The below is an extended version of a talk I gave at the University of Warwick on the 7th of June 2023 as part of the Capitalism and Crisis seminar series organised by Will Berrington. I would like to thank Will for the invitation to present and participate in the series, and my co-panelist on the day, Leigh Claire La Berge, whose paper on ‘No More Commodification’ I enjoyed immensely. For the past couple of months I have been involved in union-led efforts to oppose wide-ranging redundancies and restructuring at London South Bank University (for recent coverage please see here and here and, if you feel inclined, please sign our petition). Whilst most work that goes on in the University is bounded by these contexts of struggle – at LSBU, the threat of deskilling and increased workloads for colleagues that are ‘spared’ , worsening conditions and outsourcing for others, whilst joblessness for the rest – I appreciated the opportunity to speak to some of my academic interests for once, a brief respite from the administrative activities that otherwise consume the day.
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In an essay published in The Minnesota Review, Fredric Jameson praises Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel The Names for the ways in which it navigates the ‘spatial dilemma’ confronting fictions of the world-system. This dilemma, Jameson glosses, can be ‘described as the increasing incompatibility – or incommensurability – between individual experience, existential experience, as we go looking for it in our individual biological bodies, and structural meaning, which can now ultimately derive only from the world system of multinational capitalism’. Whilst the non-identity of self and concrete social reality is crucial to Lukács’s theorization of the novel, Jameson suggests that the rift between bodily experience and structural intelligibility recorded in texts like The Names breaks with the novel’s previous ability to resolve what Lukács calls the ‘fundamental dissonance of existence’. Whereas realism reconciles the individual’s alienation from society through the nation-state and modernism takes the disintegration of such institutional compromises as the impetus for its own formal innovation, contemporary writers encounter a situation where the economic structures organizing social existence cannot be mapped from daily life. As the narrator of The Names observes: ‘the sense of things was different in such a way that we could only register the edges of some elaborate secret. It seemed we’d lost our capacity to select, to ferret out particularity and trace it to some center which our minds could relocate in knowable surroundings’.
Appearing in 1984, these elliptical reflections on The Names rehearse lines of argument which will become more familiar as Jameson elaborates his account of postmodernism – here, only tentatively referred to as a ‘new slogan’. In a near contemporaneous essay, Jameson stresses that postmodernism is not merely the name of a new style or aesthetic sensibility but a ‘periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and new economic order’. DeLillo is an exemplary postmodern novelist because of his attraction to pastiche, for his restless picking up of worn-out genres like the thriller and reviving them artistically. With its exhaustion of the new, pastiche stylistically indexes the total subsumption of social relations by the commodity-form, a situation which dismays the murderous alphabet cult in The Names, who strive to exit a world that has become, in their view, ‘self-referring’. Jameson links this self-referential world to the post-war economic boom, an unprecedented period of growth which globalized production and transformed the affective composition of the economy, with the fear of non-work replaced by the joy of consumption. The emergence of a multinational world-system constitutes a new stage in the history of capitalism, one whose central problem to be solved formally for ‘epistemological’ writers like DeLillo, Jameson contends, is the ‘ineradicable tension between fragmented, private experience and the “scientific” explanation of the world’.
From the vantage point of the 2020s, Jameson’s techno-futurist faith in the unrelenting dynamism of post-industrial societies might appear less persuasive. Rather than an era of ambient prosperity ushered in through the colonization of nature and the unconscious, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are instead characterized by economic stagnation, endemic joblessness, ecological deterioration, and persistent unevenness within both poles of the world-system. The worsening of capital’s structural contradictions has prompted another return to Marx in literary studies, although now, the focus is trained less on the alienation of the soulless consumer and more on the immiseration of the proletarianized worker. For example, instead of pursuing the unmappable split between sensory perception and social legibility though a Kantian framework of the sublime, Christopher Nealon and Colleen Lye advocate for materialist readings sensitive to Marx’s general law of accumulation, to the production of non-production, to surplus populations only put to work on the most precarious of terms. In what follows, I will retain Jameson’s intuition that the ‘ineradicable tension’ structuring the work of novelists like DeLillo does indeed register a historical change within the social arrangements constituting and re-constituting capitalist societies. However, rather than a symptom of ever greater networked complexity, I will suggest this disjunction gestures towards intensifying struggles within a cycle of accumulation. Taking DeLillo as a guide through the signal and perhaps terminal crises of US hegemony, I will consider recent efforts to periodize the post-1960s era as being ‘after-yet-within’ or simply ‘after’ value.
