Published in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the emergence of a new cycle of struggles, Rachel Kushner’s historical novel of the 1970s concludes with three moments of temporal suspension. A post-minimalist artist traverses New York City during its 1977 blackout; in this “night of suspended time,”2 she encounters proletarians smashing store windows and taking whatever they desire. The heir to an Italian industrial empire has boarded a plane to return home to fulfill his filial role, but the blackout prevents his takeoff: “The airport had lost power. They would wait until it came back on” (374). The artist stands at the foot of the French Alps, waiting for a member of the Red Brigades to appear; the novel’s final pages are a meditation on waiting, a wait that does not resolve in the militant’s appearance. Suspension, dead time, waiting — each of these moments resonates with a common description of our contemporary experience of temporality, one that speaks of a crisis of futurity and a “perpetual” or elongated present.3 Read allegorically, they signify the end of a long epoch of capitalist development: a surplus population in the streets of a deindustrialized city, industrial capital unable to move, the disappearance of the Leninist militant.

In this article, I read The Flamethrowers as a historical novel of deindustrialization, taking this relationship of form and history as its constitutive problem. Predominantly set in two of the defining locations of the world economic crisis of the 1970s, Kushner’s novel has often been read as a historical novel about the emergence of neoliberalism.4 Its main narrator is Reno, a fledgling post-minimalist artist who travels to New York in the wake of its fiscal crisis (and several years after “the factories were closing” and “the worker was leaving the city”) (195) and immerses herself in the art scene burgeoning in its abandoned warehouses and factories. There she falls in love with “Sandro Valera, of Valera and Moto Valera motorcycles” (23) — the heir to one of the major industrial firms at the heart of Italy’s postwar miracle and a minimalist artist older and more established than herself. Throughout the New York chapters the crisis of the Italian economy hums in the background — “Italy applying for an IMF loan. Inflation, unemployment. Valera getting hit especially hard by the oil crisis. Suffering work stoppages. Sabotage. Wildcat strikes” (109) — before coming to the fore when Reno travels to the country with Sandro.5 There, she discovers his infidelity at one of his family’s factories and flees only to be swept up in the revolutionary Movement of 1977 (ultimately inadvertently aiding the Red Brigades’ assassination of Sandro’s brother, the head of Moto Valera).

Existing scholarship on the novel has thoroughly analyzed how The Flamethrowers cognitively maps the political-economic restructuring of the 1970s.6 Yet if the genre of the historical novel has often been evoked, the historicity of this form is less often dwelled upon.7 In a commentary on György Lukács’s study of the historical novel, Jameson writes that Lukács’s account of the genre was animated by an “attention to the ways in which the content of a given historical moment enables or limits its representational form, or better still, its narrative possibilities.”8 For Lukács, the historical novel emerged as a narrative form out of the transition to modernity, premised on a new conception of history as “the bearer and realizer of human progress.”9 Underwriting this conception of history was the rise of the bourgeoisie and the experience of capitalist modernization which broke from the stasis of the feudal economy.10 Indeed, The Flamethrowers directly evokes this historical passage in what Kushner refers to as the novel’s “spine”: a loose Bildungsroman of Sandro’s father, the industrial magnate T.P. Valera, that traces his life from his childhood in nineteenth-century Alexandria to his establishment of the industrial empire that powers Italy’s postwar economic miracle.11 Set at the opposite end of this arc of accumulation, the bulk of The Flamethrowers concerns a markedly different transition: the onset of protracted economic stagnation and the passage to postmodernity (in which “modernity, in the sense of modernization and progress, or telos” is “definitively over”).12

Revisiting this “pivotal decade,” The Flamethrowers is a potent example of what Sean O’Brien identifies as a renewed sense of historicity in the capitalist core since the 2008 financial crisis, one which looks to “trace the emergence of the historical present and its various impasses.”13 Yet, this content poses definitive narratological problems for the genre. What Jameson identifies as the “waning” of historicity in the postmodern denotes not simply presentism, but rather a fundamental transformation of time: “a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and present alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present.”14 As he notes with regard to the popularity of the genre today, the contemporary historical novel might be considered a symptom rather than a solution to our waning of historicity, “doomed to make arbitrary selections from the past” and offering “at best a host of names and an endless warehouse of images” rather than an authentic narration of the historical process. At the end of development what kind of history can be made to appear?15

In what follows, I argue that The Flamethrowers dialectically fulfills the project of the historical novel insofar as it registers the historical forces that “have made our present-day life what it is and as we experience it” as stressing the genre’s formal system.16 It does so by identifying a developmental historical temporality with the expansion of industrial capital, situating the waning of historicity within the trajectory of capitalist development whereby industrial expansion engenders its opposite in deindustrialization.17 Ultimately, I find the novel’s value to reside less in its mapping or critique of the political-economic transformations of the 1970s than in how it stages the crisis of an inherited transitional imaginary and revolutionary horizon.

Existing commentaries on Kushner’s novel have curiously tended to render the insurrections at the novel’s climax — an adaptation of Nanni Balestrini’s 1980 poem Blackout that proleptically conjoins the Movement of 1977 with the New York blackout of the same year (experienced by Reno upon her return to the US) — devoid of specific political or historical content beyond a nebulous resistance to capital. However, the novel portrays a very specific moment in Italy’s revolutionary 1970s, one that Balestrini and Primo Moroni describe as the “crisis of the concept of development.”18 The critique of capitalist development was a defining feature of the entire revolutionary cycle which broke from the Italian Communist Party’s faith in the development of the productive forces. “One could say,” commented the operaist Raniero Panzieri in an editorial meeting of Quaderni Rossi, “that the two terms capitalism and development are the same thing,” and indeed I argue that Kushner founds her reinterpretation of the historical novel on this same insight.19 Yet Balestrini and Moroni refer specifically to a late moment in this sequence: the displacement of the hegemonic figure of the male industrial worker and the factory as the locus of class struggle, occurring in the context of the disaggregation of the factory system, the rising weight of the service sector, and an increase in unemployed and precarious proletarians.20

Commenting on the “strategic value of generic concepts” for Marxist literary criticism, Jameson proposes that such concepts allow “the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life.”21 As theorized by Jameson and Lukács, the historical novel does not simply denote the narrative representation of historical events, but is rather premised on a set of essentially modern categories which mediate aesthetic and social form (namely, a concept of historical development and the political representation of the masses). It is these very categories that the Movement of 1977 — and the epochal break of the 1970s more broadly — put into crisis. In The Historical Novel and elsewhere, Lukács conceives of the transition to socialism through an analogy with the bourgeois revolution: developing its early progressivist philosophy of history, the workers’ movement “[extends] the last great phase of bourgeois ideology by means of criticism and struggle and by overcoming its limitations.”22 As Endnotes writes, Lukács and other theorists of the workers’ movement “all took heart from the idea that their revolution inherited the baton from a previous one, the so-called ‘bourgeois revolution,’ which they saw as the inevitable result of the development of the forces of production and the rising power of the bourgeoisie.”23 At the moment in which Kushner’s novel is set, the bourgeoisie are extinguished “as a class possessed of self-consciousness and morale,” yet the industrial proletariat can no longer appear as the representative of a dawning socialism.24 If the proletarian revolution can no longer be identified with the tendencies of capitalist development or the transitional imaginary inherited from the bourgeois epoch, what form can it take? Setting the end of development against the form of the historical novel, The Flamethrowers makes this question appear at its limits.

