Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”

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Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”:Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11

marco abel

It may be that believing in this world, this life, becomes our most difficult task,or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered. . . .

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (75)

DON DELILLO’S ESSAY “IN THE RUINS OF THE FUTURE,”published in Harper’s, appeared among the earliest nonjournalis-tic responses to the event of 11 September 2001.1 What makes the

essay remarkable is not merely what it says about 9/11 but how, in re-sponding to the event, it simultaneously puts the notion of response atstake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare whatthe event means, his essay instead shows that response is always a ques-tion of response-ability, or the ethical how. DeLillo stylistically config-ures response-ability as always and necessarily a question of how ratherthan what; (e)valuation rather than representation; the power of the falserather than the regime of truth. What DeLillo’s response thus teachesus—its most significant intervention in the post-9/11 discourse—is thatpresent-day attempts to image a (traumatic) event’s sense cannot operateexclusively on the level of the event’s content (the representational what)without attending to the rhetorical mode of presentation, the ethical how.Or, rather, what DeLillo shows, and what I will elaborate on below, is thatwhat an event means is always already shot through with how it appears.

Foregrounding the style—the ethical how—of response slows downthe impetus to declare what an event is. This impetus supposes that anevent such as 9/11 contains an essence, a representational truth that mustbe voiced—represented—by the perceiving subject. And since truth, asNietzsche teaches, mainly operates on a moral register, the demand to saywhat’s what is inevitably a demand for judgment, for affirming a correctmorality—even in the absence of a language explicitly couched in the

Marco Abel received his PhD in Englishfrom the Pennsylvania State Universityin May 2003. This essay is drawn fromhis book manuscript, “On Becoming-Violent: Affect, Critique, and Violence inPost-war America.” He has publishedarticles on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road(Modern Fiction Studies, 2002), Bret Eas-ton Ellis’s American Psycho (and MaryHarron’s film adaptation of it [ Angelaki:Journal of the Theoretical Humanities,2001] ), and the Coen brothers’ Fargo(Critical Studies in Mass Communication,1999). He is working on a book-lengthstudy, tentatively entitled “Seeing with-out Vision: Encountering Images in theAge of Digital Production.”

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rhetoric of judgment. DeLillo’s style of response,his aesthetic stance, refuses to hypothesize an es-sence of 9/11, toward which a subject must sub-sequently assume a clear position. Instead ofconstituting a correct standpoint to be defended,DeLillo’s reconfiguration of response as an aes-thetic stance—as response-ability—suggests thatresponse is about a mood, a rhythm, or a capacityto give oneself over to the primacy of the event.2

DeLillo’s foregrounding of the event’show—its force relations rather than its mean-ing—temporarily defers the endless proliferationof judgments based on hasty answers to the ques-tion of what, interrupting a specific mode of posi-tion taking that, as DeLillo shows, might havepartially produced the conditions for 9/11.3 De-ferring judgment, however, does not mean advo-cating moral relativism. Deferral does not meanto step outside, as if one ever could fully escapejudgment’s clutches. Rather, to defer is to sus-pend. Attending to the event’s how suspends theevent. Asking how the event works and what itdoes creates a suspenseful rhythm that mightslow down the rapid speed of judgment—not toescape judgment but to examine the value ofvalue itself. Suspending the event to defer judg-ment is not avoiding taking a stance; rather, it istaking a stance that, paradoxically, is no stance atall. As opposed to position taking that presumesthe speaking subject’s perceptual mastery of theevent, which is then affirmed as a generality, asthe right way of seeing or representing it, a stanceas suspension puts the capacity to perceive atstake. Suspension constitutes an immanent modeof response that heeds the event’s “irreduciblesingularity” (Baudrillard), whereas judgmentbegins from outside the object or event to bejudged, and the judging subject sits safely afar orabove—unaffected and, allegedly, objective.4

The necessity of thinking of image processesas presenting a stance that aesthetically aims atthe world rather than represents it (as does mostpublic discourse, as well as literary and filmcriticism) is, finally, what concerns me in thefollowing pages. That DeLillo’s response occurs

primarily on an aesthetic and consequently, as Iwill suggest, a profoundly ethical level alreadyaffected the production of Ulrich Baer’s 110Stories, which, to this date, is the most signifi-cant collection of stories responding to 9/11.5

DeLillo’s essay demonstrates the impossibilityof saying anything definitive about 9/11—espe-cially anything that captures the event’s mean-ing.6 His writerly eye, as will be seen shortly,instead focuses on the affective quality of theevent’s singularity and on how language canstylistically image and, in the process, reconfig-ure what it means for contemporary thought torespond ethically to whatever the event’s con-tent might be(come).

In the Ruins of the Event: Suspension 1

The world is, quite simply, before it is something tobe condemned.

—André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (21)

DeLillo’s style of response does not occur in avacuum. Rather, his narrative encounter with9/11 actualizes a mode of seeing the world thatthe French cineast André Bazin once conceptu-alized in terms of an ontophenomenological the-ory of cinema. Bazin advocates a film aestheticmainly relying on the long-shot, deep-focus cin-ematography characteristic of the neorealistmise-en-scène. Countering earlier realisms, es-pecially Sergei Eisenstein’s influential theory ofdialectical montage, as “making reality the ser-vant of some a priori point of view,” Bazin fa-vors a cinematic aesthetic stance toward realitythat artfully responds to the world image in its“wholeness” (64, 97).7 The event’s wholeness,however, is not posited as a transcendent cate-gory; instead, the cinematic stance mobilized by,for instance, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossel-lini, or Vittorio De Sica “divide[s] the event upinto still smaller events and these into eventssmaller still, to the extreme limits of our capac-ity to perceive them in time” (81; my emphases).For Bazin, perception itself is up for grabs, since

1238 Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11 [ PML A

his theory of cinema—as a theory of vision—ul-timately concerns the limits of perception as aconcept. Whereas phenomenology begins andends with conceiving the subject as the locus forand horizon of perception, Bazin theorizes thelimit at which the perceptive act transmutes intoan act of seeing—a mode of response to theworld that, in Bazin’s hands, puts the perceivingsubject at stake.8 Seeing, in other words, is less amatter of (in)correct perception than a questionof how subjects can respond to events.

