- 1 1 In another book, Other Things, Brown stresses: “Literature … can serve as a mode of rehabilitativ (...)
1Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, published in 2003 and adapted for the screen in 2012, is set in the so-called connected age in which things no longer remain passive objects but emerge as active participants in intricate networks. The author writes in a letter that his technology-driven, cyber-capitalist protagonist “is not influenced by ‘American culture,’ but is instead concerned with ‘the physical world, the systems and relationships in physics and related disciplines’” (qtd. in Rey 26). Given his later-published novels such as Zero K and The Silence, DeLillo’s fiction has more and more evolved around technological subjects, creating an emergent technoscape in which things are as vital as humans. Cosmopolis is no exception: it tells of things that exist in their own right, influencing the protagonist and enhancing his thought. In the year when the novel was published, Bill Brown—creator of thing theory—argues in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature: “Where other critics had faith in ‘discourse’ or in the ‘social text’ as the analytical grid on which to reconfigure our knowledge about the present and the past, I wanted to turn attention to things—the objects that are materialized from and in the physical world that is, or had been, at hand” (3). While stressing the physicality of textuality, Brown explores the thingly in the literary.1 As remarked by a reviewer, this exploration aims at “arguing how much literary criticism has yet to learn from our complicated history of dealing with things” (Dini 4). The task confronting literary studies is, then, to demonstrate what can be learned more from “dealing with things.” DeLillo’s novel provides an opportunity to explore this task.
- 2 In differentiating OOO from ANT, moreover, Harman calls into question the connectivity of actor-net (...)
- 3 As Jennifer Gabrys writes in her essay on the Internet of Things (IoT), machine-to-machine connecti (...)
2Cosmopolis appeared at the turn of the twenty-first century that witnessed the new materialist approaches to the relationship between mind and matter. To name only two of those approaches: actor-network theory (ANT) and object-oriented ontology (OOO). As put by Graham Harman—creator of OOO, which owes much to Bruno Latour’s ANT—“ANT offers a flat ontology in which anything is real insofar as it acts,” while “OOO uses the term ‘object’ to refer to any entity that cannot be paraphrased in terms of either its components or its effects” (Immaterialism 2-3).2 From these non-anthropocentric perspectives, things are reanimated by challenging the textual bias in humanities studies. In the introduction to the 2011 essay collection The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, for instance, the editors refer to its contributors as those who “have certainly rejected the traditional focus on textual critique” (Bryant et al. 3). This new millennium shift from texts to things merits special attention as the so-called “thingly turn [that] is a method used to explore object relations in an expanded field, not only in terms of their end function” (Cameron 53). With the rapid growth of digitalization, things are far more networked than ever while affording fresh insights into “object relations.”3 If a modern technology of things actualizes their autonomy from human access, a modern theory of things emphasizes their reality independent from human consciousness, as seen in the concept of thingness that reveals itself when objects cease their designed function. Cosmopolis centers on this question of things, presenting itself as an intersection between things in theory and in technology.
- 4 For example, John Updike ascribed the novel’s failure to the author’s failure to construct an appea (...)
3DeLillo once said in an essay: “Fiction is all about reliving things. It is our second chance” (“Power”). By “things,” he means moments of experiences. Given his new millennium writings, however, he is acutely aware of the role of things in the wider sense—both material and immaterial—which are relivable through storytelling. In Cosmopolis, those things range from work to life, from money to body, and from death to beyond—and they deserve to be placed into sharp focus from the perspective of the thingly turn. The novel received several negative reviews when published while its film version was generally favorable.4 Even so, as we shall see, it allows rediscovering the thought-provoking nature of things.
