Reading Eric Packer Through Takeshi Miike's 13 Assassins

13 Assassins

13 Assassins is a wonder to behold. Incredible violence, yes. But not meaningless as in action movies from Hollywood. And not the relentless violence permeating our everyday lives as totalitarian techniques crush us.

Shinraemon is the last master Samurai in the Edo period of medieval Japan. The film takes place in 1844. At the same theater Meek's Cutoff was also playing and that too took place in 1844. Interesting. Shinraemon has been summoned to assassinate Lord Aritsugo who will be the next Shogun. Aritsugo's atrocities have been more atrocious than atrocious, the usual violence usually overlooked and excused. Aritsugo is more violent, more sadistic, more perverse, more evil, an excressence of such evil that he must be killed (imploded) before attaining power and plunging Japan into endless war.

Shinraemon is full of joy that he has been chosen by fate to answer this calling to die as a true Samurai should die.  He is the last master Samurai as the Samurai warriors are dying off or being absorbed into mediocrity. He has outlived his world. He is to die and disappear with his world. That he has been elected to do so brings him great joy.

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

12 assassins are recruited and they tell their stories. A final mountain man joins them making 13. He is Koyata who presages the new enlightened messenger, the Zen master.

13 Assassins - official site

The assassins pledge their life to Shinraemon, their death belongs to him now. He says he will use their lives wisely. Their will, their destiny now belongs to Shinraemon. It has been transferred to their master. All die except Shinraemon's nephew, whom he tells to now go his way and do what he wills. The life of the Samurai is at an end.

The Samurai have paid a warlord ruler of a great clan, whose daughter-in-law was ravished and killed and his son murdered by Aritsugo. The bridge is closed and Aritsugo crosses to meet with the humiliated father who is still alive only to have borne witness to the atrocity. Aritsugo's protectors advise him not to cross but he does, saying:

Aritsugo:Watch and learn.


Eric Packer sees Elise outside the theater with a cigarette in her hand. He gets out of the limo. He forced open the door and walked across the street and Torval was at his side, ably containing his rage.

Torval: I need to know where you're going.
Eric: Wait and learn. (C 116)

Everyone has been killed and now Shinraemon and Aritsugo meet. Shinraemon slays Aritsugo himself. First he ridicules Aritsugo's decorative sword and Aritsugo plunges it into the body of Shinraemon, who then mortally wounded by his own choice, then plunges his own sword into Aritsugo and kills him. He chooses his death and chooses his disappearance now that his world is at an end. 23 years later the shogunate rule will end.

This film expresses the beauty of ritual and ceremony. Of lethal ritualistic violence.

And again:

If man must reach the outermost bounds of his possibilities, then he must also go so far as to destroy himself. For that possibility is neither the least, nor the least glorious. - Saul Bellow (Baudrillard - The Intelligence of Evil Or The Lucidity Pact, Berg, p.115)

Dying its nothing. You have to know how to disappear. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 12)

One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan. I believe the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignificant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 114)

A Rat Became The Unit Of Currency

Report from the Besieged City

Zbigniew Herbert      

For the complete poem:

".......

I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks 

monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
wednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire the enemy has imprisoned our messengers
we don't know where they are held that is the place of torture
thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected
the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender                          

friday: the beginning of the plague saturday: our invincible defender
N.N. committed suicide sunday: no more water we drove back
an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance

......" 


Rats multiply and multiply like capital. Rats are a plague, they bring disease like capital. They destroy crops, kill infants, infest the city, homes, buildings, empty lots until they are everywhere. Like capital. They breed and breed.  Everywhere you go the rats are there. Like capital. Cyber-capital is global, circulating in an orbit around the planet. Rising and setting like the sun. Twirling around and around. Twirling. Circulating. Irreversible.


FRACTAL THEORY
Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg 1990                            

Baudrillard Live 168-70


NZ: The ferocious theorist!


That's right! Almost the terrorist!


NZ: Do you enjoy being a theoretical terrorist?

Yes. I think it's a valid position - for the moment, I can't envisage any other. It's something of an inheritance from the Situationists, from Bataille, and so on. Even though things have changed and the problems are no longer exactly the same, I feel I've inherited something from that position - the savage tone and the subversive mentality. ...

... For example, in an article that I recently wrote for  Liberation on the Rushdie-Khomeini affair, I defended its subversive potential. When all is said and done, I'd very much like to be the Rushdie of the left, and become unacceptable - by writing unacceptable things.

... Yes. Well, if the Ayatollah was basically defenseless in the global context, he had one symbolic weapon, the principle of evil, which was a very strong force, and which he used with great skill.  Perhaps this concept is a little extreme, a little too moral and too close to negative theology. But all the same, I'm on the side of the principle of evil!

... All the same, I feel we are forced to work in that direction,because it is no longer possible to assume a purely critical position. We need to go beyond negative consciousness and negativity, in order to develop a worst possible-scenario strategy ... given that a negative, dialectical strategy is no longer possible today. So one becomes a terrorist.

