‘The power to burnish and renew’: porno-accumulation, fascism, and surplus populations in Don DeLillo’s Running Dog

Abstract

ABSTRACT Don DeLillo’s conspiracy novels Players, Running Dog, and The Names respond to, and imaginatively frame, what Giovanni Arrighi calls the ‘signal crisis’ of US hegemony. Despite mapping the spatio-temporal unfolding of US capital as it financialises accumulation, commodifies visual attention, and imposes neo-colonial economic reforms on ‘underdeveloped’ nations, Marxist critics have dismissed DeLillo’s pastiche thrillers as politically disappointing texts ‘constrained’ by an inability to supply alternative models of reality. In contrast, this article argues that DeLillo’s so-called formal defeats register a ‘discord’ between history and its conceptualisation, an enigma related to their discovery of ‘edge zones of modernity’. Drawing on ideas of historical lateness, the article re-situates DeLillo’s poetics through the optics of uneven and combined development, reflecting on the significance of surplus populations – both for DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracies but also contemporary Marxist political economy. The article offers a close reading of Running Dog, a porno-political caper in which non-synchronicity manifests itself through the appearance of an object, perhaps the object: an adult film starring Hitler. Running Dog juxtaposes commodity frontiers based on violent appropriation with frontiers of immiseration where labour-power has been exiled from social reproduction altogether. In doing so, DeLillo refunctions romance into a genre of secular stagnation.