Reading Eric Packer's Death Through Baudrillard - The World Willing His Death

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer in Cosmopolis

The true artificial satellite is  the mass of floating currencies orbiting the earth. Money has become an artifact pure and simple, with sidereal mobility and instant convertibility, and has at lat found its true home, a place more extraordinary even that the Stock Exchange: an orbit where it rises and sets like an artificial sun. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 15)


If man must reach the outermost bounds of his possibilities, then he must also go so far as to destroy himself. For that possibility is neither the least, nor the least glorious. - Saul Bellow (Baudrillard - The Intelligence of Evil Or The Lucidity Pact, Berg, p.115)

Dying its nothing. You have to know how to disappear. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 12)

One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan. I believe the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignificant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 114)

He wanted to be solarized. He wanted the plane flown by remote control with his embalmed body aboard..... and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed .... leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art that would interact with the desert....(C 209)

He thought about his wife. He missed Elise and wanted to talk to her, tell her she was beautiful, lie, cheat on her,live with her in middling matrimony, having dinner parties and asking what the doctor said. (C 205-6)

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point.  What did he want that wasn't posthumous? (C 209)

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

Reading Eric and Elise Through the Symbolic Order of Seduction/Challenge/Surprise and Destiny

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer and  Sarah Gadon as Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis

Destiny is stalking Eric and Elise. Destiny does not leave it to chance but repeats to make sure. Destiny is of the Symbolic Order of Seduction always paired with challenge, the duel and surprise. In each encounter with Destiny the self divides into a before and after. As time passes the two selves bifurcate and diverge away from each other, farther and farther away. They occupy parallel universes. As Eric and Elise meet and separate all day, each changes as a modified  and different self emerges from the previous encounter with each other. Elise is an apparition as she surprisingly appears and disappears. Apparition is always coupled with disappearance.

Following through (free download) Gradiva-Elise here and here. (earlier posts here)

Continuing through Baudrillard:

He took off his sunglasses , for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily with fixed attention.
Your eyes are blue, she said.

Switching to Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals: He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

Eat breakfast yet?

No, she said.

.... You never told me you were blue-eyed.

That face. Even in ten years time, I shall not know the colour of its eyes. But I see it in the street, in my dreams and just beneath the surface of a great number of other faces which suddenly start to resemble it. Baudrillard (Cool Memories, 1980-85b p. 54) :

DeLillo and Baudrillard On Rothko

Rothko

Rothko

Baudrillard:

"Rothko says that his pictures have two characteristics: either they dilate and then open up in all directions, or they contract and then close up precipitately on all sides. Between these two poles lies everything he has to say.

Rothko's change, his passage almost without transition, to an immediate, definitive form. It is there all at once, perfectly mastered, end of story. And it is light-years away from what he was doing up to that point.

This is something entirely different from an evolution - even a creative evolution. It is an almost genetic impulse by which he separates himself miraculously from the artist he still was, with his place in the history of art, to be nothing but the sovereign medium of an extremely simple form, which no longer has anything to do with expressionism or abstraction." (Cool Memories IV 84-85)

The emergent form stuns you with its simplicity. And perhaps the most surprising thing is that, during our earthly existence, in which our brains are bound with bands of steel - the tightly-fitting dream of our own personality - we did not by chance give that little shake which would have freed the imprisoned thought and procured for it the ultimate understanding.(Nabokov)

"Does not everyone have within them this potential mutation, this potential development? This absolute singularity which asks only to be effortlessly produced" (CM IV 85) - an transpired form that has sloughed off our individual yoke?

Didi Fancher: I think you want this Rothko. Pricey. But yes. You totally need to have it.

Eric: Why?

Didi: It will remind you that you're alive. You have  something in you that's receptive to the mysteries.

Eric: The mysteries?

Didi: Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. ... But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew.(C 30)
___________________________________________________________________
If you look awhile at a Rothko and then look at a white wall, you will see a negative after-image. An inversion of color, so I have left white beside these images so you can do it.  Then when you see a real one, try it.

Other Rothko blog of mine

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.

Reading Eric Packer through Baudrillard and the Double-continued

Eric Packer

Eric Packer

Eric watched himself on the oval screen below the spycam, running his thumb along his chinline. The car stopped and moved and he realized queerly that he'd just placed his thumb along his chinline a second or two after he'd seen it on screen.

Then why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet? (C 22)



His own image caught his eye, live on the screen beneath the spycam. Some seconds passed. He saw himself recoil in shock. More time passed. He felt suspended, waiting. Then there was a detonation, loud and deep, near enough to consume all the information around him. He recoiled in shock. Everyone did. The phrase was part of the gesture, the familiar expression, embodied in the motion of the head and limbs. He recoiled in shock.The phrase reverberated in the body.(C 93-94)

Between these two scenes of his screen Double there is a lengthening of seconds between the first and second noticed occurrences. Destiny has been arranging things for Eric Packer. Each time Destiny intervenes the Double diverges in time.

Eric Packer is following his Double. Which one is the original? The one on the screen or the one following the one on the screen? The Double is present from birth leading a parallel life with the historical life. (Life is what happens to you as you are carrying out your plans.- John Lennon) They will meet again at Death.

                                          

Kendra wears a sinuous skin of body armor. It is stab resistant and Eric has her wear it during sex. This is what Elise means by indifference and that she can't master it.  Eric thinks that at some level she would never be naked. Kendra has a stun gun.

Eric: How many volts at your disposal?
Kendra: One hundred thousand. Jam your nervous system. Drop you to your knees.
Eric: Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now. (C 114-115)

.... He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into  the mist on several screens.... The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual.... The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes....But he could think well enough now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. .... Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger.... He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. (C 115-116)

The stun gun. A near death experience divides the Doubles in time. They keep diverging. The one that maybe died from the one that is living. Growing farther and farther apart. Until the moment of death when they will merge.

the extermination of the real by its double in “the perfect crime” (1996, 1-7).