4Cosmopolis illustrates the oft-quoted statement of Latour: “Humans are no longer the only actors, even though they still see themselves entrusted with a role that is much too important for them” (43-44). The novel centers on an eventful and fateful day in the life of Eric Packer, the head of Packer Capital. This impossibly successful executive of twenty-eight summers takes an extended limousine trip to get a haircut at his late father Mike Packer’s favorite barbershop in Hell’s Kitchen. His Manhattan headquarter office is located in an intelligent tower called “the complex,” but in fact, his white-collar workplace is his white stretch limousine—cork-lined, bulletproof, and outfitted with television screens and computer monitors. The car operates as an office for the main character’s work as a currency speculator. In this novel on things, the car, character, and currencies are all equally actors.
5The novel moves along with Packer’s daylong journey across Midtown Manhattan. The action takes place mostly in his large luxurious vehicle as a place in motion, moving through a sequence of urban spaces almost without engaging with outside realities. Since this hedge fund wunderkind is far from the usual image of an office worker, he is asked by his newly-married twenty-two-year-old wife, Elise Shifrin, “Where is your office? What do you do exactly?” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 21) No answer comes from him, but a few pages earlier, he has said to himself: “The word office was outdated now. It had zero saturation” (17). His refusal to think of his own sphere of life as an office in the general sense is illustrative of how things are interrelated in this novel. His ultramodern limousine is a thing in its entirety: it is neither just a vehicle to move nor just a place to work, but it is the work-life continuum, the whole thing that presents itself by reducing the commonly held notion of work-life balance to zero. All the things are inseparably intertwined in his work-life universe, as illustrated in his relationship with his wife who refuses to consummate their marriage and has “right of blood to the fabulous Shifrin banking fortune of Europe and the world” (17). From Packer’s new materialist viewpoint, marriage and money are engagements with either the tangible or the intangible—i.e. either marital or financial objects—and they allow him to consider how efficient and intelligent he is in both work and life: “In business, in personal acquisitions. Organizing my life in general” (35). In his personal-professional sphere, any one thing is thus a part of object relations that constitute an actor-networked or object-oriented whole.
6When viewed in this light, Cosmopolis embodies how far the author has come since his literary debut with Americana. This novel, published in 1971, centers on David Bell, an ex-network executive who turns into an avant-garde filmmaker to locate his own America. To be sure, there are overlaps between these unconventional road novels. Foremost among their parallels is that Bell’s integration with his camera is as intense as Packer’s connection to screens. What, on the other hand, differentiates these protagonists is Bell’s sense of office life: “[H]ow much did you know,” he asks early in the novel, “and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship” (DeLillo, Americana 20). While making himself at home in his office, he has made his home with his wife, which means that the dividing line between his work life and his home life is at least officially still there. Indeed, “the mother ship” implies that there is another place that allows him to feel a sense of safety and community. Thus, the office is hardly as vital to Bell as to Packer, who feels no sense of home in his luxury forty-eight-room apartment in Midtown Manhattan.
7What Packer lacks severely is a sense of belonging to any particular place or group. It is this lack that instills in him an extraordinary sense of things and propels him into an attempt to encompass all things, including his work and life. In his ubiquitous office, Packer performs his work-life experiment, or in the third-person narrator’s words, “the business of living” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 124). The point here is not only that he puts the idea of office into question, but also that he puts the idea of mobile office into action. In the chapter, “The Confessions of Benno Levin,” the titular character, born Richard Sheets, who used to work for his firm and turns into an assassin of Packer, says reflectively: “Even at the firm, it was not easy to find his office. It changed all the time. Or he voided it to work elsewhere, or work wherever he happened to be, or work at home in the annex because he did not really separate live and work, or to travel and think, or to spend time reading in his rumored lake house in the mountains” (64). Packer’s nomadic work style demonstrates that his actual office is where he is. To put it in the words of Mark Seltzer—author of The Official World—he is the embodiment of “an official world—a world that everywhere generates life-size models of itself” (725). The work-life continuum upon which Packer places himself indicates that the sphere of work and that of life are modeled upon each other. On this artificially unified world the narrator says: “When he died he would not end. The world would end” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 6). What ends at the end of his life is the world as an overall environment into which he integrates himself.
