Derivitive as creating ontologies

I'm reading the fascinating account of derivatives by Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, in which the authors describe derivatives as a particularly powerful form of fiction, one that allows financial analysts to abstract risk and value from the sociohistorical events that make them up, and so to create the very measurements of risk that they allege to be accurate accounts of the underlying world:

“[F]inancial derivatives also shape a new means of grasping historical events, in that they presuppose that the market can reimagine and reduce sociohistorical processes, no matter how seemingly incommensurable or complex, to terms of abstract, quantifiable, and hence manageable risk.[…] The financial derivative thus has an underlying categorical structure based on its ability to ontologize real-time event structures. The social fiction made real is that aculturally derived technologies of understanding—especially the development of particular differential equations for modeling time-bracketing transactions—permit (post)moderns to parse any event structure into its naturally occurring components, to abstract these components from the event structure and from their temporal flows, and to assign a calculable and quantified value to these components, thereby allowing agents to entertain the expectation that they can predict and manage future events (135).

Derivatives thus act as a kind of critical theory, asserting abstract, disconnected versions of the social world which are nevertheless interconnected in the financial sphere. Like certain kinds of postmodern fiction, they assert misidentified truths about the world that become their own predictions of the future, substituting socially constructed versions of connectedness for actual connections.

I'm not sure how accurate this analogy is. But it certainly seems at work in Cosmopolis.

Of neoliberalism and subjectivity

On the first page of their influential volume, Do Economists Make Markets, the sociologists Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Munesa and Lucia Siu describe the eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs, who served as an advisor to Bolivia in the 1980s, famously implementing "shock therapy," in which the Bolivian government spent much of its remaining reserves of foreign cash to remove pesos from circulation. He also eliminated government subsidies, removed import tariffs, and linked the Bolivian economy to the U.S. dollar, all in the name of enabling Bolivia to pay back its debt to the IMF. In short, Sachs implemented what has come to be called a neoliberal agenda. As MacKenzie et. al. observe, though, Sachs himself later questioned his application of purely academic theories to the specific case of Bolivia:

Later, Sachs was to muse on his meager understanding of the country to whose leaders he gave his crucial advice. It was only in a conversation a couple of years after his 1986 visit that he realized that Bolivia's physical geography was a fundamental feature of its economic situation, not merely an incidental fact. "Of course I knew that Bolivia was landlocked and mountainous.... Yet I had not reflected on how these conditions were key geographical factors, perhaps the overriding factors, in Bolivia's chronic poverty.... Almost all the international commentary and academic economic writing about Bolivia neglected this very basic point. It bothered me greatly that the most basic and central features of economic reality could be overlooked by academic economists spinning their theories from thousands of miles away" (Sachs 2005, p. 105) (1).

It strikes me that this conflict--between a universally-applicable solution for Bolivia, despite its mountains, and an "on the ground" solution in tune with Bolivia's specific situation--is also the conflict at work in Cosmopolis. In wanting to believe himself a universal subject, in desiring to transcend the earth, Eric Packer is acting just like Sachs. The very notion of a one-size-fits-all solution seems bound to Packer's singular identity. It is thus that the problem of subjectivity--the anti-Cartesian assertion about partial selves, and identifiable in Butler, Lacan, and Foucault--returns to haunt the Latourian/Callonian notion that all actors act in relation to a series of actants. Partial subjectivity, ill-fitting universal solutions--these are cut from the same philosophical cloth. It's quite possible, actually, that neoliberalism and old liberalism have something in common this way.

(Their point, of course, is about economics as a science intervening in the objects it observes: "economics is at work within economies in a way that is at odds with the widespread conception of science as an activity whose sole purpose is to observe and study, that is to 'know' the world" (2).

The inevitability of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories

In reading the surprisingly vibrant conspiracy theories circulating around the Sandy Hook tragedy, I'm struck not by the narrative form of these theories--they are typical in their way, finding "inconsistencies," alleging the participation of "crisis actors" who stood in as parents and other spokespeople, asserting the inconsistent release of film, and so on. Instead, I see this episode as indicative of a new inevitability around conspiracy theorizing: not that anything can be turned into a conspiracy, but that every issue must become a conspiracy. I'm not sure, really, if the Internet simply makes visible the same subset of the population who have always made such assertions. Subcultures of conspiracy theorists have existed for many years, but before the Internet, these scubcultures would have faced difficulty getting media attention; but now, researchers at CNN or MSNBC looking for a story need only log onto Facebook or Infowars to find people willing to make wild allegations. Similarly, likeminded ideas flourish in the unchecked comment boards of these sites.