Bazin suggests that modes of seeing inherein events rather than originate in a perceivingsubject. However, “inhering” does not connote apreviously existing authenticity of the event somuch as posit point of view as a relation offorce, as an effect of the event’s actualization.As Claire Colebrook argues, “[A]ny specificpoint of view is not a point of view overlookingsome object world, but a proliferation of points,a pre-personal field of singularities” (111). Shewrites that, consequently, “perspective and pointof view are enabled by style. Style is not the ex-pression of the human point of view; the humanis an effect of a certain style” (113). For Bazin,the event does not contain a truth to be un- or re-covered. Hence, abstracting clichés from theevent to push it to its extreme limits necessar-ily precedes the need for structuring imagesthrough dialectical montage. Whereas Eisen-stein assumes an a priori emptiness of the screenthat must be filled with dialectically ordered im-ages arranged from a preexisting human vantagepoint, Bazin’s cinema thought implies that thescreen virtually is filled with images even beforethe film projector plays what the camera’s eyehas artfully “captured.” The neorealist mise-en-scène’s task is, therefore, to abstract imagesstylistically from the fullness of the screen.9

This mis-en-scène thus renders visible the eventas nothing but a conjunction of singular view-points preceding the objects to be viewed.

Dialectical montage cannot but begin withsubordinating the event to a subject’s point ofview—first to the director’s and then to the sub-

jected viewer’s. In contrast, the neorealist visualprocess of abstracting images actualizes fromthe event modes of seeing that take the eventelsewhere: seeing as a rhetorical actualization offuturity rather than a perceptive capturing of anevent’s inherent authenticity, which is then of-fered for judgment; seeing as an experimentalmode—not as creative discovery of what is butas an ethical production of the yet to come.

Instead of the thesis-driven mode of induc-ing conscious perception through dialecticalmontage, DeLillo, as I will show below, mobi-lizes a neorealist aesthetic that Bazin calls “aphenomenology,” which holds a “more ontolog-ical position than an aesthetic one” (65, 66).The differentiated modes of seeing constitute asubject’s point of view or mode of experience.Thus, an aesthetic stance that responds to theevent a subject encounters must be consideredfirst and foremost ontological. Yet, at the heartof Bazin’s answer to the question “What is cin-ema?” lies the way this ontology is engaged—the way it is (made to be) viewed throughartifice. For Bazin, the ontology of seeing con-sists of myriad modes of seeing. These modes,or force relations, continually become imageevents that eventually manifest themselvesthrough how specific subjected viewers actual-ize—(are made to) see—them. Hence, if cinemadesires to encounter reality, it has no choice butto begin from within the acts of seeing. Bazincan therefore claim that the neorealist aestheticstance “knows only immanence” (64). This aes-thetic stance begins and ends in the middle, po-sitions the act of viewing amid the event’s forcerelations, and, leaving the act there, tries to ha-bituate the subject to encountering the middleso that the subject becomes able to see theworld—itself always a becoming-middle—as it“is” before judging it.

When Baer, in his introduction to 110 Sto-ries, designates the task of responding to 9/11as not giving in to a rhetoric of the “incompre-hensible” (2), he might well be indexing thisBazinian conception of seeing as it operates in

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DeLillo’s essay. The one thing 110 Stories triesto avoid is recourse to the incomprehensible, orthe sublime. Whereas the sublime names forKant the thing in itself, which transcends andthus persists outside the realm of representation,for post-Kantians such as Slavoj Zizek and KajaSilverman the sublime connotes the thing in it-self as radical negativity. For them, the impossi-bility to experience the thing is the thing initself in its radical negativity. Accordingly, theproblem with representation is not, as it was forKant, that it reduces reality (that, e.g., 9/11 can-not be represented justly) but that it allows for apositive entity to exist beyond phenomenal rep-resentation (i.e., 9/11 can be experienced onlyin representation).10

In contrast, for DeLillo the problem withrepresentation is a matter of speed: representa-tion is always too fast, positioning itself as acause when it is merely an effect of a series offorces acting on one another.11 Representationsare apparatuses of capture that assign sense toan event in accordance with the type of forcesthat produce these representations. Conse-quently, for DeLillo as well as Bazin, the criticaltask is to render visible the acts of seeing thatgenerate specific representations, not to declare,mourn, deny, or judge the (im)possibility of rep-resenting or attaining the real.

In the Ruins of Epistemology:Suspension 2

Film criticism has no longer any meaning; it is real-ity that we have to analyze in a cinematic way.

—Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (65)

To suspend judgment of the world and to “be-lieve in this world,” as Gilles Deleuze, evokingBazin, once demanded (Cinema 2 201)—thisethical recipe ultimately generates the paradoxof a cinematic “realism” that is profoundly aes-thetic. Producing realism to render visible theworld’s ontological wholeness without imme-diately capturing the world on the plane of judg-

ment “can only be achieved in one way—through artifice” (Bazin 26). Cinema must aes-thetically extract one of the world’s most consti-tutive material processes—acts of seeing. Thisis perhaps why 9/11, the documentary by theFrench brothers Jules Naudet and Gédéon Nau-det, while haunting in its own right, comesacross as “being there” almost too much, in thesense that the film’s images capture the momentof terror so well as to foreclose response-abilitythat does not begin and end with what the view-ing subject already knows. The film offers forour perception images that do not further our ca-pacity to see the event in a manner differentfrom the ways we have perceived it before. Atbest—and this is no small accomplishment—itintensifies existing feelings of horror as we hearfalling bodies impact the ground with a fatalthump. Ultimately, however, the film seems toreinforce rather than transform, perhaps becauseit does not wage the question of seeing. It doesnot see that, as Deleuze puts it, the “difference inthe origin does not appear at the origin—except,perhaps, to a particularly practiced eye, the eyewhich sees from afar, the eye of the far-sighted,the eye of the genealogist” (Nietzsche 5).