The Crisis of Development

In the opening pages of the novel Reno has two visions of humans dwarfed by immense machinery. Thinking of her boyfriend Sandro Valera, she recalls his favorite scene in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969): a boy and a girl in a bungalow “overshadowed by industry.” Falling asleep, she then dreams of a “gigantic machine, an airplane so large it filled the sky with metal and the raking sound of slowing engines,” slowly decelerating without being able to land (16-17). In discussions of The Flamethrowers as a historical novel, critics and scholars have predominantly framed the historical transition it narrates in terms of the rise of neoliberalism: the shift from factories to finance, the emergence of a “post-Fordist” subject, and the recomposition of the US-led global order.25 To adequately understand the relationship between form and historical content in The Flamethrowers , I contend that we must place a different (if not unrelated) aspect of this epochal transition at its center: the development of a high technical and organic composition of capital which in the 1970s engendered a structural crisis of accumulation and the ongoing displacement of labor from the sphere of industrial production. It is the transformation of historical time effected by this rising ratio of constant to variable capital — the slowing of engines dreamed by Reno — that stands at the heart of The Flamethrowers’s formal system as a historical novel.

The novel articulates the waning of a developmental historical temporality as the growing disproportion between two spheres, one corresponding to industrial capital and the other to those excluded from it. The novel primarily (though not exclusively) articulates the distinction between spheres through the gender distinction.26 Upon arriving in a deindustrialized New York, Reno finds work at a film processing lab. It is a typical service job — “helping customers, answering the phone, restocking” (85) — with one notable exception: Reno also serves as a “China Girl,” a woman whose image briefly appears on film leader as a reference point for lab technicians (but is unseen by the audience). Musing on this role, her boss Marvin asks a rhetorical question: “The girl cut into the leader, wouldn’t you say she’s as much a part of the film as its narrative?” (92). Underpinning yet obscured by the narrative, the strobing image of the China Girl presents a series of serialized presents: “Me then gone, me then gone” (86). This figure’s two sides evoke a set of conceptual oppositions through which our “waning of historicity” tends to be theorized: time and space, temporal development and a perpetual present. Yet the figure suggests not (only) a logic of succession—i.e. from the “temporal dominant” of modernity to the “spatial dominant” of postmodernity—but their interconnection as gendered spheres of a single structure. As Mathias Nilges argues, the novel undercuts any straightforward narrative of the rise and fall of a “linear conception of temporality and futurity” by demonstrating that this conception was “from its beginnings…connected to the temporal exclusion of women.”27 Yet this claim must be more firmly grounded in the novel’s figuration of political economy. For what this masculinized experience of development denotes in the novel is nothing other than the dynamic of industrial capital.

The figure of the China Girl presents a gendered hidden abode underpinning and obscured by the more conspicuous narrative.28 Appearing intermittently between the 1970s chapters of the novel, the “spine” narrative of T.P. Valera articulates the development of its male protagonist as predicated on the utilization and delimitation of a minor, feminized character. In these chapters, Kushner invokes two narrative forms that emerge from and narratively represent the passage to capitalist modernity: the Bildungsroman and the historical novel.29 As an adolescent in late nineteenth-century Egypt, the young Valera reads Flaubert and dreams of “his own sentimental education” as an “endless succession of breasts and velvety cunts” (33). Modeled on the Bildungsroman—in which, Bakhtin writes, “man’s individual emergence is inseparably linked to historical emergence”—the novel’s narration of Valera’s individual development is premised on an experience of historical development mediated in turn by typified, objectified images of women.30

The narrative form of the Bildungsroman has been theorized as negotiating the contradictions of an emerging world in which the “new and destabilizing forces of capitalism impose a hitherto unknown mobility” and orientation towards the future.31 In the “spine,” these temporal and spatial coordinates of the modern are condensed through the figure of the motorcycle, the eventual product of Valera’s factories. Jameson has argued that the modern experience of historical time was predicated on the “mixed, uneven nature” of modernity “in which the old coexisted with what was then coming into being” and it is this sense of spatial unevenness — temporalized as the opposition old/new — that inspires Valera’s fascination.32 Appearing as a metonym for industrial production (“a motor like an industrial machine,” a wheel “like a factory flywheel”) (35-36), the “frisson” between the “gleaming motor parts” and “cracked limestone wall” (39) in Egypt delights Valera. Over the course of the “spine,” the motorcycle serves as the medium of his development as he learns to ride it and befriends a group of machine-worshipping, motorcycle-riding futurists, all of whom share his masculinized, developmental experience of time: “smashing and crushing every outmoded and traditional idea…every past thing…the only thing worth loving was what was to come” (74).

This experience of development is also constitutively gendered. For Alex Woloch, the “free, full development of the central protagonist [of the Bildungsroman ] is contingent on the utilization, and delimitation, of minor characters,” and it is the typified image of a woman that supports Valera’s Bildung. 33 The novel’s central symbol for the dynamism of modernity is first encountered as the possession of his childhood crush, Marie.34 The erotic image of Marie “getting on strange cycles and spreading her legs” (38) inspires Valera’s initial fascination with motorcycles and recurs as a reference point to measure his development. Resonant with Marvin’s description of the China Girl as a conversion of the specific to the generic “woman,” Valera reflects that he has reduced his crush to a “vivid image” (75). Envisioning her as confined to reproductive labor (“squeezing out children”) and thus, like all women, “trapped in time,” he defines his form of temporality by contrast: “I am changed for the better” (79).35

A loose analogue for FIAT founder Gianni Agnelli, Valera stands as The Flamethrowers’ primary representative of what Lukács analyzes as an integral element of the historical novel: the world-historical individual, the characterological representative of historical progress. Quoting Hegel, Lukács writes that the world-historical individual embodies the historical movement by which the “new opposes itself hostilely to the old, and the change ‘goes hand in hand with a depreciation, demolition and destruction of the preceding mode of reality.’”36 The propulsive, masculinized time of Valera and his futurist gang is predicated on this sense of historical progress, of the supersession of the old and passage into the new. “To progress,” a futurist exclaims, “which is always right!” (77). However, while the futurists only experience modernity’s temporal dynamism through the medium of the motorcycle, Valera produces it. “Time,” Valera reflects, “had worn a mask,” and he and the futurists would tear it off to know it as “cataclysmic change” (128) — a knowledge that leads him to the factory.

