The Political Economy of Instrumentarian Power: Surveillance Capitalism and Posthuman Subjectivity in Jennifer Egan's The Candy House

Abstract

This article offers a condensed critical reading of Jennifer Egan's The Candy House (2022), examining how the novel's speculative technology of memory-externalisation, Own Your Unconscious, dramatises the mechanisms that Shoshana Zuboff (2019) theorises as surveillance capitalism. Reading the novel alongside Zuboff's account of behavioural surplus, prediction products, and instrumentarian power, and alongside Rosi Braidotti's (2013) posthumanism and Karen Barad's (2007) concept of intra-action, the article argues that Egan's text stages a productive but strained analogy between corporate data extraction and a fictional platform whose users volunteer their memories in pursuit of communal transparency. This voluntariness, the article contends, is not incidental to the novel's design but is also the analogy's chief theoretical liability: it allows Egan to dramatise the affective and existential stakes of datafication with unusual intimacy, while risking a softened picture of a phenomenon whose real-world force depends on asymmetry, opacity, and non-consent. The analysis traces this tension across the novel's interlocking narratives, arguing that Egan's formal fragmentation - rather than any single character's fate - constitutes the text's most persuasive argument about distributed, posthuman subjectivity under conditions of pervasive datafication. The article closes by weighing what this reading contributes to, and where it strains against, existing scholarship on surveillance fiction and critical posthumanism.

Keywords: Surveillance capitalism, behavioural surplus, instrumentarian power, posthuman subjectivity, intra-action, Jennifer Egan