Performance, Performativity, and Posthistoricism in Don DeLillo's Underworld

J.L. Austin's account of performatives has been enormously influential in literary studies; scholars routinely deploy speech-act theory to explain how words and texts do things in, rather than simply report on, the world. However, critics have begun problematizing the widespread use of performativity as an interpretive heuristic: focusing on illocutionary force makes interpretation irrelevant by shifting attention away from what texts mean to what they do. An emphasis on textual effects, Walter Benn Michaels and Amy Hungerford argue, valorizes the subject position and makes claims concerning cultural identity primary.

In recent books, Michaels and Hungerford explore how identitarian misconceptions inform the postwar thinking of a disparate assortment of literary, theoretical, and historical writers - including Don DeLillo. Erroneously ontologizing language, these writers misconstrue the relationship between history and experience, memory and identity. Consequently, their texts (including Underworld and Mao II) sustain a fundamental posthistoricist, neoliberal fantasy: a world divided by cultural differences rather than ideological beliefs.

Is this critique of DeLillo's project accurate? Does DeLillo's fascination with performative resignification lead him to produce deeply posthistoricist works? Is Underworld an historical or a posthistoricist novel, and what’s the distinction? To begin addressing such questions, I analyze an allegedly posthistoricist trope—nonsensical performatives as a technology for fashioning personal identity—found throughout DeLillo's work. While I discuss various literal performances in Underworld, the primary focus is on Nick Shay's performative attempts to live “responsibly in the real,” particularly his efforts to negotiate his criminal past via rote memorization.