Reading Eric Packer Through Ayn Rand

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex. (C p. 5 the first page)

Raymond Massey

Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead has his bedroom at the top of his penthouse where it is glassed all around. The world can watch him fuck women. A little bit of trivia that DeLillo throws in for Ayn Rand intelligentsia. A "floating sign"? 
"When she entered his bedroom, she found it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside."When Dominique enters his penthouse after their marriage.

Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper - Fountainhead

Alert cue, alert cue!

He bypassed sleep and rounded into counterpoise, a moonless calm in which every force is balanced by another. This was the briefest of easings, a small pause in the stir of restless identities. (C p.5-6)

The dialectic is stilled, balanced, the see-saw is even, straight across. It's not charting. The line is flat. Like a brain-dead flatline on the oscilloscope. 

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow. (c p.6)

The appearance of the Double, just barely sensed, like a shadow. Restless identities stirring. Death enters the novel quietly, on the first two pages, like a shadow, with the appearance of the Double.

DeLillo writes in this way: He types a paragraph on one sheet of white paper, edits it, retypes it again on another white sheet of paper, re-edits it, etc until it reads the way he wants it to read. There is always plenty of white around the paragraph. If you have ever seen a shot of an Ayn Rand manuscript, not like DeLillo at all.

Eric Packer:

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

Freud is finished. (dead). Einstein is next. (to die) Their worlds are dead.(C p.6)

On reading Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller:

On the last page:

"It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end," Ayn Rand liked to say. It is a favorite quote of hers her fans like so much.

DeLillo is challenging Baudrillard on ending global capitalism through narrative transcendence, and he is also challenging Rand and  her moral defense of capital. 

Anne Heller

Although Heller's book was published after Cosmopolis, it seems prescient that this quote is on the first page of Cosmopolis and the identical quote is on the last page of Heller's biography of Rand. DeLillo's self chosen book cover for Underworld seems also prescient in its erie image of the coming 9-11. And Cosmopolis is clairvoyant about the 2008 meltdown.

                                                                                                                                       

Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals

Now I feel that DeLillo's ghost is following me as I am reading Cosmopolis through Atlas Shrugged but even more through Rand herself. I am coming to believe that she is the great unacknowledged post modern philosopher her rather poorly educated disciples have always thought her to be, but not for the same reasons as they. I believe she is Nietzsche's heir, more than Foucault and Baudrillard, and taking in the consideration that she disavowed Nietzsche early on, stopped writing in her journals about him so much, all his thought embedded in her mind went underground. Until Baudrillard came along and blasted it up in my face without even knowing about her.

Does DeLillo intend to just blast her for her defense of capital? Or is DeLillo somehow divining her   unconscious catastrophic collision with capital via Greenspan in the 2008 meltdown. As a defender of capital on a moral foundation of self-interest,  this is the flaw Greenspan told Congress he had found in his thinking.

From Digby at Hullabaloo who blames Rand for the 2008 meltdown.

Digby

Under questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, Greenspan acknowledged that the failure of that expected self-regulation represented "a flaw in the model" he used to analyze economics. "I was going for 40 years or more on the perception that it was working well."

This is the fundamental problem with Randian thinking. They really do believe that capitalism is a moral system in which the people become wealthy because they are morally and intellectually superior to those who don't. Why, it would be wrong for them to not self-regulate and endanger the whole economy, right? It wouldn't make any sense. - Digby

No Digby, that's not the reason they believe it is a moral system. They believe it is a moral system because it is based on man's reason and self-interest. The flaw is rational self-interest. Why would these financiers destroy their financial empires? Well, Mr. Greenspan, you should have known in 1968. Rand destroyed her lucratively financial, philosophical empire of Objectivism that Nathaniel Branden had built for her, his lover, because he didn't want to fuck her anymore. She wanted to punish him, destroy him, kill him for choosing a beautiful young woman instead of an old brilliant frumpet.

And OMG I believe she was following Nietzsche all this time. Taking every single premise she had and carrying it to the extreme. And every goddamn one of them from sex, to friendship, to love, to her writing,  all of it, to the extreme, to excess. What is Atlas Shrugged as a novel, but a novel that is more a novel than a novel, a hyper-novel, an excessive novel, a novel that is "worse" as Nietzsche would say. All the way to Death as Canetti would say. Being more a capitalist than a capitalist. More so. Worse as Nietzsche advocates to bring something down. To destroy it. This is where Baudrillard kills Foucault in Forget Foucault. This is where Rand does it in reality through Greenspan instead of advocating or writing about it. She is a major philosopher by default. She didn't know she knew.

Does DeLillo know that he knows. I dunno.

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)

Reading Eric Packer and Elise Shifrin Through Destiny

On The Continental Divide Trail

Against this assumption into generalized exchange, this movement of convergence towards the Single and the Universal: the duel form, irrevocable divergence. Against all that is striving to reconcile the antagonistic terms: maintain impossible exchange, lay on the very impossibility of that exchange, lay on that tension and that duel form, which nothing escapes, but everything opposes.

