#12 Leveraging the Void, part 2

Continuing my essay on DeLillo, focusing on nihilism as a theme in his 2003 novel Cosmopolis.

vi

Deep assignments run through all our lives. There are no coincidences.

J.G. Ballard¹

Since I published the first part of this essay in November there’s been an upsurge of interest in DeLillo, for two related reasons. The first is Netflix’s release, in late December, of Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation of White Noise, starring the ubiquitous Adam Driver alongside Greta Gerwig. The second is the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment of February 3rd. That disaster is linked to DeLillo in a disquieting way: central to the plot of White Noise is an ‘airborne toxic event’ that results from the derailment of a train bearing a hazardous cargo. Yet there are more coincidences (which Ballard would say are no such thing): the White Noise film was shot in Ohio, with shooting for the airborne toxic event segment taking place pretty close to where the real derailment would take place. In a further surreal twist, a number of Baumbach’s film extras found themselves caught up in the real ATE, hurriedly evacuating their homes in much the same way as portrayed in the movie. CNN caught up with one such extra, Ben Ratner:

Ratner tried to rewatch the movie a few days ago and found that he couldn’t finish it.

“All of a sudden, it hit too close to home,” he said.

Ratner and his family – his wife, Lindsay, and their kids, Lilly, Izzy, Simon and Brodie – are living the fiction they helped bring to the screen.

“The first half of the movie is all almost exactly what’s going on here,” Ratner said Wednesday, four days into their evacuation.

The article quotes the president of the Don DeLillo Society, Professor Jesse Kavadlo, who, in that banal and conformist way typical of contemporary academics, dismisses as a nothingburger this weird example of life imitating art:

“The terrible spill now is, of course, a coincidence. But it plays in our minds like life imitating art, which was imitating life, and on and on, because, as DeLillo suggests in ‘White Noise’ as well, we have unfortunately become too acquainted with the mediated language and enactment of disaster,” Kavadlo said.

What CNN’s article on Ben Ratner notably fails to mention is that one of DeLillo’s early novels bears the title Ratner’s Star.

I think it must be obvious, to anyone not blinded by rationalism, that something very peculiar is going on here. What we’re to make of such ‘deeds of the devil’ (to quote Georg Christoph Lichenberg²) I’m not entirely sure: White Noise, black magic? But perhaps we can venture the beginnings of a theory.

Psychogeographer Iain Sinclair has occasionally written admiringly of DeLillo and his works. This from American Smoke:

My reading, outside immediate research, came down to a select group of authors: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (worked through in chronological order), Don DeLillo (backwards), Malcolm Lowry, Roberto Bolaño, Walter Abish.³

Sinclair, in command of an encyclopedic knowledge of literature (much of it accumulated during his years as a book dealer), knows better than most who ‘has it’ and who does not. And, by Sinclair’s account, the signs of 'having it' are not isolated to the work a writer produces. The Hackney author has remarked on the frequency of coincidences connected in some way to Ballard, one of the writers he returns to again and again in his own work. The greatest writers, the ‘magi’ as Sinclair has called Ballard and others, seem to be strange attractors (to repeat Baudrillard’s flagrant misuse of that term⁴), drawing into their orbits coincidental happenings, whether happy or baleful.

vii

My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines
where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

From “In the Pines”, a traditional American folk song of unknown authorship⁵

One of the odder threads in Cosmopolis is Eric Packer’s chaste relationship with Elise Shifrin, his wife of twenty-two days and a writer of (in Packer’s estimation) ‘shit’ poetry. It’s odd for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they seem to barely know each other, and DeLillo doesn’t clue us in as to how this unlikely pair came to marry. Secondly, they seem to encounter each other only by chance, in a series of serendipitous meetings that stretch credibility. The first meeting comes when Eric, stuck in stalled traffic, spots Elise in an adjacent cab. In a moment he’s sitting next to her, and the taxi’s moving; it cuts a swift diagonal across an intersection, with Packer’s chief of security Torval ‘jogging hot’ behind:

