and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City
-Zbigniew Herbert, "Report from the Besieged City"
So how does capitalism end? Whimper, or bang? Both, if it's from a gun to the fucking head.
Or maybe something stranger happens.
In David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (released in 2012, the year of the fauxpocalaypse, and adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel), the Occupy Wall Street movement has progressed well beyond Zuccotti park, into the kind of crisis territory feared by an ignorant many and hoped by an insane few. The President of the United States is in town and there are strong rumors of an assassination attempt. An odd pause in a finance minister's speech on the state of the economy causes panic in the stock market. Protesters fling rats and pies. They spraypaint limousines stuck in the infinitesimally-moving traffic that persists all day due to flooding and the funeral of a rap star. So far, so much stochastic misfortune. But there are more signs and wonders, portents of a more violent telos, of rough beasts and the blood-dimmed tide. In this slow-moving and stagey film, these moments fairly shocking, though those who should be reading the writing on the wall are unmoved: a protester immolates himself, and the head of the IMF is stabbed in the eye on national television. The whole thing has the air of France in the 1790's, when some aristocrats lost their heads and the world was forever changed, or that strange period in the late 19th and early 20th-century when there were some sporadic assassinations of heads of states by anarchists and "anarchists," which changed nothing.
Through this brewing chaos creeps along a sleek, hi-tech limo, carrying currency trader Eric Packer, a 28-year old wolf of Wall Street. New money but married to old, he is a would-be master of the universe, owner of priceless art, two private elevators, and a decommissioned bomber. In the shadow of his monumental acts we eke out our puny existences. He is played by Robert Pattinson, whose association with the vampire in the mass mind is completely apropos, as this sucker of economic life rolls around in his black car/coffin that protects him (though not for long) from the illumination of the revolution. The limousine is really the star of the show, though. A product of Cronenberg's longtime erotic obsession with automobiles (Fast Company, Crash) and computers (Scanners, eXistenZ), the thing looks like the Batmobile fucked an iPod. Here, en route to get a haircut, Packer conducts business, has a string of sexual and quasi-sexual encounters, and watches the world, his world, fall apart just like it was on t.v. He is also thoroughly examined by a doctor in the car, the same check-up he gets every day. Although Packer is young and healthy, he dreads death with an unusual intensity that seems to afflict those who have amassed an obscene amount of filthy lucre. Packer is neurotically obsessed with his body being infected by outside forces. His car is cork-lined (not entirely effectively) to wall out noise. In his car, he comments, he is "safe from penetration." Ironically, though, his neurotic need to see the doctor (in lieu of eating an apple, I suppose) ever day combined with his tight business schedule leads to him getting a rectal exam in the car front of one of his employees.
The doctor visit yields two results which are central to the meaning of the film. One, he is informed that he has an "asymmetrical prostate." An awful augury, it would seem. Two, he asks the doctor about a strange mark on his back, which the doctor shrugs off as benign. "Let it express itself," the doctor says. This Packer cannot do, and this is what destroys him.
Packer is the City, the Cosmopolis. The city is New York, which is also the world. Packer says he's "a world citizen with a New York pair of balls." There is an analogy between Packer's body and the body politic, the meaning of which will become clearer after a couple of quotations:
Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
-Georges Bataille, "The Solar Anus"
The very highness of high culture is structured through the obsessive banishment of the low, and through the labor of suppressing the grotesque body (which is, in fact, the material body, gross as that can be) in favor of what Bakhtin refers to as the "classical body." This classical body- a refined, orifice-less, laminated surface- is homologous to the forms of official high culture which legitimate their authority by reference to the values inherent in this classical body.
-Laura Kipnis, "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler"
Hierarchization begins with the body, and is extended out into class culture. Microcosmos and macrocosmos. There are "higher" organs like the brain and "lower" ones like the genitals. There are "higher" senses like sight and "lower" ones like smell. Cronenberg's "body horror" is all about the grotesque body overpowering the classical one. I don't have the space here to examine this theme throughout Cronenberg's ouvre, but suffice to say that where Bataille gleefully looks forward to the eruptions, infections, and penetrations which constitute the social revolution, Cronenberg is more ambivalent. I think he presents two visions in his work: one negative in which there is simply dissolution of the body, and one positive in which there is a transformation. The latter is called (in Videodrome) "The New Flesh." The issue is more complex in Cronenberg, where it is often presented as an eruption of Nature into technological civilization, while it is seen in purely social terms in Bataille and Bakhtin. Both ideas are intertwined in Cosmopolis. Kipnis describes the classical body as a "refined, orifice-less, laminated surface," which is an apt description of Packer's limo. (I also think of Cronenberg's penchant for putting orifices in surprising places, both on human bodies and technological objects.)
