ABSTRACT
The introduction outlines the book and develops my theory of upper-middle class subjectivity and its relationship to culture and politics. My work uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital to combine aesthetic analysis and cultural interpretation to examine how class is signaled on an unconscious level through specific artistic effects in a particular social context. While the shows I examine do come from American culture during the period called Neoliberalism, these productions have reached a global audience and relate to political ideologies transcending national borders. Moreover, my use of psychoanalytic concepts places this new aesthetic form into a shared set of psychopathologies. As a mode of modern democratic universalism, psychoanalytic theory represents a liberal conception of culture and subjectivity, which is itself countered by the Neoliberal Right and a centrist mode of political ideology and individual psychopathology.