8Packer’s official world reveals how selective he has grown when it comes to things that make up for his lack of belonging. So selective is he that he weaves them into a whole that materializes as an opulent vehicle of his own. It is questionable, however, that this high-tech and high-powered vehicle reifies his extraordinary desire for material possessions. His car is indeed an embodiment of the automotive industry that is arguably the world’s largest consumer of products manufactured across a different variety of industries, from materials to electronics to applications. As an embodiment of finance capital, however, Packer himself is rather hostile towards material things: he hates office buildings, airports, and ATMs; he loathes the physical form of money and the jewelry sold in the Diamond district. In light of this anti-materialistic stance, it is understandable why he is attracted to the immaterial and hence the impersonal: he likes white spaces between words in poems and blank canvas paintings; he loves his white limousine because of its anonymity that allows him to disappear into the camouflage of extreme wealth; he longs to download his consciousness into cyberspace. In this way, his relationship to the material world is fundamentally incoherent. As discussed further below, the material is closely relevant to the immaterial in Cosmopolis.
9Packer’s ultramodern limousine transforms him into an all-time participant in virtual financial markets that never close, and there are synchronic parallels between the nomadic move of the protagonist and the dynamic move of the markets. Against the background of the so-called dot-com bubble that stems from the speculative fever among online companies in the late 1990s, Cosmopolis invites a focus on his utilization of immaterial technologies, such as big data and electronic currencies (although each of which are built on material infrastructures of data centers and computer networks). Surrounded all by large data sets that can only be analyzed computationally, Eric finds himself thinking:
It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole. (27)
10In currency speculation markets, money exists as electronic data. However immaterial it may appear, anything is valued at more—and often much more—than their intrinsic value once it is used as a medium of exchange. According to the money theorist Katsuhito Iwai, “money is a pure ‘social entity’ whose existence owes nothing to the ‘technology and preferences’ of the economy nor to the ‘infinite memory’ of its members,” and “money can mediate exchanges between individuals whose abilities and needs fail to supplement each other and whose past actions are unknown to each other” (423). In brief, money cannot be reduced to its conventional function as a medium of exchange; for it is also a medium of expanding the sphere of exchange itself. In DeLillo’s novel, though, electronic money is more than such a “social entity.” Rather, it is something biological in its own right, which manifests itself constantly in the streams of charts and numbers of currency indexes as intangible representations of “every breath of the planet’s living billions.”
- 5 It is worth mentioning in this connection that Philip K. Dick was already aware of how physical obj (...)
11It comes as no surprise, then, that Packer conceives of “data itself” as “soulful and glowing.”5 It is such a uniquely dynamic state of things that moves him beyond “shallow thinking.” From a thingly perspective, the subject-object relation is here brought into question. As explained by Steven Shaviro—author of scholarly books including The Universe of Things—it is not the subject that cognizes an object’s qualities such as beauty: “Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it” (Without Criterion 4). While being just there, such an indifferent object allures the subject into sensing its thereness. In Packer’s case, what is alluring is data as “a dynamic aspect of the life process.” In his technology-driven environment attuned with “market cycles [that] can be interchangeable with the time cycles of grasshopper breeding, wheat harvesting” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 228), objects are all networked as actors by the medium of electronic money. In “The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” Mark Osteen writes: “In eschewing materiality, electronic money constitutes a form of the sublime—a condition that DeLillo renders in many of his novels by the word ‘aura’” (293). As an entity without materiality, electronic money is not merely another form of currency, but it is another name for sublimity that takes the form of aura as an invisible force and therefore that allows confrontation with the presence of the Other. For Packer, the aura is a greater sum of its parts as electronic currencies. His Chief of Theory, Vija Kinski, explains to him: “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 89). While losing “its narrative quality,” electronic money gains sublimity by withdrawing from immediate interpretation—by “talking to itself.” In this sense, it is not so much an object of interpretation as an object of its own, existing beyond the control of the human subject.
