3 Neoliberal Style

In the song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix),” Jay-Z puns, “I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man.”1 This line brilliantly illuminates the ideal subject of neoliberal economics—the entrepreneurial individual, unfettered from any organization or regulation.2 The “businessman,” the company man, is outmoded in a world where the individual is, him- or herself, the business. In the years following Bob Dylan’s shift from folk activist to rock icon, personality in general has also shifted into an increasingly economic logic, as, for example, in the concept of “personal branding” so central to social media. Jay-Z captures this logic and represents its cultural power in the elaboration of a multicultural society stratified by the free market and the abandonment of collective bargaining, organization, and agitation.3 As Jay-Z indicates in his autobiography, Decoded, his own career and the history of rap music more generally have developed by documenting life stories through the trope of the hustler—a stylized narrative of an individual accumulating wealth outside of regulated markets.4 The hustler’s reach into hip hop and, by extension, contemporary global culture, is vast. As Tricia Rose remarks of hip-hop culture, “Being a hustler is the central model of success.”5

In the afterword to the paperback edition of Decoded, Jay-Z places his memoir in the context of literary culture, though he does so through an interlocutor, the poet Kathleen Norris. He recounts:

A month before the hardcover edition of Decoded hit the shelves, a poet named Kathleen Norris saw unbound pages of the book . . . lying on the desk of my publisher. She picked them up out of curiosity and started reading. Norris isn’t exactly part of the hip-hop generation: She’s an award-winning poet who has spent much of her adult life in South Dakota, and her most famous books are meditations on the spiritual life, based on her experiences in a monastery in North Dakota. I’m not sure she knew who I was at all when she started reading those pages. . . . But her response was humbling and gratifying—the first suggestion that maybe the book would achieve what we’d set out to accomplish.6

Norris’s response to the book, also reproduced in the afterword, dwells on how Jay-Z’s lyrics and his discussions of them reminded her of Emily Dickinson’s “bending” of language and the endnotes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But, she writes, “Most of all, this book has reconnected me with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A teenage hustler in jail, realizing that his vocabulary is limited to street slang, sets out to learn English by reading the dictionary! It’s really the story of a life saved, and a book written so that other kids that our society considers ‘throwaways’ might find a way out, another way to live.”7 Norris’s chain of literary associations—Emily Dickinson’s poetry, T. S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, and Malcolm X’s autobiography—place Jay-Z’s book in both an aesthetic and a social context. Resonant with traditional literary values—the use and manipulation of language, the construction of a tradition in which a contemporary work exists—the nonfiction work also has an overtly social and political meaning: it imagines and articulates an alternative to social norms, “another way to live.” This twinned formal compulsion—aesthetic and activist—is precisely what Jay-Z is after.8 Following Norris’s email, Jay-Z remarks,

For her, the book wasn’t a passive, one-way experience. She left it hungry to make more connections. That was all I’d hoped for when I first decided to write a book. When my publisher sent me Norris’s email, I emailed them back: Take the books off the shelves, I’m good.

Of course, I didn’t mean that literally.9

The joke that concludes Jay-Z’s citation of Norris replaces aesthetic and political values with individualized, economic value. Since Decoded pleased an established poet, who then placed it in a luminary literary context, Jay-Z asks to have the book taken “off the shelves,” humorously implying that the book’s economic function is subordinate to its aesthetic and political meaning. To the contrary, the joke emphasizes, the book’s economic value is inextricably connected to its literary value. The saturation of art by economics is even more apparent in the music video for Jay-Z’s 2013 song “Picasso Baby,” titled Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. The video was filmed at New York’s Pace Gallery over the course of a six-hour performance, during which Jay-Z performed with marquee artists and provocateurs like Marina Abramović and Andres Serrano. In the video, Jay-Z registers in the rarefied world of fine art as a sign of multiculturalism’s success and the free market’s meritocratic operation.10 Economic agency in “Picasso Baby” is equivalent to art making—the ability to buy a Picasso is evidence of Jay-Z’s own aesthetic production: “House like the Louvre or the Tate Modern . . . / . . . I’m the modern day Pablo, Picasso, baby.” Jay-Z’s joke in Decoded—that he “didn’t mean that literally,” that his book shouldn’t actually be taken off the shelves because Norris praised it—likewise makes clear that economic value coextends with aesthetic value, rather than differing from it.11 Jay-Z’s text posits that the work of nonfiction has aesthetic, economic, and political functions—it aims to be art, to sell, and to incite the reader to make new connections with others—yet economic rationality and the entrepreneurial figure of the hustler determine the circulation and presentation of the work. As in “Picasso Baby” and his larger body of work, Jay-Z is both speaker and subject, rapping about his experiences and their value as models both of entrepreneurial individualism and of the commodification of life. Perhaps the greatest aesthetic theorist of our time, Jay-Z writes and raps in neoliberal style.

