Reading Eric and Elise Through the Symbolic Order of Seduction/Challenge/Surprise and Destiny

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer and  Sarah Gadon as Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis

Destiny is stalking Eric and Elise. Destiny does not leave it to chance but repeats to make sure. Destiny is of the Symbolic Order of Seduction always paired with challenge, the duel and surprise. In each encounter with Destiny the self divides into a before and after. As time passes the two selves bifurcate and diverge away from each other, farther and farther away. They occupy parallel universes. As Eric and Elise meet and separate all day, each changes as a modified  and different self emerges from the previous encounter with each other. Elise is an apparition as she surprisingly appears and disappears. Apparition is always coupled with disappearance.

Following through (free download) Gradiva-Elise here and here. (earlier posts here)

Continuing through Baudrillard:

He took off his sunglasses , for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily with fixed attention.
Your eyes are blue, she said.

Switching to Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals: He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

Eat breakfast yet?

No, she said.

.... You never told me you were blue-eyed.

That face. Even in ten years time, I shall not know the colour of its eyes. But I see it in the street, in my dreams and just beneath the surface of a great number of other faces which suddenly start to resemble it. Baudrillard (Cool Memories, 1980-85b p. 54) :

Was DeLillo Reading Baudrillard? He Won't Say Anything About Post Modernism When Asked.

 DeLillo is smart enough not to fall into the trap of putting himself in the box of post-modernism which is a floppy box at best. Even Baudrillard steered away from that.

The grid in NYC that Packer is trying to get through is no different than a Foucauldian grid of power/knowledge,capital that we all exist in. Until we don't. In Forget Foucault Baudrillard accepts all of Foucault and then disappears this grid Foucault analyzes power within. He says that it is over and we are somewhere else. Perhaps in the stage he calls Paroxysm, the moment just before the end. Maybe just the moment after the end before simulation. Vija is Baudrillard in this novel, almost. She says it will all be over when the limos are gone. By the end of the day Packer's limo is pretty much gone, the thought of even trying to go crosstown ever again in his old life is not an option. Early in the day he talks about a heliport so we know he is thinking about a helicopter. The grid of streets in the city is impassible on a daily basis. DeLillo is saying the grid is gone. Foucault is over as theory, although Foucault said his work was a toolkit, not a theory.  DeLillo is disappearing it within the metaphor of NYC traffic. There is no one in charge on this last day of Packer's life. Read  this as  no power around. Eric Packer has only his bodyguards to protect him.

Schuster

And Rob Pattinson has only his bodyguards to protect him. And Kristen Stewart felt terrorized in Australia with the New Moon publicity car show. The fictional Eric Packer and real people are now obvious hostages. But all of us are without identifying our plight as such.

Duvall

Buadrillard outright states that capitalism is evll. He defines evil not as banal as Hannah Arendt defines it, but as he does in The Transparency of Evil. When the dialectics have disappeared, good and evil are no longer oppositional, and are indistinguishable from each other, then that is evil, the transparency of evil. In this we are approaching Catharism and Manicheanism, the great heresies of the Roman Catholic Church, that the world is created evil. Only man can redeem himself by transcendence. Man cannot redeem the world.

Foucault

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.

OK I'll stop for awhile now. And all this is not the same as Edward Cullen's longing.And we can read the Rothko scene with Didi Fancher through Baudrillard. Tonight?

DeLillo

Reading Eric Packer Through Baudrillard and the Double

Of all the prostheses that punctuate the history of the body, the double is doubtless the most ancient. The double, however, is not properly speaking a prosthesis at all. Rather it is an imaginary figure, like the soul, the shadow or the mirror image, which haunts the subject as his 'other', causing him to be himself while at the same time never seeming like himself. The double haunts the subject like a subtle death, a death forever being conjured away. Things are not always like this, however - for then the double materializes, when it becomes visible, it signifies imminent death. (The Transparency of Evil 113)

... the historical advent of the "soul" ... gives rise to another figure of the double, wending its diabolical way just beneath the surface of Western reason. Once again this figure has everything to do with the Western figure of alienation, and nothing to do with the primitive double. The telescoping of the two under the sign of psychology (conscious or unconscious) is only a misleading rewriting....Historically then, alienation begins with the internalization of the Master by the emancipated slave: there is no alienation as long as  the duel-relation of the master and slave lasts.

