Leiden University
‘False Profits’: Futurology and Futurity in Contemporary
Crisis Fiction
Gabriel Burrow S2572990
Literature in Society: Europe and Beyond Supervisor: Professor Maria Boletsi
Second Reader: Dr. Joke Kardux 20th December 2020
Introduction
In After the Future (2011), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi reflects that “the future has lost its zest, and people have lost all trust in it, because the future no more appears as the object of a choice, and of collective conscious action, but is a kind of unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in any way” (125-126). The restricted future that Berardi describes, characterised by unavoidable catastrophe, is at the heart of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds
Against Tomorrow (2014). The novels articulate the problem that Berardi describes through their
focus on protagonists who have an active role in divining, and even shaping, the future—they are futurologists. Odds Against Tomorrow tracks the experiences of an accomplished forecaster called Mitchell Zuckor. Zuckor is employed by FutureWorld, a futurological consultancy that models worst-case crisis scenarios on behalf of corporate clients in order to help them evade financial losses. Cosmopolis, meanwhile, offers a vivid portrayal of a currency speculator, Eric Packer, travelling in an armoured limousine through Midtown Manhattan while the city is on the brink of crisis. These are the actors who cause and experience events within the two novels’ respective intradiegetic worlds, individualised with distinct behavioural patterns and traits that can be analysed (Bal, 7). Through my examination of the methods that fictional forecasters employ and the futures that these practices impel, I will come to consider the futurity of the novels themselves. My thesis, indeed my prediction, is that literature can be a vital tool for reclaiming what Berardi terms the future’s “zest” (After 126).
This thesis’s primary argument is comparative: it juxtaposes literary portrayals of
the novels themselves. Although both “futurology” and “futurity” can be defined in a number of ways, I will use them to define two distinct concepts. “Futurology” is sometimes used
specifically to refer to a post-industrial intellectual movement (Andersson 3). Here it is used in its broader sense to refer to “the study of the possible (and assumed to be likely) nature of the world in the near future based on what is known about present trends” (Buchanan). “Futurity” often takes on a broad meaning, relating to “ways of thinking the future that involve both the future and the past” (Boletsi 6). However, I will follow Amir Eshel, who uses the term to describe the creative and provocative potential of contemporary literature:
Futurity marks the potential of literature to widen the language and to expand the pool of idioms we employ in making sense of what has occurred while imagining whom we may become. (Eshel 5)
Eshel describes the capacity of literature to unlock new ways of expressing and conceptualising our future, prompting reflection and debate. This futurity allows readers to consider what might occur, while futurology is often an exercise in determining what is most likely to occur. This is the distinction that anthropologist Arjun Appadurai also draws between “politics of possibility” and “politics of probability” (1). The former examines “the capacity to aspire” (Ibid.), while the latter reflects a neoliberal rationality that calculates likely outcomes in terms of risk, in the process containing and controlling the future (Amoore 8). It is the tension between the more subtle futurity demonstrated by novels and the futurological practices of characters acting within them that will be examined in this thesis.
We live in a world where ‘futures’ can be bought and sold. Parties “enter into a contractual relation with the future” and are able to protect themselves from unfavourable outcomes by hedging their bets with insurance, credit default swaps, and other financial
instruments (Shaviro 5). These structures are open to exploitation and mismanagement in equal measure, as was seen in the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, which was the result of rampant trade in derivatives, in particular mortgage-backed securities (Grossburg 298). Discourse surrounding the global financial system is often preoccupied with the apparatus of securitisation, and it can be all too easy to forget that there are still rational human actors who have their own relationship with the future. Appadurai’s understanding of how financial actors interact with the “machinery of risk” that governs the modern financial system and speculate upon uncertainty is a notable exception to this trend, one which will assist my analysis of the primary texts’ futurologists (239). This will include a consideration of the theory of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ within contemporary capitalism. The former represents a measurable calculation of probability, while the latter cannot be measured (Knight 20-21). Some have criticised this
Knightian distinction as being “artificial” (Taleb 128), but it remains a useful starting point from which to consider the more complex role of “risk technologies” in “managing uncertainty” (Amoore 7).
An assumption on which this analysis rests is that the practice of futurology is
underpinned by a neoliberal capitalist system that has a particular relationship with the future. I will be adopting a Foucauldian account of neoliberalism as defined by Wendy Brown, who describes it as “a governing rationality through which everything is ‘economized’ and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen
as a market” (176). This definition offers a firm basis from which to examine contemporary patterns of prediction and speculation since it considers neoliberalism not simply as economic policy, but rather as a rationality at work within late-stage capitalism. Significantly, Brown also finds in futurology one of neoliberalism’s contradictory characteristics: “it carries purpose and has its own futurology (and futures markets), while eschewing planning” (49). Neoliberalism monopolises and economises relationships with the future, while negating human agency in its creation.
The result of this neoliberal rationality is a state of enduring contemporaneity, which is best considered as a temporal state that “absorbs all difference and futurity into an
ever-expanding instant from which we are unable to imagine an escape” (Brouillette et al. xxi). The future is being perpetually flattened in the present by a system that negates our capacity to imagine other possibilities, a preclusion of alternatives that Fredric Jameson (2005) considered to be “the invincible universality of capitalism” (xii) and Mark Fisher subsequently coined as
Capitalist Realism (2009). Fisher approaches neoliberalism from a broadly Marxist perspective,
while Brown’s outlook is Foucauldian, but these two overarching forms of analysis will be treated as complementary and overlapping approaches. The essence of the neoliberal relationship with the future considered here is described by Berardi, who echoes Brown’s observation that neoliberal rationality eschews planning:
Financial capital is not planning for any future, as the future is now, in the instantaneous valorization of virtual value and in the devastation of the radial spaces of physical territory. (Futurability 139)
Here Berardi captures the fundamental relationship between neoliberal capitalism and the future. An all-consuming focus on financial returns and exponential growth, amplified by new forms of technology and automation, creates a future in the present. This automation of financial
instruments has also seen the rapid rise of cybercapital, a disembodied form of wealth creation and storage—as Berardi puts it, “the valorization of virtual value” (132). Critically, this system has a concrete, negative impact on the physical world: Berardi rightly juxtaposes the “virtual” nature of the value created by cybercapital with the “physical” territory being devastated by this system, which in his formulation sits outside of a protected “bunker” that is occupied and maintained by financial interests (137). Later in Futurability, Berardi tracks a more explicit line of causation between neoliberal rationality, cybercapital, and crisis: “capitalist greed and
neoliberal conformism have brought the planet to the brink of a multifaceted apocalypse”, a crisis scenario named for the way it intertwines financial and environmental breakdown (189). The practice of prediction is focused on the creation of virtual value, even as the system that underpins it spirals towards a deeper and deeper state of crisis.
