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In 1973, renewed capital accumulation by financial means is still a “mellow promise” or as one of the characters in Great Jones Street would describe it, US’ capital’s “latent history”(GJS, 75). However, Bucky’s journey through the heart of Manhattan in 1973 “burns a hole in time”(RD, 3-4) which reaches out to Lyle Wynant in 1977, as the latter traverses the Financial District, now haunted by the ghostly figures of outcasts symbolising the body of labour that the financial turn is in the process of vaporising. Back in the late 1970s, one can hear the “amplitude pulse of history [pounding from the] inmost crypt”(P, 132) of Wall Street, the heart of the new financial economic order that was gradually emerging in 1977, and which Players masterfully describes.394

In Running Dog (1978) DeLillo apparently focuses on what he calls the “fallout from the Vietnam experience.”395 _{I would suggest that Vietnam is important insofar as it produced a}

military and legitimacy crisis which compounded the US’ already shaky position as world hegemon in the face of the world economic crisis of overaccumulation. The Vietnam debacle exposed militarization as a failed national gambit to support prosperity and expand US corporate and governmental power. More importantly, Vietnam questioned the war mentality undergirding American culture, and produced a loss of beliefs, codes and models upon which

Americans had constructed their identity both nationally and internationally. Such a loss complements the loss of C within the realm of speculative capital. Bereft of the models and values which granted them “a solid footing”(133) in the world, Running Dog’s characters must adjust to a new socio-economic order and its culture. DeLillo depicts their attempt to redefine their social roles as a driving urge to possess an alleged Hitlerian pornographic movie, an object which should bestow on its final possessor an endless source of economic power and, consequently, the means to preserve a system of domination and control.

Yet, as DeLillo points out, the quest for the film is doomed to fail since the “sense of terrible acquisitiveness [characterising the quest is] coupled with a final indifference to the object.”396 _{I would argue that DeLillo’s notion of “acquisitiveness” accompanied by “a final}

indifference” to the pursued object evokes that of fetishism, which results from the novel’s characters experiencing a loss which they refuse to acknowledge. As Henry Krips points out, the fetish is an object which stands in a metaphorical relation to an object of need which is inaccessible. In fixating on the fetish, the subject trades the object of need with “something more accessible but less satisfying”397 _{which, although not the aim of desire, nonetheless produces}

pleasure when pursued. Since it attaches to substitutes of the needed object, desire produces a continuing tendency within the subject to displace his or her desire onto new objects in order to distract himself/herself from facing an objectal loss.398 _{Within such purview, the quest for the}

Hitler film might effectively be recast as a fetishistic quest for an object which is and is not the desired object, and Running Dog as an investigation of fetishism and of the effects and anxieties it produces, through which DeLillo offers a metaphorical reading of the fetishism characterising the financial and credit culture.

The magazine Running Dog (as the name suggests, paying tribute to Mao’s famous denunciation of “capitalist lackeys and running dogs”) used to be a “one-time organ of discontent”(21) and used to voice “ideological and material dissent from capitalist hegemony [and from] the US state.”399 _{The magazine has gone “mainstream”(21), but is “dying and [in}

need of] a fix”(47): in order to revive its economic fortunes it now “plays to people’s beliefs [in conspiracies]”(111). Running Dog magazine testifies to the dissolution of the countercultural

396 _{DeLillo in Anthony DeCurtis, “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An interview with Don DeLillo” in Frank Lentricchia ed.,} Introducing Don DeLillo,(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), 64.

397 _{Krips, Fetish, 22.} 398 _{Ibid., 23-24.}

movements which the Vietnam War had brought together and their reabsorption within a mainstream culture which capitalises on people’s desire for conspiracies.