As Norris’s comparison of Decoded to The Autobiography of Malcolm X suggests, Jay-Z’s brand of overblown, neoliberal individualism can be traced back to literary nonfiction about African American culture and the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the above, brief reading of Decoded and “Picasso Baby” establishes the basic terms, as well as the contemporary relevance, of this chapter’s genealogical analysis of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism. Haley and Thompson each documented radical politics and the drug culture for major magazines, and they consistently used the first-person voice in their nonfiction. The modes of nonfiction narration used by Haley and Thompson in their reportage about the 1960s and 1970s and their privileging of the first-person perspective of the hustler, the activist, the radical, and the drug fiend constitute a neoliberal style through which countercultural and revolutionary politics in the United States and beyond become ways not of contesting capitalism but of possessing rebellious individuality within it.12 As Wendy Brown has noted, the privatization and free market logic that have become dominant under neoliberalism led to a thorough instrumentalization of personhood, as humans are thought of not as subjects whose lives extend beyond the economy but instead as “human capital,” whose total existence is comprised of economic relations: “Neoliberal rationality recognizes and interpellates the subject only as a speck of human capital, making incoherent the idea of an engaged citizen, an educated public, or education for a public life.”13 Neoliberal style functions as a counter and compliment to this neoliberal rationality, as a “structure of feeling” that allows the subject to imagine individualized agency yet projects agency in political and social terms that neoliberalism renders increasingly moot as they are incorporated into market logic.14 In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey explicates the ways in which all social relations are rationalized as economic relations under neoliberalism. Harvey remarks, “The cultural consequences of the dominance of such a market ethic are legion.”15 Similar to Ferdinand de Saussure’s aside in Course in General Linguistics that the consequences of the arbitrary nature of the sign “are numberless”—a provocation that can be mapped onto the rise of literary theory—Harvey’s claim points to the vast cultural consequences of neoliberalism, a charge that has been taken up by a number of scholars in anthropology, geography, literary studies, and philosophy.16 Indeed, as the ideology of finance capitalism, neoliberalism has influenced the subjective mode of the documentary aesthetic. In nonfiction prose about African American culture and the drug culture, neoliberal style presents radical, countercultural politics as individualized and personalized, and in the context of nascent and emergent neoliberalism in the 1960s and 1970s, this individualization functions to obscure the collective promise of countercultural politics and to outfit resistance as an attractive posture for the neoliberal subject.

Haley’s and Thompson’s writings about the counterculture and their publication histories demonstrate the coextension of 1960s radicalism and emergent neoliberalism. As the “embedded liberalism” that Harvey notes as dominant in the post-1945 United States and Europe broke down in the 1960s and came into crisis in the 1970s, neoliberal policies were unevenly adopted and exported throughout the world over decades.17 While neoliberalism “only converged as a new orthodoxy with the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1990s,” the “capitalist world stumbled toward neoliberalization” during the decades in which Haley and Thompson produced their major works.18 In these decades, the high growth rates following World War II began to stall out, spurring on neoliberal strategies of privatization and deregulation.19