Part One
For the Fredric Jameson of the nineties, postmodernism is something like the aesthetic reflex that accompanies the completion of modernity, a project conceptualized as the elimination of all non-synchronous times and spaces. Through economic modernization, capitalism pacifies, incorporates, and overcomes its constitutive outsides and, in doing so, breaks with the now finished history of modernity. The conceptual utility of this dis-alignment of capitalism from modernity has been challenged by Nathan Brown, who maintains, after Marx, that the history of modernity is the history of capital’s moving contradictions. Amalgamating Robert Brenner’s ‘long downturn’, Théorie Communiste’s ‘cycles of struggle’, and discussions of deindustrialization in the Endnotes journal, Brown revises Jameson’s periodization so that what is accomplished by the 1960s is the process of real subsumption, understood in the narrow sense of the technical modification of the production process along capitalist lines, expanding the extraction of relative rather than absolute surplus value. Capitalist societies, cultures, and economies, then, are less beyond modernity than structured around and inflected by the social and political consequences of real subsumption, effects which remain within the history of modernity’s unfolding, not outside it. Brown correlates these secular tendencies with entry into a late phase of modernity, a condition he conceptualizes as ‘being after-yet-within; it acknowledges the ambivalence of the not yet, and it demarcates the extension of a horizon that we still have to pass beyond’.
Don DeLillo’s zany political thrillers from the tail end of the seventies are similarly preoccupied with lateness and intuit some kind of approaching historical terminus. ‘It’s unbelievably late’, notes one character from Players, ‘I’ve never seen it so late. It’s really late out there’. Loosely structured around the disintegration of Pammy and Lyle Wynant’s marriage, Players disjunctively synthesizes two romances out of bourgeois inertia: adultery and terrorism. Skipping over the novel’s dubious gendered division of genre, Lyle, a Wall Street trader, inscribes himself into a conspiracy to blow up the stock exchange, an assault conceptualized by the anarchist minded conspirators less as an attack on the concrete infrastructures of financializing capital and more on its abstract possibilities: on the ‘idea of worldwide money’ and its ‘currents of invisible life’. For the anarchists, the ‘waves and charges’ pulsating from the stock market and the electronic spiritualization of money into an ‘occult theology’ signal a transformation within the class relation and relegate previous forms of political struggle to antiquity. Hence the novel’s contrast between the unearthly flow of finance and the material remainder of the workers’ movement, whose lone representative takes to the streets of the financial district, hoisting aloft a placard which documents the industrial and colonial rise of capitalism, encompassing the mutilation of workers bodies from Manchester to Kinshasa. Described as having made a ‘world where people were carvings on rock’, the protester is both a late modernist monument to the workers’ movement, but also a figure for that movements tendential dissolution, of its involution into the prehistory of decayed futures.
Responses to the economic crises of the 1970s like financialization and deindustrialization, Brown suggests, can be read through Marx’s general law of accumulation. Sometimes referred to as the immiseration thesis, the general law of accumulation outlines two processes of proletarianization: one which reorganizes the labor process, the other which recomposes class. On the one hand, the increasing technical composition of capital which improves the productivity of social labor through technological innovation and management techniques, entails a degradation of work, with workers turned into the living appendages of machines. On the other, increases in productivity mean that fewer workers are required to set greater amounts of capital in motion, the consequence of which is that an expanding number of workers find themselves superfluous to capital’s needs and appetites. As surplus value can only be appropriated from variable capital or waged work, capital’s rising organic composition also undermines the very foundation of accumulation, hence an increasingly unsteady lurch from crisis to crisis. Profitability is fitfully restored through financial speculation or renewed forms of extracting absolute surplus value, like offshoring industries to regions of the planet with less regulated workforces. One of the emergent experiences of late modernity, then, can be associated with those sections of the working class that find themselves expelled from value creation but nonetheless remain dependent on the sale of their labor-power to survive. To twist Brown’s formulation, these declassed proletarians are ‘after-yet-within’ the value relation.