In contrast, DeLillo’s writerly eye concernsitself with these rhetorical acts of imaging andseeing. Indeed, DeLillo’s literary eye, in its at-tentiveness to the question of imaging, actualizesthe neorealist conception of seeing as articulatedby Bazin, thus crucially transforming (the imageof) the event 9/11.12 Always the astute observerof contemporary narrative possibilities and ne-cessities, DeLillo shows that literary languagedoes not remain unaffected by the language ofvisuality that has encroached on the publicthroughout the twentieth century.13 Crucially,however, DeLillo—unlike countless commenta-tors who argued that 9/11 was “like” a Holly-wood disaster flick—does not have recourse tothe language of images as a simile or meta-phor. Instead, imaging processes propel his nar-rative to “analyze [reality] in a cinematic way,”although his medium of expression remains


language. While his “reflections on terror andloss in the shadow of September,” as the essay’ssubtitle states, alternate in eight sections be-tween more abstract, perhaps more “properly”essayistic musings and detailed, almost impres-sionistic (imaginary?) lists of stories emergingfrom the attack on the World Trade Center, De-Lillo’s language performs the meandering lookof the neorealist camera eye, following no narra-tive in particular, yet many at once, thus intensi-fying the experience and concept of narrative asa mode of seeing.

Unlike the dialectical desire to perceive—orcapture—reality representationally to alter it, De-Lillo’s narrative strategy intervenes in the worldby seeing, or rhetorically (re)inventing, it (whichis why his encounter with 9/11 has nothing to dowith a lack of the real, in either the Kantian or theLacanian sense). The essay invents a view of re-ality that invites readers to shape and reshape re-ality into different impressions of equal value,which combine in a speculative series: this hap-pened and this and this and. . . .14 Thus, the essayattempts rhetorically to position readers so thatthey become capable of seeing that which cannotbe perceived in the event’s endless televised im-ages—images that through their proliferationsfirst intensified the public’s affective responses toa point of utter confusion (“What happened?”;“Why?”; “What am I supposed to think?”) beforethis affect found itself territorialized on the planeof judgment, of “correct” perception (George W.Bush’s “the evil ones”). Operating alongside andwithin television’s powerful perceptual appara-tus of capture in order to mutate its most mind-numbing and moralizing effects, DeLillo’s essayinstead allows the event to emerge with a “crys-talline ambiguity,” to use a phrase LawrenceWeschler once ascribed to Art Spiegelman’sgraphic novel Maus (qtd. in Taylor)—also an at-tempt to render the singularity of an irreducibleevent. DeLillo’s essay lucidly responds to themood of 9/11 and to its aftermath—without re-ducing it to a simple explanation or meaning—bymobilizing seeing as a narrative mode that works

from within the image event instead of imposingitself on it. Yet the essay does not avoid montage;rather, its splicing together of various images,stories, and styles of narrating the event providesan artificial means to serialize the ontologicaleventness of 9/11. In so doing, the essay shiftsfrom the epistemological register of the post-9/11public discourse to an ethico-ontological registerthat primarily addresses how an event demandsits own mode of response.

In the Ruins of a Point of View:Suspending Plots

Plots reduce the world.—Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future” (34)

Perhaps the most important aspect of DeLillo’sengagement with 9/11 is his alternating betweenvarious narrative points of view. Indeed, the essayis overtly preoccupied with the question of howto narrate and thus see the event. Note, for in-stance, his countless uses of “narrative,” “story,”and “counter-narrative” when naming the eventand the possibility of responding to it. DeLillo’sessay even invokes the need for us to respond tothe event by rewriting it. The cold war narrativefavored by the Bush administration “ends in therubble, and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative,” DeLillo writes, prefacing the random,fleeting impressions he then proceeds to list:

There are a hundred thousand stories criss-crossing New York, Washington, and the world.Where we were, whom we know, what we’veseen or heard. There are the doctors’ appoint-ments that saved lives, the cell phones that wereused to report the hijackings. Stories generatingothers and people running north out of the rum-bling smoke and ash. Men running in suits andties, women who’d lost their shoes, cops run-ning from the skydive of all that towering steel.

(34)

But it is not enough to give voice to the “storiesof heroism and encounters with dread,” though

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they form part of creating a counternarrative:“These are among the smaller objects and moremarginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day.We need them, even the common tools of theterrorists, to set against the massive spectaclethat continues to seem unmanageable, too pow-erful a thing to set into our frame of practicedresponse,” or what he later calls “slant of ourperceptions” (34–35, 39). The ultimate task isto alter “our frame of practiced response.” Foronly by doing so, the essay suggests, do westand a chance of encountering 9/11 as a singu-lar event without having recourse to what Fou-cault and Deleuze dub the “indignity ofspeaking for others” (209). Speaking for otherstoo often serves as a disguise for speaking one’sown point of view, thus eradicating that which isother. DeLillo’s stance here suggests the neces-sity of altering our capacity to respond.

The essay tries rhetorically to induce in thereader a certain kind of response-ability throughintensifying its narrative rhythm. It alternatesbetween what appears to be a dialectical move-ment of impressionistic close-ups of the eventand distanced, intellectual analyses of what hap-pened—but without ever arriving at a resolutionof this movement. If the rhythm of DeLillo’sessay can be described as dialectical, it is soonly in the sense of Theodor Adorno’s “nega-tive dialectics,” which proceeds “immanently”(Dialectics 5) or chiasmatically, casting eventand response as immanent to each other.15 Inshort, DeLillo’s essay deploys a style of re-sponse—an ethic of movement—that appears toemerge from within the rubble of images circu-lating around the event of 9/11: this, then this,then this, then . . . , serializing itself ever furtherinto the event’s materiality.

Thus, the essay functions as a transforma-tive relay that provokes responses (including110 Stories) to the event by mobilizing a specificaesthetic stance that does not pretend to do jus-tice to it—even if the event is (necessarily)available for a discourse of justice. The essaypresents merely an asignifying series of images

rather than a series of just, or moral, images, toparaphrase Jean-Luc Godard, a cinematic seerinfluenced by Bazin. As Deleuze glosses Go-dard’s slogan “Pas une image juste, juste uneimage,” “[A] ‘just image’ is an image that ex-actly corresponds to what it is taken to repre-sent; but if we take images as ‘just [a series of ]images,’ we see them precisely as images, ratherthan correct or incorrect representations of any-thing” (Negotiations 190n1). In this sense, De-Lillo’s image events resonate aesthetically andethically with those of neorealist cinema: facedwith the impossibility yet necessity of respond-ing to events that exceed immediate explanation,both kinds enact their response-ability to showhow intensively inhabiting—suspending—anevent can bring ethical responsibility to it.

