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

DeLillo's Yen and Cronenberg's Yuan in Cosmopolis - Reading Through Lacan

Las Meninas - Diego Valazquez

Cronenberg has gone for the literal by using DeLillo's exact words in his Cosmopolis dialogue. But then strangely Cronenberg eliminates Yen (Japanese currency), replacing it with Yuan (Chinese currency), destroying the Lacanian resonance with yen: a whim for something; an innocuous wanting; and when, "He didn't know what he wanted, then he knew,  he wanted a haircut." Actually this is not a want is it? Is it a yen turning into a want as he persists with his plan? And he will keep his Appointment in Samarra to get it. A yen. Packer then begins to yen (want?) for yen, a play on the verb and the noun.

Then Packer wants all the yen - yenning? - that there is, he wants to want, he wants to Desire, but having no Lack, cannot. He wants all the Rothkos (does he want the sudden break, the cut in his life as Rothko had?), in fact the entire chapel, a religious setting these paintings were painted for. He wants all the volts the stun gun has. "Make me feel something I don't know." Then he wants to LOSE all Elise's heritage. 

Rob has said, "I think he was searching for something. He wanted something."  Cronenberg shuts him up once again. The first time being "....the world will die" the resonating quote of Ayn Rand. Is this the time Cronenberg pats Rob on the head? Good boy.  Does Cronenberg just want to touch Rob's hair like all his fangirls want to? Is this why Cronenberg gave him a slicked down 1950's hairdo (an armoured helmet of hair as Diane Rubenstein might say), perfectly groomed, not looking at all as if he might want, have a yen for, a haircut? What is Cronenberg thinking here?

In a literal recognition of the present economic world prominence of China over Japan, Cronenberg replaces the Japanese currency of the yen with the Chinese currency of the yuan, thus revealing his complete ignorance of the importance in our thinking about our world given us by Lacan that DeLillo has mirrored. (This is an auteur filmmaker?)

Ah, but a Lacanian reading still triumphs. The word yuan in the mouth of a native English speaker does not have the same resonance as spoken by a Chinese. Yuan. Roll it in your mouth. Feel its sound. Feel all the resonance of yearning in the sound of this word, the yawning longing it draws from the native English speaking mouth. Cronenberg has concealed and revealed from himself, concealed and revealed himself to us. In wishing to dispose of yen, a very very mild and almost invisible want, he has substituted yuan, a yearning, a longing. For what Mr. Cronenberg? What are you masking  with this  "floating sign" to escape knowing something you don't want to know that you feel? What if we consider Zizek's terminology of  unknown knowns at this point? Is it Death?

"Money has lost its narrative. Money talks only to itself," says Vija Kinski.

"The New York City skyline of skyscrapers has lost its narrative," says Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism. The Twin Towers of totalitarian monolithic proportions faced each other saying that although we appear to be two, we really are one. They are mirror images reflecting each other into infinity saying, "There is no outside." How clairvoyant do you think DeLillo is now?

"Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," sahe said. "I grew up comfortably. took me awhile to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt instensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore." (C 29)

Didi Fancher is talking about the loss of representation; the concrete feel of money. The signifier and the signified. Vija Kinski is talking about cyber-capital, Virtual Reality Capital, money as "floating sign", the signified and the signifier parted forever, money floating free as CODE (just air as Packer says)  in Virtual Reality.

Benno Levin:

"But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.....Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link. (C 55)


The loss of representation so carefully elucidated by Foucault in The Order of Things in chapter one with Valazquez's Las Meninas. In the painting among the royal family of Philip IV,                                                                                                                                                               is the painter. The painter is looking at you. The canvas he is painting you cannot see, only its back. At the far end of the painting, among the shadowy paintings on the wall, a figure midway on stairs appears to be lit by the invisible source of the light that allows you to see the royal family and the painter himself  But it is not another painting, it is a mirror,  "It offers us at last that enchantment of the double that until now has been denied us, not only by the distant paintings but also by the light in the foreground with its ironic canvas." (TOT 7)

I attended Leo Steinberg's seminar on Valazquez and he spent an evening on this painting. He did not mention the faraway "painting" that upon a closer look betrayed itself as a mirror. In Barcelona at the Picasso Museum there are all the studies of Las Meninas that Picasso did. I wish I could take another look.

You are in the light that is lighting the painting. You are the invisible subject Velazquez is gazing at. Foucault then discusses the royal family in this painting that is a portrait of them.

These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him. But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visual, they prove supersably inadequate. 

Neither can be reduced to the other's terms; it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.( TOT 9)

And in this way Foucault gives us THE CUT with representation in the Dominating Discourse of painting paving the way to the modernist era with its lack of representation.

Proposal For The DeLillo Society Symposium on DeLillo

My main focus is on the character of Eric Packer who is seen a self-destructive loser who loses, gambles away, all his money in one day. I see him as realizing immediately after the conversation with Kinski in the limo, that his actions can prove her wrong. There being no outside to the demonstrators (as we are watching with OWS) they cannot accomplish any change because their opposition is necessary to the system. This is Foucault and the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/capital in which all opposition is inherent in the founding Discourse. This is not to say that resistance is not necessary because it is. Very much so.

Baudrillard sees a way out in his Forget Foucault and that is to push the system to extremes (Nietzsche) and it will implode. Originally he had no hope of this until 9-11, when the hijackers in action, showed how: Giving the Gift that must be returned, the Counter-gift (not right away and it must be more so than the original gift  - "potlatch by Maas"). This is what Packer does. He pushes the global circulating currency trading market to its extremes by borrowing - on margin of course - all the yen there is that he can get his hands on. Of course all his shadows, watchers, stalkers, etc in the currency markets are following him, as he is Eric Packer. The yen is driven to its extreme high because of the tenet of the capitalistic market place of demand and price. The yen demand is so great that all other currencies collapse under its soaring price. (How many wheelbarrows of currency in Weimar Germany to buy a loaf of bread?) How many dollars to buy yen? So many the dollar becomes worthless as do all other currencies.

The modern money changers have been driven from the temple.

Packer begins the day in the dialectic, desiring balance not asymmetry. The global circulating speculative market "rises and sets with the sun" - Baudrillard - and like all planets and satelites has an asymmetrical orbit. As Benno tells him asymmetry was the key.

Reading Jesus through Isaiah, following his destiny, not the career choice of being the messiah, his last major action of overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple, was so outrageous that he could no longer be ignored. (He pushes the limit boundaries to excess.) His capture and death was desired. 

Since DeLillo was brought up Catholic, and has said he believes in the power of narrative transcendence - which Baudrillard and Foucault do not - DeLillo has made Kinski speak Baudrillardian thinking, and has made Packer throw the challenge in action to Baudrillard, who liked to think of himself as an "intellectual terrorist", and implode the currency market just because he could! We can say he felt an affinity with the demonstrators, because of Herbert Z's poem, and  wanted to lead them, etc. but that will put us back into hermeneutics which I avoid after studying Foucault and Sontag On Interpretation. 

I think DeLillo has created a political visionary for the post modern world we are living in. Our fast movement into simulation is dizzying. Total Simulated reality becomes Virtual Reality and from that there is no escape. Baudrillard is proposing the Order of Seduction to reverse our willing slide down the slope.  DeLillo has created Eric Packer to show us one way out. Genet and Burroughs have emphasized the power and responsibility of the writer in creating reality, and here IMO is where DeLillo is.

We have seen Margin Call and how that debacle was started. Interesting.

The Cut For the End of Representation and the Beginning of the Grid and Measurement

Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas (1656) spells the end of representation and the introduction of measurement and the grid. Don Quixote  (1605 vol 1 & 1615 vol 2)initiates the modern novel as language refering to itself, literature is the referent which tears language loose. The architecture of the city of Philadelphia assumes the grid in 1682 and New York, Barcelona, London and Buenos Aires fall in line. These dates are roughly the Foucauldian "cut" for the end of representation in language, art and architecture.

Dating from 1682, the City Plan of Philadelphia has provided a model which has helped mold the development of cities throughout the US. Key features, many of which were firsts in the US, include a gridiron street pattern and open public squares.  

Charles Darwin called Buenos Aires, “the most regular city in the world.” In the New World there was greater freedom to construct cities on regular plans. 4 grid cities

These grids are lovely I think, like Agnes Martin paintings.

Manhatten Grid Map of Packer's Journey to Samarkand

Cervantes Don Quixote 1605&1615 by Dore

Las Meninas 1656 Valezquez

 Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour)^[1] is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. 

Agnes Martin 1960's 1970's

Foucault then proceeds to lay down the grid of power/knowledge. The two are not separate but fused. Each cannot exist without the other. Still today this is not understood as most people think power comes from above to repress and control them. Foucault locates power below, within the interstices of the grid, tightening, crushing and controlling the individual within the family, the educational system, the society in which s/he lives through the Inscription of the Body and with it the mind forcing the person to conform to what is perceived as normal behavior. The way you speak, walk, work, reproduce, everything in your life, must conform within the parameters of normality. Walk outside with green hair and you are going to be noticed, and not favorably, unless you move in slacker or punk sub-culture.

And this is where Eric Packer is this spring day in April 2000 at Eastertime, the same time of year Hansen is following his Gradiva in the simulacrum of Pompeii. The same time of year Jesus is following Isaiah. Packer is crushed within the grid, a hostage in his own limo, surrounded by bodyguards to protect him, make him secure, but who really cannot even as the pie thrower gets him with a whipped creme pie. He is as if in custody.

He is shorting the yen. The yen is going up and up and up above its resistance points and beyond. 

Yen plotted against the dollar

It charts, says Packer. But it only charts within a grid. It only charts within linear time. It only charts within the dialectic of opposites, up and down, true and false, etc. And Packer is not in the dialectic anymore, not in linear time anymore, but interfaced with the screen of globally orbiting numbers, currencies that move asymmetrically. That is they don't chart, not even according to Packer's meditative esoteric rhythms. Charting requires time:past present future and Packer is in real time, cutting it smaller and smaller into infinitesimal particles into zepto seconds, that accelerate asymmetrically with positive and negative charges that collide and go pouf. Packer is being crushed within the interstices of the grid, just as Nina was in Black Swan. 


But Elise-Gradiva is seductively luring him on. She is ahead of him all day and he is following her as she is hiding from him. He is not searching for her, but he keeps finding her. Inside the limo is the Order of Production and outside the limo is the Order of Seduction, and Elise Shifrin keeps shifting as Packer's mind shifts on this day. Death is ahead of him and hiding from him, but Packer unerringly moves towards Samarkand to meet his destiny with death.

Black Swan

 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.

Reading Cosmopolis Through Joyce's Ulysses, Freud, Hamlet,Proust, Moby Dick etc

Don DeLillo reading in NYC

Cosmopolis has been interpreted as a modern day James Joyce Ulysses by reviewers. It seems that any novel that takes place in one day gets covered by the Ulysses template. The last one I remember was Ian McEwan's Saturday, a marvelous novel taking place in London during one day with some back story in the thoughts of the main character. Or maybe it was just plain backstory, I can't remember now. So it seems that the Dominating Literary Discourse for a novel that occurs in 24 hours is a self-referencing footnote to Ulysses. And yes it can
certainly be interpreted this way.

Eric Packer begins his journey to get a haircut, to get shorn, just after sunrise. His triplex faces the water on the east side by 1st Ave and 47th Street. He will go West through Hell's Kitchen all the way to the west side, sunset and then darkness and night, where he will meet Death waiting there for him. It is April - Easter.

Eric Packer has been married 22 days. The moon is in the 22nd day of its phase. Eric wants a haircut. To be shorn. Lorn. Delilah betrays Samson who loses his strength when his hair is cut. When it grows out he tears down the pillars of the temple. Eric gets an asymmetrical haircut.

Appointment In Samarkand

"The disciple of a Sufi of Baghdad was sitting in the corner of an inn
one day when he heard two figures talking. From what they said he
realized that one of them was the Angel of Death.
"I have several calls to make in this city during the next three
weeks," the Angel was saying to his companion.
Terrified, the disciple concealed himself until the two had left. Then
applying his intelligence to the problem of how to cheat a possible
call from death, he decided that if he kept away from Baghdad he
should not be touched. From this reasoning it was but a short step to
hiring the fastest horse available and spurring it night and day
towards the distant town of Samarkand.
Meanwhile Death met the Sufi teacher and they talked about various
people. "And where is your disciple so-and-so?" asked Death.
"He should be somewhere in this city, spending his time in
contemplation, perhaps in a caravanserai," said the teacher.
"surprising," said the Angel; "because he is on my list. Yes, here it
is: I have to collect him in four weeks' time at Samarkand, of all
places."

from: 'Tales of the Dervishes' by Idries Shah 
http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~ade/sld/sld10.html

Spencer Tunick Installation Montreal

Again following Ulysses:


We have Hades with all the naked bodies, and Orpheus leading Eurydice back out to the world, only he can't look at her for her to return safely. Samson married only 22 days to his Delilah, his hair growing back, and Eric is shorn, but only half of his head, but he does pull the pillars of the temple down. On top of him. The bicyclist at the end with his arms spread wide, balanced, riding no handed, the winged messenger Mercury/Hermes signaling to him his message.

Mercury/Hermes

 

 The made up words spinctered, prousted. All Joycean signs, dissimulating. Enchanted cookie crumbs _ madeleine cookies? -  leading to the enchanted cottage in the forest where indentured servitude awaits or being roasted in the oven and eaten by the witch.

Remembrance of Things Past

It can be interpreted through Proust. Eric says his limo is prousted. He tells Elise that it is cork-lined. He is journeying all day to return to his childhood, the past. Elise smells sex on him. But it doesn't smell like a madeleine, that famous cookie whose smell brought back all Proust's memories  - involuntary memory  -  and started him on A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. So anyone in the know about Proust will pick up this reference of the quiet limo, and the return to an earlier time that moved very slowly, where there was time for intimacy and contemplation.

Proust’s Madeleine

By Kenneth Rexroth 1905–1982 Kenneth Rexroth

Somebody has given my

Baby daughter a box of

Old poker chips to play with.   

Today she hands me one while   

I am sitting with my tired   

Brain at my desk. It is red.   

On it is a picture of

An elk’s head and the letters   

B.P.O.E.—a chip from

A small town Elks’ Club. I flip   

It idly in the air and

Catch it and do a coin trick   

To amuse my little girl.

Suddenly everything slips aside.   

I see my father

Doing the very same thing,   

Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”   

His breath smelling richly

Of whiskey and cigars. I can   

Hear him coming home drunk   

From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart   

Indiana, bumping the

Chairs in the dark. I can see   

Him dying of cirrhosis

Of the liver and stomach

Ulcers and pneumonia,

Or, as he said on his deathbed, of   

Crooked cards and straight whiskey,   

Slow horses and fast women.

Freud

Many girlfans go for the Freudian. His relationship with his mother, watching films after his father had died so they could learn how to be together. The gangster ones where doors got kicked in and victims/victimees  got killed. Carry this thought to  Didi, the older woman perhaps a mother figure,  who gets out of bed when he talks about wanting the entire Rothko Chapel. Or the fact his wife doesn't have sex with him, and so on. Eric feels insecure etc etc etc in the psychological swamp of never ending interpretation.

Following Lacan and Monty Python how about Moby Dick and Ahab's search for the great White Whale Moby Dick. Eric rides in a huge white whale of a  limo and gets tail _ not whale _ all day. What a fluke!

Moby Dick

These are all fun games. Interpretation is accepted literary discourse, in fact it is the Dominating Discourse for lit crit. And it really makes you feel so with it and smart that you know how to decode it. And you can use all of them if you want in a glorious mishmash of erudition. And don't forget Deleuzian flux as Torval lies inert (no flux and flow anymore) and Eric's dead body inert and smelling foul. There's smelling again.

So DeLillo throws out all these signs that distract and send your well conditioned mind to its well traveled rut. These signs dissimulate, they act as masks, to both reveal and conceal DeLillo's secret.

Or we can read Cosmopolis  through Hamlet  by way of doubt. Hamlet's doubts and search for "truth" bring about disaster after disaster.  Didi tells him that he is doubting, an interpretation that Eric denies, (there is no such thing as doubt anymore)and then Vija denies Doubt to him (using the same rationalization) when talking about the yen going up but that it has to come down. With doubt comes ambivalence, and ambivalence is how Marc Schuster organizes his reading of Cosmopolis through Baudrilard.

Marc Schuster

Again that quote from The Foucault Reader: Knowledge is not for knowing;knowledge is for cutting.

Reading Eric Packer Through The Interface of the Market: Inscription of the Body

Robert Pattinson as Eric Packer in Cosmopolis

Eric Packer cannot sleep. This is not because he is worried about the yen. This is because the market never sleeps. The market is interfaced in his brain, his mind, his body, his breathing, his barrel chest, his appetite and preference for foods, his sex life, and his reticular formation; in fact, he is totally inscripted. For more detail on the inscription of the body go here and here. For Butler go here.

Foucault-Discipline and Punish

As Foucault demonstrated at length in "Surveiller et Punir" it is these micro-mechanisms of power that, since the late 18th century, have played an increasing part in the management of people's lives through direct action on their bodies: they operate not through a code of law, but through a technology of normalization, not by punishment, but by control, at levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its machinery.... We must free ourselves from this image of power as law and sovereignty, says Foucault, if we are to understand how power actually operates  in our technologically advanced societies. Foucault has two aims in this proposed series of studies: to show that sex - an area where, above all others, power seems to function in terms of prohibition - is not, in fact, subjected to power in this way and, second, to formulate an alternative theory of power, 'another grid for deciphering history'. 'We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law and power without the king.'(Sheridan MFTWTT 183)

The new technologies, with their new machines, new images and interactive screens, do not alienate me. Rather they form an integrated circuit with me. Video screens, televisions, computers and Minitels resemble nothing so much as contact lenses in that they are so many transparent prostheses, integrated into the body to the point of being almost part of its genetic make-up: they are like pacemakers - or like Philip K. Dick's 'papula', a tiny implant, grafted onto the body at birth as a 'free gift', which serves the organism as an alarm signal. All our relationships with networks and screens, whether willed or not, are of this order. Their structure is one of subordination not of alienation - the structure of the integrated circuit. Man or machine? Impossible to tell. (Baudrillard The Transparency of Evil, p.58)

at amazon-link

 There is no better way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our own brain are interwoven than Moebius's topology, with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral. It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object within and without, question and answer, event and image, and so on. The form is inevitably that of a twisted ring reminiscent of the mathematical symbol of infinity. (TOE p. 56)

This Moebius Strip is the structure of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The novel of the last half of the 20th century.

DFW at amazon

Moebius

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 As DeLillo's Political Visionary Prophet

Warning to Rob Pattinson: Stop knocking my Eric Packer in interviews about Cosmopolis. I am doing my best to counteract  the inundation of bourgeois, mainstream, run-of-the-mill interpretations, academic sound bites, etc. of Packer. Stop adding to them. Although this may be the way DeLillo is concealing and revealing Packer. Hmmmmm. Hadn't thought of that until right now.

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo

The link goes to a bunch of mostly shitty reviews at Amazon.  In The New York Times Michiko Kakutani writes that the novel amounts to the story of a comic strip capitalist pig whose crosstown trip to the barber turns out to be a long day's journey into tedium that is marred by flat, tired dialogue and the sort of rote recitation of status  items found in 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' (Kakutani E-10). The academics see Packer as a self-destructive loser who pisses away all his billions in one day. 

Marc Schuster comes very close as he comments on Eric Packer's horror at the sight of the Burning Man is in line with Baudrillard's position in Symbolic Exchange and Death that a suicidal act of protest can amount to defying the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death, in order to save face(37). Schuster, however, does not connect Eric's act of numerical implosion with Baudrillard's theory of implosion. Baudrillard's aim is to disappear theory, and Eric's act does just that. It is  theory no more. DeLillo has won the game using Baudrillard's technique in killing Foucault. So close to eXistenZ here.

Conte in Duvall employs a great deal of convoluted interpretation, which is fascinating BTW, focusing on the narrative of terrorism DeLillo put forth in his In the Ruins of the Future (Harper's December 2001). Conte, reading through The Spirit of Terrorism, says that Baudrillard again provides insight into how in a chaotic and asymmetrical warfare the dominant system can be induced to self-destruct.  He is so close here, but then he immediately says after that:

Packer has committed suicide rather than fallen victim to an assassination plot. Then a few paragraphs further down, Packer is a financial Icarus in meltdown, too  prideful to admit miscalculation (Duvall 190)

Conte in Duvall,  In Cosmopolis Packer possesses an almost preternatural ability to recognize the patterns in currency values that shift in nanoseconds and cyber-capital that is traded instantaneously on the Nikkei and Nasdaq markets. He assumes the hieratic role of the prophet.

Dagnabbit! He almost had it, by god, he almost had it. 

Since I am way out of the Literary Discourse on Cosmopolis I will again read this following Jean Baudrillard: On credibility in the media

You launch a news item. So long as it has not been denied, it is plausible. Barring accidents, it will never be denied in real time. Even if it is denied later, it will never again be absolutely false, since it has once enjoyed credibility. Unlike truth, credibility cannot be refuted, since it is virtual.... Truth is not dead: it has become viral and elusive... (Paroxysm 73)

Like when you say something and it is twisted. Or someone attributes your saying something you didn't say or takes it out of context. Or just makes it up. Or takes a pic of you going to the store and before you get there your pic is global - viral. This is what is happening to the character of Eric Packer. Why? Because he is dangerous. In fact in this time of paranoia and economic crisis it seems more prudent for academics to lay a bit low on Packer's lethal act.


So attuned is Packer to the future that he repeatedly literalizes the rhetorical trope known as hysteron proteron, that is, as he scans the several digital monitors mounted to his limousine, he experiences an effect before its cause. On my first reading I remember thinking of an inverted deja-vu. (Conte in Duvall)

Baudrillard has much to say on the error of thinking in terms of cause and effect, the present Scientific Discourse already discarded by physics, but still the mainstay of the human sciences. He says that effects lead causes, and we use precession to give it meaning. Usually the slant that we are most inclined to favor ourselves. Foucault has already put this baby to bed in The Order of Things, The Archeology of Knowledge and in his College de France Lectures-Abnormal in 1974.

The Baudrillardian Double is so perfect. Aaaaghhh! What's a blogger to do!! Well more on the Double in another posting.

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.