Babbling as Resistance in Don DeLillo’s The Silence

Drawing on poststructuralist theories, this article asks what becomes of contemporary epistemology and ontology when digital technology collapses, as portrayed in Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020). Dialogue at the beginning of this novel reveals the extent to which each character’s thoughts have been conditioned by the regimes of capital and digital signification. When DeLillo’s characters attempt to speak apart from the discourse of technology that has structured their knowledge and language, their speech becomes incoherent noise, or babbling. However, when read through Attali’s formulation of noise as subversion and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization as an escape from hegemonic language, babbling emerges as a form of speech that can resist technological dominance by disrupting the demand to make sense. As DeLillo’s characters face the loss of meaning and turn towards silence, they enact the resistant potential of thinking with silence rather than with technology. By foregrounding silence and babbling as processes that subvert the discourses of capitalist technology, this article claims that nonsignifying language in The Silence problematizes and envisions a tentative escape from the emptiness of hegemonic digital language.