Aside from their shared historical moment, Haley and Thompson have, on the surface, very little in common. Haley is a commercial writer with moderate politics. He built his career publishing in mainstream magazines like Playboy, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post, coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and published a massive best-seller, Roots. Thompson, by contrast, rose to prominence writing for Rolling Stone about drug use, Freak Power, and Brown Power. In both cases, though with different valences and implications, Haley’s and Thompson’s first-person, nonfiction prose transforms political opposition into neoliberal style, an individualized, rebellious lifestyle ethic that inflects the subject’s imbrication in the free market. By naming and providing this genealogy of neoliberal style in first-person prose about 1960s and 1970s countercultures, I seek to name neoliberal style as a style and thus point to the ideological stakes of style in neoliberalism. As D. A. Miller notes, “Though style has never exactly been an art that conceals art, it has certainly been an art that tries hard to conceal labor.”20 The labor underneath neoliberal style is both the labor of Haley and Thompson as nonfiction stylists, as writers who struggle to articulate political positions through first-person prose, and the labor of neoliberal reforms, the increasing construction of the first-person perspective as a hegemonic subjectivity, determined by economic rationality. In his lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Michel Foucault captures Fredrich A. Hayek’s neoliberal philosophy when he remarks that in order for subjects in neoliberalism to believe that free market logic produces “the greatest good . . . for the greatest number of people, not only is it possible, but it is also necessary that each actor be blind with regard to this totality. . . . Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic agents are absolutely necessary.”21 In Playboy interviews, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and writings for Rolling Stone, despite their different politics and personas, Haley and Thompson use a mode of narration, neoliberal style, that is focalized through the first-person perspective of successful celebrities or charismatic activists associated with eroding political projects, thus finding in personal experience both the myopia that Foucault deems “necessary” to neoliberalism and also the promise and appeal of individual success and individual charisma as the only values remaining after the failure of collective movements. Because of their subjective form and content, Haley’s and Thompson’s writings produce a neoliberal style that comes to dominate life narratives and, not insignificantly, left politics under neoliberalism.22

In neoliberal culture, as all activity is rendered in economic terms, it is clear why Malcolm X can be a footnote reference to Jay-Z’s lyric “I got a hustler spirit.”23 Malcom X’s politics recede from view, as an economic understanding of Malcolm X as an agent in the free market, rather than an activist in society, becomes the hegemonic way of reading not just him but all subjects. In Haley’s and Thompson’s prose, the figure of the hustler is both a villain and a hero, a criminal and an icon of the rapacious ambition both writers themselves possessed and found in their subjects. For Haley, the transformation of the hustler “Detroit Red” into the activist and intellectual Malcolm X revised a classic American narrative of individual development. For Thompson, the figure of the hustler identifies not those at the bottom of America’s class structure but those in places of power: “[Henry] Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.”24 Whether Detroit Red or Henry Kissinger, the hustler finds a way to thrive and control his circumstances, and Haley and Thompson admire this drive—Kissinger even becomes “Super K.” Haley’s and Thompson’s documentary prose offers a formal, stylistic presentation of the individualized hustler, the production of neoliberal style.

The Hustler and the Handshake

The figure of the hustler is famously central to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a collaboration between Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Haley is a somewhat neglected figure in American literary history. He is excluded from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature despite being one of the most influential and successful writers of the 1960s and 1970s.25 Haley pioneered the Playboy interview in the early 1960s and would become a celebrity with the publication of Roots in 1976, adapted into the landmark TV miniseries in 1977. Ranging from articles like “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” in Reader’s Digest in 1960 to his Playboy interviews with Cassius Clay, Miles Davis, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Haley’s work would represent African Americans and, especially, the Nation of Islam in mass-market magazines and in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Haley completed after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. The distillation of Malcolm X into the figure of the “hustler” is one of the ultimate results of Haley’s work in the 1960s, in which he wrote about radical politics for a largely white readership and, in so doing, explained them away as radical positions that would inevitably be tempered and folded into American democracy. As Roderick Ferguson describes this process, neoliberalism thrives as “a means of using difference to foster capitalist distribution while curtailing social redistribution for underrepresented folks.”26 In what follows, I read Haley’s work as a way of promulgating racial difference within and as complementary to mainstream politics and nascent neoliberal economics, thus replacing redistributive justice and structural critique with the promise of agency in the free market.

