This post got taken down/lost in the death of the domain TheSpouter.com (doesn’t exist anymore), restoring it here from the PDF. It was written way, way back in the day, when I was an undergraduate.
Paranoia and Despotism
My copy of Gravity's Rainbow is a product. As a product, it has a host of social and economic functions, and it is those functions that I want to understand in this analysis. It was originally manufactured by the printers of the Penguin Group, who were eager to use the critical success of the novel to help them increase their flow of capital, both economic and social.1 o one, to my knowledge, has commented on the irony that a novel that so effectively critiques the imperialist, omnipotent force of corporations should so immediately and readily be surrendered to one of the largest American publishing houses. It is so surrendered because in order for the novel to achieve its own productive agenda, it has to be read and internalized by at least some segment of the public, and the best resources for marketing and distribution of novels come with the largest corporate publishing houses. Likewise, it was originally created by Thomas Pynchon; the circumstances of its production have passed into the realm of mythology—the unquestioned belief is that he wrote it out longhand on engineer’s paper in LA and/or Mexico while imbibing large quantities of hallucinogenic drugs. Regardless of what his chemical composition was at the moment, he was obsessed and involved in the political situation in America, the Civil Rights movements, the cultural liberalization. He created a unique schizophrenic machine, a unit of social signification, that Americans responded passionately to.
What is distinct about the social function of Gravity's Rainbow? As critics note ad-nauseam in the introductory paragraphs of their essays or books, it has had a tremendous impact in many realms. But what does it seek to do, as a text? What is the output of Gravity's Rainbow? I am primarily interested in using the novel as a machine that produces a unique critique of political structures in society. One of my assumptions in creating my argument about the function of Gravity’s Rainbow is that it exists in a specific social and historical context; although I will not delve deeply into this historical analysis, I agree with critics like Eric Meyer3 who choose to see the novel in its social and historical context, which is twofold. The novel was published in 1973, and its composition must have spanned much of the late sixties; as Meyer argues, the novel is very much a part of the idealistic and political revolution that was taking place during that time. On the other hand, it is a historical novel, and as even a cursory reading shows, Pynchon was very well versed in the circumstances of life in Europe during the late part of World War II.
Therefore, the novel is located at two of the most dramatic junctures in postwar history and cultural history, and it is impossible and pointless to try to disassociate it from that historical context. Likewise, Jeffrey S. Baker4 tried to prove that Gravity’s Rainbow was a part of the radical democratic movements of the sixties counterculture—a project somewhat parallel to my own—but he offered almost no textual analysis of the novel.
But I must return once again to the question of the novel's productivity and functionality within that context. I think that one of its functions is to disassemble the tendency to create molar totalities and political unities, to critique the desires that drive us to create fascisms and centers of power both in our daily lives and in our political systems. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I will argue that it is a paranoiac reaction that allows fascisms and totalitarianships to evolve, and a schizophrenic tendency that tends to take apart large totalities. Therefore, I will argue that the function of Gravity's Rainbow is schizophrenic; it fragments and segments every aspect of its being, its narrative, its social critique, its style and tone. But to understand the novel’s schizophrenia, we must understand the paranoia that it is so deeply concerned with.
To begin this process, I will offer a reading of the seminal postmodern literary text, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, using the Schizoanalyitic theoretical framework outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory not only describes the forces that makes the modern subject desire its own repression, it also offers some promise for a way out—Foucault called Anti-Oedipus an “introduction to the non-fascist life” (Anti-Oedipus xiii). This is one of the concerns of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I see as a fictional illustration of schizophrenic life. The subjects of the novel are caught on giant flows of capital and desire that they cannot control; they are oppressed and paranoid, and their little resistances seem alternately silly and depraved. And yet, I will argue, the awareness of repression in Gravity’s Rainbow creates a schizoid deconstruction of the structures that create that repression, and offer a line of flight away from that repression.