This state of crisis is depicted in the two primary texts: Cosmopolis portrays financial breakdown, while Odds Against Tomorrow primarily explores environmental disasters. Both works are imbued with the same sense of perpetual instability. Indeed, crisis has become so synonymous with the contemporary that its historical conceptions as “a critical, decisive
moment, or a turning point” (Roitman 10) have been superseded by the idea of “chronic” crisis, defined by “a state of greater or lesser permanence” (Koselleck 358). This contemporary conceptualisation of crisis, first theorised by Reinhart Koselleck in the 1970s, seemingly
contradicts the concept’s meaning as a decisive turning point. “Seeing crisis as a context”, as anthropologist Henrik Vigh proposes (8), offers an opportunity in this regard—not only does it help formulate an understanding of how a chronic state of anxiety and fragmentation becomes normalised, but this understanding can also imbue the present with the contingency that crisis necessarily signifies.
Both Cosmopolis and Odds Against Tomorrow can be considered works of contemporary crisis fiction, described by Emily Horton as texts that “take up a new global and cosmopolitan social and ethical consciousness”, and hence emphasise crisis as a mode of social anxiety that relates to the context of global neoliberalism (35, 3). Indeed, in their representations of
crisis-scapes defined by anxiety these two texts are typical of the classification. In Odds Against
Tomorrow,FutureWorld’s entire business model is predicated on the ability of its consultants to engender a sense of fear in its clients, something that is best communicated by Mitchell, who is petrified by his own worst-case scenarios. In Cosmopolis we learn that the Packer Capital’s portfolio is diversified across so many major institutions that the entire global system is under threat if it were to collapse; billions of people live in a state of utter helplessness where their future is dictated by structures beyond their control.
The fear and anxiety that stems from a state of chronic crisis is a tool for the perpetuation of neoliberal capitalism and the state of contemporaneity that it engenders. Mark Fisher describes how the neoliberal era is defined by both “low-level panic” and “a massive deterioration of social imagination” (K-Punk 516); his analysis relates primarily to the dismantling of social security and new forms of work, but this interrelation between anxiety and the suppression of imagination can just as easily be applied to a state of chronic crisis. The framework of chronic
crisis and associated rhetoric can become an “instrument of rule”, as Agamben notes, but it also restricts our ability to imagine alternatives to capitalism via the repressive influence of anxiety.
This underlying state of crisis-fuelled anxiety can be associated with what LeMenager terms “the everyday Anthropocene” (224). The term evokes the geological concept of the Anthropocene—“an image of the Earth as captive to the machinations of a single species” (Howe, et al. 17)—but applies it in a more granular way. Rather than viewing the anthropocene as a geological era, LeMenager calls for scholars to consider it as a “present tense, lived time”, paying particular attention to “what it means to live, day by day, through climate shift and the economic and sociological injuries that underwrite it” (225). Coming to terms with a lived experience defined by chronic crisis and the “economic and sociological injuries” that stem from late capitalism is a matter of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, an idea that Roy Scranton derives from Montaigne’s assertion that “to philosophize is to learn how to die” (9). The practice of “learning to die” means reconciling with the existential threats that define the everyday Anthropocene, not only on an individual level, but as a civilisation, accepting “human limits and transience as fundamental truths” (Scranton 24). LeMenager proposes a compelling application of learning to die to contemporary literature: “when learning to die enters novelistic practice... [it] invites readers’ empathy, theory of mind, and, to some extent, identification” (229). By encountering characters who find ways to come to terms with a state of enduring crisis, letting go of fear, and constructing new relationships with the future, readers are invited to consider their own relationship with the flattened present.
In my final chapter, I focus on Eshel’s conception of futurity, by which contemporary literature “has the capacity to affect our aspirations (‘hope’) and our future actions”, mobilising
the past to inspire action in the present (3, 7). Through literature’s capacity for futurity,
contemporary crisis fiction can provide readers with the vocabularies and imaginative spark to visualise possible futures that are beyond the boundaries of capitalist realism, which Fisher describes as dominating the “horizons of possibility” (Capitalist Realism 81). In the face of futurological practices focused on profit above all else, literary representations of the very crises that neoliberal rationality and cybercapitalism impel and profit from may pave the way for alternative futures.
To trace this futurity, I will analyse the formal characteristics of Cosmopolis and Odds
Against Tomorrow using a narratological toolset, derived most notably from the work of Mieke
Bal (2017). Bal’s approach to narratology is the most useful for the purpose of this thesis, since it takes what has traditionally been solely a text-imminent methodology derived from structuralism and uses this framework to engage in deconstructive cultural analysis. Through analysis of texts, we are able to identify the ideologies ingrained within them, as well as considering that of readers interpreting the texts (23, 62, 107). I will analyse the “creative narratives” and “‘poetic’ language” that Eshel identifies as the basis of futurity in relation to the three layers of literature that Bal outlines: narrative text, story, and fabula (Eshel 7-8; Bal 5). These layers are
interrelated, from the texts’ “structured whole composed of signs”, to the stories’ narrative content, and the fabula’s “logic of events” formed of time, location, and actors that is constructed in one’s mind through the process of reading (Bal 5, 7). The way that the narrative texts of
Cosmopolis and Odds Against Tomorrow give rise to fabulas will be fundamental to
understanding the potential for futurity that stems from the two novels. Through these means, I will argue that works of contemporary crisis fiction can help readers imagine possible futures,
overcoming the restrictive effect that neoliberal rationality has on the human imagination in the process (M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism 8; Brouillette et al. xxi).
1. ‘False Profits’
“There are profits to be made… in being prophets” (Rich 208). This is a phrase uttered by Jane, Mitchell Zuckor’s futurologist colleague in Odds Against Tomorrow, which epitomises the cynical role of speculators in contemporary capitalism. For Jane, and indeed Eric Packer in
Cosmopolis, the exercise of predicting the future is fundamentally oriented around profit. Of
course, the image of individuals who claim foresight as financially motivated, even devious, is not a new one. Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller (1594) depicts a young woman who is
supposedly divining the future by reading a man’s palm, but upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that she is slipping a ring from his finger. When reflecting upon this painting, Taleb notes that “we have always been suckers for those who tell us about the future” (164), and it is this reality that my first chapter looks to elucidate. It will show that futurologists play a vital role within contemporary capitalism; the fact that they are making predictions within a system that negates the possibility of futures other than a protracted state of contemporaneity could even be considered the modern-day equivalent of the trick that Caravaggio portrayed.
