THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND CAPITALISM IN THE FICTION OF DON DELILLO LUKE ALLERTON-HILTON (student number N0762499) A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. December 2020 This work is the intellectual property of the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed in the owner(s) of the Intellectual Property Rights. i Acknowledgements There are a number of people I want to thank for helping to make this thesis go from being a dream of an unemployed man to an 80,000 word project with three years of research behind it. It was not easy to get here, dealing with imposter syndrome, the isolation that comes from distance working, and a global pandemic meant that there were many times that I thought it would have been best just to pack the whole thing in. Thankfully I decided not to, and the pages laid out before you are the product of an excellent relationship with my two supervisors, Dr Daniel Cordle and Professor Philip Leonard. Their guidance over the first two years helped me turn what was essentially a man throwing ideas at a page into a much more coherent piece of work. The final year saw them help me refine my ideas and help me get to a point where I felt like maybe I wasn’t an idiot who was in way over his head. Their advice has been invaluable and, on top of that, I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting with them to talk about literature and culture. I won’t miss some aspects of a PhD (referencing), but I will certainly miss our regular catch-ups. Perhaps the most important person to thank is my mum. Although the world of academia wasn’t one with which she was familiar, it was something that she always pushed me towards in the hope of learning more and having a better life. From when I was young she wanted me to be a doctor. I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, but hopefully it’ll do. My good friend Macon Holt deserves special mention for his passion for literature and cultural theory. Without him I probably wouldn’t have even known what a PhD was. Finally, this whole process has gone on side-by-side with the PhD of Sarah Bates. Her tireless work ethic continually put me to shame – to the point I would work harder, and this has probably been pretty influential in getting me to this point. Although neither of us understands what the other’s thesis is actually about, it’s been fantastic to have somebody to talk to about being a PhD student… and everything else besides. ii Abstract This thesis seeks to understand more about the intersections between emotion and capitalism, to uncover how capitalism functions through emotional means. It does this in two ways: through analysis of the work of Don DeLillo during the period associated with neoliberal capitalism, and through exploration of cultural theory and philosophy that touches upon capitalism, emotion, or both. Using DeLillo’s fictions as contextual artefacts that depict the experience of a particular time and place, the thesis explores the emotional lives of his characters in combination with cultural theory, to develop a novel mode of reading that reveals emotions to be the language of neoliberalism. The project is split into three parts, with the first providing an overview of the functional nature of emotions within neoliberal capitalism, building on the work of Mark Fisher and Gilles Deleuze in particular. It asks how emotions functionally enable the reproduction of neoliberalism. The second part looks more closely at the emotional and affective structures that underpin neoliberalism, asking how we can understand affective infrastructure to work, and how facets of capitalism such as crisis impact on the emotional experience of individuals. The final part explores both the global spread of neoliberalism, as well as its potential future. It asks what the impact of globalisation is on emotions, and whether emotions can be part of resistance movements against capitalism. The three parts rely on theoretical works to outline the fundamentals of the various approaches, but it is through the analysis of DeLillo’s fiction that the nuances of these intersections between emotion and capitalism emerge. His works enable us to see where capitalism makes happiness a tool of manipulation, where it is an indicator of success and performance, and where it is something promised but never delivered. His work reveals the fleeting nature of happiness in contemporary America and how it is more common to find an interlocking mixture of fear and hope at the heart of the neoliberal emotional landscape. iii Contents Introduction ‘In the name of a future that will never actually arrive’: Don DeLillo, emotion and neoliberalism ....................................................................................................................... 1 Part One Capitalism and Control ........................................................................................ 35 Chapter One ‘There’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful’: The naturalisation of capitalist control ...................................................................................................................... 36 Chapter two ‘The camp was not enclosed by stone walls’: Deleuze, Foucault and power in capitalist society ...................................................................................................................... 68 Part Two Structure and Crisis ........................................................................................... 103 Chapter Three ‘Science awash in irrepressible fantasy’: Neoliberalism’s Structure of Feeling ................................................................................................................................... 104 Chapter Four ‘The dead and missing. Then the commercial’: Tragedy, crisis, pandemic, profit ...................................................................................................................................... 140 Part Three Globalisation and Resistance .......................................................................... 174 Chapter Five ‘I travel between places, never in them’: Innovation, globalisation, and the nation ..................................................................................................................................... 175 Chapter Six ‘Marching into American sunlight’: Routes to resistance ............................... 209 Conclusion ‘There’s always something else coming at us down the pipeline’: Happiness, capitalism, the future. ............................................................................................................ 240 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 253 iv Introduction ‘In the name of a future that will never actually arrive’: Don DeLillo, emotion and neoliberalism In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, his protagonist Jack Gladney makes a rare comment on the nature of happiness. Speaking about the perceived follies of youth, the professor of Hitler studies says ‘he thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation’.1 This is interesting because DeLillo rarely has his characters talk overtly on any emotion that is not fear. Although it is not an exceptionally complex thought, especially by the standards of the text, the idea opens up the possibility for studying DeLillo’s work from the perspective of happiness. Gladney questions what happiness is, suggesting it is nothing more than a neuro-chemical reaction. In a novel that is obsessed with another emotion (fear), why would DeLillo have his character make a cynical comment about the existence of happiness? If Gladney believes that happiness can be just ascribed to stimulation, then the cause of that stimulation must be of interest to DeLillo scholars who are interested in emotion in his fiction. This thesis does not agree with the belief that happiness is merely a neuro-chemical reaction, but it does suggest that this position is influenced by the consumerism typical of capitalist society. Zygmunt Bauman writes that, through consumerism, it is possible to ‘add bright spots throughout the day’, allowing individuals to be stimulated into happiness whenever they shop.2 It is too early to say whether Gladney was referring to capitalist or consumer stimulation in his formulation of happiness, but to understand the emotion in this way is to understand it as capitalism asks for it to be understood. It is happiness as conceived by 1 Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 2011), p. 182. 2 Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013), p. 19. 1 American capital. Gladney’s colleague at the university is proud to be American because they ‘still lead the world in stimuli’, as if this is equivalent to leading the world in positive emotion.3 Although DeLillo makes few authorial interventions defining his own philosophy of emotion, the way his characters instinctively link emotion to capitalism is telling. It forces the question as to why DeLillo’s characters think that way; why they, as the written products of DeLillo’s social context,