Running Dog’s journalist Moll Robbins’ life partakes the destiny of the magazine. Once a critic of the capitalist consumer society exemplified by her advertisement executive father (39), Moll had embraced revolution and investigative journalism to uncover shady collusions between big business and the government (112). She had also dated a Gary Penner, also known as “Dial- a-bomb”, a terrorist targeting banks and other symbols of the establishment (40). Now, instead, Moll leads a life marked by “transience and flash”(109) and feels “disassociated”(86). Arguably, her sense of disassociation originates in the end of the countercultural movements as the source of Moll’s unacknowledged loss of “old [revolutionary] values”(32) which provided her with a sense of identity and stability. As a result, I would suggest that Moll conducts a fetishised existence through which she attempts to disavow her having lost that part of her self which enabled her to dissent from the dominant ideology. Moll generally pursues conspiracies which are in fact the product of fantasy (such as an alleged “system of assassination by mental telepathy [devised by the KGB]”[133]), “a product that you offer to the highest bidder or the most enterprising and reckless fool.”400 _{However, as one first encounters her, she is in the}

process of writing a piece on “sex as big business”(14), an inquiry into the relations between smut merchants, the mafia, the police and “highly respectable business elements”(58), through which Moll seeks to preserve some of the magazine’s original radical spirit.

Her inquiry leads her to visit Lightborne’s erotica gallery, the place around which all those vying for possession of the Hitler film will subsequently converge, and where the film will eventually be screened. The gallery resembles “an antique shop in serious decline”(14), a place of ambient decay emanating from the erotica painting, sculptures and knick-knacks that pack the place. Here, she meets a young man, Glen Selvy, who acts as front for an unnamed erotica collector. At the end of an auction, Lighborne reveals to both Moll and Selvy that “a film exists. Unedited footage. One copy. The camera original. Shot in Berlin, April, the year 1945”(18). The film is allegedly “a filmed record of an orgy”(19) that Hitler shot in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery shortly before killing himself. Led to believe that the man behind Selvy might effectively be a member of the government, Moll finds herself irresistibly drawn into the quest for the movie. While on the one hand the pursuit of the film might offer an insight into the world

of the sex business, on the other hand her engagement in the quest suggests her attempt to overcome her transience, her sense of disassociation. In my view, her decision to follow the pursuit of the film reveals an unconscious attempt to recuperate that radicalism, the thrill and “the danger”(213) of her former revolutionary life by uncovering an intricate web of links between the government and dubious business enterprises.401

Moll’s resorting to a “deceptive appearance [by means of] clothes [as] a method of safeguarding her true self”(29) further evidences her suffering from a form of melancholic incorporation which leads her to preserve the encrypted knowledge of her loss of radical self. Like Bucky’s Wunderlick’s “sweater fetish”(GJS, 115), disguise clothes offer a protective barrier that prevents her loss from resurfacing. In addition, in order to counteract a certain disquiet arising from her confronting “the hard surfaces, the blatant flesh of things”(244), Moll seeks a “wholly secure escape”(225) in “a life in the movies”(224).

In Players DeLillo had singled out film as a privileged aesthetic medium through which he sought to render visible the organising principles and the effects of the hiatus between form and content proper of finance capital. In Running Dog, the movies offer Moll “a permanently renewable…sense of freedom from all the duties and conditions of the nonmovie world”(225), and functions as the locus where she can shed the weight and anxieties of “real events”(225) she seeks to escape. Films offer Moll an endless source of pleasure arising from the multiple filmic existences that she may vicariously experience. The filmic world caters to her desire’s “intrinsic instability…its continuing tendency to displace onto new objects” and thus allowing Moll to “distract [herself] from facing the…recurring trauma”402 _{of her own loss.}

Film in Running Dog, however, does not feature simply as a medium but as a commodity, whose “flimsy ribbon [contains] a magical power”403_{, a residual materiality that}

testifies to the resistance of a world that is obliterated within the financial regime. The fascination that the film exerts derives from its problematic nature: absent and immaterial for most of the novel, its existence for most of the time only a rumour, and, at the same time, a tangible, material object of great value. The mere possibility that such film might exist “put[s]

401 _{I agree with David Cowart who points out that, in taking part in the quest for the movie, she attempts to produce}

some piece of investigative journalism modelled on Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate piece. For Cowart, Moll “seeks evidence of a senator’s secret corruption– she seeks the “smoking gun” that has its pop art representation in the neon objet d’art on her wall.” David Cowart, Don DeLillo. The Physics of Language, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 62.

