#ben jeffrey

[starsofnorway]

The Darkside ✨ Ben Jeffrey

[thena0315]

SVU Guest Star - Ben Jeffrey in

"If I Knew Then What I Know Now" [23x13]

"Divide and Conquer" [26x03]

[martymontana]

[varanine]

Ben Jeffrey, Foes of God, The Point Magazine:

Corruption—and the fear of corruption—runs all the way through Cosmopolis, along with an unshakeable current of despondency and frustration. In a 2005 interview with the French magazine Panic, DeLillo outlined part of the problem:

"You know, in America and in Western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I’m able to write whatever I want to write. But I can’t be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture’s absorbing of everything. In doing that it neutralizes anything dangerous, anything that might threaten the consumer society. In Cosmopolis [a character] says, “What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized."

What’s unsettling about the phenomenon DeLillo describes is that it doesn’t seem to depend on anybody’s intentions. It’s just how consumer culture works: an impersonal mechanism with an apparently limitless capacity to assimilate dissent, as though every effort to evade the system’s logic were somehow always and already enclosed within it. From his limo, Packer watches as anti-capitalist rioters attack banks and fight with the police in the heart of New York—another of the book’s prophetic details, this time of the Occupy protests—but still he thought “there was a shadow of a transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systematic hygiene … It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.” You don’t need a sharp eye to pick up on the autoreferential subtext here: the demonstration that Packer regards as so ineffectual is already “contained” within the novel Cosmopolis, a marketized commodity. (One character goes so far as to call the riot a “market fantasy,” which it literally is.)