And this is where Eric Packer is when he didn't know what he wanted. Fretting over the yen and unable to sleep, Packer has internalized the Master and now Master and slave are one. This is the state most of us are in in our relation with the will.  Willing and resistance to willing.

The primitive has a non-alienated duel-relation with his double. He really can trade....with his shadow as with some original, living thing, in order to converse, protect and conciliate this...hostile shadow....it has a full part to play, and consequently is not an "alienated" part of the subject, but one of the figures of exchange. (Symbolic Exchange And Death 140-141)


The status of the double...in primitive society is therefore the inverse of our alienation...

With the internalization of the "soul" and consciousness... the subject undergoes a real confinement.... It is at this point that the primitive thought of the double  as continuity and exchange is lost, and the haunting double comes to the fore...." Whoever sees his double, sees his death." ...the double begins to prefigure the subject's death, haunting him in the very midst of his life. This is Dostoievsky's double,....Our entire culture is full of this haunting of the separated double, even in its most subtle form, as Freud gave it in "Das Unheimliche" ("The Uncanny: Disturbing Strangeness or Disturbing Familiarity"): the anxiety that wells up around the most familiar things. Here the "vertigo of separation" builds up to its greatest intensity, since this is its simplest form. There comes a moment in fact, when the things closest to us, such as our own bodies, the body itself, our voice and appearance, are separated from us to the precise extent that we internalize the soul.

By a final ruse of spirituality, this internalization also "psychologises" doubles. In fact it is interpretation in terms of an archaic "psychical apparatus" that is the very last form of the "Verteufelung", the demonic corruption and elimination of the primitive double:...(SEAD 142)


Much more to come.

Forget Foucault! Forget Baudrillard! DeLillo Weighs In and Wins the Game!

Michel Foucault

Sylvere Lotringer

Michel Foucault

Jean Baudrillard

Don DeLillo

Anyone who has spent serious time with all of Foucault's ouevre will feel that their brain has been scrubbed clean of trivia and useless baggage. You never want to leave off reading him and I didn't even want to read anything criticizing him. If I read an academic who was writing about him, their style of interpretation stopped me. I had gone beyond endless interpretation, searching for origins and secret meanings into an endless depth that had no end. Nor was I interested anymore in extending towards a horizon that kept receding the closer I got.

Forget Foucault I read after nothing but Foucault for over one year. It was a revelation. Baudrillard never argues, disputes, interprets, spins, none of that stuff at all. As Lotringer says to him in Forget Baudrillard that he proves every one of Foucault's hypotheses and makes Foucault the revolutionary he never dreamed of being. 


IMO Delillo does the same to Baudrillard in his Cosmopolis novel. The essential difference between Baudrillard and DeLillo is that of the transcendence of the narrative or narrative transcendence. DeLillo believes in human spiritual transcendence and that of the artist, the writer in particular; whereas, Baudrillard, following Foucauldian genealogy does not. DeLillo puts the challenge to Baudrillard with Eric Packer and wins the game. He proves Baudrillardian theory from start to finish. Eric moves through dialectical thinking into simulation, then following seduction and challenge and destiny to his world willed death. DeLillo has been criticized for not drawing a truly politically challenging character. Eric Packer is his answer to that. And so subtle is he that no reviewer or academic even noticed.

The Problem of the Will: He Didn't Know What He Wanted.

Hannah Arendt On Revolution

The Origins of Totalitarianism

On Violence

He was reading the Special Theory tonight, in English and German, but put the book aside, finally, and lay completely still, trying to summon the will to speak the single word that would turn off the lights. (C 6)

Our first indication of Eric Packer's problem with the will. His will.

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

Arendt discusses the will in On Revolution, I believe. (All her books are to be read by anyone wanting to understand philosophy, politics and the human condition so here they are linked to amazon.com.)  In her writing on the will she clarifies the will, as she does everything she writes about. When you will something or anything, immediately the resistance to acting comes into existence, into play, into awareness. All smokers who have ever thought about quitting understand this right away. This is why it is so difficult to quit. You enter into conflict with yourself.