Though fearful of infection and death, Packer is not exactly Bataille's "asexual noble head." He conforms in some ways to the classical hierarchy of the senses and the body. Throughout the film he is associated with the noble sense of sight. He is called a "visionary," and at one point asks himself "Why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet?" Smell, on the other hand, is a sense he suppresses. His wife asserts on multiple occasions that he smells of sex, which he denies. At the end of the film he confronts his assassin, Benno Levin/Richard Sheets (played by Paul Giamatti, who usually plays schlubby, average-guy comic characters, in other words men of the working class), who is a personification of the grotesque body. He can't get a job because he "smells." He has a fungus on his feet which he says speaks to him. His grotesque body granting him prophetic powers. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia utilizes Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian ("Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal."), which roughly conforms to the classical and grotesque body. She assigns the sense of sight to Apollo, god of order, quoting the great Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight: "The Apollonian is the created ideal, forms of visionary beauty that can be seen, sight rather than sound, intellectually clear to us." By sight one can act from an aristocratic distance. One "looks down upon." Sound, a lateral phenomenon, belongs to Dionysus, god of the democratic mob. In one scene, Packer looks down on a bunch of kids at a rave in which he is not participating, as they use drugs and sound to dissolve themselves into a Dionysian mass. Paglia criticizes the Left for reducing the Dionysian to this kind of event, a harmless party. "The Dionysian," she says, "is no picnic." It is sparagmos, the complete destruction of the individual and social body, with their respective ethical conscience and legal code. Dionysus is "the god of theater, masked balls and free love--but also anarchy, gang rape, and mass murder." Cronenberg is not so naive, which is what makes his films so interesting.
Yet Packer is not a classical aristocrat, but a modern capitalist, simultaneously drawn to build and to tear down. He has the classical urge to find order in nature, even if this means breaking units of time ("femtoseconds, yoctoseconds") and space down to the infinitesimally small. But in his business, wealth "creation" demands taking risks that threaten to tear down every known law of nature: "An assault on the borders of reality always seems rash." He is also drawn to the grotesque body. He's as promiscuous as we would expect from someone with his age, looks. What he denies about his own body seems to hold an attraction for him in the bodies of others. In the bizarrely sexualized scene where he gets the rectal exam in front of front of one of his female employees, he criticizes her "Judeo-Christian jogging," as not being in her character. "You're sloppy-bodied, smelly, and wet," he says, with evident lust. The bodyguard he fucks later confesses to slacking and the gym, and not keeping the low body fat maintained by Packer. This scene also gives us the first major sign that he's courting his own bodily destruction. He asks her to shoot him with the powerful stun-gun she's been given, evidently because he's bored with sex ("You find this interesting?" he keeps asking her) and needs a new thrill. Thus the torture imposed upon the powerless is consumed by the rich as a leisure activity (as with his flying the bomber). Alas, she doesn't do it. But Packer continues with this urge to destroy himself until it leads him to the final confrontation with the grotesque body of the worker, Sheets/Levin. In this final scene they spend most of the time talking, and to various degrees of coherence this worker (a bourgeois one, but let's bracket that for the time being), this blemish, gets to express himself.
Why does Packer self-destruct? We are given two answers to this question. The first is Marxist. Sheets/Levin tells Packer that his "whole waking life is a contradiction," and we recall that according to Marx, capitalism is not destroyed by something outside it, but dies out of its own internal contradictions. The novel has a line of dialogue (I haven't read the book, I got the line from here) that makes this more explicit:
"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."
"Its own grave-diggers."
There is, however, a more troubling answer, suggesting that revolution is a movement within the body of capitalism, a part of its own developmental dialectic. This may be why we don't see Packer get shot, and therefore cannot be sure he's dead. (Sheets/Levin also tells Packer he's been dead, for over a hundred years, leading us back to the vampire motif.) In the middle of what has now become a full-blown riot, Packer meets with his "theorist" in his car. She asks him, "What have the anarchists always said?" He answers immediately with the well-known Bakunin quote, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." She responds that this is also the dynamic of capitalism. The dynamic is known as "creative destruction," and was popularized by the (Austrian though not quite "Austrian") economist Joseph Schumpeter. Marx had already recognized that capitalism has its own sparagmos, indeed exists only insofar as it destroys all established order:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
(Manifesto of the Communist Party)
This constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production is the subject-matter of Packer's theorist's musings, though in fact we should probably say "means of communication." In hi-tech late-capitalism, production has been replaced by information, and so has everything else. She says, "people will be absorbed in streams of information." Computers, which were the catalyst for this information apocalypse, will not survive it. They "are dying in their present form, dead as distinct units, melting into the texture of everyday life." Even the word "computer," she notes, "sounds backward."
