Autofiction and Emotional Capitalism: The Tortured Poets Department and I Love Dick

Words: Martha French

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“Hyperbolic” is how Taylor Swift describes her latest ‘double’ album The Tortured Poets Department: “It’s about a dramatic, artistic, tragic take on love and loss”. Everything within – and around – the album seems to have been figured through this lens of excess. Over 31 exhausting tracks, it delves deep into Swift’s failed relationships: with partners; fans; friends; enemies.

She has often leveraged emotion as an economy – and made literally billions out of it – and TTPD is her most knowingly self-absorbed album yet. In part, through its visceral, almost abject, emotional intensity, yet also (given its controversial vinyl variants, and Spotify-sponsored pop-up at The Grove Mall in LA) its nature as an explicitly capitalist project. Try as we might, we cannot separate Swift’s work from the language of value and accumulation. 

But TTPD complicates this, as its length allows it to embody the excesses of feeling and industry that constitute Swift’s brand, whilst also being an earnest and accomplished album in its own right. It relies on self-dramatisation and (over)sharing in order to fulfil the “artistic” mode its title promises: that is, to perform as – and parody – a literary project. In this sense, TTPD has an autofictional logic, with its faux-confessional slant both challenging and indulging her audience. So, what would happen if we viewed the album not simply as a rushed attempt at more money grabbing, nor as a morally pure effort to portray heartbreak, but as autofiction that figures emotion itself as a kind of currency? 
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The definition of autofiction is as ever-expanding as Swift’s persona, but it is essentially shorthand for art that treats its creator as a (main) character, controlling and complicating the audience’s understanding of said creator. Autofiction is at once radically intimate and necessarily performative; to fictionalise yourself is both to expose and obscure it. But it is also market it. For instance: American writer Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick (a fantastic potential subtitle for TTPD), which follows ‘Chris Kraus’ through an affair with her own British ‘bad boy’ Dick Hebdige, told through letters he never responds to. Like TTPD, it is a messy and unsparing subversion of a literary form (here the letter, rather than the poem) that radically centres the feelings of its female protagonist: Kraus describes herself as “a factory of emotions evoked by all the men”. 

“What would happen if we viewed the album not simply as a rushed attempt at more money grabbing, nor as a morally pure effort to portray heartbreak, but as autofiction that figures emotion itself as a kind of currency?” 

Swift too is a woman who is pretending to tell us about men so that she can tell us about herself. Or rather, her selves. She has often spoken of the need to “reinvent” herself to remain commercially viable, and throughout TTPD she fashions herself in turns as: an alcoholic (functioning); a queen; suicidal; a toy; wise; an idiot; a poet (but not Patti Smith); an ex-convict; a simple girl; Jesus Christ; a witch; a “tough kid”; a fool; a depressive; a bitch; a loser; cool; uncool; a stalker; a heroine; a bird; a high schooler; Cassandra; an Aristotle-aficianado; and – in the final track of the album’s first half – “like Taylor Swift”. Both Kraus and Swift tell the story of how autofiction is simultaneously humiliating and professionally useful: I Love Dick is Kraus’s bestselling work by far, and TTPD instantly became Swift’s.

These self-centred emotions are not a disavowal of craft, but the engine of a different kind of emotional project. Sociologist Eva Illouz argues that the emotional and the economic are inextricably tied in contemporary cultural exchanges, a phenomenon she calls ‘Emotional Capitalism’. In this context, ‘emotional life [...] follows the logic of economic relations and exchange’, and Swift seems acutely aware of this throughout TTPD, where such exchanges drive her autofictional persona. On I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, she claims “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday”, before quipping – in a sudden, knowing turn – “try and come for my job!”

However, the resounding response to the album has been that it is – in so many words – too much. TTPD’s lyrics are arguably her most vulnerable yet, not only in their emphasis on sadness (and obsession with babies and death), but in their sheer quantity. Even individual lines feel uncomfortably overstuffed: try and say “at dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding” without pausing for breath. The New York Times suggests Swift needs an editor, but this excess is an integral part of its hyperbolic mode. 

Indeed, academic Rachel Sykes describes Kraus’s I Love Dick as a deliberate, feminist act of ‘oversharing’, arguing “Chris never intended to “share”, but rather to perform and parody the act of sharing itself,” and we can map this onto TTPD. Swift is, like Kraus, her own entrepreneurial editor, and TTPD is a pointedly cynical experiment, offering listeners a ‘share’ in her life by playing on the many forms of value – from the cultural to the monetary – that emerge from the confessional in an attention-based economy. 

TTPD is a dark album, but it’s also her most self-parodying. Kraus’s narrator believes “if wisdom’s silence then it’s time to play the fool”, and on TTPD there is power and profitability in performing delusion. See: ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’ where she cries “So tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is?”, simultaneously mocking and elevating her obsession with herself, and our obsession with her. Kraus too considers how to bring together the “open wound I used to be with the money-hustling hag that I’ve become. We suicide ourselves for our own survival”. Autofiction routinely embraces symbolic suicide over reconciliation, much like Swift’s Old Taylor who can’t come to the phone right now. Her “survival” as a creative worker depends on this willingness to poke and rewrite the “open wound”; on TTPD she satirises this process. 

And so, the aesthetics of the album are fundamentally compromised; equal parts emotionally and economically motivated. TTPD is moving within, rather than in spite of, its potential profitability; to quote Kraus “you have to work the market”. This is not a romantic version of events, but it is – just as TTPD strives to be – a messier, truer, one. Even if Swift insists she wants her fans to stop “bitching and moaning” on But Daddy I Love Him, she has us exactly where she wants us: still talking, still feeling, and still buying in.