Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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One-Way Street in a Global City: Don DeLillo and the Lugubrious Boredom of the New Economy / Samuel Gerald Collins

<1> A few of the things we have fought against in cultural studies include the erroneous perceptions that the forces associated with globalization are 1) benefiting the world's peoples and 2) producing a homogeneous "global culture." Against this, we have proffered endless texts documenting the sufferings of the world's peoples and critiquing the underlying assumptions regarding U.S. and Western hegemony as well as more hopeful tracts charting a more equitable future as an alternative to crushing regimes of neo-liberalism. In this, we have been joined by countless activists as well as others in women's studies, Latino/a studies, international relations and so on -- a regular deluge of critical writings that, in a more equitable world, would have already precipitated the revolution. Despite some victories, however, the forces of neo-liberalism remain rampant.

<2> But has the Right been so triumphant? I don't mean the Right that routinely calls for a Brave New World of total war and absolute subservience to the State, but the optimistic, techno-utopian Right embodied in the writings of George Gilder (Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World), Kevin Kelly (New Rules for the New Economy), Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, Wired magazine, and cheerfully upbeat management books like Who Moved My Cheese? (Spencer Johnson). All of these forecasted/celebrated a "new economy" that was really supposed to be (in their words) revolutionary: whole new ways of succeeding, working, living, profiting, new "paradigms" which we were supposed to have embraced if we wanted to survive in a world where "the rules" of success had changed.

<3> But, of course, they haven't changed. We live in a world where the continuities with past epochs are much more marked than any "post" condition -- monopoly capitalism, institutionalized racism, high Gini coefficients, stagnating wages, white Europeans still in change, metropoles still metropoles, greed and imperialism still spurring people on to alternating spectacles of ruinous consumption and violence. Plus ça change. What, exactly, was new? Enron? The AOL/Time Warner merger? Instead, we live in what Benjamin almost a century ago called the "Hell" of modernity, the endless repetition of novelty without meaningful change (Buck-Morss 1989:96).

<4> In 2005, it's easy to heap scorn on these little manifestoes/prognostications from the 1990's, even easy to feel a little twinge of nostalgia for them, forgetting for a moment that the "we" in their slogans excluded vast swathes of the world's population. And books like Who Moved My Cheese? are nonsensical to all but the most feeble (and to university administrators, who are always 10 years behind). But the idea behind them is interesting. What would a truly "new" economy look like? If there was a real "paradigm shift," how would we live?

<5> All of these themes come up in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), the comi-tragic story of new economy-mogul Eric Packer over one day in the year 2000 as he rides down 47th street in Manhattan in a stretch-limousine to get a haircut. Interrupted on his drive by various allegorical representations of globalization and postmodernity, he finally meets his death, fittingly enough, at the hands of a former employee. The dull -- almost desiccated -- prose style (a tribute to Paul Auster?) underlines the centrality of the theme: the monotonous, morally bankrupt, disingenuous hype of globalization. And perhaps, in the space of Eric's welcome death, a gesture towards alternatives.

<6> And yet, this is not going to be Delillo's best remembered novel. The laconic style, broken only by moments of desperate attempts at humor like an SNL skit gone horribly awry, have not impressed many reviewers. As Walter Kirn fires, "The result is a totalitarian reading experience that clicks by without surprise or spontaneity, a numbing abacus calculation in prose that makes the staccato operas of Philip Glass sound like Walt Whitman poems by comparison" (Kirn 2003:8). While not defending the sheer ennui wrought by the "novel of ideas" (Kirn), I nevertheless think the novel worth reading. Here, in frequently enervating prose, the claims of global capitalism -- it's glorious speed, roller-coaster excitement--are shown for what they are: the dull, thudding continuation of the 19th century. Unlike Silicon Valley cheerleaders like Po Bronson (The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest), DeLillo has written about digerati who are mean and trivial, characters whose death inspires no feeling whatsoever. And it is this dullness that makes DeLillo's novel interesting.

<7> Walter Benjamin is sine qua non the best ethnographer of the mundane. Looking to all of the tedium of bourgeois life--trash, Parisian arcades, lace doyleys draped over chintz-patterned chairs -- Benjamin can be credited with founding the serious study of popular culture. But this was not out of any reverence for the commodity. By pulling the tawdry wrack of 19th century fashion into his twentieth century scrutiny, Benjamin accomplishes what he calls "dialectics at a standstill," both exposing the lie of progress under the phantasmagoric patina while, in the space of that "lightning flash," reviving the "utopian potential" in the real conditions beneath the illusion (Buck-Morss 1989:219). After Benjamin, we should follow our visceral boredom and disgust with globalization not only to peer into the "Hell" of modernity but also to plumb its utopian possibilities.

