Eric Packer as Singularity and Event: Franco Berardi Bifo Reading Through Jean Baudrillard

FRANCO BERNARDI BIFO

Curioushaired Gal	4:31 PM (23 hours ago)
to me

Read this yesterday, Franco Berardi Bifo, lovely last chapter but it kinda killed me. Bifo does say suicide is the answer, following Baudrillard, so I guess it makes sense then.
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Eric's suicide, Dalva's suicide, DFW.....

"Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in the history of our time. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death.Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends  that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean to renounce it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene of economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force...."

" Capitalism is over but it's not going to disappear. The creation of Non Temporary Autonomous Zones  is not going to give birth to any totalization. We are not going to witness a catharthic event of revolution, we will not see a sudden breakdown of state power. In the following years we'll witness a sort of revolution without a subject, In order to subjectivate this revolution we have to proliferate singularities."

"By the word singularity I mean the expression of a never before seen concatenation. The actor of this expression can be an individual, a collective but also an event. We call it singularity is this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its field of existence following a principle that is not repetitive and referring to any pre-existing form of subjected subjectivity.

By the word singularity, I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity or repetition, and is not framed in any historical necessity. Singularity is a process that is not necessary , because it is not implied in the consequentiality of history neither logically nor materially. It is the emerging of a self-creative process."

Identity in the Order of Production, singularity in the Order of Seduction.

Another reading of Cosmopolis, Eric as singularity, yay!

Subverting the Norm at Drury University: DeLillo's Cosmopolis Reading Eric Packer and Jesus Through Each Other As Intellectual Terrorists

To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. ...For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. (Jean Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death 37)

Baudrillard following Nietzsche:

Capital stripped bare by Speculation itself, like the bride by her bachelors. What becomes of Capital once the veil of Profit is lifted? What becomes of Labour once the veil of Capital is lifted?(Baudrillard - Cool Memories II 38)

Contrary to the historical slogan which says that the 'emancipation of the workers will be achieved by the workers themselves', we have to accept that Capital will be put to death by Capital itself or (not at all). (CM II 38)

We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: how can we ever 

hope to find what we have never looked for? There is a sound adage which 

runs:"Where a man's treasure lies, there lies his heart." Our treasure lies in the 

beehives of our knowledge. We are perpetually on our way thither, being by 

nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. The only thing that lies 

close to our heart is the desire to bring something home to the hive. 

(preface The Genealogy of Morals)

Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach. (C. pp. 96-98)(Kathy Chang(e) 

This is Eric Packer's Epiphany. The Burning Man is the pivotal point in the novel.

It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess. - Baudrillard 

http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2012/06/cosmopolis-review-delillo-and-ayn-rand.html


DeLillo Cosmopolis Interview with Krasny SUMMARIZED  HERE parts 1.6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEXGqGkMQTE

If you check the summaries parts 1-6 DeLillo discusses narrative transcendence. Foucault and Baudrillard do not believe in transcendence so this is where DeLillo parts with them. DeLillo was raised Catholic and educated by the Jesuits.

DeLillo wanted his character Eric Packer to destroy cyber-capital in one day as the financial world has speeded up our world. He mentions Baudrillard's term "implosion." Packer is borrowing dumbfounding amounts of YEN and in fact wants all the YEN there is.

Yen speculation HERE EXPLAINED.

The problem of the will. Eric Packer cannot even summon the word to turn off his lights. He doesn't know what he wants. THE WILL DISCUSSED HERE by Hannah Arendt and Baudrillard.

He didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut. (C 7)

Eric has a yen. Then he wants all the yen there is. Does that much yen equal wanting, equal desiring? Packer cannot desire because desire is in a relation with lack. Desire/Lack always go together. Packer lacks nothing. He is the man who has everything in excess. Everything. Eric Packer is "packed." So he cannot desire nor want. Just yen. So DeLillo offers a playful pun here on yen as currency and as a weak "want."

