Chapter 2: Schizophrenia and Capitalism in Gravity’s Rainbow
1. Theoretical Foundations
Gravity’s Rainbow is a schizoid novel. However, when I use the word schizophrenia, I have in mind a vastly different theoretical foundation than the usual psychoanalytic conception of schizophrenia as a clinical disease. For this reason, before we can proceed with our analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow, I must explain some important aspects of schizophrenia as Deleuze and Guattari use the term. For them, Schizophrenia is an inevitable product of capitalism in society.
Let me begin by returning to our analysis of capital as a body without organs in the zone. We have said that capitalism tends to depend on decoded and deterritorialized (in economic terms, deregulated) flows of capital. Capitalists tend to favor open markets and fresh territory to exploit. This is the impulse towards laissez-fiare that accompanied modern Capitalism. And yet, everywhere we look in today’s capitalist world, capital is tied to extremely well coded apparatuses of power, like massive corporations or governments. Such is the nature of power in a capitalist society; the goal of each individual and organization is to control the flows of capital and inscribe their own code on the surface of capital. And yet we can continue to see the tendency of Capital to escape that overcoding—for example, in the drug market, which has created a huge bubble of capital outside of state control in an unregulated black market. We have already seen that in Gravity’s Rainbow, it is this tendency of capital to decode itself that caused it to create the War and its product, the Zone.
So Capital is the first form of a socius to depend on the decoding of flows, and yet a capitalist state seems to offer plenty of despotic oppression. In fact, in Deleuzian thinking, the term “capitalist state” seems to be a contradiction in terms, and it is—the capitalist state is built on a schizoid foundation. Because although capital itself depends on decoding and deterritorialization, a capitalist government constantly seeks to overcode all of society:
What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. (Anti-Oedipus 34)
Deleuze and Guattari call the government functions of policing, lawmaking, educating, etc., functions of ‘antiproduction,’ because they seek to control and regulate the productive forces of capital. This is the aspect of government that we are most familiar with; the official repression that so often gets confused for all repression (as if raw decoded capital alone cannot enslave a man). In Gravity’s Rainbow, the lack of any clear state authority within the Zone means that the forces of antiproduction are limited, allowing the flows of desiring-production to flow more freely.
Whereas paranoia is connected with barbarian despotism, Deleuze and Guattari argue that schizophrenia lies at the limit of capitalism, and is an unavoidable product of it. To understand why this is, we must go back into the nature of capitalism. We understand capitalism as a chain of desiring machines who control a flow (of capital). But each one of these machines constitutes a break in the flow, a disjunction; they operate through disjunctions in the flow. I visualize these disjunctions as a necessary step in creating a commodity: one cannot package and sell and endless flow, instead, one must manufacture a singularity (what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘partial object’) that has a perimeter, a beginning and an end, that can be encased in plastic to be sold. But there are other functions of disjunction. The most important function of these disjunctions is that it creates desire, which is the energy that keeps production moving. Deleuze and Guattari vehemently deny that desire is a product of a lack; lack is, instead, a necessary product or even a by-product of production (as we have seen, it can just as easily be created by the operations of antiproduction). Desire is a decoded flow that becomes the social code. Desiring-production and social-production is exactly the same thing, but under different regimes. That social code plays into the hands of the Despotic Signifier, the paranoiac machine who assembles all the flows into a giant, molar edifice of social control. But at the absolute limit of capitalism, the schizophrenic continually detaches the partial objects, carries them off in every direction to create a code of desire. These two, the paranoiac and the schizophrenic, sit at opposite poles of the socius, and both the capitalist machine and the subject that it produces oscillate incessantly between the two.
Although I am not denying that there is a clinical disorder called schizophrenia, I am here treating schizophrenia as a social and textual process of decomposition and multiplicity on the surface of a body without organs. That process is, however, embodied in a schizophrenic subject (Deleuze and Guattari love to cite Judge Daniel Schreber as an example of this). We must then understand some of the characteristics of the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic subject, created on the surface of the body without organs, passes through various intensities as he roams over the surface. Each of the surfaces becomes connected with a different identity. But the identities are not of the subconscious as a psychoanalytic perspective would argue; instead, each identity is a mere signification. The schizophrenic subject names him or herself according to the zone of intensity he or she is experiencing at the moment. But history, culture, and race is already distributed over the surface of the body without organs, and so the identifications that the schizophrenic makes are always historical, and always raced: “I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Heliogabalus and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a Templar, I was my father and I was my son” (Anti-Oedipus 85). (notice how a psychoanalytic or Oedipal identity is included among a multiplicity here; Deleuze and Guattari sought to construct an argument by which psychoanalysis was only seen as part of the picture). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said “Every name in history is I” (Qtd in Anti-Oedipus 21). The schizophrenic experiences universal history in the form of delirium. It will be within this context that we can understand racial identity and blackness in Gravity’s Rainbow in Chapter 3. This is one way that the schizophrenic takes desiring-production (and with it, social production) apart and reproduces history within the realm of the molecular. We recognize this in aspects of Slothrop’s being; he moves through multiple identities like Ian Scuffling, the Kenosha Kid, and Rocketman with ease, but in name only. But as we will see, this is not the only role for Schizophrenia within Gravity’s Rainbow.
2. The Schizophrenic Sign
Just as the representative mode of the primitive territorial machine was graphism and the representative mode of despotism was writing, so the representative mode of schizophrenia is simulation. Therefore, if schizophrenia lies at the limit of capitalism, than schizophrenic simulation lies at the limit of capitalist representation. Schizophrenics merely simulate identities, and they do so within the world of the surface of the body without organs; they can only be by being someone or something else. Capitalism is illiterate; it depends on decoded flows. Thus the simulation of the schizophrenic is a form of writing without despotic signifiers: “a writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine. The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice” (Anti-Oedipus 87). The schizophrenic simulation created by a capitalist socius is the closest one can get to “the beating heart of reality.” This is because Reality is a production of the desiring-machines. This does not make it any less real—we are not entering The Matrix here. It is simply an understanding that machines are material objects that manufacture a material reality, and that reality is physically very different than one produced by another type of socius.
For Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is a process of simultaneity; the subject feels the impact of many differential zones of intensity at once, and thus creates multiple differential identities for himself at once. Instead of identity being a matter of “either/or,” it is a matter of “either/or…or…or…or” without restricting or excluding one from the other (Anti-Oedipus 76). Immediately, this could be said of Slothrop, who acquires countless names and identities throughout the novel. The same could be said of the schizophrenic use of language; where one sign or packet of signs has countless simultaneous meanings. Or, conversely, where one meaning has multiple signs that refer to it; all the names of all the identities of a schizophrenic will refer back to the schizophrenic subject him or herself, and the same is true of the schizophrenic sign.
By this notion of simultaneity, Gravity’s Rainbow is rife with schizophrenic signs. This is the linguistic equivalent of how we tend to imagine clinical schizophrenia: a subject identifies him or herself with many different personages. The example that I would like to analyze, that I believe sets a formula for schizophrenic language throughout the novel, is the Kenosha Kid episode from Part I. Pynchon begins the episode with six numbered fragments that all employ different meanings of a single sentence. Because layout is important to this section, instead of citing passages from this section, I will use scans of my copy of the book, with an addition from page 62:
The phrase “you never did the Kenosha Kid” is always presented in the same word order, but its meaning is manipulated. In the first instance, it is a response to a (somewhat paranoid) query from Slothrop: “Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?” In this instance, the Kenosha Kid is an identity; there is a person named the Kenosha Kid. So we immediately have a schizophrenic formation of identity layered on top of what will immediately become a schizophrenic linguistic formation; in (2), the “Kenosha” becomes a dance step, and the “kid” becomes a different identity, the smartass youth. (2.1) illustrates that the schizophrenic formation must not always be so starkly opposed to itself; a subtle shift serves to attach a previous meaning to a new signifier—the dance that was once the “Kenosha” is now the “Kenosha Kid.” This is an important illustration that under a schizophrenic regime of signs, the confusion flows both ways; a single meaning can attach to multiple signs, just as multiple signs can refer to the same meaning. In (3), the “Kenosha Kid” is given another identity, a despot at the center of the Slothrop Affair, a figure of the “They” of Slothrop’s paranoia. In my reading, the Kenosha Kid retains this despotic character in (4), where he becomes the omnipotent despot at the center of a regime of signs; “he gave us in fiery letters across the sky all the words we’d ever need, words we today enjoy, fill our dictionaries with…” This is the origin of the sign as an arbitrary set of signifiers given to us by a despot under whose regime Slothrop rebels by questioning: “you never did ‘the,’ Kenosha Kid!” meaning that the Kenosha Kid forgot to impose his own significance upon that most common and fundamental word, ‘the.’ It is also in (4) that the text becomes self-aware, and gives the reader the setting in which the rest of the episode is to be told. Slothrop is undergoing drugged interrogation at the hand of PISCES, which is one of the organizations in Slothrop’s paranoiac plot. This frame story illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s description of schizophrenia as “either/or…or…or,” multiple identities. Slothrop is either in the ‘reality’ of being interrogated by PISCES, or he is dancing (2), or he is an employee (3), etc. With initial awareness, Slothrop begins the process of struggling to awaken: “snap to, Slothrop.” But not before lapsing back into his schizophrenic linguistic delusions in (5). There follows one of the most humorous and memorable episodes in the novel: Slothrop narrates to his interrogators at PISCES the story of his journey down the toilet and into an alternate reality in pursuit of his lost harmonica. I will address this episode at more length later. At the end of this episode, Slothrop returns to the Kenosha Kid, for a seventh variation on the phrase:
In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the connection he’s traveled all this way to see. The face is as weak as a house-dog’s, and its owner shrugs a lot.
Slothrop: Where is he? Why didn’t he show? Who are you?
Voice: The Kid got busted. And you know me, Slothrop. Remember? I’m Never.
Slothrop(peering): You, Never? (A pause.) Did the Kenosha Kid? (71)
Here again we see another schizophrenic identity of the Kenosha Kid. But this passage also gives another illustration of the ease and wit with which Pynchon employs schizophrenic language: the “connection” is not only a drug dealer, but also a textual connection, back to the beginning of the episode. This pun is one example of how intensely Pynchon interweaves textual self-reflection into the story—the story constantly refers back to itself. This self-referentiality gives the novel another vital component in its schizophrenic nature: along with all the other identities that the text signifies, it also signifies itself. Or, rather, because Slothrop has been seeking out the signifier “The Kenosha Kid”—a textual connection to the beginning of the episode—the text has only ever signified a search for itself.
3. The Schizophrenic Regime of Signs
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that, language is a construction of the paranoiac, imperialist or despotic socius. For them, language was first used to express a legal system and exercise control over a polity. But in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari offer a counter to the paranoid despotic regime of signs; they argue that a line of escape for a sign is available—a sign detaches itself from the despotic signifier at the center of the regime, and proceeds outwards, creating its own passional (but not despotic) regime. Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the paranoid Pharaoh and the passional Hebrew; the Hebrews follow a line of escape out of the despotic system, and in so doing, they create a new regime of signs that is based on a prophet, who is authoritarian but not despotic, because he does not thrust an interpretation upon the people. Deleuze and Guattari call that point where signs escape the despotic regime the point of subjectification, because it is the point where the sign is liberated from an absolute referent, and thus made subjective. Where before signification depended on the face of the despot at the center, now the prophetic book becomes the body of the regime of passional signs: here comes the holy book. The holy book either gets rid of the interpretation that was vital to the signifying regime, or it displaces interpretation inside itself. Either the text must be taken at its authoritative word, or the text can be interpreted only within its own system of logic. Here Deleuze and Guattari take a rare swing at the avant-garde: “[…] all of these platitudes so dear to the avant-gardes, which cut the book off from its relations with the outside, are even worse than the chant of the signifier. Of course, they are entirely bound up with a mixed semiotic. But in truth they have a particularly pious origin. Wagner, Mallarme, and Joyce, Marx, and Freud: still Bibles” (A Thousand Plateaus 127).
