acceptance of circulation not just between apparent forms but of the
circulation of forms as such. To become the corpse, rather than to have the body, is to dislodge
(neo)liberal logics of permanent (self-)possession and reorient oneself towards an ontology that
is necessarily always-already involved in processes of exchange. The corpse, contrary to its
gruesome casting as an enemy of “improvement,” is a shared phenomenon of ongoingness, even
though its seeming brutality may frighten and sadden us; it is corpsehood, rather than “person”-
hood, that bequeaths the very possibility of form, the very possibility of human-being (which can
only ever be a relational element amongst other sorts of thermodynamic beings). Again,
necrontology does not ask for glee at the prospect of one’s becoming the corpse, but rather aims
to articulate that it is because of the selflessness of that corpse that other humans, beyond one’s
self, may go on.

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Yet if this is the case what is to be done with such a story? As Barad and Wynter both
insist, humans (or, at the very least, neoliberal subjects in the United States) are materially
contiguous with their discursive articulations. Though such articulations may occasionally slip
into Wynter’s “cognitive closure,” “material-discursive phenomena” are never truly fixed:
“matter is iteratively and differentially articulated, reconfiguring the material-discursive field of
possibilities and impossibilities in the ongoing dynamics of intra-activity that is agency” (Barad
170). How does necrontology enter into material circulation as an available genre of storytelling,
of discursive boundary shifting, particularly when it chafes against intuitions cultivated amidst
tales of transcendent corporate bodies? Though it is necessary to speak of necrontology, it is not
sufficient to isolate one’s efforts to inscription. Our dying, that process of becoming the corpse,
is already being enacted in each of us, though we must be witnessed in our dying if we are to
have a chance at collaboratively authoring otherwise. Thus, it is the material-discursive practice
of performance that will offer a platform for us, the dying, to dance tonight and, with the
introduction of a research methodology that I name “performance as prefigurative praxis,” dance
differently tomorrow.

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CHAPTER 3
TO BEGIN: PERFORMANCE AS PREFIGURATIVE PRAXIS
The Story So Far
Neoliberalism in the United States, though primarily cast as the prevailing genre of
contemporary global capitalism, is also a cultural system. This system tendentially furthers the
already disproportionate power and significance of wealthy white men at the expense of others.
Neoliberalism is predicated on assumptions central to originary liberal humanism (the primacy of
the individual, the sanctity of private property, and the rights that accompany legally recognized
personhood) as well as more recently established assumptions that transcribe the imperatives of
corporate expansion into guidance for what constitutes meaningful human existence (the
marketization of all facets of society, the necessity of endless exponential growth, and the
assurance of ongoingness for those entities deemed “too big to fail”). Within neoliberalism the
corporation emerges as the aspirational model for human personhood due to its tremendous
capacity for “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism 159)
and its ability to secure its accumulated possessions indefinitely through its “legal immortality”
(Winkler 47). For those hailed most favorably as neoliberal subjects (white men who would be
wealthy), neoliberalism offers an entitlement to feelings of relative superiority over non-white,
non-masculine “others,” a superiority that ought to be realizable in economic terms: higher
earnings, greater assets, and, crucially, the ability to transfer wealth generationally (or, better
still, to never die at all).
Neoliberalism requires the labor, resources, and psychological investment of a critical
mass of white men – as well as white women aligned with white masculine values – in order to
ensure its reproduction as a dominant cultural system. This is because the resources concentrated
beneath the purview of white men in the United States, an advantage bequeathed by centuries of

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dispossessive accumulation and inheritance legally protected along lines of race and gender,
allow white men to function as powerful gatekeepers to levers of possible social change. This is
to say, if some form of prevailing social organization other than neoliberalism might be desirable
for some (or many), it would be difficult to realize under neoliberalism without the participation
of white men: given neoliberalism’s tendency to elevate the importance and wealth of white
men, there is an accompanying tendency for white men to value the continuation of
neoliberalism for their own sake and, thus, resist its lessening.
However, neoliberalism harbors a material contradiction: beyond the “fictitious capital”
of speculation from which the engorged valuations of publicly traded corporations are derived
(Durand), capitalism still depends upon the production of goods and services from the
intermingling of waged labor and resources in order to function – and the world’s matter is not
inexhaustible. The corporation’s call for infinite immensity – and the structuring of society in
response to this mandate towards competitive hoarding – is antagonistic to metabolic processes
that are reliant on the cycling of material through different forms. Whether it be the ongoing
combustion of fossil fuels (without any meaningful way to remove their byproducts from the
atmosphere), the evisceration of social services (to accommodate tax relief for the highest
earners), or the increasing implausibility of workers being able to afford their livelihoods (as
wages perpetually lag behind inflation), neoliberalism eliminates the very possibility of its
further accumulation by refusing to allow that which the wealthy possess to be ceded back to
processes of regeneration; as each and every tranche of the world’s finite resources are claimed
without release, fewer and fewer sites for extraction remain.
For this ontological reason alone, neoliberalism has locked itself into a death spiral that
its own logics cannot combat. Yet there is an additional factor that appears to be contributing to

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neoliberalism’s decline in the United States: it has ceased to provide a sense of significance and
wellbeing for white masculine culture as, in an emerging shared consciousness, white men are
beginning to recognize that they are not immune to neoliberalism’s dispossessions. Though
doctrines of white supremacy enable in white culture a level of comfort with the immiseration of
others, it is taken for granted that that same immiseration is never meant to touch the prospects of
a white man. Yet for its need to keep pace with runaway financial projections, neoliberalism
cannot help but to commence devouring those whom its rhetoric would claim it serves; during
the United States’ 2016 election, the perceived downturn of the fortunes of white men in the
United States precipitated in many white men a turning away from neoliberal dogmas and
towards either authoritarian ethnonationalism (Donald Trump) or social democracy (Bernie
Sanders) (Gerstle 255). Ultimately, neoliberalism’s rhetoric of individual responsibility as a
universal precursor to prosperity belies its true effect: the redistribution of the totality of the
world’s matter into the possession of an ever-decreasing number of wealthy white men.
To the extent that such a teleology is undesirable, harmful, unacceptable, those of us who
wish for otherwise are compelled to respond. But how and with what aims? I have offered what I
call “necrontology” not as a solution, but as one possible vein of address, one that attempts to
orient attention towards processes of mattering and materializing that neoliberalism would deny.
Specifically, necrontology forefronts the thermodynamism of matter, or the tendency for forms
to disincorporate over time. While neoliberalism would propose a subject capable of endless
accretion, necrontology insists that all seemingly solid entities, regardless of the overwhelming
inertia they may demonstrate, are continuously enmeshed in processes of decay. The apparent
persistence of any given form is only ever the consequence of energy received from “elsewhere,”
from beyond the would-be boundaries of the possessive individual. Against the self-sufficiency

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extolled by white masculine culture, necrontology proposes that existence is not monadic but
fundamentally relational. Per physicist-philosopher Karen Barad: “Existence is not an individual
affair… individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (ix). Such
relationality involves, in an inversion of neoliberal logics, not discrete and transactional
exchanges of packets between knowing market actors, but instead continuous and circulatory
flows of energy through heterogeneous systems of recombination – often in spite of (and
exceeding) human attempts to corral such energy into the confines of private property.
This reckoning of ontology refuses the atomization that neoliberalism requires in order to
assign value through competitive comparison. Insofar as each entity is affected and effected by
the existence of entities beyond its bounded “self,” value and significance are not properties
contained within isolated market objects. Rather, value and significance emerge from relations,
fluid and collaborative endeavors of human meaning making, provisional stories of mattering
which orient the social through their (re)telling. This has profound ramifications for those
phenomena called “death” and “dying,” which under neoliberalism are treated as indicators of a
failure to realize market potentials. Necrontology strategically focuses on dying in order to
antagonize white masculine denials of death, the liberal narrative trope that a (white male)
individual need not ever truly “die” so long as they earn superlative cultural status above and
beyond that of others, whether it be through wealth, the exercise of power, or literal bodily
longevity. This “immortalism” overdetermines white masculine desires towards individuation,
conquest, hoarding, domination, and supremacy, as only these pursuits might permit one’s
ongoing participation in “the promise of the unfolding future” (Farman 40). Though such efforts
towards immortality can never be consummated by their perpetrators, who each must die in turn,

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their reverberations in the bodies of others often span generations in the guises of
authoritarianism, systemic racism, climate change, immiseration, colonialism, and genocide.
Central to the discourse of necrontology is the direct and ongoing reckoning of death and
dying as founts for sadness and grief as well as a wellsprings for the very possibility of human
being as such. Foreknowledge of the event of death, that instant in which one’s access to all
narratives of being permanently ceases, renders for each of us the constraint of time. It casts all
that we do as the enaction of our dying, of our “becoming-imperceptible” as agential contributors
to the stories of our relations, of our culture (Braidotti 135). Yet even for our eventual
imperceptibility, even as we become the corpse and fall beneath the threshold of formal
recognition, we contribute to an iteratively otherwise world by releasing that which was held so
dear: the material instantiation of the “self.” In this way, necrontology aims to divert
neoliberalism’s psychic fixation on the corporation and allow the mind’s eye to rest upon the
corpse, to acknowledge both its sorrow and its generosity as necessary to human being.
Why might necrontology be helpful as a response to the harms that radiate from the
reproduction of neoliberal subjectivity? For those ensconced in white masculine systems of value
and who feel those same systems cannot confer the entitlements they’ve long promised
(progressive improvement of one’s fortunes, the sanctity and sovereignty of one’s property, a
perpetual sense of supreme cultural importance), I propose that necrontology offers a framework
to attend to the real (if deeply uncritical) discomfort in white people that follows from
neoliberalism’s accelerating dispossessions. By introducing an alternative basis for significance
that eschews competitive and dispossessive profiteering in favor of an appreciation for the
cyclical and relational qualities of matter, necrontology affirms the importance of deterioration
and mutation. It encourages an elevation of sociality, the necessity for engaging in acts of

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cooperation and care in order to “go on” as a constituent of an entropic universe. As erstwhile
neoliberal subjects morph into necrontologists, they might be able to redirect their local streams
of resources away from futile immortality projects and towards, first, reparative redistributions
and dispersals of hoarded matter, and second, the generation of new structures of wellbeing
bereft of white supremacy and its suicidal teleology.
The following elaborates a method of research by which necrontology and neoliberal
subjectivity may be held in friction, a knowledge-seeking and knowledge-making social
endeavor to initiate the movement of heat from that which is rotting towards that which may take
form. I name this method “performance as prefigurative praxis,” or PPP for brevity. Extending
from the writings of Amelia Jones and José Esteban Muñoz on queer and relational performance,
I situate PPP as a mode of research that takes social performance as its primary form of
expression. I contend that performance is a crucial site of the (re)production of social imaginaries
and, as such, is worth exploring as a strain of research that might be actively applied to the
diminishment of the systemic harms it investigates. I refine PPP by incorporating the
sociological notion of “prefiguration” (“concrete processes of anticipating a better future in the
present, in heterotopic spaces created to that end” (Dinerstein 2)) and an interweaving of Hannah
Arendt and Sylvia Wynter’s distinct notions of “praxis,” the iterative processes by which “the
human” comes into being through collaborative performances of the social. With PPP thus
articulated, I specify how it may be deployed to realize necrontological relations in the midst of a
keeling neoliberalism and consider the possible longitudinal effects of such explorations.
And with that, let us begin.