Players is acutely aware of this tendential unmaking of class and provides a kind of mise-en-scène for the condition of being ‘after-yet-within’ the value form. In addition to the protester’s lonely vigil, the financial district is traversed by ‘outcasts’, by those without work or direct economic purpose who drift into the speculative core of the US empire from its ruined hinterlands. These apparitions of non-work perplex Lyle:
The use of madness and squalor as texts in the denunciation of capitalism did not strike him as fitting here, despite appearances. It was something else these men and women had come to mean, shouting, trailing vomit on their feet. The sign-holder outside Federal Hall was not part of this. He was in context here, professing clearly his opposition.
There is an unnerving tension here between the clotting opacity of abjection and the supposed crystalline transparency of workers’ resistance. Divorced from the history of radical instants preserved by the protester, these desperate figures arguably underscore how the progressive ejection of labor from the valorization process undermines the grounds from which to affirm a positive workers’ identity. The ‘something else’ which eludes conceptualization but nonetheless structures this discord between fragmented perception and social meaning might be felt to gesture towards one of capital’s most surprising dialectics, its production of non-production, its exclusion of labor-power from the scenes of value-creation.
This feeling of being haunted by the specters of abstract labor that cannot be productively incorporated into the present is echoed later in the novel by Pammy, who worries that she ‘can’t accommodate any more time than what’s right here’. Paired with the non-belonging of the encircling jobless, the novel proleptically explores an anxiety that the labor to-come promised by financial speculation might never materialize, might never be converted out of its grotesque appearance and into a new round of accumulation, into a spatial expansion of the world-system. A similar trajectory is traced in Running Dog, a porno-political caper which travels from the hollowed-out docks of New York to a former silver mining town in the Texas desert. As one character observes, this is the ‘end of the line’ for a certain arc of accumulation, with workers left behind, the ‘half ghosts’ stationed on the empire’s exhausted commodity frontiers, thrown out of the perpetual motion of romance narratives and exterior to value’s imperatives but trapped within its organization of social relations. In this regard, the future that is repeatedly felt to have ‘collapsed right in’ on the Wynants, is one in which the class relations that constituted the period of industrial expansion have reached a limit and are now undergoing a process of decomposition. The future, Lyle adds, ‘is being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect’. Yet rather than signal capital’s triumphant annexation and homogenization of the future, this staticky arrival demarcates the continuation of unevenness and maintains the ambivalence of the not yet.
Part Two
The buzzing future glimpsed in pastiche thrillers like Players and Running Dog extends itself across Underworld, DeLillo’s historical epic of the atomic age. Interrupting the ‘monotone of the state’ with its contrapuntal compositional style, Underworld scavenges a history of late modernity out of that modernity’s discarded objects and tacky residue: Minute Maid orange juice, Lucky Strike Cigarettes, a B-52 Bomber – the maintaining commodities of US hegemony. As Philip Wegner has noted, the ‘narrative act of periodization’ is crucial to Underworld, which opens with a bifurcation in time, with the Soviet detonation of an atom bomb on the 3rd of October 1951 and closes in the outlands of the former USSR, with a commercial enterprise to dispose of imported toxic waste through nuclear detonations. On a molecular level, this radioactive core finds its counterpart in the shape of a baseball, one that was perhaps tomahawked over the wall of the old Polo Grounds to win the New York Giants the 1951 National League pennant – the ‘shot heard around the world’. Taking on the social, cultural, and political tasks Lukács’s sets the mediocre hero of the historical novel, this scuffed ball guides the reader through the subterranean longings which both made and were thwarted by the American century.
The waxing and waning of the accumulation across the American century is a feature of Joshua Clover’s work too, although, unlike DeLillo, Clover eschews the feverish totalization of paranoia for the totalizing dynamics of value. On the one hand, Clover is dialed into the transformation of value into price, into the ‘Ovidian’ metamorphoses of living labor into commodities, a transformation which in Underworld trends towards bodies that have mutated out of the wage relation. On the other, Clover draws on the work of Giovanni Arrighi and engages with the re-organization of the world-system, as capital’s moving contradictions force it to spiral ever outwards. For Arrighi, historic cycles of accumulation alternate between phases of material expansion before a limit to profitability is reached, at which point capital takes flight and scours the globe for new investment opportunities, comically backing its hegemonic successor. Arrighi identifies 1973 as the moment in which the US cycle underwent its signal crisis, a periodizing break Clover loosely adheres to, but develops through Robert Brenner’s account of the long downturn. A story of global overcapacity in manufacturing, Brenner’s account also picks up on the rising organic composition of capital, of the technologically induced redundancy of abstract labor. In Underworld, industrial workers, with their ‘caffeine nerves’ and histories of ‘clinical depression’ have been banished from the assembly line and are ‘absent from the scene’ of production.