The production of difference as a facilitator of rather than an inhibitor to the spread of the free market is perhaps best seen in Haley’s work as an interviewer for Playboy. Haley’s first interview published in Playboy was with Miles Davis, and it would be the model for the Playboy interview feature still running in the magazine today. In the interview, the unnamed interviewer, Haley, opens by asking Davis to comment on his “reputation for bad temper and rudeness to [his] audiences,” a question that addresses one of the major features of Playboy, the marketing of jazz, stereos, cocktails, and fashion to white males under the banner of the “hip.”27 Davis’s response both reassures the white consumer of jazz and educates him about the proper, cool attitude to take when listening to the music: “Look, man, I like people. I love people! I’m not going around telling everybody that. I try to say that my way—with my horn.”28 As suggested by the advertisement for Brookfield clothes that ran alongside the Miles Davis interview in the September 1962 issue of the magazine, Playboy attracted a youthful, white male readership who increasingly turned to jazz and African American styles—two of the three styles offered by Brookfield, “Ivy, Jivey, and Cats,” connote racialized hipness (fig. 11). Moreover, as Elizabeth Fraterrigo argues in her study of Playboy, the magazine actively reported on and took a liberal stance toward the civil rights movement in keeping with its editorial focus on the “rights of an individual in a free society,” even if, ultimately, “Playboy cared more about the status line than the color line.”29

Haley’s interview with Miles Davis focuses on what can now be described as emergent multiculturalism, especially when it comes to Davis’s account of race in music, television, and film:

If movies and TV are supposed to reflect this country, and this country’s supposed to be democratic, then why don’t they do it? Let’s see all kinds of people dancing and acting. I see all kinds of kids downtown at the schools of dancing and acting, but from what I see in the movies and TV, it’s just the white ones that are getting any work. . . . Look, man, right in music you got the same thing happening. I got this album, ‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’ and you know who’s on the jacket cover? My wife—Frances. I just got to thinking that as many record albums as Negroes buy, I hadn’t ever seen a Negro girl on a major album cover unless she was the artist. There wasn’t any harm meant—they just automatically thought about a white model and ordered one. It was my album and I’m Frances’ prince, so I suggested they use her for a model, and they did it.30

Davis’s interest in representation is coupled in the interview with his emphasis on individual artistry. As he remarks when Haley asks how he would rank other trumpet players: “Trumpet players, like anybody else, are individualized by their different ideas and styles. The thing to judge in any jazz artist is does the man project, and does he have ideas.”31 Haley then shifts the interview away from Davis’s aesthetics—the above rationale for why Davis plays with his back turned to the audience as a refusal to be considered a paid performer, a refusal of the tradition of minstrelsy—to a discussion of how “hip” consumers can modify their habits of consumption according to Davis’s desires. Fittingly, the interview concludes with Haley asking Davis if he is indeed “one of the financially best-off popular musicians,” to which Davis responds by discussing his “good portfolio of stock investments,” his house, “worth into six figures,” and his Ferrari.32 In the interview, Davis’s resistance to commodification and resistance to the marketing of jazz music rests comfortably next to his financial success. As the Brookfield ad demonstrates, printed alongside Davis’s statement of aesthetic principles and discussion of his stock portfolio, Davis’s individualized aesthetic commitments are both what make his music attractive as a hip commodity and unrelated to the marketing of jazz music and the jazz musician as a commodity for Playboy’s readers. Individual determination and perseverance would remain key to Haley’s representations of race in America, a mode of difference compatible with free market ideology as long as one’s individual commitments remain individual, not collective. This emphasis on the individual meshes with the consumerist logic of Playboy and the withering of modes of collective belonging under nascent neoliberalism, with which Davis’s view that prejudice obstructs the individual artist is entirely compatible.