The most important thing she says, though, is that "money has lost its narrative quality," and she compares this to the move away from representation in painting. I couldn't help but think about a couple blog posts I had written a few years ago (here and here) in which, drawing on diverse sources, I found an analogy between postmodern theory and finance capitalism, that the split between finance and the "real economy" mirrored the split between literature and "real life." (Oddly, Don DeLillo shows up in the second post as well.) Actually here it was a split literary theory and literature, but literature and life is what I meant, since there is no distinction between literature and theory in deconstructive criticism. Every text is a free play of signifiers with no connection to anything outside the text. The root of the problem, I was hinting at the time, was move from the gold standard to fiat currency. What has happened to money has happened to words, and thus to all meaning and value. I referred to an essay by the libertarian critic Paul Cantor, who used Austrian economics to analyze a short story by Thomas Mann set in Germany during the hyperinflation. As Cantor put it, "Everything threatens to become unreal once money loses its reality." I've moved leftward in the years since I wrote those posts, both less friendly to Austrian economics and less hostile to postmodern theory (though I remain both an anarchist and allergic to the prose style of Lacan and Derrida). But I still find this parallel compelling. And so does Cosmopolis. "All that is solid melts into air" indeed!
Cosmopolis is obsessed with the way both words and numbers fail to accurately represent reality at the same time they create it by becoming laws unto themselves. Packer says a man's reputation "rises on a word, falls on a syllable." The economy does the same. A finance minister can create a panic with a an ill-timed pause in a speech. Unmoored from its "narrative quality," that is, its role as representation of an underlying reality of wealth, of actual supply and demand, of utilitarian facilitator of exchange and indicator of value, money becomes an independent, almost magical (almost?) force which creates its own reality. At 28 minutes into the film, the female security guard who later sleeps with Packer steps in front of the car window. She's in front of a sign for a check-cashing store called "Money Mart," and for a moment her head blocks the second "M" so that it reads "Money art." The speculator as artist, as magus, as shaman assaulting the borders of reality. Cosmopolis is strange and sly in this way. (To be honest, on one level the film is just mediocre, and its reviews are accurate on this level, but on another level it's stuffed with mysteries, nuts I'm barely beginning to crack. Criticism almost never understands this, because it doesn't understand that film and television even at their most base and moronic levels are forms of magic. Conspiracy theorists are interesting to me because they do understand this, but they usually lack a theoretical vocabulary and/or a refined aesthetic sense.) At one point, Sheets/Levin appears outside the car window in front of an ATM. On first viewing, we don't see him, but by the end of the film we know that Packer, the visionary, did. At any rate, once money becomes art, strange things start to happen to reality. Packer's theorist explains to us that time is speeding up, the future and the present become one ("Everything has become too contemporary, another character says cryptically). "Time," she muses, "is a corporate asset now." Packer has no response to most of these cogitations, but I would say that this is all just corporate propaganda ("money art"): every commercial for a new gadget tries to make us feel like we're living in tomorrow today. The Future as the Present is a utopian spectacle in Debord's sense of "capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images" and "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." The Soviet Union and the U.S. both used to use Outer Space in this way. Cosmopolis is set amid a kind of Burroughsian image-war. The problem with the protesters/rioters is that their counter-spectacle infected by the postmodern condition. Packer and his theorist watch a man set himself on fire outside the car. Packer is somewhat impressed by the bravery of this, but the theorist sniffs, "It's not original." The reference here is to Thich Quang Duc, or quite possibly for the average Occupy-type, that Rage Against the Machine album cover, which is exactly the problem for revolutionary acts in postmodern society. In a postscript to his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco famously described the condition thus:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.
Now I've always thought Eco overstated the case. In the first place, who the fuck is Barbara Cartland and what gives her the monopoly on "I love you madly?" (Most people don't say "madly" because it's a dated word, not because of Barbara Cartland or any single work of fiction.) Nevertheless, the problem does exist in modern life generally, and to the protest movements and the "Left" especially. Propaganda of the deed under the anxiety of influence. Always acting out somebody else's revolution. Somebody else's failed revolution. If this isn't a recipe for bad faith, I don't know what is. The thought of applying Eco's solution here is amusing: "As John Wilkes Booth said, 'Sic Semper Tyrannus!'"- Blammo! Or they could blast "Killing in the Name," while the dude torches himself. Still, it's pretty weak beer compared the esoteric arsenal of the Money Artists. The image adopted by the revolutionary artists is the Rat, the exact meaning of which in the film frankly escapes me (Cronenberg introduces his film with a quote from Polish anticommunist poet, economist, and lawyer Zbigniew Herbert, from the same poem I quoted at the beginning for my own reasons, "a rat became the unit of currency," which is later quoted by Packer), but I'll tell ya this: it aint original. Are they saying capitalists are rats? Didn't the Nazis say that about the Jews? (One imagines the editorials in neoconservative rags in response.) Since Cosmopolis presents the protests as a matter of guerilla art (there's a pie-in-the-face guy who's rather self-satisfied in his genius work, who boasts about how he got the drop on Michael Jordan once) I also think of Banksy's rats, and interestingly enough, Banksy has been accused of copying a graffiti artist named Blek le Rat. But his rats are fairly lovable figures, avatars of the street artists themselves, roaming around underground and at the margins of the capitalism's polis, not just surviving but making a party out of it. The rats in Cosmopolis are figures of decay, black dead things held up as a sign of immanent doom.