At all events, this duality governs us. Each individual life unfolds on two levels, in two dimensions - history and destiny - which coincide only exceptionally. Each life has its history, the history of its successive events, its twists and turns - but elsewhere, in another dimension, there is only one form, that of the absolute becoming of the same situation, which occurs for everyone in the form of the Eternal Return. The form of destiny, which Nietzsche also calls 'character, to distinguish it from any psychology of the ego and its successive changes. (79 IE)
Somewhere in Colorado there is a demarcation line where the waters part - the so-called Continental Divide - some running off to the Atlantic, the rest to the Pacific. It is a line almost as imaginary as the one separating the past from the future - that line we call the present. And the two dimensions of time themselves run off and vanish into oceanic depths of their own. The instant, that dividing line, is a line of destiny, past and future part there, never to meet again. And existence is merely this ever-greater divergence of past and future, until death reunites the two in an absolute present.

The line where the waters divide - the line where thoughts divide. No planispheric extension.  Waters and destinies always divide. (1 Cool Memories IV)

In man, it is thoughts which divide - the 'mental divide'. Like the continental waters, they run off unpredictably in opposite directions, and often those which were closest together will end up furthest apart.

Map of Eric Packer's Journey Through the Grid of NYC Traffic

There are always at least two occasions when two persons, unwittingly, almost meet. Each time destiny seems to have prepared this meeting with the greatest care, attending first to one possibility, then another, ordering the tiniest detail and leaving nothing to chance. But each time some tiny, unattended eventuality intervenes to prevent the coming together, and the two lines diverge once again at a greater rate... But destiny iis much too persistent to allow itself to be put off by a failure. It arrives at its ends, by such subtle machinations that not even a click is heard when at last the two persons are brought together. (Nabokov)(IE 81)

Agnes Martin Print

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)

Continental Divide - Mark Tansey

That which has separated definitely  - for example, the I from the non-I at birth - continues none the less to run along another line. These lines, or these parallel lives, meet only in death. But at certain moments, you can jump from one to the other, cross one of these other lives. Destiny dooms us to a personal death, but something of this multiple predestination remains. Alterity  is a trace of these crossings, which provide one of the grids of becoming...(IE 82)

Thus each existence is the product of a double declension. It is in this sense that it is a dual, not an individual form.  We are not free to exist just on the side of our ego,, or just on that of the so-called real world. We are wholly the products of this relation of adversity, this twin complicity. Destiny is divided, like thought, which comes to us from the other. Each is the destiny of the other. There is no individual destiny. (IE 82-3)

Destiny has been arranging the day for Elise Shifrin and Eric Packer. Elise - The Symbolic Order of Seduction/destiny/surprise/challenge/duel -  is ahead of Eric all day, moving West into the sunset and the night. Eric has been following her. Each time they meet, their selves diverge and divide like the waters at the Continental Divide. They split and then split again. Until they end pure and lorn, naked under blinding light.

Reading Eric Packer through Baudrillard and the Double-continued

Eric Packer

Eric Packer

Eric watched himself on the oval screen below the spycam, running his thumb along his chinline. The car stopped and moved and he realized queerly that he'd just placed his thumb along his chinline a second or two after he'd seen it on screen.

Then why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet? (C 22)



His own image caught his eye, live on the screen beneath the spycam. Some seconds passed. He saw himself recoil in shock. More time passed. He felt suspended, waiting. Then there was a detonation, loud and deep, near enough to consume all the information around him. He recoiled in shock. Everyone did. The phrase was part of the gesture, the familiar expression, embodied in the motion of the head and limbs. He recoiled in shock.The phrase reverberated in the body.(C 93-94)

Between these two scenes of his screen Double there is a lengthening of seconds between the first and second noticed occurrences. Destiny has been arranging things for Eric Packer. Each time Destiny intervenes the Double diverges in time.

Eric Packer is following his Double. Which one is the original? The one on the screen or the one following the one on the screen? The Double is present from birth leading a parallel life with the historical life. (Life is what happens to you as you are carrying out your plans.- John Lennon) They will meet again at Death.

                                          

Kendra wears a sinuous skin of body armor. It is stab resistant and Eric has her wear it during sex. This is what Elise means by indifference and that she can't master it.  Eric thinks that at some level she would never be naked. Kendra has a stun gun.

Eric: How many volts at your disposal?
Kendra: One hundred thousand. Jam your nervous system. Drop you to your knees.
Eric: Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now. (C 114-115)

.... He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into  the mist on several screens.... The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual.... The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes....But he could think well enough now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. .... Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger.... He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. (C 115-116)

The stun gun. A near death experience divides the Doubles in time. They keep diverging. The one that maybe died from the one that is living. Growing farther and farther apart. Until the moment of death when they will merge.

the extermination of the real by its double in “the perfect crime” (1996, 1-7).

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.