A good portion of Haley’s other journalism from this period, including later Playboy interviews, would deal more directly with political figures. Alongside Playboy interviews with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Haley would also work on articles on the Nation of Islam for Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post. In these articles and ultimately in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley would position the Nation of Islam as an extreme in relation to a more universalist and less separatist racial politics. For example, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1963, “Black Merchants of Hate” was cowritten by Alfred Balk and Haley. According to Manning Marable’s definitive biography of Malcolm X, Haley’s coauthor was fed information by the FBI,33 and the article explicitly critiques the Nation of Islam as a threatening, radical group: “The Muslims’ mass rallies are perhaps the most spectacular and frightening events they stage, reminiscent in some way of the huge meetings at which Hitler screamed his doctrines of Aryan supremacy. We attended their latest rally in Philadelphia last October. Three hours before meeting time at the Philadelphia Arena a vanguard of 40 charter buses and caravans of cars began arriving from as far away as Boston and Atlanta. Most passengers wore the Muslim ‘uniform’—for men, dark suits and dark shoes; for women, Arabic-type white robes and kerchiefs.”34 The overt parallel between the Nazi Party and the Nation of Islam here casts the Nation of Islam in starkly negative terms, bizarrely erasing racial difference, and in so doing, Balk and Haley present other civil rights groups and strategies as beneficent in comparison. Alongside this portrait of the Nation of Islam as a kind of African American Nazi Party, the article also amplified Malcolm X’s role in the Nation of Islam—Malcolm X is introduced as a “lanky, energetic, good-looking man,” and the article devotes five paragraphs to outlining his life story, detailing his childhood, his young adulthood as the small-time hustler “Detroit Red,” named after his reddish hair, and incarceration for larceny.35 The article positions Malcolm X as an imminent threat to the Nation of Islam organization: “While Muhammad appears to be training his son Wallace to succeed him when he retires or dies, many Muslims feel that Malcolm is too powerful to be denied the leadership if he wants it.”36 Malcolm X’s history as the hustler Detroit Red and his conversion in prison would become key events in the Autobiography, which would soon get underway following Haley’s subsequent interview with Malcolm X in Playboy’s May 1963 issue. “Black Merchants of Hate” begins to narrate Malcolm X’s difference from the Nation of Islam and the power of his life story to resonate with others as both “remarkable and typical,” unusually interesting yet full of possibilities for identification. Haley would go on to expand on this in the Autobiography, a work whose potential audience is made clear in the early excerpt published in the Saturday Evening Post titled “I’m Talking to You, White Man.”37

If Haley’s interview with Miles Davis foregrounds the ways in which multiculturalism is compatible with free market ideals, Haley’s reporting on the Nation of Islam positions the separatist group as a foil, to propose and advocate for integrationist reform against the specter of fundamentalist, even fascist collectivity. Malcolm X would become the chief figure through which Haley would develop his advocacy of integration, and Haley’s own political perspective would be largely articulated in autobiographical form, giving the Autobiography its neoliberal style. Published in 1965, just months after Malcolm X’s assassination, the Autobiography is one of the most important texts in late twentieth-century American literature and culture. As Loren Glass has shown in his history of the Autobiography’s original publisher, the Grove Press, the book “was in the vanguard of the curricular revisions that transformed American education” from the 1960s to the present.38 The political becomes the personal in the Autobiography, especially insofar as the political recedes in the face of the personal. By casting Malcolm X as a man in perpetual conversion, ultimately arriving at a moderate racial politics, Haley expresses his attachment to the Cold War ideology of humanistic belonging.39 What the history of this attachment and the collapse of radical politics into identity make clear, though, is that a commitment to humanist belonging leads to the production of the individual consumer as the ultimate arbiter of politics, culture, and society. By making Malcolm X accessible and heroic to a wide audience, the Autobiography takes radical politics and turns them into life narrative, thus making any substantive political change seem unrelated to the more pressing issue of self-actualization. The structure, here, is one similar to what Lauren Berlant has described as “cruel optimism”—an affective attachment to an object that promises to further one’s political goals but in fact obstructs them.40

One of the most compelling and influential figures in the Autobiography is, of course, the hustler. Late in the Autobiography, Malcolm X reflects on his ability to speak to so many different audiences:

The point I am making is that, as a “leader,” I could talk over the ABC, CBS, or NBC microphones, at Harvard or at Tuskegee; I could talk with the so-called “middle-class” Negro and with the ghetto blacks (whom all the other leaders just talked about). And because I had been a hustler, I knew better than all whites knew, and better than nearly all of the black “leaders” knew, that actually the most dangerous black man in America was the ghetto hustler. . . . The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing. He has no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear—nothing. . . . The ghetto hustler is forever frustrated, restless, and anxious for some “action.” Whatever he undertakes, he commits himself to it fully, absolutely.41