But whose doom, and what is the nature of this doom? Tarot diviners insist that the death card merely means a transformation, rebirth, or end of a cycle.
There is no Cartesian dualism for Cronenberg, the mind and body being one thing, itself not extended from anything coming into contact with it. Infection, whether viral or technological, results in evolution, not death. Decay is procreative.
-The Niles Files, "Dangerous Minds, Dangerous Flesh: David Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method'"
The ancients believed that the theory of man’s being made in the image of God was to be understood literally. They maintained that the universe was a great organism not unlike the human body, and that every phase and function of the Universal Body had a correspondence in man. The most precious Key to Wisdom that the priests communicated to the new initiates was what they termed the law of analogy. Therefore, to the ancients, the study of the stars was a sacred science, for they saw in the movements of the celestial bodies the ever-present activity of the Infinite Father.
-Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
The creative destruction of the bourgeois body can be best be symbolized by Andre Masson's illustration of the first issue of Georges Bataille's Acephale. Acephale was both a magazine and a secret society. With the magazine, Bataille tried to rescue Nietzche's philosophy from the fascists (this was France in the 1930's). The purpose of the secret society, which met in the woods at night like real occultists, is a bit more nebulous, but can be inferred from the name, which means "headless." They celebrated the beheading of Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Presumably they had no leader, no "head." They refused to shake hands with anti-semites. They read "Nietzsche, Freud, Sade, and Mauss." They wanted a human sacrifice, in which someone in the group would lose their head, but everybody wanted to be the victim and nobody the executioner! Masson's illustration deforms the greatest symbol of the classical body, Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man." Vitruvian Man demonstrates not only the Roman architect Vitruvius' beliefs about ideal human proportions, but esoteric teachings about the unity of macrocosm and microcosm. Da Vinci "believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe." This universe is essentially symmetrical.
Sheets/Levin tells Packer, who has lost a fortune in a day by betting against the Yuan, that his error was his assumption that nature is everywhere symmetrical. Sheets/Levin was an analyst for Packer, working on a project called "The Bot," which looked for "cross-harmonies of nature and data" and then used this information to get rich in speculating. Sheets/Levin loved the work, until it drove him mad. He couldn't keep up with the precision of Packer's system. He has since come to the conclusion that the project was faulty. Nature is not perfectly pattered everywhere. There are anomalies, things that stick out. For instance, Paker and Sheets/Levin both have asymmetrical prostates. What does this mean? Nothing. It's harmless. Some things are just asymmetrical. If Packer had listened to his body (Packer doesn't listen, he only watches), he wouldn't have failed.
Here is where Cosmopolis links up in an interesting way with the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky (whose films frequently feature esoteric themes). Sheets/Levin mentions that the patterns he utilized came from the arms of spiral galaxies and sunflowers, among others. These are also mentioned in the movie Pi as illustrating the golden ratio, a pattern found in all kinds of places in nature such as nautilus shells, and indeed in Vitruvian Man. The protagonist of Pi, mathematician Max Cohen, is working on a math problem that will crack the stock market. He works with three assumptions:
1. "Mathematics is the language of nature."
2. "Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers."
3. "If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge, therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature."
Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but the argument seems circular to me. The "therefore" is already contained in the first axiom.
En route to cracking the stock market, his computer spits out a number that just may represent the True Name of God. Max is therefore pursued both by a Wall Street firm who want him to make them a fortune and a group of Hasidic Jews who want him to help usher in the Messianic Age. (There's a "God and Mammon" metaphor here, but Max apparently rejects both.) The Kabbalist Lenny Meyer tells Max that "Hebrew is all math, " and "Torah is just numbers." It's "a code sent from God." Interestingly, the protagonists are compared to Icarus. Both are decidedly hubristic. They want to square the circle, to have nature yield all its secrets. Max is undergoing a breakdown due to cluster headaches. His friend Sol had a stroke which he believed was caused by his obsessive work on the number pi (which is of course related to the problem of squaring the circle). The abject body avenging itself on the head, acephale, revolution, heads roll.