The passional sign is the first state of exception under a despotic signifying regime. The phrase "the state of exception" and the logic of exception under a despotic regime was formulated by Giorgio Agamben. The starting-place of his argument is the idea that the despot himself gains power because only he has the power to declare a state of exception from the rule of law; as exemplified by the idea within a state of a "state of emergency" in which the constitutional or foundational rights that the state claims to hold dear are suspended. The paradox of sovereignty is: "I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law" (Agamben 15). From there, the sovereign can go about the business of interiorizing everything else within the logic of law—here Agamben quotes Deleuze and Guattari, "sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing" (A Thousand Plateaus 445). The state interiorizes even the exception simply by defining it as such, forcing the exception to exist only in relation to itself. This type of exception must be presented as (but not necessarily be) a reaction to a threat to the people and stability of the state. For example, although Hitler came to power through constitutional means, in order to solidify his power, he needed to declare a state of emergency in which he could assume absolute control. He presented this state of emergency as a necessity given the threat posed by the Jews (the internal scapegoat) and the Western powers (the external threat). Deleuze and Guattari include the scapegoat as a vital component of their despotic regime of signs because a despot can only gain the power to be outside the law through a relation of exception.
I argue that this relation of exception is exactly the relationship of the despotic regime of signs to the passional regime of signs (the passional is the exception to the despotic). Always, despotism looms in the distance, the repressive origin of all textual signification, but the passional regime removes itself from despotism by one degree. Agamben seems to agree: he argues that in order to have a denotation under the rule of law, it must also be meaningful in all that it does not denote, and, by extension, the language of the law can only be law because there is an alternative sense in which it is nonjuridicial. As I understand Deleuze and Guattari, the passional regime of signs provides just this type of exception to the language of law by replacing despotic, legal signifiers with a passional, authoritative system of signs. That passional system of signs follows exactly the same route of escape that was created for it by the necessity of a scapegoat in the despotic state; just as the system of legal signification presupposes a previous nonjuridicial regime of signs (in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari discuss a short list of regimes of signification that preceded the despotic, i.e the graphic), so the passional regime of signs presupposes a despotic regime that created a place in society for it to exist—a route of escape. In Homo Sacer, Agamben says,
Just as in occurrence of actual speech, a word acquires its ability to denote a segment of reality only insofar as it is also meaningful in its own not-denoting […] so the rule can refer to the individual case only because it is in force, in the sovereign exception, as pure potentiality in the suspension of every actual reference. Just as language presupposes the nonlinguistic as that with which it must maintain itself in a virtual relation (in the form of a langue or, more precisely, […] in the form of a discourse whose actual denotation is maintained in infinite suspension) so that it may later denote in actual speech, so the law presupposes the nonjuridicial […] as that which maintains itself in a potential relation to the state of exception. (Agamben 20-21)
To restate his argument in Deleuzian terms, Agamben argues that the despotic regime of signs presupposes a passional regime (“actual speech”), thus the despotic regime depends on a state of exception from itself. Only through this relation of exception can the rule of law create signification in a sovereign system. Hence, the escape from the despotic regime is not really an escape because it only enables the despotic regime to exist. And the despotic regime constantly internalizes its elements, so even the element of escape is part of the despotic system.
So is the schizophrenic use of language that I describe in Gravity’s Rainbow an example of this passional regime of signs? Is Gravity’s Rainbow a holy text? It is tempting to think so, because it clearly does not employ a despotic system of signification where a signifier has a clear and predefined relationship to the signified. Indeed, Pynchon offers a parody of this system in Slothrop’s puritanical (“bookish”) tendency. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari would probably say that the novel is an example of the passional, post-signifying regime of signs. I assume that they would argue this given that they have already lumped all of modernism—including and especially novelists like Joyce—into this regime of signs. But I would disagree with them. I believe that Gravity’s Rainbow operates under a new regime of signs, that I call the schizophrenic or schizoid regime. There is room in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory for a new regime of signs: they are very careful to say that they do not offer a comprehensive list of all possible regimes.
Because the schizoid regime has no predetermined relationship of exception to the despotic regime, it could also be conceptualized as a path of escape from the passional regime. The passional regime is always locked in a binary with the despotic that forbids it from ever being genuinely revolutionary. But the schizoid regime is a real escape. Therefore, the schizoid regime is an escape from the passional regime of signification, because it resolves the fundamental contradiction inherent in the passional regime. In this mode of looking at it, the passional regime is an escape from the despotic, but the schizoid is an escape from the passional. It is important to return here to the text of Gravity’s Rainbow to see how the text understands this logic, beginning with the paranoiac and working through the states of exception.
I have argued that a paranoiac system of despotic control guides Slothrop. That paranoiac system is dependant upon a regime of signification that depends on binary opposites; for example, the binary differentiation between the elect and the preterite. This vocabulary has its roots in Slothrop’s puritan heritage, which I have already argued is a signifier of his despotic/paranoiac tendency. The American puritans adopted the Calvinist belief in predetermination, in which a human was either saved or damned by God before he or she was born. But the culture of the puritans depended on an all-important system of signification between the material world and the divine: material success achieved through hard work was the absolute signifier of Election, and so each member of the socius worked hard to prove to each other that he or she was saved. Molly Hite makes the assumption that the Elect are the They at the helm of the paranoiac system. That assumption seems to be borne out by the text: Pynchon does tend to refer to the elect as those in power and the preterite are on the periphery or are under control. In the Nazi séance at which Rathenau makes his pronouncements, for example, “Only certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter’s sitting room. The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving their hands…”(163). Pirate (544), Slothrop (590), and Enzian (316) all identify themselves as preterite; they each feel themselves used by the They-system. This type of thinking is embedded in a despotic regime of signs which structures a paranoiac society.
The use of this vocabulary of predestination appears to leave very little possibility of resistance or revolt on the part of the preterite; they are not the masses or the workers of revolutionary theory, but rather the hopeless and the totally controlled. But this is not the uniform assertion of the text—rather, the Preterite have the power of exception over the Elect. This is according to Slothrop’s first American (and Puritan) ancestor, William Slothrop:
“That’s what Jesus meant,” whispers the ghost of Slothrop’s first American ancestor William, “venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could hve been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table. (554)
Slothrop objects that the Puritans didn’t have jigsaw puzzles, to which William can only say “Aw, shit,” a joke, but a joke with a schizoid textual function: the text refuses to attempt a logical system to unify anachronistic elements. William Slothrop’s philosophy holds no promise of liberation, only offers a predestined universal binary that implies that the elect are just as important as the preterite to the cosmic system. Without Slothrop, the paranoid They-system would have no one to control. “Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be the exception?” (555). The rule of William Slothrop’s system is the exception—William Slothrop's rule itself demonstrates the power of Agamben's state of exception. Everything must have its exception which allows it to exist. This is vital to an understanding of the structures of power in the novel: power is derived from the state of exception, power is a reaction to a series of threats to itself. The war itself is a state of exception, and it allows governments on both sides to transform themselves into totalizing War Machines.