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Performance
“Performance” is a word that is used so ubiquitously and differentially that its
significance can be muted and nebulous without an attempt at specificity. There is performance
in its lay sense, theatrical or musical or comedic art that is delivered by a performer to an
audience. Then there is performance in scholastic and professional settings, how well one
accomplishes the tasks for which they are responsible (particularly when it comes to performing
one’s occupation for the assessment of superiors). Further, there is performance as a pejorative, a
critique of the perceived inauthenticity of someone’s behavior. Amidst these various
deployments of the term lurks the academic discipline of “performance studies,” described by
performance scholar Jon McKenzie as being concerned with “cultural performance as an
engagement of social norms, as an ensemble of activities with the potential to uphold societal
arrangements or, alternatively, to change people and societies.” He notes that “it is
[performance’s] transgressive or resistant potential that has come to dominate the study of
cultural performance” as opposed to those performances which might effectively reproduce
prevailing social relations (30). Included in each of these meanings is the notion that someone is
doing something and that this action has some sort of effect.
Given my interest in the possibility of a social otherwise, I would like to hone my
deployment of performance by engaging with Amelia Jones’ work on queer performance. While
resisting any essential classification of “queerness,” Jones explores queer performance as a
process by which subjects are instantiated through their social relations, contrasting the anti-
sociality (possessive individualism) promoted under regimes of (neo)liberal subjecthood. Per
Jones:
Queer coming from me, then, means something like opening all
identifications and meanings to relational exchanges – acknowledging that

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the appearance of “being” is always activated through “doing.” I begin
from a framework that connects queer and performativity, even as this
assumed connection irritates me and I seek to denaturalize it. My starting
point with these interpretations is to assert that performances arguably
become queered when actively polluted or perverted by feelings, opening
the subjects (the one performing as well as the one interpreting, if indeed
we can separate the two) to the obvious tug of relational desires,
revulsions, and otherwise. Performance or performative images work in
and on the spaces in between subjects. (xvi)

Jones’ casting of subjectivity finds affinity with Barad’s agential-realist notion of “phenomena,”
the proposal that ontology itself, even at its most reduced, is relational and not atomized – though
the discourse of neoliberalism is reproduced in explicit denial of this proposal. While Jones’
investigations of performance certainly engage with the fluidity of identity as it runs through
gender and sexuality, her idea of the queer (the “opening of all identifications and meanings to
relational exchanges” [emphasis added]) offers a rather capacious level of abstraction that
permits us to consider its effects not only in terms of gender and sexuality, but also in terms of
“meaning itself - even of the meaning and structures of one’s own identifications and sense of
self, not to mention the histories and genealogies one writes and traces” (Jones 25-26).
Insofar as meaning is rooted in the relational, that which circulates between and through
us as we perform and are witnessed by others in our performing, performance confers the ability
to make legible our sociality, the specific means by which we collectively attend to – or fail to
attend to – the wellbeing/ongoingness of one another in the production of selves. In the intra-
activity of the social (that constitutes the social as such) we iteratively invent what matters and
what doesn’t, who matters and who is excluded from mattering, and it is in our performances that
this process of iterative invention is rigidly maintained or released into mutation. I consider
performance to be witnessed doing that articulates our relational being, perceived action that

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affects and effects both what it means and what it’s like to be “us” (and, crucially, the psychic,
social, and material stakes for those who “us” omits).
To reckon social behavior as not being performance is to assume that such behavior is
given, rote, essential – the execution of some natural law unaffected (and un-effected) by the
doings of people and their meaning making. To understand social behavior as non-performative
is to barter in anti-sociality, which under neoliberalism indicates the belief that insofar as human
social forms go, we have reached Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” where what we do and
who we are doesn’t matter because the necessary and proper organization of the social has taken
hold and mandates our certain future beyond the possibility of human intervention; in the words
of Margaret Thatcher, “there is no such thing as society” and “there is no alternative.” Against
this neoliberal sensibility, performance becomes the very possibility of otherwise.
Indigenous feminist scholar Stephanie Nohelani Teves writes of Indigenous performance
practices in which Natives, under threat of cultural and corporeal disappearance by continuing
settler-colonial incursions, must constantly renegotiate their social recognition in order to exist,
often against coercions to represent some kind of “natural” state of primitivism for the
fascination and enjoyment of colonizers (a “naturalness” that, ironically, exacerbates Indigenous
disappearance):
The performative status of the “natural” Native needs to be exposed
because the power of this myth extends to all facets of Indigenous life. In
place of an emphasis on how we perform as “natural,” performance theory
allows us to see that what is considered “natural” was created in
opposition to colonialism’s notion of modernity. By denaturalizing what
indigeneity is supposed to look like, we allow indigeneity to be performed
in very strategic ways. Without presuming a realm of representation as
distinct from the realm of the real, we sharpen our tools of analysis in
order to identify the underlying substance of any performance as it
emerges out of a particular social formation. In other words, we can
acknowledge that performance creates and sustains identities, rather than
search for a subject that existed before the performance. Performance

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creates knowledge through action; by creating subjectivities, it is a process
of world-making. (137)

Within the discursive frameworks of Jones, Barad, and Teves, performance is imbued with a
significance that is quite different from its rendering under what McKenzie refers to as
“Performance Management,” “the challenge of ‘working better and costing less,’ of maximizing
outputs and minimizing inputs, the challenge of efficiency” (56). This sort of management-based
performance is all about permitting only those changes that yield more of the same (profit, in the
case of already-profitable corporations and banks). For Barad, whose reckoning of
“performativity” Jones cites for its “usefulness… as a means of undermining realist claims to
knowledge founded on the idea that the world pre-exists its representations” (72), meaning is not
dictated as the violent enunciation of some dominant ideology, but rather is iteratively realized
through action, or performance: “[M]eaning is not a property of individual words or groups of
words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility” (Barad, qtd. in
Jones 72). This is to say that though we can’t know the effects that our performances of the
world will have ahead of their enactment (or entirely understand the cascade of perturbations
they will stir up in their wake), it is by virtue of performance that our social world is made; if
social intervention is to be motivated by us, it will be through our performances.
For the purposes of realizing some desirable social otherwise, there is a relative
distinction that one might make between performances of reproductive iteration and
performances of mutation. Depending on the specific social phenomena under consideration,
intervention involves modulating the degree to which the same social form is made to be
performed again and again or modulating the degree to which the repetition of form eludes our
performances. While this is hardly a strict dichotomy, cultural narratives concerning how the
social is organized are often cast in terms of fixity or change. Let us consider fixity, the sort of

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reproduction we observe in the teleology of neoliberalism (its tendency to provide the
appearance of dynamism while progressively entrenching flows of dispossession along well-
worn lines of white supremacy).
Looking to sociologist Erving Goffman and his theory of social performance (a mid-
1950s antecedent to what we now think of as “performance studies”), we receive the idea of “the
front,” those “expressive equipment of a standard kind” (13) that allow one to be legible to
witnesses, to be understood, by effectively reproducing relations as a set of known and
prescribed roles (for example, in the classroom or boardroom, when the professor or CEO speaks
– typically from the head of the table – the students or lower executives turn their heads and
listen). For Goffman, encounters with new or novel situations do not tend to produce new fronts
so much as they cause one to “find that there are already several well-established fronts among
which [one] must choose” (17) – though it’s arguable to what degree one actually “chooses” the
fronts one performs.
In this model of the social, the possibility of being acknowledged/recognized is
commensurate with one’s ability to perform fronts with a certain fidelity, the failure of which
leads to ostracization: “At such moments the individual whose presentation has been discredited
may feel ashamed while the others present may feel hostile, and all the participants may come to
feel ill at ease, nonplussed, our of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomie
that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down”
(Goffman 6). Goffman argues that at an “everyday” level of being, the threat of social stigma
acts to regulate performances in a highly conservative way, where the reproduction of prevailing
performative fronts admits one into the social body and deviation (purposeful or not) can result

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in expulsion. There exists a pressure to perform “normatively,” to always maintain a “veneer of
consensus” concerning how we ought to be together (Goffman 4), or else.
The potential for punitive qualities in reproductive performance, the risk of or else, is
thoroughly elaborated in Jon McKenzie’s analysis of “Performance Management” (framed by
McKenzie as the organizational mandate to “[p]erform – or else: be fired, redeployed, or
institutionally marginalized” (7)). In the context of the workplace, where what is to be
reproduced is the optimization of profit, performance is hardly without “change”: sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman writes of our “liquid modernity” which guarantees that “[n]o one may
reasonably assume to be insured against the next round of ‘downsizing’, ‘streamlining’ or
‘rationalizing’, against erratic shifts in market demand and whimsical yet irresistible,
indomitable pressures of ‘competitiveness’, ‘productivity’ and ‘effectiveness’” (161). With
precarity becoming increasingly common in the lives of most workers, it is given that
tomorrow’s profitable market disruption, that purveyor of “creative destruction,” could easily
eliminate the work that sustains a given worker today.
This threat of material diminishment – and its reproduction – has served neoliberalism as
a powerful tool of squeezing more and more profit out of workers: since the onset of neoliberal
policies in the United States in the 1980s, the growth of workers’ “productivity” (their economic
output in a given time) has outpaced wage growth by more than a factor of 3 (Economic Policy
Institute); work is happening more “efficiently” but workers aren’t receiving remuneration for
their efforts. Instead, profits are being leveraged to further the economic disparities between
those who already benefit most from neoliberalism (corporations and banks managed
predominantly by white men) and those who benefit least (workers, particularly those at
intersections of systemic oppressions). Under neoliberalism, the reproductive performances that

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support this uneven accumulation are valorized at every level of activity: whether it be “rise and
grind” entrepreneurialism, the cultivation of a CV, submitting to exclusionary application
processes, jealously guarding the knowledge of one’s rate of pay, forgoing unionization under
threat of individual punishment, growing one’s “following” on privately-owned/publicly-traded
social networks, or the acceptance of severance packages on the condition of non-disparagement
and non-compete agreements, the behavioral imperatives for surviving corporate extraction are
increasingly felt to infect every cultural performance that would be meaningful – with each
performance acting as a tributary to floods of dispossession.
For the neoliberal subject, the performance of work is viciously regulated for a critical
reason: according to Marxist feminist scholar Tithi Bhattacharya, “labor power is the sole
commodity – the ‘unique commodity,’ as Marx calls it – that is produced outside of the circuit of
commodity production” (7); we might add further that under capitalism, reproductive labor (the
bearing of children and their care) is assumed to be the uncompensated onus of women and, thus,
is not considered to be a commodity at all. The reproduction of neoliberalism is only possible by
virtue of a phenomenon that resides outside the logics of capitalism, namely that of sociality
itself, the ongoing biological, cultural, and psychic reproduction of people-as-workers that must
be ratified again and again (within and across generations) through relational performance.
Bhattacharya invokes “social reproduction theory,” the contention that “human labor is at the
heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole” (2), in an attempt to render neoliberal
capitalism not as a collection of economic inevitabilities, but instead as a highly cultivated set of
beliefs and relations (which I argue must be performed) that are the necessary prerequisite for the
consolidation of greater and greater swaths of the world beneath the purview of corporate and
financial institutions.

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Of the various intra-active components of systemic neoliberalism, it is the performing
worker that haunts the very possibility of the system’s reproduction – for if the worker cannot be
efficaciously reproduced and made to accept that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal
immiseration, they may reject the atomization that professionalization entails and discover social
significance can be conferred without participating in the global dispossessive profit project.
Neoliberal subjects, as beleaguered as they have been flagellated into feeling, might realize that
their collective performances are vital to the continuity of neoliberalism, that their performances
matter, and wonder if other performances might be possible. Bhattacharya again:
[Social reproduction theory] is especially useful in this regard because it
reveals the essence category of capitalism, its animating force, to be
human labor and not commodities. In doing so, it exposes to critical
scrutiny the superficiality of what we commonly understand to be
“economic” processes and restores to the economic process its messy,
sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings,
capable of following orders as well as of flouting them. (19)

If neoliberalism and white supremacy are effectively reproduced through the reproduction of
people who perform in a specific way, shouldn’t the elimination of the ills of neoliberalism and
white supremacy be as simple as “flouting” those performances? To what extent can we
“choose” to modulate what we do? To what degree might be anticipate the effects of such
modulation? For Marxist theatre practitioners Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, any sort of
“intentional” mutation of the social can only follow from a consciousness of how the social is
presently configured, a recognition of prevailing articulations of power and how they guide – or
seemingly determine – our performances.
Brecht, a German playwright writing in exile following the rise of the Nazi Party, is well
known for his deployment of “Verfremdungseffekt,” or the “alienation effect,” in order to
undermine belief in any “natural” order of the social and, instead, make possible an awareness of

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its unrecognized contours of domination, exploitation, and control. He believed that this effect
could be achieved through an act of attention (self- or relationally-directed), by “turning the
object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something
ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected”
(143). Of course, this requires that some such object be selected for alienation, but the basic
principle remains that for social mutation to be coaxed into its unpredictable emergence,
“[b]efore familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its
inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation”
(Brecht 144). In order for mutation to be conceivable, one must recognize that any “certainty”
that is held can only ever be the foreclosing of otherwise; history has not reached its end.
Countering such foreclosure became the theatrical/pedagogical aim of Augusto Boal, a
Brazilian, also exiled, who extended Brecht’s theories of theatre and Paulo Freire’s theories of
emancipatory learning to publish Theatre of the Oppressed in 1974. For Boal, experiencing
alienation from normative social performances wasn't something that the theatre could simply
imbue in an audience, but rather people had to actually practice such performances themselves.
Such a practice would allow performers to develop an intuition for identifying which aspects of
social reproduction were progenitors of harm and, thus, ought to be targets for mutation. This
required the transformation of the spectator, one for whom oppressors have “imposed finished
visions of the world” (Boal 155), into an active practitioner of “people’s theater” – controlled
exercises in which “everyday people” leverage the materials and spaces of theatre to stimulate
awareness of the construction of their sociality:
Aristotle proposes a poetics in which the spectator delegates power to the
dramatic character so that the latter may act and think for him. Brecht
proposes a poetics in which the spectator delegates power to the character
who thus acts in his place but the spectator reserves the right to think for

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himself, often in opposition to the character. But the poetics of the
oppressed focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to
the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the
contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic roles, changes the dramatic
action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change – in short, trains
himself for real action. In this case, perhaps the theater is not revolutionary
in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. (Boal 122)