Eric Packer cannot even will the word to turn off the lights. He doesn't know what he wants. Then after seeing into the gull, focussing and really seeing into it, he knows what he wants. He wants a haircut. Desire does not exist for Packer as he does not experience lack. Wanting the haircut feels more than just a yen.  ( my blog on Lacan) And following Lacan, desire/lack are always coupled. Eric Packer lacks nothing. He has everything in excess as Marc Schuster indicates in his book, which is the most accessible of all the books on Baudrillard and DeLillo, as he reads through each author to illuminate the other, back and forth, back and forth. What I constantly do.

Marc Schuster - at Amazon

Jean Baudrillard tackles the problem of the will in his always singular fashion. He turns it on its head.

The point is - above and beyond all the categories of willing, knowing and believing - to discover a parting of destinies and a strategy of otherness, whether in this plurality of collusive, parallel universes or in any form which alters the individual being which displaces, metabolizes, metamorphoses or captivates him. On this tack, one may, paradoxically, simply let things happen: let the other will, know, decide or desire. This is not a form of defeating desire, but of sidestepping or outwitting it, of ironically investing the other. A more seductive, more effective stratagem than that of the will. A more powerful strategy than that of desire: playing with desire.

Impossible Exchange at Amazon

In this way one can offload one's will, one's desire, on to someone else and, in return, become free to take on responsibility for someone else's life. A symbolic circulation of affects and destinies is created, a cycle of alterity - beyond alienation and all the individual psychology in which we are trapped. There is in this symbolic circulation, in this sharing of destinies, the essence of a subtler freedom than the individual liberty to make up one's mind according to one's conscience - a liberty which ultimately we do not know what to do with, and which it is, in fact, better to slough off right away, in order to recover the impersonal concatenation of signs, events, affects and passions.

....by a straight transference on to the desire or will of another. ( Impossible Exchange 84-85 )

To make a pact with chance is not to speculate on random events, but to attune oneself to the world, to explore its secret connections and concatenations; it is, in a sense, to be initiated.

Nothing is accidental anymore, since, from the point when the world thinks us, things follow in a sure progression. Nor is anything intentional, a matter of will, since, in a sense, everything has already been willed.  ( IE 87-88 )

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  He didn't wonder who Nancy Babich was and he didn't think that Torval's choice of code humanized the man or required delayed regret. Torval was his enemy, a threat to his self-regard. When you pay a man to keep you alive, he gains a psychic edge. It was a function of the credible threat and the loss of his company and personal fortune that Eric could express himself this way. Torval's passing cleared the night for deeper confrontation.

  (C 147)
  
  Leave everything and follow me He said. Where your treasure is, there is your heart.
  
  Eric is no longer a hostage. Now the world can will and think him.

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  He tossed his weapon in the bushes because he wanted whatever would happen to happen. Guns were small practical things. He wanted to trust the power of predetermined events. The act was done, the gun should go.(C 147)
  
  The world is willing Eric Packer. He is choosing the Order of Seduction, destiny.

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As the ancient Chinese sage said: It isn't the man who drinks the tea, it's the tea which drinks the man. 
( IE 89 from Ceronetti )

And hasn't Rob Pattinson done exactly this.

It's Kristen who chose me.
It's the elephant who chose me.
It's Cronenberg who chose me.


And hasn't he taken responsibility for many of his friends and their careers? And hasn't he taken on responsibility for the life of Bear? And now that abuse of Tai has come out, his affection for her is weighing in on her abuse.

Reading Eric Packer As Baudrillardian Seer

Available at Amazon.com

Yes I said Packer is a seer. He is not a loser, nor a nihilist as Rob Pattinson has called him. And it is important to make his character crystal clear. Why? Because De Lillo has emerged as a great American writer  of his generation and has written clairvoyantly of our time.  His novels have predicted similar singular events that occur soon after their publication. The characters in his novels are now the subject of extensive academic writing, dissertations, theses, and numerous papers and books within the academic world. Eric Packer is consistently described in terms of his downfall: that is, losing all his billions betting on the yen. Not to mention his sexual exploits, all lumped together, undifferentiated, the same meaning attributed to each one, carbon copies of the same experience, as if he is a paid prostitute. Elise Shifrin is given short shrift as the estranged wife, one of his fucks for the day by academics, men and women, and cold and frigid by Pattinson girlfans. None of them are anywhere close.


