Lucy Burke

‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ – Antonio Gramsci

A decade after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession, the sense that neoliberalism survived the financial crisis unscathed remains a dominant narrative in political economy. Gothicised references to Zombie Economics (Quiggin, 2011), The Strange non-Death of Neoliberalism (Crouch, 2011), alongside more prosaic titles such as The Status Quo Crisis (Helleiner, 2014 ) and The System Worked (Drezner, 2014) all testify to a characterisation of the present as a continuation of the neoliberal global order. In this context, Gramsci’s reference to an ‘interregnum’ is often cited, with the past decade interpreted as a time of the living-dead in which old ways are yet to be replaced, despite their expiration.

Against this intellectual backdrop, this paper offers a materialist analysis of Stranger Things which suggests that the series bespeaks a very different view of the present conjuncture: one which outlines not so much a morbid symptom but rather the birth of a new world marked by dramatic shifts in politics and economics. With particular focus on the destabilisation of conventions of the horror genre (with good girls punished and non-nuclear families reunited) and the symbolism of the central device - a dual world (itself a repetitive feature of contemporary sci-fi) -, the paper argues that Stranger Things is symptomatic of a new ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams) signalled by a conjunction of previously unimaginable heterodox events and discourses: Trump and Brexit; the resurrection of concepts such as communism; discussions of the future of capitalism in mainstream media; arguments about inequality following tax evasion scandals, protests of the 99% vs the 1%, and recent publications on economic redistribution (The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; Capital, Piketty 2013); and the acceptance of onetime unorthodox ideas like cryptocurrencies and universal basic income. However, the paper’s analysis of Stranger Things’ contradictions - postmodern pastiche or nostalgia aesthetics (Jameson 1991), images of violent, religious self-sacrifice and the indefatigability of the ‘upside down’ - suggests that the birth of this new world lacks the means to fully combat the sources of its own horror.

Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi blockbuster Elysium (2013) expresses the radically uneven distribution of wealth that characterises contemporary global capitalism in the form of separate worlds. Transforming the gated, high security communities of today into a space station accessible only to a wealthy minority of citizens, Elysium is a fully automated luxury off-world whose ultimate image of social stratification resides in access to hi-tech medical technology which cures all diseases and reverses ageing. In contrast, earth is an overpopulated and environmentally devastated space in which mostly poor, unemployed people without access to medical care are overseen by robotic security guards and AI. Paradoxically, what remains of formal work for humans on earth in this automated cyberpunk reality is a 20th century style assembly line form of industrial production which constructs the very robots that render human labour redundant in the first place. 
If the uneven development offered by the film is a striking expression of the contradictory logic of globalised capitalist modernity, then what is equally if not more suggestive is the way in which its liberal narrative resolution –  effectively, Obamacare plus a Green card – includes its own unconscious contradictions that betray wider and problematic symptoms of our own political responses to questions of futurity and technological automation. This paper argues that Bloomkamp’s film is symptomatic of a recurrent impasse that besets contemporary cultural and critical responses to problems of worklessness and political change. In contrast to left neo-futurist dreams of post-capitalism, our reading of the fusion of sci-fi with older, biblical and mythical forms in Elysium emphasises the way in which our vision of a radically different future is often premised upon promises and tropes of older, premodern formations, in this instance, messianic redemption and self-sacrifice. Whilst acknowledging the limits of the film’s liberalism, we explore the significance of the film’s recourse to a messianic narrative as symptomatic of a key problem to which the left must attend: why is it that in today’s atomised world, mass cultural forms still exhibit a reliance on the affective powers of what Raymond Williams would describes as ‘residual’ cultural formations? Rather than disavow such residual forms in the name of a ‘poetry of the future’, the paper argues that a materialist approach must embrace their popular political and imaginative potential.

A decade after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession, the sense that neoliberalism survived the financial crisis unscathed remains a dominant narrative in political economy. Gothicised references to Zombie Economics (Quiggin, 2011), The Strange non-Death of Neoliberalism (Crouch, 2011), alongside more prosaic titles such as The Status Quo Crisis (Helleiner, 2014 ) and The System Worked (Drezner, 2014) all testify to a characterisation of the present as a continuation of the neoliberal global order. In this context, Gramsci’s reference to an ‘interregnum’ is often cited, with the past decade interpreted as a time of the living-dead in which old ways are yet to be replaced, despite their expiration.

Against this intellectual backdrop, this paper offers a historical materialist analysis of Stranger Things which suggests that the series bespeaks a very different view of the present conjuncture: one which outlines the morbid symptom of a new world of post-neoliberal chaos signalled by Trumpian populist reaction. With particular focus on the destabilisation of conventions of the horror genre (with good girls punished and non-nuclear families reunited) and the symbolism of the central device - a dual world (itself a repetitive feature of contemporary sci-fi) -, the paper argues that Stranger Things is symptomatic of a new ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams) signalled by a conjunction of previously unimaginable heterodox events and discourses: Trump and Brexit; the resurrection of concepts such as communism; discussions of the future of capitalism in mainstream media; arguments about inequality following tax evasion scandals, protests of the 99% vs the 1%, and recent publications on economic redistribution (The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; Capital, Piketty 2013); and the acceptance of onetime unorthodox ideas like cryptocurrencies and universal basic income. However, our primary focus is on populism and the way in which the narrative resolution of Stranger Things produces an allegory of the new chaos of Trump-led America. More significantly, the paper suggests that the fun, nostalgia aesthetics of the series are themselves a symptom of the affective pull of populist political reaction in the present era. The paper’s analysis of Stranger Things’ contradictions - postmodern pastiche or nostalgia aesthetics (Jameson 1991), images of violent, religious self-sacrifice and the indefatigability of the ‘upside down’ – finally suggests that the birth of this new world of Trumpian reaction ultimately lacks the means to fully combat the sources of its own horror.

The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) focuses on cultural and especially literary representations of disability. Containing a wide variety of textual analyses that are informed by disability theory and, by extension, experiences of disability, it is essential reading for scholars whose work concentrates on the portrayal of disability in literature. More broadly, it is instrumental in the interdisciplinarity of literary studies, cultural studies, and disability studies.