Though Boal offers a number of specific people’s theater exercises one might try, my focus here
is on the suggestion that an opening towards the possibilities of otherwise can’t be conferred
from above. Rather, otherwise is the outcome of people relating in a context that is explicitly
designed to turn them towards relation itself as an emergent property of intra-acting. In this
way, mutation is not about realizing targeted outcomes but instead involves the recognition that
our moments of contact always see us affected. If we can come to experience and intuit this
tendency towards change as the effect of our being, we can deprogram the discursive givenness
of oppressive narratives and begin to consider the effects of our performances beyond the
margins of the previously deemed possible.
Before formulating how performance can be construed as a specific kind of research
methodology (PPP), I’d like to elaborate on the importance of “queerness” in such an endeavor.
In an email correspondence with Amelia Jones concerning this writing project, Jones emphasized
the difficulty in proposing that some desired otherwise can be realized through directed
“choosing.” She suggested instead that “perhaps it is the impossibility of resolving
meaning/identity that is queer.” Per Barad’s reckoning of agency not as choice-making but as the
relational basis for matter (that things, however seemingly separate, exist on the basis of their co-
constitutive affecting), I do not mean to claim that we can dictate the effects of change through
the strength of some liberal humanist force of will, through intention; no matter how rigid a
particular discourse, cosmogony, or hegemonic articulation may appear to be, it is always-

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already mutating, though sometimes at a rate so glacial we can’t perceive it. Rather, I take Jones’
meaning of queer as a releasing of the impulses to dictate and control which, in contrast to the
claims of fixity and permanence that accompany (neo)liberal and white masculine imaginaries,
involves making uneasy peace with the radical irresolution of being.
To queer Brecht and Boal, then, is to suggest that the alienation effect and people’s
theater are not to be wielded like solutions to the problem of an undesirable resolution of the
social (that can be leveraged to erect an alternative resolution that is “better”), but instead can be
used as prompts that can help generate a relationship with irresolution as such. For when one is
taught to insist on denying the ongoing decay of fixed forms endemic to agential intra-action,
one is not only shocked and harmed by the entropic tendencies of the material (by death, by
viruses, by institutional collapse), but also actively seeks – with great futility – to reproduce
oneself in terms of perpetual growth and expansion, which can only be temporarily simulated
through the violent extraction of the wellbeing of others, human and nonhuman alike. To
understand the universe as queer, to be open to the undulating coalescence and dissolution of
form across time, is to permit mutational performance. Instead of being on alert for “improper”
performances and clamping down on them, eliminating them, shaming their enactors before they
can be shared, queer performances would encourage the emergence of difference. With such an
openness, then, we invite queer performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz to orient queerness
toward “the future.”
Of queerness, Muñoz writes: “Queerness is… performative because it is not simply a
being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the
here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1).
Though we might take issue with the ironic invocation of there being anything “essential” about

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queerness, there is tied up in the queer not only irresolution, but the fact that it recognizes the
world in relation to a desire for that which does not appear to be present. And in ways that are
not always satisfying, it is likely we have some experience with effecting change by which
something that “wasn’t there” appears: in authoring this writing, I began with Microsoft Word’s
canonical blank white skeumorphic page and, now, there are far too many words splayed across
the scroll of my screen. This is to say that, within the perceived limits of one’s reckonings of the
world, one can begin and, from such beginnings, effect changes, witness changes, and modulate
changes, though not by virtue of any kind of predetermined design.
To speak of prefiguration (again, “concrete processes of anticipating a better future in the
present, in heterotopic spaces created to that end”), is to explore precisely what sort of
modulations occur – and don’t – as one attempts to reconcile the ostensible desires for otherwise
with would-be intentions to realize them. Prefiguration is not about guarantees or optimal
implementation. It is a performance tactic for beginning, for driving oneself directly into the
walls of given assumptions concerning the social – like particle acceleration, it is about
instigating collisions and noticing what spirals through the ether in the aftermath. Further, it is
about recognizing which components of “us” sneak through the fissures in such walls and
attempting to account for what made such escape velocity possible. Praxis, then, becomes the
shared promise to begin again.

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Prefiguration
Prior to attending to prefiguration, which implicates an intervention in normative ways of
doing and being, I’d like to offer a few words on the notion of agency, that which affords the
ability to begin. In articulating her notion of “agential realism,” Karen Barad, who brings
theoretical physics to bear on philosophical questions of “the agential,” de-centers the human and
its intentions and, instead, posits a model of agency that is not rooted in intention or choice but
rather is the metaphysics of existing itself, regardless of how such agency might confer the
capacity to direct selection. While others might point to the atom or some further-reduced
subatomic particle as the foundational unit of ontology, Barad’s agential realist ontology roots
existence in relation, what she refers to as “phenomena”: “phenomena are the ontological
inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting ‘agencies.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically
primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata” (139). The neologistic “intra-action” is
crucial here, for it allows us to specify (within the limits of language) what agency could mean
beyond the rendering provided by (neo)liberal humanist rationality. Intra-action refers to how
any particular “thing” we might perceive or encounter, despite any appearance of formal
coherence, is only ever the result of the processes by which the constitutive components of that
thing affect and are affected by one another. Any “thing” we might name is not “of-itself” but,
rather, is of relations. Because of this, Barad eschews the term “interaction” because it implies
the a priori existence of entities completely independent of others, electing instead for a
declaration of the co-constitutive nature of things and their doings.
Following from the metaphysics of intra-action is Barad’s reworked understanding of
causality as it emerges from “agential cuts”: by using a given apparatus to observe a particular
set of intra-acting components that participate in the production of a given phenomenon, we

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apprehend a localized but always provisional “cause” for the “effects” of that phenomenon.
Barad still provides us with a means by which to understand how “one thing leads to another,” so
long as we don’t forget that our agential cuts produce the very relation of causes and effects that
we observe. McKenzie Wark, citing Barad in her own analysis of apparatuses, elaborates on the
consequences of such cuts:
Things don’t necessarily exist as separate or separable prior to the cut
made in the world by the apparatus, which yields the phenomenon of
something separate and knowable as an object of knowledge to the
subject. It is the apparatus that produces the phenomena, here of waves,
there of particles. There is thus a bit less one can claim about the causal
order of the real. The deterministic universe, separate from the observer
and relentless in its cause-effect sequences, can’t be said to be there. (161-
162)

Wark goes further to provide an interpretation of Baradian agency:
Another way to approach this might be to ask: What counts as agency?
What can be said to act? Agency is not something that humans or even
nonhumans “have.” It is not something that some possess and some do
not. It’s an effect of a situation, often a situation that includes an
apparatus. For an agent to appear, there’s a prior cut. The agent appears
separate as an effect of a kind of “exteriority-within-phenomena.” (162)

Everything, every thing (literally), is agential. The ongoing process of affecting and effecting, for
Barad at least, is agency. By virtue of existing as swirling intra-active phenomena, we are
agential to begin with; we act, with or without consciousness, as a matter of matter.
With this reckoning of agency in mind, steeped in a sense that all agents are always-
already imbued with the potential to effect changes in one another, I offer prefiguration as a
mode of performance that, as I will discuss later, can assist in exploring those facets of
necrontology denied by neoliberalism. The previously alluded to definition of prefiguration
(“concrete processes of anticipating a better future in the present, in heterotopic spaces created to
that end”) is provided by political sociologist Ana Cecilia Dinerstein in her consideration of

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“radical politics,” or “struggles for a breathing space from where to conceive and organise social
life alternatively” (2). Though not explicitly “utopian,” within this call for an alternative social
organization – what I call “otherwise” – is a desire to perform what Dinerstein calls “experiential
critique,” “a critique that, far from being ideological, is rooted in everyday life, in the body, in
social relations, in communal practices” of the “plural subject” (3). Prefiguration is a critique that
is actively performed so as to engage with the possible trajectories of change, emerging from an
understanding of the intra-active basis of being (that what “exists” is not given, but emergent).
Scholars of prefiguration, in a similar vein to Muñoz, reject the casting of commitments
to hope, futurity, and even utopia as naïve, opting instead the explore what is enabled by
considerations of mutational possibility rather than certainties of stagnation. This often involves
a non-teleological nuance towards the idea of an “aim,” “goal,” or “objective” in the seeking of
otherwise, a refusal to essentialize the necessity for a singular outcome or a dogmatic adherence
to a particular manner of proceeding. Social anthropologist Marianne Maeckelbergh discusses
prefiguration as an implosion of the means/ends binary often deployed when discussing the
efficacy of efforts towards social change, arguing that prefiguration promotes an inseparability of
what things are done and how things are done:
Prefiguration holds the ends to be equally important as the means, and has
as its intention (over time, or momentarily) to render them
indistinguishable. Prefiguration, therefore, is an approach that neither
ignores the consequences of an action, nor does it emphasise the
importance of a consequence regardless of the means used. Activists are
invariably highly concerned that their actions should have concrete
consequences, but this concern does not preclude them
from elevating the means to a level of strategic importance. (88)

By collapsing harsh distinctions between “now” and “then,” prefiguration makes available a
social imaginary in which extant displeasure and suffering need not be eternal but, rather, can be
understood as active processes of reproduction that are susceptible to rerouting, diminishment,

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and nullification. To the extent that all matter is always-already agential, there is the possibility
(though without any guarantee) that changing what things are done may change how things are.
Of course, there are differential consequences in the US for attempting to initiate such
change depending on how one is situated in relation to neoliberalism and patriarchal white
supremacy. An inclination towards prefiguration does not eradicate threats of reprisal from
systems that are all too prepared to snuff out dissent at or even before its first impulse (Eubanks
2018). Yet when decoupled from having to author “solutions,” prefiguration can be explored as
an ongoing experiment with quotidian practices that fall below thresholds of official detection
and sanction, efforts which over time and in aggregate may contribute to meaningful systemic
changes. Ruth Levitas, a British sociologist well-known for her theorizing of utopia, contends
that while large-scale efforts towards change are vital in order to attend to the scale of dystopian
systems already in-process, there is a critical importance to prefigurations that are construable
and achievable within people’s intimate, immediate contexts:
Within utopian studies, the focus here has primarily been on intentional
communities which create alternative enclaves or heterotopias, although
some clearly intend the prefiguration or instantiation of a transformed
world. The idea of prefigurative practice may usefully be extended to
social practices which intend or embed a different way of being. People
seek to live differently in myriad individual and collective ways. There is
a growing literature on mundane or everyday utopianism, where
alternative or oppositional social practices create new, or at least slightly
different, social institutions. (xiii)

If there is a desire to cultivate prefigurations that can challenge global neoliberalism, it seems
that there must also be efforts to practice the prefiguration of otherwise locally, where one is
most intra-actively agential in proximity to the matters of one’s being, at the level of the
neighborhood, the home, the self.

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As a specific example of such quotidian prefiguration, let’s say that I (notably, a white
man) live in an apartment complex and realize that my tendencies towards atomization and
settling on private “territory” have led me not only to have no socially consequential
relationships with my neighbors, but also to actively avoid getting to know them better (out of
fears of difference, responsibility, dislike, loss of privacy, the assumption they feel similarly
inclined towards me, and so on). Further, let’s say I come to the realization that I have few
friends with whom to share my existing and who might share their existing with me; it’s not so
much that I would like to make a “project” of becoming intimate with everyone in the complex,
but rather that I wish I had some community at home beyond the walls of my unit. There are a
number of particular reasons for this desire: my partner and I like to play cooperative games and
would enjoy more collaborators in our play; I enjoy composing and performing music and would
appreciate meeting someone who contrasts my approach to music-making in such a way that we
could form an interesting band; it would be nice to have someone trusted to look in on and care
for my small dog when I’m out of town; it would be nice to share a meal with someone. In brief,
I desire a social situation in which I have more fluid contact with others around me, to learn how
to care for them and to be cared for.
How might I prefigure such a situation, which differs so radically from the
neoliberalized, white-masculine, isolationist habitus of a guy presiding over the fiefdom of his
apartment? It might occur to me that in order for my neighbors to become my friends, I have to
meet them first. And where are they most likely to be found?; presiding over their own homes,
up and down stairways, behind numbered doors. I could travel door-to-door, performing the
salesman, knocking to solicit company; yet already I realize that the “ends” co-constitutively
produced by such “means,” while prefiguring a world without neoliberal edicts of privacy,

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mirror the transactional qualities of a pop-up ad – invasive, uninvited, unlikely to be well-
received (I must recall, also, that my inclination to proffer myself to strangers comes from my
white-masculine assumption that I should not be perceived as threatening). Instead, I could post a
flier by the communal mailboxes informing my neighbors that I’m looking for a third player to
join my partner and I in one of our tabletop games, asking for interested parties to come by and
ring the doorbell of unit 108; while prefiguring a world in which it’s acceptable to invite a
stranger into one’s home, I feel the stirrings of fear in my neighbors who have heard stories of
lures and traps on Craigslist and the violence that follows – neoliberalism would have us
beginning from a stance of distrust. Alternatively, I might allow encounters with my neighbors to
emerge without control or planning, running into my neighbors (as I often do) in the parking lot
or on the street walking our dogs; instead of offering a meek smile and moving on, I could
mention that I’d seen them before and introduce myself – I could prefigure a world in which I
share something of myself with another and allow for any possible performance to circulate
back, any possible intermingling to coalesce or dissipate. At the very least, this would be a
beginning.
These brief considerations of prefigurative performance may seem overly banal, too
scattered and small-scale to effect meaningful change. This is the critique levied by political
theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams against prefigurative politics, who claim that because
the prefiguration often involves the only the provisional instantiation of “short-term spaces
containing the transitory experiences of an immediate community,” prefiguration does not on its
own provide a model for “sustained change or the working out of concrete alternatives” (34).
Further, Srnicek and Williams argue that the immensity of prevailing systems of domination and
dispossession render any potentially efficacious prefigurative gesture moot: “The moment a

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prefigurative space becomes a threat [to global capitalism] is the moment when repression
weighs down on it… Prefigurative politics, at its worst, therefore ignores the forces aligned
against the creation and expansion of a new world. The simple positing and practising of a new
world is insufficient to overcome these forces” (35). In the context of neoliberalism, to the extent
one’s performances of prefiguration only occur as ad hoc acts, the prefigurative efforts of white-
identified people risk sliding away from otherwise and back towards the performative fronts that
reproduce white supremacy (those who white supremacy dysselects are always-already engaged
in attempts to prefigure a world that permits their existence by virtue of their existing at all); an
additional element is necessary for prefigurative performances to encourage enduring mutations
of the social. This additional element is a praxis of social cooperation.