An embodiment of industrial capital and world-historical figure — who must, as Lukács writes, grant “consciousness and clear direction” to the movement of historical progress — Valera becomes the conscious bearer of historical development by becoming an industrial capitalist.37 While the futurists can only conceive of their experience abstractly, writing poems about speed and metal and throwing themselves into the inferno of modern warfare, Valera—the “only one with the training to conceptualize speed” and “interested in generating actual speed” (78-79) — plans to open Moto Valera, beginning the industrial empire that powers Italy’s postwar economic miracle.38 Elliptically narrating the transition from an early situation of “incomplete” modernization to a world of integrated industrial production and consumption—“the postwar miracle, everyone in his own little auto, put-putting around, well enough paid from their jobs at Valera to buy a Valera, and tires for it, and gas” (266) — the “spine” identifies its developmental form with the expansion of value qua industrial capital. It grounds this identification on the basis of the temporal logic embodied by the ratcheting speed of the motorcycle, allegorically rendering capital’s compulsion to raise productivity through mechanization.39

If the novel moves back and forth in time — principally, between the “spine” and the 1970s chapters — it also invites us to read this movement as a lateral one between either side of the China Girl figure. For many critics, one of the most striking features of The Flamethrowers is the apparent passivity and weak protagonicity of its primary narrator. Like her flickering appearance at the head of the film leader, Reno is consistently located in a subordinated, feminized position — one defined by a non-developmental form of time. Unlike her boyfriend Sandro Valera (or his father), for whom “the future…was a place, and one that he was capable of guiding himself to” (125), Reno “expect[s] change to come from outside” (88) and is frequently rendered as a support for the development of others (especially Sandro, introduced as “[holding] all the power” in the relationship) (5). While some critics have read Reno’s passivity as a kind of “narrative technology” that enables the novel’s cognitive mapping of the political-economic landscape of the 1970s, others have argued that her passivity grounds an overarching critique of the “illusion of direct, unmediated experience.”40 Departing from these readings, I want to propose that the novel invites us to read Reno’s weak protagonicity vis-à-vis the historical dynamic of industrial capital.

Marvin’s question to Reno, posed as a non-sequitur in the conversation in which she learns of Sandro’s romantic interest — “wouldn’t you say she’s as much a part of the film as its narrative?” — invites a reading of the China Girl figure in terms of a major theoretical and practical intervention of 1970s Italian feminism: the reorientation of attention and struggle from the factory (and figure of the male industrial worker) to the domestic sphere and the unwaged activity of the housewife.41 When a housewife appears in the novel, it is to figure a particular relationship to time — appearing, appropriately enough, on the cover of Time magazine. “The job of the housewife is a little vague,” muses Reno, “and it’s easy to just not cross anything off the long list of semi-urgent chores. The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by” (150). If commodity production is governed by the direct temporal compulsion of value — i.e. to continually raise the productivity of labor through mechanization — this feminized sphere is only indirectly mediated by value, characterized instead by a serialized or durational logic of time expenditure.42 Reno, of course, is not a housewife, and neither are any of the novel’s other characters. Yet it is this non-directional form of time differentiated from the temporal dynamic of industrial capital that the novel narrates as coming to the fore in the context of deindustrialization.

When the novel first introduces Reno, she is astride a ’77 Valera motorcycle and travelling to the Nevada salt flats where she intends to use the motorcycle to enact an artwork: racing across the desert and then photographing the traces left in the sand (what she, describing an inspiration for the piece, calls “drawing in time”) (9). Hearing Sandro describe another woman’s art performance — walking in a straight line for a mile into the Mojave Desert and marking it with chalk — as “submitting passively to the time it took,” Reno adopts this idea of registering the “time it took ” for her performance-cum-photography project — a relationship to time that Sandro characterizes as feminine (and which the novel juxtaposes to Valera’s nineteenth-century experience of the motorcycle in the subsequent chapter). Speeding across the desert at 125 miles per hour, Reno comes to a heightened awareness of time — one less like Valera’s experience of convulsive change and more resembling her strobing appearance as a China Girl: “I felt alert to every granule of time. Each granule was time, the single pertinent image, the other moment-images, before and after, lost, unconsidered” (29). Time congeals into a series of images, each producing, as Jameson writes of the spatialized time of the postmodern, “no future out of itself, only another and a different present.”43 As she remarks at the climax of the race, moments before wiping out on the sands, “I was in an acute case of the present tense” (30).44 A spatialized experience of time and speed, registered as movement across a flat plane, the novel’s first representation of post-minimalist art figures time as sheer presence — in the sand, as images — stripped of qualities of change or development. At the height of her race, Reno recalls Sandro telling her that a “young woman is a conduit” — she does not need to use time, but merely pass through it (30).

As many readers have noted, the novel invites an allegorical reading of post-minimalist art such as Reno’s in terms of the expansion of service work. As Nadja Millner-Larsen writes, Kushner’s novel concerns the rise of a new kind of art that “mirrors the rise of another kind of work, that central to the growing service economy, in which the performance of immaterial labor has overtaken the manufacturing of material goods.”45 Those seeking to theorize service work have often turned to performance as a metaphor through which to apprehend a production process in which “the product is not separable from the act of producing” and it is this aspect of post-minimalism that Kushner stresses in her depiction of the New York art world, most directly in an account of a conceptual art piece in which a woman “performs” as a waitress: applying for and performing the job for over a year under an assumed name.46

