Eric Packer as Singularity and Event: Franco Berardi Bifo Reading Through Jean Baudrillard

FRANCO BERNARDI BIFO

Curioushaired Gal	4:31 PM (23 hours ago)
to me

Read this yesterday, Franco Berardi Bifo, lovely last chapter but it kinda killed me. Bifo does say suicide is the answer, following Baudrillard, so I guess it makes sense then.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:bGcHvJqmUT0J:www.sok.bz/web/media/video/AfterFuture.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShJ1zLyrYu6DzF_kUluLG5AxlTXKe_1dMj0ZRxFyvgvYqNN-V7DuMPZwIVmQ5SlEy8C5v6l44G_BHawxJPwmqZxe_IPdgUq2pzOuTk6_l_3petEOaydDiwUd6qhmoF4xSUBj3Im&sig=AHIEtbRuRXTJspcQkApEUZnj9feIMjWaNA Download PDF

Eric's suicide, Dalva's suicide, DFW.....

"Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in the history of our time. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death.Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends  that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean to renounce it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene of economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force...."

" Capitalism is over but it's not going to disappear. The creation of Non Temporary Autonomous Zones  is not going to give birth to any totalization. We are not going to witness a catharthic event of revolution, we will not see a sudden breakdown of state power. In the following years we'll witness a sort of revolution without a subject, In order to subjectivate this revolution we have to proliferate singularities."

"By the word singularity I mean the expression of a never before seen concatenation. The actor of this expression can be an individual, a collective but also an event. We call it singularity is this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its field of existence following a principle that is not repetitive and referring to any pre-existing form of subjected subjectivity.

By the word singularity, I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity or repetition, and is not framed in any historical necessity. Singularity is a process that is not necessary , because it is not implied in the consequentiality of history neither logically nor materially. It is the emerging of a self-creative process."

Identity in the Order of Production, singularity in the Order of Seduction.

Another reading of Cosmopolis, Eric as singularity, yay!

Cosmopolis LIterary Conference - DeLillo: Riddled with Epiphanies

Information for “’Riddled with Epiphanies’: DeLillo, New York”

April 20-21, 2012

Presented by the College of Mount Saint Vincent & the DeLillo Society

6301 Riverdale Avenue   Riverdale (Bronx) New York 10471

2^nd International Literary Conference devoted to the work of  American author, Don DeLillo

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Calls for Papers:  http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/

Deadline for Paper/Panel Proposals Feb. 28, 2010

            “’Riddled with Epiphanies’: DeLillo, New York” is a conference based on conversation.  Presenters’ papers will be circulated amongst the participants and summarized during the conference itself.  We are looking to foster an atmosphere of intellectual play and a kind of collaborative inquiry long known to the sciences.  In foregoing the customary model of twenty-minute presentations, we hope to create a more lively atmosphere  which we hope will foster a fruitful dialogue about DeLillo’s work and inspire even more scholarship.  Thus, we encourage fully developed work on the author as well as more tentative projects.

The College of Mount Saint Vincent is especially beautiful in the spring, with its rolling- hills campus and flowering trees, sitting on a broad expanse of  the Hudson River.  It is located in the very northwest corner of the Bronx,  a short distance to DeLillo’s old neighborhood in the Bronx and very close to Manhattan and Yonkers as well. Accessible by all forms of public transportation as well as by car (right off the Henry Hudson Parkway), the Mount is a perfect venue for this event. 

 Festivities include a tour of “DeLillo, New York,” – Arthur Avenue to Great Jones Street – as well as a  staged reading of Love-Lies-Bleeding.

Please send a check or money order made out to the College of Mount Saint Vincent and send to Dr. Zubeck c/o the English Department.

$100  for presenters; $ 65 for guests and graduate students

For information, please contact Dr. Jacqueline Zubeck:

jackie.zubeck@mountsaintvincent.edu      718 405 3310

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Wins MTV Movie Brawl: Robsessed Fangirls Packer An Implosion Voting

A victory in Eric Packer style. MTV voting allows multiple voting with no limits. This ensures multiple hits, increased revenues from advertisers,eh.

Certainly Dark Knight and Hunger Games have funneled multi $$$$$$ into MTV: trailers, movie stills, all that hoopla stuff. Already these franchises have spent a fortune and the movies are not even in the theatres yet.

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis has no trailer yet, and no movie stills with the exception of Caitlin Cronenberg's photo. What is the meaning of this win by the underdog, the Seabiscuit of a movie race?

A Baudrillardian/Nietzschean example of an excess of voting carried beyond limits, over the edge in an excess so tumultuous that the voting machinery was turned on its head, defeating its purpose, which was to garner votes for their advertising giants, create an award for them, and promote their franchises.

They got fooled big time by ladies at robsessed who voted day and night all weekend long for Rob Pattinson and brought Cosmopolis to victory.

This is what Eric Packer does to the yen in Cosmopolis. He buys vast amounts of yen, creating a vast demand for yen by everyone who follows him. The higher the yen goes, the lower the dollar falls.

Like gas prices. Gas doesn't go up. The dollar goes down. 

The yen goes so high that all other currencies in the speculative global circulating currency market crash to nothing.

Baudrillard through Nietzsche calls this IMPLOSION. The destruction of the mass marketing tool which is MTV for its advertisers to give the win to The LIttle Engine That Could - Cronenberg's Cosmopolis.

And who imploded MTV? Women from robsessed who love Rob Pattinson. And who also hold a deep grudge against Scummit Summit/now Lionsgate for messing up Twilight, thus beating their next hopeful multi-billion enterprise franchise The Hunger Games.

A pity says Jane.

The fangirls showed how you can beat the big machine. They voted all day and all night all weekend. Nothing but love as motivation.

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. 

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.