Modernist Literature as Political Topology

Modernist Literature as Political Topology is McGowan's designation for a body of literary works — paradigmatically Faulkner's novels — that function not merely as aesthetic objects but as structural maps of the psychic terrain that any genuinely political act must traverse. The concept emerges from McGowan's argument that capitalism's durability is not primarily a matter of ideological mystification or failed class consciousness, but of a deep libidinal attachment: subjects invest in scarcity as a defense against the traumatic weight of abundance. The political revolution required is therefore psychic before it is economic, and modernist literature — especially Faulkner's — provides what McGowan calls "landmarks," orienting markers within that psychic and political space. These works are politically topological because they chart the shape of desire, lack, and jouissance rather than offering programmatic solutions; they reveal that lack and excess are not opposites but inseparable dimensions of the same Real, and that abundance is not relief from scarcity but its own form of trauma.

The "topology" in the concept is not metaphorical decoration: it signals that modernist literature operates at the level of structural form — the configuration of subject, object, and the field of the Other — rather than at the level of representational content or ideological message. Faulkner's prioritization of abundance in his prose (excess of language, of time, of affect) becomes, on this reading, a formal enactment of the insight that subjects cannot escape satisfaction, that enjoyment is always already there and cannot be deferred into a future plenitude. The political lesson such literature teaches is therefore Lacanian in structure: it stages the traversal of the fantasy that future enjoyment will resolve present lack, confronting the reader with the satisfaction they are already living.

This concept appears in capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan at a moment when McGowan is converting his psychoanalytic diagnosis of capitalism into a political program. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonicals. Its deepest anchor is the Scarcity-Abundance Dialectic: modernist literature is the cultural site where that dialectic is formally enacted rather than merely argued. The concept also depends on Fantasy: the political function of such literature is precisely to perform something analogous to the traversal of the fundamental fantasy ($◇a), stripping away the promise-structure of future enjoyment and exposing the jouissance that is already operative. Faulkner's abundance of form thus stages what McGowan sees as the psychic work that political subjects must do — not acquiring a correct ideology but relinquishing a fantasy.

The concept extends and specifies the canonical understanding of Ideology by insisting that literature's political efficacy is not ideological-critical in the traditional sense (i.e., demystifying false consciousness) but topological: it reshapes the subject's relation to Lack and Jouissance. Where Ideology names the structural operation that binds subjects to capitalist promise-logic, modernist literature — as political topology — names an alternative practice that makes visible the Lack at the heart of both scarcity and abundance, and the Jouissance that cannot be eliminated by any future redistribution. The concept also implicitly invokes Alienation: the modernist text does not overcome the constitutive split of the subject but maps its terrain, making it navigable. By positioning Faulkner as the figure who "speaks more poignantly today," McGowan implies that literature operating at the register of excess (abundance, formal overflow) is better suited to the current political moment than literature that merely diagnoses scarcity or exploitation.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.225)

A path toward this political act is illuminated by the landmarks of modernist literature... it is Faulkner, the writer whose novels give priority to abundance, who speaks more poignantly today.

The phrase "landmarks of modernist literature" casts literary works as navigational markers within a psychic-political space — not illustrations of a thesis but structural orientations — while "gives priority to abundance" identifies Faulkner's formal excess as itself the theoretical content, directly enacting the scarcity-abundance dialectic that McGowan argues capitalism cannot metabolize. "Speaks more poignantly today" anchors the claim historically, suggesting that the traumatic Real of abundance has become the dominant ideological problem of the present moment.