Unlike most 9/11 documentaries, which es-tablish their trustworthiness by giving voice topersonal experience—something that tends tolie outside evaluation—DeLillo’s essay rhetori-cally affects his readers by not allowing them totrust any of his narrative voices as qualified todo justice to the event. Ostensibly nonfiction thatgenerically requires the writer to tell it as it is(or, in any case, not to make up stories), it com-mences innocuously enough by situating 9/11seemingly objectively in the last decades’ glob-alization processes. But even in this first section,the third-person account is already complicatedby its explicit juxtaposing of different narra-tives—the West’s and the terrorists’:

In the past decade the surge of capital marketshas dominated discourse and shaped globalconsciousness. Multinational corporationshave come to seem more vital and influentialthan governments. . . . Terror’s response is anarrative that has been developing over years,only now becoming inescapable. It is our livesand minds that are occupied now. (33)

Whereas in 1976 Wim Wenders’s film Kings ofthe Road could postulate that “[t]he Yankeeshave even colonized [Germany’s] unconscious-ness” through relentlessly proliferating popular


culture images, thus giving voice to a perceivedmovement of colonialism even within the so-called first world, the situation, at least froma United States standpoint, has now cruciallychanged. Although the United States continuesto circulate images—at a greater pace thanever—DeLillo writes that it is now “[o]ur world,parts of our world, that have crumbled into theirs,which means we are living in a place of dangerand rage” (33): “they” are now colonizing “us.”

But this juxtaposition does not hold. Sec-tion 2 of the essay narrates a different kindof story. Instead of affirming the dialectical us-versus-them rhetoric that was encroaching on theessay—first world versus third world, UnitedStates of America versus the Taliban, West versusEast, globalism versus tribalism—DeLillo nar-rates that the terrorist “planted in a Florida town,pushing a supermarket cart,” is not affected bythe “sight of a woman pushing a stroller,” because“he does not see her” (34; my emphasis). Incom-prehensible to most of “us,” the terrorist does notsee the woman and is thus not touched by theimage—because he exists in a narrative “format”and mood that differ from ours (34). Whereas ournarrative format has a logical plot (think classicalHollywood cinema), the terrorist pursues the“apocalypse” (34)—a narrative where logic andunderstanding, or knowledge, have no purchaseon the event. Thus, DeLillo’s narrative intimates,the dialectic of recognition that permeates publicdebates of 9/11 does not hold as an explanatoryapparatus, because the other does not even ac-knowledge—is not capable of acknowledging—our self. The other bypasses us. The terrorist’sself is already other to our concept of the self; theterrorist’s self is non-self-identical: the I of theself is always already an-other.

DeLillo’s competing narratives suggest thatattacking the other’s self is bound to fail be-cause that self does not exist as we configure it.“We” can bomb “them” out of their caves, buttheir selves have already mutated into some-thing else, fleeing to a different location, even ifthese selves have yet to be produced:

For many people, the event has changed thegrain of the most routine moment. We may findthat the ruin of the towers is implicit in otherthings. The new PalmPilot at finger’s reach, thestretch limousine parked outside the hotel, themidtown skyscraper under construction, carry-ing the name of a major investment bank—allhaunted in a way by what has happened, lessassured in their authority, in the prerogativesthey offer. (39)

The other has already become other to itself: itnow percolates in “us” and our technology, ef-fecting transformations in “us” that cannot helpaltering the possibility of eradicating “them.” Toput this in a slightly different register that isnevertheless central to DeLillo’s essay, 9/11 hasdestroyed, too, the neoliberal dream of global-ization as citizen-consumer utopia. The eventhas, in a certain sense, brought back tribalforces, but this reintroduction of tribal power is,as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empireillustrates, not so much a return as an intensifi-cation of globalization. Globalization is notopposed to what media pundits demean as “me-dievalism,” nor is it a progressive movementaway from medievalism. On the contrary, glob-alization is infused with and affected by me-dievalism, constituting its most intensifiedmoment yet: the global self is always alreadythe tribal other going global.16

However, the reader is ultimately not askedto take this analysis at face value, as if it repre-sented the meaning or truth oozing from theevent. The event cannot be reduced to an atmos-phere of mass paranoia à la X-Files narrativesin which the main characters must always fearthat their bodies have been injected with aliencorpuscles. For paranoia is the most comfort-ing narrative available in response to trauma,positing the self as persecuted by the outside,the other.17 The other serves as the explanationpar excellence to reinforce the self as a self-contained entity that controls itself by suspect-ing everything else. But paranoia is just anotherplot, and, as DeLillo asserts in what might be

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his thesis (if having a thesis were not to goagainst his essay’s performative force), “[p]lotsreduce the world” (34).18 Plots reduce the worldbecause plotting constitutes the virtual seed ofdestruction: al-Qaeda’s plotting ended in theplanes’ perfectly staged and executed doubleimpact on the twin towers. DeLillo’s essay doesnot plot an explanation that would offer readersa safe reconstitution of the world; instead, theessay indicates that plot constitutively partakesin the problem, as a “vision of judgment” pre-ceding the event (34). And what else is judg-ment if not a world-reducing plot?

