CAPITALISM: In Vincenzo Latronico’s slim, sociological novella Perfection, it’s not the sole, identifiable agent but what Louis Althusser called an “absent cause” that organizes the world and lives of Latronico’s protagonists: millennial expats Anna and Tom, who moved from an unspecified place in southern Europe (presumably Italy) to Berlin in their twenties seeking a dream life as digital creatives only to become disenchanted with their aspirational lifestyle and their social media-motivated existence of curated images and shallow connections. An allegory of David Foster Wallace’s might help render this reading of Perfection clearer. In a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College (what’s become widely known as the “This is Water” talk), Wallace recounts two young fish swimming along who meet an older fish. The older fish asks, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” Later, one of the young fish later asks his companion, “What the hell is water?” Anna and Tom are akin to those young fish (though by Perfection’s end, the two are pushing forty, and have tried to recapture the charm and magic of their early years in Berlin in Lisbon and then Sicily). While they sense, here and there, what produced the booms and busts (materially and emotionally) of their lives, capitalism is but water for Anna and Tom. They need it, they live on it, but they never name it, never put their fingers on it. With its narrative of the vicissitudes of the pair’s lives, Perfection distills countless analyses of the spiritual, historical, and political void into which capitalism has thrown life.
If not quite faultless in execution, Perfection’s form as much as its plot points to the absent cause of capitalism. That Latronico places a quote from French novelist and filmmaker Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965)—“That was where real life was, the life they wanted to know, that they wanted to lead”—hints at the organizing principle of Perfection. But we only learn in Latronico’s acknowledgements, inserted at Perfection’s end, that his novella is “a tribute” to Perec’s novel: “Anything good in it owes a lot to him.” Indeed, Perfection transposes Perec’s novel, set against the backdrop of the “Trente Glorieuses” in France, that is, the post-World War II economic boom that led to the emergence of a consumer society characterized by increased wealth and the commercialization of mass-produced goods, onto twenty-first century Berlin, a city which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, reunited, and after the triumph of global capitalism over socialist models, experienced a neoliberal wave that transitioned the city (and Deutschland) from a managed economy to a more fluid and turbulent entrepreneurial economy. Occurring in different periods of capitalism notwithstanding, Perfection and Things both begin with a detailed description of a young couple’s flat: Things: “L’œil, d’abord, glisserait sur la moquette grise d’un long corridor, haut et étroit.” Perfection: “Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud.” Both novels also feature a youngish couple (Jérôme and Sylvie, a French pair living in Paris, in Things) who experience a comparable plot within capitalist waters.
Yet there are differences between Perfection and Things, and they boil down to the different capitalist oceans within which their protagonists swim. Drowning in the consumer culture and new wealth of the “Trente Glorieuses,” Perec’s upwardly mobile sixties couple (and those of the postwar generation across the North Atlantic) defined and invested themselves vis-à-vis “things.” In the end, Jérôme and Sylvie never (could) satisfy their cravings for material objects; they are left existentially sinking, the gap between the consumer items displayed in Parisian boutiques and the reality of their humdrum existence too great. Such dissatisfaction was inevitable: “Ils voulaient jouir de la vie, mais, partout autour d’eux, la jouissance se confondait avec la propriété.” In Latronico’s Perfection, by contrast, millennial expats Anna and Tom strive to tune their reality—work, social life, sex life, etc.—to the perfect images that they consume, almost always via a screen, and often via social media. “They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also around them.” Never the twain shall meet. Whereas Jérôme and Sylvie’s generation grappled with the effects that the explosion of things, of material objects, exerted on individual and societal levels, Anna and Tom’s (our?) millennial generation mightily struggle, compulsively so, with how the material world never matches—is sometimes devoured by—images. “The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated.” But: “Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures.”
This de-materialization of links between reality and representation is legible in Latronico’s description of the neoliberal principles of digital capitalism that inform Anna and Tom’s and their millennial manner of thinking and living. “The internet came of age with them.” The “passion” they had for “building personal websites and profiles…wasn’t learned. It was a natural consequence of the context in which they had grown up.” Such digital skills and digital proficiencies came in handy when Anna and Tom, post-university, dove into digital creative work; assignments were arrived at haphazardly in the beginning but then flooded their screens once they embraced their lifestyle, providing them with an abundance of leisure time and a mobility that they compared with their schoolmates’ “adulting,” which “painstakingly…followed another generation’s script.” Based in Berlin in the new millennium, Anna and Tom “instinctively” understood that their generational cohort—that is, Spaniards, French, Italians, and Americans—universally shared the desire to digitally “express what makes each person special.” Having learned enough English—that lingua franca of global capitalism (“English was the glue that held their community together”—to work for clients from all over the world, Anna and Tim were already prepared to creatively go with the flow, to let the market screen reality into and through a screen.