At its heart, financial speculation is an exercise in storytelling. The narrative paradigm, a concept coined by Walter Fisher (1985) to describe how narrative is the fundamental basis of communication, shows how stories can help speculators make sense of profound complexity and abstraction and share this information with others (Kay and King 216). Equally, narrativising can lead speculators to rationalise uncertainty, which is “the lack (and limitations) of knowledge”, as a “precise category” or “nerdified field”, a propensity that Taleb considers to be derived from a Platonic urge to focus on well-defined “forms” (xxv). So, any work of fiction concerning
speculation is really a story about storytelling, and is in turn primed to portray deluded attempts to create patterns where there are none. The superforecasters portrayed in Odds Against
Tomorrow and Cosmopolis are both storytellers in this vein: the success of Mitchell Zukor’s
client meetings as a FutureWorld consultant is based entirely on his ability to weave abstract concepts, data, and possibilities into terrifying worst-case scenarios, while Eric Packer’s speculation on stocks is predicated on his ability to utter self-fulfilling prophecies that make markets move on account of his status as a respected forecaster. After Packer transitions to the foreign exchange markets, which prove harder to predict, let alone dictate, his desire to define patterns in seemingly random market movements becomes more pronounced. These are individuals who tell stories about the future for a living, and, on occasion, witness their realisation.
This chapter considers the portrayals of these superforecasters and their roles within the novels’ respective intradiegetic worlds. I show an appreciation of the real-world underpinnings of fictional speculation and incorporate insights from theorists such as Frank H. Knight (1921) and Arjun Appadurai in order to contextualise these stories, and the work of the futurological storytellers who inhabit them. Indeed, there are a few points relating to the development of speculation that serve as a relevant backdrop to the contemporary novels analysed. Futurology is derived from the work of mystics, priests, and soothsayers, and was more recently pioneered as a vocation in the twentieth century by the likes of Alvin Toffler (1970) and John Naisbitt (1982). From the 1980s onwards the practice became increasingly focused on risk and innovation research—in other words it was increasingly geared towards financial and corporate interests (Andersson 224). Futurologists, sometimes called futurists, became industry-focused consultants
representing parties with an interest in the future, and often in maintaining a status quo that prioritises profit above all. This coincided with the wider proliferation of financial institutions, which, although not considered futurological, tapped into the same predictive frameworks. Novels from this era reflect this shift in speculative practices: Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the
Vanities (1987), which is in many ways a precursor to the primary texts examined, describes the
immediacy and potency of speculation, by which anything can be achieved in “four ticks” (73). Yet, in Bonfire the “capitalism of the future” is still portrayed as a constructive relationship with the material world, with investment going towards the creation of roads and hospitals, or
speculating upon gold-backed bonds (163).
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the two primary texts are set, the central story being told is different. Professionalised future-thinking has been incorporated into both the jargon and the practice of late-stage capitalism—accordingly, any engagement with futurology is necessarily interwoven with financial interests. Furthermore, disembodied cybercapital has overtaken the more clearly defined relationship between finance and the material world set out in Bonfire. Berardi tracks this transition:
In the last twenty years, computers, electronic exchanges, dark pools, flash orders, multiple exchanges, alternative trading venues, direct access brokers, OTC derivatives and high-frequency traders have totally changed the financial landscape and particularly the relation between human operators and self-directing algorithmic automatons.
The shift that Berardi describes fundamentally reconfigures the relationship between human operators and financial instruments. What took “four ticks” in Bonfire has become instantaneous, a matter of “yoctoseconds” (DeLillo 79), and is executed by a computer, not a human. This final characteristic is also notable: the “human operators” who used to be responsible for decision making are increasingly handing over this function to algorithms (Berardi, Futurability 156). These are the mechanisms in cybercapital, “a seamless, timeless global network, a frictionless system of exchange that can dispense with real-world referents” (Shonkwiler 252). Cosmopolis is the most explicit in its depiction of this timeless network: “the glow of cyber-capital” is a perpetual presence in the text, emanating from the screens that line Eric Packer’s stretched limousine and bathing the city through which he cruises in its light (DeLillo 78).
The instantaneous and omnipresent nature of this new financial landscape is closely associated with a state of contemporaneity. Brouillette, Sauri, and Nilges’ definition of contemporaneity as a temporal state that “absorbs all difference and futurity into an
ever-expanding instant” is a useful touchpoint in this regard (xxi); the breathtaking speed at which cybercapital functions reflects the flattening of the future into a perpetual present. In Cosmopolis, Packer’s Chief of Theory Vija Kinski reflects that “it’s cybercapital that creates the future”—a future that is defined by “uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential” and above all the “acceleration of time” (DeLillo 79). This leads Wang to assert that in the novel “the dominance of technology engenders complete shift in temporality, in which the past and the future collapse in, rendering in the present eternal, which is different from the concept ‘now’” (1070). Contemporary capitalism fundamentally reconfigures our relationship with the future.
One might think that the seemingly deterministic nature of this state of contemporaneity, which “absorbs all difference” (Brouillette et al. xxi), coupled with the proliferation of
self-directing automatons within the financial landscape would render human prediction redundant. However, the temporal state of contemporary capitalism in fact feeds futurological enterprises. Futurologists can still harness the “investment potential” that cybercapital offers (DeLillo 80) and profiting from the contemporaneity that it occupies. As Appadurai notes, there is still scope for individuals with an affinity for risk to operate within, and perpetuate, this system:
The spirit that informs today’s heroic charismatic players at the very high ends of the financial market lies not in an as yet undiscovered set of proprietary databases, screens tools, or models... Rather, these are players who have a different strategy of divination, of reading the signs, charts, trends, flows, patterns, and shifts in the market, than those who are less willing to take their outsized bets on the certainty and timing of market
downturns. (Appadurai 248)
Here Appadurai emphasises the continued significance of human speculators operating within financial markets. He places a premium on contemporary forecasters’ conviction in not only predicting certain outcomes based on the abundant data available to them, but also in taking disproportionate risks based on “the spirit of uncertainty”, a cavalier attitude which he contrasts with the more restrained, “rational” Calvinist spirit that Weber describes (238, 240). Springing up since the onset of mass financialisation in the 1970s, these new players are pessimistic in their
predictions, looking to profit from “market downturns” (248). Most commonly referred to as “bears”, Appadurai describes how such contrarians bet against the markets, demonstrating “a capacity to channel uncertainty so as to tame the machinery of risk” (249). So, Appadurai claims that “the spirit of uncertainty” present within these bears can to some extent temper the cold rationality of automated systems.
The basis of this assertion can be tracked via the distinction between “uncertainty” and “risk”, notably explored by Knight: the former is “the result of our incomplete knowledge of the world” (Kay and King 13), which in its “true” sense is “unmeasurable” (Knight, 20), while the latter is “a known chance” (21). Appadurai, like Kay and King (2020), laments the severe underappreciation of Knightian uncertainty within modern day speculation, which he contrasts with how risk has played a crucial role in the financialisation of contemporary capitalism: the “machinery of risk” to which he refers is comprised of “‘devices’ that measure, model, and forecast risks”, while “uncertainty remains outside of all financial devices and models” (Appadurai, 239). By “channelling uncertainty”, Appadurai means that headstrong forecasters and analysts can operate in the grey areas outside of this machinery for financial gain. The definition of the uncertainty requires a further clarification, introduced by Taleb, who breaks the concept into two categories: “nonscalable” and “scalable” uncertainty (36). Nonscalable
uncertainty relates to outliers within large sample sizes, in which “no single instance will
significantly change the aggregate” (32); in contrast, with scalable uncertainty a single outcome
or observation is able to “disproportionately impact the aggregate” (33). The potential for scalable uncertainty has grown with the development of modern technology, for example financial mechanisms, and its most extreme, rule-breaking events are known as “Black Swans”
(33-34). The primary texts’ futurologists deal in this scalable uncertainty—the potential for freak weather events or unprecedented fluctuations in markets—with appropriate pessimism.