12Later in the novel, Packer happens to talk about his declining fortune—his massive loss of billions due to betting against the yen that continues to rise—with an extra woman on the film shoot. Their conversation ends with him being unable to answer her question, “Where does it go when you lose it?” (202-203). The lost money disappears in the market because it represents a decline in market value, not a direct transfer of cash to another person. This sense of disappearance is amplified when it comes to electronic money. If cyberspace brings the conventional sense of place into question, then the same applies to electronic money as something—or rather some thing—that challenges subject-object relations. It is, in this context, worth referring again to Bill Brown. In his seminal essay, “Thing Theory,” he articulates his new materialist idea of thingness.
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. (4)
- 6 In his oft-underrated novel, Great Jones Street, DeLillo draws special attention to a telephone tha (...)
13Thingness emerges when objects abandon their human-oriented function.6 Since it is incommensurable with our knowledge of the qualities they produce, the whole being of money is ungraspable, let alone that of electronic money. Money’s aural character that stems from its self-referential nature—“Money is talking to itself”—is indicative of this impossibility, which can be taken as an effective cue for exploring another aspect of the thingly in Cosmopolis. As far as the novel is concerned, when the story of money is ending, another story is beginning. It is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject, namely story of objects asserting themselves as things.
- 7 Whether numbers exist in nature is, though, an as-yet unsolved question in mathematics and philosop (...)
14Packer—“a financer in a first-world city who operates at an extreme remove from anything but what can be reduced to information currency” (Sciolino 210)—applies the modeling of complex fractals in nature to finance. This currency-speculating genius is endowed with an extraordinary capacity not only to play the market but also to study its context, as described by Levin: “I loved the cross-harmonies between nature and data. You taught me this. The way signals from a pulsar in deepest space follow classical number sequences, which in turn can describe the fluctuations of a given stock or currency. You showed me this” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 228). The advent of cyber capitalism has made it possible to integrate a broad range of phenomena, from financial to natural to cosmological.7 This integration of big data is an essential aspect of cyber capitalism. Shifrin says to Packer, “You know things. I think this is what you do” (21). He does “know things” insofar as he can uniformly deal with them as data. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in his bestseller, Homo Deus, capitalism processes data by connecting parties rather than by centralizing power, so it is in line with what he calls “Dataism,” which “declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing” (372). Dataism is neither just an idea nor just an ideal, but rather an emerging worldview that sees the universe as an all-embracing system of information streams. Its core missions are to collect anything and connect everything, not excluding human beings.
15In Cosmopolis, Dataism presents itself as an actor-network in cyberspace. To be noted is that Packer himself is an actor, or more objectively, an object as much as every other one within the virtual environment. Indeed, while situated alone (except his chauffeur) in the official world where his personal staff, such as doctors and advisors, make regular visits to perform their professional jobs for him, his body is at all times connected to and monitored by the complex: it is an object of observation. Of more importance is, however, that the body is, as tautological as it may sound, an object of objectification: it is central to his desire to feel like an object. Throughout the novel, he engages in casual extramarital affairs with several women who work for him, such as the art dealer Didi Fancher and his bodyguard Kendra Hays. These open relationships reveal not only his sexual desire, but also what cannot be satisfied by sexual acts. As declared famously by Jacques Lacan, “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (235). His point is that desire is irrevocably linked with lack—that our desire is never completely satisfied because our sense of lack is never completely fulfilled. As Morris Nitsun puts it, “The sense of lack is aligned to a desired other, the desire for and of the other, reflecting an ongoing quest for merging with the other, a quest that is essentially unfulfillable since the moment of satisfaction gives way to a new moment of desire, in an unending chain” (20). Having said that, it has to be added that Packer the Dataist is ultimately not the subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis; for he is indeed facing such constant discrepancies between desire and satisfaction, but in his case, as shown above, “an ongoing quest for merging with the other” leads him to feel like connected with other things rather than other beings.
