In the final chapter of his 2011 book The Server, Markus Krajewski reiterated the book's animating claim: “The history of subaltern serviceability must update its traditional means of analysis and conventional sociological theories.” The basis of these traditional means and conventional theories is underscored with a curt parenthetical: “(keyword: exploitation).” To understand the twenty-first century logic of subalternity, Krajewski argued, it is necessary to look beyond the “intricate paths of migration . . . dark storage rooms and broom closets,” those exemplary scenes of under-waged and heavily arbitraged labor in the globalized service sector. Instead, one must pursue “the transposition of various service functions into the virtual domain” (298). To do so, it is necessary to place the electronic digital server—whether a mail server, a file server, a web server, a print server, or one of the many other types—at the end of a historical trajectory that passes through...
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Book Review|
November 01 2023
Server the Servants
Mark McGurl,
Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
(New York
: Verso, 2021
), pp. 336
, hardcover, $29.95.
Seb Franklin
King's College London
SEB FRANKLIN is reader in literature, media, and theory in the Department of English at King's College London. He is the author of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (2021) and Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015).
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Novel (2023) 56 (3): 481–486.
Citation
Seb Franklin; Server the Servants. Novel 1 November 2023; 56 (3): 481–486. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10750687
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