That plots reduce the world, however, is nota problem in itself. Rather, what counts is thestyle of reduction. DeLillo’s essay reduces theevent to its most intensified moments, abstracts it:

The cell phones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefsmashed in the faces of running men and women.The box cutters and credit cards. The paper thatcame streaming out of the towers and driftedacross the river to Brooklyn back yards: statusreports, résumés, insurance forms. Sheets of pa-per driven into concrete, according to witnesses.Paper slicing into truck tires, fixed there. (35)

DeLillo’s essay takes these reduced events totheir limits: “a pregnant woman, a newborn, adog” (37; my emphases). Deleuze and FélixGuattari call these limits “haecceities”—verbsin the infinitive, proper names, dates, indefinitearticles—which “consist entirely of relations ofmovement and rest between molecules or parti-cles, capacities to affect and be affected” (Pla-teaus 261). A haecceity names the event becauseit “has neither beginning nor end, origin nordestination; it is always in the middle. It is notmade of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome”(263). In DeLillo’s asubjective, amorphous nar-rative serialization, seeing is itself rhetoricallyactualized from within the event and away fromthe territorializing force of subjective and sub-jectifying acts of explanation based on “truth-ful” perceptions. DeLillo’s haecceitic narratingbegins to render seeable the public’s initial af-

fective response to 9/11 and its hallucinatoryeliding of expository claims. Recourse to plot aspredominantly an explanatory mechanism of theevent’s whatness fundamentally misses the pointthat plot—or systematicity—is constituted byaffect or continual variation.

In the Ruins of Analogy:Suspending Likeness

The event itself has no purchase on the mercies ofanalogy or simile.

—Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future” (39)

DeLillo’s essayistic encounter with 9/11 rigor-ously teaches this last point. For while we asreaders are inclined to believe that the essay’sinitial third-person account is reasonably objec-tive, the essay quickly undermines this impres-sion. Section 4 narrates the story of Karen andMarc, whose first names are the only ones usedin the essay.19 In the essay’s rhythm, this newnarrative seems a mere close-up, calling our at-tention to a specific instance among the manystories—for instance, the “two women on twoplanes, best of friends, who die together andapart, Tower 1 and Tower 2” or “the saxophon-ist playing softly” (36–37)—that were only al-luded to earlier. Yet, two-thirds of the way intothis section, the narrator undermines our confi-dence in him. Having just described Marc’s ac-tions during the attack (Marc selflessly helpedother tenants in his building), the narrator states:

Marc came out to the corridor. I think wemight die, he told himself, hedging his sense ofwhat would happen next.

The detective told Karen to stay where theywere.

When the second tower fell, my heart fellwith it. I called Marc, who is my nephew, onhis cordless. (37)

We are surprised to discover that the narratorhas told a more personal and presumably sub-jective story than we have been led to believe


thus far. Curiously, in a few lines the narrativevoice shifts from third person omniscient to anodd mixture of point of views. Why, for exam-ple, does the narrator not say, “He thought hemight die” (indirect discourse)? Or why doesthe narrator not provide direct discourse (i.e.,“‘We might die,’ he told himself”), as he did inthe passage just preceding this one, which de-scribes the moment Marc experiences the un-thinkable: “When [Marc] heard the first lowdrumming rumble, he stood in a strange deadcalm and said, ‘Something is happening’” (36)?Instead of providing readers with a stable view-point—and thus the possibility of identifica-tion—the confused narrative perspective callsattention to the impossibility of (identifyingwith) a clear view of the event. For during thedisaster, as Karen and Marc come out of thebuilding “into a world of ash and near night,”the event is impossible to apprehend and yettransforms those responding to—seeing—it:

There was no one else to be seen now on thestreet. Gray ash covering the cars and pave-ment, ash falling in large flakes. . . . The mem-bers of the group were masked and toweled,children in adults’ arms, moving east and thennorth on Nassau Street, trying not to lookaround, only what’s immediate, one step andthen another, all closely focused, a pregnantwoman, a newborn, a dog. (37)

The circumstances demand this merging of per-spective, not because it promises a democraticinclusiveness that will explain 9/11 but becausethe event induces a necessary incorporeal trans-formation of itself and the responding subject:neither event nor subject can be named otherthan with a date or indefinite articles and pro-nouns: something happened, a dog, and, finally:“Someone said, ‘I don’t want cheese on that.’Someone said, ‘I like it better not so cooked’”(37; my emphases).

The first-person point of view eventuallyensuing from this instantaneous transformationdisplays a remarkable descriptive insight into

events it did not witness (the narrator was not inhis nephew’s apartment building when the tow-ers crashed). By this means, the essay stylisti-cally (neorealistically) marks the eventness ofthe event: it happens or happened and thus re-quires response, but it does not allow preexist-ing subject positions to remain unaffected.Subjects respond because they are made to re-spond in a particular way, having been subjectedto that which cannot be reduced to a preexistingposition, a plot’s limitations, the truthfulness ofa subject’s perception, or the ever-present de-mand for moral clarity.

Eventually, the section shifts back to a third-person narration, but by then the narrator’s aes-thetic devices have induced a delirium thatallows us no longer to respond to—or identifywith—the essay’s standpoint on the level of purecontent. We are now trying to “catch up” to whathappened to us (39)—to the rhetorical force rela-tions inhering in the event of narrative, of lan-guage. If we thought that the narrative, or themultiple mininarratives, meant to represent atruth about 9/11, then now we cannot have anyfaith in the veracity of these accounts. If we weretempted to believe that the fleeting counternarra-tives would accrue a larger meaning, we are nowaffectively placed in a position—a becoming-other to one’s self—that cuts across the experi-ence the essay is attempting to provoke but notcapture. But our experience reading DeLillo’sessay is not “like” experiencing 9/11, nor is De-Lillo’s deployment of narrative mise-en-scène“like” that of the Italian neorealists. Nor is the ex-perience of 9/11 “like” that of Auschwitz or PearlHarbor, to name the two most unfortunate com-parisons that have circulated through the media.Rather, DeLillo’s essay puts likeness at stake.The tower’s implosion, so the narrator recounts,

was so vast and terrible that it was outsideimagining even as it happened. We could notcatch up to it. But it was real, punishingly so,an expression of the physics of structural limitsand a void in one’s soul, and there was thehuge antenna falling out of the sky, straight

Marco Abel 12451 1 8 . 5 ]down, blunt end first, like an arrow movingbackward in time.

