25 - Transforming the Spectacle in DeLillo’s Late Novels

Summary

The overall effect of an ever-increasing quantity of images is the radical alienation of consciousness and its isolation and separation, its inability to convincingly ‘language’ reality and thus its reduction to something on the order of a free-floating hallucination, cut away as it is from all ground.

Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (15)

Spectacle and/as Performance: A Critical Prelude

The commodity principle of what Guy Debord called, in the book of the same title, the ‘society of the spectacle’ has preoccupied Don DeLillo's writing for decades. In his late novels, The Body Artist (2001), Point Omega (2010), Zero K (2016) and his most recent at the time of writing, The Silence (2020), DeLillo frequently evokes Debord's notion of spectacle as an ‘autonomous movement of the non-living’ (Debord 2), a movement mediated by screens, images and automation. Critiquing the trappings of our increasingly digitised and automated commodity culture of human disconnection and alienation, DeLillo's recent novels query whether art, too, has fallen victim to what Debord views as spectaculist drives, pondering whether ‘[t]his is what we want, this separation’, this commodification, as one of the characters in Zero K notes (30). This separation materialises as a detachment that eats away at the characters’ sense of agency and embodiment. Not surprisingly, waning bodies pervade DeLillo's late novels: from The Body Artist's Lauren Hartke, the body-artist-turned-artform, Point Omega's Jessie and her ‘abridged quality’ (59), to Zero K's fading Artis awaiting some ‘lyric intensity’ in her cryogenic vault (39). The Silence transforms the Super Bowl screen gone black into a blank canvas of quiet relativity. Although DeLillo's characters frequently stage their own disembodied spectacles through performative acts that cannot help but reinscribe their commodification, his late novels refuse to deploy spectacle as a unilateral medium.

Challenging normativity of any kind, DeLillo's late novels encourage us to think beyond the consumer drive of passive watching, beyond the spectacle that alienates, entertaining the notion that it is the very nature of ‘performatives’ to straddle the normative and transformative realms. To explore the fluid nature of performatives, this chapter employs Judith Butler's theory of performative acts as polymorphous and dynamic. As Butler emphasises, a performative act, despite its reinforcement of the power dynamics that have created it, can also generate an alternative agency that is neither-nor, that is, to use Butler's words, ‘queer’ (Gender Trouble 226).