ABSTRACT
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King achieves a new novelistic form that narrates different capitalist temporalities simultaneously – in his case, the classic logistic of capitalism and its particular contemporary form in neoliberalism. A reading of his novel suggests a solution to the goal of cultural materialist theory. By rereading the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital, we can perceive the absence of a term – fixed labour-power – that ought to be present but is not. By providing this term, we can resolve incompletely theorised techniques from Russian Formalism and its later adaptation by Fredric Jameson. The Pale King thus creates a text that suggests what a Western communist or left front novel in the postCold War, post-9/11 period might look like.