It also seems that the zero-compromise climate that has arisen in recent years, a toxic product of right-wing radio, FOX news, gerrymandering, and the "blogosphere," has made such theories far more palatable. It's frightening, really, the lengths to which these voices go. They're driven by a increasingly impending sense of social breakdown, and likely the perceived sense that whiteness is on the decline. Guns become, in this context, a symbol of retaining agency. That may be a generous reading, though, one that assigns more rationality to these voices then they likely deserve. What likely happens is that the possibility of gun regulation becomes amplified, resignified every time it is deployed, so that even the specter of regulating some particularly militaristic guns, or requiring more universal background checks becomes the specter of a totalitarian government taking over rights. It's not so much that guns symbolize anything, as that the fight itself is enjoyable, and the persecution fantasy powerful.

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.

Gibson on deluge of information/paranoia

With overtones of the Sandy  Hook conspiracy theory insanity, whereby any media event is turned into a faked moon landing because there is simply so much data to examine and rewrite:

We’ve all got infinitely more soil for paranoia than we previously had before. But I don’t think it necessarily means we are more prone to grow it. But if we are prone to grow it, we could grow it more quickly and lavishly than we could when we only had a few newspapers and monthly magazines to act as fertilizer.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interview/2/

Cosmopolis/DeLillo/Filmic Violence

First take on Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Heard a lot about this film at the DeLillo conference back in April.
A lot of the commentary predictably and compellingly focused on the film/novel's invocation of global technocapitalism and its discontents, focusing with particular urgency on the protest scene at the film/novel's center, as well as the protagonist's self-destructive drive to self-immolate through a radically risky bet on the Japanese yen (the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, per wikipedia). Many of the film's reviews, such as this excellent one in Salon, emphasize the same themes. While I see these themes undeniably active in the film, and also well in keeping with the themes circulating around post-08 capitalism, I also think the film version does a good deal to emphasize the novel's violence, beginning with the grisly public assassination of an IMF official live on television. The blood gushing out of that official's eye prefigures the abrupt gunshot that Pattinson's Packer uses to kill his bodyguard and ultimately the tense, violent exchange between Packer and Benito Levin.

What difference, then, does putting Cosmopolis to film make? Many of Cronenberg's reviewers spend a lot of time talking about how faithful he is to DeLillo's text: he makes few significant changes, aside from rerouting some dialog from Packer's head into conversation. For the most part, the film is meticulously adherent to the novel, radically unlike Cronenberg's take on Naked Lunch. But in transfer to film, of course, the narrative changes, and I would argue that one of the most startling areas of change lies with the novel's violence.

Because this is the first filmed version of a DeLillo novel, it foregrounds the long association in DeLillo's work between violence and film, most centrally with the Zapruder film in Libra, Underworld, and the American Blood essay (as well as with the Frank Volterra character in The Names and David Bell in Americana). DeLillo has written and spoken about the influence of assassination and Zapruder film on his work, and in the following I want to call attention to the way this original piece of filmic violence emerges in Cosmopolis's own filmic violence. The physical representation of this violence, juxtaposed with the self-conscious conversation that Levin and Packer have at the end, serves to disrupt the uneasy association between abstraction and violence, the continual, difficult question that DeLillo explores: how and why does violence become a useful way to overcome the anxieties of postmodernity, to assert a meaningful identity in the context of forces that would erase such identity? But when the violence appears onscreen, particularly in a Cronenberg movie, it can no longer serve as an abstraction: the film enters into the very media world that DeLillo has long critiqued, by virtue of the very visual imagery deployed by Cronenberg. I raise these issues not to criticize Cronenberg's use of violence, since his oeuvre has repeatedly queried the filmic deployment of violence, and often seems in self-conscious dialog with filmmakers who use violence more instrumentally. Rather, I assert that DeLillo's violence become something different onscreen, and that experiencing its physicality alters, at least in part, DeLillo's long fascination with the irruption of violence through the medium of film. Cosmopolis self-consciously engages the troubling confusion of filmic violence with transcendence (an argument the book itself seemingly takes up as well). Moreover, the filmed version of Cosmopolis represents, in some ways, a return to the scene of violence that DeLillo claims created him as a writer: the Kennedy assassination and its famous filming.