The event itself has no purchase on the mer-cies of analogy or simile. We have to take theshock and horror as it is. (39)

Note the immediate erasure of the narrator’s in-tuitive recourse to that which he asserts lies be-yond the event’s purview: the event is “like anarrow moving backward in time” only to be notlike it because the event is not reducible to re-presentation: “We have to take the shock andhorror as it is.” This erasure is expressed withthe force of an image event, one DeLillo pro-duces by hitting the enter key on the keyboardto create a visual aporia marked by the whitespace between two paragraphs. So not only doesthe event have no grasp on the mercies of repre-sentational language, but, conversely, thesemercies have no purchase on the event becauseof its pure singularity. Or, as Deleuze and Guat-tari contend, an event is not of history (i.e., anarrative or plot), though it is born in and fallsback into history through the inevitable appro-priation of the event’s becoming by narrativeforces (What Is Philosophy? 110).

The point here is not to assert the impossi-bility of speaking, writing, or knowing; nor is itto suggest that ethics consists of an eternal eras-ing of the said by the saying. We do not ade-quately interrogate the event by wonderingwhether or not to write or speak about it. Themovement of DeLillo’s essay, its “aestheticstance,” rhetorically images how to become re-ceptive to the response-ability in the event: “Be-fore politics, before history and religion, there isthe primal terror. People falling hand in handfrom the towers” (39). But there is also the pri-mal force of language. DeLillo’s essay tries toheed and render palpable this force or affect—the how of language. The form that responsetakes becomes the event’s content (which is notto downplay or deny the deaths or the destruc-tion of the cityscape), and so this particularmode of response immanently subsists in theevent’s necessary variability. Or, as the essay’s

narrator affirms, even though the language ofrepresentation has no purchase on the event’ssingularity, “living language is not dimin-ished. . . . [L]anguage is inseparable from theworld that provokes it. The writer begins inthe towers, trying to imagine the moment, des-perately” (39; my emphases). The event has adiscursive dimension, exists in and through dis-course, even if it is not reducible to language.

Rather than a limitation, however, the event’sdiscursive dimension is the writer’s—or direc-tor’s—condition of possibility for response-ability. In the event’s virtual but real realm, thelanguage of analogy or simile—representationand judgment—functions as a crucial territorial-izing force. It is a cliché (e.g., “heroes versus vil-lains”) that reduces the irreducible to the familiaror at least to that which we think we know—with-out marking that this knowledge has been cast inrepresentational terms. In contrast, response be-gins in the event. Language immanently inheresand subsists in the event’s variability or seriality,which provokes imaging. The problem with thelogic of representation as resemblance is that italways positions the responding subject outsidethe event and so reduces the event to what sub-jects believe to be their points of view.

Yet, as Richard Powers’s response to 9/11 in-sinuates, while there are no words that representthe event, “there are only words.” And while “nocomparison can say what happened to us[,] wecan start with the ruins of our simile and let ‘like’move us toward something larger, some under-standing of what ‘is’ ” (22; my emphasis). Wemight be unable to escape the language of simi-les, analogies, and thus meaning. The interestingaspect of an analogy, however, is not the points tobe bridged but its modulation, its movement.20 Tobe moved, to become affected—not so much interms of feeling as in terms of thinking otherwiseand being provoked to move elsewhere—consti-tutes the ethical responsibility of the writer, direc-tor, critic, teacher, and anyone else who engagesimages. This movement or moving proceeds el-liptically, suspensefully. The process of seeing


the event, as rhetorically inscribed in and by De-Lillo’s essay, leaps, to quote Bazin once more,“from one event to the other as one leaps fromstone to stone in crossing a river” (35).

Literature and cinema thus provide rhetori-cal tools or strategies for responding to eventsthat exceed these fields’ immediate realm ofinfluence and concern, as well as go beyondsubjects’ ability to perceive them. Indeed, per-ception, pace the (neo)phenomenological tradi-tion, appears unnecessary (though it might beuseful at times) for response-ability.21 Instead,learning to respond to the event requires heed-ing “the primacy of the object” (Adorno, Aes-thetic Theory 145); it is learning how to deployand respond to images without making them in-debted to something that is not part of the event.One must follow the lines of incision or entrypregiven by the event’s force relations, just as adiamond cutter cuts the raw diamond by follow-ing its preexisting lines that determine the onlyway of cutting it without ruining its structuralintegrity and luminosity. As DeLillo caps theend of section 6 of his essay, “In its desertion ofevery basis for comparison, the event asserts itssingularity. There is something empty in thesky. The writer tries to give memory, tender-ness, and meaning to all that howling space”(39)—but the writer never knows whether andwhen the effort will succeed. Or, as PaulAuster’s narrator in City of Glass states, “Thequestion is the story itself, and whether or not itmeans something is not for the story to tell” (3).

In the Ruins of Representation

I can’t help but dream of a kind of criticism thatwould not try to judge.—Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher” (326)

In response to the horrors of the Holocaust,Adorno famously claimed that

to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.And this corrodes even the knowledge of whyit has become impossible to write poetry to-

day. Absolute reification, which presupposedintellectual progress as one of its elements, isnow preparing to absorb the mind entirely.Critical intelligence cannot be equal to thischallenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. (Prisms 34)

The singularity of the violence inherent in the Ho-locaust, Adorno suggests, cannot be explained orcomprehended in an act of contemplation quaperceptual discovery of the event’s meaning.However, for Adorno, writing after Auschwitzdid not literally exclude poetry. It excluded anypurchase on a meaningful representational, ormetaphoric, explanation of violence’s most ex-treme instantiation, since such an explanationis implicated in the Holocaust’s violence. ForAdorno, we are left with the ethical obligation torespond to the various modes of operations mani-fested by the forces of violence. What Adornocalls “[c]ritical intelligence” must begin to re-think what it means to respond to that whichseems beyond one’s capacity to perceive and un-derstand. At stake is the question of how to de-ploy imaging processes in response to events suchas Auschwitz—or 9/11, a violent event altogetherdifferent from the Holocaust. Because one violentevent is never like another, each requires its own,singular mode of response. At least for Adorno,perception—the act of uncovering meaning in agiven event—tends to have a limited critical andexplanatory force and is likely to impede singularresponse-ability. Indeed, the privileging of per-ception can serve as an ethically and politicallydangerous covering over of the fact that the un-tested and undertheorized assumptions underly-ing the quest for meaning, or the desire to attributemeaning to an event’s singularity, reduce theevent’s complexity to a (moralizing) explanation.

