포스트휴먼 시대 환경의식의 비전: 돈 들릴로의 『언더월드』

Abstract

This paper aims to suggest the futuristic vision through the performativity of posthuman space that human and nonhuman can have the interactions, in order to resurrect the humans that surrounded with massively accumulated wastes in the totalitarian technoscape in Don DeLillo’s Underworld. In this novel such vibrant interactions can be found at the artistic recycling of waste, the development of baseball community and the coexistent possibility of technology and spirituality in cyberspace. DeLillo converts the waste to the redemptive object, connecting with the sacredness in the viewpoint of new materialism. Through the integration of vibrant matter in the waste form, he attempts to prove that the affect stems from our material surroundings. The matter is not a static but a generative becoming. DeLillo recognizes the primacy of space, the Bronx in New York City. Though a waste manager, Nick Shay and an artist, Klara Sax move out the West, the Bronx takes an position as a central space. Nick has a nostalgia of the East, assessing his present life in Phoenix. Nick is removed from his actual perception and expressive space. This novel shatters the West myth as the space of renewal, revealing the industrialism and militarism invading into the dream land. Sax’s project on the discarded warplanes shows the artistic recycling of detritus in the post-Cold War period. She attains the identity through the reappropriation of American economic and military powers. Also, pursuing the trail of homerun ball, baseball community proves to nourish the formation of communal consciousness rather than the disruption of unity myth. It centers on the relations with others and the exposures of singularity. Ultimately, through Sister Edgar’s transposition to the cyberspace, her techno-afterlife represents the coexistent possibility of technology and spirituality. Transforming into the most fluid figure, Edgar becomes the medium to construct the global community. DeLillo emphasizes the cyberspace as the divine space through the interaction of technology and human. In conclusion, DeLillo suggests the endurance and adaptability to survive at the destructed and damaged environment. This novel emphasizes that humans should search for the redemptive power by the radiance of the dailiness, the intersubjective connection with material environment and the new recognition about thing-power that generates the communal consciousness.