<8> Cosmopolis takes place over a single day, a day defined by the flux of currency markets that are the foil for Eric's tragic hubris -- his instinctive "feel" for what markets will do. Climbing into his customized, stretch-limousine with his bodyguard, Torval (whom he later murders for sport), Eric is the quintessential globetrotter, peering at the world through the darkened windows of the limo and (more often) through the computer and CCTV screens that bedeck his automobile, his attention trained on world news and the behavior of the yen.

<9> This is "Conompolis," literally a global city, but one defined by a perspective sited nowhere. Indeed, Eric's interaction with New York is slight, consisting of the aforementioned electronic surveillance from his limousine and brief visits to hotels and restaurants as he traverses 47th street. "The cosmopolis" here is literally what Marc Augé (1995) has called a "non-place," i.e., a place completely disembedded from social and historical contexts, emptied of meaning like a bottle evacuated of air for a vacuum. These are, like the financial markets themselves, vertiginous "flows"; the airport, the corporate hotel, the Zagat-surveyed restaurant are the res extensa equivalences of the financial markets that stretch between metropoles. Like the non-places themselves, bent to serve narrowly instrumental purposes in the global economy, Eric's social relations are, in the Durkheimian sense, strictly organic. His bodyguards, financial advisors, sexual partners, wife -- each is an empty encounter subordinated to DeLillo's disquisition on globalization.

<10> The time is the time of global capitalism, defined by perpetually accelerating change, linear teleologies, one event overtaking the next in an increasingly rapid succession towards some asymptote of capitalism and technology, where producer, consumer and commodity disappear into an explosive singularity of corporate profit. It is Moore's Law (chip density doubles every eighteen months) applied to all aspects of life. It is exponential change, forms overtaking one another in a race into the future.

He took out his hand organizer and poked a note to himself about the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper. No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the narrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born.

The hand device itself was an object whose original culture had just about disappeared. He knew he'd have to junk it. (9)

This, of course, is the vision of Schumpeterian "creative destruction" that underlies the manifestos and delphic prognostications of the sages of the "new economy" -- including many of its critics (Cf. Harvey 1989). For Eric (and for the pundits of globalization), everything 'solid melts into air' is true of all aspects of life -- commodities, language, social relations. Eric's day traces a chain of obsolescence, relations and language that were current in the morning utterly inadequate by sunset.

<11> Indeed, one of the key attributes of "globalization" today is its apparently all-pervasiveness, its totalizing embrace that subsumes all heterogeneity into its vampiric embrace, transforming everything into a commodity-reflection of itself. This is also true of putative resistance. Indeed, when Eric and his entourage encounter a anti-globalization demonstration, Eric's domesticated academic-ideologue, Vija Kinski, theorizes that:

The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system. (90)

That is, the neo-liberal is conceived tautologically, ballooning to incorporate attempts to destroy the hegemony of the market as well as the market itself.

<12> In this total commodity, time itself disappears as a separate variable (Harvey 1989). In Cosmopolis, we can see this as Eric's temporality begins to unravel, events from the near future proleptically seeping into the present. For example, his CCTV network begins to show him the near future:

His own image caught his eye, live on the oval screen beneath the spycam. Some seconds passed. He saw himself recoil in shock. More time passed. He felt suspended, waiting. Then there was a detonation, loud and deep, near enough to consume all the information around him. He recoiled in shock. Everyone did. (93)

So: the speed of information, the rate of advance and obsolescence, these all have increased to the point where media represent the future rather than the past. Isn't this pretty much the animus behind advanced capitalism? The motor of consumption is not just one of commodities allowing one to progress into the future, but, trumping that, the frantic necessity for consumers to "catch up" to information technologies represented as already existing in the future.

<13> But is this an indication of a hyperbolic rate of change or Hyperborean stasis? With the bending of time around the event horizon of advanced capitalism, does change itself disappear? Is this the confirmation of Fukuyama's "end of history"? Or, does the seepage of the future into Eric's present suggest past, present and future flash-frozen into a tableau vivant?

<14> The time of globalization, is, strictly speaking, not change at all. As Henri Bergson -- certainly the most puissant critic of linear conceptions of progress -- noted, this is a spatialization of time, events succeeding each other like a series of photographic frames arranged on a table. Subsumed into space, time ceases to be a significant dimension.

If the products of evolution are given in advance, in the form of pre-existent possibles, then the actual process of evolution is being treated as a pure mechanism that simply adds existence to something that already had being in the form of a possible. (Ansell-Pearson 2002:72)

This kind of change -- increasing rates of profit, faster and faster financial transactions, futures markets, hedge funds -- do not represent, qua Bergson, real change. Delimited to variables on a spreadsheet, the future devolves to a question of quantity. This is the kind of "change" that Kevin Kelly and others lionize, where the excitement of the "new economy" is a matter of degree: profits are higher, risk is greater, markets are more volatile, etc. From the perspective of, say, a worker getting her pink slip: more of the same.