16After making love with Hays, Packer watches her showering, dressing, and fastening the waistband holster for the stun gun. It is at this moment that some desire other than the desire for sexual pleasure arises within him:
He says: ‘Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I’m looking for more. Show me something I don’t know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now.’ (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 131)
17What satisfies him most is not so much having sex as having a sense of something else, of “what it feels like.” When stunned, he transforms himself, albeit very temporarily, from a speaking into a sensing subject, or rather from a human being into a human thing. This pleasure-seeking experience is literally mind-blowing to him. It foregrounds his thingness as an object acted on by an electronic force. “Now” he is, as it were, reliving a life as just a thing constitutive of “DNA.” Viewed differently, it may be said that his longing for objecthood is driven by an impossible (or almost impossible) desire for an end to subjecthood, given that he used to long for turning into microscopic particles—“quantum dust” (232). In either case, the above-quoted scene depicts his thingness as well as his humanness.
18To reemphasize, Brown’s thing theory claims that objects reveal their thingness when they cease working for humans. One thing not to be overlooked is that we humans are also objects—that our thingness reveals itself when we stop being subjects, whether violently or voluntarily. Packer derives an ineffable pleasure from being tasered, “electroconvulsive and strangely elated, deprived of his faculties of reason” (132). For this cyber capitalist, the transformation from a being into a thing is a human moment of his own, which allows him to feel alive and active, or even interactive like electronic things surrounding him. This moment could have hardly been expected from DeLillo in 1983—exactly two decades before the novel’s publication. That year, he published his short story, “Human Moments in World War III,” in which the narrator-astronomer and his sole companion, Vollmer, orbit above a war-torn earth, realizing that the titular war has removed everyday life and eliminated human moments: “Our hammocks are human moments”; “Vollmer’s football jersey is a human moment” (27); “Minnesota is a human moment” (38); “The apple cider and the broccoli are human moments. Vollmer himself is a human moment, never more so than when he forgets there is a war” (40). All these moments are about earthly things that evoke an ever-remaining sense of humanity. Given that Delillo has displayed an intense sensitivity to the material world throughout his long career, the story is an illustrative example of this sensitivity. Unlike Packer, who seems to feel no (or next to no) nostalgia for his early years, the astronomers feel nostalgic for a variety of things but feel no impulse to become like those things, which is to say that there is still a significant distinction between humans and things. Thanks to the story, Cosmopolis can thus be seen as an initial, essential step toward the thingly turn in his twenty-first century writing.
19The twenty-first century sees the body and other objects being progressively abstracted and converted into data flows. Packer’s body is no exception: he subjects it to data processing for information purposes. His fully stocked limousine is capable of handling his daily medical exam, and his physician finds an asymmetrical prostate. Although the physician explains that this asymmetry is of no significance, it haunts the protagonist throughout the novel. As Daan Wesselman analyzes in his essay on Cosmopolis,
he cannot account for or accept the anomaly: his own perspective of his body will not allow it. In other words, his prostate does not follow the dominant discourse on the body as something that can be controlled and inhabited by a subject. By singling out this origan on the basis of its asymmetry, Packer reveals that the very logic of separation—of body and subject, and of separating the body into discrete functions and organs—has its own limitations, in the fact that a specific, isolated organ can actually deviate from the discursive norm. The asymmetrical prostate proves that the body does not necessarily conform to prescribed ideas, that it is not simply subservient to a knowing subject. (179)
20Packer’s asymmetric prostate is a stumbling block to “his own perspective of his body.” Its “anomaly” keeps resisting his drive to enhance efficiency within his integrated work-life environment—that is to say, to subsume the body into information according to “discrete functions and organs.” His body’s thingness reveals itself through this constant escape from “a knowing subject” embodying “the dominant discourse” or “the discursive norm,” thereby reinforcing the novel’s thingly turn.
- 8 When Packer looks through the car window at the outside world, he amuses himself by watching police (...)
