Fictional Labor: Ethics and Cultural Production in the Digital Economy

This book advocates for the ethically formative labor that fiction accomplishes. As a force of production, the fictional labor of literature and the visual arts shapes the formation of collective meaning in an era marked by the negligence of social, financial, and environmental responsibility. As neoliberalism’s hegemony since the 1980s has intensified through the proliferation of digital technologies in the 21st century, considering works of creative art as an ethically productive force is a necessary complement to political and economic critiques. The book invites readers to rethink how mutations in the production, circulation, and consumption of literary and visual materials are implicated in the commodification of information and attention for private gain. The link can have a positive effect that transforms the social relation from a capitalist ethos that expends life for profit to an alterity-driven ethos that defends life. But remedying the paucity of moral sentiments of social existence requires fictional labor to generate ethical sensibilities, cares, desires, and wills. The book’s close analyses demonstrate the aesthetic and formal aspects of literary and visual art that mediate between social relations to yield a dependence alterity, including the otherness of a precarious present, a menacing future beyond economic mastery, and an environment enmeshed with living beings and things.

Jiewon Baek is an independent researcher, formerly an Associate Professor of French at Covenant College.