However, the figuration of time in the novel’s depiction of post-minimalism has been less remarked upon. In his account of the waning of historicity, Jameson writes that the “postmodern ‘perpetual present’ [could be characterized] as a ‘reduction to the body’ inasmuch as the body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present.”47 If such a non-developmental form of time is merely attributed to a minor character and denigrated by T.P. Valera in the “spine,” it takes on a new weight in the 1970s chapters. Throughout, post-minimalism is associated with a serial, non-narrative form of time registered in the span of a performance or the singularity of an event and unbound from any developmental schema. For instance, one artist’s performance involves punching “a time clock on the hour every hour twenty-four hours a day for a year” (199), and Reno’s first encounter with the city’s galleries brings her before a “a ten-minute-long film of a clock as it moved from ten o’clock to ten minutes after ten” (47). It is most prominent in the weak protagonicity of Reno. Drawing on Woloch’s work on minor characters, Jasper Bernes and Nancy Armstrong have each argued that the conditions of post-industrial labor are not amenable to the novelistic development of character (as emblematized by the Bildungsroman).48 “In a post-industrial world,” Bernes writes, “[classical protagonicity] no longer exists. We have, instead, majorly minor characters” — characters such as Reno.49 Unlike both T.P. Valera and Sandro, Reno, as Sasha Frere-Jones observes, moves through the novel “like a passive observer, or like a camera.”50 Sometimes the narrative is directly mediated by Reno’s use of a camera in such a way that evokes Lukács’s argument regarding the “contemporizing” and imagistic qualities of description.51 In a key passage in which she equates her weak protagonicity with the role of a service worker, Reno films limousine chauffeurs across the street waiting by their cars. As her “camera [grazes] their faces,” Reno reflects that she “expect[s] change to come from outside” (88) — an outside predominantly represented by Sandro, one of the few minimalist artists in the novel and whose work signifies factory production.

Commenting upon the career of Stanley Castle, the only minimalist in the novel besides himself, Sandro observes that the rising technical composition of his artistic process has rendered him superfluous: Stanley’s “algorithm,” Sandro comments, has subtracted him “from the production of his own art” in a manner analogous to “the way in which the postindustrial age was now robbing the worker of his place” (159). This displacement — what I’ve described as a growing disproportion between two spheres — is the very narrative structure of The Flamethrowers.52 As a Künstlerroman (loosely tracing the rise of post-minimalism), a love story culminating in separation, and a historical novel, The Flamethrowers narrates the weakening of the developmental temporality of the Valera men and the coming to the fore of those in the position of the China Girl. If the “spine” associates a directional historical temporality with industrialization, the reduction to the present/the body is identified with its remainder — a non-absorption that comes to predominate in the context of economic stagnation and deindustrialization. In this sense, the novel’s structure could be understood as a narrativization of William Baumol’s theory of economic stagnation.53 For Baumol, advanced economies stagnate because the very dynamism of the technologically “progressive” sector of the economy — i.e. its ability to raise labor productivity through mechanization — also causes it to shed labor, creating a massive shift of employment to a stagnant sector and, asymptotically, a stationary economy. In this account, the “service sector” denotes a remainder: those activities resistant to industrialization which, in the context of deindustrialization, absorbed a sizeable proportion of the surplus population produced by slowing growth — a process that has also been theorized as the “feminization of labor” insofar as it has involved both the entry of large quantities of women into the workforce and capital’s mobilization of competencies traditionally unwaged and gendered as female.54

If in her introductory chapter Reno dreams of the slowing engines of an airplane, by the novel’s end they have stilled. Its final chapters represent the New York blackout of 1977 twice, once from each side of the now-separated Reno/Sandro couple — that is, from each side of the China Girl figure. The last chapter to feature Sandro finds him waiting at the TWA airport terminal to return home to Italy to fulfill his filial role after the death of his brother, the head of Moto Valera. Once, the futurists had dreamed of a “future in which the city would be built to the size and scale of machines and not men” (78). By the 1970s, this dream has been realized; the terminal makes Sandro think of man dwarfed by his creations, of infrastructures not built “to any human scale” born of “a proscriptive lie about progress and utopia” promoted by men like his father (366). Right before the moment of takeoff, just as the plane is ready to take Sandro forward to his future, the blackout begins — the novel leaves him on the stilled plane. Meanwhile, Reno rides her motorcycle through the stilled city in what she describes as a “night of suspended time” (353) and encounters a surplus proletariat in the streets, smashing store windows and looting goods.55 She interprets their actions as declaring that “the system is in ‘off’ mode” — a deactivation that refers to the loss of power, but also what this vast, stalled infrastructure signifies: the end of industrial expansion. This final presentation of the China Girl figure — now brought up to date, with Sandro directly occupying the counterpoint to Reno instead of his father — articulates the crash of futurity as the very consequence of what the “spine” narrates: industrial capital’s temporal dynamic and the rising organic composition of capital.

Decomposition and Revolution

Shortly before Reno leaves for Italy, Reno’s boss Marvin makes a second oblique reference to a key text of Italian feminism. If his rhetorical question about the China Girl evokes Italian feminists’ analysis of the hidden abode of reproduction, this second non-sequitur evokes Carla Lonzi’s seminal essay “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” Referring to a subtitle error in a print of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), Marvin comments that “Hegel” came out wrong as “Helga.” Seemingly ignoring Reno’s comment that she’s leaving the country, he muses that the subtitles occasionally run onto the film leader, just “a few frames from the girl cut into the negative as a calibration tool. You, or some other, there with a bit of accidental subtitle. Helga” (208). A critique of patriarchy and Marxism, Lonzi’s essay presents women as the non-dialectical underside of the Hegelian dialectic: “confined to one particular stage” and thus excluded from traditional Marxism’s model of class struggle and historical development. Proposing the crisis of men’s “historical role as protagonists,” Lonzi concludes her essay with the declaration that women are the “Unexpected Subject,” the “world’s dark past…giving shape to the present.”56

For Lukács, the Hegelian conception of history was deeply resonant with the classical historical novel’s narration of historical development as “a process full of contradictions, the driving force and material basis of which is the living contradiction between conflicting historical forces, the antagonisms of classes and nations.”57 With Reno’s journey to Rome, such antagonism comes to the fore of the novel in its dual climax — the Movement of 1977 and the New York blackout of the same year. Yet if the classical historical novel narrates historical transition in terms of the rise and fall of contending classes, The Flamethrowers depicts less the emergence of a new class than class decomposition.58 In the prior section, I argued that the novel articulates the restructuring of the 1970s in terms of the rising organic composition of capital, identifying the crisis of historicity with the generalization of a form of non-developmental time previously obscured or subordinated by the temporal dynamic of industrial capital. Now, turning to the insurrections at the conclusion of the novel, I argue that it represents this transition — deindustrialization — as the fraying of the very narrative schema of transition underpinning the classical historical novel.

