The snake that is eating itself

I’m reading, or rereading, Stefan Mattessich’s brilliantly dense Lines of Flight on Gravity’s Rainbow. Mattessich makes the difficult point that GR is ultimately about its own terminology, and the very groundlessness of the power-oppositions which it nevertheless makes us of. For Mattessich, the opposition preterite/elect  performs itself; instead of working within a predefined set of hierarchies, in its very naming such hierarchies it creates them.

“Preterition is in its lines of flight a tendency to seek (identify with) election (in forms of autonomous utopia or transcendence, be they social or textual), a state in turn defined by not being preterite. In this paradox, one in fact recognizes the figure of praeteritio, a conspicuous omission or constitutive substitution (a figurative “passing over”) that indicates an ontological modality of exception both for the preterites in the novel and for the preterite novel. The paradox, in other words, opens in Gravity’s Rainbow the abyss or groundless ground of its own figural nature” (86).

Like Saussurian terms, these oppositions define themselves; the seeming exception of the preterite is created by conceiving of the preterite as opposite to the elect. While Mattessich is not citing Foucault nearly as much as Deleuze/Guattari, and (always less convincing for me), Baudrillard, these are pretty clearly Focauldian concepts. I wonder, too, if we’re not missing an important original opposition that works to functionally ground such seemingly groundless categories: doesn’t gender function in the novel as a kind of Prime Mover, and Slothrop’s hardon as a recognizably jarring limit to the endless substitutions here. Else how does the tyranny of the Rocket’s symbolization come to register as tyrannical? Preterition does not simply occur within an existing set of hierarchical values; it causes or conditions the space of values. It names its own exceptionality “It names the enveloping framework or limit-horizon within which it appears but also passes away, and as such it premises a possible deconstruction” (86)

The conspiracy only diverts itself from itself: “The war is a metaphor for a secret conspiracy that reduces it to the status of a diversion not from another event but from the actual event it is” (88). And that goes for the text of the conspiracy theory as well. But what to do with all this?

Such groundless illusions have real political consequences, at least for the forms opposition takes. As Mattessich argues, the Hereros invest Rocket with symbolic truth in order to empower themselves away from the rationalizing discourses that make them Other, and yet such investment paradoxically makes their desire less, not more, visible: “marginalizes desire, ensures its perpetual dissatisfaction and, more disturbingly, its lack of true substance or authority” An elsewhere that belongs to the interpreter (90).