The below is a copy of a talk I gave at the Marxism in Culture seminar series on the 7th of July 2023. I would like to thank Antigoni Memou and Andy Murray for helping to organise the talk, David Cunningham for agreeing to act as a discussant, and Barry Dean and Toby Manning for encouraging me to submit a proposal in the first place. At risk of lapsing into melodrama, with this presentation, it does feel like a cycle of research (2014 – 2021) has been brought to a close and with that my connection to academia too – at least as an active researcher anyway. Part of the reason for starting this blog was to provide an outlet for writing that wasn’t intended to advance a career in higher education, so three cheers to purposelessness!
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In a review of Don DeLillo’s seventh novel The Names (1982), Fredric Jameson advances two claims that are of crucial significance for the arguments put forward in Peripheralizing DeLillo. First, that DeLillo is an ‘epistemological’ writer whose novels foreground an ‘ineradicable tension between fragmented, private experience and the “scientific” explanation of the world’. What Jameson describes as the ‘increasing incompatibility’ between bodily experience and structural meaning saturates the moods, atmospheres and textures of The Names, as its often disorientated narrator notes: ‘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’. The second relates to Jameson’s preferred reading of the novel as a ‘minor work’, a text concerned with geography, language, and the names for collectivity produced out of such a crucible. Minor works dissolve the boundary between private affairs and the affairs of the nation, a dissolution whose ‘verdict of life or death’ refluxes in The Names through an attempted political assassination. At once dreamily disembodied and acutely aware of imperial domination, the novel arguably amalgamates the uneven and combined development of the world-system into a single bifurcated narrative.
Appearing in 1984, Jameson’s reflections on DeLillo rehearse arguments which will become familiar markers of his account of postmodernism – here, only tentatively referred to as a ‘new slogan’. Postmodernism, Jameson insists, is not merely the name of a new style or aesthetic sensibility but a ‘periodising 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’. Famously it is what happens once modernity has been completed, once all non-synchronous times and spaces – and their resistant energies – have been eliminated through economic modernisation, with social being now enveloped within a perpetual present devoid of structural change. The annexation of ‘nature’ and the ‘unconscious’ is stylistically indexed by pastiche, a self-referential cultural form which gives expressive shape to the exhaustion of the new. DeLillo, in this sketch, is identified as an exemplary postmodern novelist because of his attraction to such stylized effacement, for his restless picking up of worn-out genres like the thriller and reviving them artistically. But DeLillo is also associated with postmodernism for the ways in which his work explores the image addiction that Jameson fears erases any sense of past and future, and with that end of temporality, any prospect for collective political projects too. Discussing the most photographed barn in America, one the of college professors in White Noise observes that: ‘we can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now’.
The account of DeLillo my book seeks to tease out is concerned less with the auroras of postmodernity and more with the grim persistence of unevenness, that despite its aura of sameness, a world remade in the image of the commodity is constitutively uneven and prone to malfunctions. To do so, the book offers a reading of DeLillo’s oeuvre through an engagement with Marxist theories of capitalist crisis on the one hand, and contemporary Marxist literary theory on the other. The book argues that DeLillo has insistently given representational form to a seemingly insoluble contradiction between affect and collective history, a disjunction DeLillo’s texts situate within emerging zones of peripheral accumulation, zones where the people, as a collective subject, are missing. In what follows, I will try to outline, in skeletal form, the basic architecture of the book, touching on the position of surplus populations within the critique of political economy, recent theories of the novel, before concluding with some remarks on how these histories acquire form in DeLillo’s work.
Part One: Why Surplus Populations?
Fredric Jameson’s elegant study of Capital: Volume One opens with the claim that Marx’s book is about unemployment and concludes with situations of enforced idleness, with populations ‘who have’, Jameson writes, ‘been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism’. Abandoned to refugee camps and shantytowns, the wretched of the earth are at best administered to by NGO’s and, at worse, ‘prey to incursions’ from warlords and police death squads. Such scenes of desperation would appear to drive a black hole through the ‘single vast unfinished plot’ of collective emancipation which otherwise propels The Political Unconscious, a narrative which has shattered and whose conjunction of development as social death is the subject of novels like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Against the helplessness and despair that tends to characterise ideas of bare life, Jameson recodes this ‘new kind of global and historical misery’ through the concept of exploitation. In doing so, Jameson seeks to expand the political constituency of unemployment so that it not only includes the reserve army of labour but also encompasses the unincorporated multitudes structurally barred from the promises – and protections – of waged work.