I don't particularly look forward to being absorbed into the stream of information. We are already being spied on and catalogued by global brain, and as Proudhon said, "watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighted, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue." I'd rather see the head, the governments and money powers of the world, lopped off and absorbed into the body politic. The dualisms of Apollo and Dionysus, mind and body, tyrant and mob, need to be overcome.
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City
-Zbigniew Herbert, "Report from the Besieged City"
So how does capitalism end? Whimper, or bang? Both, if it's from a gun to the fucking head.
Or maybe something stranger happens.
In David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (released in 2012, the year of the fauxpocalaypse, and adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel), the Occupy Wall Street movement has progressed well beyond Zuccotti park, into the kind of crisis territory feared by an ignorant many and hoped by an insane few. The President of the United States is in town and there are strong rumors of an assassination attempt. An odd pause in a finance minister's speech on the state of the economy causes panic in the stock market. Protesters fling rats and pies. They spraypaint limousines stuck in the infinitesimally-moving traffic that persists all day due to flooding and the funeral of a rap star. So far, so much stochastic misfortune. But there are more signs and wonders, portents of a more violent telos, of rough beasts and the blood-dimmed tide. In this slow-moving and stagey film, these moments fairly shocking, though those who should be reading the writing on the wall are unmoved: a protester immolates himself, and the head of the IMF is stabbed in the eye on national television. The whole thing has the air of France in the 1790's, when some aristocrats lost their heads and the world was forever changed, or that strange period in the late 19th and early 20th-century when there were some sporadic assassinations of heads of states by anarchists and "anarchists," which changed nothing.
Through this brewing chaos creeps along a sleek, hi-tech limo, carrying currency trader Eric Packer, a 28-year old wolf of Wall Street. New money but married to old, he is a would-be master of the universe, owner of priceless art, two private elevators, and a decommissioned bomber. In the shadow of his monumental acts we eke out our puny existences. He is played by Robert Pattinson, whose association with the vampire in the mass mind is completely apropos, as this sucker of economic life rolls around in his black car/coffin that protects him (though not for long) from the illumination of the revolution. The limousine is really the star of the show, though. A product of Cronenberg's longtime erotic obsession with automobiles (Fast Company, Crash) and computers (Scanners, eXistenZ), the thing looks like the Batmobile fucked an iPod. Here, en route to get a haircut, Packer conducts business, has a string of sexual and quasi-sexual encounters, and watches the world, his world, fall apart just like it was on t.v. He is also thoroughly examined by a doctor in the car, the same check-up he gets every day. Although Packer is young and healthy, he dreads death with an unusual intensity that seems to afflict those who have amassed an obscene amount of filthy lucre. Packer is neurotically obsessed with his body being infected by outside forces. His car is cork-lined (not entirely effectively) to wall out noise. In his car, he comments, he is "safe from penetration." Ironically, though, his neurotic need to see the doctor (in lieu of eating an apple, I suppose) ever day combined with his tight business schedule leads to him getting a rectal exam in the car front of one of his employees.
The doctor visit yields two results which are central to the meaning of the film. One, he is informed that he has an "asymmetrical prostate." An awful augury, it would seem. Two, he asks the doctor about a strange mark on his back, which the doctor shrugs off as benign. "Let it express itself," the doctor says. This Packer cannot do, and this is what destroys him.
Packer is the City, the Cosmopolis. The city is New York, which is also the world. Packer says he's "a world citizen with a New York pair of balls." There is an analogy between Packer's body and the body politic, the meaning of which will become clearer after a couple of quotations:
Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
-Georges Bataille, "The Solar Anus"
The very highness of high culture is structured through the obsessive banishment of the low, and through the labor of suppressing the grotesque body (which is, in fact, the material body, gross as that can be) in favor of what Bakhtin refers to as the "classical body." This classical body- a refined, orifice-less, laminated surface- is homologous to the forms of official high culture which legitimate their authority by reference to the values inherent in this classical body.
-Laura Kipnis, "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler"
Hierarchization begins with the body, and is extended out into class culture. Microcosmos and macrocosmos. There are "higher" organs like the brain and "lower" ones like the genitals. There are "higher" senses like sight and "lower" ones like smell. Cronenberg's "body horror" is all about the grotesque body overpowering the classical one. I don't have the space here to examine this theme throughout Cronenberg's ouvre, but suffice to say that where Bataille gleefully looks forward to the eruptions, infections, and penetrations which constitute the social revolution, Cronenberg is more ambivalent. I think he presents two visions in his work: one negative in which there is simply dissolution of the body, and one positive in which there is a transformation. The latter is called (in Videodrome) "The New Flesh." The issue is more complex in Cronenberg, where it is often presented as an eruption of Nature into technological civilization, while it is seen in purely social terms in Bataille and Bakhtin. Both ideas are intertwined in Cosmopolis. Kipnis describes the classical body as a "refined, orifice-less, laminated surface," which is an apt description of Packer's limo. (I also think of Cronenberg's penchant for putting orifices in surprising places, both on human bodies and technological objects.)
