the last great literary movement of the west, dixit levinson

From its inception as an institution in modernity, literature has been thus the cultural agent of either revolution or conservation, or of both. It comes to a close, however, when we can no longer discriminate between the two. When we cannot distinguish ‘literature as intervention’ from ‘literature as conservation,’ when aesthetic innovation, revolt, disturbance, and difference represent entrances into the market, into the Same itself, literature ceases both to sustain and disrupt the social dichotomies upon which the globe banks and thus concludes its modern function. I do not mean to suggest that literature now never plays these foundational roles. Rather, it does not enjoy any privileged right to those functions, and must compete for them with other forms. This is what we face today, the closure of literature. And this is why the Latin American Boom should be understood as the last great literary movement of the west and as the expression and thematization of the end of that movement.

The Ends of Literature: The Latin American 'boom' in the Neoliberal Marketplace de Brett Levinson. 

the topos called the market, dixit Levinson

Because it [the nihilism of the market, of neoliberal consensus], first, adopts the signifier and representation, thus mutability and diversity as its ground, and, second, distinguishes these from the signified, immobility, imposition, and unity—because it demands that intellectuals, like shoppers, choose from the signs before them, assume their proper place in the order of representation, thereby support unawares a market arrangement whatever discourse or idea they select—because of all this, the linguistic turn tends to ‘sweep right by’ saying as the counter to the ‘it goes without saying’ of consensual postdemocracy. Our concern for language, to repeat, lies here: in saying this topos which runs most efficiently without any saying, indeed, which makes all saying increasingly difficult or scarce even as it creates avenues for more and more voices—to wit, the topos called ‘the market’.

Market and Thought:

 Meditations on the Political and Biopolitical, de Brett Levinson.