The novel itself presents this rule of exception, but it is the self-conscious exception to the rule of exception which gives a place to the schizophrenic signifier, the escaped regime of signification which does not reinforce the despotic structures of power; the exception to William Slothrop and Agamben’s rule that all power is derived from the exception. We have seen that the novel constantly resists any totalizing tendency, and therefore there must be the possibility of escape within the logic of the novel:
And yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel’s Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us. . . something will. So the permutations ‘n’ combinations of Pudding’s Things That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Gödel’s Theorem, don’t give Hitler an outside chance. So, when the laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the “S-Gerät” Slothrop thinks he’s been chasing like a grail. And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around in Germany even now—the Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate. (275)
Pynchon is right in likening Murphy’s Law to a layman’s Gödel’s Theorem; the theorem comes in two parts, the first of which is that for every consistent arithmetic theory that produces a true statement there is an alternative statement that is true and yet is not provable within the logical system of the theory. The second part of the theorem follows from the first part: any theory is only consistent if it includes a statement of its own inconsistency. This provides the foundation for ideas like William Slothrop’s: in order for God to save, there must be some that God does not save. As this passage points out, it is the exception which is central to the novel; it is the S-Gerät that Slothrop chases, not just any old rocket. The point that the Schwarzkommando is the escaped term of “the black scapeape we cast down from Lucifer” is so important to the novel that we will have to leave it aside until we can give a full treatment of blackness in the next section. Power is derived from its exception. But to demonstrate that Gravity’s Rainbow follows and illustrates the theoretical arc I laid out in the last section, then we must understand that the novel argues that the rule that all power is derived from exception must have an exception. There must be an element that escapes the totalizing structures of power without reinforcing it. This is the origin of the schizophrenic regime of signification, which is not only an exception to the rule of the despotic regime, but an exception to the passional regime, as well. Deleuze and Guattari argued that the passional regime followed the line of flight out away from the despotic regime, and thereby became the Other term which reinforces the existence of the despotic regime; they provided examples of this from the canon of modernity: Freud, Marx, etc. But the schizophrenic regime of Gravity’s Rainbow is the exception to the rule of exception. Deleuze and Guattari would call this an extremely high degree of ‘deterritorialization,’ because it distances itself so far from any regime of signs that is already coded by the structures of power.
If Gravity’s Rainbow poses itself as an exception to the rule that power is derived from the state of exception, it must posit an absolute and divine system that has no exception, because the exception to Gödel’s Theorem would be a theory that has absolutely no exceptions, that is always true. This is exactly why the paranoiac They-system plays such a huge role in the novel; although I am arguing that the schizophrenia of the novel as a whole offers some escape from despotic rule, within the logic of the narrative itself—within the paranoiac machine of Slothrop—there is absolutely no escape. By emphasizing this system of absolute control, Gravity’s Rainbow proves itself an exception to the rule that power comes from the state of exception, and thereby achieves a degree of secondary deterritorialization or escape that is generally unavailable to the passional cries for revolution from modernist thinkers in the Marxist tradition, for example. It is important to remember here that the desire that fuels the paranoiac system of social control in the novel is the desire for decoded capital ("the real business of the war is buying and selling"); so the point of escape (for Deleuze the point of subjectification) from the law of exception is the schizophrenic force of decoded capital.
It is important that the escape from the passional regime of signs is only made possible by self-awareness; it is the awareness of itself as the exception to the rule that 'power is built on the state of exception' that gives the novel a high degree of deterritorialization. This is why the above passage is vital to this understanding of the novel; it is aware of itself as an open system, as a system of exceptions, and here tells the reader as much. In an important move of self-awareness, the paragraph from which I have cited above opens as a critique of cultural criticism:
“Yeah, well,” as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, “you know, he did love her, folks.” Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people…even interviews with King Kong Kulstists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam…and yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider […] (275)
Pynchon here mocks the modern approach to cultural theory that above all claims that the critic is ‘authoritative’ and thus absolutely exhaustive. He makes this criticism within his own cultural production that critics would later call “encyclopedic” (Hite 96). In no unclear terms, Pynchon here tells the reader and would-be critic that any totalitizing attempt on his own novel will necessarily fail, as Mitchell Prettyplace (a real critic of King Kong) would. Prettyplace’s theory rests on a statement that claims to be axiomatic, but is in fact an assumption that could be wrong (what if he didn’t love her, folks?). Pynchon then tells the reader that the only axiomatic of his own production would be Gödel’s Theorem, and the ensuing play on the exception to the rule of exception.
This self-referentiality fuels the parodic nature of the novel, which is a vital component in its schizophrenia. It is untrue to say that nothing in Gravity’s Rainbow should be taken seriously, but it is impossible to untangle satire from belief because Pynchon constantly refers every belief or ideology back to itself, making it seem ridiculous. Here is yet another point that I could choose almost any passage as an illustration of, so I will do so:
“Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted…of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? (214)
The text constantly references this type of cultural knowledge outside itself, and in so doing calls attention to itself as a text. This passage is almost just a citation—a citation of a very well rehearsed theme of the American consciousness. The internalization of the ideology of manifest destiny is a bit too real to become a cliché; the expanse of the American West still dominates the American consciousness, but Pynchon can be familiar enough about it to allow just a hint of dismissiveness into his tone (‘artists nobody ever heard of’). The language of this passage is a parody of Modernist writers like Fitzgerald (and specifically the end of The Great Gatsby), but it is not simply a parody of the writing, but of the idea. Although Pynchon’s language is rich throughout the book, phrases like “when the land was still free and innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct” stick out as being particularly sickly-sweet, calling attention to itself as clichéd language about a clichéd idea. However, Pynchon is a social critic and a political writer, and he would never discount the political importance of the idea of manifest destiny—just because it is worn out does not mean that it isn’t powerful. But he maintains his ironic tone by invoking sexual and misogynistic language: “purity begging to be polluted…virgin sunsets to penetrate and foul.” Passages like these constantly call the reader’s attention to the act of textual production itself to remind them that they are consuming a cultural artifact, a product of a society and of desiring-production. In this way, the novel stays within its own text, even while it alludes to an entire tradition worth of cultural production.