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Praxis
If one understands the entrenchment of white supremacy and capitalism to be centuries-
long projects of experimentation and amplification, one can hardly expect that otherwise can be
wrought from mere moments, from a singular concept or gesture. Further, to propose from the
outset a destination at which a known otherwise could be “achieved” is to reinscribe the very
domineering and monolithic logics that make normative modes of “knowing” so harmful in the
first place. My deployment of prefiguration is non-solutionist inasmuch as it does not assume
that the attempt to realize desires will ever yield some ideal actualization of those desires. For
me, prefiguration is an approach to overriding imaginary foreclosures of a future that would
differ from the present, a method for generating frictions between that which ostensibly is and
that which could be through social performance. From such frictions, it becomes possible to
cultivate new intuitions and orientations towards one’s world as one actively learns from
encounters that probe (and, at times, exceed) the apparent bindings of hegemony. Such learning
does not happen all at once nor can it be settled once and for all; mutation is an iterative process
with no necessary end. In Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy of “the human condition,”
informed by first-hand experience as a Jewish scholar and refugee during the rise of Nazi
Germany, she articulates the necessity for praxis (or, synonymously, action: “the spontaneous
beginning of something new” (234)), as well as the shared and recurring social responsibility for
a given action’s consequences to require new actions, in order for human existence to be possible
at all: “action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth… the actualization of the human
condition of natality” (178).
According to Arendt, praxis has no inherent moral valence; it is neither “good” nor “bad”
in the abstract, but rather it is the material reality of human beings existing by virtue of their

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doing. Praxis is co-constitutive with human states of being and, given the plurality of human
performance and the innumerable beginnings it instigates, cannot be controlled in its totality:
“The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is
simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout
time until mankind itself has come to an end” (Arendt 233). For this reason, Arendt claims
praxis-as-beginning has three features that often lead to its suppression by social forces
committed to a predictable and manageable world: “the unpredictability of its outcome, the
irreversibility of [its] process, and the anonymity of its authors” (220). By unpredictability,
Arendt is indicating the cascading butterfly effects of even the smallest social acts; by
irreversibility, the thermodynamic implausibility of “taking back” a gesture once its effects have
begun to ripple outward; and by anonymity, the impossibility of attributing ongoing social
circumstances to a single, initiating, causative person (who might be held to account for harms or
given credit for benefits). This is all to say that praxis is tendentially disruptive to that which is
being maintained; unless one wishes to live beneath a tyranny that crushes any and every
difference as it is born, praxis demands ongoing social engagement with the spontaneous
emergence of otherwise.
In light of her analysis of and desire to repudiate totalitarian modes of social
organization, Arendt offers a model of praxis which allows for processes of mutation to be given
their appreciative due while, at the same time, permitting people to actively participate (though
not without perpetual negotiation) in the ceaseless generation and disassembly of social forms.
Core to this participation is the fragile notion of “trust,” the concept that if society is able to
mitigate its narrative need to determine who “owns” the causes of social forms (for benefit or for

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punishment), it may be able to cultivate widespread wellbeing through the twin faculties of
promising and forgiving:
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility – of being
unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have
known what he was doing – is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for
unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in
the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together
in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past,
whose “sins” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and
the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean
of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security
without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would
be possible in the relationships between men. (237)

In order for the social to resist dissolving into a miasma of spite, hatred, violence, and extinction
(let alone for it to yield sociality, from which humans mutually benefit from one another because
of the distribution of their differences), there must exist the possibility of cooperation. Without
being able to communicate how one plans to attend to the wellbeing of oneself and others – and
a willingness to forgive when such plans go awry – no iterative collaboration in producing
togetherness can sustain itself. In short, Arendt provides a reckoning of praxis that accounts for
the emergent qualities of human performance (against systems of domination that would
permanently suspend them) and a technique for navigating the unknowability of being: begin,
promise, forgive, begin, promise, forgive, begin, promise, forgive…
And so I offer a method of coming to know the world and to affect it in relation to desire:
prefigure otherwise with performances of praxis. That is to say, actively attempt to instantiate
otherwise, meet the world and its prevailing tendencies, come to know differently, reorient
desires, imagine new prefigurations, and begin again (in the company of others whenever
possible). Performance as prefigurative praxis (PPP) is a call to legitimize, with greater

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specificity, what people are always-already doing as they make sense and significance out of
matter.
In their essays examining how the Black radical tradition can be used to confront white
supremacy and neoliberalism in institutional spaces, particularly the university, Stefano Harney
and Fred Moten articulate what they call “study” as “the incessant and irreversible
intellectuality” involved in everyday social encounters. Moten elaborates:
When I think about the way we use the term “study,” I think we are
committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s
talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing,
suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name
of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of
workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a
porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various
modes of activity…. To do these things is to be involved in a kind of
common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that
has been the case [all along] – because that recognition allows you to
access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought. (110, empahsis
added)

Just as Arendt emphasizes in her theory of praxis (as well as Barad in her theory of agential
realism), so Harney and Moten’s rendering of “study” suggests that the capacity for change is
endemic to human ontology; to reiterate Jones’ understanding of queerness (in contrast to
systems of knowledge that would propose a natural givenness to atomized forms), “the
appearance of ‘being’ is always activated through ‘doing.’”
With PPP, I augment these ideas of matter’s a priori tendency to shift in form (what I
have called necrontology) to generate a communicable, sharable process with which to
interrogate normative assumptions concerning the intransigence of social systems and their
seeming irreconcilability with desires for wellbeing; PPP provides a non-deterministic program
for beginning. From performance theory (particularly that of Amelia Jones), I borrow the
insistence that human being is reproduced through relational doing; from prefiguration, I borrow

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the collapsing of temporal imaginaries to permit experimentation with otherwise in the present;
and from Arendtian praxis, I borrow the ethos that, in order for the social to be aligned on a
trajectory towards care, there must be a willingness to engage in limitless iteration – iteration that
is accompanied by empathy for our shared inability to know in advance what our would-be
intentions might disclose. In combination, these facets of PPP are tuned to enable research that
not only investigates social circumstances but, by virtue of its mode of investigation,
simultaneously responds to those circumstances by orienting its practitioners towards imagined
alternatives.
Before considering how PPP might be applied to a desire for a necrontological sociality
(in the shadow of the decline of neoliberalism’s narrative persuasiveness), there is an important
question that ought to be considered: when change is sought, what exactly is to be changed? In
other words, what are the dimensions of ontology to which humans have access and how might
these dimensions be affected by human performance? Though each deploys different
nomenclature and approaches this question from a distinct vantage point, three theorists –
Hannah Arendt, Karen Barad, and Sylvia Wynter – all appear to glean the same insight from
their studies of the human: the human must be understood as a material-discursive continuum.
Beginning with Arendt, she outlines a human materiality in terms of a series of behaviors,
each redeeming the prior as humans effort towards significance and meaning: labor, work, and
action (praxis). For Arendt, labor is the “activity in which man is neither together with the world
nor with other people, but alone with his body, facing naked necessity to keep himself alive”;
labor includes the baseline metabolic processes that permit the existence of a “mere living
organism” (212). Work, on the other hand, is “the capacity for making, fabricating, and
producing… [that which] not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but also erects a world

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of durability” (236); work, the “making of things” to ostensibly lessen suffering and preserve
wellbeing in the face of decay, involves the human creation of forms that persist beyond the
moment of their formation, for ongoing use (buildings, institutions, furniture, art, almost
anything we might now think of as a “commodity”). Action/praxis redeems a world of work by
allowing for that work to be given significance, but only when combined with what Arendt refers
to as “speech”: work can “be redeemed from [its] predicament of meaninglessness, the
‘devaluation of all values,’ and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined
by the category of means and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech,
which produce meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects” (236).
Arendt identifies praxis, the generation of “newness” that accompanies every act, as the
common territory shared equally by all humans while “speech corresponds to the fact of
distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a
distinct and unique being among equals” (178). In an ontological context where each human is
alike in their tendency to effect and affect the world as a condition of their existing (along
Baradian lines of “agency,” which does not by any means guarantee a particular degree of
effect/affect), the (re)production of the social (or “the plural”) is the ever-unfolding disclosure of
the specificity of different instances of the human, different “people,” as performed through
speech: storytelling, conversation, writing, singing, semaphore, all those method of mediation by
which a person might attempt to communicate their “self” to others. Arendt elaborates on the
necessity of speech in order for praxis to be humanly meaningful:
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and
specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the
question asked of every newcomer: "Who are you?"… The action he
begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be
perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment,
it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies

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himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to
do. No other human performance requires speech to the same extent as
action. (178-179)

Thus, for Arendt, praxis detached from speech, those processes of sharing the stories of selves, is
meaningless to humans; in order to attempt meaningful social change, the material and the
linguistic constitution of each person must be considered inseparable.
For Barad, the particular constellation of what is marked for inclusion in the use of
language can be thought of as “discourse”: “Discourse is not what is said; it is that which
constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful
statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified
subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities” (146-147). This
“field of possibilities” does not only constrain how language is deployed but, to the extent
humans are contiguous with their “speaking,” further constrains or enables what might be done
and the way in which such doing may matter. Such possibilities are mapped by what Barad calls
“material-discursive practices,” the ceaseless motion of provisional boundaries of inclusion and
exclusion that make imaginable what might be done and said. Such boundary-making is not
“spoken into being” by human actors, but rather is always-already underway by virtue of the co-
constitutive nature of matter and discourse:
[M]ateriality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from
the apparatuses of bodily production; matter emerges out of, and includes
as part of its being, the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as
discursive practices are always already material (i.e ., they are ongoing
material [re]configurings of the world). Discursive practices and material
phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other;
rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the
dynamics of intra-activity. The relationship between the material and the
discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither discursive practices nor
material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither
can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other.
Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is

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articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning
are mutually articulated. (151-152)

Barad is pointed in her insistence that the material-discursive qualities of the universe are not
specifically “human,” but rather humanness emerges in affinity with the material-discursive
constitution of the universe: “Humans are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world
in its open-ended becoming” (150). Therefore, when wondering how one might participate in
directed efforts towards change, it is critical to recognize that all forms one encounters or
imagines (human or not) proceed in their particular way of being in relation to boundaries of
discourse. The material and the discursive cannot be affected distinctly from one another but
must be reckoned as continuous. Further, material-discursive phenomena are never fixed or
permanent, but rather only appear as recognizable “forms” because of the temporary boundaries
erected: “Outside of particular agential intra-actions, ‘words’ and ‘things’ are indeterminate”
(Barad 150); the tendency for otherwise is latent in the reconfigurability of relations. In other
words, it is relations that are productive of forms; as relations shift, so too do the discursive
forms they suggest.
As for Sylvia Wynter, philosopher and Black studies scholar, she contends that the
speciated entity that is given the name “the human” is not some kind of biologically-determined
material fait accompli, but rather that entity itself is an active participant in the instantiation of
what “the human” might be:
[T]he human is homo narrans. This means that as a species, our hybrid
origins only emerged in the wake of what I have come to define over the
last decade as the Third Event. The First and Second Events are the origin
of the universe and the explosion of all forms of biological life,
respectively. I identify the Third Event… as the origin of the human as a
hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species: bios/mythoi. The
Third Event is defined by the singularity of the co-evolution of the human
brain with – and, unlike those of all the other primates, with it alone – the
emergent faculties of language, storytelling. (25)