Packer is shorting the yen. He wants all the yen he can borrow. Then when it goes down relative to the dollar he will pay it back at a lower rate relative to the dollar and the difference between borrowing yen and paying it back will be his profit. What goes up must come down.

As Eric Packer continues his journey east to west on 47th street by quarter inches in the traffic grid, DeLillo's sentences are short, choppy mirroring the start/stop of the traffic. Packer is in his limo in the Order of Production. As the day goes on to keep his Appointment in Samarra with Death, Destiny is crossing his path with Elise, creating alterity, and Packer keeps losing his clothes, his shirt, his wallet, his money. He ecstatically borrows yen in dumbfounding amounts driving all the other currencies down and depleting Packer Capital and his investors of all their money including his own. He destroys his assets, the assets of his investors and the value of all other currencies relative to the yen. The only currency left is YEN. 

He is disappearing it! He is not losing it. He is ecstatically tossing it away with joy. HE IS DESTROYING THE MONEY CHANGERS IN THE TEMPLE OF FINANCE just as Jesus destroyed the money changers in the Temple by turning over all the tables. 

 It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess. - Baudrillard

And the imploder, the intellectual terrorist, will disappear as his world becomes a different world because of his actions. He will make the leap into death to offer the gift of his life. The world will die when Packer dies.

He's not a self-destructive loser, folks. He is an intellectual terrorist. 

And so was/is Jesus.  HERE

El Greco painted Jesus in the Temple overturning the tables of the money changers for 40 years. HERE

http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2011/05/money-changers-in-temple-eric-packer-is.html

Eric: He knew they would figure it out eventually how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. (C 140) HERE 

When Eric Packer sees The Burning Man he thinks Vija is wrong. What has happened is that The Burning Man is of the Symbolic Order of Sacrificial Death. Vija is still thinking in the Order of Production but she is pulling at her mole as she tries to integrate The Burning man in her thinking, but then sums him up as unoriginal. So see my blog lower down of Jesus and his unoriginality, which changed the world BTW in case you hadn't noticed.

And it is exactly at this point that Eric Packer borrows yen in dumbfounding amounts. Switching to Lacan, the more yen Eric wants, the more yen Eric borrows, the more yen Eric experiences for the world. He is exploding with hunger.

Eric Packer's Death: The world is willing it. : The excess of reality must be coupled with sacrifice in the Symbolic Order.

When he died he would not end. The world would end. (C p.6)

Packer will allow himself to be drawn to his assassin to be killed. At this point he is letting the world will him, becoming passive. He shoots himself in the palm of his left hand, creating the stigmata of blood.

The Lion In Love - Aesop

The Lion In Love - Aesop

And it was all those mediocre untalented directors who pulled your fangs Rob.

That you traded your body thrusting, thrusting, thrusting for so they could ride on your back to the box office NOT as it turned out.

Just as you have conspired - knowingly or not - with Cronenberg to defang DeLillo by ringing that fucking NYSE bell this morning.

Occupy do not ever forgive him for this. Do not ever forgive either one of them for this. 

Cronenberg will get his "30 pieces of silver" in financing for his next film for this.

Rob will get maybe some acting acclaim.

THE USUAL for bending over to take it up the ass. 

TimesTalk Interview with Cronenberg, Rob Pattinson and David Carr And Werner Herzog

David Cronenberg born 1943

Just before 44.xx Cronenberg remarks that Packer's Chief of Theory Vija Kinski is really a philosopher. Carr pushes for a deeper dialogue than the sound bites so far from Cronenberg. At 44.xx Cronenberg discusses Fukuyama, The End Of History, Hegel, evolutionary theory based on progression towards the ideal when in fact evolution is constant diversification. He sounds impressive for the  mob of fangirls in the audience.