“The historical novel as a genre,” Jameson writes, cannot exist without the appearance of collectivity “which marks the drama of the incorporation of individual characters into a greater totality, and can alone certify the presence of History as such.”59 When the collectivity appears in The Flamethrowers , it is through the act of leaving the factory. In Italy at the invitation of the Valera company, Reno visits one of their plants with the aspiration of filming the factory grounds. Instead, she discovers Sandro’s infidelity. Fleeing the factory with Gianni, an employee of the Valera’s (and member of the Red Brigades), Reno travels to Rome where she encounters a revolutionary collectivity assembled in the city’s streets.60 Separated from the artists’ parties of New York and the Valera family villa, Reno encounters this collectivity as “so many bodies massed together that they formed a vast shifting texture, a sea of heads filling the square” (274-275). With camera in hand, she is struck by the heterogeneity of the crowd, the masses are a “stream of faces, a pointillism of them. Face after face after face” (278).

What appears before Reno’s camera is the finale of Italy’s “creeping May.”61 In the years following World War II, Italy experienced its “economic miracle,” premised on the rapid growth of large-scale industry (and identified, in Kushner’s novel, with T.P. Valera). While the Italian Communist Party remained broadly committed to the development of the productive forces and ideology of progress, workers began to collectively resist the despotism of the factory in a series of wildcat strikes and factory actions. For the theorists of operaismo , this “mass worker” appeared as the primary subject of class struggle and vanguard fraction of the proletariat: situated at the heart of Italy’s economic development (the large-scale factory), homogenized by the Fordist factory system, and militant, the mass worker appeared as “the primary force of change.”62 This hegemony of the industrial worker would come into question over the course of the 1970s and, by 1977, was wholly untenable. In Nanni Balestrini’s novel of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of 1969, a militant proclaims that a demonstration “has the job of explaining the struggle in the factory to the city.”63 By 1977, the struggle was in the streets — “To speak still in the old terms, after the experience of 1977,” Antonio Negri wrote two years later, “is to be dead.”64 This shift in the locus of struggle was conditioned not only by the further politicization of other constituencies, but the restructuring of the Italian economy. Beginning in early 1970s, the workers’ insurgency and the economic crisis of 1973 “set in motion various processes that reduced the role of industrial labor and commodity manufacturing” including automation, offshoring, the disaggregation of the large-scale factory, and the expansion of the service sector.65 One of the major consequences of the restructuring was a growing mass of un- and underemployed proletarians, infamously theorized by Asor Rosa as Italy’s “two societies”: an organized industrial proletariat and a growing mass of the “marginalized and unemployed, whose behavior was symptomatic of the disintegration of the old order.”66 The Movement of ’77, the final revolutionary phase of this sequence, symptomatized and affirmed this disintegration, making a definitive break from the traditions of the Third International and a politics predicated on the affirmation of labor.

Standing amidst the demonstrators in the Piazza del Popolo, Reno toggles between two categories for the deindustrial collectivity surging around her. Noting that “Popolo means crowd or multitude,” she raises an alternative: “Popalaccio: rabble or mob” (283). If the former evokes Hardt and Negri’s term for a new, heterogeneous subject of post-Fordist production, the latter presents a different tense: not the emergence of a new class composition, but a decomposition into the rabble — a term referring to the disparate mass of the poor conceptually and historically prior to an industrial working class.67 Just as it articulates the rise of the service sector in terms of industrialization’s remainder, The Flamethrowers elects for this latter meaning in its rendering of collectivity.68 What globally connects the masses as they appear in Italy and the New York blackout is a shared condition of superfluity — a passage from the factory to the streets. In Rome, Reno’s attention is most drawn to young proletarians “dressed in the most ragged clothes imaginable,” identified by a companion as living in “remote slums on the outskirts of Rome.” “There’s nothing to do out there,” she explains, “they’re young and it’s like they’re left for dead.” Observing these youths without a future, Reno links them to a specific tactic of class struggle, price-setting (“I thought of what Sandro had told me about people setting their own rent, their own bus fare”) (276) and later witnesses them expropriate goods through smashed store windows just as the surplus population of New York does during its “night of suspended time” (276).69

Joshua Clover has theorized this tactic of price-setting as a form of “spatialized struggle” that comes to the fore in the context of economic stagnation and a rising surplus population: displaced from the factory — and its temporal logic of ratcheting productivity growth — proletarians in the age of deindustrialization struggle in the streets not in their capacity as workers, but as those united only by their dispossession. For Clover, it is the rising organic composition of capital that is the very “process of spatialization itself, and thus the transformation of temporal to spatial struggles” — what I have argued to be the very form of The Flamethrowers , brought to a crescendo in Reno’s departure from the factory and the suspended time of the blackout.70 This transition from time to space, from development to its crisis, is both the narrative result of capital’s dynamic — the rising technical and organic composition of capital and the extrusion of proletarians (and capital) from manufacturing — and the collapse of the form of historical time produced by this dynamic and the progressivist vision of historical development it underpinned. Earlier, I discussed how T.P. Valera — as a “conscious [bearer] of historical progress” — identified a modern sense of historical development with the expansion of industrial capital.71 In the same passage in which he decides to open his factory, he contrasts his experience of development with that of other groups, derided as stagnant and unable to access his historical time. Besides women — “trapped in time” — he and the futurists contrast themselves to a second group: “Rome’s slum inhabitants,” “zombie lumpen who seemed…as if they were living in the Middle Ages” (77-79). At the end of the long arc of capitalist development the lumpen reappear at the forefront of class struggle, the “world’s dark past…giving shape to the present.”72

In Lukács’s and Jameson’s accounts of the historical novel, the character of the “world-historical individual” is necessary for the incorporation of collective history into narrative. Never the protagonist of the historical novel, the world-historical individual emerges out of the mass experience of history to embody a “historical movement…[granting] consciousness and clear direction to a [progressive] movement already present in society,” which he concentrates in a “historical deed.”73 This narrative function is inseparable from a question of representation. As Jameson writes, the role of the world-historical individual raises the question of “the representation of a collectivity by individual characters” — a question that is “fully as much a narratological problem as a political one.”74 In Lukács’s account this representative function of the world-historical individual (as “embodiment” of a historical movement), is analogous to the party-form (“viewed socially, a party , a representative of one of the many contending classes”) and a Leninist conception of leadership, one of the many points of resonance posed between the passage to modernity given form by the classical historical novel and his conception of the transition to communism.75