21As the novel unravels, Packer loses control over his body and thus his life. His fate depends on whether he is inside or outside the official world. As long as he surrounds himself in his own vehicle, he can limit his human contact with his staff from the outside but at the same time can interact with the flow of data in the world. When he is situated in his limousine—or, in the words of Wesselman, when he is covered with “his prosthetic skin” (183)—he is protected from street disturbances.8 While living his life in his own way, in other words, his life is lived in the cosmic web of things. As long as we are involved in the data flow, Harari says, “We mustn’t leave any part of the universe disconnected from the great web of life” (387). Whatever is incorporated into this dynamic universe takes on a life of its own. Like Packer, Dataists are required to have an abiding faith in life. One can immediately assume, then, that death is never meant to occur in the universe; that is, the only outside of the universe is death. While positing “the freedom of information as the greatest good of all,” Harari explains what is diametrically opposite: “Conversely, the greatest sin is to block the data flow. What is death, if not a situation when information doesn’t flow?” (387) Whether by intent or accident, Packer commits this very sin by throwing himself in “a situation when information doesn’t flow,” by withdrawing himself from “the great web of life” as “the greatest good of all.” As the novel approaches its end, he approaches his end: he steps closer into the sphere of death as he steps down from his vehicle of life and disconnects himself from the complex. Setting his body free from the actor-network of things, he is now driven by an inner need for a sense of reality that manifests itself in the inevitability of mortality.
22As mentioned earlier, Packer’s whole idea of taking an unscheduled trip across the city is to have a haircut at the barbershop in Hell’s Kitchen. According to the narrator, “His father had grown up here,” although “this had never been his home or street. He was feeling what his father would feel, standing in this place” (181-82). When the father died, Packer was only five years old. His virtually blank memory of his father drives him to frequent this working-class and ethnically diverse district that is “neither his home [n]or his street.” The old neighborhood embodies a materiality missing from the world of the finance capitalist. As far as Packer himself is concerned, the place in question is an embodiment of the pre-existing reality of the world-without-him. Or, in the words of Quentin Meillassoux—arguably one of the best-known philosophers in the movement of new materialism, or more precisely, speculative realism—the place is an epitome of what he calls “‘arche-fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter,’ not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil,’ but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event” (10). Those materials pose the problem: “how can we have knowledge of something that was given prior to there being any mind it could be given to?” (Nunes 22) From the thingly point of view, an answer to this question is that “there” is always “something” inaccessible to “any mind.” In Packer’s mind, this something is his father’s neighborhood as an ancestral but external reality.
23Judging from his conversation with the barber Anthony, Packer was born into an unprivileged family but owed his business acumen to his wise and astute mother. Struggling for his own selfhood, he has detached himself from the physical and social consequences his currency speculations create in the outside world, but what awaits him after his material success is a series of fatal incidents that occur on the outside of the world made for himself. Disturbed by the great financial loss, Packer leaves his childhood barbershop in the midst of his haircut. Early in the novel he says, “A haircut has what. Associations” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 17). A twofold meaning can be elicited from this statement: “Ultimately, he gets his haircut, both literary and metaphorically. A ‘haircut’ is also a common slang word among stock currency traders for losing enormous sums of money in the stock market” (Noble 58). Of note in relation to haircut is that the barbershop is a contact point with the outside world filled with what he thinks of as everyday things of reality, such as a swiveling chair, a calendar, and mirrors on the wall. At the same time, however, it is a part of the world of reality fraught with things that are not what they seem. Indeed, he is in a critical situation where he is facing the threat of assassination as well as losing his vast fortune. That he excuses himself during haircut is then suggestive of his suspension between life and death. This ambivalent state indicates that he is now living a life that will irreversibly end in death—that he is on the outside of, in the words quoted earlier, “the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions.”