“Where's your car?"
"We can't seem to find it," she said.
"I'd offer you a ride."
"I couldn't. Absolutely. I know you work en route. And I like taxis. I was never good at geography and I learn things by asking the drivers where they come from."
"They come from horror and despair."
"Yes, exactly. One learns about the countries where unrest is occurring by riding the taxis here."
"I haven't seen you in a while. I looked for you this morning.”
He took off his sunglasses, for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily, with fixed attention. "Your eyes are blue," she said.
He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.
”Eat breakfast yet?”
”No,’ she said.
”Good. I’m hungry for something thick and chewy.”
”You never told me you were blue-eyed.”
He heard the static in her laugh. He bit her thumb knuckle and opened the door and they stepped across the sidewalk to the coffee shop near the corner.

“I looked for you this morning,” is another thing left unexplained by DeLillo. The opening pages of the novel strongly suggest Packer lives alone, so did his ‘Swiss or something’ wife pay him a visit the previous night? Why else, and where else, would he look for her (since we know he hasn’t been anywhere else that morning)? But if Elise did visit him, the following scene in the coffee shop makes it clear they didn’t have the most passionate of nights:

“When are we going to have sex again?”
”We will. I promise,” she said.
”We haven’t in a while now.”
”When I work, you see. The energy is precious.”
”When you write.”
”Yes.”
”Where do you do this? I look for you Elise.”

Strange, comically off-kilter relationships are something of a DeLillo speciality. Through such odd pairings and groupings he carries out an examination of the evolution of love in the so-called postmodern era: what we might think of as the fate of love in a time of deepening nihilism.

DeLillo’s celebrated 1985 novel, the aforementioned White Noise⁶, centres on the lives of a small-town college professor of ‘Hitler studies’ and his family. The family unit consists of the Hitler expert, Jack Gladney, his part-time teacher wife Babette, plus their four children. Aged from two to fourteen, the kids are all from previous marriages (which are several in number). Somehow this extraordinary and unwieldy band manages to cut a more or less successful path through each day. As an exaggerated depiction of the oftentimes dysfunctional and cobbled-together modern family, White Noise may well have been intended as a satire, but if so it’s an affectionate one: DeLillo makes it clear Jack, Babette and co love and cherish each other, despite their far-from-trifling individual faults. To take one example: although Gladney invented his discipline, Hitler studies, and has been a professor of it for fifteen or sixteen years, his command of German is effectively nil, and this latter fact he takes considerable pains to conceal from the academic world.
However flawed its members, I rather think DeLillo admires the White Noise gang for its pluckiness; perhaps it can be taken as representative of all those real-life families who manage to keep it together, who succeed in making a go of things in spite of modern life’s chaotic swerves and curveballs (many of which said families will, of course, have brought upon themselves).

A later and darker novel, 1991’s Mao II⁷, centres on another peculiar group of cohabiting people, a ‘family’ of sorts. Here the protagonist is the Salingeresque Bill Gray, a famous recluse in his sixties whose legend has been built on the back of only two novels. He’s been writing and rewriting his third for years, never satisfied with a book that, as his young, devoted live-in assistant Scott confidentially tells visiting photographer Brita, is simply not up to scratch. Scott’s girlfriend is Karen, a 24-year-old woman who was rescued from the Moonies⁠, having participated in a mass wedding during which she was wedded to a Korean fellow-believer she’d never met before⁠. Karen, like Scott, also calls Bill’s house home, and sleeps with both men. Whether Scott knows for sure his girlfriend is sleeping with his employer, and what he thinks about it, we’re never told, although Bill and Karen do wonder about it. “Well he hasn’t shot us yet,” Karen points out. When Scott beds the older Brita, it might be to get his own back⁠—though secretly, this infidelity remaining unknown to Karen and Bill.

