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).

The American divide in American Pastoral

Roth's Swede Levov is a complicated character, and his relationship with the cultural upheavals of the 60s is more complicated than the following passage suggests. Still, Roth seems to encapsulate, in his flawed, unexamined protagonist, the ideology of a certain job-creator Silent Majority:

These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who’d never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or car, had never sold anything and didn’t know how to sell anything, who’d never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker—people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. All that awareness, all that introspective Sheila-like gazing into every nook and cranny of one’s soul went repellently against the grain of life as he had known it. To his way of thinking it was simple: you had only to carry out your duties strenuously and unflaggingly like a Levov and orderliness became a natural condition, daily living a simple story tangibly unfolding, a deeply unagitating story, the fluctuations predictable, the combat containable, the surprises satisfying, the continuous motion an undulation carrying you along with the utmost faith that tidal waves occur only off the coast of countries thousands of thousands of miles away—or so it had seemed to him once upon a time, back when the union of beautiful mother and strong father and bright, bubbly child rivaled the trinity of the three bears (413).

The Swede here sounds like someone out of the Ayn Rand mythography, whereby looters and moochers have taken over the American dream.

Puzzling out the epistemology, or the contemporary use-value, of Gravity's Rainbow

There's no reason to reify this novel, obviously, and Molly Hite is right to historicize it as a function of certain countercultural discourses and energies. But I'm certain that Pynchon has seized something about the shift into late capitalism, and the bewildering transnational Network Societies that it breeds. In Slothrop, I will argue, he captures a consciousness torn between paranoid certainty and a disorienting embrace of multitude, the white male last subject cast into the whirlwind of flow.

Slothrop’s whole existence under the They-system is one of jarring realizations, followed by drifts into uneasy ... what I'll call for lack of a better term disknowledge, or disparanoia, the epistemological black holes which rive the Zone, the Zone itself being a jumble disknowledge/knowledge, the organization of the War Machine and the disorganization of its collapse. (In Lines of Flight, Stefan Mattesich terms this duality "drift" and "submission" (2)). “What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences… “’Want me here’? What for?” (395). This dim slide of meaningless into meaning, disorientation into orientation, characterizes the shifting flows of rigid Cold War nostalgias juxtaposed with vertiginous overflows, sublime aggregations of disarrayed facts, which characterize life in the Risk Society or Information Society. All anchored, in Slothrop’s case, by the ultimate nostalgia, the one that works at you before you were born: gender.

Pynchon analysis

Pynchon's voice: the counterculture, the C. Wright Mills sociology, the Weberian analysis of bureaucracy, the technologist, all brilliantly cascading into this particularly pithy analysis of the War:

The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provided raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while there still here to gobble it up” (Gravity's Rainbow 105)

What does Benjamin say in the Theses on History that Pynchon doesn't say here?

Conspiracy theory as allegory

In an article expressing sympathy for 9/11 skeptics, Michael Truscello critiques conspiracy theory as allegory:

"[For cultural critic Jeffrey Melnick] this “grassroots rebellion” is not to be taken seriously on its own terms, but rather as a “revolt not only against governmental control over 9/11 inquiry but also as a critique of the centralized control of American media held by corporate actors such as Clear Channel” (p. 43).

Truscello critiques what he views as the wide brush with which Bratich, Fenster, Dean, Birchall paint conspiracy theory, particularly 9/11 conspiracy theory:

by assuming the label “conspiracy theory” applies to all 9/11 skepticism, they condemn even demonstrable falsehoods to what Orr and Husting call the “freak show” of postmodern American culture; and by focusing on how the theories are able to circulate, rather than whether the theories possess any epistemological legitimacy, they avoid questions regarding the very definition of conspiracy theory (33).

Truscello, then, would seem to pose an "epistemological test" for would-be conspiracy theories: if such theories have more truth value, then they should not be labeled conspiracy theory. This is an old argument, and a bit defensive, but, as Truscello notes, one that continues to be worth making as long as legitimate skepticism continues to be dismissed via the label conspiracy theory

In contrast to this group of "academic treatises" Truscello poses the more heterogeneous references to 9/11 embedded in film and television: V for Vendetta, Rescue Me, Jericho, Heroes, and others, arguing that such a field renders visible 9/11 skepticism that these academic treatises obscure:

The difference between these examples of popular culture appropriation and the academic treatises on 9/11 in American culture is that these films and TV shows at least contained consideration of the ideas in circulation online, whereas mainstream academics seemed to believe 9/11 skepticism was either marginal enough to ignore or unconvincing in the forms it has appeared (57).

The question here: why is 9/11 skepticism worth discerning? Also, does the fact that an idea resonates through popular culture translate into "useful" or "worth promoting"? After all, popular culture is a vast and uneven field, capable of harboring both the most hopeful subversions of power and the worst petty racisms...

Colonial refusal

Pynchon on colonial refusal, the zerodeath among the Herero:

A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's teh fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe its nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit (317).

Tribal death or Christian death...Hereros choose refusal.