Postpolitical deregulation eroded the institutions and hierarchies that novels depend on

Evidence

As the American critic Christopher Caldwell has pointed out, the age of postpolitics “require[d] dismantling hierarchies, institutions and cultures.” Although presented as an economic imperative, this generated a nettlesome problem for fiction writers, since the “same hierarchies, institutions, and culture are what novels have always been about,” even if society “does not nurture these the way it did in an age of large and loyal families, intertangled commercial enterprises and long-settled communities.” In Caldwell’s view, Houellebecq “faced this predicament with artistic integrity, refusing to fantasize that individuals in our time can somehow be re-inserted into such ‘novelistic’ webs of meaning.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 80

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what postpolitics meant in practice: dismantling hierarchies and institutions, not merely depoliticizing.
• XREF: Connects to why mass institutions that convert feeling into force have hollowed out — exactly the reader’s causal chain.