“The City Eats and Sleeps Noise”: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Contours of Entangled Corporeality

ABSTRACT

This essay aims to explore Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) in order to examine how the corporeal schema of a feeling human is radically reconfigured in the contemporary capitalist culture that thrives on augmenting the lived body’s somatic and cognitive experientiality. By accommodating a narrative frame where the location of the body as an organically sealed discrete biological category is problematized, the novel partakes in a landscape of endless entanglements. How such an ontological convergence unsettles the epistemic realms of reasoning is what this reading attempts to investigate. DeLillo’s novel dramatizes a reconceptualization of human subjectivity by unpacking a conflation of biogenetic matter and algorithmic flow of data within a postmodern metropolis. To situate this problematic, the reading affirms “intra-active” transactions between the biomedically theorized body and extra-human ontologies. In illustrating how the notional frames of epistemological certitude seem increasingly untenable in the cultures of neoliberal technocracy, the novel points toward a posthuman condition and wagers what appears to be a transhumanist ethos at the end. The essay interrogates this trajectory by looking at templates of corporeal entanglement in the text.

Acknowledgments

I thank my supervisor, Prof. B. K. Danta, the anonymous Reviewer and the Executive Editor of Critique for their comments on the previous draft of this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For instance, by Crystal Alberts. See Alberts, 2016.

2. Ron Franscell made this comparison in an unfavorable review of Cosmopolis that appeared in Chicago Sun Times (23 March, 2003). See Valentino, 2007.

3. For instance, by Joseph M. Conte. See Conte, 2008.

4. Laist’s essay refracts many of the cultural attributes of technology in DeLillo’s novel. It adopts the idea of a technoscientific imagination expounded by Virilio and the frames of locating media and communication technologies theorized by McLuhan in exploring the text. The essay sees information as taking on the ontological character of the reality principle against a backdrop of conflation between “global informatics and the ecology of global biota” (Laist 262). See Laist, 2010.

5. In their advocacy of a non-unitary worldview where meaning and materiality are entangled, these philosophers anticipate an emergent condition of convergence, cross-overs and “becomings”. “Becoming”, holds Rosi Braidotti, “is the actualization of the immanent encounter between subjects, entities and forces which are apt mutually to affect and exchange parts of each other in a creative and non-invidious manner” (68). This emphasis on the dynamic nature of processes acquires a considerable fillip from the works of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari among others. As a potent frame of critical evaluation, this thesis shows trans-disciplinary scope and relevance. For an overview of its implications in environmental humanities, for instance, see Barua, 2016.

6. Haraway’s ontology of the cyborg moots the idea of a post-Oedipal entity that is simultaneously a human and machine. With intensified quotidian proximity to technologized objects, this form emblematizes ways to understand the neoliberal subject positions and corroborates the idea of a posthuman convergence. For Claudia Springer, “cyborgs incorporate rather than exclude humans, and in so doing erase the distinctions previously assumed to distinguish humanity from technology” (306). This idea of “transgressed boundaries” is what characterizes DeLillo’s narrative teleology accumulating an order of ceaseless entanglements.

7. The contemporary cosmopolitan biomedical practices of organ harvesting and surgical replenishment of biomatter mark an epistemological shift where the notional divide between subject and object is problematized. Medical anthropologists like Lasley Sharp dwells on the research events that had preceded the procedures of clinical involvement. Throughout these events the subjects involved showcase initiations where “their bodies have been violated, their intimate boundaries breached, the essence of their very being commodified” (Sharp 310) in an attempt to acquire the most effective outcomes for transhumanistic perfection. In essence, the doners assume the locus of fetishistic claims (with their organs being reduced to purchasable products) in an arrangement that Sharp identifies as “commodified kinship” (304).

8. Packer has been appositely described as “a crypto-fascist who plays out his fantasies of domination and personal hegemony in the arena of global finance” (Varsava 104). When at one instance in the novel, Didi Fancher, the art dealer and mistress, asserts that “the Rothko Chapel belongs to the world” it took barely a split second for Eric to claim that “It’s mine if I buy it” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 28). His proclivities as a person are reflective of the neo-cannibalistic culture in global capitalism where anything can be systematized and repurposed. Sciolino calls him a “neoliberal antihero” in the master narrative of global market (2015).

9. Codification of life began at the moment when the vitality and essence of life was reduced to a series of chemical components (enzymes, hormones, proteins, peptides etc.) following the pathbreaking discovery of the complex morphology of genes that perform as informational vectors (or codes in the form of DNA and RNA) of the living body. Richard Doyle identified a “postvital” moment at this juncture where “life is no longer confined to the operation of DNA but is instead linked to the informatic events associated with nucleic acids: operations of coding, replication, and mutation” (19-20). The electronic age fostered versions of molecular biology where these biological codes emerged into the computerized display enacting a convergence between genomic sequencing data and digital medical imaging.

10. I am drawing here on Eugene Thacker who brought forth the trope of biomedia to conceptualize “a situation in which a technical, informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes enables the body to demonstrate itself, in applications that may be biological or nonbiological, medical or militaristic, cultural or economic” (Thacker 78).

11. Transhumanists believe in perfectibility of the human by looking at the limitations of the biological body as something that might be transcended with technology. To Nick Bostrom, transhumanism “holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods” (202-3).

12. Clark and Chalmers advocate the view that the material contents of human cognition are dispersed along the continuum of brain, body and the environment inhabited by the individual. This view embraces the external, non-biological, inorganic matter to be active actants in the process of cognition.

13. The elements of parody and pastiche are evident throughout the novel. Packer’s parodic quest for a haircut – an act that serves to structure the textual architectonics of the novel – becomes a postmodern pastiche of a heroic odyssey. Likewise, Benno Levin is portrayed as “a parodic variation to Eric Michael Packer” (Leps 320), the protagonist/hero of the tale.

14. The ambivalence and uncertainty circumscribing Eric have compelled readers to forage alternatives for interpretation. Eric Heyne, for instance, affiliates him with the superhumans of DC and Marvel universe (2013).

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Ajitabh Hazarika

Ajitabh Hazarika is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at Tezpur University, India. His research focuses on the intersection of affect studies, cognitive neuroscience and posthumanism while looking at embodied spaces, mediated social relations and the cultures of postmodern technology in the corpus of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.