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.292, 247).The flight from professionalism is thus a circular one.Rather than providing aconduit to some kind of direct relationship with nature and the material world, thecult itself embodies a condition of primal mediation which Axton and Brademasfind always already inhabits the spaces into which they are drawn.The epiphanicritual murder is never witnessed.Instead, the lesson the cult teaches is, in the wordsof one of its members, that The world has become self-referring.the world hasmade a self of its own.a self-referring world in which there is no escape.Secondnature, to use Neil Smith s formulation, has colonised and eclipsed first nature,depriving it of its originality, indeed putting the whole notion of originality intodoubt.After colonisation there can be no escape from history in nature, as thetheorist of decolonisation Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).Neither, The Names suggests, can the mediations of rationality and specialisedknowledge be evaded in a direct relationship with the object world, nor theabstracting and reifying force of capital in some projected precapitalist enclave.Finally, there is no escape from the class conditions of experience in as much as the NATIONAL ALLEGORY AND THE ROMANCE OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT: THE NAMES 197quest for the cult can be seen as a dramatisation of what Bruce Robbins calls thelogic that links professionals to the disappearance of their objects (Robbins, 1993:p.173).Robbins points here to the abstracting nature of professional rationalitywhich tends to seize upon an object at precisely the moment of that object s eclipseby the modernising process of which professional rationality is itself an embodiment.This object is then dissolved into a collection of concepts and codes and, ultimately,into discourse.15 This is precisely what happens to the absent encounter with naturein The Names.The projected return to nature is concurrent with the intensificationof capital s invasion and transformation of natural space, what Jameson defines as the moment of a radical eclipse of nature itself (Jameson, 1991: p.34).Moreover,the direct, unmediated act of ritual killing which promises to lie at the novel s heartis displaced, even obscured, by discourse.Axton and Brademas only ever talk andtheorise about the longed-for primal encounter, and do so, significantly, in a seriesof professional languages, discourses and identities: So we talked, so we argued,taking roles, discarding them, the social theorist, the interrogator, the criminologist(Names: pp.297, 172).16In this respect, the novel shifts its emphasis from the thematics of space and placeto a thematics of language in order to pursue its interrogation of multinationalcapital and the condition within it of professional deracination.The suggestion isthat language itself is the primal mediation; the process of naming thus turns thingsinto signs and interposes an originary distance between subject and object, adistance which the rationalising processes of modernity (and its agents, theprofessionals) simply intensifies.But whereas we saw DeLillo breaking down theopposition between space and place, between first nature and second nature, in hisdescription of the deterritorialising spatial logic of these processes, the theme oflanguage is deployed to introduce an alternative opposition which serves Axton asan alternative mapping device.This is the opposition between speech and writing,or between what Walter Ong calls orality and literacy, and between the distinctkinds of social and subjective being structured by these modes.Ong describes writing as a kind of secondary, technological mediation of the spokenword.Writing is the technologising of the word ; it is the original reproductivetechnology, initiat[ing] what print and computers only continue, the reduction ofdynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present.Historically, the spatialisations of writing have undermined the warm, personallyinteractive lifeworld of oral culture in which the spoken word forms human beingsinto close-knit groups (Ong, 1983: pp.82, 80, 74)
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