The transformation of the hustler into the political leader and the coextension of the two entails notable omissions, mainly the elision of the collective belonging and advocacy so central to the Nation of Islam. Importantly, this hustler mentality is articulated in the Autobiography when Malcolm X is on the cusp of his full break with the Nation of Islam and his shift toward a more inclusive politics: “In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again—as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man.”42 This speech is followed with a brief scene in which a white couple in a car pull up at a traffic light next to Malcolm X. The white man in the opposite car asks, “Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?” And Malcolm X narrates, “Imagine that! Just as the traffic light turned green, I told him, ‘I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?’”43 It is left unsaid, of course, if the handshake actually happens, and that is key to the Autobiography, a text published mere months after Malcolm X’s assassination. The Autobiography’s opening chapter contains the following predictive sentences in a stand-alone paragraph, foreshadowing what the reader already knows to have happened: “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.”44 In his epilogue, Haley concludes with the following paragraph, sealing Malcolm X’s reputation through the book contract: “After signing the contract for this book, Malcolm X looked at me hard. ‘A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.’ I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can’t quite conceive him dead. It still feels to me as if he has just gone into some next chapter, to be written by historians.”45 The unrealized handshake functions as a metonym of Haley’s own engagement in crafting Malcolm X’s story and the legacy that Haley imagines here. By casting Malcolm X as a radical turned moderate, a separatist turned universalist, a criminal hustler turned political hustler, Haley’s epilogue mourns the death of the leader who could have been, the man that Malcolm X is projected to be on the way to becoming. The handshake between Malcolm X and the white man, African American radicalism’s transition to a less threatening, more moderate politics, never happens, but Haley stages it as a formal possibility. The “next chapter” that Haley wishes could be written about Malcolm X’s life would come to be occupied by Haley’s own pilgrimage not to Mecca but to Gambia, where he would construct his own ancestry through the figure of Kunta Kinte in Roots. Neoliberal style, then, offers not just a way to retain political beliefs as an individual, rather than part of a collective, but also a transformation of the past into a deeply personal genealogy, one that culminates in the late twentieth-century neoliberal subject.

Gonzo Journalism’s Freak Power

While The Autobiography of Malcolm X personalizes radical politics by undermining political difference in the name of universalism, thus positioning the desire for collective politics as a compliment to, rather than a potential disruptor of, the free market, Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo journalism” takes a different approach. Rather than occupying the position of moderate in relation to radicals, Thompson in the 1970s occupies the position of the radical, a position shared with Chicano lawyer and “Brown Power” activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, who appears in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as “Dr. Gonzo.”46 Thompson’s gonzo journalism documents the perpetual derailing and failure of radical politics in the 1970s, as emergent neoliberalism accommodates the drug culture as consumerism rather than resistance to American hegemony. As in Haley’s and Jay-Z’s first-person texts, Thompson’s prose uses neoliberal style to present a charismatic, rebellious individual, a subject who speaks as a political radical yet is ultimately isolated.

In his first contribution to Rolling Stone in October 1970, “The Battle of Aspen: Freak Power in the Rockies,” Thompson details his involvement in candidate Joe Edwards’s mayoral race, as well as his own run for sheriff of Aspen County. Thompson begins the essay by explaining his Freak Power party’s strategy of registering young people to vote, a difficult pitch to members of the drug culture: “The central problem that we had grappled with last fall is the gap that separates the Head Culture from activist politics. Somewhere in the nightmare of failure that gripped America between 1965 and 1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating the System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.”47 Balancing the desire for individual freedom with the commitment to political activism is the tension that motivates Thompson’s writing from the 1960s to his death in 2005, and that tension would often register the triumph of consumer choice over and against political change. Of course, Thompson immediately brings to mind hedonistic abandon and drug-fueled depravity—these famous paragraphs from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, originally published in Rolling Stone in 1971, speak to this mad accumulation of pleasure and goods:

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of mutli-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

All this we had rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County—from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.48

The shopping spree that opens Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas stands out as a hyperbolic example of the consumerist side of Thompson’s individualism. Pushed to its limits—by buying illegal drugs, and in such quantities—consumerism becomes less a progressive facet of modern life, as it is in Playboy’s association of consumerism with integration, and more of a dangerous, threatening violation of conventional morality and the self. The massive consumption of drugs—especially, in Fear and Loathing, ether——pushes individual consumption into the dissolution of the individual: “There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”49 This hyperindividualism that then dissolves the individual is where politics emerge in Thompson’s writing.