24After the aborted haircut, Packer runs across a film shoot where three hundred naked extras act dead in the night street with loads of floodlights. Thrilled by this spectacle that brings upon him an immense sense of nakedness, he finds himself joining them. The game of playing dead can be replayed any number of times, since the game is a game independent of real things—either real life or real death. It allows the player to experience what it is like to be in between, as sensed by Packer: “He felt the presence of the bodies, all of them, the body breath, the heat and running blood, people unlike each other who were now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead together” (199); and: “He wanted to be here among them, all-body, the tattooed, the hairy-assed, those who stank” (201). Here again, he is feeling like an object, however temporarily, together with many other objects. This is a reliving thing for him. Once the shoot is over, though, the game is also over, no matter how game he is for different things. Standing alone in the street, he confronts the vital question: “Where was the life he’d always had?” (206) No longer can he return to that thing—“the life”—now that he is where death is an inevitable part of all life. In terms of plot development, moreover, his real life is coming to an end. His playing dead act is thus an ominous prelude to his real death—although the novel’s ending leaves the reality of his death open to question.
25Just before he is shot by his former employee who has since his dismissal oscillated between love and hate—“‘I wanted you to heal me, save me,’ Benno said” (233)—Packer recalls his desire to become “quantum dust,” which he believes is a vehicle for surviving a death and living a life: “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” (236). Once again, this desire is the desire to feel like something else, to relive like some other thing through the feel of materiality. It seems, however, that his pain makes him come to terms with his mortality:
The things that made him could hardly be identified much less converted into data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, though his pain. (237)
26“The things” range from intellect to taste to pain. To be sure, “the things that lived and milled in his body” are all translatable into data, but they become untranslatable at the end of life. Packer’s end is the embodiment of this untranslatability. His self-awareness in the end signifies that his selfhood is nothing other than his finitude—“all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end” (238). If death is the only thing that can never be replaced by any technology, that is the only outside of the actor-network of ever-living things or things kept alive as objects. In a book on narratives of technology, one scholar concludes his discussion on Cosmopolis: “In the final analysis, the human dimension still asserts itself over against technology” (Laan 146). Although this dimension is certainly what is left with humanity in relation to technology, something more thingly can be said about the novel in light of its uncanny and visionary ending that is distinctly DeLillo-esque.
- 9 The life suggested here is relevant to that envisioned by the critical posthumanist Rosi Braidotti, (...)
27The ending of Cosmopolis leaves much room for speculation. Packer seems to be dying, but the reader can hardly find any definite signs. The novel closes with him being open to something other than death: “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” (240). Not only does this concluding passage imply how difficult it is for him to reintegrate into a reality in which he cannot possibly feel belonging due to his upbringing, due to his lack of certain things such as familial identity, ancestral roots, and origin of place. It is also implicative of the future transformation of his personal death into an impersonal life—life in the “original space” free from time constraints represented by “his watch.”9 Can we retain our life after death? The answer is firmly negative at present, but it is subject to change in the future. Now that oocyte cryopreservation is practiced as one of the major technologies in life sciences, it is worth considering if death can be replaced with life or if the former can be postponed by prolonging the latter. DeLillo’s 2016 novel, Zero K, takes these considerations into full account. It takes on cryonics technology that allows the living body to be preserved at ultra-low temperatures (after which the novel is named) to permit the future revival of the cryopreserved person. This technology serves as an intertextual reference to Cosmopolis. The technology of immortality had yet to come in the day of Packer, but he was of the firm opinion that, whether in the near or distant future, it will be implemented: “It was the natural next step” (236). This next step manifested itself in the form of cryonics, with the speculative hope that resurrection would occur.
28In his very last moments, Packer realizes that there is “something else to consider,” imagining “his [younger] wife, his widow, shaving her head, perhaps, in response to his death, choosing to wear black for a year, and watching the burial in isolated desert terrain” (239). Zero K presents Packer’s near-future incarnation as Ross Lockhart, an American reclusive billionaire in his sixties, who cannot stand losing his younger wife with terminal illness, nor can he resist his urge to become immortal with her. What characterizes him most is this double rejection of his own death and his wife’s death. The novel opens with his thingly stance on death: “Everybody wants to own the end of the world” (3). These words are recalled by his son Jeffrey, who arrives at a secret and secure facility located in the desert near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, namely “in isolated desert terrain” as envisioned by Packer. The facility is where living bodies are preserved until the time comes to restore them to medically improved lives—where death becomes controllable by owning “the end of the world.” Echoes of Lockhart’s above-quoted words are to be found in Packer’s “This is not the end.” Both protagonists share the Dataist logic concerned exclusively with life—life to last rather than to live. Overall, in light of their life-and-death attitudes, they can be seen to practice the thingly turn of their own by extending their life into the future where they will be leading another life—life beyond death.