It is important to differentiate the schizophrenic regime of Gravity’s Rainbow from the passional regime of modernity because they do not have the same function as machines of social production. The passional sign follows the same line of escape that a scapegoat under a despotic regime follows, only instead of a single subject escaping from the despotic regime, it is a sign or an entire packet of signs. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not address this, I have argued, using Agamben, that because its path was created by the despotic regime, the passional regime has a function within the despotic regime that it has departed from. It occupies the place of the scapegoat within the despotic system. The despot can always refer to the people who live under the escaped sign as the “enemy,” and this serves a vital function in his regime.
On the other hand, the schizophrenic regime of signs uses as its line of escape the decoded flows of capital. The despotic state still lies at the center of signification, even in a modern, capitalist society; I have tried to demonstrate that a despotic state tries to control and overcode the flows of capital in its own society, but that sometimes a flow of capital will escape its overcoding, and a deterritorialized market will open up—like a black market, or like the open market of The Zone. It is this escaped flow of capital upon which the schizophrenic sign rides away from the despotic signifier. Because of this, the schizophrenic sign has no purpose, even as a counter-example, to the despotic regime. Instead, it serves to dismantle the despotic regime, piece by piece, slowly decoding the paranoiac legal edifice that the despot has built.
The schizoid regime of signs, then, offers the possibility for a genuine escape from the despotic system, and thus offers genuine revolutionary potential. Although they do not explicitly acknowledge the existence of a schizoid regime of signs in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they do believe that implicit in the schizophrenic escape is the power of a revolutionary force, and it is this function that I am looking for in Gravity’s Rainbow. In Anti-Oedipus, they say,
The schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away at and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, everywhere setting the molecular charges that will explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape, at each point ensuring the conversion of schizophrenia as a process into an effectively revolutionary force. (Anti-Oedipus 341)
It is not the schizoid himself who is revolutionary, rather, it is the schizophrenic process which breaks down the molar totality into its segmentary parts that is revolutionary. That process exposes the absurdity and meaninglessness of some of the signifiers that the structures of power are built upon; later on, I will demonstrate this operation with the signifier of blackness. Simultaneously, the schizophrenic process decouples the signifier from the signified. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the process deterritorializes signifiers. This removes the political power of those signifiers. And, as they point out in this passage, the schizophrenic decomposition of a society allows room for other escapes; people, ideas, and flows of capital that were locked within the social body are set free and form their own schizophrenic lines of escape.
I must take a moment to clarify how this argument differs from that of Deleuze and Guattari. Although schizophrenia is absolutely central to their analysis (the title of their project is Capitalism and Schizophrenia), the term and the idea “a schizophrenic regime of signification” is my own extension of their linguistics. They do not spend too much time on the issue of capital as a point of subjectification—one paragraph on page 130 of A Thousand Plateaus—so I am not challenging the bulk of their argument. To address this issue, they rely on the thinking of Louis Althusser, who they dismissed in Anti-Oedipus. For Althusser, capital is always tied to a social assemblage, to an organization of power, and therefore, Deleuze and Guattari conclude, a system of passional signs that uses capital as its point of subjectification must act in the service of this organization of power. However, the confluence of Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier writing on the decoded and deterritorialized nature of capital combined with my reading of Gravity’s Rainbow leads me to believe that the assemblage or organization of power that Althusser describes is not capital itself, which is nothing but a decoded flow, but rather the system of coupled machines which manipulates and confines that flow. Capital is not inherently in the service of the organization of power in a “capitalist” society, but rather it seeks to escape to territories that are decoded. This is exactly the situation of The Zone in Gravity’s Rainbow; the forces of Capital, seeking decoding and deterritorialization, created a war which hollowed out a great Zone in the middle of Europe that would be free from exactly this organization of power which seeks to overcode it. This is what makes Gravity’s Rainbow schizophrenic rather than merely passional: its point of subjectification is the act of decoding capital (the war). We could imagine a different set of passional signs that would have as its point of subjectification a movement of capital that was still confined by Althusser’s assemblage of power, and the passional regime that resulted would still serve the interests of that assemblage. But in Gravity’s Rainbow, we have a way out; this new schizophrenic regime of signs offers new possibilities for social critique that escapes the old problem that all revolutionary sentiment ends up reaffirming and clarifying the power-structures that it fights against.
Perhaps this seems utopian and unrealistic. However, it is not yet a political theory; it is only a mode of textual analysis. So, I will now demonstrate that first Gravity’s Rainbow is a schizophrenic text that performs this process of decomposition, then I will give an example of how this process is revolutionary.
4. Capital and Schizophrenia in Gravity’s Rainbow
I have argued that Gravity’s Rainbow is schizophrenic because it is a product of capital; that is, in order to escape the regime of first the despotic and then the passional signifier it follows the path of an escaped and renegade flow of capital. It achieves this through being aware of itself as a product of capital. Again we must remind ourselves that Gravity’s Rainbow is fiction, and the completely uncoded capital that it imagines is little more than a thought experiment; in reality, capital is always controlled and overcoded by the forces of antiproduction. Earlier in this essay I argued that all the forms that a socius can take—all modes of political organization—exist side-by-side in the Zone, but that it was the flow of capital seeking a decoded market that created it through the machine of the war. One difference between the forces of capital that Pynchon imagines and the real ones that Deleuze and Guattari’s reflect is that Pynchon’s capital is conscious. We could say that he personifies capital, but the personage is always hidden—it is part of the They that controls Slothrop and every other character.
Gravity’s Rainbow is uniquely a product of capitalism because it reproduces the schizophrenic movement of decoded capital in its own structure. I have said that schizophrenia is the process of decoding the molar totalities, and we have said that capital necessarily tends toward decoding and deterritorialization, and therefore schizophrenia is linked with capitalism, and necessarily lies at the limit of capitalism. I have touched on the aspect of the novel tracing the process of decoding and deterritorializing capital in the creation of the Zone, but I have not yet fully unpacked this part of the analysis. I will argue that the act of reading Gravity’s Rainbow performs a similar production; it tends to decode rather than to code, it deterritorializes both the reader and the setting of the novel itself.
