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 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 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.

Money Changers In The Temple-Eric Packer Is A Currency Trader-Currency Traders Are Money Changers

Jesus Chasing the Money Changers From the Temple-El Greco

In the High Renaissance, a figure's turn, the pose called contrapposto, stood for balance, depth, and human perfection. El Greco exaggerates Jesus's twisted, elongated body to all but a parody. For Michelangelo, as in tradition, Jesus's right hand pointed to the saved, his left to the damned. (When it comes to godhead, lefties need not apply.) El Greco has it all backward. He sees salvation as if through a clouded mirror.

Even sorting left from right takes work. The crowd swirls around Jesus. A dealer at left, among the bad guys and bending to salvage the burden of his trade, has the youthful strength and perfect foreshortening of a hero. More confusing still, he leans into one version of the painting, his back to the viewer, obscuring his pose and flaunting his butt. On Jesus's good side, Temple elders kneel, not in praise of God but to debate the outcome in puzzlement. It may serve as a reminder that they did not necessarily prove supportive.

Strangest of all, one may well leave remembering none of this. At the far, far right, away from it all, a young woman weaves forward, alone, her basket poised delicately above her head. Behind her the Temple arcade lies almost empty. Do her downcast eyes stand for modesty and virtue, the side of the saved? Does she represent all that Jesus condemned, when he "would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple"? Or does a whole world still go on, all that fuss an overwrought performance, like last year's summer blockbuster?

The work's asymmetry—its twin vistas of packed bodies and empty space, of sky and Temple—rip apart any Renaissance ideal of balance and perspective. Paintings this wild, one might think, come once in a lifetime. Michelangelo alone passed through enough stylistic changes to fuel art for decades. He left copies to assistants, if that, and moved on. Better think again. El Greco repeats almost the same composition half a dozen times or more over the course of some forty years—and it is anyone's guess why. (Link in title of painting above for the entire review.)

Because this act of Jesus is an EVENT! It is not of linear time and history. It is an unprecented irruption, an unpredicted occurrence. An Event comes from elsewhere. It is singular, unanticipated. El Greco is painting an Event. And he meditates on it for 40 years. That is the meaning of contemplation which requires time, slow time, not clock time.

El Greco

Gustave Dore

El Greco

Turner

Rembrandt

VALENTIN de Boulogne

El Greco

VALENTIN de Boulogne

These are samples. Follow the links for 4 pages of them.

DeLillo has orchestrated Eric Packer's Act as an EVENT! And as a dream worthy of a Freudian essay. Packer is both subject and object as he vanishes numbers referring to capital. Packer Capital is a hedge fund speculating in global circulating capital. Eric Packer is borrowing yen in huge amounts to buy stocks, commodities, whatever, that are expected to rise in value. The amount borrowed will be paid back at a lower rate. He hopes. The yen can only go so high. But it keeps going higher. By throwing the billions of capital of Packer Capital at the yen, he has disappeared the capital and fortune of the people who invested with him as well as his own. He has driven the money changers and thieves from the temple. Jesus didn't get all the temples. Packer doesn't get everyone but he does crash the money supply.

Let's say I bet the yen is going to go down - called shorting the yen -  I "sell" yen worth 10 to 1 dollar. If the yen drops in value - relative to the dollar -  over time, then when I buy back  the yen at the lower rate the money I have made is the difference between the rate I ''sold" and the rate I "paid". You are "selling" without having the yen, but you promise delivery at a time in the future when you buy your yen cheaper. So you have sold high, and bought low. This is what hedge funds do. They speculate. They gamble.

Now if in the time of Jesus a money changer changed currency at a certain rate and by the next day  the currencies he had as capital for money changing changed in value, he would have less-or more maybe- capital to work with. They are gambling. This is what they were doing in the temple when Jesus drove them out. And this action of Christ was the final straw leading to his death. Looking for causes always. Speculating on currency is in the Order of Production. This was being carried out in a sacred place, defiling it.

This is what DeLillo has Eric Packer do when the world wills him. Drive the yen so high that all other currencies implode to nothing. You see gas prices at the pump are not going up.

The dollar is going down. But the assassination of Osama Bin Laden has made the dollar stronger. Read that as the US image. So gas prices at the pump are dropping. The image of the US has been strengthened. All smoke and mirrors.

Eric Packer has been described as self-destructive, impulsive, a loser, a gambler, etc. Well, I guess we could describe Jesus in similar terms, couldn't we?