Fukuyama first published this in 1992 so Cronenberg is about 20 years behind in his (ahem) brilliant intellectual auteur status. Since then Foucault has become mainstream in Europe and in seminars and academic conferences in the US and the world. Jean Baudrillard will follow Foucault as the first major philosopher to challenge the great one. These two are the deep structure of DeLillo's Cosmopolis. Apparently Cronenberg doesn't know that. 

Please listen to his mish-mash at 44.xx when he begins to fidget and squirm trying to sound profound as his confidence begins to disintegrate. He dissembles, and Rob saves him with his strange pronunciation of Hegel as Hi-gel indicating he has never discussed Hegel in any academic classroom and doesn't know anything, where he makes a quick shift to Calvin and Hobbes, a free association of philosophical jargon here, and makes a joke then saying he doesn't know what he is talking about. Arrrrggggh. 

Now listen to Cronenberg's contemporary Werner Herzog on University of California TV. This is 2 hours that you will never forget as long as you live. You will be in the presence of a fully realized human being of great personal culture who grew up with an outdoor toilet, no phone until puberty, never saw a movie until he was 11. You will be in the space of greatness and an audience at UC that is so enthralled no one even coughs or sneezes. You will laugh, cry, weep, and know what it is to be a spontaneous fully evolved person of great joy. A Nietzschean ubermensch. A superman, a superhero.

Werner Herzog will be one of Rob Pattinson's upcoming directors. He will know then the poseur and fake that Cronenberg is.  Listen and you will know before Rob does.

Werner Herzog Born 1942

There is no way that even the least sophisticated person cannot know the great chasm of difference between these two men. Let us pray that Herzog will open Rob's eyes to the bullshit artist he now idolizes. 

Cronenberg takes Rob all around the world as his boy toy to pimp his film and revels in the attention Rob is getting for him and for his film. The cheap publicity stunts (NYSE) and half-assed interviews and still the reviews of the more major - using the term loosely - reviewers have little good to say of it. But they are not blaming Rob. Breathe a sigh of relief Rob.

Herzog 

American criticRoger Ebert wrote that Herzog "has never 

created a single film that is compromised, shameful, 

made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular."^[4]

This is how it is done folks by a filmmaker of integrity.

Rob Pattinson Is Cronenberg's New Boy Toy

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Winning the MTV Award 2012 Over Hunger Games

Rob Pattinson says Cronenberg says he doesn't make commercial films. He was ecstatic over this win. Does this pic look like a man who doesn't care?

The Young Beautiful Cronenberg As An Actor - Forget the film

He looks gender ambiguous to me. How about you? Shall we have a little vote on it?

Nolan has been criticized by a number of reviewers for the way he has portrayed Batman's sexual relations and the sexuality of the women in his Batman films. In The Dark Knight Rises they have said that this has been corrected somewhat. Anne Hathaway's Catwoman is confident sexually and Bruce Wayne is displaying seductive sexual interest for the first time in Nolan's Batman series. Interesting. 

So I began to think about Cronenberg. His recent Cosmopolis reviewers have reported that there is a lot of sex in it that is not sexy. eXistenZ? Naked Lunch? A History of Violence? Eastern Promises? Videodrome? Dead Ringers? All of them have sex in them that is not sexy with the exception of A History Of Violence between Viggo and Bello. There is no way Cronenberg is going to tamper with what Viggo wants to do in a scene. Viggo is the dominant one in this pairing of actor and director. 

Crash has lots and lots of sex in it that I do not find sexy but pornographic, but that is the way Ballard wrote it. Cronenberg decidedly has sexual issues. He imposes his arid sexuality on his characters or he chooses material that is already that way. The exception is  A History Of Violence. In Eastern Promises Cronenberg focuses his camera on the body of Viggo using the ploy for showing the viewer his gangster tattoos. It works. Definitely. Viggo is lovely.

Gender ambiguity - James Spader

James Spader was super hot in Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, and playing opposite Susan Sarandon in White Palace in the early 90's. In 1996 Spader plays Ballard in Crash for Cronenberg. Again lots of hot sex that is not hot, but is very physical and pornographic. And the camera focusesing on Spader's body. From the reviews of Cosmopolis he is repeating his sexual problems with women yet one more time. 