The theoretical centerpiece of Jameson’s argument can be found in Chapter 25 of Capital. Here Marx considers how the fate of the working class is affected and modified by changes in the composition of capital. As it spirals every cursedly outward, capital extends its forms of subjugation, dissociating communities from the means of subsistence and increasing the numbers of people dependent on the sale of their labour power to survive. Workers are absorbed into the valorisation process as variable capital, as the waged bodies and brains which set the infernal machines and engines of accumulation in motion. Squeezed by competitive pressures and workplace unrest, capital is forced, over time, into advancing the social productivity of labour, a process which alters its composition, as technological innovation, scientific management techniques, and the fragmentation of work based on efficiency, increase the ratio of constant capital – the machinery of production – to variable capital – its human incarnation. Increased amounts of capital are set in motion by diminishing amounts of labour power. The greater the productive capacities of capital, the greater the mass of workers who find themselves expelled from the production process, ‘a consolidated surplus population, whose misery’, Marx notes, ‘is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour’. Rendered relatively superfluous to capital’s continued reproduction, workers are transformed into disposable human material, separated from direct economic purpose but nonetheless condemned to the social rule of value – a destitution immanent to the logic of accumulation.
According to Jameson, it is this emphasis on the production of non-production, on the production of a planetary working class without formal work, which renews the actuality of Capital today. In Valences of the Dialectic, for example, Jameson engages in a cognitive mapping of the global spaces of accumulation through the categories of the worker, the reserve army, the unemployable and the formerly employed – that is, those who have been priced out of the world market, a fate that menaces all who work for wages. The epochal difference, is that whereas Marx is typically assumed to have inscribed into the visible the toiling masses who are both made by history but also promise to make history too, the present is structured around an absence, around the non-presupposition of such a militant class in formation. Jameson is far from alone in this regard and the repulsion of abstract labour from the valorisation process is key to numerous accounts of capitalism’s immiserating tendencies, its dialectic of overwork and enforced idleness. Perhaps the most influential of these is Robert Brenner’s ‘long downturn’, an economic history of global overcapacity in manufacturing which provides the base note for diverse commentaries on de-industrialisation, financialised ‘profits without accumulation’, secular stagnation and class decomposition. Common to all is the conviction that ‘jobless growth’ is a progressively chronic feature of contemporary capitalism, a historical situation in which, as the late Mike Davis puts it, ‘the fate of this “superfluous humanity” has become the core problem for twenty-first-century Marxism’.
Part Two: The Theory of the Novel
What does the changing composition of capital and the proletarianization of labour have to do with literature? In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács presents the form as ‘the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality’. The non-coincidence of private existence and structural intelligibility is resolved symbolically through the ‘problematic individual’, a character who finds themselves estranged and at odds with social conventions but whose search for recognition either recalibrates the field of social possibilities or reinforces the coercive disposition of the many. After Lukacs’s political conversion to Marxism, this rift between sensuous life and intellectual meaning acquires a telos, with the novel now believed to enfold individual consciousness within collective will as it progressively reshapes the material conditions of embodiment. Hence, for Joshua Clover, the harmonization of individual and society achieved through the hero’s separation from their individual capacities, narrates nothing less than the ‘becoming-socially productive’ of the subject and their internalization into the circuits of production. One of the consequences of the rising organic composition of capital over the latter half of the twentieth century, is that outsiders can no longer be incorporated, a situation in which the novel is only left to dramatize the impossibility of reconciliation.
The struggle to synthesize the fragmented perception of the individual with an expansive cognitive mapping of the social totality is also crucial to David Cunningham’s re-reading of the novel as a form of capitalist epic. Traditionally associated with the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie, both as the literary formalization of middle-class interiority but also for its portrayal of the nation-state as a collective project, the novel might also be said to instantiate, in displaced form, an account of the capitalist system. Critical, in this regard, is a distinction Lukács makes between novels that narrow down and encompass their content and those which gesture wildly to the largeness of the world and ‘show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object’. In contrast to narratives of personal development, which seek accommodation with society, the restless novels of polemical impossibility, Cunningham notes, take as their ‘primary object … not so much the unfolding of individual freedom and difference (or their limits), but … the very impossibility of an adequate “cognitive mapping” of any “total” world tout court’. What such texts stage over and over again is an ineradicable tension that annuls any hope of reconciliation between isolated consciousness and social totality.
If the novel retains its status as a modern epic, then, with the foreclosure of the political horizon opened by the Bolshevik Revolution – signaled by the ugly demise of actually existing socialism and social democracy alike – the only force left capable of revolutionizing the ‘whole relations of society’ – the ostensible content of the novel – is the system of global capitalism itself. From this perspective, if there is a ‘subject of history’ in Marx’s critique of political economy, it is self-valorising value itself: the social forms through which the value relation is constituted and re-constituted, enabling capital to continue its unholy advance across space and time. If, in one moment, capital acts like a predator and seizes on the labourers ambivalent freed from feudal bondage, in another, it recombines atomised individuals into a socialised productive body, a monstrous interconnection of muscles and minds. The abstract social forms through which the experiences of modernity are concretely lived, Cunningham adds, assume ‘the structure of a Subject in an objective, “inhuman” form, quite different from that form of social subjectivity positive of the collective worker’. Critical cultural artworks, in turn, adopt a ‘dialectic “without” synthesis’, indexing the vectors of accumulation and the trail of wreckage such vectors leave in their wake.