Cosmopolis has multiple parallels with the Zapruder film: Both films focus on a limousine. The limo's slow crawl across the city mimics the way the Zapruder film is often seen, in slow motion.The film contains within itself a filmed assassination, of the IMF officialPacker expects his own assassination, to the point that when Torval points out a "threat level," Packer presumes it applies to him, not to the real U.S. president visiting New York.  The film's climatic moment concerns an encounter between a deranged loner and a powerful man. Even Packer's destination, to get a "haircut," recalls Kennedy's decapitation, given the long history of linguistic jokes about haircuts and decapitations. In a larger sense, the scenes of Packer intact in his limo as an anti-capitalist riot occurs outside invites questions of Kennedy's opposite vulnerability, and the rigid barriers between power and people that are a legacy of the assassination. . Even the "faux assassination," involving a pie-thrower, echoes the roughing up of Adlai Stevenson in the months before the Kennedy assassination.

Of course, describing the up-to-the-minute Cosmopolis in terms of the half-century-old Kennedy assassination seems a bit anachronistic; the former has its protagonist complaining about the "old-fashioned" terms "skyscraper" "ATM machine" and "office," while reveling in the hyperfast exchanges of capital on dozens of tiny screens, while the latter, while framed justifiably as the "first postmodern event" (Jameson), is nevertheless recorded on Kodachrome II 8 mm safety film and takes place not in a start of the art "Prousted" stretch limousine, but in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, admittedly upgraded to serve as a "presidential limousine." The Zapruder film seems to have reached a kind of apotheosis in Oliver Stone's JFK, though continuing to circulate through both art and conspiracy theory cultures.

But there's no doubt at all that the Zapruder film is central to DeLillo's work. DeLillo not only uses the film throughout Libra, he also talks about it extensively in one interview and features it prominently in Underworld. If Cosmopolis overtly concerns global capital and its discontenteds, it is, like Libra, intricately concerned with the assassination of powerful men; threats to Packer keep recurring, and if DeLillo firmly establishes the assassination as a form of meaning-making in Libra, this idea also courses through the latter text.

The Zapruder film is more or less synonymous with filmic violence: Zapruder himself claims to have had a nightmare in which he saw a billboard in Times Square reading "See the President's head explode." In reading Cosmopolis as a kind of extended meditation on the Zapruder film, multiple vectors around the film emerge: its focus on mediation, privilege, and distance; the intersection between the what Slavoj Zizek calls "structural violence" of capitalism itself and the more immediate, subjective violence of assassination. As Mark Osteen has demonstrated, the idea of the rat as currency comes from Zbigniew Herbert, who frames it as "expos[ing] the vanity of wealth and asserting against it the fact of mortality." The Zapruder film was almost immediately commodified, sold to Time/Life, before becoming the most expensive piece of film ever sold. Violence and commodification are intricately bound up in Cosmopolis, then.

DeLillo has never been a bloody writer; he is no Cormac McCarthy or Burroughs. Even when DeLillo describes overt violence, as he does in Cosmopolis, his work seldom functions as visceral; the famously detached language, his focus on sociological and philosophical abstraction, the very themes of his work (The Names isn't about murder, nor is Libra about an assassination) divert readers' eyes from any actual violence. The same cannot be said for Cronenberg, of course, most of whose opus has concerned violence in one way or another, and who has worked the theme with particular intensity in a pair of films from the mid-aughts, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Whereas another filmmaker, then, might choose to cut away from either the stabbing death of the IMF official or the gunshot to Torval, Cronenberg gives these scenes a visual intensity that sharply contrasts the film's otherwise deadness (much has been made of the intersection between Cosmopolis and Pattinson's more famous role).

Within the register of DeLillo's work, violence serves a role that is not quite redemptive, but nevertheless is set in opposition to the banality of mass culture. In her wide-ranging meditation on the depiction of cruelty, Maggie Nelson observe a distinction between "benumbing banality" and "unthinkable, rupturing calamity," with the representation of the latter serving as a kind of truth (42). Throughout her work, Nelson seeks to complicate such easy oppositions, and certainly DeLillo does not draw such easy oppositions. Nevertheless, the showdown between Jack Gladney and Mr. Gray in White Noise features some sense of Gladney cutting through the "white noise" of consumer culture to something real, and Nick Shay's nostalgic memories of the Bronx, set in opposition to the overriding "waste" of present-day Underworld, are also connected with an act of violence. One could continue: Libra seems to privilege the "man on the slab" over the false representations of Oswald. It is no surprise, then, that in Cosmopolis, the immediate, or real, has similar associations with violence: Packer, hungry all day for sex and food, identifies his immediate scene with the barbershop of his youth, a barbershop in which Packer is handed a gun by the barber (and, one might add, shaved with the same kind of razor that kills several characters in Eastern Promises).