The impossibility of the present in Cosmopolis

Famously, Cosmopolis concerns digital capital, with Eric Packer serving, in many accounts, as an extension of digitalized trading. But there's a problem with digital capital, of course: it's fundamentally an unrepresentable force. Is it computer code? Algorithms? Feedback loops? Flows of data? Concatenated trades, assimilable only as system? Partly as a result of this representational impossibility, Cosmopolis has an extremely tortured relationship with the present, functioning as a novel obsessed with the future but continually defending the future from an encroaching past. This tendency occurs most prosaically in Packer's irritated mutterings about how words like "skyscraper" and "automatic teller machine" and even "office" are offensively outdated, pointing their users back toward a twentieth century of more immediate dreams and out of the highly theorized, self-consciously now world of information flows, rapidly changing numbers, and infinitesimally measured units of time. Packer asserts himself to be simultaneous with these flows, a function of rapid market calculations, a kind of visionary who expresses his sublime (in the Kantian sense) digital world using the language of critical theory. I assert that DeLillo asks, in this novel, whether it is possible to grasp the present at all, and questions whether it is at all possible to comprehend the world we are to believe Packer is from. Of what electric sheep do androids like Packer dream, DeLillo asks, and it turns out that they dream of a world not terribly different than midcentury America--the era, say, of the Kennedy assassination.

For Packer may not believe in "office" as a term, but he certainly believes in it as a concept. His ostensibly high-tech limousine functions no differently than Kennedy's limo: as a cognitively convenient shorthand for power's expression in the industrialized twentieth century. (Oddly, Packer never examines the word "limousine" in his etymological critiques.) I believe this is intentional on DeLillo's part, and that Cosmopolis constitutes, in part, an extended meditation on either the passing of or persistence of a certain midcentury representation of power, or, alternately, the ways in which technological power has evaded its own conditions of representation. The limousine, in other words, is hopelessly nostalgic, as is the assassination Packer imagines. The networked disasters of climate change, cyberwar, and genetic modification are all unrepresentable through the neatly compelling narrative of assassination. Eric's dreams of assassination herald from the same era as the limo, and  the misplaced sense that individual bodies achieve meaning outside of the networks in which they are embedded. As much as Packer claims to be a creature of a hyper-networked present, then, he continually imagines a nostalgic past that likely, as Jameson asserts of Kennedy's war room, never existed as physical space with intact set of meanings.

What sorts of cognitive mappings are possible for digital capital? Cosmopolis doesn't answer this question, but poses instead an elaborate series of interesting failures. The novel installs itself in the same position as the anti-globalization protesters in one of its central scene: doomed to repeat dated versions of radical critique that never reaches its target.
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It also strikes me that DeLillo, a writer who has spent his career trying to use the tools of critical theory to represent postmodern power, represents an idea figure to scrutinize the transition from identifiable, mappable versions of (masculine) power and the impossible representation of digital flows pantomimed by Packer.

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.