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.

Graph of Yen To Buy 1 US Dollar: Money Changers In The Temples of the World

Japanese Yens to 1 US Dollar

This graph is in linear, read historical, time. The dialectic is in play. As the Yen goes up, the dollar goes down. Eric Packer is not observing the Yen in this format. He is watching numbers scroll across a screen, a flat screen, but never flat enough. He watches for patterns that mime the patterns of different processes in nature: cicadas, grasshoppers, perhaps wave theory or other mathematical formulations. But still the natural processes occur in linear time. In linear time what goes up must come down.

Throughout the day Eric Packer will become aware that he is in virtual reality, real time. The numbers are circulating globally. They are not necessarily moving up and down. In fact the Yen keeps going up. It is going beyond its resistance levels. If you look at the graph you can draw a line crossing the highest peak and the lowest peak. In a given amount of time this is a resistance level. The Yen moves but does not break the resistance line. Except when it does. And then there is a break out or a break down. But on this day in April, Eric Packer, the currency trader, the money changer, watches the Yen go up, then continue up and continue up.

This graph is current as of May 15 2011. About 3/4 of the way from February 25 to March 28 the Yen dropped to 79 Yen to buy 1 dollar. Between March 28 and April 26 it took around 85 Yen to buy one dollar. So if you bought Yen at 79 to 1 dollar and sold the same Yen between March 28 and April 26 you would have made 6+ Yen on each dollar. 1 thousand dollars would have bought 79,000 Yen and then when you sold you would have made 6,000 Yen gross minus expenses of trading.

It charts, he says. Over and over. It charts.  Only it doesn't. The more he borrows the higher it goes. Surely traders are watching Packer Capital and following him, copying his trades. If Packer Capital is borrowing, he must know something. The more people copy him and borrow Yen, the higher it goes. So the more money changers are going to be driven from the temple of Wall Street and the exchange temples all over the world. Untold numbers of them will go broke.

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?