The cultural fix : capital, genre, and the times of American studies

How might genre theory intertwine with Marx’s work on expanded reproduction of capital? In this chapter, I argue for the importance of an implied, but absent, category in Marx’s Capital: fixed labor-power. Once we provide this term, it becomes possible to generate a non-representational framework for the relations of capital and culture. Rather than considering genre as a nomenclature of exclusion and difference, we can see it as a mechanism for the creation of more durable mixtures of culture. The resulting construction can be considered as a cultural fix, a narrative apparatus that helps maintain class relations over a long spiral containing multiple, smaller capitalist cycles