Returning to the oddly-matched couple of Cosmopolis, that theme of lovers’ callousness to each other raises its head in the second part of the book. After confessing to Elise that his bet on the yen has failed spectacularly, leaving him financially ruined, Eric Packer immediately finds himself in the position of jilted husband:

“That's so awful. Don't say things like that. Free to do what? Go broke and die? Listen to me. I'll help you financially. I'll truly do what I can do to help. You can reestablish yourself, at your pace, in your way. Tell me what you need. I promise I'll help. But as a couple, as a marriage, I think we're done, aren't we? You speak of being free. This is your lucky day.”

Soon after, having parted from Elise, Packer uses his smart watch to hack into his wife’s accounts and destroy her fortune (“Let them see each other pure and lorn… Let them see each other clean, in killing light.”). Her net worth disappoints him, being a ‘paltry’ seven hundred and thirty-five million dollars. The obliteration of Elise’s millions is Packer’s first really nihilistic act—assuming the motive behind his decision to not cut his losses on the yen bet, when it became clear he was in real danger of being ruined, was not deliberate self-destruction.

In a third coincidental—and much more intimate—meeting with Elise (absent from the film adaptation), Packer confesses his sabotage: he has ‘lost’ her money. Yet his wife doesn’t care—carried away by sexual delirium, she merely laughs:

“Where?”
”In the market.”
”But where?” she said. “Where does it go when you lose it?”
She licked his face and shinnied up his body and he could not remember where the money went.

What DeLillo means to say with these three serendipitous meetings, the last of which ends happily (a rare Packer W), isn’t entirely clear. The uncharitable interpretation, which many reviewers seem to have opted for, is that it’s just lazy, illogical writing. On the other hand, perhaps DeLillo is alerting us to the reality of that phenomenon I wrote of earlier, which some call synchronicity. And / or he’s asserting the mystic nature of love, love as a mystical force. At any rate, the more nihilistic reader in particular is given some food for thought. As withWhite Noise, then, the excessiveness is perhaps deliberate.

viii

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent [Heraufkunft] of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere ...

Nietzsche, 1887/88⁸

A pretty lengthy stretch of the novel’s first part is devoted to an anti-capitalist protest that engulfs the Manhattan streets, with Packer in the midst of it, secure in his limo of course, watching the action unfold on TV alongside Vija Kinski, his chief of theory:

Protesters were rocking the car. He looked at her and smiled. There were close-ups on TV of faces scorched by pepper gas. The zoom lens caught a man in a parachute dropping from the top of a tower nearby. Chute and man were striped in anarchist red-and-black and his penis was exposed, likewise logotyped. They were knocking the car back and forth. Projectiles came popping from tear-gas launchers and cops free-lanced in the crowd, wearing masks with twin filtration chambers out of some lethal cartoon.
"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."
"Its own grave-diggers," he said.
"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.”

Kinski’s take recalls the thought, on the subject of capital and capitalism, of three real-life theorists: firstly, Mark Fisher, who in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism asked, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, if there really were no alternative to neoliberal capitalism, as the system’s ideologues had always maintained:

That slogan [‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’] captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.⁹

Fisher’s framing of the problem as one of the imagination echoes the previously-mentioned 19th-century theory of Brooks Adams (see Leveraging the Void, part 1), to whit that, at the civilisational level, it is the decline of the imagination that leads to a culture’s vital energies finding almost their sole outlet in economic activity, capital accumulation. The evolution of the art world over the course of the last century provides a striking example of this process. With ‘fine’ art becoming increasingly meaningless and devoid of aesthetic value, the industry surrounding it has given itself over to speculation and money-laundering schemes, with gargantuan sums of money changing hands. The emperor has no clothes, but art speculators either don’t grasp this or don’t care.

The third thinker who’s relevant here is Jean Baudrillard: his idea of ‘trompe-l'œil negativity’ practically mirrors Kinski’s remarks about the protestors being a fantasy of the market. Baudrillard’s idea pops up in a 2003 interview he gave discussing The Matrix:

Interviewer: It is rather astounding that all contemporary American marketing blockbusters, from The Matrix to Madonna’s new album, explicitly claim to be a critique of the very system which massively promotes them.