... in the sense that there's a sacrificial strategy involving the principle of evil, the politics of the worse scenario possible, or the strategy of intellectual terrorism. Ultimately I don't believe in it. It is not the consequence of any particular faith, but simply an act of defiance, a game. But it seems to me to be the only enthralling game. At the same time, it's often an act of provocation.  Perhaps the only thing one can do is to destabilize and provoke the world around us. 

We shouldn't presume to produce positive outcomes. In my opinion this isn't the intellectual's or the thinker's task. ... I've the impression that if energy still exists, it is reactive, reactionary, repulsive. It needs to be provoked into action. One should not inaugurate positive solutions, because they will immediately be condemned _ so they're virtually a waste of energy. In other words, one needs to make a kind of detour through the strategy of the worse scenario, through the paths of subversion. It's a slightly perverse calculation, perhaps. But in my opinion it's the only effective option _ it's the only way that a philosopher or thinker can, as it were, become a terrorist. Of course today, the real terrorists are not so much us, as the events around us. Situationist modes of radicalism have passed into things and into situations. Indeed, there is no need now for Situationism, Debord, and so on. In a sense all that is out of date. The hyper critical, radical, individual sensibility no longer exists. Events are the most radical things today. Everything which happens today is radical. 

Reading Eric Packer As Dangerous: A Dangerous Seer;Visionary;Prophet

Elise Shifrin and Eric Packer in the Taxi

Elise: You know things. I think this is what you do. I think you're dedicated to knowing. I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful. You're a dangerous person. Do you agree? A visionary. (C 19)

Jesus was a visionary. Jesus was and still is dangerous.

Foucault: Knowledge is not for knowing. Knowledge is for cutting.

From Burroughs Live, 1960-19997 p. 104

New York Interview 1968

Burroughs: ... Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American a great book. I hadn't read it before, but when I got to the point of the milk bar...   

Jeff Shero: The what bar?

Burroughs: The milk bar. You know the explosion in the milk bar. He's looking around in this milk bar, and I said wait a minute, time to hit the floor. I knew when the explosion was going to take place. I hadn't read it yet. And that was about two years before the same explosion happened in the milk bar in Algiers. I had been in Algiers eating in this milk bar. Two months after I had left there, about two years after Graham Greene had written this scene with people, their legs all splattered with Maraschino cherries and ice cream and blood and brains, passion fruit, pieces of mirrors __ in this very milk bar where I would eat __ a friend of mine got to the milk bar just at this time and saw this scene. Wow! Graham Greene had written that.

Writers don't want to take responsibility for these things; they have to. A long time ago I said, "The Soccer scores come in from the capital." You remember the Soccer riot in Peru __300 people. That's what it referred to.

Jeff Shero: Why do you think Genet is the only one who has taken responsibility for his characters? What about Kesey? You know Kesey's book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ?

Burroughs: Sure. It was simply that Genet was one of the first ones to state this.

Jeff Shero: So more than that, it was Genet who recognized it?

Burroughs: Genet recognized it, yes, probably before I did. But if the soccer scores are coming into the capital one must pretend an interest. That was 10 years before this soccer riot happened. I realized what writers write happens. Therefore writers have responsibility to be there and to do something about it. In Chicago Genet said to me, "writers now must support the youth movement, not only with their words, but with their presence." I agree with that one hundred percent.

DeLillo has been noted for having predicted a number of catastrophic events. Cosmopolis  has been written about as predicting the dot.com meltdown in Bush II's reign. I don't think so. I think it predicted the 2008 derivative meltdown which was a much more catastrophic event. Now was Eric Packer the model for it? We will never know, will we?


Eric: "How will we know when the global era officially ends?”
Vija: “When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhattan.”


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

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.

DeLillo and Baudrillard On Rothko

Rothko

Rothko

Baudrillard:

"Rothko says that his pictures have two characteristics: either they dilate and then open up in all directions, or they contract and then close up precipitately on all sides. Between these two poles lies everything he has to say.

Rothko's change, his passage almost without transition, to an immediate, definitive form. It is there all at once, perfectly mastered, end of story. And it is light-years away from what he was doing up to that point.

This is something entirely different from an evolution - even a creative evolution. It is an almost genetic impulse by which he separates himself miraculously from the artist he still was, with his place in the history of art, to be nothing but the sovereign medium of an extremely simple form, which no longer has anything to do with expressionism or abstraction." (Cool Memories IV 84-85)

The emergent form stuns you with its simplicity. And perhaps the most surprising thing is that, during our earthly existence, in which our brains are bound with bands of steel - the tightly-fitting dream of our own personality - we did not by chance give that little shake which would have freed the imprisoned thought and procured for it the ultimate understanding.(Nabokov)

"Does not everyone have within them this potential mutation, this potential development? This absolute singularity which asks only to be effortlessly produced" (CM IV 85) - an transpired form that has sloughed off our individual yoke?

Didi Fancher: I think you want this Rothko. Pricey. But yes. You totally need to have it.

Eric: Why?

Didi: It will remind you that you're alive. You have  something in you that's receptive to the mysteries.

Eric: The mysteries?

Didi: Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. ... But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew.(C 30)
___________________________________________________________________
If you look awhile at a Rothko and then look at a white wall, you will see a negative after-image. An inversion of color, so I have left white beside these images so you can do it.  Then when you see a real one, try it.

Other Rothko blog of mine

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