The climax of The Flamethrowers stages the closure of this revolutionary orientation. For participants in ’77, what was decisive about the movement was its rupture with this very form of representation. It was, Balestrini and Moroni write, “the historical moment in which the subjectivity of a new social composition definitively ruptured all the theories and praxes of the ‘party form.’” 76 As Sergio Bologna commented at the time, the heterogeneity of the movement inhibited the possibility of “a majoritarian social reference point for the class” and the “kind of relationship (as with the large-scale factory) of mass vanguards capable of pulling behind them the whole of the movement.”77 Faced with the multiplicity of the crowd, Reno points to the emergence of this problem of composition: “How do we find each other? It repeated in my head as more and more people packed into the enormous square. The ‘we’ of it: people lost in the vast thickets of the world” (277).78 Commentaries on The Flamethrowers that make Reno’s naivete central to their reading have stressed her incomprehension of the political events unfolding around her. For Tucker-Abramson, Reno’s use of photography and her attempt to “import her distinctly New York conceptual frameworks” to the Movement of ’77 is exemplary of this ignorance.79 Yet I want to propose that Reno nonetheless grasps something important by positing an identity between the differential composition of the amassed demonstrators and the post-minimalist art practices of New York. Among that “massive crowd of strangers, this stream of faces, a pointillism of them,” she thinks of an acquaintance’s fantasy of photographing every living person. Panning her own camera across the piazza, Reno reflects that “this would be a place to start” on that project (278). For Rosalind Krauss, what unified post-minimalism — a “post-Movement” art that did not “flow through a single channel for which a synthetic term…might be found” — was the logic of photograph, the indexical registration of singular presence (“[isolated] from within the succession of temporality”).80 If Kushner’s account of the demonstration makes continual reference to Reno’s use of her camera (“I kept my camera going”), we should read this not as highlighting a political unseriousness, but an identity between this logic of the photograph and a deindustrial proletariat. Written in a clipped, serialized manner, Kushner’s account of the demonstration suggests a procession of photographs like the one embedded at the chapter’s beginning (or the strobing image of the China Girl) — a serial, spatialized mode of representation adequate to a decomposed proletariat united only by a common dispossession.

However, The Flamethrowers does evoke a possible candidate for the role of the world-historical individual: Gianni, the member of the Red Brigades who brings Reno to the demonstration and, in aiding the kidnapping and murder of Roberto Valera, is responsible for the novel’s climactic deed. If T.P. Valera fulfilled the role of the Hegelian “world-historical individual” for the rising bourgeoisie, one might expect Gianni to do so for the proletariat, granting “consciousness and clear direction” to the historical transition rendered by the novel.81 Just as the world-historical individual is analogized by Lukács with the Leninist party, the Brigades positioned themselves within the tradition of the “historic parties of the Third International,” presenting the organization as a hegemonic pole for the broader revolutionary movement.82

The last pages of The Flamethrowers describe Reno waiting for Gianni to appear. Having driven him to the Alps — which he plans to ski across to avoid arrest at the border — she stands on the other side to collect him.83 As dusk settles and Gianni fails to appear against the white snow of the mountains, Reno meditates on the experience of waiting. “No longer pointing toward an anticipated future,” Theodore Martin writes, the wait might redirect “our attention to the complexity of a present in crisis.”84 As the world-historical figure fails to arrive, Reno experiences the end of an expectation: “You can think and think of a question, the purpose of waiting, the question of whether there is any purpose, any person meant to appear, but if the person doesn’t come, there is no one and nothing to answer you.” Finally, one must “Leave, with no answer” (383). Having dissociated from the factory and party, the novel then ends.

In his account of the historical novel, Jameson raises an interesting question about the relationship between the genre and revolution. Noting an ambiguity in the latter term — “what we call revolution in the passage from the old order or feudalism to capitalism is not at all the same structurally or substantively” as other forms of seismic historical transition — he doubts “whether the historical novel —as a narrative form historically generated by the passage from the old order to a bourgeois society as well as the representation of that historical passage — can function as a useful generic category for novels which issue from and represent wholly different kinds of historical convulsion.”85 Concerned with a different historical convulsion — the end of capitalist modernization — The Flamethrowers sets the form of the historical novel in tension with the epochal transition of the 1970s. In doing so, it fulfills the project of the historical novel — to grasp history as process, as the “concrete precondition of the present” — by rendering the historicity of that form. “In order to arrive at its own content,” Marx wrote, “the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” In the destitution of the historical novel, the problem of revolution in our time appears at the genre’s limits.

1. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989) 333. Marcello Tarí, There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021) 27. Carla Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel” in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, eds. Paola Bono & Sandra Kemp (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991) 59.
2. Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013) 348. Hereafter cited in text.
3. To take a few examples: Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (2003): 695-718. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?” New Literary History 39 (2008): 519-532. Jane Elliott, Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
4. See, for instance, Rachel Greenwald Smith, “The Contemporary Novel and Postdemocratic Form,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51.2 (2018): 292-307 and Eli Jelly-Schapiro, “Literature, Theory, and the Temporalities of Neoliberalism,” Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2019) 22-41.
5. In histories of neoliberalism, the response to New York’s fiscal crisis (as it neared default on short-term debt) marks a pivotal moment in the neoliberal assault on entrenched Keynesian orthodoxy. As economic historian Kim Moody writes, “The crisis regime shaped in 1975 [in New York] would in many ways be an example of how government could be used to reassert class power and shift priorities toward both the traditional goals of business and the newer ideas that would be known as neoliberalism.” Similarly, the Italian 1970s are a central referent for narratives of the transition from an industrial to a deindustrial (or “post-Fordist”) capitalism. As Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni write, “Many in the Western world . . . think that the Italian case was one of the most revealing social and productive laboratories for deciphering the epoch-defining passage from one phase of capitalism to another.” Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (New York: The New Press, 2007) 18. Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, The Golden Horde: Revolutionary Italy, 1960-1977 (London: Seagull Books, 2021) 34.
6. In addition to the texts previously cited, see Andrew Strombeck, “The Post-Fordist Motorcycle: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and the 1970s Crisis in Fordist Capitalism,” Contemporary Literature 56.3 (2015): 450-475. Myka Tucker-Abramson, “The Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art,” Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2019): 73-91. Eli Jelly-Schapiro, “Literature, Theory, and the Temporalities of Neoliberalism,” Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2019) 22-41. Treasa De Loughry, The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis: Contemporary Literary Narratives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Davis Smith-Brecheisen, “The Pivotal Decade Revisited, or the Contemporary Novel of the Seventies,” Praktyka Teoretyczna 50.4 (2023) 25-49.
7. In Andrew Strombeck and Myka Tucker-Abramson’s respective essays on The Flamethrowers , each consider its relation to the genre of the historical novel. For Strombeck, “Kushner allows her historical novel to fail” by refusing to make what he identifies as the novel’s three parts—the “spine” narrative, the New York chapters, and the Italy chapters—cohere. For Tucker-Abramson, The Flamethrowers is “a properly historical novel,” albeit one that “doesn’t quite function as it did for Lukács” insofar as the mass experience of history appears in the background of the novel (while the main characters, in her reading, are “fantasies of capitalist regeneration under US hegemony”). While I find each reading compelling, the one developed here departs substantively from both Strombeck and Tucker-Abramson’s accounts. “The Post-Fordist Motorcycle” 453. “The Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art” 88-89.
8. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso Books, 2013) 264.
9. The Historical Novel 27.
10. For the long-term patterns of stagnation and non-development characteristic of the feudal economy and the subsequent emergence of modern economic growth, see: Robert Brenner, “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong” in Marxist History-Writing in the Twenty-First Century ed. Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 49-111.
11. Drew Arnold, “The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Kushner,” The Rumpus , 2013. https://therumpus.net/2013/08/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-rachel-kushner/ [accessed 4 March 2022]
12. Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (March/April 2015), 104.
13. Sean O’Brien, “Detecting the Present: Contemporary Neo-Noir and the Case of American Decline,” Polygraph 29 (2024) 48. On [em]The Flamethrowers[/em] as an example of a recent turn to the 1970s in contemporary fiction, see Smith-Brecheisen, “The Pivotal Decade Revisited.”
14. Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity” 120.
15. Jameson, Antinomies of Realism 260-263. On the contemporary historical novel, see Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).
16. The Historical Novel 53.
17. In other words, the novel articulates “historical time” in a manner similar to Moishe Postone: as “an ongoing directional movement of time, a ‘flow of history’” produced by the intrinsic dynamic of the value form. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 293.
18. Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, The Golden Horde 34.
19. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002) 36.
20. Paolo Virno, “Do You Remember Counterrevolution?” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics ed. Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 244-245. Sergio Bologna, “The Tribe of Moles” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics ed. Sylvère Lotringer & Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007) 36-61.
21. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 105.
22. Historical Novel 173.
23. Endnotes, “A History of Separation: The rise and fall of the workers’ movement, 1883-1982” in Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation (2015) 86.
24. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso Books, 1998) 85. See also G.M. Tamas, “Telling the Truth About Class,” Socialist Register 42 (2006) 254-55.
25. “The Pivotal Decade Revisited” 41.
26. The now-canonical account of the gender distinction as predicated on a spatial separation between value-productive and non-value productive activities posited by the value-relation is Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender: On the separation of spheres and the process of abjection” in Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and other Misfortunes (Endnotes, 2013) 56-90. For an important critique of this theory see Beverley Best, “Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-form,” Theory & Event 24.4 (2021) 896-921.
27. Mathias Nilges, How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021) 117.
28. As Genevive Yue writes, the example of the China Girl demonstrates how what is seen in a film rests “on a foundation of what is unseen.” Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021) 7.
29. Nilges argues that if the Bildungsroman was the symbolic form of modernity, the Zeitroman (i.e. time novel) is the symbolic form of the contemporary in which the “flow of the world that gave rise to the bildungsroman appears to have stopped.” He characterizes The Flamethrowers as an example of the latter. How to Read a Moment 19-20.
30. M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) 23. On the Bildungsroman as the symbolic form of modernity, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).
31. Moretti, The Way of the World 4.
32. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) 311.
33. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) 29.
34. Way of the World 4.
35. Valera’s objectification of Marie is only a slight distance from that of Lonzi’s, his futurist companion, who suggests that “in the future women would be reduced to their most essential part, a thing a man could carry in his pocket… Women will be pocket cunts, Lonzi said. Ideal for battle, for a light infantryman. Transportable, backpackable, and silent. You take a break from machine-gunning, slip them over your member, love them totally, and they don’t say a word” (75-76). By contrast Valera’s use of Marie as a literal vehicle for his personal development “reduces her to her own foot, to a thing he could carry in his mind, like a rabbit’s foot” (76).
36. Historical Novel 39.
37. Historical Novel 39.
38. Perry Anderson, writing of the modernist fascination with technology (e.g. as evidenced by the futurists), notes that in the early twentieth century this did not necessarily mean a celebration of capitalism. The condition of this interest, he writes, “was the abstraction of techniques and artefacts from the social relations of production that were generating them. In no case was capitalism as such ever exalted by any brand of ‘modernism.’ But such extrapolation was precisely rendered possible by the sheer incipience of the still unforeseeable socio-economic pattern that was later to consolidate around them.” In other words, in the condition of uneven development (or incomplete modernization) in the early twentieth century, the “still incipient, hence essentially novel, emergence within these societies of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution” such as the automobile generated a fascination with speed and machinery seemingly abstracted from the still-developing mode of production that generated them. However, Valera identifies the experience of speed, of historical progress, with capitalism and its preeminent institution, the factory. For the futurists, machinery is something abstractly fascinating, set against an otherwise traditional world. For Valera, a true apprehension of machinery—and speed—leads to the capitalist factory. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (1984) 104-105.