Adorno suggests that position taking, orjudgment, is the problem, not the solution—even if the position is a politically admirableone. The careless deployment of representa-tional language in the form of similes andanalogies enforces a culture of judgment insteadof prompting an investigation of how values

Marco Abel 12471 1 8 . 5 ]

function. I am not suggesting that we can stepoutside the realm of representation and thusjudgment, though I share Foucault’s dream ex-pressed in this section’s epigraph. Rather, be-cause of the impossibility of escaping thisrealm, it matters all the more how we deploylanguage, images, and forms of judgment.22

DeLillo’s essay teaches that one deploys themproductively not by pronouncing what shouldbe thought but by asking again, with greater se-riousness and rigor, how imaging processes canrender visible—seeable—an event such as 9/11,how the style of encounter matters at least asmuch as the ability to declare what happened.

The essay’s final section provides a subtlecase in point. Recalling an image he witnessedone month before 9/11, the narrator describesthe bustling scenery of Canal Street at sunset:“the panethnic swarm of shoppers, merchants,residents and passersby, with a few tourists aswell” (40). Amid this hectic capitalist environ-ment the narrator recalls having seen a womanon a prayer rug, “young and slender, in a silkheadscarf.” Everyone is busy buying and selling,and “no one seemed much to notice her.” Thiswoman, “partly concealed by a couple of ven-dors’ carts,” was “kneeling, upper body pitchedtoward the edge of the rug.” While the narratorcould have easily made the praying woman intoan image akin to the media clichés of Islamicfundamentalism, he instead renders her visibleas an invitation for readers to think of Islam asan intensification of the present rather than anarchaic holdover. Instead of having her practicerepresent the Eastern other to the Western self,he offers the woman’s image as a line of flightdirected at a future, a future that is infused with,not opposed to, the forces of the past. For whilethe woman practices her religion in ways seem-ingly recognizable in media images of funda-mentalism, she does so by engaging—indeedmobilizing—the globalized present.

The narrator configures the woman as in-habiting a liminal—barely perceptible—spacebetween her rug and “a storefront just a foot and

a half from her tipped head.” Traditionally,prayer rugs “include a mirhab in their design, anarched element representing the prayer niche ina mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca.”Crucially, however, the “only locational guidethe young woman needed was the Manhattangrid.” In the praying woman’s becoming-visible,global capitalism does not so much represent aforce to be overcome, as the terrorists appear tobelieve it does. Instead, the woman uses a con-stitutive organizing principle (the grid) of whatis often considered the heart of globalization(Manhattan) to inhabit her tradition in the pres-ent environment. At this moment, then, shebecomes visible as infusing her capitalist sur-roundings with a kind of spirituality that doesnot depend on representation in any form.

Inhabiting a liminal space in which global-ization is shot through with spirituality and spiri-tuality with capitalist technology, the womanremains as unrecognizable to the busy citizen-shoppers as the woman pushing a stroller was tothe terrorists. This liminal space’s becoming-visible triggers in the narrator, in the post-9/11present, the image of “the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York,” a city that“will accommodate every language, ritual, be-lief, opinion” (40). But this image is character-ized—indeed enabled—not so much by a liberaltolerance for difference as by the absence ofrecognition. If it were merely a matter of toler-ance, of open-mindedness, difference would besecondary to the logic of representation or iden-tity (the self-other dialectic): difference existsthen only because it is recognized by subjects.But DeLillo rhetorically images an ontologicaldifference that persists before a pluralist politicsof recognition (see n21). Not beholden to subjec-tive recognition, this ontological difference nec-essarily subsists as an asubjective differentiatingforce relation (a “becoming” in the Deleuzeansense) rather than as an identity to be recognizedand labeled as different. The ethical task, accord-ingly, is not to re-present (i.e., recognize) differ-ence but to respond to its already present forces.


Hence the essay’s final image: “the fellowship ofthe dead” recalled in prayer at Mecca, a fellow-ship, a practice, resoundingly affirmed by thebilingual “Allahu akbar. God is great” (40). Thisfellowship of the dead is recalled through spe-cific practices that treat the dead not as nonliving(representations of their former living selves) butas dead, as nonrepresentable, as nonrecogniz-able. But though the dead are treated as nonrec-ognizable, they become all the more seeable intheir ongoing eventness.

As DeLillo’s rhetorical actualization of aneorealist mode of seeing suggests, literatureand film can respond to the contemporary mo-ment—if they do not presume that response, orseeing the world, begins with the subject as adetached perceiver. The chance, rather, consistsin their pausing in the space in which imagesare made to circulate, thus provoking a suspen-sion of judgment, without which, as a characterin City of Glass says, “you’ll never get any-where” (Auster 29). Conversely, if we demandthat literature and film speak to the world welive in, we cannot demand that these media doso by (accurately or justly) “representing” 9/11.

Whatever responses fiction and film willmake to 9/11, the difficult task at hand is to avoidreducing it to a moralistic lesson. DeLillo’sessay, I believe, provides a recipe for future re-sponses (110 Stories is an encouraging exam-ple). What if, he asks, we were to take seriouslythe event qua event, in its singularity, its unrepre-sentability in language because it is not of lan-guage? The essay repeatedly wonders, What ifthe event were like this, then what? or if it wereotherwise, then what? In short, the ruins of thefuture of DeLillo’s essay are the ruins of repre-sentational language. Yet, since representationallanguage is the (only?) one we have, asking howto use it might not be a bad start for interveningin the world, for seeing it again, and thus, onehopes, for acting on it “for the benefit of a timeto come” (Nietzsche, “On the Uses” 60).

NotesThis essay greatly profited from the generous input of JohnMuckelbauer, Daniel Smith, Jeffrey Nealon, and ChristineHarold. I also thank David Cowart for his helpful suggestions.

