| dc.description.abstract | Since the “Great Recession” in late 2007, economic inequality in the United States has been increasing sharply. The notion of “talent” has been a key prism through which the various responses to economic inequality have been refracted. Talent is able to bend and shape the appearance of economic inequality because it is rhetorical, attributing innovation and economic productivity to the “authorship” of specific individuals through metonymy. The rhetorical function of talent operates within a broader “neoliberal imaginary,” in which the invisible order of the market appears to operate behind the material world, organizing the environment of concrete, everyday reality. Against the dominant understanding of economic inequality as an issue of the redistribution of wealth, I argue a fundamental, prior issue is the reattribution of talent. Framed as a problem of redistribution, economic inequality appears to require the transfer of wealth from productive individuals making disproportionately large economic contributions, to less productive individuals contributing substantially less. I examine the metonymical function of talent through three case studies. In First, in US immigration reform debates, pro-immigration advocates use the discourse of the “global war for talent,” enabling neoliberal state governance by positing talent as a key ingredient in gaining economic advantage. Second, biographical constructions of Steve Jobs do not quarrel over whether he was talented or a “genius,” but instead take his genius for granted, and concern themselves with specifying the particular sort of genius he manifested. The circulation of Jobs enables the attribution of Apple’s productivity to his possession of “delicate taste,” allowing him to function as a cultural shorthand justifying relations of economic inequality. Third, the response to President Obama’s “you didn’t build that,” speech explicitly argued individual immigrant entrepreneurs were “talented” because they act as the source for “inventions,” enabling the success of their companies to operate as evidence of talent ex post facto, through metonymy. Each case study demonstrates a unique site at which talent is operationalized as a rhetorical mechanism for organizing economic relations of power. While the sites are distinct, however, all three sights illustrate the importance of rhetorical theory to the study and critique of economic inequality. | |