Gravity’s Rainbow is about schizophrenic machines. The War is a schizophrenic machine, and the Zone that it produces is schizoid. The War is schizophrenic because it was created from capital; it is a machine because it is a social production. Indeed, the War is an assemblage of machines, all connected to themselves to make a paranoid totality. And so, the war is also paranoiac. It imposes itself over everything, and transforms production and signification in its own image. Here it becomes clear that, even though I have presented paranoia and schizophrenia as opposites, they usually accompany each other, as binaries tend to do. After all, the paranoid-schizophrenic is a common diagnosis in psychoanalysis.
According to the novel, the real business of the war was to create open, decoded markets. In the chaos of the destruction left by the war is the liberation of capital from logic and law ("The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled 'black' by the professionals" (105)). As we have seen, the war machine exists to change the flow of capital through Europe; each part of the machine disrupts, conjoins, or welds together segments of capital, which Pynchon imagines as a conscious force which craves deterritorialization. That deterritorialization is realized in the recording process of war production on the body without organs: the War records its every move through its mark of devastation and wreckage on the Zone. The war’s product is just this record of its process, leftover after that process has stopped: the Zone itself. The Zone is a schizophrenic space where all despotic signification is broken down into molecular units: there is no real centralization of authority, and none of the segments of the Zone seem to quite fit together.
The War is itself a molar machine, an assemblage of desiring machines, which unifies all segments of society in a totalizing manner inevitably reminiscent of the rigid structure of fascism. During World War II, all of Europe was mobilized as part of the war effort, from the home front outwards and inwards (for much of Europe, the home front was indiscernible from the front lines). In the first part of Gravity’s Rainbow, until VE Day roughly at the end of part II, each of the characters has his own place in the War Machine. Most of that part of the novel takes place within the British War Machine. Pirate’s job is to have other, more important people’s fantasies for them; Slothrop’s job is to investigate the wreckage of the rockets, and so on. This creates the nature of the War itself:
The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The war does not appear to want a fold-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fϋhrer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity…Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so cast and aloof is it…so absentee. Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At “The White Visitation” there’s a long-time schiz, you know, who believes that he is World War II. (130-131)
But for the rest of the book, the War is treated as a consciousness, as an entity with some mysterious agenda. Whatever its agenda, the function of the machine is the same; the War machine divides, subdivides, creates partial objects. This passage illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the function of schizophrenia as the process of breaking down, decoding, and deterritorializing. In the context of war, this is usually simply called destruction. As Pynchon here points out, this is contrary to the fascist ideologies of the war machine which claim to seek unity and compliance. At once, Pynchon points out two dynamics in the nature of wartime propaganda: first, that it is only propaganda, and two, the difference between the product and the process of war. The process of war demands absolute compliance from its component parts—all the human and technical machine that work for the war must behave as a totality, but the end result of that process is chaos and destruction, fragmentation and segmentation. The nature of war is so schizophrenic that it can be simultaneously omnipresent and completely absent, as well as molar (in its social formation) and molecular—molecular as in the schiz who believes that he is World War II.
Whether or not the War itself is an awareness, it is certainly a process that records itself on the surface of the territorial socius. This is a theme of the novel that recurs again and again—remember Enzian thinking that the wreckage of the oil refinery had been created with a purpose and a motive, that the war had finally realized the true potential of the factory, and that the entire war had been fought with the purpose of creating that specific form of material devastation in that particular place. In fact, the devastation caused by the war was not only located in that one refinery, but all throughout the Zone:
The War has been reconfiguring time and space in its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of… (257)
Slothrop treats the War as a conscious entity. Its intentions are governed by the flow that runs through its veins: capital. But the ways of capital are mysterious, because they constantly escape coding. The devastated railroad system now connects various chaotic segments of black markets; they shape the space of the Zone in a chaotic way that cannot make sense to any individual human observer.
The product of the war is the Zone. It is on the surface of this schizophrenic socius that the middle chunk of the novel takes place—and in this part of the novel, the schizophrenia of the Zone controls the schizophrenia of Pynchon’s language. The Zone is a completely deterritorialized open market. I have already mentioned that Pynchon refers to it as the early days of capitalism, the Ur-market. I have not, perhaps, emphasized the prevalence of the black market in the Zone, which is the mode of survival for many characters, including, at times, Slothrop. The novel presents a series of black-market barons like Von Göll and Säure, who play the black market well enough to amass a private empire, which gives each of them private power--each are, like Slothrop, "as properly constituted as a state." In the completely decoded market of the Zone, everything becomes a commodity--the inflation of the German currency has rendered paper money useless, and so the black market works on a collective bartering system. One interesting discussion of this takes place between Semyavin and Slothrop in Zürich:
"First thing you have to understand is the way everything here is specialized. If it's watches, you go to one cafe. If it's women, you go to another. Furs are subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others, Same with dope: Stimulents, Depressants, Psychomimetics...what is it you're after?"
"Uh, information?" Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie...
"Oh. Another one." Giving Slothrop a sour look. "Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn't remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term 'industrial espionage' was unknown. But I've seen it change--oh, how it's changed. The German inflation, that should've been my clue right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin [...]"
A tragic sigh. "Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"
"I thought it was cigarettes."