In “The Battle of Aspen,” published a year before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson describes his Freak Power party’s platform. Freak Power advocates for large-scale action against real estate developers: “Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the town and, in fact, to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls where everybody, even freaks, could do whatever’s right. . . . Fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.”50 Thompson’s idea of open space now conjures up visions of open-air pedestrian malls, popularized from the 1960s to the present as vital to urban renewal. Freak Power’s platform was launched against real estate developers and was articulated through the drug culture, a mode of consumption that is outside of sanctioned consumerism. Thompson’s vision is nevertheless coextensive with emergent “community-minded” real estate development, which equates personal freedom with the ability to shop, to consume, to purchase. That is, once the illegality and resistance of the drug culture is stripped away, Freak Power’s platform looks like a more acerbic version of urban renewal—the production of a community organized around the fusion of working, shopping, and consuming, rather than an alternative to the lifestyles produced from within free market ideology.

The tenuous fusion of individual liberty and the collective good imagined by Thompson would be the focus of his next article for Rolling Stone, too, published in the April 29, 1971, issue. “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” details the murder of journalist Ruben Salazar by the LAPD—he was shot in the head with a tear-gas canister—and its galvanizing effect on the Chicano movement in Los Angeles:

Within twenty-four hours, the very mention of the name Ruben Salazar was enough to provoke tears and a fist-shaking tirade . . . all over East L.A.

Middle-aged housewives who had never thought of themselves as anything but lame-status ‘Mexican-Americans’ just trying to get by in a mean Gringo world they never made suddenly found themselves shouting ‘Viva La Raza’ in public. And their husbands—quiet Safeway clerks and lawn-care salesmen, the lowest and most expendable cadres in the Great Gabacho economic machine—were volunteering to testify; yes, to stand up in court, wherever, and calling themselves Chicanos. The term ‘Mexican-American’ fell massively out of favor with all but the old and conservative—and the rich.51

These articles on Freak Power and Brown Power articulate consciousness-raising not as an act of self-realization but as an act of self-revision, and for both Thompson and Acosta, that revision of self was facilitated by massive drug use, which led to the dissolution and reconstitution of the self. Thompson’s political vision here is quite different than Haley’s—for Haley, a focus on life narrative signals a universal, liberal sense of belonging and community. For Thompson, the personal pronoun “I” leads to the formation of an oppositional block, a utopian collective founded on Truth and Power.

In an editorial note published in Rolling Stone in 1971, Thompson rails against the recent popularity of born-again Christianity: “A generation of failed dingbats and closet-junkies should under no circumstances be allowed to foul our lines of communication. . . . We have serious business to deal with, and these fuckers will only be in the way.”52 Thompson’s political aspirations, at this point, combined the rhetorical style of the counterculture with the pragmatics of political party organization, namely, the construction of a party platform and voter registration efforts. His neoliberal style both relies on and belies collective organization—he aspires to a great collective good on some level, but, at the same time, the forceful, foul-mouthed Thompson’s tone is so distinctive, so stylistically personalized, that it is incapable of being collectivized, of being imagined as the voice of a group rather than the voice of an individual.

