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.Within this schema the cult represents the momentof primal mediation at which the logic of writing invades the rhythms of speech andthe closeness and community of oral culture.Despite claiming to be returning to acondition of immediacy prior to writing, history and even to language itself   we areworking at a preverbal level , one of the cultists claims  the cult is nevertheless clearlydetermined by its relationship to written language.As Axton notes, the alphabet is its whole mechanism , its  whole point.Its ritual of murder according to the logic of thealphabet is thus a perversion of the ancient practice of sacrifice in premodern, oralcultures.While this latter was a manifestation of the presence of the sacred, the cult s198 CAPITAL, CLASS AND TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTUREpractice is a rationalised degradation of sacred ritual and a symptom of the sacred sabsence.What is produced in its stead is  death by system, by machine intellect(Names: pp.208, 246, 175).Writing functions also to undermine subjectivity in the novel.Axton learns thathis first name, Jim, is also the name of an Arabic letter, while Brademas observes thatthe word  character means not only  someone in a story but also  a mark or symbol ; Like , Axton retorts,  a letter of the alphabet (Names: p.10).Thus Axton s sense ofalienation from himself is close to the way in which identity or selfhood is representedhere as being evacuated by the mediations of writing.But while we can read this asan example of DeLillo s postmodern literary reflexivity, we must note that The Namesdoes not essentialise this condition of textualised absence or emptiness as aninescapable ontological fact.Rather, it is frequently related to particular kinds ofhistorical and class experience.For both Axton and Brademas are professionalstudents and practitioners of writing.Brademas is an epigraphist, Axton for thegreater part of his career has been a freelance writer for high-technology businesses.He thus stands at the centre of that process of the technologising of the word whichOng argues begins with the development of the written alphabet.Moreover, writingis identified within the narrative as an enabling aspect of both the accumulationprocess and the development of modern empires.The concern with writing as primalmediation cannot therefore be separated from the concern with the derealising effectsof multinational capital in the age of electronic communications, and the placewithin it of the professional managerial class.Speech, by contrast, offers certain consolations in the face of this condition ofmultiply mediated textuality.That epiphanic moment sought by many of thecharacters occurs eventually for Axton, not in relation to the cult, nor in connectionwith the Greek nationalist conspiracy he attempts to uncover, but at the end of thenovel during his much deferred visit to the Acropolis.Here he unexpectedly findsthat sense of connectedness and authentic  human feeling , as he calls it, which hasbeen absent from his mobile, free-floating professional existence, and it comes as aneffect of speech, of the voice.Contemplating the remains of the Parthenon, Axton found a cry for pity.This, he continues,  is what remains to the mauled stones intheir blue surround, this open cry, this voice we know as our own.And this voiceis not simply an abstract, unrealised ideal voice; it is an attribute of the very realeveryday conversations of ordinary people.Axton concludes that at this ancienttemple  No one seems to be alone.This is a place to enter in crowds.Everyone istalking.I move past the scaffolding and down the steps, hearing one language afteranother, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong.This is what we bring to the temple, notprayer or chant or slaughtered rams.Our offering is language (Names: pp.330,331).Spoken language here becomes a positive instance of cosmopolitanism andcommunity, a medium of presence still tinged by what Fredric Jameson calls  theevanescent warmth of the sacred (Jameson, 1984b: p.122).It is set against the coldand empty cosmopolitanism of writing whose deterritorialisations mean that itsrelationship to the sacred can, as in the case of the cult, only be contrived and brutal.This opposition also serves Axton as a mapping device [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]