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As homo narrans, or biological-storytelling beings, Wynter suggests that we have a cultural
tendency to cultivate “cosmogonies,” discursive apparatuses which function both as prevailing
explanations of our primordial origins (“where we come from”) and as well as, per the “nature”
of those origins, what sort of future will inevitably come to pass. Further, though such
cosmogonies are always emergent phenomena of humans attempting to make meaning and
significance of their worlds (to make matter matter), the ordering force of a given cosmogony is
likely to erase the metanarrative of the efforts that produced that cosmogony in the first place
(efforts that unfold across spans of generations). This means that cosmogonies can have the
quality of being “extrahumanly mandated.” Per Wynter again, “as humans, we cannot/do not
preexist our cosmogonies, our representations of our origins – even though it is we ourselves
who invent those cosmogonies and then retroactively project them onto the past” (36).
Therefore, in lieu of the memory of our collaborative/cross-generational authorings, the
story of our existence appears to come from beyond ourselves and is able to carry with it the
weight of “the truth”: the word of God (or, for the benefit of the subject of neoliberal
competition, of Darwin). The authority of cosmogony, however fictive, can institute a “cognitive
closure” against which no other way of being can be recognized, lest one abandons the
organizing certainty such a cosmogony provides concerning “the only possible expression of that
‘once upon a time’s’ extrahuman mandating of what… [our] higher level, self-organizing,
autonomously functioning, living autopoietic, now humanly (i.e., storytellingly chartered)
encoded eusocial system, would have had to be” (Wynter and McKittrick 38).
But does cognitive closure really seal off discourse from the possibility of mutation?
Only apparently so, for while one may be hypnotized by the enunciation of discourse as a solid
scripture delivered from on high and refuses (or is unable, which is not a trivial distinction) to

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perceive its moment-to-moment reproduction and its mutagenic qualities, one must remember
that cultural stories change, however imperceptibly, with each telling. As Wynter implores:
We need to speak instead of our genres of being human. Once you
redefine being human in hybrid mythoi and bios terms, and therefore in
terms that draw attention to the relativity and original multiplicity of our
genres of being human, all of a sudden what you begin to recognize is the
central role that our discursive formations, aesthetic fields, and systems of
knowledge must play in the performative enactment of all such genres of
being hybridly human. (31)

Wynter concludes that “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis” (23); in
affinity with Arendt’s notion of praxis as the capacity to initiate difference (to begin), Wynter
finds hope for overcoming cognitive closure through the realization that there is no human
essence as such – no cultural formation can capture and claim humanity once and for all. Stories
will be told and what is human will be (re)produced in their telling
For Wynter, Barad, and Arendt, it’s not a question of how might change be possible but,
instead, a question of how one might, first, come to acknowledge that changes are happening,
second, to identify where the flux of change is being energetically held at bay (so as to maintain
a given form, for good or for ill) and, third, to reckon with how discourses are co-constitutive
with these material streams. For discourse, without any inherent positive or negative social
valence, is the attempt at enacting a deadening slice in the fluid intra-play of being, an attempt
that can only ever be too late as being will always have already exceeded the boundaries erected.
Despite attempts to preserve its borders as a kind of taxidermy, any discursive slice is animated
the instant it comes into relation, which it always-already is by virtue of existing at all; mutation
is underway.
PPP, then, takes as its site of intervention the entanglement of the material and discursive,
the biological and the narrative, the performing of acts and human attempts to communicate such

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performances. It is a non-solutionist proposal (one that refuses to assume an essential “problem”
to be overcome) for an antiteleological approach (one that refuses to assume there will be a
terminal point of arrival) to active intervening (the enacted attempt to modulate change’s rate and
direction of realization) and studying (coming to know through social experience and intuition as
well as cognition). Given the irresolution of being, PPP assumes that change will not cease and,
therefore, human sociality requires a commitment to iteration, to letting go and coming again.
My particular deployment of PPP is founded on a desire for the discovery of relational wellbeing
in the midst of decay, a direct contrast to white masculine neoliberal desires for the certainty of
possessive individual superiority on a trajectory towards immortality. What follows is an
ideation of necrontological performances that might get some of us neoliberal subjects started as
we wind to a stop.

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Necrontological Performances of Otherwise
Critical to any necrontological imaginary is the idea of corpsehood; the tendency for
humans, in all of their performing, to approach that form – the corpse – in which all the materials
of the self are released to otherwise. As feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti writes: “We may call
it death, but… it has rather to do with radical immanence. That is to say the grounded totality of
the moment when we coincide completely with our body in becoming at last what we will have
been all along: a virtual corpse” (136). While any number of cultural postures can be assumed in
relation to the corpse, the shared necrontology under which we all toil (the “human condition,” if
you will) is the thermodynamics of disincorporation, the common and unintentioned
recirculation of matter that marks the cessation of a life and makes possible life as such. It is this
affinity for coming into and out of being that is denied by the neoliberal subject, who would
insist that for the selected, life’s duration and concentration ought to be infinite.
I’ve written in the previous chapters of the harms bequeathed by the neoliberal
orientation towards the immortal corporation; I’ve written also of the potential for kindness and
ongoingness that may be summoned by the specter of the corpse. Here, I share three hypothetical
instances of PPP that would affirm necrontology while neoliberalism’s peals, though perhaps
diminishing in volume, continue to hail those who stand to acquire most from white supremacy’s
dispossessive flows. The first PPP gesture I propose involves noticing that which departs from
one’s body and attending to how it might be made available to other forms; this is a performance
of conscientiousness that would confound neoliberal insistences of bounded, atomized, self-
possessed personhood. Second, I detail how an acute attention to the words, concepts, and
metaphors one deploys when speaking to others on a day-to-day basis either reproduce or
dissolve neoliberal discursive boundaries; this is a performance of disclosure that would erode

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neoliberalism’s hold over the way stories of the self are told in service of accumulation,
competition, and possessive individualism. The last exercise of PPP I offer, perhaps the most
challenging to implement, encourages the ritual identification and circulation of prospective
future “deathdays,” specific moments in time in which practitioners would be asked to imagine
that their corpsehoods would be consummated; this is a performance of acceptance that would
short-circuit immortalism in those who harbor it and encourage the social necessity for empathy
and cooperation.
The liberal humanist notion of the body as “an object of control and mastery” (Hayles 5)
is a fiction; one is literally surrounded by evidence to the contrary. This fiction, which posits that
the body functions as the legal possession of the always-separate mind and, as such, remains
intact within its circumscribed form (to be disposed of only by the willful choice of its owner) is
belied by the body’s ceaseless sloughing. The procession of the body’s detritus is inexhaustible:
hairs, skin cells, boogers, mucus, oils, feces, urine, sweat, tears, fingernails, teeth, vomit,
eyelashes, milk, rheum, semen, menstruation, earwax, saliva, blood, pus, flatulence, the
exhalation of breath, and the birth of entirely new humans project the body beyond its
boundaries. The belief that these emissions are to be kept secret, flushed, scrubbed, vacuumed,
covered, flicked away, or swept off shelves and under rugs is predicated on the assumption that
the aforementioned sloughing is improper, a failure to fix the body so that it remains as it ought:
intact, unchanging, putatively deathless.
To the extent one’s sloughing is apprehensible, to oneself or (even worse) to others, one
is humiliated by their inability to ward off the dispersion of their property into a sort of pollution
of one’s habitat, what amounts to the “disturb[ance of] identity, system, order” (Kristeva 4). This
discourse of the body identifies decay as a problem to mitigate or, with some innovative product,

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solve rather than a basis for affinity. It cleaves those with access to bodily longevity (“health”)
away from those who live in a perceived proximity to death (Sylvia Wynter’s “dysselected”: “the
globally homogenized dysgenic non-breadwinning jobless poor/the pauper/homeless/the welfare
queens” (37)). In cultivating a disgust for and un-seeing of sloughing, (neo)liberalism make
unimaginable for its beneficiaries the total slough of the corpse-to-come and instills a sense that,
given one’s habituated avoidance of encounters with disincorporation, one’s death ought to
always be quite distant if not unnecessary. This leaves erstwhile neoliberal subjects woefully
unprepared for death when it inevitably occurs. Rather than having laid the groundwork for
relations of support and comfort that so aid in enduring grief, the deaths of neoliberal subjects
are normatively executed out of view of the social: in the hospital ward or alone in one’s rented
apartment.
I maintain a desire for the affirmative socialization of sloughing in my day-to-day
performances. I would like to cultivate an appreciative regard for that which departs the body. I
would disturb my neoliberalization so as to humble the impulses I harbor towards a solipsistic
hoarding of the materials of being and to make more imaginable within myself and those I love
the eventuality of becoming the corpse. I would allow for abjection, the rupture of jealous
enclosure, to serve as a basis for the sharing of oneself instead of as a source of self-obliterating
horror. Through these efforts, I would hope for the emergence a conscientiousness for the
fragility of extant forms and how those forms’ disintegration is a prerequisite for otherwise.
How specifically might I prefigure such performances of sloughing and how might these
performances mutate through iterations of praxis? As on most days, I begin in the bathroom by
alternately ingesting and expelling fluids; given the nascency of my necrontological explorations,
perhaps I decide to leave the content and character that which enters the toilet for another day,

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another prefiguration. For now, I notice the loose hairs that have evacuated my scalp and the
scalp of my partner; those that were once “mine” are straight and rust-colored while hers are
long, dark, and curled around themselves. The hairs rest by the sink and, I recognize, my
intuition tells me to swipe them onto the floor (there’s a palpable sense that I don’t want to see
them anymore, that they are cluttering the sink’s white ceramic grounds). Typically, once I begin
to notice the hair assembling into tumbleweeds around the various bathmats, I will stoop down
and run my fingers in a swirling motion across the tiles, pinching the proteins into a parcel and
depositing them into a small aluminum trashcan with a foot-operated lid. There, they join hairs
from previous cleanups and crumpled wads of toilet paper laced with other improprieties. This is
to say, they fall in line with my desire for tidiness. They become invisible on their way to the
nearest landfill. They can be forgotten.
Yet I would remember these hairs; in lieu of abandoning tidiness, I would consider how
else these hairs might be shared. I recall hearing at some point that birds can use hair as a
component of their nests, the homes they make for their children to come into being. Though the
birds in my apartment complex sometimes make a mess on the sidewalk for their nesting, I
generally appreciate them for their strange sounds and their curious regard for that which might
be food. I wonder if I could collect all the hair from the bathroom and the carpets about my home
and place them in a bush somewhere for the birds to enjoy. A brief visit to the National Audubon
Society’s website tells me this is a bad idea: “human hair is a triple threat for birds: It’s long,
thin, and strong. These characteristics can be a deadly combination, allowing the hair to easily
ensnare a bird’s leg or wing and sever it” (Langas). I do not wish to harm the birds in their nest
making; I should find some other manner in which to circulate the hair.

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I find what appears to be a fascinating journal article on exactly this challenge: “Human
Hair ‘Waste’ and Its Utilization: Gaps and Possibilities,” authored by development scholar
Ankush Gupta. Gupta remarks that “human hair is considered a waste material in most parts of
the world and its accumulation in waste streams causes many environmental problems; however,
it has many known uses,” including wigs, fertilizer, art, pest repellant, stuffing, suturing, rope
making, and in musical instruments (1, 3). Throughout each year, my partner tends to a small
portable garden of potted plants (cilantro, habaneros, jalapeños, succulents, and other leafed
beings), attempting to support their cycles of poiesis through watering and relocating them inside
and outdoors depending on the state of the seasons. However, these plants occasionally succumb
to the vicissitudes of their Colorado climate, wilting and sloughing their leaves around their pots.
Perhaps these plants, at least some of them, simply need more nutrients more regularly; Gupta
writes:
Human hair is one of the highest nitrogen-containing ( ∼16%) organic
materials in nature because it is predominantly made up of (nitrogen-
containing) proteins. For comparison, cattle dung contains only ∼0.2-0.3%
nitrogen. In addition, human hair also contains sulfur, carbon, and 20 other
elements essential for plants. In the atmosphere, hair decomposes very
slowly, but moisture and keratinolytic fungi present in soil, animal
manure, and sewage sludge can degrade hair within a few months. (4)

By shredding human hair and embedding it in the soil (assuming the hair is not heavily infused
with toxic chemicals), plants might receive more of the materials they need to persist and
propagate. Therefore, the performance: invite one’s housemates to collect hair lying around the
home, using a pair of scissors to break it apart, and mix the hair bits into fresh potting soil or
tamp it into soil that already supports plant life. The prefiguration: a world in which human hair,
rather than clogging plumbing systems or slowly disintegrating in hidden corners, is actively

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recognized for its capacity to give life through its decay and, possibly, yield plants that bear fruit
and flavor to be shared with friends.
After overcoming any initial awkwardness associated with such a focused engagement
with sloughing, the potential discoveries to follow might permit elaborations that would
transform this performance practice into a praxis: perhaps it’s determined that one person’s hair
seems to be excellent for assisting in the wellbeing of habeneros while another’s helps jalapeños,
leading to experimentation with affinities between particular people’s sloughings and the
cultivation of plants. Further, perhaps such familiarity with the latent energy in hair will
encourage explorations of any and every other sort of sloughing humans are already performing,
reconfiguring narratives of waste disposal into tales of reciprocal renewal, the antithesis of
neoliberal calls to (dis)possess.
With the emissions of the body in play, one may also attend to the body’s transmissions:
the human use of language and its codification of stories. As already articulated by Karen Barad,
discourse (“that which constrains and enables what can be said”) is in continuity with
materiality; neither undergoes change as an isolated phenomenon, but rather change always
implicates material and discursive facets of ontology. To prefigure a necrontological sociality,
violating the established boundaries of neoliberal discourse through a targeted performance of
language makes imaginable different relations to the material, to death and dying and
disincorporation. Undertaking such performance as a praxis allows for the possibility of
incorporating these experiments with language into the cultural lexicon in the long term.
In their influential 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguists George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson argue that the human “conceptual system, in terms of which we both think
and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (4). This is to say that the availability of

