Post-leftism: The political economy of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting

Abstract

This thesis examines Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting with a view to distilling the politics of the novel. Assessing how the text treats political economy and using neo-Marxist thought, I argue that Welsh's politics might be described as post-leftist. Trainspotting problematises and rejects both the new left (Third Wayism) and the old left (socialism) as politics that lock parties into late capitalism, forming part of the landscape of what Jacques Ranciére calls 'consensus' politics. Instead, Welsh develops a politics beyond these positions. Identifying distributive wrongs in late capitalism, Welsh addresses these wrongs by developing a 'dissensus' politics that stakes terms outside the frame reference of neoliberalism. These terms refute the core belief that late capitalism is good for us - that it operates utterly in our interests and is the only viable contemporary regime of social, economic, and political organisation. Complementing this strand of investigation, the research also probes whether this post-leftist politics might be compromised by the fact of Trainspotting's phenomenal commercial success of, especially within a market context where the symbols and messages of anti-capitalism and rebellion as been commodified as popular products. I suggest that rather than nullifying Welsh's politics of resistance, the commercialisation process actually advanced the politics of the fiction. The marketing and capitalisation of the novel and its author failed to capture and sell post-leftism, and rather furnished a chance for Welsh to focus attention on political economy as well as to publicise a demand for the refusal of consensus politics. Indeed, the circulation of the novel in the market also ran against the grain commercial arrangements for its retail, aggravating internal contradictions within the market and leveraging its mechanisms to put stress upon the regime's impetus to (the wrongs of) accumulation and vertical stratification. Trainspotting, then, is a novel committed to resistance in the face of contemporary post-political defeatism.