It
is our national tragedy. We are obsessed
with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the
blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us.
~Thomas
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
The second section (“Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”)
of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s
Rainbow, presents readers with four maxims, humorously titled “Proverbs for
Paranoids.” They occur intermittently,
although in close proximity to one another, throughout the section’s hundred
pages, and are labeled as follows:
· Proverbs for
Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his
creatures. (240)
· Proverbs for
Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the
immorality of the Master. (244)
· Proverbs for
Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have
to worry about answers. (255)
· Proverbs for
Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek. (265;
italics in original)
The Proverbs appear
throughout the sequence as Tyrone Slothrop attempts to comprehend the
conspiracy in which he is embroiled, “the plot against him” as the narrator
describes it (240). Of course, in
Pynchon’s elaborate and complex textual world, the conspiracy is the novel, the literary machine in
which Slothrop is merely one character among many. The genius of Gravity’s Rainbow is the way it prevents its readers from achieving
any veritable god’s-eye view; it repeatedly pulls the rug out from under its
readers’ feet, incorporating their perceptions of the narrative back into the
narrative, continually blurring the line between where the text ends and their
interpretations of it begin. Like
Slothrop, readers become helplessly embroiled in an irreducible
conspiracy. As media theorist Friedrich
Kittler describes the novel, it transforms its readers “from consumers of a
narrative into hackers of a system” (162).
Kittler identifies this transformation as indicative of
the novel’s “critical-paranoid method,” a sentiment echoed by John Johnston in Information Multiplicity: American Fiction
in the Age of Media Saturation (1998).
According to Johnston, Pynchon novel introduces a new organization of
human existence in the wake of World War Two’s violent technological upheaval:
“World War II as a watershed event in the growth of technology and scientific
research is precisely the subject of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose publication in 1973 endorsed what had
already become a given within the sixties counterculture: that paranoia no longer designated a mental
disorder but rather a critical method of information retrieval” (62; italics in
original). As Johnston insinuates, the
postwar era witnessed a plethora of ultra-paranoiac literature, likely
beginning with William S. Burroughs’s Naked
Lunch (1959), but pursued through the work of J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick,
Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, etc.
The degree to which these literatures embrace their paranoia varies:
Dick succumbed almost entirely to a debilitating paranoia, while DeLillo
maintains a critical distance. The
notion of paranoia-as-method, however, remains at the forefront of several
texts by both writers. To this day, Pynchon
remains the godfather of critical, intellectual, and literary paranoiac
fiction.
The presence of paranoia-as-method predates the field of
High Postmodernism, however, appearing as early as the mid-nineteenth century
in stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) or in
classic gothic/detective narratives such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). This paranoiac development does not dissipate
with the advent of modernist fiction, but in fact finds itself repositioned and
embraced in the work of surrealist writers such as André Breton, whose Nadja (1928) proposes to gather “facts
which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion
present all the appearances of a signal” (19).
Details of paranoiac puzzle-solving appear throughout High Modernism, in
works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), or William Faulkner’s Absalom,
Absalom! (1936); but the power of paranoia as a critical method doesn’t
fully materialize until the postwar fictions of Burroughs and Pynchon. Even at this point, the expansive
methodological rigor of paranoia, which I will call critical paranoia, will remain decades away.
In the same passages where Gravity’s Rainbow lays out the four Proverbs for Paranoids, the
narrator also relates the brief life of Paranoid
Systems of History – “a short-lived periodical of the 1920s whose plates
have all mysteriously vanished” (241).
The narrator goes on to reveal that the periodical has suggested, “in
more than one editorial, that the whole German Inflation was created
deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition
into Control work” (241). Throughout
Pynchon’s encyclopedic text, numerous conspiracy theories are broached, from
the systematic devastation of European nations to the possibility that Franklin
Delano Roosevelt is actually an automaton.
The entire narrative operates according to a kind of conspiratorial
logic. If there is a conspiracy, then
there must be a narrative explaining the conspiracy; the textual totality,
therefore, abides by a minimal narrative coherency, opting instead for lines of
flight that gravitate toward chaos, disrupting the internal consistency that
characters (and readers) attempt to impose on the text.