But, propelled by the social media that “had spread through every aspect of their lives,” Anna and Tom’s aspirational existence also cognitively and physically dis-embedded the couple, setting them adrift, unmooring them from their place. For, while Perec’s French couple lived in Paris, Latronico’s couple in Berlin are expatriates (interestingly they did not believe that that term applied to refugees and migrants). Whereas Jérôme and Sylvie were thus “French,” in part perhaps because France supported robust state-oriented industries next to private market mechanisms, Anna and Tom (and their friends) are driftwood, anxiously floating through Berlin. “Periodically” a friend “would disappear.” “That sense of [social] instability manifested as a constant nervous energy.” Such loss was both sign and symptom of an absent cause. By the 2010s, as the city’s intense transformations inundated the expat pioneers, Anna and Tom began using “the term ‘back home,’ surprising even themselves that Berlin was not it.” For the couple was never really there: “Language wasn’t the only national trait to dissolve…Their intellectual horizon was…largely formed from headlines in the Guardian or the New York Times…In their world Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.” The years run their course, and Anna and Tom only sipped from the source: they gained enough knowledge of Berlin to impress fresher transplants (now from Bavaria and the U.S.), yet never forged any meaningful connection with locals. They neither felt the need to learn German in an increasingly Anglophone city nor know about Berlin’s history. “This lack of awareness was reflected in their limited knowledge of the city’s topography.” Unable to see, they nevertheless advanced a capitalist flood: “Gentrification, as they understood it, was something other people did.”
Coupled with the “news and language” that “created a sort of shared ideological koine,” Anna and Tom’s failure to embrace Berlin and to understand how Berlin’s past tangibly exerts itself on the city’s present sinks the couple’s attempt to politically engage with their surroundings, drowning the future. When refugees, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, arrived in 2015, Anna and Tom tried to contribute to the migrants’ integration at the old Flughafen Tempelhof (now a public park). “They were driven by the urgency of the humanitarian crisis, of course, but also by the feeling that something was taking place around them that they didn’t want to miss, an outstanding rendezvous with history.” The couple wanted to participate in this historical deluge, but their “German wasn’t up to it,” and, despite what the “pictures” circulated on social media “suggested,” they “weren’t actually achieving much” at Tempelhof. In other words: the very capitalist forces that had carried Anna and Tom like a digital current to Berlin had at the same time washed away the possibility of political agency, of navigating the stormy seas of history. This impossibility, as Latronico’s explains, stands in contrast to previous generations’ opportunities, as they were presented with clearer solutions to political problems. “Now there were too many choices, with each one leading off on endless branches, preventing any real change. [Anna and Tom’s] idea of a revolutionary future didn’t go beyond gender balance on corporate boards, electric cars, vegetarianism. Not only had [they] not had the chance to fight for a radically different world, but they couldn’t even imagine it.” Here, Latronico echoes Frederic Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Mark Fisher, each having observed and formulated in their own ways: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” Or, as Latronico puts it: his bleary-eyed couple recognized “the future appeared out of focus.”
A consequence of the unrepresented turbulent typhoon of capitalism, the inability to steer the present into an imagined future leaves that future up to the whims and whimsies of that storm. In Berlin, “their network had…begun to disintegrate,” and the city’s once seemingly limitless open spaces were filled up while prospects evaporated. In response, in 2017, Anna and Tom decided to try remote work in Lisbon, only to find the place “felt like they were in Berlin”—that is, capitalist currents had, in a manner similar to Berlin, flooded “The City of Seven Hills”; the couple “were bored” there. To escape the harsh Berlin winter, they then float over to Sicily, but, after staying for “the unhappiest” four months “of their relationship,” sense “how similar it was to their place in Berlin.” Like Wallace’s fish, then, Anna and Tom remain unable to see—and thus analyze—the water they need (for example, on social media) to survive. Latronico tells us that the couple are only vaguely aware of the issue: They “were looking for…an authentic, uncrowded world of dark house wine in carafes and quiet hideaways by the sea” that “must have existed once upon a time…But now they knew those days were over and that…they couldn’t afford that world today.” Resignation, rather than rebellion, is habitual: almost forty, they now recognize “the con” of creating perfect images of their lives to beam across the global internet, but do nothing about it.
Impotent and ignorant, Anna and Tom keep drowning. They drift back to Berlin, “[i]tensely disoriented,” unable to grasp that the charm and magic—which flowed from “abundance”—they once felt there was “a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs.” Yet, while receding in Berlin, that oceanic wealth, as luck would have it, courses toward the couple when Anna’s uncle left her his farmhouse and estate. In 2019, Wallace’s fish still, the two excitedly decide to close their Berlin chapter (though they keep their apartment to rent it to subtenants) and convert the farmhouse into a boutique bed and breakfast. The frisson Anna and Tom feel as they embark on this new entrepreneurial venture, like the one they felt in Berlin in their twenties, is produced by inherited wealth. However, this fresh abundance is not generated by a political-historical sea change that affected entire populations (and several generations), but a rivulet directed at two. The depletion will constrain possibilities for any significant change: that Anna and Tom still seek perfection in images, and, instinctively, set up a website and social media accounts for their farmhouse and hire influencers to inflate its digital presence, fate the couple not simply to dissatisfaction at the disconnect between their material surroundings and their curated images. Rather, Anna and Tom are destined to swim against a torrent that only political organizing with a historical sense can halt and which the two fish lack: and this lack suffocates. One wonders how Perec’s Jérôme and Sylvie might have responded to the upheavals of May ’68, but three years after Things was published. Latronico powerfully leaves us with little to imagine.
Gregory Jones-Katz
Gregory Jones-Katz is a Research Associate at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He specializes in U.S. intellectual and cultural history and is the author of Deconstruction: An American Institution (Chicago, 2021). His work has appeared in Raritan, The Baffler, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Merkur. He is currently writing a cultural history of Dungeons and Dragons.