In Cosmopolis, Packer fits directly into Appadurai’s mould of charismatic players. As the futurologist journeys across Midtown Manhattan he participates in exactly the kind of bearish investment practices described: he bets on a market downturn in the value of the yen. His prediction is pessimistic, backed up by a disproportionate bet, and sits outside of the machinery of risk. Michael Chin, Packer’s currency analyst, warns him that “what is happening doesn't chart… We are betting big-time here” (DeLillo 21), signalling that the activity dwells within the murky realm of uncertainty that cannot be tracked by the instruments of cyber capitalism. Packer, disregarding the warnings produced by the machinery of risk, insists that a pattern underpins the currency’s movements, but he is unable to determine its nature—he is “speculating into the void” (21), as Chin remarks. The source of this seemingly unpredictable movement is later claimed to be latent in nature, a “lopsided” pattern that resembles the symmetry of Packer’s own prostate (200). However, it is possible that Packer’s willingness to accept his own body’s asymmetry as the source of the yen’s movement is nothing more than a case of narrativisation, as Taleb describes (xxv), or indeed a confirmation of his profound narcissism. In any case, this discovery comes after the yen has continued to rise beyond what is considered possible by the mechanisms of risk and PackerCapital’s portfolio is reduced to “near nothingness” on account of his decision to take out loans, also in yen, to double down on his bearish position (DeLillo 121). As the yen’s value continues, inconceivably, to rise in relation to dollar, Packer’s debts are compounded; this time his outsized bets do not pay off.
views this form of forecasting as the highest calling of a futurologist. This is particularly apparent when he compares this fixation with his previous focus—investing in the stocks and shares of technology businesses. Packer’s mind is brought back to this period as his car passes a brokerage house, with his perspective shared via focalisation:
Back in the days when he was forecasting stocks, when forecasting was pure power, when he’d tout a technology stock or bless an entire sector and automatically cause doublings in share price and the shifting of worldviews, when he was effectively making history, before history became monotonous and slobbering, yielding to his search for something purer, for techniques of charting that predicted the movements of money itself. (75)
When dealing in stocks, Packer can directly influence the movements of the markets. Given his respected status as a forecaster, he can shift values in particular companies, innovations, or entire sectors via his blessing alone, even changing others’ worldviews in the process. To return to Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm, Packer is able to leverage his ability to tell compelling stories for financial gain. The passage is punctuated by instances of alliteration, be that the staccato “tout a technology” or the plosives of “pure power”, and this reflects the potency of Packer’s self-fulfilling prophecies (75). This is the same sense of power and status that leads the protagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy, to consider himself “a Master of the Universe” (Wolfe 11). And yet, this ability to determine the future loses its excitement for Packer all too quickly, and “history became monotonous slobbering”. As well as communicating
his disdain for those he influenced, who are bound up with the “slobbering” personification of “history”, this phrase hints at what was missing in Packer’s speculation on the stock market from a futurological standpoint—uncertainty, or even any meaningful risk for that matter (DeLillo 75). Without any uncertainty, Packer’s ability to determine future outcomes grows stale and he looks to move from “pure power” to something “purer” still (Ibid.). He turns his foresight to the movements of money itself.
The progression of Packer’s career as a futurologist mirrors the wider dematerialisation of finance with the proliferation of cybercapital. We can assume that the stock markets upon which Packer speculated were grounded in institutions and technological innovations, in the way that the investment practices in Bonfire are focused on infrastructure or gold-backed bonds, but since the gold standard was abandoned decades earlier in America and earlier still in Japan, currencies have no relation with the material world beyond promissory notes and coinage.
Osteen, who tracks the role of currency in Cosmopolis deftly, describes this as a transfer from the “solid world to spectral money”; cybercapital emits its ghostly glow from the screens in Packer’s limousine “because it is free from the grit and muck of the material world” (296). We learn that Packer has always wished to emulate this dematerialisation in his own form, to become
“quantum dust”, infinitesimally finer than the material grit that Osteen describes, and “extend the human experience towards infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment” (DeLillo 207). This physical and temporal transcendence would epitomise the exponential progress of cybercapital, which squeezes its functions into smaller and smaller units of time, as small as “yoctoseconds” (79), just as Packer’s body would be broken down into particles so fine that they can no longer be considered material at all.
This shows the lengths to which Packer will go to assimilate with cybercapital—he would give up his human form entirely if it will allow him to become a disembodied speculative instrument within the machinery of risk. This desire reflects the wider dematerialisation that capitalism engengers; Berardi describes how “the more you destroy physical things, physical resources, and the body, the more you can accelerate the circulation of financial flows” (The
Uprising 105). It is deeply ironic, then, that the pattern Packer lacks when forecasting the yen is
in fact derived from the imperfect material forms found in the natural world, indeed, in his own body in the form of his asymmetrical prostate. Ultimately, the failure of his bet on uncertain market movements is a form of redemption; it is the loss of his portfolio that sees him “purified in nameless ways” (DeLillo 106), not having his life further intertwined with cybercapital. In the final pages of the novel, when Packer is about to be murdered by Richard Sheets, a reclusive ex-employee, he contemplates all of his body’s small idiosyncrasies, be that “a small wart” or “his strangely achy knee” (207)—these simple, physical things define him more than his futurological relationship with cybercapital ever could.
Mitchel Zuckor, The Odds Against Tomorrow’s most notable futurologist, has a different relationship with the future to that of Packer, but demonstrates the same predictive pessimism that Appadurai describes, and comes to draw similar conclusions about the nature of futurology. Rather than speculating on the stock or foreign exchange markets, Zucker’s role at FutureWorld involves the direct monetisation of risk by predicting possible negative scenarios. Following 9/11 and Puget Sound, a fictional earthquake that destroys Seattle, insurers cease to provide
catastrophe coverage, leaving major corporations financially liable for the death and destruction caused by any such disaster in the future. FutureWorld is founded to occupy this gap in the
market: its consultancy work exploits limited liability statutes to reduce companies’ exposure to catastrophes. Essentially, companies enlist the services of FutureWorld for an annual retainer of eight-hundred and fifty thousand US dollars, to brief them on a variety of possible worst-case scenarios, indemnifying themselves from liability should one of these events take place.