Too many instances to brush off now. Once again Rob Pattinson is being castrated. For other times see HERE. His face and body once again used as pornography void of sex. In one trailer we see him asking for the stun gun, the camera on his naked upper body. Again the erotic male body.

Sexy Hot Spader - Cool Cronenberg Sex

Trailer For Crash  - Lots of Sex

And again we have lots of sex without sex. 

Seems to be a trademark of a Cronenberg film eh? 

A repetition compulsion maybe?

In Rob Pattinson he has found a malleable mind to mold and it seems Rob Pattinson, adoring him now instead of Stewart, is his latest Boy Toy.

DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis alternates between the limo (Order of Production) and the outside (Order of Seduction). It is Elise who seduces him on, away from the limo, to let the world will him. Eric Packer is following her all day without searching for her, just finding her as Destiny keeps their paths crossing. At the end is an ecstatic sexual encounter beginning in a naked body sequence being filmed. Cronenberg said in an interview that it was too over the top to be believed so not cinematic. He uses "not cinematic" whenever he wants to get rid of something. Since Spencer Tunick's naked body installations have been performed all over the world, it appears DeLillo has put them in his novel in the Hades scene as a movie set where naked Eric Packer lies down beside his naked wife Elise Shifrin without knowing it is she at first. (Cronenberg has said he cut it out because it was a fantasy.) Is that a fact.  (She is the "woman who keeps disappearing" as Zizek will describe these film women. these Gradivas.) As they leave the naked bodies to get their clothes in some seclusion she shimmies up his body in passion and kisses him in ecstasy and "he knew he loved her" and just at the moment he knows she slithers down his naked body and away like Gradiva. Or Eurydice. It is the woman here in the novel who has hystericized on the male body, Packer's, inverting the process. (Baudrillard The Perfect Crime; Fatal Strategies)

Sarah Gadon has given Cronenberg the rationalization he requires of the character of Elise as cold and asexual. Sarah has used post modern sound bite lingo to say in an interview, "She is not going to let her husband hystericize on her (Gadon's words), so she exits the marriage. She's out of it. Yet another misreading by Cronenberg. 

Alan Sheridan in his 1980 Foucault: The Will To Truth discusses this in the chapter Sexuality, Power and Knowledge. 

Foucault elicits four great strategies that have emerged in Western society since the late eighteenth century.The 'hystericization' of the female body is a process whereby the woman's body is seen as an organism saturated with sexuality.....(p. 187)

The result has been the femme fatale we all know from noir film. At the present time she has almost vanished. There are no men for her says Baudrillard. He proposes the 
solution of the female 


hystericization of the male and his body, and this seems to be going on with Rob Pattinson initiated by his role of Edward Cullen. Meyer has dreamed Edward into existence, and Rob Pattinson has fulfilled the dream. The new sexy male is a type portrayed by Pattinson with all his gender ambiguity David Bowie style refined beauty. So we have the male version of the femme fatale in Rob Pattinson, and Cronenberg appears smitten and willing to pimp his latest Boy Toy, his latest Ken doll. And Rob is complicit.

“I forget who said that films are desires visualized, but for me, at least, film is the visualization of the director’s desire. But the director’s desire doesn’t appear in the film directly. It appears in all kinds of convoluted forms. My fear that my desire will appear in my films has always caused me to be extremely wary of making films, hasn’t it? Haven’t I made films to hide my desires instead? Trying to hide them made them appear even more vividly.”

Nagisa Oshima
March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013

(Source: strangewood)

Blyth

If Elise is out of it instead of DeLillo's drawing of her leading Eric Packer to transcendence, then the film falls apart and becomes just another "hard" Cronenberg film instead of "soft". Blyth has discussed the pairing of the relation fear/hatred in his book on Zen. We fear what we hate and we  hate what we fear.