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specific performances of thought and social behavior are deeply impacted by the cultural
metaphors used to understand one’s existence. Their text is populated with hundreds of examples
of common English phrases that, when considered carefully, reveal deep-seated assumptions
about the world and how it “works”: “let us consider some cultural values in our society that are
coherent with our UP-DOWN specialization metaphors… ‘More is better’ is coherent with
MORE IS UP and GOOD IS UP. “Smaller is better” is not coherent with them (23);
“INFLATION IS AN ENTITY… Inflation is taking its toll at the checkout counter and the gas
pump” (27); “TIME IS MONEY… He’s living on borrowed time” (9). By examining taken-for-
granted premises embedded in everyday deployments of language, one can develop a sense of
discourse’s boundaries and propose tactical linguistic interventions that challenge them,
reorienting discourse (and materiality) itself in the process.
Revisiting Sylvia Wynter’s concept of cosmogony (narratives that interpretate present
social conditions to be representative of past events and partially determinative of the future),
one finds that stories seem tellable to the extent that they offer a sequence of happenings that are
construable as causative: stories help to codify how one imagines certain phenomena lead to
others, explaining “how we got here” and “where we’re going.” This causative
“past/present/future” mapping of ontology has as its narrative analogue a fixed
“beginning/middle/end,” which Wynter suggests can instill a kind of “cognitive closure” in
human imaginings of the possible; “all such relative degrees of domination and subordination
law-likely come to be reflexly and subjectively experienced by their respective subjects as being
normally, the only possible expression of that ‘once upon a time…’” (38). However, if one
consciously recognizes the participatory role humans perform in the crafting of cosmogony, if
there is a recognition that such stories are not given but collaboratively authored (though most

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prolifically without directed intent), it becomes possible to modulate cultural understandings of
“the human” and reopen cognition for other tellings of origins and futures. Though one cannot
simply “decide” which metaphors will have the necessary cultural resonance to be adopted into
common usage (nor can one mandate a new cosmogony all at once), iteratively experimenting
with performances of language and stories excluded from discursive conventions might effect
otherwise accounts of ontology and the relations they support.
In researching how language might anticipate necrontological sociality, I utilize PPP to
instigate an intervention on introductions. When I meet someone for the first time, I typically
engage them in a transaction in which two items of information are exchanged: my name and my
occupation. Such introductions follow this simple script:
-ACTOR 1: Hi, I’m [name].
-ACTOR 2: Hi [name], I’m [other name]; what do you do?
-ACTOR 1: I’m a/n [occupation]; what do you do?
-ACTOR 2: I’m a/n [occupation].
It can be inferred from this disclosure that between one’s name and occupation, the most
pertinent aspects of the story of one’s life will be revealed; depending on what one does for one’s
work, their past, present, and future seem to tumble forth in an instant of recognition. Of one’s
name (which, ironically, I almost always immediately forget after its announcement), I gain a
sense of how one might be summoned to a task and how one concludes their emails. If my
interlocutor then declares themself a coder, I might assume that they have a background in heavy
computer use, spend much of their time in relative isolation, and will make more money than I
will make over the course of their earning years. If I’m meeting an elementary school teacher, I
assume that they found their time in school to be incredibly formative, are often surrounded by

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children with needs that are mostly irreconcilable with state-mandated testing regimes, and will
make less money than I will make over the course of their earning years.
While I find the neoliberal enculturated conflation of doing/being in the arena of labor to
have some necrontological potential (“What do you do?”/“I am a Lyft driver”), the metaphor of
MY JOB IS ME and the sorts of stories it compels maintain a mapping of the social in which
one’s significance and capacity for meaning making are strapped to the manner in which one is
recognized as being employed. That I so often establish myself with others to reinforce this
discursive system is a habit, an automatic performance that does more to ensure the ongoingness
of neoliberal labor roles than to bring me into another’s intimacy. What otherwise introductions
might be made to alter how people come to know each other?
I suggest this: when I meet someone for the first time, I won’t start with my name as it is
too easily discarded with the glut of details that might immediately follow. Instead, I approach
this other person in all of their nuance and complexity and say to them: “Hello there, can I ask
you a question?” If they consent, I then ask: “If it were up to you, how would you propose that a
person would introduce themself to another person they’re meeting for the first time?” Here,
though it puts to other person “on the spot,” if asked with good humor and kindness in mind,
perhaps the person, this “someone,” will feel invited to share not reductive employment data but
a microcosmic account of how they care and how they could be cared for – and perhaps I might
learn of a manner of reckoning the world that I would never have ideated on my own. Depending
on what they say, we might then have an opportunity to ruminate on how such an introduction
might affect the onset of social relations. If it seems appropriate, I would share with my friend
my idea for introduction: “I don’t mean this in a macabre way but in total earnestness: when
people meet, I would like for them to tell one another how they ‘inhabit their dying.’” Per

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prevailing neoliberal revulsions towards death and dying, this would make meeting someone a
non-trivial experience and propose a new metaphor: DYING IS A HOME, a place one inhabits.
Depending on how my friend responds, we might mutually have developed the necessary context
to divulge how we make distinctions between “living” and “dying,” what it might mean to “die
well,” why the topic of death is so fearfully skirted, and what it means to “inhabit” as a type of
relational existing. I might conclude the introduction by stating: “My name’s Ben, by the way”;
they might share their name as well and I might remember it.
This performance of disclosure has the potential (depending on the relation between the
interlocutors) to prefigure a world in which coming to know another includes an articulation of
the integral significance of dying. Further, it encourages a dialogue concerning what matters and
kicks off a praxis of being iteratively affected by the meaning-making systems of others,
prefiguring a culture in which significance itself is explicitly up for negotiation and mutation.
These otherwise discursive boundaries, rather than chaffing harshly against necrontology, would
echo necrontology’s narrative of the gradual change and disintegration that makes way for other
forms to begin – and for forms to begin to disincorporate in their own right in reproducing the
cycle of forms anew.
While Sylvia Wynter’s theory of cosmogony posits that myths of origin impart on the
present a powerful sense of the future’s likely unfolding, anthropologist Abou Farman highlights
the role eschatology plays in understanding the present, the narrative account of how human and
non-human forms come to their end (and what, if anything, happens beyond). Of eschatology,
Farman writes: “different eschatological frames, based on ideas about death, endings, and
continuity… affect how time, as a kind of pressure at the end of life, is felt and lived” (144). He
further argues that under neoliberalism, with its emphasis on an ontology rooted in economics

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and the possibility of endless economic growth, there emerges a secular eschatology of
immortalism by which the certain US technologists (almost universally white men) desire to
“extend… personal identity beyond its current biological limitations, beyond what is seen as its
current and contingent instantiation in a defective biological platform that leads to death” (1).
That is, within the horizon of imaginability for the neoliberal subject is the “solution” to the
“problem” of eschatology: an end that doesn’t end.
As discussed at length in the previous chapters, such a belief is harmful on two key
fronts: the denial of the thermodynamic tendency for matter to degenerate into disordered states
eliminates planning and accommodation for realities of decay (continuously reinscribing death
and dying as some sort of mistake) and, at the same time, requires the accelerating expropriation
of resources from the already marginalized to maintain the ultimately-futile systems of
“deathlessness” for the few (who are at peace with the premature deaths of others so long as
those deaths might extend the longevity of the selected). In short, immortalism ironically
exacerbates the socio-material strife of death while foreclosing discourses that would allow
people to prepare for and respond to death and dying as a normal feature of human ontology.
My PPP proposal to mitigate immortalism in those who subscribe to it, namely those who
strongly identify with whiteness and its superiority, has as its foil the common cultural event by
which each person marks the duration of their presence on Earth: the birthday. Though there is
much that can be said about birthdays and the “age” they render, I would like to consider
birthdays to the extent that they function as a narrative opening, the start of a story that, despite
the desires of some to prefigure immortalism, necessarily ends. The foreknowledge of death, by
a certain age, becomes unavoidable; Rosi Braidotti writes “death as a constitutive event is behind
us; it has already taken place as a virtual potential that constructs everything we are” (132). As

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an example of the prevalence of this foreknowledge, a cursory visit to the Wikipedia page for
any person who has passed will list, first, their name, second, their recorded date of birth and,
third, the date of their death. This is how the stories of people are situated (Steven Paul Jobs
[February 24, 1955-October 5, 2011]). However, so long as the moment of death remains a
mystery, particularly in the data-fied world upon which neoliberalism grounds its “realities,” it
becomes possible for some to imagine that the data of death’s delivery need not ever be entered
into the ledger (Benjamin Ross Nicholson [April 2, 1988-never]). Thus, I propose the
introduction and socialization of a prospective “deathday” to accompany one’s birthday
(Benjamin Ross Nicholson [April 2, 1988-May 21, 2069]).
Given the stakes of invoking one’s death when there exists the perspective that death is
the ultimate indicator of failure (again, this is an address to the psychic makeup of immortalist
white-masculine neoliberal subjects, not those for whom the possibility of death is felt to be
ever-present), the revelation of one’s deathday cannot be done flippantly; it ought to be
performed with care and a capacity for comfort. Further, a deathday cannot be a schedule for
extermination, but rather must serve as a concrete reminder of that which neoliberalism would
have its subjects forget; recipients of deathdays must be asked to imagine that they will die on
the indicated date, to carry this date with them and keep it handy for those moments in which
neoliberalism would attempt to entice them with permanence. Therefore, like the gifting of
birthday presents, the announcement of one’s deathday ought to be handled as a ritual practice.
Though I would love to prefigure a world in which this ritual could occur on the occasion of, say,
one’s eighteenth birthday, for the time being it should be made available to anyone with
immortalist tendencies who might be willing to participate.

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The ritual would take this form: the recipient joins their chosen deathday facilitator and
any witnesses they might wish to have present (ideally, all involved hold love for the recipient
and are prepared to offer support). The facilitator produces a death date calculator, perhaps a
simple computer program that takes the recipient’s current age and determines a statistically
likely future day on which the recipient might die based roughly on current life expectancy data
(the point is not for the deathday to be accurate so much as plausible). The deathday is provided
to the recipient, who then may engage the facilitator and witnesses in any manner of
conversation, meditation, or reflection they see fit. Using some salient method, the recipient
should record their given deathday in such a way as to encounter it frequently in their time of
dying to follow (my deathday, Tuesday, May 21
st
, 2069, serves as the lock combination for my
smartphone: 052169).
The cultural denigration of death under neoliberalism, as well as fears of death associated
with its unknowability, tend to yield a refusal (in those who imagine they might continue to exist
in perpetuity) to consider that the terminal quality of the human state of being has specificity.
Making the specificity of the moment of death thinkable to immortalists has the potential to
soften their entrenched megalomania and give rise to empathy that makes the hoarding of energy
less acceptable. If one understands their impermanence intrinsically as a component of their day-
to-day being (circumstances that are deeply familiar to many outside of the white-masculine
identity matrix) and not as some abstract mistake that might always be deferred, one becomes
open to the vulnerabilities that haunt the maintenance of all forms. As one cultivates an intuition
for precarity in the self and others, it becomes more possible to center the social upon a narrative
tenet that directly contradicts the possessive individualism of white masculine systems of
thought: to be well requires care for those others who might care for you. That is to say, the

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shared knowledge of deathdays inspires a reorientation away from brute survival through
competition and towards provisional ongoingness through sociality; there can be no denying we
are all dying together.
As a praxis, the nectrontological gesture of the deathday inaugurates a process by which
each person’s death is put into a new network of relations to negotiate: how to prepare for
supporting those whose deaths will occur sooner rather than later; how to consider the remaining
years of dying and their energies in continuity with the coming and going of other forms; how to
make meaningful the discrepancies that emerge between deathdays and the occurrence of death.
By anticipating the closure of consciousness that death represents, existing hardly becomes
resolved. For those feverishly clinging to the need for boundless life, the release of death’s
refusal reroutes those energies amassed (so as to ensure permanence) into any number of
possible otherwises. An acceptance of one’s foreknowledge of death doesn’t solve the challenges
endemic to a necrontological universe, but it does make those challenges construable in terms of
matter’s mattering (as opposed to in antagonism to white masculine fictions of neoliberalism).
PPP, lacking the assurances of a “program” or ideology, is how I intend to explore and
make sense of my being and doing as they undergo their mutations. It is my sincere hope that
such study might be done in company, company that would alter and revise and play with the
bounds of discourse that would bar access to the otherwises we might desire. And it is my hope
beyond hope that in our approach – as we change – otherwise will continue to serve as a horizon
for that which has yet to come into its being, a future that includes the beneficiaries of our shared
disincorporation. With a love for the unknowable difference our dying generates, let us begin
again.