In contrast with Packer’s targeted bets that the yen will decline, Zuckor adopts a scattergun approach, addressing countless potential catastrophes by category: potential wars; public health crises; terrorism; natural disasters; financial fiascos. These potential Black Swans are a long held obsession of Mitchell’s, one which he first professionalises during an assignment estimating financial liability in the event of the Empire State Building’s destruction for his previous firm, Fitzsimmons Sherman, before moving to FutureWorld to create scenarios full time. Mitchell does his utmost to quantify “unmeasurable” Knightian uncertainty (Knight 20) as risk through his scenarios, as is seen when Mitchell calculates the value of his colleagues’ lives at Fitzsimmons Sherman, or when he outlines the annualised probability of an event leading to a nuclear stand-off between nations using a formula, borrowed from a Stanford statistician, that suggests the chance is “one in ten” (Rich 107). The automated “machinery of risk” (Appadurai 249) is all but absent here; Mitchell is rarely seen without his computer, making use of
spreadsheets and formulas, but it is he who pulls together disparate statistics, facts, and acronyms into meaningful scenarios. The futurologist is even likened to an “android” as he alphabetises his disaster folders, suggesting that he is serving as a direct stand-in for such automatons. We must, however, take such attempts to model scalable uncertainty with a pinch of salt, since all of these scenarios are necessarily “hard to predict from past information” (Taleb 36).
The real driver for FutureWorld’s business is clients’ uncertainty. Since Puget Sound caused untold damage, companies fear scalable uncertainty, having seen what is at stake should such Black Swans take place. This fear of scalable uncertainty is what makes them pay
FutureWorld’s considerable retainer. Significantly, clients are indemnified simply for having “made a reasonable, good faith effort to protect… from said circumstances through substantial investment in precautionary measures”, as per the limited liability statute (Rich 47). This protection is not contingent on a specific risk-based scenario taking place. Watson concisely summarises this mechanism, stating that FutureWorld creates a temporal relationship in which “future uncertainty can be acted upon in the present, even when there is little or no likelihood of accurately identifying what will occur or when it will happen” (65). For Watson, this structure is akin to the workings of weather derivatives, which he suggests “the novel is directly satirizing” (Ibid.). This parallel stands up to scrutiny. Both FutureWorld and firms offering weather derivatives financialise ecological breakdown: “ecological hazards that unevenly threaten capital’s infrastructure are decoded as such, and recoded as financial risk which is distributed across global capital markets” (Dibley and Neilson 149). Unpredictable events are packaged up as risk, insuring clients against uncertainty, while the institutions offering such financial
instruments profit in the present.
FutureWord’s model is also notable in the way it is still reliant on the actions of human consultants. Mitchell has abilities that machines do not, most notably in face to face client meetings, which are recorded in order to comply with federal insurance briefing regulations. Indeed, Mitchell’s worst-case scenario presentations are part analysis, part narrative
performance, and FutureWorld’s earnings are contingent on his ability to instill a sense of fear in clients by creating impactful stories:
He glanced at his notebook and found nothing but disarranged sentences and abandoned phrases, with no logical progression between them. It was only when he began to speak, his clients struggling to determine the veracity of what he was saying, that he could truly visualize the horrors he was paid to predict. His eyes would float faraway and water slightly, and a Cassandra prophecy would unfold in full paragraphs. (Rich 73-74)
Here, Mitchell’s role as a financial storyteller is on full display. He is able to construct
persuasive narratives out of “disarranged sentences” and “abandoned phrases” (73), a process that Kay and King note for its potential to “aid both understanding and persuasion” in financial contexts (216). However, this is a disconcerting process for clients, at least when Mitchell is starting out as a consultant at FutureWorld. Clients are unable to judge whether these
presentations are pure pageantry, or whether Mitchell is truly lost to these data-driven visions when his eyes glaze over. Mitchell’s early presentations sow doubt, an idea conveyed by his predictions being described as “Cassandra prophecy” (Rich 74); as was the case with the mythical Trojan princess, Mitchell’s prophetic visions doomed to come true, but never to be believed. Based on this performance, it would be a stretch to classify him as one of Appadurai’s “charismatic” players (248), but his role in stoking fear and uncertainty still serves a purpose.
As Mitchell gains more confidence in his abilities, the sheer intensity of his prophetic displays increasingly achieves the desired, lucrative, effect: clients are caught up in an
“exhilarating cycle of doom”, asking themselves “where is this maniac going?” (Rich 79). As was the case with Packer’s stock market predictions, which saw him change others’ attitudes with the potency of his convictions, Mitchell finds with his clients that “the more strongly he believed his prophecies, the more strongly they did” (107). This boom period for FutureWorld also sees Mitchell’s intuition develop: although he cannot determine which of his scenarios will come true, he can sense that “disaster was real, and it was coming fast” (Ibid.). His predictions grow more and more compelling, and FutureWorld enlists the services of “a second Cassandra”, a quantitative analyst called Jane whose approach is rooted firmly in “data points” and “charts” (111). The pair take their clients by storm.
But unlike Cassandra, or automated instruments for that matter, Mitchell remains vulnerable to his own human fallibility. When extreme weather conditions wrack the
North-eastern seaboard—first drought, then torrential rains—Mitchell’s predictive capacity is put to the test in intensified client meetings:
Was it really one in eight? Might it be higher? The truth was that he had invented the figure. Twelve point five percent seemed a safe, low number. It was a hunch—no more no less. The calculations were vague because the data was vague. (135)
Here the narrative voice shifts to Mitchell’s erratic perspective entirely, as opposed to the more distanced focalisation that the majority of the text conforms to, as he questions the validity of an unfounded claim he has made about the threat of Tammy. Tensions mount as he second-guesses his calculations, which were presented as a measured calculation of risk, but relied on “vague”,
outdated data (135). Contrary to his usual speculative pessimism, Mitchell has in fact
underplayed the dangers of the hurricane on “a hunch” based on what seemed “low” and “safe” (Ibid.); this is outright uncertainty, torn from any grounding in mathematical deduction. From there, Mitchell spirals, attempting to refine his calculations, only to be overcome by increasingly breathless visions of “high probability of major impact, high Saffir-Simpson rating. High
casualties. High chaos.” (136) The shortening length of these sentences reflects the acceleration of Mitchell’s thought process, ending with staccato sentences that reflect the harsh reality of the situation: rather than Mitchell’s “low” estimation of the danger posed by the hurricane, New York is soon to be the victim of “high” levels of devastation (135-136). Upon reaching this conclusion, Mitchell passes out. Soon after, Hurricane Sandy leads to the flooding of Manhattan.
Ultimately, Mitchell realises the futility of his futurological ventures. He and Jane spend weeks stranded in New York, after the population, including many of his clients, had already fled the city; the pair were so preoccupied meeting with clients to discuss the finer points of the oncoming disaster that they failed to heed their own advice. They form a new company, Future Days, to capitalise on the renown Mitchell earns for having supposedly predicted the hurricane, but he becomes increasingly disillusioned in the face of constantly escalating levels of threat and uncertainty. One exchange between him and Jane summarises illustrates this:
“It will get worse, but by how much I have no idea. Our expectations are constantly being surpassed. The scales need to be recalibrated.”