1 That Harper’s asked DeLillo to respond to the terroristattack is hardly accidental, for “[t]errorism has played animportant part in nearly every novel [he] has written to date”(Allen, par. 1). Indeed, “[t]error, like an airborne toxic event,floats across the deceptively shiny surfaces of DeLillo’s fic-tion” (Scanlan 229) and often manifests itself in his exami-nation of the writer-terrorist relationship. For more on thisconnection, see Baker; Simmons.

2 I borrow the phrase “aesthetic stance” from Nietz-sche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in the Extra-moralSense,” which delineates why the question of truth is thequestion of morality.

3 Any cursory look at the discourse surrounding the bur-geoning conflict between the United States and Islamic fun-damentalism before 9/11 immediately reveals judgment as astrategic force both sides relentlessly mobilized to the detri-ment of almost any other mode of encounter. While thisrhetoric of judgment did not cause 9/11, it played a signifi-cant role in the event’s genealogy.

4 If anything, a rushed affirmation of judgment consti-tutes moral relativism, as Nietzsche argues in The Geneal-ogy of Morals, asking, what if “morality was the danger ofdangers” (20)? My argument about suspension is indebtedto Deleuze’s Masochism.

5 Baer introduces the collection with a central referenceto DeLillo’s essay, arguing that “In the Ruins” identified“the task at hand: ‘to give memory, tenderness, and meaningto all that howling space’” (1).

6 See Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real! for atelling contrast.

7 Eisenstein postulated, “Absolute realism is by nomeans the correct form of perception. It is simply the func-tion of a certain form of social structure” (35). Dialecticalmontage supposedly reveals to viewers their true conditionsof life and inspires them to act accordingly.

8 That Bazin carefully distinguishes between perceptionand seeing—that he suspends perception as an event—dis-qualifies him from being considered a phenomenologist,even though he is frequently labeled just that (see Sobchack;Rosen; and Jay). Further, Bazin’s considerable influence onthe cinema thought of Deleuze, who, as Protevi compel-lingly argues in Political Physics, is not a phenomenologistbut a materialist, should also trouble any assessment of Ba-zin’s writings as phenomenological.

9 Addressing a different kind of screen—the painter’scanvas—Deleuze argues, “[I]t would be a mistake to thinkthat the painter works on a white and virgin surface. The en-tire surface is already invested virtually with all kinds ofclichés, which it will be necessary to break with” (Francis

Marco Abel 12491 1 8 . 5 ]Bacon 17). Also remember that Deleuze considers the vir-tual to be real.

10 See Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology (esp. 201–07).In Silverman’s recent World Spectators, which merges Lacanand Heidegger to show that “[v]isual perception [rather thanlinguistic expression] comes first” (128), the sublime, thoughnot named as such, percolates as the Lacanian “impossiblenon-object of desire” inflected by Heideggerian “Dasein.”Kant discusses the sublime in his Critique of Judgment.

11 Lyotard aphoristically expresses this when he asserts,“[T]hat there is [precedes] what there is” (82). For Lyotard,this “there is” articulates the sublime as a relation of force or“a matter of intensification” (100). Although Lyotard suc-cessfully wrestles the sublime away from theories that con-figure it in terms of lack, I hesitate to turn to Lyotardbecause I fear that theories of lack have too much of astronghold over the discourse of the sublime for the dis-course to be useful for describing DeLillo’s endeavor.Virilio discusses in depth the issue of speed in, e.g., Aesthet-ics of Disappearance and Ground Zero, his essay on 9/11.

12 That DeLillo’s mode of narration functions neorealis-tically might not be a coincidence considering that, asDeleuze argues, the neorealist mode of seeing emerged fromthe destruction permeating Europe at the end of World WarII (Cinema 2 xi). DeLillo’s narrative begins within and re-sponds to another, albeit different, ruin.

13 Throughout DeLillo’s career, moving images havestrongly infused his narratives. See, e.g., Americana, WhiteNoise, and Underworld.

14 For an excellent essay on DeLillo and seriality, seeKarnicky.

15 Against the Hegelian dialectics that sublates a posi-tive term from the opposition of two negative ones, Adornocasts negative dialectics as a critical operation that suspendsresolution. It prolifically produces new concepts and anglesof entry for social diagnosis. For an excellent examinationof Adorno’s chiasmatic style, see Nealon.

16 Hardt and Negri’s Empire analyzes fundamentalism assomething that is “not backward-looking at all, but rather anew invention that is part of a political project [Empire]against the contemporary social order” (148)—an “empirical”project that relentlessly intensifies capitalism’s processes.

17 On paranoia in DeLillo’s work, see Allen; Hantke;and Knight.

18 A recurring idea in DeLillo’s oeuvre, where plots“tend to move deathwards” (White Noise 26) and “move to-ward death” (Libra 221).

19 We can observe this sudden zooming in on a particu-lar story in many neorealist films. This narrative strategy iscommon to many cinema aesthetics, but the choice of focustends to be more random and less inevitable in neorealismthan in, say, classical Hollywood cinema. For instance, DeSica’s The Bicycle Thief focuses on the father-son relation-ship, but the film’s overall aesthetic suggests that it couldhave been otherwise, that there is no intrinsic importance to

the telling of the specific story. That DeLillo’s narratorquickly abandons the focus on his nephew merely intensifiesthis neorealist device: what seems to be most personal—andalmost by definition most important—is provided as merelyone nonprivileged link in a series of images.

20 Deleuze makes a similar argument in ch. 13 of Fran-cis Bacon.

21 That is, understanding and meaning—indeed pres-ence and Being (in the Heideggerian sense)—constituteproblems only if one agrees with (neo)phenomenology thatconsciousness sits at the root of every response-ability. ForBazin, Deleuze, and DeLillo, however, presence or Being isno problem because being can be said only of becoming(Deleuze, Difference 35–42). If being is nothing but becom-ing—variation, differentiation—then perception or under-standing serves at best as one among many lines of entryand flight.

22 Or, as Jameson might say, the question of whether rep-resentation is good or bad is irrelevant, since representationis indifferent to how it is judged; the issue is how representa-tion works. See, e.g., his essay “Postmodernism” (esp. 46).

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Documents

Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”