New-Economy Zombies: Kathrin Röggla’s wir schlafen nicht

Abstract

In her 2004 documentary novel wir schlafen nicht, Kathrin Roggla ventures into the destructive universe of the so-called New Economy. Cracks are beginning to show in the New Economy boom, and the reader is drawn into a world where pressure to perform has been driven to the point of absurdity amidst the mantras of competition, flexibility, efficiency, and downsizing. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony, this chapter considers how, through the medium of orchestrated polyphonic dialogues, Roggla imparts a trenchant criticism of man's dysfunctional and self-destructive condition under the totalising effects of a technology-based, neo-liberal economy that has spiralled out of control. The result is a disconcerting insight into the reification of the individual within a totalising economic system which, in its striving for efficiency, commodifies human beings, transforming them into zombie-like automatons.The Austrian-born writer Kathrin Roggla made her literary debut in 1995 with the novel niemand lacht ruckwarts. Among her numerous subsequent works are the novels Abrauschen (1997), Irres Wetter (2000), really ground Zero. 11. September und folgendes (2001), and wir schlafen nicht (2004). Her most recent works include the plays worst case (2009), Die beteiligten (2009) die unvermeidlichen (2011) and the prose collection die alarmbereiten (2010). Roggla's concerns are contemporary, and they are varied. Born in 1971, she belongs to what can be considered a new generation of Austrian writers who, primarily for generational reasons, are no longer chiefly concerned with coming to terms with Austria's complicitous National Socialist past. Roggla is concerned instead with the world of work, the consequences of identity loss in an increasingly globalised world, the shattering effects of a totalising neo-liberal form of social organisation for the individual, and the instrumentalisation of language in the age of digital media. Roggla's style is experimental and often ironic. Like Austrian predecessors such as Ernst Jandl, H. C. Artmann, Oswald Wiener and Gerhard Ruhm, or her contemporary Elfriede Jelinek, the author makes extensive use of lower case letters in her work in an attempt to present the ?Materialcharakter' of language, which she defines as ?ein anderes Bild von Sprache [...], das dem hergebrachten instrumentellen entgegensteht'.1 In this respect, Roggla's perspective on language is in the tradition of the Wiener Gruppe;2 she views language as a raw material with an optical as well as acoustic quality. She attempts to reconstruct language in uncustomary contexts, to arrange her medium in such a way as to facilitate new insights, to draw her readers' attention to how they are reading and to the manner of her characters' speech. She employs linguistic criticism, in other words, as a form of social criticism, and her writing can thus be definitively placed in the tradition of ?Sprachskepsis' often associated with Wiener Gruppe writers.3 Roggla is equally experimental in terms of genre; many of her works - including the novel under consideration here - have also been produced for the stage.4 She is interested in what she calls ?Schreibformen, die sich zwischen alle Stuhle stellen'.5 Moreover, much of her work belongs in the category of documentary realism. Her plays, prose texts and novels are saturated with interview and journalistic material and with quotations from the mass media. In this respect, Roggla has been hailed as ?die Reporterin unter den deutschsprachigen Dramatikern'.6 She displays a particular interest in what she calls ?[die] in den Massenmedien geschurte neoliberale Hysterie' and specifically in the mass media's representation and instrumentalisation of social, ecological and economic catastrophes.7 These concerns are particularly manifest in her two 2009 plays worst case, which deals with media scaremongering, and her critically acclaimed Die beteiligten, which presents the media storm surrounding the case of the kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch. …