In contrast to previous periods of hegemonic transition, the present, Clover suggests, is marked by the absence of new growth industries whose internalization would kick-start another cycle of accumulation. Due to technological transfers, productivity levels have reached such a level globally that there is no emerging hegemon capable of re-enlisting the world’s displaced labor. Or, to paraphrase Pammy Wynant from Players, there is no emergent industry that can accommodate any more socially necessary labor time than what is right here. This uneven and combined pooling of ‘profits without accumulation’ and labor without valorization, feeds back into a re-interpretation of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. The ‘problematic individual’ who overcomes the structural dissonance of existence through the estrangement and reconciliation of their ideals with concrete social reality, acts as the form through which the novel synthesizes the necessary alienation and consequent socialization of the productive subject. As Clover provocatively argues: ‘the ground for the novel is no other than the ground for hegemonic cycles: internalization of mobile labor into the productive circuit’. It follows that the ineradicable tension diagnosed by Jameson and attributed to a post-industrial sublime might instead register this waning of value production. The novel after value, Clover concludes, can ‘only narrate the impossibility of reconciliation’.
Nick Shay, the emeritus executive of waste whose backwards running story of personal development organizes Underworld’s narrative structure, concludes the novel having searched out the ‘whisper of reconciliation’. Whilst Nick remains concerned about the ‘intractability of waste’ and its non-disappearance, he is nonetheless convinced that the political horizon forced open by the Bolshevik Revolution has been permanently sealed over with the absolute globalization of the value-form. According to Lukács, the task of the historical novel is the invention of the people, a mission accomplished through the transformation of alongsides into teleologically ascending before-and-afters, with provinces subordinated to centers, and with those expropriated from the commons folded back into chains of value production. Underworld’s reverse chronology partially upends this collective project, and the novel is populated instead by unincorporated multitudes, with the wall over which Bobby Thomson slugged his walk-off homerun collapsing into the ‘Wall’, a ruined section of the South Bronx, a zone of social death, where cruelty without a face slouches towards Esmeralda, DeLillo’s angel of history. Underworld ends with the face of Esmeralda, whose image appears behind an advertising billboard several weeks after her brutal murder and which contemplates the social catastrophe of the United States as it exits the twentieth century. In a novel acutely aware of the miraculating power of capital, the unclaimed souls who cluster around this secular apparition, nonetheless remain resolutely exterior to work but surrounded by the market, after value but reckoning with the ambivalence of the not yet.
Coda
The irreconcilable tension between fragment and totality, between the unemployed and the failure to recruit them as anything other than structurally necessary non-work, continues to inform DeLillo’s more recent twenty-first century fiction. Cosmopolis ostensibly stages a neo-western style showdown between de-synchronized abstract labor and the savant boss attuned to the future. Class war, however, is disappointingly replaced by a manic Crusoe like figure, who, wrecked by finance capital’s ‘assault on the borders of perception’ tries to re-start the isolated individualism of the bourgeois era from within its condemned warehouses. Where the collective fitfully appears, it does so as a flash mob, a fleeting episode that can only accelerate rather than shatter the ‘hell-bent’ sprint of 24/7 capitalism. In Point Omega, the workers of the world briefly coincide with the novel’s oblique crime-mystery plot. The search for a character who has disappeared, perhaps murdered, is stalled as local rescue teams have already been mobilized after receiving reports that a group of migrant workers have been led across the border and then abandoned to their fate. Labor which finds itself exterior to capital’s requirements yet bounded within its laws, is one of DeLillo’s central themes, as his fiction scans the dismembering of collectives from the 1960s on. The shift in later novels like Point Omega, is that unlike the uneven combination of surplus capital and populations in Players, labor is increasingly exiled from the novels own scenic production, a torque in aesthetic form which perhaps motions towards the need for new types of narrative beyond which DeLillo himself can supply.
Thomas Travers 