Baudrillard: That is exactly what makes our era so oppressive. The system produces a trompe-l'œil negativity embedded in products of the spectacle just as obsolescence is built into industrial products. It is the most efficient way of locking out all genuine alternatives. There is no longer any external Omega point to anchor one’s perception of the world, no antagonistic function; only a fascinated adhesion.

Yet a few sentences later he concludes the interview on an uncharacteristically hopeful note:

We don’t need to be nihilistic or pessimistic in the face of all this. The system, the virtual, the Matrix—all of these will perhaps return to the dustbin of history. Reversibility, challenge, and seduction are indestructible.¹⁰

While most of us likely hope to eventually be liberated, or to liberate ourselves, from the nihilistic system that dominates us, it’s clear that the challenge we face in the present, the challenge of imagining a path to such a liberation, is a steep one.

The anarcho-Marxist protest movement that enlivens the pages of Cosmopolis is a relic, a curio of the 20th century living on borrowed time in the 21st. The likelihood of it having any meaningful impact is effectively nil, as Packer realises:

Even with the beatings and gassings, the jolt of explosives, even in the assault on the investment bank, he thought there was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating, even, in the parachutes and skateboards, the styrofoam rat, in the tactical coup of reprogramming the stock tickers with poetry and Karl Marx. He thought Kinski was right when she said this was a market fantasy. There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. 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.

In an earlier book, 1973’s The Mirror of Production¹¹, Baudrillard argued Marxism was not a genuine alternative to liberal capitalism, with which it shared many basic axioms (materialism as the truth of the world, the rightness of rationalism and secularism, the perfectability of man etc). For Baudrillard Marxism, by promulgating a rationalist, materialist and utopian vision of the world, had inadvertently helped liberal capitalism rise to its late-20th-century position of global dominance:

Marxism assists the ruse of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labour power; hence it censors the much more radical hypothesis that they do not have to be the labour power, the ‘unalienable’ power of creating value by their labour.

Baudrillard unmasks as a mystification this imperative, common to both liberal capitalism and Marxism: the imperative to labour, to produce, to contribute to progress and to history. It’s a conception of man as above all a productive being—but selecting production as the essential activity of man is arbitrary, no less arbitrary than saying, as Freud did, that man is oriented primarily towards sexual reproduction.

Now of course, not all those who have declared themselves members of the broad church of Marxism have been convinced materialists and secularists. For instance, while a good portion of Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary writings are distinctly Marxist in character, they are also mystical and kabbalistic¹². But the main current of Marxism has always been atheistic, materialist, rationalist. It is this current that has so greatly contributed to the progressive and productivist mystification we’re considering here. And it is in large part because we are mystified, Baudrillard indicates, that we cannot conceive of a genuine alternative to the nihilistic reality of Late Liberalism.

This essay is continued in part 3, concluded in 4. It may not seem it, but I have managed to keep this work shorter than the novel that inspired it.

1. Ballard, J.G., The Atrocity Exhibition, Chapter One, notes to the paragraph entitled ‘Serial Deaths.’ Re/Search Publications, 1990.

2. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, The Waste Books, Notebook A, fragment 8. New York Review Books Classics, 2000.

3. Sinclair, Iain, American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light, Penguin Books, 2014.

4. Baudrillard, Jean, The Transparancy of Evil. See the essay ‘The Object as Strange Attractor’. Verso, 1993 (original French publication 1990).

5. Aka “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, “My Girl” and “Black Girl”. The song dates from the 1870s, if not earlier, and originated in the Southern Appalachian area of the U.S.

6. DeLillo, Don, White Noise, Viking Adult, 1985.

7. DeLillo, Don, Mao II, Scribner, 1991.

8. Nietzsche, Friedrich, a notebook dated 1887—88.

9. Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism, Zero Books, 2009.

10. Baudrillard, Jean, interview with Aude Lancelin published in The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), 2005.

11. Telos Press, 1973, translation 1975.

12. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations. See page viii, the observation made by Leon Wieseltier in his Preface that Benjamin ‘was modernity’s kabbalist’.