Lecture held on April 23, 2013, KFU Graz.

1. EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
DON DELILLO’S MODEL OF A NETWORKED
SOCIETY

2. postmodernist writer
Underworld: A novel
-Structure of the novel
-Network society
-How does network(ing) affect
categories and mechanisms of
identity formation
Don DeLillo, Underworld: A
Novel, New York:
Scribner, 1997. (a selection of
excerpts)
John Duval, Don DeLillo’s
Underworld: A Reader’s
Guide, New York:
Contnuum, 2002.
Jan Van Dijk, The network
Society: Social Aspects of New
Media, London: Sage, 2006.
(Ch. 2)

3. DELILLO AND THE POST WWII USA
DECODER OF AMERICAN FREQUENES,
WRITER OF AMERICAN MAGIC AND DREAD

4. A beginning is a very delicate time...
Everything is connected.
Hell is a place where nothing
connects with nothing.

5. Network society
Six degrees of
separation
a social formation
with an infrastructure
of social and media
networks enabling
its prime mode of
organization at all
levels
(individual, group/org
anizational and
societal)

6. Mass Society vs. Netwok Society

7. Manuel Castells
The Rise of the Network
Society, [The Information Age:
Economy, Society and Culture
Vol. I. Cambridge, MA;
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.]
Relativization of time and
space
Space – product of social
dynamism (flow)
Layered:
Eletronic impulses
Nodes
Governing elites

8. Plutonium
Pluto – god of
Underworld

9. Brainstoming for a minute – 5 items
from XX century USA

10. STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL
• Prologue – The Triumph of Death
• Part I – Long Tall Sally
• Part II – Elegy for Left Hand Alone
• Part III – Cloud of Unknowing
• Part IV – Cocksucker Blues
• Part V – Better Things for Better Living...
• Part VI – Arangement in Gray and Black
• Epilogue – Das Kapital

11. Voices from the
Underworld
Walter Benjamin
Articultating the past
J. Edgar Hoover
Lenny Bruce
Cotter Martin
Zapruder movie
Sergei Eisenstein

12. The Prologue
Focus: baseball
game, the
ball, timeframe
Pafko at the Wall

13. The shot
heard around
the world

14. •time counter set to zero
•celebrating and criticizing American life at a local and
personal level
•introducing ominous symbols – mass destruction and the
triumph of death

15. Long Tall
Sally
Focus:
timeframe, waste
as outcome, shift in
the balance of
power

17. "Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the
balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no
limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money
anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier
now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it
has no level of values."

18. Elegy for left
hand alone
Mid 1980s, 1990s
Focus: TX highway killer –
crime and media,
Fresh Kills,
Marvin Lundy and his private
collection

19. And there is something about
videotape, isn't there, and this
particular kind of crime? This is a crime
designed for random taping and
immediate playing. You sit there and
wonder if this kind of crime became
more possible when the means of taping
an event and playing it
immediately, without a neutral
interval, a balancing space and
time, became widely available.

20. Chapter 8 of the Part II
Creative power of waste
The South Bronx surreal

21. Cloud of
Unknowing
Focus: Watts
Towers, Detweiler – garbage
archeologists
Culture of garbage
Waste as ―culture’s secret
history‖

22. Cocksucker
Blues
Focus: mediated history, Klara
Sax tracing the flows of money

23. She loved the washed blue light of the
film, a kind of crepuscular light, a
tunnel light that suggested an
unreliable reality-not unreliable at all
in fact because you have no trouble
believing what you see but a
subversive reality maybe, corruptive
and ruinous, a beautiful tunnel blue.

24. Klara’s Rooftop
Summer
"I sometimes wonder what
money is," she said."Yes, of
course, exactly. This is the
question. I will tell you
what I think. It is becoming
very esoteric. All waves and
codes. A higher kind of
intelligence. Travels at the
speed of light.

25. Better things
for better
living
through
chemistry
Focus: Sputnik - Consumer
society, black and white
ball, social protests
http://youtu.be/gfNhiRGQ-js

26. Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house
lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a
second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers
here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working.
Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kyke. And
there's another kyke— that's two kykes and three niggers. And there's a spic.
Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack;
and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And
there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got
three kykes here, do I hear five kykes? I got five kykes, do I hear six spics, I got
six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass
with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kykes, three guineas, and one
wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the
suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.
Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to
introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger
nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie
boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean
anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry
because somebody called him a nigger at school.

27. Sputnik
http://youtu.be/F1S6bQUoD8I

28. The radio
said, PigPigPigP
igPigPigPig.

29. Arangement
in Gray and
Black
Focus: the city transforming
from modern to postmodern

30. Epilogue – Das Kapital
There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There
are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge
gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact
referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password -- world
without end, amen.

31. Discussion
DeLillo has been criticized for
the way that his fiction prior to
Underworld tends to represent
white male subjectivity
exclusively. In this
regard, Underworld seems less
open to such criticism. What
role does the representation of
the fragmented histories of
women, African-
Americans, gays and
lesbians, and other
marginalized groups have in
the novel? Does Underworld
still privilege white male
subjectivity? If not, what
seems more decentered —
whiteness or masculinity?