Some leftists avoid the term “late capitalism” because of its implication that we’re nearing capitalism’s end, running against our pessimism of the intellect, even as it thrills the optimism of the will. Nonetheless, it’s a term I’ve long been fond of because of its usefulness in distinguishing our current stage of digital info-capitalist saturation from previous eras of industrial capitalism – “late” isn’t “last,” after all. If there’s a competition for the novel that most fully embodies the cultural superstructure of the overwhelming, post-irony, post-sincerity, digitized, microplasticized, coopted, climate-catastrophre’d, alienated and incomprehensible late capitalist dystopia we find ourselves living in, the smart money might be on Thomas Kendall’s psychedelic, postcyberpunk noir How I Killed The Universal Man (Whiskey Tit, 2023); a book fully and distressingly imbricated with late capitalism in setting, plot, and style.
It’s the day after tomorrow, and all of society’s worst tendencies have been amplified and intensified. Our protagonist, John Lakerman (consistently referred to by the narrative as “Lakerman,” an early signal of the alienation that suffuses the novel), “produces content for” (not writes; produces content for, another signal) the culture site donkeyWolf (haphazardly italicized when it appears in the text – the book is full of either typos or intentionally off-putting textual variations; that it isn’t clear which is yet another signal). It occurs to Lakerman that most consumers of donkeyWolf’s content “believed the end of the world had already occurred,” and the narrator describes Lakerman himself as “a wrongly directed organism, a single blood cell in the bled out world.” It’s an enervated, just-barely-not-apocalyptic world; air conditioning has been outlawed, tourism takes place virtually after air travel has collapsed, exposure to the sun is lethal, real fruit is an ostentatious display of wealth. “The whole world had become uncanny a long time ago,” Lakerman thinks. On the off chance that any readers of this piece are reminded of my review of The Marigold from last year, well, you should be.
Where The Marigold held onto a core of humanity in a future Toronto torn apart by the dual forces of capital and toxic mold, everyone involved in How I Killed the Universal Man is much too alienated for that, lines between the organic and inorganic broken down almost completely, emphasizing the post-cyberpunk setting of rampant implants and virtual reality. It’s a very online novel, relentlessly channeling the internet’s overstimulation, the too-much-ness of modern online life, a nonstop cavalcade of references, asides, cynicisms, witticisms, theories both critical and conspiratorial, non-sequitur conversations and scene breaks. The novel’s prose, rapturous, paranoid, and discursive, somehow simultaneously gestures toward both irony and earnestness, pushing the bounds of coherence from the very first pages on.
Lakerman is a disaffected cynic in the best noir tradition – one might be tempted to say this is hardboiled postcyberpunk where the crime propelling the narrative is late capitalism itself. The plot is similarly drawn from noir, initially centered on one thing (Lakerman writing an interest piece on the clinical trial of a new drug called “Noumenon,” expected to be outlawed immediately) and convolutes and grows expansively from there. It’s further complicated by clones, unexpected familial relations, the growth of nonhuman intelligences, biorobotic implants, corporate entities, etc. It’s incomprehensible. Whether that’s a plus or a minus is up to the reader. Even as the novel is so firmly rooted in several traditions – the noir, of course, but also digressive Pynchonesque postmodernism, Dickian psychedelic SF (winked at through a corporation called UbIQ) – it also feels fully of the moment in our dystopic present. The hyper-contemporary voice is, indeed, almost distressing at points – intentionally and (post?) ironically, I believe, as hard to swallow we might find tongue-in-cheek (?) lines like “Threads of clouds the colour of burnt sugar crisscross the horizon as if the sky has low key self harmed,” or a club full of “people who looked like they were doing ableist Stevie Wonder impressions as they massaged one another. There was zero irony in the room.”
The narrative often dips into free indirect style, Lakerman’s thoughts and affect bleeding into the tight third person voice; when first given the assignment to look into Noumenon “Lakerman didn’t know what to make of the name though his initial feeling was that it was self consciously clever and a total misunderstanding of the concept and therefore totally indicative of yada yada yada.” Further adding to the conflations, it appears that some of the narrative is Lakerman’s notes for his article: a potential interview subject’s “brain maybe wanted the world to be as understandably complex and recognisably beautiful as a diamond, Lakerman thought. Scratch that. Delete. Lakerman ‘trashes’ the note. That would never make it past the line editor.” Further dissolving reality are hints he may be playing an Augmented Reality Game (complete with dialogue menus!), culminating in the actual immersive game of the title. There are constant mental digressions and discursions, but little in the way of introspection; it’s interiority as a misdirection and misapplication of exteriority. Chemical, psychological, technological, and narrative disassociation blur the lines between reader, narrator, and Lakerman; between human and implant; living and dead; animal and mineral; physical and digital; noumenon and phenomenon. All of these narrative tactics combine with the disaffection and alienation of late capitalism incumbent in Lakerman’s being, his reflections on narrative and abstraction and his inability to achieve real interiority, his struggle with subjectivity mirrors society’s slide away from objectivity as digital manipulation renders sensory evidence and trustworthy recordings a thing of the past. It all overwhelms, alienates, and lulls the reader as the narrative abruptly veers into abject, awful body horror; the biological recapitulating the personal and the social; capitalist colonization literalized as the remaking of bodies by biological AI.
All of this – narrative, style, late capitalism – culminates in “How I Killed the Universal Man,” the game/art piece/alternate reality/AI training ground embedded within the book’s final act. The Universal Man is an entity lacking individuality such that he’s a stand-in, “a living nightmare,” a face impossible to see, an AI cut off from the digital world and trapped in “the total monotony of knowing that you are a body cut subjugated to the world and its inexpressibility.” He’s the villain of the novel, if a concept so reductive can even be applied here, and his title rests less on the historical use of the term, a precursor of what we know as “the Renaissance Man,” than on a kind of platonic ideal (or nadir) of multiplicity. This struggle for identity and individuality drives Lakerman, and the Universal Man, and the novel, all of which struggle with the incompatibility of thought and language, with the lack of universal subjectivity, with the endless multiplicity of narratives and viewpoints.
In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx wrote that humanity “lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. … The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body.” This dialectic between the organic and inorganic resonates within Marx’s larger point in the manuscripts about the alienation of the working class: from their productive labor, from their fellow workers, from their selves. It’s not hard to draw a line from that uncanny estrangement through to the miserable, universal late-capitalist commodification and colonization driving How I Killed The Universal Man. Kendall’s narrator riffs on The Communist Manifesto to note that “All that is data will melt into air.” One hopes that readers of this timely novel will be at last compelled to face, with sober senses, their real conditions of life.
Zachary Gillan
Zachary Gillan is a critic residing in Durham, North Carolina. He blogs infrequently at doomsdayer.wordpress.com and tweets somewhat more frequently at @robop_style. His reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons and Ancillary Review of Books, where he’s also an editor.