Material Encoding and Libidinal Exchange: The Capital Culture Underneath Don DeLillo's Underworld

Abstract

Whereas much critical attention has focused upon how Don DeLillo’s novels offer a sustained critique of the postmodern condition within American culture, this essay uses DeLillo’s most recent novel, Underworld, as a lens to explore how American postmodernity has manifested as a limbo where certainty and value have drifted free from the “real.” The essay traces how the fracturing of the real has historical precedent in American Puritan ideology, and how the postmodern rendition of Puritanism in twentieth century is characterized best as empty materialism and displaced spiritual desire that departs from the Puritan stance of material wealth as the sign of divine calling. Drawing upon DeLillo’s critique, I argue that the “real” and the spiritual in American culture have been erased by the pervasive force of despiritualized capitalism.