Regulation and Refuse Matter in Don DeLillo's Underworld and Eugene Marten's Waste

Abstract

In the context of the summer 2012 edition of this journal, Serenella Iovino argues for a conception of posthumanism as “a way of seeing agency that does not emphasize the single agents but their inextricable connection in ‘a new relational ontology’” (Iovino and Oppermann, 2012: 456). Quoting from Andrew Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, she defines this posthuman space as “a space in which the human actors are still there but now inextricably entangled with the nonhuman, no longer at the center of the action” (Pickering, 1995: 26). She explains this condition through the fact that, according to scholars of the ‘material turn’ – who think of both organic and inorganic matter as ‘vibrant’ substance – “[t]he world makes us in one and the same process in which we make the world” (Pickering, 1995: 26). Hence, in theories of queer ecology especially, “the distinction between organism and environment [tends to] disappear[…]” (Yaeger, 2008: 324). The present paper explores to what extent Don Delillo’s Underworld and Eugene Marten’s Waste illustrate these preoccupations of ecological postmodernism by enacting “ways of knowing, being and acting that do not externalize the world” (Alaimo, 2012: 479). Through the integration of vibrant matter in a variety of forms – and in waste form especially – within their narratives, both authors attempt to prove that affect, or “the capacity to feel force before [or without] subjective emotion” stems directly from our material surroundings regardless of the idea of a “spiritual supplement or ‘life force’ added to the matter said to house it” (Bennett, 2010: xiii). In other words, they appear to suggest that matter is affect itself.