402 _{Krips, Fetish, 24.} 403 _{Boxall, Don DeLillo, 33.}

powerful forces to work”(238), setting in motion various parties who will make no scruples in using violence and intimidation in order to possess such commodity, as the murder of Christoph Ludecke, the original repository of the film, in the novel’s prologue demonstrates.

The erotica dealer Lightborne, who acts as the novel’s theoretician of Nazism (a period of which he happens to be a student [99]), pornography and the relation between the two subjects, initially offers Moll a lesson in the market of erotica. Lightborne posits that such a market is undergoing a shift in that erotica consumers are now drawn by “[m]ovement, action, frames per second. This is the era for better and for worse. It seems a little ineffectual what’s here. It’s all mass and weight”:

“Pure gravity”

“Sure a thing isn’t fully erotic until it has the capacity to move. A woman crossing her legs drives men mad. She moves, understand. Motion, activity, change of position. You need this for eroticism to be total”(15).

Lightborne’s inquiry into the changing habits of erotica consumers does not simply point to a shift towards flimsier and more mobile forms of commodity (a shift entirely consistent with an economy which is transiting towards unfixed forms of capital) but possibly seeks to render visible the ways in which desire arising from motion and change can help foreground an analysis of the financial culture which attends to the medium of speculative capital.

Perhaps the best way I can gloss Lightoborne’s theoretical assumptions is via sociologist Richard Sennett’s work on The Culture of the New Capitalism, a culture which, he argues, reflects the new economy of high tech and global finance’s emphasis on flow and flux and constant change.404 _{Within such new economic and cultural context, consumers, for Sennett, are}

attracted to the commodities’ brand or carefully constructed images which lure them with a

promise of potency and potential.405 _{Consumers are thus led to desire not so much the}

commodity in its material body (although the use-value therein contained originally motivates their purchase), but rather an immaterial something to the side of the commodity which yields the promise of limitless potential, of constant movement.406 _{The object of desire, Sennett argues,}

must contain an excess of potency which “stimulates the [consumers’] imagination instilling in

404 _{Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, 10, 12.}

405 _{Ibid., 142. Sennett’s argument is similar to the one Haug exposes in his Commodity Aesthetics concerning the}

commodity’s second skin.

[them] a sense “of potential ability, [the object of desire must] emphasiz[e] the prospect of doing things one yet has to do.”407

In pursuing the promise of excess of potency and limitless potential, consumers display an intrinsically fetishistic behaviour. What they seek is an affective dimension, a promissory quality which exceeds the object itself and which accommodates the essential character of desire. For Bersani and Dutoit, “desire is always on the move”, an activity of fantasy which requires an unending mobilization of imagination.408

In the light of Sennett’s argument, Lightborne’s emphasis on motion and change as the new and essential features of film and erotica reflects the emergence of a new culture which substitutes mobility and unfixity for the deadening fixity and solidity of static objects. Indeed, the Hitler film seems to contain what Sennet calls an “excess of potency” in that it promises not only a valuable content, but the potential to extract even greater value from its distribution. While of course actually possessing the film is paramount for porn mogul Richie Armbrister, for Earl Mudger (head of paramilitary organization Radial Matrix) and mobster Vincent Talerico, their desire to possess the film arises from the prospect that, through the film, they will command an endless source of profit deriving not from production but from marketing and distribution rights over the movie. These characters wish to participate in a rentier economy where profits arise from ownership titles.

Yet the desirability of the Hitler film derives most prominently from in its allegedly being an original, unedited copy which has been stored in a vault for thirty years. As such the original footage would be invested with what Benjamin called “aura”, its mark of authenticity, which, Benjamin argues, “is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantiative duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”409 _The

film’s authenticity and auratic quality render the film “the most eloquent expression [and embodiment] of [a] lost historical dimension.”410

Arguably, the film possesses a kind of structural preciousness not unlike that which characterised the Mountain Tapes in Great Jones Street. If like the Tapes, the Hitler film remains mostly absent from the novel, yet it is able to mobilise the appetites of various parties, it

408 _{Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Violence, 71.}

409 _{Walter Benjamin, “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, trans.by Harry Zohn,}

edited and with an introduction by Hanna Arendt, (London: Jonathan Cape 1970), 222-223.

also represents an object which has remained hoarded and which once released, i.e. dishoarded, will generate previously unheard of profits arising from its circulation.