"You dream" [...] "It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future." (258)
The first part of this passage calls to mind Deleuze and Guattari's description of the action of schizophrenia as the process of segmenting a totality into molecular parts; of dissassembly. This is the action of uncoded capital; in the black market, the economy is segmented into ever smaller parts, so that everyone can get a piece of the action. Over time, some players like Von Göll will amass a larger segment then other people, and in so doing will begin the process of re-coding the loose flow of capital and assembling his own structure of power. But at this point, early in the novel, before V-E day, the market is completely decoded. As Semayvin points out, the decoding and deregulation of the German market occurred during the interwar period with the massive inflation of the Reishmark, about which the novel tells us: "The theory was going around at the time that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts" (285). Stinnes was the international financier before the war whose vast assets included, at one point, Slothrop. So the novel tells us that Inflation occured because Stinnes and company were trying to bail out Germany from war debts; in other words, they were trying to dissassociate capital from the State apparatus. In a capitalist state, the goverment tells the people that capital only has worth because of their guarantee behind the currency, but the truth is that capital, in a form other than paper currency, can exist in any social context, as we see in the above passage--capital can be anything from information to cigarettes without any association with the state. And so the inflation was the first big step in decoding and deregulating the German economy by breaking the link between capital and official currency, which then became another commody because you "used them for toilet paper" (284). And then the War came and wiped out the state completely. By the time of Slothrop and Semayvin's conversation, the idea that the German state would be involved in the economy was out of the question; the state was just another (large) consumer to feed its war machine. And so in Zurich ("neutral" switzerland, another aspect of decoding and deterritorailization), the medium of exchange is information--language. This importantly reinforces my point that the language of Gravity's Rainbow is given meaning by the flow of escaped capital; just like capital, language can no longer depend on the State (the law) for meaning, nor is it passional, like the bible. Instead, it gains meaning through its value as capital; capital that has been liberated and has no relation at all (even a relation of exception) from the despotic regime. In an “information economy” language (information) is given signification by capital, because a piece of information has an attached price. It is important to note that this decoded market is not a state of anarchy; Squalidozzi the Argentine imagines that it could become an anarchic utopia, but it is not the prevalence of capital as its own schizophrenic structure which prevents the molarization necessary for communalism, the foundation of most anticapitalist anarchist thinking.
5. The Schizophrenia of Structure in Gravity’s Rainbow
“The Kenosha Kid” pages above also illustrate a schizophrenia of form that will serve as a model for understanding the molar schizophrenia of the novel. This is why I wanted to use scans of the pages instead of a typed quote: this passage reveals how quickly and unhesitatingly Pynchon skips between literary forms. The passage begins as a correspondence in letter form between The Kenosha Kid and Slothrop. Within the context that is later revealed to us—that Slothrop is under a sodium-amytal induced series of delusions—the letter form seems initially to make no sense: people may have visual delusions, auditory hallucinations, even verbal hallucinations, but to hallucinate in such a rigorously structured textual form seems unlikely. The letters emphasize impeccable letter-form, with the address in the right place on the page. On one level, this can be rationalized as an illustration of Slothrop’s highly developed textual or bookish sensibility. But on another level, it serves only to illustrate the schizophrenia of the assumptions that Pynchon seems willing to make: the forms that he chooses to write in seem to have a relationship of exclusion or resistance to the content of those forms. Additionally, the speed with which he is willing to transfer between forms is itself schizophrenic, because it gives the text itself multiple identities.
In the space of these three pages, the text breaks into song twice. The continual breaking up of the text into poetry and song makes the text more structurally schizophrenic: first of all, it physically and visually breaks the text into segments that do not fit together. This can be seen here in the Kenosha Kid pages where the “Snap—to, Slothrop!” poem acts to rip the reader and Slothrop away from his linguistic delusions and into the reality of the PISCES interrogation—it breaks the form that Pynchon has begun of numbered episodes.
Some of the most jarring schizes between forms come when the text randomly breaks out into a musical number, for example “The World Over There” (203) about paranoia, “Pavlovia (Beguine)” (229-230), “Loonies on Leave!” (259-260), and “Victim in a Vacuum!” (414-415). There are many other songs and poems dispersed through the text—many of them are very clever, but I chose these examples because they are completely without context in the text: either it is unspecified who is actually singing, or the actors/singers of the song are brought on and off the text just for the song-and-dance number, as in “Loonies on Leave!” The effect of these unannounced musical numbers is to suddenly shift the form of the text to become a musical stage—they make it impossible for the reader to take Pynchon’s world seriously, just as we do not take the world of a musical seriously, because of the absurdity of everyone breaking out into choreographed song with no warning whatsoever. This absurdity also ensures that musicals are only every about musicals, no matter what their storyline (just as Gravity’s Rainbow is only ever about Gravity’s Rainbow). But, as Heikki Raudaskoski points out, citing Richard Dyer, the musical form comes with a utopian feeling of communalism and togetherness, a feeling of optimism. Pynchon parodies this utopian sensibility with the subject matter of his musical numbers, with dark lyrics like “Just a slave with nobody to slave for” (414). Together, this creates a fantastic example of the schizophrenic dissonance of forms that creates the entire structure of the novel.
These formal strategies add up to make the entire novel schizophrenic; the totality of the novel defies totalization. Every reader of the novel realizes this, and struggles with it. There is something slippery about it; even though it is humorous, engaging, and rich, in parts it tends to repel the reader’s attention. The novel presents itself as a vast network, a representation of an entire fictional social reality. Hundreds of characters emerge and return and yet never resolve themselves. Unlike a hypertextual novel, this is not a closed network in any way; many characters defy connections within the plot of the novel. Many plotlines are left unresolved and many characters are lost to time. So on this level, it is easy to understand why I call Gravity’s Rainbow a schizophrenic novel.
By Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of schizophrenia, a schizophrenic names him or herself differently depending on the zone of intensity he or she experiences on the surface body without organs. As the flows of desiring-production hit against the unyielding body without organs, the zone of dissonance on the surface of the body without organs creates differential levels of intensity, much like atmospheric pressure differs on the surface of the earth. The schizophrenic subject travels across the body without organs, through these different zones of intensity, and each zone becomes associated with a different name, a different identity. But in this case, there is no single subject—this is not about Slothrop alone—but rather an entire novel that meanders over its own pages through differential zones of intensity. In this case, in place of multiple identities, the novel takes on multiple forms throughout its course. This novel encompasses a huge range of other genres and forms of text. So instead of the multiple identity-formation of the schizophrenic subject, a schizophrenic novel constructs itself in a multiplicity of forms, some of which entirely escape generic classifications, and others of which insist on their genre (like the musical) to the point that they exhaust the form.
