by
Don DeLillo
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"And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself."
Vija Kinski (chief of theory) speaking
He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.
The technology was imminent or not. It was semimythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment.
But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that's not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.
Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.
2.7 I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked.
enjoyed this
I wrote about all this. It made me famous—relatively speaking. Let’s not get carried away. A famous anthropologist, even one with a real book out, is about as well-known as a third-division footballer. No, less: let’s say an Olympic badminton player, or a reality-TV contestant from an unpopular show five years ago. And come to think of it, I’m even exaggerating the degree of fame my study brought me in my own field, let alone the world of letters. Rather than “made me famous,” it would be more accurate to say that the book “garnered me some attention”—the odd public reading, the odd newspaper review; and, as they say, tomorrow’s fish (unlike ichthyomancers) can’t read. It was enough attention, though, to bring me onto Peyman’s radar, there to beep, or throb, or do whatever things on radars do; which, in turn, prompted him to pluck me from the dying branches of academia and re-graft me inside the febrile hothouse of his company.
[...] I stole a concept from the French philosopher Deleuze: for him le pli, or fold, describes the way we swallow the exterior world, invert it and then flip it back outwards again, and, in so doing, form our own identity. I took out all the revolutionary shit (Deleuze was a leftie); and I didn’t credit Deleuze, either. Big retail companies don’t want to hear about such characters. I did the same thing with another French philosopher, Badiou: I recycled his notion of a rip, a sudden temporal rupture, and applied it, naturally, to tears worn in jeans, which I presented as the birth-scars of their wearer’s singularity, testaments to the individual’s break with general history, to the successful institution of a personal time. I dropped the radical baggage from that, too (Badiou is virtually Maoist). This pretty much set up the protocol or MO I’d deploy in my work for the Company from then on in: feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine. The machine could swallow everything, incorporate it seamlessly, like a giant loom that reweaves all fabric, no matter how recalcitrant and jarring its raw form, into what my hero would have called a master-pattern—or, if not that, then maybe just the pattern of the master.
[...] While my supposed business, my “official” function, as a corporate ethnographer, was to garner meaning from all types of situation—to extract it, like a physicist distilling some pure, unadulterated essence out of common-mongrel compounds, or a miner drawing gold ore from deep within the earth’s bowels—I sometimes allowed myself to think that, in fact, things were precisely the other way round: that my job was to put meaning in the world, not take it from it. Divining, for the benefit of a breakfast-cereal manufacturer, the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it); establishing for them some of the primary axes shaping the way in which the practice of living is, or might be, carried out; and watching the manufacturer then feed that information back into their product and its packaging as they upgraded and refined these, I understood the end-result to be not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents. Helping a city council who were thinking of creating parks and plazas but had yet to understand the ethnographic logic driving such an act; laying out for them the history of public (as opposed to private) space, making them grasp what these zones fundamentally embody, what’s at play in them from a political and structural and sacred point of view; and doing this in such a way that this whole history is then injected back into the squares, sports-fields and playgrounds millions of citizens will then inhabit—same thing. Down in my office, stirred and lulled by ventilation, I would picture myself as some kind of nocturnal worker, like those men who go out and repair the roads, or check the points and switches on the railway tracks, or carry out a range of covert tasks that go unnoticed by the populace-at-large, but on which the latter’s well-being, even survival, is dependent. While the city sleeps, bakers are baking bread in night-kitchens, milkmen are loading crates onto their floats; and river-men are dredging riverbeds or checking water-levels, while other men in buildings with nondescript exteriors track storm surges and spring- and neap-tides on their screens, and activate the flood defences when this becomes necessary. When the populace-at-large wakes up, they just see the milk there on their doorstep, and the fresh bread in the shop down the street, and the street itself still there, unflooded, un-tsunamied from existence; and they take it all for granted, where in fact these men have put the milk and bread there, and have even, in deploying the flood defences, put the city there as well, put it back there every time they deploy them. That’s what I was doing, too, I told myself. The world functioned, each day, because I’d put meaning back into it the day before. You didn’t notice that I put it there because it was there; but if I’d stopped, you’d soon have known it.