Without such structural preciousness, the film could never become a source of liquidity. Therefore, I would affirm that particularly Lightborne’s preoccupation with verifying the structural preciousness of the film exemplifies a monetary concern for preserving money’s function as the universal equivalent and store of value within an economic regime which relies heavily of finance and credit, credit which can never act as a trusted measure and store of value. Preserving money’s “preciousness” once attached to gold becomes a structural necessity for without the “precious” to sustain the fictionality of the credit system, the system would collapse under the weight of its own fictionality. The Hitler film in Running Dog then constitutes another instance of the precious, of the hoard as treasure. As I pointed out in the previous chapters, the need for an alternative to gold as that which is “precious” becomes paramount in the wake of the collapse of the dollar-gold convertibility in the early 1970s. Indeed, one might note that the instantiations of the precious in DeLillo tend to assume more and more immaterial forms, passing from the thinness of tape in Great Jones Street and of film in Running Dog to become pure electronic form in Players (where stacked pennies symbolise residual forms of the treasure as hard cash) and in Cosmopolis. Such dematerialization of the precious might indeed symbolise the transformation of the concept of money within the Western culture, dematerialisation which is entirely in keeping with both severance from gold and immaterial forms of money within the realm of finance.

Reading the film as an instantiation of the “precious” helps to gloss Senator Percival’s desire to possess the movie. Senator Percival heads a committee inquiring into PAC/ORD. The acronym stands for “Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Record and Disbursement [and while working] on the surface as the principal unit of budgetary operations for the whole US intelligence”, PAC/ORD was instead a cover for the paramilitary activities conducted by Earl Mudger and his Radial Matrix as PAC/ORD’s “secret arm”(74). The Senator is known as a “righteous”(25) politician and hopes to uncover “something evil”(25) about the government. Nevertheless, the hearings on PAC/ORD are closed and whatever information the Senator has collected has to remain secret. His gathering valuable information which must not be released complements his privately collecting extremely valuable erotica which, as Moll Robbins discovers, are stored in a secret, vault-like room in his Georgia house. The senator’s collection

has enormous value as it includes precious paintings by “Icart, Housaki, Picasso, Balthus, Dali…Botero”(80) and a vast amount of equally precious potteries, sculptures, drawings and so on. Both his private collection and the information he gathers via his inquiry possess the characteristics of a valuable hoard, and indeed one may see the Senator as a hoarder who pursues the Hitler film as a “treasure”. The Senator’s role as a hoarder, given his being the representative of a government which has abandoned gold as that which is treasurable, may appear contradictory. Yet, in pursuing the ‘precious’ in the form of artwork and the film, the Senator may effectively be attempting to preserve the notion of the hoard as a the monetary expression of value. Indeed, the accumulation of “considerable reserves of real wealth”411 _{in the}

form of art objects, precious metals and antiques has become, according to Harvey, an effective means to “store value for any length of time…under conditions where the usual forms of [unconvertible] money [particularly within inflationary periods, are] deficient.”412 _{In addition,}

his hoarding activities, as expressive of the need to preserve the function of money as a store of value, are entirely in keeping with the regulatory function that the state must play: even as it creates the conditions for “the untrammelled and continuous flow of interest-bearing money capital” by means of deregulation, the state (either via the central bank or via direct intervention on monetary or credit policies) must guarantee the soundness of money “in the face of over- speculation, distortion and all other ‘insane forms’ that the credit system inevitably spawns.”413

While the Senator’s motives for pursuing the movie may differ from those of Mudger, Armbrister or Talerico, and while the same Lightborne remains sceptical about the actual content of the film, they all display a willingness to believe in the existence of such commodity and the actual quest for the movie assumes the features of a speculative bid. Indeed the world of erotica is “a world of rumormongers”(18) where the bare rumour of the film’s existence suffices to “heat up the market”(100). In effect, Lightborne helps “create a fever”(100) and propagates it,