“Then we’re in the right line of business. Wouldn’t you say? The more uncertainty, the higher the stakes—Future Days will only get bigger.” (235)
The two futurologists, Mitchell and Jane, have fundamentally opposing views of their vocation following the hurricane. For Mitchell, the reality of environmental breakdown shows him the futility of attempting to quantify risk—the immediate future is rife with uncertainty, and the only thing guaranteed is perpetually escalating disaster. Jane sees this same reality as an opportunity: more scalable uncertainty means “higher stakes”, which in turn ensures a growing supply of clients willing to pay top-dollar to be indemnified from catastrophe (235). She willingly accepts “lucrative business” in the “short term”, while Mitchell is preoccupied with the realisation that “there would be no long term”, at which point the role of a futurologist is necessarily redundant (236). In its most literal sense, the negation of the “long term” relates to the proliferation of catastrophic events; Mitchell realises that “that the next flood would come, then another one” and humanity will be eradicated in due course since “every arrow pointed down” (236). But this loss of the long term also, I think, relates to the contemporaneity that neoliberalism engenders. Talking to Jane, Mitchell is faced with the reality that FutureWorld and Future Days’ sole focus is profiteering in the present, acting as part of a capitalist system that tends to “create a
repressive, totalising sense of global contemporaneity” (Brouillette et al. 181), rather than a meaningful relationship with the future. These two meanings—the proliferation of fear inducing crises and creation of a perpetual present—intersect when it comes to the flattening of the future: the scenarios that FutureWorld create are designed to engender fear, which in turn negates the potential for change by stifling imagination. Mark Fisher describes this effect, commenting that the “affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions... breed
conformity and the cult of minimal variation” (Capitalist Realism 76). This intersection between fear, contemporaneity, and crisis will be elaborated upon in my next chapter.
It must be noted that Odds does give some credence to the concrete role of futurologists in pre-empting negative outcomes based on their calculations of risk. At one point a FutureWorld client reveals how they acted upon Mitchell’s scenario, his “wisdom”, to help evacuate their employees from New York (Rich 207), something that supposedly reflects futurologists’ function “to prevent the future from happening... to devise solutions that might halt change” (236). Instead of merely profiting from ecological breakdown, this outlook, shared by Jane and Mitchell, sees futurological firms working to prevent negative outcomes, in effect halting the future in its tracks. In this case, this means halting a future visualised as disaster.
There is, however, an obvious conceit to this interpretation of the futurology being conducted in the novel: Mitchell’s scenario does not prevent Hurricane Tammy devastating New York, it merely helps a small number of wealthy corporations navigate the disaster, while serving as the basis of a public relations drive to acquire more major corporations as customers—a veneer of prophecy laid on top of a cynical financial agenda. To return to the words that began this chapter, “there are profits to be made… in being prophets” (208). The only sense in which these futurologists halt the future is via their perpetuation of the neoliberal capitalist system, which negates possibility through a state of contemporaneity. When Mitchell finds himself in a FEMA camp filled with climate refugees, he is incapable of helping them; these desperate people hail him as a “prophet”, but he answers that he is “just a financial consultant” (247). This episode not only reminds us that futurological practices cannot prevent such disasters, indeed the role of extractive capitalism can induce them, but also that capitalist structures create an uneven
distribution of vulnerability in the aftermath of such disasters. Affluent employees of
corporations had their interests preserved, while less wealthy survivors become climate refugees, plagued by a state of chronic anxiety, which can also contribute to the flattening of the future, as will be explored in my next chapter. Following this experience, Mitchell recognises that the “mode of hyper-calculation” that he practices is a financialised farce and rejects it in favour of a “mode of embodied living”, tending to nature and his own physical needs in the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic “Dead Zone” (Siperstien 163-164; Rich 305).
What, then, binds the two novels’ primary futurologists together? Both undertake
personal journeys, which lead them to see the flaws in their predictive pre-occupations. Packer is forever searching for a “purer” form of disembodied speculation (DeLillo, 75), only to find that losing his entire portfolio at the hands of a natural pattern, severing his link with cybercapital, is what truly purifies him; Mitchell goes from obsessing over worst-case scenarios to a state of disillusionment, one in which he abandons futurology entirely in favour of a simple life. It would be too moralistic to suggest that these characters ‘see the error of their ways’. Rather, this is a process of coming to terms with glaring realities that were with them the whole time—quite literally, in the case of Packer’s asymmetrical prostate. A sense of predictive power, of being “Masters of the Universe” akin to that of the speculators described by Wolfe in the 1980s (11), is slowly stripped away, leaving simpler, natural ways of living and dying in a world of scalable uncertainty. This acceptance of a world defined by uncertainty and crisis will be addressed in my next chapter. It is only when Packer and Mitchell abandon their futurological professions that they take any meaningful steps towards change: Packer induces a financial crisis and Mitchell begins a new, simpler life.
To return finally to Appadurai’s claim that futurologists can “tame” the mechanisms of cybercapitalism, or indeed halt the future, as Odds unconvincingly posits (Rich, 236), it is my contention that these fictional futurologists fail to achieve this. The pessimistic ethos that
Appadurai describes certainly allows speculators to exploit a blind spot of the new machinery of risk—uncertainty—but it does nothing to moderate the overbearing influence that contemporary neoliberal capitalism has on the future. Indeed, the practices of forecasters such as Packer and Zuckor are primarily oriented around profiting from downturns and crises, rather than tempering their virulence. This is not a refutation of Appadurai’s analysis, but rather the proposition of an alternative interpretation of the charismatic players he describes. They are ‘false prophets’. This categorisation is a means of relating to these fictional figures, one that views them not only as individuals who seek to profit from the catastrophe-ridden short term that capitalism creates through outsized bets or compelling financial storytelling, but also as being complicit in the maintenance of a state of contemporaneity that precludes other possible futures. Through their dealings in uncertainty, these false prophets supplement the machinery of risk and associated politics of probability that Appadurai describes, rather than taming it.
2. Crisis, Fear, and Contemporaneity
In one of Odds Against Tomorrow’s most memorable moments, Mitchell Zuckor arrives to meet a client after Hurricane Tammy has struck, only to find their offices emptied; the one remaining occupant reflects that “people are afraid. Bad things are happening. This is a new world we've made” (Rich 147). The twenty-first century crisis-scape described by this office worker is the subject of both Rich’s novel and Cosmopolis: environmental breakdown and financial volatility engender fear and anxiety in their respective intradiegetic worlds. As Berardi puts it,
“irreversible trends of devastation, pollution, and impoverishment are marking the horizon of our time” (The Uprising 25-26). It is this daily reality that I intend to elucidate in this chapter,
describing how neoliberalism engenders “contemporaneity”, a “homogenous and frozen contemporary moment” that precludes other possibilities in relation to the kinds of crises that both novels depict (Brouillette et al. xvi). The future becomes flattened.