Line of flight
is a Deleuzian concept, outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). In relatively simple terms, it designates the
attempt by various energies to escape the territorializing and colonizing
confines of the social body. A traditional
Marxist methodology would likely define such confines as ideology, but that doesn’t quite capture Deleuze and Guattari’s
sense. Deleuze-Guattarian
territorialization signals a complex technological/post-sociological process of
libidinal intensification, of multiple becomings and formalizations that are
continually battling the entropy that seeks to dismantle them: “It is not a
question of ideology,” they write in Anti-Oedipus;
“There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that
coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments
[…] It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of
being subject to, an illusion. It is a
problem of desire, and desire is part of
the infrastructure” (104; italics in original). Allowing for some sense of historical
development, we can admit that Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism and Jean-François
Lyotard’s post-Marxism bear some
similarities to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy; but none of these theories
conform to the traditional strategies of Marxist critique, and the work of
Pynchon and other postmodernists can tell us something of why.
We can sum up traditional Marxism’s treatment of
conspiracy through Fredric Jameson’s comments in Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). According to Jameson, conspiracy theories are
causal (i.e. linear) interpretations
of emergent (i.e. nonlinear)
phenomena. They are psychic reductions
of vastly complex, systemic conditions.
Jameson describes conspiratorial literature as a kind of high-tech
paranoia, in which systems and networks are “narratively mobilized by
labyrinthine conspiracies,” reproduced in manner that is linearly
comprehensible (38). Conspiracy theory, however, is a “degraded attempt
[…] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38). In short, Marxist theory treats paranoia in a
symptomatic fashion: paranoia is a psychosis, a reaction to the overwhelming pressures
of techno-culture.
Writers such as Pynchon illuminate an alternative to the
sociological approach, which treats paranoia as indicative of a larger social
problem to be diagnosed. He displaces
paranoia and its cousin, schizophrenia, from the realm of psychic energy to
that of material energy, energies of systemic forces at large. Paranoia shifts from a psychic problem of perceiving
the world to a mode of operating technologically within the world. Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani makes
this point in Cyclonopedia (2008)
when he compares psychoanalysis with archaeology: “According to the
archaeological law of contemporary military doctrines and Freudian
psychoanalysis, for every inconsistency or anomaly visible on the ground, there
is a buried schizoid consistency; to reach the schizoid consistency, a paranoid
consistency or plane of paranoia must be traversed” (54). Taking Negarestani’s lead (which coincides
with Pynchon’s), we might suggest that Freudian psychoanalysis was never
well-suited to the psyche at all, but rather to the material distribution of
energies along planes of various scales, whether these be microbiological or
international.
In this manner, paranoia is not something to be diagnosed
as symptomatic, dismissed as politically reactionary, or pursued as
conspiratorially perceptive: it is to be methodologically recalibrated as an
instrument of information processing.
Paranoia composes narratives, albeit in a manner that necessarily leaves
plot holes; surface inconsistency can only be explained by leaps of faith,
assumptions that cannot be proven, in order to construct a linear and often
malign explanation. This is the compulsion
of the conspiracy theorist. Rather than
accept such assumptions as rational, surface inconsistency should be countered
by a drive toward subterranean consistency, an appeal to the neutral and
nonintentional complexity of schizoid systems – what Pynchon articulates as the
incomprehensibility of terrestrial matter itself, “the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow
ever to be seen by men directly. They
are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or
coal” (GR 734). Unable to look at it alive, the conspiracy
theorist entertains fantasies about its evil plans, its malign motives, as
Oedipa Maas does at the end of The Crying
of Lot 49 (1965): “[Pierce Inverarity] might himself have discovered The
Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure
she’d fine it. Or he might even have
tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he
loved” (148). By contrast, the
critical-paranoiac theorists force themselves to see through the senselessness
to the schizoid consistency beneath: the horrifying proliferation of networks,
systems, and matter.
If Cthulhu was born today, its name would be Skynet – but
then, both are still paranoid reductions of the world we live in. For the closest thing to an accurate
expression of Western culture’s schizophrenic processes, read Reza
Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.