Though fearful of infection and death, Packer is not exactly Bataille's "asexual noble head." He conforms in some ways to the classical hierarchy of the senses and the body. Throughout the film he is associated with the noble sense of sight. He is called a "visionary," and at one point asks himself "Why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet?" Smell, on the other hand, is a sense he suppresses. His wife asserts on multiple occasions that he smells of sex, which he denies. At the end of the film he confronts his assassin, Benno Levin/Richard Sheets (played by Paul Giamatti, who usually plays schlubby, average-guy comic characters, in other words men of the working class), who is a personification of the grotesque body. He can't get a job because he "smells." He has a fungus on his feet which he says speaks to him. His grotesque body granting him prophetic powers. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia utilizes Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian ("Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal."), which roughly conforms to the classical and grotesque body. She assigns the sense of sight to Apollo, god of order, quoting the great Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight: "The Apollonian is the created ideal, forms of visionary beauty that can be seen, sight rather than sound, intellectually clear to us." By sight one can act from an aristocratic distance. One "looks down upon." Sound, a lateral phenomenon, belongs to Dionysus, god of the democratic mob. In one scene, Packer looks down on a bunch of kids at a rave in which he is not participating, as they use drugs and sound to dissolve themselves into a Dionysian mass. Paglia criticizes the Left for reducing the Dionysian to this kind of event, a harmless party. "The Dionysian," she says, "is no picnic." It is sparagmos, the complete destruction of the individual and social body, with their respective ethical conscience and legal code. Dionysus is "the god of theater, masked balls and free love--but also anarchy, gang rape, and mass murder." Cronenberg is not so naive, which is what makes his films so interesting.
Yet Packer is not a classical aristocrat, but a modern capitalist, simultaneously drawn to build and to tear down. He has the classical urge to find order in nature, even if this means breaking units of time ("femtoseconds, yoctoseconds") and space down to the infinitesimally small. But in his business, wealth "creation" demands taking risks that threaten to tear down every known law of nature: "An assault on the borders of reality always seems rash." He is also drawn to the grotesque body. He's as promiscuous as we would expect from someone with his age, looks. What he denies about his own body seems to hold an attraction for him in the bodies of others. In the bizarrely sexualized scene where he gets the rectal exam in front of front of one of his female employees, he criticizes her "Judeo-Christian jogging," as not being in her character. "You're sloppy-bodied, smelly, and wet," he says, with evident lust. The bodyguard he fucks later confesses to slacking and the gym, and not keeping the low body fat maintained by Packer. This scene also gives us the first major sign that he's courting his own bodily destruction. He asks her to shoot him with the powerful stun-gun she's been given, evidently because he's bored with sex ("You find this interesting?" he keeps asking her) and needs a new thrill. Thus the torture imposed upon the powerless is consumed by the rich as a leisure activity (as with his flying the bomber). Alas, she doesn't do it. But Packer continues with this urge to destroy himself until it leads him to the final confrontation with the grotesque body of the worker, Sheets/Levin. In this final scene they spend most of the time talking, and to various degrees of coherence this worker (a bourgeois one, but let's bracket that for the time being), this blemish, gets to express himself.
Why does Packer self-destruct? We are given two answers to this question. The first is Marxist. Sheets/Levin tells Packer that his "whole waking life is a contradiction," and we recall that according to Marx, capitalism is not destroyed by something outside it, but dies out of its own internal contradictions. The novel has a line of dialogue (I haven't read the book, I got the line from here) that makes this more explicit:
"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."
"Its own grave-diggers."
There is, however, a more troubling answer, suggesting that revolution is a movement within the body of capitalism, a part of its own developmental dialectic. This may be why we don't see Packer get shot, and therefore cannot be sure he's dead. (Sheets/Levin also tells Packer he's been dead, for over a hundred years, leading us back to the vampire motif.) In the middle of what has now become a full-blown riot, Packer meets with his "theorist" in his car. She asks him, "What have the anarchists always said?" He answers immediately with the well-known Bakunin quote, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." She responds that this is also the dynamic of capitalism. The dynamic is known as "creative destruction," and was popularized by the (Austrian though not quite "Austrian") economist Joseph Schumpeter. Marx had already recognized that capitalism has its own sparagmos, indeed exists only insofar as it destroys all established order:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
(Manifesto of the Communist Party)
This constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production is the subject-matter of Packer's theorist's musings, though in fact we should probably say "means of communication." In hi-tech late-capitalism, production has been replaced by information, and so has everything else. She says, "people will be absorbed in streams of information." Computers, which were the catalyst for this information apocalypse, will not survive it. They "are dying in their present form, dead as distinct units, melting into the texture of everyday life." Even the word "computer," she notes, "sounds backward."