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CONCLUSION
Recapitulation
And so we return to the beginning (of this dissertation, at least). I am a white man who
was raised with certain myths concerning the contours and character of my own importance, that
to be “me” involved the mastery of my “self” as a kind of possession, the superlative positioning
of said self in relation to those who have proven to be inferior in direct competition, and
exponential growth (of my career, of my wealth, of my significance), forever. In brief, I was
raised as a neoliberal subject, for the benefit of the propagation of systemic neoliberalism. What
I have referred to as the decline of neoliberal subjectivity does not imply its erasure, but only its
apparent trajectory. Neoliberalism, that “regime of truth” (Wilson 241), that “creed that prizes
free trade and the free movement of capital, goods, and people” (Gerstle 5), that “project to
achieve the restoration of class power” (Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism 15), is still the
prevailing shaper of stories in the white-masculine dominated United States. Its subjects, those
hailed favorably per their alignment with and capacity to assert white masculine cultural values
(possessive individualism, relative superiority realized through competition, the pursuit of
endless growth), have not fully turned away from neoliberalism’s narratives, but rather of late
have started doubting them.
This doubt has emerged as neoliberalism’s harms, the contemporary
extension/elaboration of harms long-levied against those whom fall outside of white supremacy’s
selected minority, have begun to increasingly damage many white men who believed themselves
to be neoliberalism’s beneficiaries. However, it must be emphasized, such nascent hurt, born of a
sense of a lessening access to dispossessive entitlements, is incomparable to the kinds of
suffering neoliberalism and white supremacy have visited upon the dysselected. Whatever harms

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white men are encountering as a result of neoliberalism’s further encroachments into their lives
cannot be separated from the fact that their prior sense of comfort and satisfaction was always
predicated in other people’s exploitation, subordination, and even death. Given that much of the
pain white men are experiencing stems from an uptick in the difficulty of dispossessing others
(as neoliberalism consolidates its dispossessive capacities in the hands of fewer white men), it
would be callous to claim that white men are deserving of a restoration of wellbeing at the
continued expense of most others. Still, there is sense of loss, a felt lessening of significance, that
chafes harshly against what neoliberal subjects believe they have been promised: exponential
growth forever, within their own lives and across generations (again, whether with consciousness
or not, through the dispossession of others). That this promise is faltering has led neoliberal
subjects to search for new stories, to imagine what other sort of subjects they might become.
In light of these circumstances, I have sought a story that would not reinscribe the harms
of white masculinity onto some new social order but would, instead, make the values of white
masculinity socially inoperative. As neoliberalism cedes its psychological hold to whatever
prevailing social order is to follow, there is an opportunity to engage those who maintain the
greatest access to resources and institutional status in the United States (white men) in a
reorientation of their very sense of being. This reorientation could diminish their dispossessive
tendencies and set them towards a cooperative sociality in which differences between people,
rather than serving as a basis for routing certain people into immiseration, would be absorbed by
that which is shared: everyone is dying and, someday, will die. Though not all dying and not all
deaths are the same, particularly when death is used as a threat by the powerful to coerce and
punish the dysselected, attaching the story of the social to the provisionality of matter provides a
starting point to imagine affinities across differences, to undermine systems that would leverage

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difference as a justification for dispossession. I call this story necrontology for its attention to
processes of dying (necr-) in the constitution of all forms (ontology), whether those forms be
extinct, extant, and prospective.
In order for the story of necrontology to be compelling to erstwhile neoliberal subjects, to
turn them away from possessive individualism and towards cooperative care, necrontology must
offer a system of significance that responds directly to emergent fears proliferating amongst
white men without rearticulating familiar neoliberal/white supremacist notions of essential
superiority as a corrective to those fears (along lines of race, gender, class, or any other known
category of identity). This is not specifically for the benefit of white men (though, in order for
them to participate in the telling of such a story, they must sense some benefit), but rather to
disincorporate white masculine desires for monumentality and, thus, allow for the possibility of
wellbeing amongst all those forms that accept their decay.
For example, through the lens of necrontology, neoliberal anxieties related to a lack of
financial “growth” (growth that often requires taking that which others need to subsist) can be
mitigated by valuing forms (including people and their wealth) because they are temporary,
withdrawing imperatives for expansion (which can only ever “fail” in that no form is immortal)
and promoting a conscientious curiosity for how any given form happens to be attending to its
dying. Whereas neoliberal subjects might feel compelled to cast down rivals in competition (lest
they be cast down themselves), necrontologists, given their appreciation for how fragile each
person is, would seek to combine their efforts with others to affirmatively generate worlds they
could never generate on their own, refusing to claim such worlds as private property so that
others still might join in creation, in maintenance and mutation. Rather than the hoarding
encouraged by neoliberalism (and the poverty the most massive hoards provoke), necrontology’s

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reckoning of the contiguousness of circulation and decay makes for a social context in which to
release that which one holds is valued as an act of communal care; in circulatory fashion, ceding
and receiving are mutually implicated in the procession of life, though all must be ceded in the
end (and, once ceded, make available the materials for different things to come into being).
To ground any abstraction that necrontology summons, I propose a research methodology
that allows its practitioners not only to gain embodied experiences with necrontological
responses to neoliberalism, but also allows for collaborative, iterative, and longitudinal
adjustment to such responses: once again, performance as prefigurative praxis, or PPP. I have
described PPP as a non-solutionist, antiteleological, interventionist mode of study (“study is what
you do with other people… [t]o do these things is to be involved in a kind of common
intellectual practice” (Harney and Moten 110)) for the application of its three primary
components. From performance studies theory, PPP borrows the notion that “the appearance of
‘being’ is always activated through ‘doing’” (Jones xvi) and, therefore, the instant one does
otherwise one instantiates the potential recognition of an otherwise form of being. There is no
essence to a given form that persists in perpetuity, but rather forms are that which they express in
time; performance is the disclosure of the becoming of matter.
From prefiguration, PPP extends the above-mentioned notion of performance by
introducing one of performance’s key motivators: desire, the urge to realize conditions that differ
from those which appears to prevail. Prefiguration, “concrete processes of anticipating a better
future in the present, in heterotopic spaces created to that end” (Dinerstein 2), aligns performance
and desire towards practical action where practitioners attempt to materially instantiate that for
which they hope. Crucially for PPP, prefiguration must be understood as an initial comportment,
a direction towards which shared efforts are directed, with a strong tendency for reinitialization

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as the study of performance modulates desires and imagined orientations towards them; this
iteration is where praxis becomes indispensable, so as to not reinstitute a system of being in
which only a delimited manner of being is deemed acceptable, one that necessitates the
dysslection of those who deviate from acceptability (as in the case of any authoritarianism-
inclined hegemonic regime, neoliberalism included).
From praxis, PPP asks practitioners to view their performances not as teleological (as a
means of ultimately arriving at some proper form of being) but as perpetually shifting processes
of becoming. Hannah Arendt attends to such becoming in terms of “action,” “the spontaneous
beginning of something new” (234) that coincides with each instance of human doing through
which human being is expressed. Per her model of a praxis that would promote social wellbeing,
Arendt suggests that the attempt to articulate intentions (to make promises) and the capacity to
accept in one another the impossibility of every fully accounting for the changes those intentions
would seek shape (to forgive) are necessary to begin again together and, thus, “actualiz[e] … the
human condition of natality” (178). In brief, human existence is only possible with recurrent
beginning, which requires of people a resistance to terminal narratives that would stifle or
eliminate the impulse to realize desire.
Sylvia Wynter augments Arendt’s reckoning of praxis by introducing the notion of homo
narrans, the insistence that “the human” is no essential category of entity but rather it is that
which emerges from our unique constitution as both biological and narrative beings; for Wynter,
“humanness is no longer a noun… [b]eing human is a praxis” (23). When people are
participating in praxis, they are recurrently contributing to a culturally distributed (and thus, non-
proprietary) story of what the human is. Wynter thinks of human beings as a set of “genres” (31)
rather than any kind of fixed type of creature and suggests that as we exist, we continually invent

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and modify our accounts of what we are as a condition of being human, a praxis of storytelling
by which we make claims concerning what stories can be told. By blending together Arendt and
Wynter’s respective ideas of praxis, we receive an iterative method for approaching human
wellbeing (begin, promise, forgive, begin again…) that simultaneously acknowledges the
ceaseless mutation of what the human (and, therefore, its wellbeing) might be.
In sum, PPP is a mode of that human study that is always-already underway, yet
concentrated and articulated in hopes of providing a shared basis and grammar by which
different stories and experiences of being might be conscientiously encountered, circumstances
that I have referred to as “otherwise.” I have provided some specific examples of how PPP might
be used to encourage a necrontological turn away from neoliberal subjectivity and towards an
attendance to decay (as a narrative strategy for diminishing specific white supremacist harms
and, alternatively, fostering care). Of course, these particular deployments of PPP are only so
pertinent as their practitioners are hailed as neoliberal subjects; as I have argued, neoliberal
subjectivity is strongly correlated to white masculinity (as well as ability, wealth, official
education, and Protestant Christianity). With this dissertation, I have attempted to provide a
framework of address that can be applied to any site in which neoliberalism/white supremacy is
operative in the United States, a preponderance of American social and institutional contexts. I
would like to depart from this writing with a (relatively) brief reflection on the social and
institutional context in which this writing has been crafted: the university and its contemporary
codification of knowledge.

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Departure
When I began this dissertation, I had originally intended to title it “Dying to Know:
Performing the Classroom within the Neoliberal Academy.” I was considering Paulo Freire’s
rendering of knowledge not as static data to be stored and transferred but as a “process… of
inquiry” that “emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient,
continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each
other” (72). In addition to chapters on neoliberal subjectivity, necrontology, and performance as
prefigurative praxis, I imagined a fourth chapter that would focus on critical pedagogy, a field of
study strongly associated with Henry Giroux:
Critical pedagogy is not about an a priori method that simply can be
applied regardless of context. It is the outcome of particular struggles and
is always related to the specificity of particular contexts, students,
communities, and available resources. It draws attention to the ways in
which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under
specific basic conditions of learning and illuminates the role that pedagogy
plays as part of a struggle over assigned meanings, modes of expression,
and directions of desire, particularly as these bear on the formation of the
multiple and ever-contradictory versions of the “self” and its relationship
to the larger society. (Giroux 2)

Along with Freire and Giroux, I was interested in visiting the works of Sara Ahmed, bell hooks,
and Linda Tuhiwai Smith to explore how the classroom (and its many configurations of
“teacher” and “student”) can serve as a space for experimenting with anti-oppressive sociality
and what sorts of knowing are made available through a commitment to collaboration. I felt that
as a practical matter, my doctorate would put me in a position to teach in the university
classroom and wanted to better understand how I could bring my research framework to bear on
my relationships with students for the wellbeing of all involved; how might I facilitate frictions
between neoliberalism, necrontology, and performance within the confines of a semester?

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On a personal level, I genuinely love the teaching and learning that I’ve had the privilege
to enjoy in my time as a student and occasional pedagogue. I wish to continue experiencing
encounters in the classroom and to share my research with those who are curious, those who
believe they might be affected by knowledge beyond their own. Further, I would be affected by
those ways of knowing that flow from those selves that are not “me,” to make myself available
and responsive to those mutations that relations release. I would be one entity amongst many in
the circulatory system of knowing and dying, a system that runs through all places including the
classroom; I would offer an appreciation for the classroom and its inhabitants in keeping with the
shared decay of all those present.
Why did I turn away from this version of the project, with its greater focus on pedagogy
and questions of knowledge, of epistemology? For one thing, this dissertation was already
stressing my capacities for the merging of discourses: trying to be accountable for representing to
the university (this is a dissertation, after all) my conversance in political theories of capitalism,
the history of liberal humanism, cultural theories of white supremacy, new materialist reckonings
of ontology, thermodynamics, performance studies, utopian studies, and more, so that I could
bring these discourses into a shared context, was challenging enough without trying to then
introduce critical pedagogy and theories of decolonial education. For another, with my
immediate proximity to and immersion in the university, I found it difficult to shift my ongoing
day-to-day experiences towards broader reflection; though I am compelled by autoethnography, I
feel too close to my nascent writing practice, my navigation of the university dissertation filing
bureaucracy, my mostly futile attempts at applying for academic jobs, my general (and often
petty) frustrations with graduate student identity, and my impossible-to-suppress careerist
anxieties concerning how I will “make a living,” in order to share with you, reader, something

