Accelerationism in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis is a cautionary tale. Most critics believe that this caution is against the expansion of global capital; i.e. the financialization of all things. I disagree; to me, the novel does not warn against but actively incites this expansion. It does not, in other words, attempt to reel in the excesses of global capitalism, the novel seeks to accelerate them.

The belief that Cosmopolis warns against the expansion of global capital is shared by ‘[m]uch of the criticism on Cosmopolis’ (Sciolino). In his essay, ‘The “Saturated Self”’, Jerry A. Varsava argues that Cosmopolis is ‘a cautionary tale that reminds us that the triumph of global capitalism should not lead to the defeat of common decency and communal goals’. Like most, he sees the novel as a critique of global capitalism, or more specifically, what he calls ‘rogue capitalism’; i.e. ‘that subspecies of capitalism’ that prioritizes ‘[g]reed, social prestige, and often obscure forms of psycho-emotional gratification’. In this view, Eric Packer — the Ebenezer Scrooge of the tale — is an emblem, representing ‘the most worrying aspects of contemporary rogue capitalism’. This makes Packer/rogue capitalism an Icarian figure. Hubris is his hamartia (his fatal flaw) and it sends him, almost inevitably, to an anti-climactic ‘[m]eltdown in the sun’ (DeLillo):

While we might agree with free-market economist Joseph Schumpeter that capitalism per se is a process of “creative destruction” in that, in stark neo-Darwinian fashion, weak economic forms and practices are decisively eliminated — no more buggy whips, no more iceboxes — rogue capitalism yields, quite simply, chaos and, allowing the tautology, “destructive destruction” (Varsava)

According to most critics, overcoming rogue capitalism is a matter of restraint; it is only by reeling in the excesses of the current system that we can prevent its violence and self-destruction. Of course, the problem with this view is that all hitherto forms of resistance and restraint have failed. Anti-establishment protests against our current trajectory are relegated — quite literally in Cosmopolis — to the background, and when they are over, they are easily assimilated: ‘Just two hours ago they were a major global protest. Now, what, forgotten’ (DeLillo). In the words of Vija Kinski (Packer’s Chief of Theory) and even DeLillo himself (‘In the Ruins of the Future’), the protestors

want to decelerate the global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully toward a landscape of consumer-robots and social instability, with the chance of self-determination probably diminishing for most people in most countries. Whatever acts of violence marked the protests, most of the men and women involved tend to be a moderating influence, trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future (DeLillo)

Whether this ‘moderating influence’ has an effect is uncertain. However, Cosmopolis seems to suggest that deceleration does not prevent destruction, it prolongs it by inadvertently rejuvenating the system:

The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it (DeLillo)

There is, however, at least one form of protest in Cosmopolis that resists assimilation; that is the act of self-immolation:

A man in flames […] 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 (DeLillo)

Clearly Packer has reverence for this act. This reverence — and his status as an emblem of global capital — makes his own personal self-destruction seem a lot less accidental. Like the ‘man in flames’ — and less like Icarus — Packer embraces the ‘starkness and horror’ of violent self-destruction; hence his ‘misanthropy, malevolence, and outright evil’ (Varsava).

In this respect, DeLillo appears to be channelling the ‘rabid nihilism’ of philosopher Nick Land — the father of Accelerationism — who insists we must ‘[a]sk always where capital is most inhumane, unsentimental, and out of control’ (Land) — not in order to forestall its entropy, but to accelerate it; thereby coercing rogue capital ‘into immanent coexistence with its undoing’. According to this theory, rogue — or ‘runaway’ — capitalism is ‘a social suicide machine’. Left to its own devices, it destroys or ‘deterritorializes’ existing social structures; meaning that what was once bound together — priceless and sacrosanct — is prised out of its previous territory; e.g. communities are displaced into industrial centres, holy items are commodified and exchanged, and communal assets are greedily privatised — eventually, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Marx & Engels). It was deterritorialization that brought us out of Feudal society and into a capitalist one; and it has continued transforming social relations ever since. For PR purposes, capitalism has always attempted to disassociate itself from this rogue element but cannot fully do so ‘without de-fanging itself’ in the process (Land). Conversely, capitalism cannot over-indulge in this ‘destructive destruction’ without eventually creating conditions unsuitable for its survival:

Capital is thus at once a revolutionary force (as evidenced by its destruction of all previous social formations) and a barrier, a limited form or mere transitional moment on the way to this force’s ultimate triumph in another mode of social relation (Mackay & Avanessian)

To offset this dissociable element, capitalism must ‘reterritorialize’. As the term suggests, this entails retrenchment, sometimes in the form of proto-fascist and protectionist policies but more commonly in the form of critiques and anti-establishment protests against global capital. In Cosmopolis, Packer’s desire to uproot the Rothko chapel and place it in his apartment is an act of deterritorialization. When Didi Fancher objects, claiming that the chapel ‘belongs to the world’, her objection is a form of ‘reterritorialization’. This dual tendency of capitalism creates a ‘carrot and stick’ situation:

at the same time as it liberates a frustrated tendency toward synthesis — the dissipation of all tribal chauvinism through uninhibited trade and exchange, internationalization, miscegenation, migration, the explosion of patrilineage and the concentration of power — it reinstates ‘a priori’ control by sequestering kinship from this general tendency and containing it within familialism and the nation-state (Mackay & Brassier)

Despite his callousness, even Packer retreats into patrilineal nostalgia; his odyssey across town is a form of nostos (homecoming), in which he returns to his father’s neighbourhood to bathe in the ‘rueful nuance of longing’ (DeLillo).

His slow traffic-heavy journey is a reterritorialization — compare this with the deterritorialized speed of cybercapital, moving at ‘one septillionth of a second’ (DeLillo). The ‘longing’ and the relatively ‘long’ journey is a detour; what Packer truly seeks lies on the ‘borders of perception’, in the ‘void’ created in the ‘interaction between technology and capital’. In pursuit of this ‘singularity’, Packer must ‘[engineer his] own downfall’:

He’d always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void […] It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment (DeLillo)

This would explain the gratuitous detour; it is an attempt to prolong the inevitable; it is reflexive self-preservation. In this, there is a clear parallel between Packer and the global capitalist system. It is almost as if they are stuck self-immolating without the prospect of death. As Steven Shaviro puts it,

crisis has become a chronic and seemingly permanent condition. We live, oxymoronically, in a state of perpetual, but never resolved, convulsion and contradiction. Crises never come to a culmination; instead, they are endlessly and indefinitely deferred (Shaviro)

Even Packer’s death at the end of the novel is deferred passed the limit of the book. The ‘electron camera’ on his watch captures — in a symbolic reterritorialization — his death before it actually happens: ‘This is not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound’ (DeLillo). This moment — in between the effect and its cause — encapsulates our current condition; a condition Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes as ‘the slow cancellation of the future’. The effect of this condition is a sense of certain-uncertainty: ‘The technology was imminent or not. It was semi-mythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now’ (DeLillo). ‘Accelerationism’ is the belief that the only way out of this impasse is through it: ‘The hope driving accelerationism is that, in fully expressing the potentialities of capitalism, we will be able to exhaust it and thereby open up access to something beyond it’ (Shaviro). It is for this reason DeLillo inverts the first line from the Communist Manifesto; it is no longer the spectre of communism, but the ‘SPECTER OF CAPITALISM’ that is ‘haunting the world’ (DeLillo).