The most important thing she says, though, is that "money has lost its narrative quality," and she compares this to the move away from representation in painting. I couldn't help but think about a couple blog posts I had written a few years ago (here and here) in which, drawing on diverse sources, I found an analogy between postmodern theory and finance capitalism, that the split between finance and the "real economy" mirrored the split between literature and "real life." (Oddly, Don DeLillo shows up in the second post as well.) Actually here it was a split literary theory and literature, but literature and life is what I meant, since there is no distinction between literature and theory in deconstructive criticism. Every text is a free play of signifiers with no connection to anything outside the text. The root of the problem, I was hinting at the time, was move from the gold standard to fiat currency. What has happened to money has happened to words, and thus to all meaning and value. I referred to an essay by the libertarian critic Paul Cantor, who used Austrian economics to analyze a short story by Thomas Mann set in Germany during the hyperinflation. As Cantor put it, "Everything threatens to become unreal once money loses its reality." I've moved leftward in the years since I wrote those posts, both less friendly to Austrian economics and less hostile to postmodern theory (though I remain both an anarchist and allergic to the prose style of Lacan and Derrida). But I still find this parallel compelling. And so does Cosmopolis. "All that is solid melts into air" indeed!
Cosmopolis is obsessed with the way both words and numbers fail to accurately represent reality at the same time they create it by becoming laws unto themselves. Packer says a man's reputation "rises on a word, falls on a syllable." The economy does the same. A finance minister can create a panic with a an ill-timed pause in a speech. Unmoored from its "narrative quality," that is, its role as representation of an underlying reality of wealth, of actual supply and demand, of utilitarian facilitator of exchange and indicator of value, money becomes an independent, almost magical (almost?) force which creates its own reality. At 28 minutes into the film, the female security guard who later sleeps with Packer steps in front of the car window. She's in front of a sign for a check-cashing store called "Money Mart," and for a moment her head blocks the second "M" so that it reads "Money art." The speculator as artist, as magus, as shaman assaulting the borders of reality. Cosmopolis is strange and sly in this way. (To be honest, on one level the film is just mediocre, and its reviews are accurate on this level, but on another level it's stuffed with mysteries, nuts I'm barely beginning to crack. Criticism almost never understands this, because it doesn't understand that film and television even at their most base and moronic levels are forms of magic. Conspiracy theorists are interesting to me because they do understand this, but they usually lack a theoretical vocabulary and/or a refined aesthetic sense.) At one point, Sheets/Levin appears outside the car window in front of an ATM. On first viewing, we don't see him, but by the end of the film we know that Packer, the visionary, did. At any rate, once money becomes art, strange things start to happen to reality. Packer's theorist explains to us that time is speeding up, the future and the present become one ("Everything has become too contemporary, another character says cryptically). "Time," she muses, "is a corporate asset now." Packer has no response to most of these cogitations, but I would say that this is all just corporate propaganda ("money art"): every commercial for a new gadget tries to make us feel like we're living in tomorrow today. The Future as the Present is a utopian spectacle in Debord's sense of "capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images" and "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." The Soviet Union and the U.S. both used to use Outer Space in this way. Cosmopolis is set amid a kind of Burroughsian image-war. The problem with the protesters/rioters is that their counter-spectacle infected by the postmodern condition. Packer and his theorist watch a man set himself on fire outside the car. Packer is somewhat impressed by the bravery of this, but the theorist sniffs, "It's not original." The reference here is to Thich Quang Duc, or quite possibly for the average Occupy-type, that Rage Against the Machine album cover, which is exactly the problem for revolutionary acts in postmodern society. In a postscript to his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco famously described the condition thus:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.
