Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Circulation of drive

Reading Jodi Dean's Blog Theory, though just finished the first chapter. Struck by how she nails the repetition-compulsion facet of social media: the way in the Twitterbook environment, it's actually really difficult, 2011 revolutions notwithstanding, to make visible the crucial connections (between the security state and the University of California, for example) which transform consciousness into radical consciousness:

the circulation of drive is functional for the prevention of [coherent enchainments of meaning] enchainments that might well enable radical political opposition. The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive (31)
I think here of how rapidly the UCD pepper spray incident has faded from public consciousness, a fading that would seem to have something to do with the "memeing" of the incident, the obsessive replication of John Pike's image. Here, a potentially transformational moment dissolved into a repeated image, a too-many times repeated idea that goes nowhere because it goes everywhere.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Conspiracy and self in Gravity's Rainbow

For the third? time, I've reached the end of section 3 of Gravity's Rainbow. This is the point where Slothrop's quest, his detective mystery of self-origin, ends, after reaching this point of what? stasis? A kind of self-reflexive joissance, the Rainbow instead of the Rocket?
and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…. (626)
Up until now, throughout sections two and three, Slothrop has been after his origin-story: who is Jamf, what is Immoplex G, what did they do to me, who am I? As Margeret Lynd argues, Slothrop's quest is a failure; he can't piece together his memories into even a simple self-narrative, that which might make him integrable into the socius. He instead "becomes a crossroad," dissipates into the rhizomatic anarchy of the Zone. If the "typical" conspiracy plot involves yoking the disconnected subject to power's core, the They to the me, with attendant self-aggrandization along Oedipal lines, Pynchon's plot instead results in an anti-Oedipal diffusion of self. Perhaps, if this move doesn't quite undo the binaries of gender, it does reject the structures of male desire that support the kind of disciplinary domination that Pynchon charts throughout his novel.

Still, in this very passage, the word "cock" signifies the phallic economy that is at work throughout these pages. And ultimately, a rocket is very different, even as a deconstructed metaphor, than a geographically implicated orange. Pynchon both moves in male economies of desire and challenges them, invokes their exaggerated (s-gerat) form, only to disperse their energies, imagines counterforces in the language of Western domination. Simultaneously, a text that harnesses the anti-Oedipal energies of the sixties and acknowledges/reinforces the impossibility of genuinely dissipating these energies. In short, I suppose, it's a text with all the promises and shortcomings of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic critiques. It's a fitting place to end a book about masculinity and conspiracy, or gender and conspiracy; as gender dissipates, it, too, returns. The original domination of gender and imperialism is everywhere in this text which nevertheless evokes and transmits the revolutionary energies of the postwar moment, including the critique of bureaucratic warmongering capitalism present in Marcuse, Mills and some of the more thoughtful elements of the New Left.

Gravity's Rainbow: all the promises, all the shortcomings of revolutionary literature.