Fantastic Autonomy: A Rhetorical Style in Economic Storytelling

In this essay, I identify and analyze a narrative style found across a range of artifacts in popular culture that I call fantastic autonomy. Based on careful readings of durable, quotidian, and spectacular exemplars, I show how these narratives seduce viewers and ultimately produce a distorted view of capitalist production wherein materials and techniques yield finished products as if by magic, ultimately perpetuating commodity fetishism. Understanding the rhetorical appeal and consequence of such stories tells critical scholars much about the ways that labor is denigrated and, more often, erased in popular culture.