This chapter is about William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitionsand its depiction of creative labor in the thoroughly commercialized space of New York City’s culture industry. In this novel the classically tragic trope of recognition or anagnorisis plays out against a social backdrop of art and commerce and within a narrative whose dominant mood is comic. In this way Gaddis’ novel presents a dialectical movement between the comic and melancholicregistering tragedy above all in the stylistic shifts that occur between long stretches of dialogueon the one hand and omniscient description on the other. Here a profound melancholia registers in the exchange between the Faustian satire performed at the level of narrative content and the sincerely wrought descriptions of art studios and the urban environment. Specifically tragic affect persists within scenic descriptions of postwar New York as though to recognize the exhaustion and defeat of artists laboring under the emergent regime of consumer capitalism.

This chapter explores the emergence of a new culture of corporate credit in the 1970s, one specifically tied to the corporate self and the practices of financialisation that supported it. It examines the ways in which these cultures were supported by the self-affirming logic of neoliberalism that was capable of rejecting the very possibility of perceiving the world outside of its own terms. It argues that William Gaddis’ novel JR draws on an alternative history of post-war economic thought, one associated with Norbert Weiner rather than Milton Friedman, which offers a critique of the positivist triumphalism of 1970s economic thinking. It reads JR through the potently ambivalent idea of entropic failure – one that suggests an entirely different conceptual trajectory for understanding the meaning of the emerging debt cultures in this decade.