This “contemporaneity” can be understood in relation to a protracted, “chronic” state of crisis that entails ongoing volatility (Koselleck 358). Indeed, just as the novels’ false prophets profit from it with their bearish strategies, neoliberal rationality can benefit from this chronic volatility. Although concrete strategies of governance are beyond the scope of this essay, Dibley and Neilson compellingly scrutinise the reasons that crisis is a concept so regularly invoked in the contemporary era: “the construction, interpretation and management of the present as a time of crisis locates individuals and populations as objects of particular strategies of governance” (144). As noted, chronic crisis and the fear that comes with it can serve to reinforce a state of contemporaneity in which the future is flattened into a perpetual present. The present system
seems to be the only option, which is the state of mind that Fisher refers to as “capitalist realism” (Capitalist Realism 8).
However, invoking crisis can also pave the way for other possibilities, since the concept traditionally signifies a decisive moment that necessitates change. In Cosmopolis the impending financial crash and dissatisfaction with the future that is being systematically impelled on the present brings anti-capitalist protesters to the streets of Manhattan, while the cataclysmic natural disasters of Odds Against Tomorrow draw attention to the relative fragility of capitalist
institutions. This chapter will explore the dual role of crisis as both a perpetual state, the causation and normalisation of which is inextricably linked with neoliberal rationality, and as a source of this system’s potential downfall, by serving as a marker of contingency and change. It will also elucidate the way that the novels’ characters respond to this contemporary
condition—these are two stories about people determining how best to relate to an era underpinned by neoliberal rationality and chronic crisis.
The traditional definition of crisis is as “a signifier for a critical, decisive moment” (Roitman 2): for the ancient Greeks, “the concept imposed choices between stark
alternatives-right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death” (Koselleck, 358). It also meant a “judgement” in the juridical sense (359). Koselleck traces the inflationary use of crisis over time, by which it was applied with greater and greater alacrity: the binary choice that crisis imposes was prominent in its applications in the early modern period, drawing from theological associations with the “Apocalypse” and the “Last Judgement”, as well as the radical change of the speculative crises and revolutions of the eighteenth century (370, 375, 390). A century later, Marx and Engels would hail this revolutionary potential of crisis as the inevitable undoing of
Capitalism—this system would fall prey to “disruption and stagnation in the capitalist production process, crisis, and the destruction of capital’’ (Marx, Capital Volume III 364), paving the way for Communism. But Marx also noted the ebb and flow of capital, with cycles of crisis and stabilisation that follow the pattern of “moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation’’(Capital Volume I 580); in this other sense, crisis was less a Last Judgement for capitalism than a cyclical test of its mettle.
However, even this cyclical interpretation has increasingly been superseded by the conceptualisation of crisis as a drawn out, or even endemic, state that eschews these decisive and episodic interpretations. Crisis can be defined as “chronic”, in other words as “a state of greater or lesser permanence”, while still representing an elongated “transition towards something better or worse or towards something altogether different” (Koselleck 358). Roitman (2014) echoes this, considering crisis to be “an omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today” (2), while challenging the way that crisis as a form of diagnosis presupposes a “norm” from which the state of crisis is judged (4). Henrik Vigh’s anthropological approach to crisis as a chronic “condition” affords a useful layer of nuance to this dynamic (9). Vigh focuses on the
“normalisation” of crisis, considering “normal” to mean “that which we do most and/or that which there is most of” (11). In time, quantitative and qualitative judgements of normality can make situations of profound volatility seem, paradoxically, routine. This treatment of “crisis as context”, sheds light on an “ongoing experience… forcing people to make lives in fragmented and volatile worlds” (8). 1
1Vigh’s theorisation of chronic crisis is an anthropological model for examining protracted crises situations, but here the concept of “crisis as context” as a volatile state is applied to my analysis of contemporaneity within late stage capitalism.
Odds Against Tomorrow and Cosmopolis portray fragmented and volatile worlds that are
defined by crisis in this vein, although they notably represent this volatility via the perspective of privileged Americans, rather than those in more profound states of poverty and precarity.
Nevertheless, Vigh’s anthropological approach to crisis as context is a useful tool for diagnosing the fault lines that punctuate the two texts. When it comes to the capitalist system that underpins these fractured crisis-scapes, my argumentation follows Dibley and Neilson’s assertion that such crises are systemic to capitalism. This is a realisation that requires one “to rethink the very category of crisis as well as the implied temporality of the cycle, upon which the dominant narratives of boom and bust, bull market and bear market, expansion and contraction, rest” (Dibley and Neilson 153). When crisis becomes context, capitalism’s cyclical characteristics overlay an enduring reality—“capitalism itself is crisis” (Ibid.). Critically, the unease that crisis engenders is a useful tool for neoliberal structures, since it limits the ability of individuals to imagine alternative futures; Berardi notes that “the present depression (both psychological and economic) obscures the consciousness that no determinist projection of the future is true” (Futurability 20-21). Chronic crisis is both a product of neoliberal rationality and a tool it can leverage to engender contemporaneity.
When it comes to addressing literary responses to this context of crisis, a formulation of contemporary crisis fiction is useful. I borrow key characteristics from Emily Horton’s
definition:
My focus is on contemporary crisis… in a mode of everyday social anxiety and unease emphasised in these novels in relation to a context of global neoliberalism. Thus, integral
to these fictions is a critique of neoliberal politics and society, which figures the genre of crisis as aesthetically crucial. (Horton 3)
Horton considers crisis as “a mode of everyday social anxiety”, rooted in neoliberal society and politics (Ibid.). Although Horton’s focus is on English novelists, this framework brings her classification to bear on the contemporary American novels, which are likewise typified by cosmopolitanism, globalisation, transnationalism (Watson 57), and, critically, this same backdrop of crisis.
In keeping with this categorisation, Cosmopolis depicts a bustling, global city in the throes of crisis. Packer’s journey down 47th Street, which should take him less than an hour, lasts all day as it is punctuated by a series of disruptions, most notably a presidential visit that “floods” the streets with a “state of chaos” (DeLillo 65) and an associated anarchist protest. Behind these immediate cases of volatility lies a deep-seated sense of unease of the kind that Horton describes; warnings of “imminent activity” and a “credible threat” are drip-fed
throughout the narrative, imbuing it with anxiety (65, 107). Through his focalisation through an omniscient narrator, Packer seems to exude confidence for the majority of the novel, in stark contrast to those around him. However, this facade of stability is problematised from the start; the opening line of the novel reveals that “sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five” (5). Packer tries to trick his mind into sleep, but neither sedatives nor meditation work—he finds that even “the palest thought carried an anxious shadow” (6). These sleepless moments reveal the fear that is engrained in Packer’s psyche, as well as an associated hyperactivity, which Mark Fisher considers “a pathology of late capitalism” (Capitalist Realism
25). Packer considers going to see a psychoanalyst, but decides against it as he views Freud’s theories, like many things, to have been rendered redundant in the contemporary world of cybercapital.
