Not All That: Autoforms, Narcissism, and the Neoliberal Cultural Landscape

In this paper, I suggest that autoforms—writing like autofiction, autotheory, fictocriticism, and autoethnography—act as cultural interventions in neoliberal landscapes. I suggest they make explicit promises to their readers: that the text will be self-consciously political; that the form will challenge neoliberal logics; and that, counter-intuitively, the subject won’t be the narrator themselves, but the neoliberal landscape they navigate. Neoliberalism contains two important contradictions: the appearance of democratic ideals alongside the practice of consolidating economic and social power (MacEwan 2015, 170). To obscure this, neoliberal societies are full of double-binds that inevitably undermine concepts of truth and expertise (Strassheim 2023, 107–108). The narrative tools to rationalise these contradictions appear throughout the neoliberal landscape, resulting in normalised hypocrisy and endemic irony. For example, authors who narrate through the close first-person are labelled narcissists, while the omniscient godly narrator is a shield against accusations of narcissism. The logics of neoliberalism are often so nonsensical that countering them risks becoming equally absurd; instead, by editing ‘all that’, autoforms reframe these logics and allow new ways of seeing the cultural landscape—not explicitly through content but implicitly through form. The paper summarises my presentation at the 2024 IABA World Conference.