My problem with this is not unlike my problem with Nietzsche, who is tagged with being a nihilist when he so emphatically counters this label in his The Genealogy of Morals in the last pages of this essay, one written near the end of his life. But Nihilist is pasted on him forever and anyone speaking or writing about him must continue to deal with the erroneous labeling.


I see this is going to happen with Eric Packer. Decades from now someone may think otherwise and present convincing evidence, but it will drop into the fold of the prevailing Discourse and be lost until another Foucault comes out of the intellectual woodwork to say and write otherwise.  All these writers, Schuster  in his book Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum  and http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=schuster+%2B+de+lillo&x=0&y=0


John N. Duvall's The Cambridge Companion to Don De Lillo  (composed of a different author on a wide variety of topics in each DeLillo novel) without exception do not acknowledge Eric Packer's great game playing heroism in the face of evil and ruinous, global cyber-capital speculation. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=+duvall+%2B+the+cambridge+companion+to+don+delillo&x=11&y=14


I am not saying he acts heroically, but instead acts within a game. He is in it to win it. And I see that I am going to have to go against heavy hitters to stake my claim on the character of Eric Packer. I think I have Cronenberg as a possible ally. One can read Cosmopolis through Baudrillard, but  one can also read it through eXistenZ, which is what I think Cronenberg will do in his upcoming film. And eXistenZ and Baudrillard can each be read through the other, illuminating both in a singular way, and taking the character of Eric Packer out of the psychological and interpretive dead end. After all DeLillo says through Packer that Freud is dead.

Available at Amazon.com

Available at Amazon.com

All these writers are incredibly intelligent, well acquainted with Lacan, Baudrillard, Virilio, Lyotard, and others. They all write within the interpretive, hermeneutic mode put to bed for good by Foucault. I am beginning to realize that if you come to Baudrillard without being first steeped in Foucault and his genealogical tool chest, as Baudrillard himself once was, then it is likely that Baudrillard's refusal to engage in the interpretive method, so completely a part of western thinking and writing since the Biblical commentaries, will not impact you enough to toss it as Baudrillard did in Forget Foucault.  It is painful to let it go as that is the mode in which we have all been educated. It is enchanting and seductive and allows us to feel how very intelligent we are as we read it and understand it. 


Here is Nietzsche on it:


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)

DON DeLILLO, JEAN BAUDRILLARD AND THE CONSUMER CONUNDRUM-MARC SCHUSTER

Marc Shuster's Wonderful Analysis

Many critics have identified the affinities between French theorist Jean Baudrillard and American author Don DeLillo;however, this is the first detailed and sustained comparison between DeLillo's novels and Baudrillard's works. .....This thorough and thoughtful reading of both writers not only acknowledges their affinities but also exhaustively explores the ways in which their writings inform and illuminate each other. By examining DeLillo's novels within Baudrillard's theoretical framework, Marc Schuster has provided a rich critical milieu in which an informed reading of both writers' works may take place. A wealth of insights is offered to both the new reader and the established fan. DeLillo is a major force in American literature and, as a consequence, a collection like this, with allusions ranging from T.S. Eliot to Slavoj Zizek, will prove invaluable to scholars of all levels. Similarly, Baudrillard's place on reading lists, especially for critical theory courses, is guaranteed, making this book crucial reading for those with an academic or general interest.(Foreword ix-x)


This blog will extend Schuster's original contribution into other areas of Baudrillardian theory as it relates to DeLillo's Cosmopolis and to Cronenberg's film Cosmopolis starring Rob Pattinson, Paul Giametti, Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton.

Since I am reading Cosmopolis very differently from all other reviews, including Schuster's, I read Eric Packer from the POV of a visionary hero rather than a billionaire, estranged from himself and everyone else who loses his fortune in one day. I am saying that he does not lose it but deliberately disappears it, vanishes it, in order to implode the system, as Baudrillard has suggested in his later work.