The response of Packer and others like him to this fear is to create a protective bubble around his body and resources—his armoured limousine. This screen-lined vehicle connects Packer directly to the flow of cybercapital, while insulating him from external threats, real or imaginary. Indeed, those outside this bubble are often perceived by Packer to be faceless attackers. When a Dr Ingram comes to the vehicle to check Packer’s prostate, “a man in a suit and tie… carrying a small satchel”, the figure is instantly reconfigured in Packer’s mind to be “a menace so impending, a tailored man with a suitcase bomb” (DeLillo 42). Here Packer’s
perception is projected in the sparse prose that defines the novel, yet the inflationary effect of his imagination is clear: Ingram’s doctors’ bag, a “small satchel”, is transformed into “a suitcase bomb” within an instant of Packer processing the visual data (Ibid.).
This distrust of entities existing outside of Packer’s limousine is best considered in relation to the concept of the bunker, as described by Berardi. The defining characteristic of the bunker is a distinction between internal and external entities:
The sphere in which all of its functionaries live and produce is ever more wired,
virtualized and sealed, separated from the territorial society that lives outside the bunker, where industrial workers labour in factories and where the growing areas of poverty and marginalization dwell… The extra-bunker sphere is composed of all those people who have no place inside the networked cycle. (Berardi, Futurability 138)
This concept has obvious physical implications, but also refers to the virtual space that Packer occupies within cybercapital, which is “wired, virtualised and sealed” (Ibid.). Indeed, the
souped-up limousine is porous, facilitating dialogue with the other inhabitants of the “networked cycle” (Ibid.). Sciolino describes the car as a “a centralizing and virtual cosmopolis” that “makes Packer a global center”, a device “through which DeLillo critiques the new world order of global cybercapitalism” (223). Within this bunker, Packer is able to participate in the system dictating the future, while those who suffer the most at the hands of its crises exist outside of these environments, in “the extra-bunker sphere” (Berardi, Futurability 138).
Although the novel begins with a focus solely on the bunker sphere, it increasingly sheds a light on the occupants of this extra-bunker sphere—those who have been left behind by
cybercapital. The most notable figure in this regard is Richard Sheets. Sheets has taken on an alius, “Benno Levin”, that bears a striking likeness to that of terrorist Osama Bin Laden (Crosthwaite 2). Sheets once worked at Packer’s firm, but was fired and retired to a life in an abandoned building, akin to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. He is a manifestation of the fear and stasis that exists outside of Packer’s bubble, with a “phobia of daily capitalism” in its new, ethereal state (Shonkwiler 258). This is demonstrated in the two men’s juxtaposed attitudes to ATMs: afraid of the future that cybercapital impels, Levin clings to anachronisms, reflecting in his first person confessions that “cash machines have a charisma that still speaks to me” (DeLillo 60); in contrast, Packer considers the term “automated teller machines” to be “aged and burdened by its own historical memory… It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated” (54). Within the bunker sphere, individuals like Packer herald the
flattened future that capitalism creates, while those existing outside of this sphere are the ones being flattened, clinging to what relics of the past they can.
Some individuals do resist this system, however. The people who fear being left behind by the speed of cybercapital participate in anti-capitalist riots. When confronted by these rioters, Packer’s Chief of Theory Vija Kinski reflects that “this is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future… keep it from overwhelming the present” (91). Kinski articulates the protestors’ desire to reclaim the future for themselves, rejecting the seemingly pre-determined, flattened future being forced upon them. These protestors want to break from the “tangle of techno-linguistic automatisms” that Berardi describes (Futurability 20-21) and reclaim control of the future, which has been homogenised in crushing pressure of capitalism’s “ever expanding instant” (Brouillette et al. xxi). This riot could be the start of system change, a decisive moment of judgement that crisis affords, rather than the low hum of anxiety and ongoing volatility that crisis as context produces. Kinski notes this potential via an explicit intertextual reference to Marx and Engels, namely that capitalism produces “its own grave-diggers” (DeLillo 90),
However, Kinski immediately problematises this interpretation with a healthy dose of capitalist realism, stating that “these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market” (Ibid.). Even those being left behind by capitalism’s inflationary present are still viewed by Kinski in relation to the market, as neoliberal rationality dictates (Brown 176). Upon reflection, Packer agrees with Kinski, echoing Marx’s observation of capitalism’s cycles: “the protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating” (DeLillo 99). This mechanical metaphor sees protestors as lubricating the capitalist
machine without any Marxist prediction of system change, presenting a relationship of optimisation, not revolution.
However, there is one glimmer, or rather blaze, of hope for an alternative: in an act reminiscent of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself alight in protest of Buddhist persecution, one protestor pours petrol over himself and ignites the liquid. The visceral nature of the act makes Packer conclude that the market “could not claim this man or assimilate his act… This was a thing outside reach” (100). This moment signifies the limits to capitalism’s totalising influence, and with it, contingency. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (2013) engage with this kind of performative resistance, by which “frames of dispossession become a performative occasion for various contingencies of individual or concerted actions of political despair and dissent” (143). Self-immolation is noted as one such act of political dissent; in the face of “processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers”, for example “economic violence” and “neoliberal governmentality” (2), an individual’s only recourse may be to take a performative act of resistance that removes them from these force’s influence permanently.
The missing element required to instigate a fully-fledged crisis of capitalism is revealed to be Packer himself. Inspired by protesters in Times Square, Packer decides to double down on his position on the yen:
It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him… He sat down for long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. (DeLillo 97)
Here, Packer’s lurking dread turns to elation as he takes the decisive act that we are led to believe will bring the financial system to its knees. As a vital node within the bunker-sphere’s networked cycle, with a “portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable”, Packer’s increasingly gung-ho approach to
investment, means that the “whole system was in danger” (116). Indeed, Osteen suggests that Packer’s actions are catalysed by more than a moment of disaster-infused elation: he has a “loss of faith”, which “would quickly infect other speculators, thereby creating a worldwide financial panic” (295). The result is “storms of disaster” (115), a domino-like crash that represents the sole potential for a more traditional form of crisis by which decisive change takes place
The outcome of this financial crisis is left ambiguous. It is safe to infer, as Hwang does, that it represents “a global accident that materially affects people and countries, creating more victims of capitalism”, but the focalisation of the narrative is such that Packer’s self-destructive financial bets and presumed death at the hands of Benno Levin are its primary preoccupation (36). This crash may well result in decisive change, catalysing further civil unrest across the globe and uprooting the capitalist system, or merely perpetuate the ongoing volatility that defines chronic crisis. Kinski’s assertion that the protestors in Times Square are themselves both
products and active participants of the market suggests that it may be the latter; they can express their fear at being left behind by cybercapital, but cannot escape it. And yet, the self-immolation of one protestor indicates the potential for forms of resistance to neoliberal practices of