6. The Erotobotization of the Rocket
The War was a machine of social production, assembled out of thousands of desiring machines. I have been treating the term “desiring production” as almost synonymous with the term “social production,” and that is exactly what they are—almost synonymous. Social production is desiring production, but set under a different regime. A regime is the code (political, cultural, linguistic) that governs the process of production. This is a more precise way of saying that desiring production is the same thing as social production but on a different scale. Deleuze and Guattari make the point that art often functions by exploding or ignoring the difference in regime: “Art often takes advantage of this property of desiring-machines by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring-production is used to short circuit social production […] Dali’s method of critical paranoia assures the explosion of a desiring-machine within an object of social production” (Anti-Oedipus 31). Gravity’s Rainbow twists this formulation by using a technical machine as a synecdoche for a social machine: the Rocket to represent the War. It explodes a social machine within an object of desiring-production. That is to say, the novel seeks to show that the War—usually conceived of as a machine of social production—is actually driven by desire. The novel operates by attributing desire to the War machine, its component parts, and its products. I will call this device erotobotization: the attribution of desire to a machine.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, the machines of war are desiring-machines, whether they are human or not. For Deleuze and Guattari, sex is just an interlinking of desiring-machines, a mechanical coupling to facilitate the exchange of fluids. Gravity’s Rainbow literalizes this idea, over and over again. For example, Major Marvy and his men are always accompanied by limericks about having sex with machines, which are too good to resist quoting:
There was a young fellow named Crockett,
Who had an affair with a rocket.
If you saw them out there
You’d be tempted to stare,
But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it! (305)
There was a young fellow named Hector
Who was fond of a launcher-erector.
But the squishes and pops
Of acute pressure drops
Wrecked Hector’s hydraulic connector. (306)
And so on, and on and on. But these limericks reveal that in the twisted space of the Zone, erotobotization is common and lightly humorous. Marvy’s men joke about sex with machines the same way we might expect our military men to joke about sex with each other. Indeed, the line between machine and man is inherently blurred—Hector’s penis is now a ‘hydraulic connector,’ a component of a technical machine.
The sexual draw to the machine is a product of a schizophrenic war machine, which treats all of its component machines exactly the same, whether they be human or mechanical. Each component machine serves exactly the same purpose: destruction, and each machine represents the same cost to the war machine: an expenditure of capital. But for the mechanical machines to be made effective, they must plug into a human machine that will point it in the right direction and press the appropriate buttons. So from the war machine’s point of view, a human machine must always be coupled with a technical machine. This is very similar to the nature of schizophrenia that Deleuze and Guattari discuss; for them, “schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines” (Anti-Oedipus 24). For them, desire creates machines: “Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, and a machine of a machine” (26). And when Deleuze and Guattari say the word machine, they truly mean just that—technical machines and humans are both machines, but under different regimes. Deleuze and Guattari argue that one of the important purposes of art is to create a group fantasy where the difference in regime between social production and technical machines is removed; art places machines in the realm of desire. Judge Daniel Schreber, the classic case of the schizophrenic, imagined sunbeams containing thousands of spermatozoids clinging to his body; Deleuze and Guattari say that the sunbeams are agents of production. Are the agents of war production such as the rocket any different?
The rocket, created exclusively as a machine of destruction, is probably the most powerful object and subject of sexual desire in the novel—indeed, almost every major character depends on the erotobotization of the rocket. It would be a daunting task indeed to cover all of the different characters’ desiring-relation to the rocket, so instead we must try to understand what function this erotobotization serves for the novel, and how it can be integrated into the paranoiac/schizophrenic opposition that we have been operating under. We should focus on the ‘holy’ rocket of the text, the Schwartz-Gerät number 00000. Although the rocket remains shrouded in mystery, we know that it was commissioned and used by Weismann. From the moment of its production, the S- Gerät is schizoid: “’Do you find it a little schizoid,’ aloud now to all the Achdfaden fronts and backs, ‘breaking up a flight profile into segments of responsibility? It was half bullet, half arrow. It demanded this, we didn’t’” (453). Each of these component parts of its production was fated to a different German scientist—the one we meet in the novel is Franz Pölker, who comes to realize that his entire life was controlled by Weismann in order to set him up for the role he was to play in the Schwartzgerät project. And even in its functionality after production, the S-Gerät is schizoid because it is simultaneously many different things: a mother to Slothrop’s pavlovian condition, the ultimate sex-toy for Weismann to use on his slave, Gottfried, a holy text for Enzian to seek out and reproduce, and therefore the object that Tchicherine must suppress from his half-brother. Each one of these identities of the rocket are products of desire.
The Rocket as a being of desire is simultaneously masculine and feminine, just as, as Judge Shreber demonstrates, the schizoid is always simultaneously a man and a woman. Katje explains that the role of each gender is played by the opposite paths of the rocket’s flight with an image that she retains from her days playing “The Oven Game” of sexual slavery with Weismann and Gottfried:
She was pleased, once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning his tail…she saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the platform, scarlet, orange, iridescent green…there were Germans, even SS troops, who called the rocket Der Pfau. ‘Pfau Zwei.’ Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love…at Brennschluss it is done—the Rocket’s purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, had submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics. The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was designed in.
Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm…(223)
“Pfau” is “peacock” in German. The rocket’s ascent is given a masculine role—it is the male peacock that puts on its display. On the launch-pad and during takeoff, the Rocket is irresistibly phallic. It is the protrusion of the German war machine that will penetrate all the way into the capital of the British territory. But at Brenschluss—which is the peak of the Rocket’s flight, the apogee of the parabola—the sexual nature of the rocket shifts. It now is submissive, subject to the laws of the universe, no longer defiant of gravity, but dependant upon gravity to reach its orgasmic conclusion. This passage reveals that Katje is secretly one of the most intelligent characters in the novel: as this passage shows, she has clearly formulated her relationship to the Rocket, which enables her to achieve a balanced sexual life, even if that balance is achieved by constantly occupying both the extremely submissive and the extremely dominant ends of the spectrum. She feels the pull of both sides of the Rocket within her desiring system. This cannot be said of the cast of men who galavant around the Zone seeking to thrust their own identity of desire onto the Rocket. It will be helpful to contrast Katje’s passage with a lesson that Weismann gave Enzian:
Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. (324)
Here, the terms are reversed from Katje’s conceptual rubric. For Katje, natural forces (gravity) occupied a benignly masculine place—as soon as gravity took over from the Rocket, the Rocket became feminine. But Enzian’s notion is much more one-sided: the Rocket is masculine and imperialist, it thrusts itself over natural space, carving out a realm of subjectivity and artificiality from the natural world. For Enzian, the Rocket is a way of dominating the world, and that is completely masculine. But alongside this division of masculinity and femininity, the construct of Blackness informs the very structure of the Rocket relations, and in so doing illustrates the schizophrenic power of a deterritorialized signifier.