Only a few months later in 1971, Thompson would begin to mourn this politics in his well-known quasijournalistic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Ostensibly in Las Vegas to report on the Mint 400 Off-Road Motorcycle Race, Thompson’s alter ego, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (Acosta), turn their trip into a drug-fueled quest for the American Dream. As Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Desert Inn to see Debbie Reynolds in concert, Thompson’s narration contrasts the glamour associated with Las Vegas with its tacky reality: “This was Bob Hope’s turf. Frank Sinatra’s. Spiro Agnew’s. The lobby fairly reeked of high-grade formica and plastic palm trees—it was clearly a high-class refuge for Big Spenders. . . . The moment we got inside we lost control. The tension had been too great. Debbie Reynolds was yukking across the stage in a silver Afro wig . . . to the tune of ‘Sergeant Pepper,’ from the golden trumpet of Harry James. ‘Jesus creeping shit!’ said my attorney. ‘We’ve wandered into a time capsule!’”53 Debbie Reynolds jumbles signifiers of the 1960s counterculture—the afro, the Beatles—into a middle-class performance for Las Vegas tourists drawn to the casinos because of their classy connotations and plastic luxury. As Duke meditates later in their journey, Las Vegas comes to represent the death of the American Dream, yet this recognition also entails, as Marianne DeKoven notes, a “muted identification with Las Vegas,” a troubling sense that Duke’s own rabid consumption is not, ultimately, that different from the middle-class consumerism on display at the Debbie Reynolds concert.54 Looking out the window and thinking about his life in San Francisco during the 1960s, Duke thinks about “that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil” that he had, that feeling of “riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”55 In Las Vegas, Duke realizes that he has found its endpoint: “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”56 Thompson’s countercultural hopes are thwarted by Las Vegas, which represents middle-class consumerism, the appropriation of countercultural styles by mainstream America, and conservative politics. Las Vegas consumerism would also, of course, come to symbolize postmodern simulacra and excess, the completely commercial landscape where form follows economic function, or as it was stated in the influential architectural book Learning from Las Vegas, where “buildings are also signs.”57 Individualism, then, becomes not a mode of redemption and universalization, as it is for Haley in his representation of Malcolm X’s break with the Nation of Islam, but a paradox—the only place left to go during neoliberalism, but also the place that has been created to contain and neutralize what once counted as political alternatives. In its dramatization of charismatic individuals who have already failed to realize collectivity, whether in Malcolm X’s potentially universalist political activism or Thompson’s Freak Power party, neoliberal style leaves one trapped within an individualized subject position, from which any kind of collective belonging has been preemptively stripped away.

Fear and Loathing was published in Rolling Stone the same year that the United States, under what is called the “Nixon Shock,” ended the convertibility of U.S. currency to gold, effectively shifting the global economy away from fixed exchange rates and toward a growing consensus against any form of protection from the vicissitudes of the free market.58 Fear and Loathing, then, signals a dirge-like retreat from politics to the personal, from collectivity to consumerism, from the protections of the welfare state to the privatizations of neoliberalism. Indeed, in one of Thompson’s last columns, written for ESPN in 2003, he writes:

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed. . . . The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be Number One, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives. . . . Big Darkness, soon come.59

Thompson’s adopted role—Raoul Duke, the cartoonish drug- and alcohol-fueled prophet of doom and despair—functions as a formal device for registering the displacement of political aspirations onto neoliberal style. It is an inversion of the handshake in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that never happens—a formal placeholder that marks the gap, ever widening, between personal experience and material conditions. That gap and its ever-widening expanse is the cultural force of neoliberalism, a force made visible through documentary.

When read as neoliberal stylists, Haley and Thompson document how personal experience and charismatic personae become the source of our political investments, just at the historical moment when entrepreneurial individualism emerges as the ideal subject of neoliberalism. Evident in the hustler trope ubiquitous in rap music, neoliberal style has also shaped the documentary aesthetic more generally: in the memoir boom starting in the early 1990s, in the “new sincerity” of contemporary writers, in the way that Errol Morris’s Interrotron presents interview subjects as speaking directly to the viewer, and in the focus on “presence” in performance art by Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, and others. It is also evident how racial differences in the United States have been the site both of fantasy projection for someone like Thompson, who finds in Oscar Zeta Acosta his rampaging, drug-fueled id, and of personal empowerment for writers like Haley and Jay-Z, for whom documenting the history of Black activism and art creates a path for future generations to follow. In neoliberal culture, these racialized modes become individualized even when they address or exploit collective experiences. Naming neoliberal style as a style and tracing its emergence in documentary narratives about countercultures is one way to begin charting the promises and the limits of entrepreneurial individualism and to become more attentive to modes of representation that cast neoliberal subjecthood against the exploitative structures that produce it.