Empty Mediation: Contemporary Media Culture and the Failure of Affect in Leaving the Atocha Station and The Answers

This article examines how Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and Catherine Lacey’s The Answers (2017) – two contemporary American novels of the 2010s – reflect and interrogate the transformation of media culture in the context of hyper-industrial capitalism and its sociocultural impact on one’s identity and affect. Charting the commodification of artistic media and the ascendancy of techno-capitalist products, the study argues that these medial changes disrupt conventional modes of mediation and identification, culminating in the failure of affect. At the same time, the novels also gesture towards the symptomatic obsession with or fixation on affective experience as a compensatory response to this disruption, which further reflects the paradoxical entanglements of one’s identity, personal desire, and mediation in contemporary life. 1