Now I've always thought Eco overstated the case. In the first place, who the fuck is Barbara Cartland and what gives her the monopoly on "I love you madly?" (Most people don't say "madly" because it's a dated word, not because of Barbara Cartland or any single work of fiction.) Nevertheless, the problem does exist in modern life generally, and to the protest movements and the "Left" especially. Propaganda of the deed under the anxiety of influence. Always acting out somebody else's revolution. Somebody else's failed revolution. If this isn't a recipe for bad faith, I don't know what is. The thought of applying Eco's solution here is amusing: "As John Wilkes Booth said, 'Sic Semper Tyrannus!'"- Blammo! Or they could blast "Killing in the Name," while the dude torches himself. Still, it's pretty weak beer compared the esoteric arsenal of the Money Artists. The image adopted by the revolutionary artists is the Rat, the exact meaning of which in the film frankly escapes me (Cronenberg introduces his film with a quote from Polish anticommunist poet, economist, and lawyer Zbigniew Herbert, from the same poem I quoted at the beginning for my own reasons, "a rat became the unit of currency," which is later quoted by Packer), but I'll tell ya this: it aint original. Are they saying capitalists are rats? Didn't the Nazis say that about the Jews? (One imagines the editorials in neoconservative rags in response.) Since Cosmopolis presents the protests as a matter of guerilla art (there's a pie-in-the-face guy who's rather self-satisfied in his genius work, who boasts about how he got the drop on Michael Jordan once) I also think of Banksy's rats, and interestingly enough, Banksy has been accused of copying a graffiti artist named Blek le Rat. But his rats are fairly lovable figures, avatars of the street artists themselves, roaming around underground and at the margins of the capitalism's polis, not just surviving but making a party out of it. The rats in Cosmopolis are figures of decay, black dead things held up as a sign of immanent doom.
But whose doom, and what is the nature of this doom? Tarot diviners insist that the death card merely means a transformation, rebirth, or end of a cycle.
There is no Cartesian dualism for Cronenberg, the mind and body being one thing, itself not extended from anything coming into contact with it. Infection, whether viral or technological, results in evolution, not death. Decay is procreative.
-The Niles Files, "Dangerous Minds, Dangerous Flesh: David Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method'"
The ancients believed that the theory of man’s being made in the image of God was to be understood literally. They maintained that the universe was a great organism not unlike the human body, and that every phase and function of the Universal Body had a correspondence in man. The most precious Key to Wisdom that the priests communicated to the new initiates was what they termed the law of analogy. Therefore, to the ancients, the study of the stars was a sacred science, for they saw in the movements of the celestial bodies the ever-present activity of the Infinite Father.
-Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Sheets/Levin tells Packer, who has lost a fortune in a day by betting against the Yuan, that his error was his assumption that nature is everywhere symmetrical. Sheets/Levin was an analyst for Packer, working on a project called "The Bot," which looked for "cross-harmonies of nature and data" and then used this information to get rich in speculating. Sheets/Levin loved the work, until it drove him mad. He couldn't keep up with the precision of Packer's system. He has since come to the conclusion that the project was faulty. Nature is not perfectly pattered everywhere. There are anomalies, things that stick out. For instance, Paker and Sheets/Levin both have asymmetrical prostates. What does this mean? Nothing. It's harmless. Some things are just asymmetrical. If Packer had listened to his body (Packer doesn't listen, he only watches), he wouldn't have failed.
Here is where Cosmopolis links up in an interesting way with the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky (whose films frequently feature esoteric themes). Sheets/Levin mentions that the patterns he utilized came from the arms of spiral galaxies and sunflowers, among others. These are also mentioned in the movie Pi as illustrating the golden ratio, a pattern found in all kinds of places in nature such as nautilus shells, and indeed in Vitruvian Man. The protagonist of Pi, mathematician Max Cohen, is working on a math problem that will crack the stock market. He works with three assumptions:
1. "Mathematics is the language of nature."
2. "Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers."
3. "If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge, therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature."
Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but the argument seems circular to me. The "therefore" is already contained in the first axiom.
En route to cracking the stock market, his computer spits out a number that just may represent the True Name of God. Max is therefore pursued both by a Wall Street firm who want him to make them a fortune and a group of Hasidic Jews who want him to help usher in the Messianic Age. (There's a "God and Mammon" metaphor here, but Max apparently rejects both.) The Kabbalist Lenny Meyer tells Max that "Hebrew is all math, " and "Torah is just numbers." It's "a code sent from God." Interestingly, the protagonists are compared to Icarus. Both are decidedly hubristic. They want to square the circle, to have nature yield all its secrets. Max is undergoing a breakdown due to cluster headaches. His friend Sol had a stroke which he believed was caused by his obsessive work on the number pi (which is of course related to the problem of squaring the circle). The abject body avenging itself on the head, acephale, revolution, heads roll.
I don't particularly look forward to being absorbed into the stream of information. We are already being spied on and catalogued by global brain, and as Proudhon said, "watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighted, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue." I'd rather see the head, the governments and money powers of the world, lopped off and absorbed into the body politic. The dualisms of Apollo and Dionysus, mind and body, tyrant and mob, need to be overcome.
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