The small room of the Fordist limousine

The more I read Cosmopolis, the more I see it as a DeLilloian reflection on his own body of work, a corpus that began, by his own admission, with the shots aimed at the 1961 Lincoln Continental 4-door convertible, built in Wixom, Michigan and customized by Hess &  Eisenhardt of Cincinnati, Ohio. I mention the car's origins because I'm seeking to inquire whether the car's conditions of production, within the Fordist framework (it is literally a Ford product) shape the different models of masculinity at work around the Kennedy assassination--specifically, the Zapruder film--and the resituated, exaggerated, but contiguous set of tropes at work in DeLillo's properly post-Fordist limousine. Cosmopolis repeatedly invokes a world of globalized labor, temporary work, and capitalist flows, situating itself within a world far from the Fordist compact and relatively local labor struggles of the factory floor. DeLillo deploys Packer's limousine as a symbol of capitalist flows: it is outfitted in terminals that feed Packer the streams of data on which he ruminates throughout the book; DeLillo deliberately contrasts the slowness of the limousine's movement across New York with the speed of capital; the limousine makes Packer faceless: it looks like every person of power's vehicle, such that the anti-globalization protesters, who would target Packer if they knew he was inside, can only treat the limo as part of the landscape in Times Square.

And yet, this being a DeLillo novel perhaps, the limo also serves as a physical meeting place for Packer and his associates. As one of my students  pointed out, this move feels odd in a novel devoted to networked communication. Cosmopolis, then, simultaneously installs Packer as a function of flows and a product of an older, bureaucratic form of power. The limousine gestures back to Kennedy, with his War Room, his Cold-War-reified position as a leader meeting with men to Decide Things, a surely nostalgic, impossible version of power as Fredric Jameson would have it. At the same time, it gestures toward a kind of power represented only imperfectly by people like Jamie Diamond, but more widely understood as anonymous flows: markets, investment vehicles, computerized trades, systems that have no true Masters. There is no small room in Packer's world; there never was, but even the semblance of such shifts in the neoliberal moment. Within this moment of digitalized flows, the limousine itself, and the meetings within it, function as a nostalgic moment of knowable order.

There's something deeper going on with the way DeLillo puts his best crit theory lines in Kinski's mouth, and has Packer confirm these. While DeLillo is, I believe, reflecting on his own past use of such lines, he's also commenting on the reader's need to believe these--an extension of the reader's need to believe that neoliberal, digital power can be figured by the conversations in the limousine. Cosmopolis becomes, in this way, a meditation on the exhaustion of critical thought itself in the face of digitalized capital. Kinski's statements are deliberately facile in the face of the data's sublime; to even call the data sublime is to gesture to a means of understanding it that belies its inaccessibility. Of course, DeLillo has long wrestled with the idea of a system beyond the individual, or at least beyond the individual's understanding, and yet his novels nevertheless often purport, alongside the critical theory they espouse, to present at least an allegorical version of such systems. Cosmopolis arguably foregrounds the failure of allegory itself, even as it continues to recognize the appeal of such allegory.

Cosmopolis is a highly cynical novel. The spaces outside the system--the protesters in particular--fail. There is no transcendent spectacular meaning (Libra), nor de-alienating immediacy (White Noise), in Packer's death, and no billboard with visions of angels (Underworld), not even the aesthetic pleasures of art, a long DeLillo standby. There is only software talking to itself, quietly destroying worlds, elsewhere, away from the multiple nostalgias of the novel itself.

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I should also observe that the limousine is a particularly complicated cultural object: a symbol of power, but product of American working-class manufacturing; mass produced, but customized in an almost artisinal context; the site of traditional Fordist labor disputes as well as the site of neoliberal, service industry labor struggles; an automobile designed for slowness; an armored vehicle long associated with violence; a representation of global power with roots in the early twentieth century.