How to map the non-place of empire

This essay argues that Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis (2003) provides a cognitive map of the fraught networks of strategic relations among cybercapitalism, biopolitics, terrorism, and identity formation in an ‘experience-book' (to use Foucault's expression), which sets in motion altered forms of knowledge co-production with its reader – and thus answers Fredric Jameson's call for a new aesthetics able to counter late capitalism. Not only a set of technological operations, communications networks, and economic relations, cybercapitalism is also a complex assemblage or dispositif comprising lines of visibility and enunciation (in ‘impersonal and pre-individualized fields of possibilities'), lines of force (drawing in biopolitical relations of racism, sexism, and war), as well as lines of identification and subjectivization. To map this way of life and death, DeLillo's novel adopts the overall strategy of governmentality, proceeding through a ‘tricky combination' of mechanisms of totalization and individualization, which make the characters both embodiments of the globalizing forces of cybercapitalism, and particular instantiations of desires and ambitions. Part one examines how DeLillo's novel diagrams the cybercapitalist dispositif; part two enfolds this analysis into formal matters shaping the dynamics of a text becoming other than itself, to sketch altered ethical relations with the reader

Aesthetics · Biopower · Empire · Epistemology · Governmentality · Political science · Politics · Relations of production · Sketch · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Philosophy

• Terror-Time in Network-Centric Battlespace

  Marie‐christine Leps, Marie-Christine Leps•Canadian Review of American Studies•2015

  Add to list