<15> So, the proleptic turn, as Eric sees his own future before it even happens, may not be a symptom of "speed-up" so much as an indication that there is no real future to begin with, that globalization replaces a real future with a linear succession of novelties where changes are confined to recapitulations of the present. That is, Eric mistakenly believes that he is already living in the future. But he's not. His globalized, "free-wheeling" "future" is narrow scope of predetermined possible, the very opposite of evolution (according to Bergson). This is, of course, one of the most insidious, collateral effects of a globalized world: truncated alternatives. Thinking beyond a horizon limned by global capitalism is not longer heretical (as it was in the twentieth century) but outright fantastic. As Jameson (1991: 281) complains,

The surrender to various forms of market ideology -- on the Left, I mean, not to mention everybody else -- has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal. Everyone is now willing to mumble, as though it were an inconsequential concession in passing to public opinion and current received wisdom (or shared communicational presuppositions), that no society can function efficiently without the market, and that planning is obviously impossible.

The inadequacy of this totalizing image of the future as something already decided is slowly evident as the supine linearity of his trip on 47th Street unravels, fraying into (Other) encounters. Slowly, other temporalities intrude on him, temporalities that call into question neo-liberal dogmatisms.

He saw a woman seated on the sidewalk begging, a baby in her arms. She spoke a language he didn't recognize. She seemed rooted to that lot of concrete. Maybe her baby had been born there, under the No Parking sign. FedEx trucks and UPS. Black men wore signboards and spoke in African murmurs. Cash for gold and diamonds. Rings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry. This was the souk, the shtetl. Here were the hagglers and the tablebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk. The street was an offense to the truth of the future. (65)

What truth of the future? If we look to critics of globalization, we understand these economic forces as precipitating not, as neo-liberal theorists would have it, singular, paradigm shifts, but a tangled vespiary of contradictory temporalities and spaces -- dual cities, nodes, underdevelopment, knowledge industries next to sweatshops.

<16> The ideology pf the future as an endless horizon of a highly-selective, neo-liberal present comes to an end when Eric witnesses the self-immolation of an anti-globalization demonstrator and begins to question the market as a totality subsuming past, present and future.

Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protestors and the riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach. (99-100)

In that eerily prescient way of DeLillo's, this parallels Kyung Hae Lee's suicide in September 2003 outside the WTO meetings in Cancun, Mexico.

<17> Finally, Eric's death at the hands of a former employee completes the transformation, revealing the "novelty" of the global as variations on usual themes of greed and violence. As Eric foreshadows early on in the novel,

He watched Torval bend a hand to the side of his head, listening to the person who was speaking into his ear bud. He knew that these devices were already vestigial. They were degenerate structures. Maybe not the handgun just yet. (19)

Or, more philosophically, Eric's existence in a global future is unmasked as the desultory continuation of the Fordist past -- exploitation under a new name. Eric's is an ossified future and his death, referring, perhaps, to 2001, suggests the extent to which violence is never far beneath the "new economy."

Conclusion

<18> There's a "Dilbert" cartoon that sums this all up nicely. Dilbert's boss is explaining the usual neo-liberal, business philosophy, "Change is good," and Dilbert asks him, "Why don't you triple our pay? That would be a change" (Adams 01/23/05). What would real change be like? What would emerge from real emergence? It is comforting to consider that real change will be thoroughly unexpected, even incommensurable from the perspective of the present. Explaining his idea of the utopian, Fredric Jameson (2004: 46) explains,

Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future bur rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future -- our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity -- so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined.

If we participated in a bonafide, "new" economy, would corporate profits still increase while wages stagnate? Would governments suspend human rights in order to woo corporate investment? Would skin color and national origin still be the best predictors of quality of life?

<19> Indeed, only an unpredictable future is anodyne to DeLillo's dreary morality tale. Out of the flat characters, stultifying inertia and utterly predictable ending, we may be able to rescue the idea of novel, alternative futures. If we follow Walter Benjamin's project and look at Eric's failure to embody the "new" (and the failure of the novel to capture the new) as dot-com ruins to be excavated and dialectically redeemed, we can gesture towards the utopian: there is something potentially exhilarating in the possibility of new ways of being and new ways of communicating. And if these are truly new, then they are inimical to the quotidian exploitation of Fordist/post-Fordist present. Out of the ruins of that 1990s archetype -- the dot-com entrepreneur -- can we build something revolutionary?

Works Cited

Adams, Scott. "Dilbert." Baltimore Sun 1/23/05 (comics section). Augé, Marc. Non-places. New York: Verso, 1995.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith.  Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual.  NY: Routledge, 2002.

Bergson, Henri.  Creative Evolution.  Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998 [1911]. 

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

--. "The Politics of Utopia." New Left Review 25 (2004): 35-54.

Kirn, Walter. "Long Day's Journey Into Haircut." New York Times Book Review 4/13/03, p. 8.

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