Sunayan Mukherjee
Assistant Professor in English, Gorubathan Government College, Kalimpong
E-mail address: mukherjeesunayan17@gmail.com
Abstract
In the present era of 21st century, our understanding of capitalism has changed dynamically, where we are experiencing a new form of it altogether. Coming out of feudalism, mercantilism, and industrial capital, now it has taken another new avatar, that of cyber-capital. With the expansion of corporate sector, stock markets, digital economy, money exists in its liquid state, characterized by the hyper-mobility spread through global business networks. The seeds of this unchecked rise in finance were sown in 1970’s, when free market capitalism, popularly known as neo-liberal policies were taken by Regan government in the United States. The effect of this finance is all pervasive and in its manifold Medusa like manner exerts its influence upon individuals, nations and societies with its continuous creation and replication of ‘desire’. Critics such as Frederic Jameson and Ernest Mandel gave a more nuanced term-‘late capitalism’.
Therefore it becomes imperative to call the present era as the age of ‘financialization’ when we are witnessing an ascendancy of global finance. The situation demands for a renewed interest in the ontological position of the rational subject, who is now construed, constituted and subjected to the flows of ‘desire’ swirling around, becoming interpellated by constant forces of production and reproduction of desire, living in a ‘libidinal economy’, in Jean Francois Lyotard’s phrase. Displacing from the idea of a rational, logical being’, we are confronted with a new ontological praxis which is enmeshed in the world of money, technology and desire. The inevitable question that haunts us now is- does the ‘real’ at all exist in the hyper-real world of simulation? Can we locate the points of ‘rupture’ when the subject refuses to be a part of these constant ‘desiring-machines’ (to use Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea which sees the unconscious as a realm of producing desires)?
This paper will try to probe into the matter of ‘subjectivity’ in the realm of this new world of economic, technological and social flows which builds the subjective economy and its assemblages, where it will juxtapose the arguments stated above with a critical reading of Don Delillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003). In the novel Cosmopolis, the protagonist Eric Packer, a billionaire traverses the city of New York in his limousine, to get a haircut and in the course of his journey witnesses the funeral of a Sufi rap star, violent anti-capitalist movements continually betting against the rise of the Japanese currency yen and losing all his wealth. Depicting the abstraction of finance from the actual reality, Eric’s subjectivity is questioned when he continuously feels that he is attuned to the machines surrounding him that generate flows of capital exchange where he always wanted to become “quantum dust, transcending his body mass.. to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as a data” and at the same time affirms himself as “located nowhere”. Immersed in technology, he is at once enslaved by the machines yet seeks a way out to feel reality, to transcend beyond the limits of his bodily perceptions and be free of it. This is the constant impulse of capitalism, where desires are commodified endlessly till the point when the ‘self’ dismantles completely, creating psychic breakdown. Borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘desiring machines’, “Body without Organs” and Nietzsche’s concept of ‘becoming’, the present paper seeks to find an analogy between the present world of late capitalism and the problematic idea of the ‘self’ , questioning the embedded semiotic capitalism. I would argue, how the dominance of finance capital has given a new idea of the ‘self’ as constituted in the ‘desire’ produced by market capitalism, how the ‘self’ remains caught up between ‘real’ and the ‘digital’, creating a hypermediated world of experience, displaying psychic disorder and how through repeated performances of identity, Eric’s personality is reconfigured and reconstituted.
Keywords: Financialization; Desire; Assemblage; Body without Organs; Cosmopolis