The Limousine and Technicity in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

This essay contends that Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) stages its own mastery of what Mark McGurl calls technicity, here figured as “cybercapitalism.” I read the novel’s limousine as the institution through which such mastery is tested. The novel’s close attention to the limousine reveals the ways in which such discourses depend on a network of human and nonhuman actants. This is both a commentary on and a departure from DeLillo’s earlier work, in which such technic ideas largely (though not wholly) floated free of such networks.