Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction by Peter Boxall
Death and the avant-garde
"As Marion Muirhead suggests, in an article entitled 'Deft Acceleration', one of the ways in which this technological, cultural force expresses itself is in the experience of speed. Muirhead suggests that it is 'technology', rather than any approach to the sacred or the sublime, that is 'responsible for the acceleration of time and the omnipotence of death' in White Noise. But if the acceleration towards the end of history that the novel charts is driven by a kind of technological speed, it is important to recognize that the speed that is encountered here, the force that drives the novel on, is of a strangely dematerialized, despecialized variety. It is the very refusal to accelerate that leads towards a new kind of acceleration. The aimless, stretched temporality of the novel is in part produced by Gladney's attempt to resist the 'deft acceleration' that he fears is around the corner, that acceleration towards the death that, for Freud, is the 'aim' of all life.Â
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It is characterized by the movement of electrons and electronic information, by waves and radiation,  rather than by the heavy momentum of steal and aluminum highway. The kind of dizzying speed that is summoned partly by Gladney's fearful resistance to Freudian acceleration, and partly by the cultural, economic and historical mutations brought about by 'advanced' capitalism, is unanchored and weightless. It is the kind of speed that Paul Virilio identifies as both the 'location' of culture, and the 'law', 'the world's destiny and its destination'. The awesome speed evoked by White Noise and by Paul Virilio is the result of a 'loss of material space', a loss which 'leads to the government of nothing but time', which casts us into an endless moment, a moment in which we can gain, however, no real purchase."