Part Three: Peripheralizing DeLillo
In their introduction to After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon advocate for a ‘theoretical imaginary that imagines capitalist accumulation not only in terms of its ability to reproduce the working class, or to subsume social relations, but in terms of the capitalist imperative to overcome a tendency toward diminished profits, which has produced both the deindustrialisation in the global north and the slumification of the south’. For Lye and Nealon, what Jameson misrecognizes as the sublime complexity of post-industrial societies, can instead be reformulated in terms of the identity of productivity and misery, the perplexing scenarios whereby production expands but profitability declines, worsening conditions within work and outright disaster for those without.
In Players, one of DeLillo’s zany political thrillers from the seventies, Wall Street becomes the site of class struggle as spectacle: directly, in the guise of an anarchist minded conspiracy to blow up the ‘idea of worldwide money’, but also more reservedly, in the manner of an indefatigable protester who hoists aloft a sign documenting the violent rise of capitalism, whilst also preserving a history of radical instants of workers’ resistance too, most fittingly, Mario Buda’s wagon bombing of Wall Street in 1920. As the novel unfolds, the financial district is infiltrated by another altogether more obscure collective, by ‘outcasts’, the specters of abstract labour who drift into the speculative core of US capital from its ruined hinterlands, without work or economic purpose. Unlike the novel’s political agitators, who are variously in context, these apparitions confound existing conceptual categories, and their porosity is felt to mean ‘something else’. Part of what my book sets out to do, is put this discord between history and concept into relation with the general law of accumulation and, in doing so, presents DeLillo as a novelist of the dispossessed, a composer of capitalist epics who is drawn to peripheral zones of accumulation, zone whose surplus populations – the aforementioned spectres of speculative value – his fiction strives to re-historicise if not re-dialecticise as subjects of history.
The surplus populations who are a near constant feature across DeLillo’s career are not the eternal poor of religious romance, subject to charity or elimination; but neither are they a latent revolutionary force, ontologically separate from capital. They are depicted as after-yet-within the value relation, ‘half ghosts’ stationed along the empire’s derelict factories and exhausted commodity frontiers, ejected from the perpetual forward motion of capital but trapped within its organisation of social relations. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that with the offshoring of manufacturing, peripheries and cores exchange determinations, with peripheral zones of underdevelopment installed within former economic centers. In a novel like Players, the coexistence of internal peripheries and the bifurcation of labour is inscribed through the disquieting presence of the outcasts, those who cannot be accommodated into productive labour and instead come to obscenely parody the gestures and frantic activities of the traders themselves. Beginning in the 1960s, the book tracks the historical arc and evolution of DeLillo’s narrative project as it reformulates itself across the genres of short fiction, political romance, the historical novel, and the novel of time, a project whose central representational task is the invention of the multitude.
At the same time, DeLillo is unable to avail himself of the types of forcefully mobile subjects that sustained the percussive modernist poetics of John Dos Passos, whose epic novelization of the wandering joys and itinerant dreams of living labour is memorialised in his USA trilogy. But if DeLillo cannot enlist the IWW to help politically organise his narratives nor does he draw on the counterfactural collectives and secret movements that orient the work of his contemporary, Thomas Pynchon, invisible groups which tilt against the day. DeLillo addresses a historical period inflected by the non-presupposition of a class that could experience immiseration as a coherent process. Marked by the absence of a collective subject, his texts search out the milieus from which one might emerge, transforming historical oddities like Lee Harvey Oswald into the vanguard of not-yet communist movement. Abstract social processes and historical flows find embodiment in the form of the underemployed on the outskirts of narrative, figures of stasis his work encounters through lateral, digressive movements. Rather than consider the lack of a buoyant utopianism as a deficiency, one of the strengths of DeLillo’s work is the way in which it places the exteriority of labour as one of the central problems of contemporary historicity.
Disjunctively synthesizing the opposition between realism and modernism, impersonal affect and collective destiny, DeLillo engages in a sort of post-Lukácsian examination of the corroded dreams of the US workers’ movement. If he is undoubtedly a novelist of the ambient monotony of consumer society, my book argues for the presence of another tradition running through his career, one that concerns the abject, the demobilised, the forsaken. Lye and Nealon contend that the general law of accumulation provides ‘the basis for uniting the employed and unemployed on the basis of their construction from the point of view capital as a common mass of disposable labour power’. From the early short stories published in the sixties, with their focus on a precarious wageless life, across the political thrillers of the seventies, whose contrapuntal scenic descriptions impress the exile of labour, to the 1980s and 90s which bring their historical novels of catastrophe and share in Walter Benjamin’s despair of linear progress, to the oblique twenty-first century novels, DeLillo’s fictional worlds have registered and encoded the ambivalent futures of this amassed disposable labour power, the dismembered many his fiction strives to unify. If the novels cannot themselves avert this bleak collective fate, they nonetheless send out distress signals, raising the question of surplus humanity as a problem for political organisation.
Thomas Travers 