The Company’s logo was a giant, crumbling tower. It was Babel, of course, the old biblical parable. It embodied one of Peyman’s signature concepts. Babel’s tower, he’d say, is usually taken to be a symbol of man’s hubris. But the myth, he’d carry on, has been misunderstood. What actually matters isn’t the attempt to reach the heavens, or to speak God’s language. No: what matters is what’s left when that attempt has failed. This ruinous edifice (he’d say), which serves as a glaring reminder that its would-be occupants are scattered about the earth, spread horizontally rather than vertically, babbling away in all these different tongues—this tower becomes of interest only once it has flunked its allotted task. Its ruination is the precondition for all subsequent exchange, all cultural activity. And, on top of that, despite its own demise, the tower remains: you see it there in all the paintings—ruined, but still rising with its arches and its buttresses, its jagged turrets and its rusty scaffolding. What’s valuable about it is its uselessness. Its uselessness sets it to work: as symbol, cipher, spur to the imagination, to productiveness. The first move for any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things—objects, situations, systems—into uselessness. I read this for the first time, long before I worked for him, in Creative Review; then later, with slight variations, in Design Monthly, Contemporary Business Journal and Icon.
good exposition example
The article kept mentioning “faith.” Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls, clips and clip-releases, strips of canvas, satin, string. It could be argued, wrote the author, that this belief had nothing of the devotional or metaphysical about it, since each of the things to be believed in had a solid evidential underpinning: the mechanics of a ripcord, say, or a spring-loaded riser—or, of course, on a larger scale, the overall infallibility of physics, its laws of resistance, drag and so on. Yet, he claimed, these things could only carry one so far towards a gaping hole in a plane’s side, and the fundamentally counterintuitive act of throwing oneself through it: to cite the clichéd but apt maxim, they could take the horse to water, but they couldn’t make it drink. That final spur, the one that carried skydivers across the threshold, out into the abyss, was faith: faith that it all—the system, in its boundless and unquantifiable entirety—worked, that they’d be gathered up and saved. For this man, though, the victim, that system, its whole fabric, had unraveled. That, and not his death, was the catastrophe that had befallen him. We’re all going to die: there’s nothing so disastrous about that, nothing in its ineluctability that undermines the structure of our being. But for the faith, the blind, absolute faith into whose arms he had entrusted his existence, from whose mouth he’d sought a whispered affirmation of its very possibility—for that to suddenly be plucked away: that must have been atrocious. He’d have looked around him, seen the sky, and earth, its landmass and horizon, all the vertical and horizontal axes that hold these together, felt acceleration and the atmosphere and all the rest, the fundamental elements in which we hang suspended all the time, whether we’ve just jumped from an aeroplane or not—and yet, for him, this realm, with all its width and depth and volume, would have, in an instant, become emptied of its properties, its values. The vast font at which he prayed, and into which he sank, as though to re-baptize himself, time and again, would, in the blink of a dilated eye, have been voided of godhead, rendered meaningless. Space, even as he plunged into it, through it, would have retreated—recoiled, contracted, pulled back from its frontiers even though these stayed intact—withdrawn to some zero-point at which it flips into its negative. Negative world, negative sky, negative everything: that’s the territory this man had entered. Did that then mean he’d somehow fallen through into another world, another sky? A richer, fuller, more embracing one? I don’t think so.
8.12 Later that evening I sat down, once more, to plot the framework of my Great Report. The clearing I’d made on my desktop was still there, untouched and un-encroached-on—save by a small, dead moth whose corpse had landed there after whatever parachute it had put its faith in had failed. I swept it aside; and, once again, the space was pristine, perfect, blank. Tabula rasa: I pronounced the words aloud as I surveyed the leather, breathing in its smell of cut grass and detergent. Just sitting before it, above it, filled me with a sense of infinite possibility. I pictured myself as an industrialist, viewing a clearing in the forest where his factory would go; or as an urban planner, given carte blanche to design from scratch a new, magnificent cosmopolis; a mathematician, a topologist or trigonometrist, contemplating space in its most pure and abstract form; an explorer, sea-discoverer, world-conqueror from centuries gone by, standing at his prow as his dominion-to-be hove into view: this virgin territory that he would shape after himself and make his own. Placing my laptop in the middle—the exact, geometric centre—of this clearing, I opened a fresh document and stretched its borders out until it filled my screen entirely. As I did this, though, just as the document’s expanding lower boundary reached the bottom of my screen, my finger momentarily lost contact with the glide-pad; when the finger made contact again, it caused the applications docked invisibly at the screen’s base to pop up, impinging on the clean neutrality both of the screen and of my mind. Trying to hide them once more, I accidentally tapped on the docked news page, which slipped from its box, inflating as it rose, like some malicious genie, taking the screen over—and in an instant, all the extraneous clutter, all the world-debris, that I’d so painstakingly eliminated flooded back into the clearing, ruining it.
amazing