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more conscientious than meandering musings. However, as I prepare to phase out of my
designated role of “PhD candidate,” as I step through the door, I’d like to turn back briefly to
regard the university with soft focus, to begin to tell a story of both how it has informed this
writing and how it contributes to my desires for the future.
Without delving too deeply into the realm of university studies, one does not need to look
far to find literature that casts the contemporary university as “neoliberal” or “corporate” and the
sentiment that such a designation serves as a signal of doom. In his book The Capitalist
University: The Transformation of Higher Education in the United States 1945-2016, historian
Henry Heller bemoans how neoliberalism has led to a “deteriorating situation” for universities:
In response to the decline in funding, but also to the prevalence of
neoliberal ideology, universities – or rather the presidents, administrators,
and boards of trustees who control them – are increasingly moving away
from their ostensible mission of serving the public good to that of
becoming as far as possible like private enterprises. In doing so, most of
the teachers in these universities are being reduced to the status of wage
labor, and indeed precarious wage labor. The wages of the non-tenured
faculty who now constitute the majority of teachers in higher education
are low, they have no job security and receive few benefits. Although
salaried and historically enjoying a certain autonomy, tenured faculty are
losing the vestiges of their independence as well. Similarly, the influence
of students in university affairs – a result of concessions made by
administrators during the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s – has
effectively been neutered. These changes reflect a decisive shift of power
toward university managers whose numbers and remuneration have
expanded prodigiously. The objective of these bureaucrats is to transform
universities as much as possible to approximate private and profit-making
corporations, regarded as models of efficient organization based on the
discipline of the market. (2)

In his analysis of the psychological and physical impacts of participating in university life, long-
time professor Peter Fleming further notes that “[i]f large formal institutions encourage certain
types of selfhood, a rudimentary insight of organizational sociology, then higher education today
is undoubtedly producing damaged people. Don’t believe the hype in those sleek university

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brochures. Stress, chronic fatigue, depression and suicide ideation are endemic” (Dark Academia
22). The aforementioned type of selfhood, what I have referred to as “neoliberal subjectivity,” is
acutely harmful for those who enter the university expecting “uplift, community, and romance”
in their engagement with knowledge (Meyerhoff 4) only to find “the lure of competitive
careerism, spurred on by crass incentive systems that even McKinsey and Co would find
distasteful” (Fleming, Dark Academia 5).
Though this literature, for its invocation of “crisis,” appears to pine for virtues the
university “once had” (which crisis threatens), Marxist decolonial theorist Eli Meyerhoff offers
a critical genealogy of education that suggests the United States university has traditionally been
“associated with modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white-supremacist, hetero-patriarchal
norms” (4) that have largely been mobilized for the ongoing aggrandizement and advancement
of white men:
Ideals of the public university have emerged at different times, in contexts
of different political struggles. A critical genealogy of the earlier public
land-grant university ideal would examine its origins in the context of
settler-colonial, capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century. The land
that was “granted” to these public universities had been stolen from
Indigenous peoples. The settlers were not given this land; they took it
from Indigenous peoples by force, and they tried to eliminate the peoples
on it by genocide and assimilation… A second form of the public
university ideal emerged in the 1950s and 1960s with the democratized
mass university. This ideal emerged along with the GI Bill’s vast
expansion of higher education access, the growth of community colleges,
and new narratives (from “manpower development” to “human capital”)
to justify increased funding for higher education. A critical genealogy of
this ideal would examine how, in the Cold War context, Third World
Liberation and Black freedom movements appropriated universities’
resources for their insurgent studying. Building on histories of these
struggles… it would investigate how, in response to these movements’
demands for expanding admissions and curricula… administrators reacted
by raising tuition, increasing campus policing, hiring more contingent
faculty, and using liberal and neoliberal discourses of “multicultural
diversity.” (202-203)

169
While it certainly has enabled “unprecedented outpouring[s] of new knowledge” (Heller ix), the
university has never been immune to complicity towards oppression and, in fact, its amassed
power and prestige makes it particularly vulnerable to reproducing the harms of dominant
political ideologies. To imagine the university as the space that somehow exists beyond the
influence of the prevailing hegemonic order risks making “the possibilities of alternative modes
of study… almost unthinkable” (Meyerhoff 5). This is to say that the university ought to be
considered in all its ambivalence, as an institution that sometimes fosters emancipatory social
action and too often reinscribes (and exacerbates) relations of immiseration and dysselection.
In this context, the stakes of performing this dissertation have been fraught. On the one
hand, I’ve been afforded time, funding, and social support to meander my way to the end of this
very sentence; it is not often that one is affirmed in their combined efforts of studying and
sharing, let alone for a five-year period. On the other hand, I’ve done this work at and in many
ways for the university, an entity that recognizes me as just another bet in its portfolio of assets;
though I intend to continue this research, I can’t claim that the specific text of this dissertation
will be widely read or have broader social impact (though I am emphatically grateful to my
committee for their patience and conscientious presence in helping me write it, a process that has
been full of care and optimism). In so many ways, all of this work is just a start – as it can only
ever be – yet this is not what neoliberalism and its university demand: as a scholar, a laborer
seeking power for my employer, I must deliver in order to be offered my further existence in
academia. That is to say, I am compelled to produce bounded, “completed,” market-ready
products for insertion into the economy of knowledge; I must publish, be cited, achieve
prominence in my field, be better-than others, be granted tenure, if I am to be regarded with
esteem by and, thus, matter to, the university.

170
When I examine my desires, I come to understand that I am iteratively less motivated by
the incentives dangled before the grasping claws of neoliberal subjects. Namely, I am losing
interest in possession, whether it be of things, power, or my “own” self. I want to be and do with
that which cannot be said to be me and, increasingly, find that that is the only sort of being that
there is. This pervasive relationality, to whatever extent it might be framed by discourse, is not
given easy passage at the university but, rather, it is energetically stifled by the university’s need
to categorize, manage, atomize, and monitor the people it claims to contain. Yet such
containment is never total, for I have found love and kindness in this place that exceed mandates
for brutal careerism. And yet, in the inverse, will any university be amenable to the company I
bring if I do not express, in my professional performances, a desire for profitable progress? How
does one get through the door of the university without representing a yearning for advancement,
dispossessive growth, and the delivery of value to shareholders (tuition-paying students and
salary-paying administrators)? Once one is inside, can one retract the performances it took to get
over the threshold, reorienting oneself away from competition and towards care?
I am leery of what it would take for me to secure a position in the academy following the
completion of my PhD. I haven’t published, I haven’t earned any awards of recognition, I
haven’t had the opportunity to teach my own courses (per department-specific stipulations of my
stipend), I am not an expert in any narrow discipline; I am no superstar and what I would offer to
the university (a commitment to curiosity, iteration, sharing, and care; a research and
performance project that would encourage the disincorporation of neoliberal subjectivity)
appears to be of nebulous worth to the university. Unless I were to further the very same
performances of neoliberalism and white supremacy that I am devoted to mitigated, in the
absence of having “played the neoliberal game, seduced by competitive careerism and its

171
incentive systems, hoping to come out on top or even famous” (Fleming, Dark Academia 12), I
fear that most hiring committees would find my priorities to be, at best, illegible and, at worst,
laughably naïve.
However, I do not pity my position. Whatever my anxieties, I cannot neglect to
remember that I have lived and continue to live as a white man in the United States. To the
extent that US universities have been culturally compelled to examine the astounding extent of
their whiteness (led by feminist and queer scholars/students of color who have demanded such a
reckoning), there is a hopeful shift in hiring in higher education, one that emphasizes offering
positions to those who have long been overlooked to ensure the placement of their white peers.
Though Sara Ahmed cautions that the “institutionalization” of diversity at the university is often
used to mollify legitimate complaints of discrimination by creating an impression that those
complaints are always-already being addressed without actually addressing them (“[d]iversity
would be institutionalized when… it ceases to cause trouble” (27)), the increased presence and
affording of resources to those of dysselected identities generates opportunities for ongoing
interjections of non-white-masculine sensibilities into white-dominated university spaces.
While the effects of such interjections cannot be accounted for in advance, at the very
least whiteness is challenged to coexist with difference; to the extent that whiteness seeks to keep
difference at a hierarchical distance, proximity can destabilize white supremacist narratives and
require those present to reimagine the story of the social. For the benefit of the sociality I argue
that neoliberalism and white supremacy continually effort to thwart, perhaps it is better that those
positions I would apply for be given to people whose sense of self is not so deeply imbued by an
identification with white masculinity. Though I try to be conscientious about which of my
tendencies may be harmful and to perform otherwise, I also know that under the pressures of

172
institutional life it is always possible, particularly in moments of unease and when rapidity is
demanded, to slide back into habits that one thought they had buried. Further, “self-awareness”
can only ever account for a narrow slice of the myriad permutations of relations that emerge
between any specific collection of people. There are components of my genre of being that I
have little ability to direct and, insofar as some of those components tend to reproduce white
supremacy, there is an irresolvable calculus of harm and care that I bring with me everywhere I
go. Though I believe this to be part and parcel with being a person among people, the fragility of
university spaces that aren’t predominantly devoted to neoliberalism make me apprehensive
about my presence there, in all the specificity of what I represent to others and what surfaces
from the contours of my self.
If the outlook I hold concerning my future in academia seems so dreary, you may ask:
why attempt to remain at the university at all? Why don’t you depart for some other place, one
that would more gladly have you? So long as I insist upon deneoliberalization, there is no
general category of prevailing wage-conferring institution (whether it be the state, “private
industry,” or the university), that would welcome me. The effective entrenchment of
neoliberalism throughout the near totality of the United States’ socioeconomic landscape makes
confrontations with its imperatives unavoidable and, often, insurmountable. There is no “choice”
to opt out; there is nowhere else to go.
I continue to turn towards the university for several reasons. First, as evidenced by the
existence of this writing you are reading, it is possible to leverage the university’s resources (so
long as one’s labor obligations are deemed to have been met) to attend to study, which, for me,
involves spending time in consideration and circulation of necrontological performance. When
cloaked in the veneer of prospectively publishable research, many avenues of inquiry are

173
permitted (so long as the university can’t fathom that such inquiry would lessen the might of its
dispossessions). Second, I have met and continue to meet at the university fellow travelers, those
with whom I find affinity across the gaps of our differences; I have made my most cherished
friendships at the university, friendships that both comfort me and instigate reorientations of
what I find to be meaningful, of what it means to be full of care. And third, which is most crucial
to me, is that the university classroom still provides an opportunity to socially enact the refusal
of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the “call to order,” “the teacher picking up the
book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the
noose… the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth”
(Halberstam 9), and then to make a praxis of the fallout. Moten elaborates:
[O]ne of the cool things about the university (I’m not saying this is the
only place where this happens, but it is a place where this happens) is that
every day that you go into your classroom, you have a chance not to issue
the call to order, and then to see what happens. And the goddamn
president of the university is not going to knock on your door talking
about, ‘how come you didn’t issue the call to order?’ (127)

In sum, for all its commitments to neoliberalism and white supremacy, the university can’t seem
to help but to foment refuge for those who would dream of otherwise.
If I am to exist somewhere (and I still very much desire my existing, even while
recognizing its associated harms), I would exist in a place where the possibility of prefigurative
performance can be realized as a longitudinal endeavor; I would attempt to help re-instantiate
such a space wherever I would go, over and over again. Of all the sorts of spaces I’ve inhabited,
it is at the university that I have felt this impulse affirmed most radically, though only at the scale
of small covens of collaborators, in classrooms and on long walks back to cars. This is to say,
though I understand what it costs for such a space to exist, I have found in various times a home
at the university, a place from which to begin; I would share in this home with others.

174
This desire for home is, in part, self-serving. Amidst my necrontology, stories of
belonging, however provisional, are a comfort that makes my decay meaningful; I rot into the
world so that the world can make its homes. Yet I also understand that if I am to lower my
resistance to the flows of mutation that would dissolve my neoliberalism, if I am to turn towards
sociality, I am only poised to do so when I feel well in my being. When I feel threatened and
under duress, I fear for an instinctual scramble back towards those white masculine ways of
being that would preserve my significance through the rabid appropriation of the wellbeing of
others. Though it may seem absurd given my full acknowledgment of the university’s neoliberal
acquiescence, I still believe that the university houses niches from which to begin prefigurative
performances of necrontology against neoliberal subjectivity. It is not the only place, but it is one
that I know how to navigate, one where I can make friends to share in the work.
So do I stay at the university? At the time of this writing, the responses I’ve received to
my job applications suggest I might not have much of a choice. So, then, do I depart? For the
moment, it appears that I must. But do I return? In the ongoing flux of departure and return that
constitutes necrontological being, the potential for otherwise is disclosed in every action, every
motion, every exchange of energy between forms. I cannot say what will become of me, only
that in becoming me I will be effected and affected by all other forms in accordance with our
difference and distance. What emerges isn’t to be decided but witnessed, narrated, repeated,
changed, and begun again.
What else can I say? For now, I say this: goodnight, university. And good morning,
universe; I’m dying to be and it is good to be so.

175
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Asset Metadata

Creator Nicholson, Benjamin Ross (author)

Core Title Dying to be: prefigurative performances of necrontology against neoliberal subjectivity

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 05/01/2023

Defense Date 04/25/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag death and dying,neoliberalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Performance

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jones, Amelia (committee chair), Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Callahan, Vicki (committee member), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), Sweeney, Mary (committee member)

Creator Email benjamin.nicholson@usc.edu,benjaminnicholson3@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113091149

Unique identifier UC113091149

Identifier etd-NicholsonB-11745.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-NicholsonB-11745

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Nicholson, Benjamin Ross

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20230501-usctheses-batch-1034 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu