Reading Eric Packer Through Baudrillard and Jesus

Samantha Morton as Vija Kinski

It was exhilarating ....to realize they'd been reading the same poetry he'd been reading.

He sat down long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was. (C 97)

Here DeLillo follows Baudrillard who is following Marcuse who uses the metaphor of Pac-Man to describe the market's ability to absorb. Baudrillard labels it Deterrence, a balancing act.

Kinski was right....There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it. (C 99)

The act of the Burning Man occurs.

What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach.(C 99-100)  This is in the Order of Symbolic Exchange: Death as Impossible Exchange.

I would like to commemorate Kathy Change (Kathleen Chang) here, a performance artist and peace activist who immolated herself on the University of Pennsylvania campus on October 22, 1996. She was a lovely person who burned herself to death by the Peace sign on campus.

Vija: It's not original.
Eric: Hey, What's original. He did it didn't he?
Vija: It's an appropriation.
Eric: He poured the gasoline and lit the match.
Vija: All those Vietnamese monks, one after the another, in all their lotus positions.
Eric: Imagine the pain. Sit there and feel it.
Vija: Immolating themselves endlessly.
Eric: To make people think.
Vija: It's not original.

An original story?

The crucifixion of Jesus is neither especially original. Of suffering executed and resurrected god men in Antiquity we can list for example Herakles, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Baal (Bel-Marduk), Mithra, Zarathustra, Odin (Wodan), Dionysos and Buddha.


Torval reports on the specific threat. Vija is delighted, Eric ...felt defined, etched sharply. He felt a burst of self-realization that heightened and clarified....It was twilight, only dimmer....He didn't know how long it was since he'd felt so good.... with the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was fine and right. ....to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. (C 102-106)


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


Jesus  seems to fit this definition of terrorist. So does Eric Packer.

Reading Cosmopolis Through Spencer Tunick's Performance Art

Mexico City

Spencer Tunick's Performance Art Piece This is huge and spectacular. See all the rest of his performances with nude/naked bodies while you are there. Very beautiful.

A slideshow that is spectacular:

And another one:


Down on left perhaps London. I don't think it is New York so tell me if you know.


And of course the last one is from the Concentration Camps just after liberation and too late for many.  The image taken with film cries out in a way the posed bodies do not, (digital?) but then the context is deathly, the bodies starved.

London?

I am wandering within McLuhan's  thought about the medium is the message. What if these images were presented differently. Some large, some very small. Would the message be different? Say the Camp bodies huge, the performance bodies small or the reverse? What about the order? If I included or you imagined the bodies in Haiti, or Afghnistan, or Tsunami, or Bosnia victims piled up, would that affect your perception of these images. If you have read the scene these refer to in Cosmopolis, does that change your perception?

De Lillo of course is self-referencing White Noise when the students are preparing for a rehearsal for an imagined catastrophe, lying down fully dressed, some in official helping roles. During War II we used to have air raid drills, hiding under our desks. The same during A bomb cold war time children rehearsed along with their teachers. A kind of higher level fire drill.

Liberation of a Camp

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.