In avoiding sensuous, ecstatic sex in his films is  out of Cronenberg's personal fear of the erotic sexuality of women, and displaces the erotic by focusing his camera on the body of the male. In this way he can satisfy his urges for the male body without acting out his desires. His Lack is assuaged for awhile until he finds a new Boy Toy to parade around and pimp to sell his movies, to get him financing that he is not able to get otherwise because his films are lacking in some way that he himself cannot see.

It is his denial of sensuous, erotic female sexuality that cripples him.

Rob Pattinson - Eric Packer - Cronenberg to Ring in NYSE Tomorrow

Zizek spoke at Occupy Wall Street and one of the things he said was,

The Holy Spirit is here.

This is what Cronenberg trashed by ringing the bell at the NYSE opening.

Rob Pattinson Betrays DeLillo AND Occupy

What a sick sick sick feeling I have on reading this.

Ringing the bell for the opening of NYSE is a publicity move to DEFANG  Delillo's Cosmopolis. 

SLAVOJ ZIZEK Speaking at OCCUPY - HERE

It is DETERRENCE to detract from the heart of the novel and Rob is complicit because he doesn't see the Game. But The Cronenberg does. He wants fame for his deliberate misreading of DeLillo's novel and for his movie and for his box office. 

Shame on you Rob for getting sucked into this! Shame. Just. Say. No. Evidently you misread the novel yourself and/or just accepted Cronenberg's authorial position on it. 

THIS IS A KNIFE IN THE HEART OF DON DELILLO!

Talk about getting your heart ripped out. I will never forgive you for this. Now this is REAL BETRAYAL!

Just to take the heat off your Break Up Porn Scandal!

Disgusted. Boycott the opening of this movie. Wait until it hits the discount theatres. Or see on DVD at your local library.

What do "30 Pieces of Silver" amount to for Cronenberg in creating this visual "floating mask" of Deterrence for the New York Stock Exchange?

You can bet he 
garnered some future financing that he is always talking about for pimping Rob Pattinson to do this. 

A boy being pimped by a man. 

Does Kristen want a man or a boy?

We know his girlfans want the perpetual, infantilized boy.

A spectacle inducing misperception. It isn't going to work.
____________________________________
David Fincher, attention David Fincher!

Please do a remake of Cosmopolis with Andrew Garfield. It is too important a novel and film to be eviscerated.

Reading Eric Packer Through Erik Satie

Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopédies"

How to Play Gymnopedie No1 by Erik Satie on 

Piano Lesson Pt1

If you listen to this music while you are reading this you will feel what Eric Packer says this music does for him. If you have access to a piano you can play it yourself with this fine tutorial. No previous music knowledge needed.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. (C 8)

I have two private elevators now. One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole. (C  28-29)

In the Krasny youtube interviews DeLillo emphasizes that Eric Packer is not a normal Wall Street cyber financier. He reads poetry in different languages, he appreciates the art of Rothko, he listens to Satie and rap music. He has turned Satie into his very own musak musik elevator music. 

DeLillo's emphasis here is to project a character who is a  consumer of high avant garde culture. An aesthete perhaps. This contrasts with his Philip Dick sexual seduction dialogue with Elise. The paradox makes the dialogue very sexual indeed. 

I am equally sure that The Cronenberg did not include Eric Packer's ride down on his own elevator listening to Satie. 

Again we turn to Babette Babich, and a chain of signifiers floating all through Cosmopolis:

Nancy Babich, Nietzsche, excess, limits, implosion, aphoristic writing, musical writing, discontinuous, non linear, non- descriptive, non-explaining writing, writing that is all short, choppy dialogue even more so (Baudrillard) than the choppy, start and stop in quarter inches Foucauldian grid of New York City traffic and the power/knowledge/capital grid of our world where "there is no outside".

New York City Street Map

Agnes Martin