“All business as usual”: Richard Powers’ Gain and the Complicities of (Re-)Incorporation

Renowned for his thoroughly researched ‘discursive narratives’ that trace in near-encyclopedic mode the complex interconnectivity of life in our (post-)postmodern period, Richard Powers’ Gain ambivalently raises the stakes of politics in the novel of late capitalism by asserting the imaginative agency of fiction itself. But how does one employ fiction to redress the simulacral hollowing out of everyday life in a corporate culture that fabricates reality by molding consumer desire to its own ends, specifically the end of financial profit? Can the ethical acknowledgement of complicity do away with its inevitability and even willingness within the unmappable totality which is our late capitalist moment? Gain confronts this problematic in ways that both resist and embrace it. The novel’s seemingly intentional ambivalence that mimics, yet strives to invert, the unashamed cynicism of late capitalist ideology finds a point of obdurate insistence in the ‘corpo-reality’ of the human body itself. At the same time, it imagines a vehicle of transcendence in the re-incorporation of that body or, more specifically, that body’s agential possibilities in a sphere beyond mere economic interest. Yet the asymmetry patent between the body’s death and the deathless corporation, despite the narrative parallelisms that the novel damningly establishes, returns us to the ambivalence of fictional ambivalence itself and the ethical dilemma of imagining ourselves beyond the currently unimaginable real.1