- 10 The woman’s question is certainly echoed by Richard Elster, the 73-year-old intellectual protagonis (...)
29What haunts Lockhart, and perhaps Packer, is the idea that we ought not to die in the same manner as we are born without choice. A woman speaks for him at the novel’s end, “Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” (DeLillo, Zero K 253)10 What she means here is associated not so much with humanism as with posthumanism in that he is attempting to transcend human fate by cutting-edge technologies that have yet to prove themselves. If Lockhart’s posthumanist stance is the continuation of life, then it is closely akin to Packer’s immaterialist stance as a Dataist. Given, on the other hand, that Packer imagines himself living a life “in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void,” he is in stark contrast to his assassin who has been living a life like the walking dead since he used to watch him meditate online—“When you shut down the site I was I don’t know, dead, for a long time after” (226). Technologically, Lockhart’s resurrection is still in the realm of science fiction, and technically so is Packer’s. What is certain is that they feel an overwhelming desire to objectify their lives as measurable, manipulatable, and manageable things. This drive toward thingification is certainly paradigmatic of the thingly turn in the new millennium.
30As Stefan Herbrechter says in his review of DeLillo’s 2020 novel, The Silence, “It is also, like all of his novels since 2001, still very much written with a sensibility of a future,” and “every piece of [his] writing, at least from a certain age onwards, is a writing against the silence that must follow death.” The action of The Silence takes place on the night of the 2022 Super Bowl, when the five main characters are due to have a dinner party in an apartment in Manhattan. The party is upended by a near-fatal airplane crash that is one of the events produced by an apocalyptic shutdown of all digital communications. Martin Dekker, the only guest who has reached the apartment, thinks to himself: “People have to keep telling themselves that they’re still alive” (102). Later he adds: “All my life I’ve been waiting for this without knowing it” (103). The crisis awakens in him a strong sense of “life,” and such an overpowering urge for “it” is among the most common characteristics of the author’s new millennium writing that develops a narrative of life as something thingly—some thing—that awaits to be realized in given conditions. Given this perspective, Lockhart’s and Dekker’s lust for (second) life is prefigured by that of Packer. As we have seen, Packer’s course of life is eventually hampered by his ambiguous end, but the narrator’s problematic statement, “This is not the end,” is suggestive of his continuous being. In light of DeLillo’s twenty-first century novels, it is indeed possible to posit this turn-of-the-century protagonist’s life after death, in the sense that Packer’s will to last lives vicariously through his kinsmen, notably Lockhart and Dekker. Taken together, his and their life revitalizes itself as an interconnected whole, endorsing the author’s belief—“Fiction is all about reliving things.”
31DeLillo’s thingly turn manifests itself in Cosmopolis and, ultimately, in its ending that highlights the will to last as an immaterial thing, as an embodiment of Dataism. Packer’s vision of lasting life is of thingly nature: it cannot be materialized without the notion of thingliness—the notion that the mind can find itself in matter. In his 2010 oft-cited essay, “Thinking Things,” Steven Connor refers to the mind-matter nexus as a thingly matter of thinking: “Thinking, which is properly nothing and nowhere, can only lay hold of itself in the form of a thing. But not just any thing will do, for it seems that it needs to be a special kind of thing, a thing apt to embody thought—a thinking thing” (1). After all, DeLillo’s novel is in itself “a special kind of thing” as “a thinking thing” that embodies his core thought about fiction. So thought-provoking is his writing that Cosmopolis will remain an enduring presence in his new millennium fiction that creates its own sense of things.
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