39. Tucker-Abramson and Strombeck have each developed analyses of the motorcycle’s role in the novel as a symbol of industrial manufacturing (and, in the 1970s chapters, its displacement).
40. Rachel Greenwald-Smith, “Six Theses on Compromise Aesthetics,” Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature, eds. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Wordon (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2016) 192. “The Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art” 86. “The Pivotal Decade Revisited” 36.
41. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2019); Women and the Subversion of Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader, ed. Camille Barbagallo (Oakland: PM Press, 2019). The China Girl figure evokes an optical metaphor employed by Leopoldina Fortunati to articulate the “at once dialectical and coconstitutive relationship of visible value and its invisible support mapped along the axis of gender.” Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) 197. Maya Gonzalez, “The Gendered Circuit: Reading the Arcane of Reproduction,” Viewpoint Magazine (2013).
42. Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender Without the Body” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown (Chicago: MCM’ Publishing, 2004) 128. See also “The Logic of Gender” 63-66.
43. “Aesthetics of Singularity” 122.
44. Her crash inspires a new thought about temporality: “What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back” (31). Tucker-Abramson reads the crash as allegorical of the crisis of 1973 that brought an end of postwar growth. “The Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art” 77.
45. Nadja Millner-Larsen, Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023) 210. Millner-Larsen’s book is a history of Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, a group whose fictionalized history appears in a standalone chapter of The Flamethrowers. Written an elliptical, chronicle-like form that sets it apart from the rest of the novel, the chapter documents a series of political actions and stunts by the group in solidarity and cooperation with “the children of the Lower East Side, under-fed, runny-nosed, of black and brown complexions, robbed of a lice-free, misery-free existence, robbed of most aspects of childhood” (186). What is most striking about the chapter is its utter incoherence. It is an account of spatialized lumpen struggle and insurrectionary anarchism, yet these actions are theorized according to a stagist and even workerist philosophy of history (195). I would suggest we read this chapter as the novel’s figuration of May ’68 — the last high point of the historical workers’ movement and the opening of a new era of struggles.
46. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1982) 1048. See Sianne Ngai’s account of “post-Fordist performance” in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) 174-231. On performance in Marxist theory see Michael Shane Boyle, “In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory” in After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 209-224.
47. Antinomies of Realism 28.
48. Nancy Armstrong, “Why the Bildungsroman no longer works,” Textual Practice 34.12 (2020) 2091-2111.
49. Jasper Bernes, “Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel after Deindustrialization,” Post45 1 (2019).
50. Sasha Frere-Jones, “I Am a Camera: An Interview with Rachel Kushner,” The New Yorker, 11 June 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/i-am-a-camera-an-interview-with-rachel-kushner [Accessed 11 November 2023]. Many recent novels that might be categorized, after Mathias Nilges, as instances of the contemporary Zeitroman turn to photography and film. See, for instance Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Paris: Metronome Press, 2005) and Ling Ma, Severance (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018). See Bernes’ essay on the office novel for a discussion of photography in Remainder.
51. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” Writer & Critic and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1970) 138.
52. In an article on postmodern literature and poetics, Joshua Clover observes the effacement of “the broadly modern association of the novel with narrative” since the early 1970s. Indexed by the diminishment or disintegration of “the conventions of the bildungsroman, of the development of a character through consequent time,” Clover argues that this waning of protagonicity is the “expression of a homologous change in the sphere of production…defined by an ‘organic composition of capital’ — that is, a decreasing ratio of workers to machines.” “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital,” Journal of Narrative Theory 41.1 (2011) 41-42.
53. My account of Baumol’s theory is drawn from Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (London: Reaktion Books, 2020) 72-74. See also Bernes’ discussion of Baumol and novels of service work in “Character, Genre, Labor.”
54. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 214-215. Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) 26.
55. In 1965, the city had also experienced a blackout — an experience in which, Rick Perlstein writes, “the wary anonymity of the city transformed itself into a contagion of joy,” inspiring the 1968 comedy Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?. “In 1977,” he writes, “different sorts of liberties were taken: 1965 inverted, as formerly alienated, atomized Gothamites once more united in carnivalesque communion, this time to strip the city bare.” Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020) 129.
56. Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel” 58-59.
57. Historical Novel 53.
58. For the concept of “class decomposition” see Endnotes, “Onward Barbarians” (2020) https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/endnotes-onward-barbarians [accessed 15 January 2023].
59. Antinomies of Realism 267.
60. Specifically, she encounters the Rome demonstration of 12 March 1977. See Red Notes, Italy 1977-8: ‘Living with an Earthquake’ (1978) 59-69.
61. Michael Hardt offers a useful account of this revolutionary sequence as “a drama in three acts.” The Subversive Seventies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) 109-124.
62. Sergio Bologna. “Workerism: An Inside View: From the Mass-Worker to Self-Employed Labour,” Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century , ed. Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (Leiden: Brill, 2013) 127. “The growing homogenization of labour by age and gender within many of Italy’s large and medium-sized industrial concerns during the late 1960s acted to reinforce that compactness encouraged by the spread of mass production techniques.” Steve Wright, Storming Heaven 108.
63. Nanni Balestrini, We Want Everything (London: Verso Books, 2022) 162.
64. Storming Heaven 197.
65. Hardt, Subversive Seventies 110. See also Paolo Virno, “Do You Remember Counterrevolution?” 244-245 and Sergio Bologna, “The Tribe of Moles.”
66. Storming Heaven 200. By the mid-1970s, Robert Lumley writes, “the distinction between the ‘adult’ world of regular waged work and youth’s transitional situation hardened; the absence of work (or work to match qualifications), and the prolonging of the educational process extended the period of being young of necessity rather than from choice.” States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso Books, 1990) 298.
67. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). On the rabble see Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.” Representations 31 (1990) 69-95.
68. Tiqqun’s text on the Movement of 1977 is vehemently critical of the concept of the “multitude” and similarly adopts the designation of “rabble.” Tiqqun, This is Not a Program (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
69. Reno paraphrases the politics of ’77 as: “We’ll take what we can and pay what we want. We’ll pay for nothing that’s already ours” (286). On “proletarian shopping” or “auto-reduction” in 1970s Italy, see Bruno Ramirez, “The Working Class Struggle Against the Crisis: Self-Reduction of Prices in Italy.” Zerowork: Political Materials #1 (1975) 143-150.
70. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (New York: Verso, 2016) 140.
71. Historical Novel 39.
72. “Let’s Spit on Hegel” 58-59.
73. Historical Novel 39.
74. Antinomies of Realism 281-282.
75. Historical Novel 47. “One of the things the ‘world-historical individual’ in the sense of the classical historical novel exemplifies, if he is really a leader or representative of genuine popular movements, is Lenin’s ‘from without.’” Historical Novel 214.
76. The Golden Horde 658.
77. “The Tribe of Moles” 51.
78. On the “composition problem” see Endnotes, “The Holding Pattern: The ongoing crisis and the class struggles of 2011-2013” in Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes (2013) 44-52.
79. “The Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art” 86.
80. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (1977) 68-81.
81. Historical Novel 39
82. The Golden Horde 666. Accordingly, if Gianni serves as the primary characterological representative of ’77 in the novel, he also stands apart from it: “Whether Gianni was in the Movement was unclear” Reno observes, registering this in terms of his appearance as an industrial worker (“He did not look like the rest of them, working-class handsome in his mechanic’s jacket”) (271). Although Gianni denies having worked on the assembly line, a newspaper describes the Red Brigades as “Italian militants who got their start in the Valera factories on the industrial outskirts of Milan” (120-121).
83. This is based on an event in the life of Nanni Balestrini.
84. Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019) 105.
85. Antinomies of Realism 271.