1. Introduction to the Schizoanalytic Gravity’s Rainbow
Although the terms that Deleuze and Guattari use are unstable and shifting, and although in Gravity’s Rainbow no identity or body remains constant, it will be most helpful to immediately assign aspects of Pynchon’s text the characteristics of the organs of the Schizoanalytic theory. This will enable us to understand each text better through the other; by itself, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is purely abstract—they almost never offer a structural example or illustration of the movements they discuss (they only occasionally reference some cultural production that illustrates a specific term)—and also by itself, Gravity’s Rainbow seems to many people to be an incomprehensible episodic hodgepodge without reason or structure. The imposition of one text upon another, from the beginning of our analysis—as opposed to summarizing Schizoanalysis and then applying it to Gravity’s Rainbow—will make both texts productive (a term which will soon come into a new meaning through our analysis). And yet the Schizoanalytic theory will require some explication before I can fully attack the text of Gravity’s Rainbow. I will simplify Deleuze and Guattari’s complex theory into a framework that will add meaning to Pynchon’s novel, but I do this with the awareness that for every character or organ of meaning from Gravity’s Rainbow that I apply to the theoretical framework of Schizoanalysis, I could just as easily chose many others from Pynchon’s universe. With this in mind, I will use Tyrone Slothrop as the primary subject of our argument, while constantly keeping in mind that Slothrop, while an extreme case, is by no means unique in the novel—many characters share aspects of his position and personality, his paranoia and his roving instability. And, while Slothrop is a subject, he could also be considered in many other locations in the Schizoanalytic framework; he could be seen as a desiring-machine or a body without organs, for example. In Deleuze and Guattari’s theory, nothing is mutually-exclusive or singular; everything is a characteristic that a givenentity can possess at a given time.
In a Schizoanalytic conception, the subject—in our case, Slothrop—is produced by the dissonance created when the forces of desiring-production hit against the immobile surface of the body without organs. The body without organs is one of the most plastic concepts used in Schizoanalysis. It is on the surface of the body without organs that the entire schizophrenic and paranoiac drama of the subject is played out. A body without organs can be absolutely anything; it can be a territory, a despotic body, a simple object, or even a flow. Perhaps the closest Deleuze and Guattari come to a definition of the body without organs might be in A Thousand Plateaus: “The body without organs is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also signification and a subject—occur” (A Thousand Plateaus 159). In practical function, the body without organs provides a surface, like a stage. The surface of the body without organs is the recording surface of production.
To take a first pass at understanding the totality of Gravity’s Rainbow we must understand it as a full body without organs, and this understanding can help illuminate what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the phrase “body without organs.” Although the concept of the Body without Organs seems at first so confusing and plastic to approach meaninglessness, it is a concept that describes the most real and material conditions of political life. The body without organs must be understood in the most physical manner; a body without organs is an object, it is just that almost any object can behave as one (in some circumstances a more metaphysical object could act as a body without organs). It is important to begin to visualize the body without organs first at the most physical and literal level. In this context, I want to use the example of the book itself, as a ream of paper contained between two covers—760 pages on the surface of which is recorded a process of desiring production at its most schizophrenic. The record is at once a process and a product. A book is a good example of a body without organs because it can help us visualize without organs; despite a book’s heft, it has no internality—it is only a continual surface on which flows of meaning roam, page after page, as endless as it needs to be, but still a finite segment. A book is a form of the body without organs, the same as a territory can be, or the figure of a despot. The subject, all the subjects of the book (but for the time being, Slothrop), is literally formed on the surface of this particular body without organs. The physical book as a body without organs is a useful mode of understanding the term, my analysis will be based on bodies without organs in the fictional reality of the text.
The subject grows on the body without organs like a barnacle on a rock in the middle of a river. Desiring-production is the fundamental movement of flows through a society; in Gravity’s Rainbow it can be seen in the movements of all the different agencies and governments that conspire to create the situation of the book: the War itself is a desiring machine, alongside all its component parts (such as the Rocket) and produces the physical space of the novel. Slothrop’s paranoia manufactures a “They,” and it is tempting to understand Their forces as desiring-production; the one problem with doing so is that Slothrop’s “They” is much too singular, coordinated, and monolithic to account for the immense multiple flows of desiring-production. This is because desiring-production can only occur when there is a disjunction, a malfunction of the machines that it depends on, and it is in this disjunction that desire can be produced (this is why desire is often mistaken for a lack). The sleek, omnipotent “They” that is constructed by Slothrop’s paranoia would not allow for such disjunctions. Desiring production is real, it is not a metaphor or an imagination, and it survives off of its flaws. This disjunction is created by the presence of the body without organs, which interrupts the flows.
At its most basic level, the disjunction between the body without organs and desiring production creates paranoia. The body without organs interrupts the flow of desiring-production, and between the two, on the surface of the body without organs, is created a zone of dissonance, which results in varying degrees of paranoia. The desiring-machines attempt to break the solid surface of the body without organs, but the body without organs experiences them as a persecution apparatus. Thus, paranoia is created on the surface of the body without organs, as one of the important zones of intensity that a schizophrenic subject must move through. Paranoia comes before it gets projected onto a specific set of fears, and it can exist autonomously without being projected upon any specific force. Deleuze and Guattari say, “in and of itself the paranoiac machine is merely an avatar of the desiring-machines” (Anti-Oedipus 9). The unstated implication is that if paranoia is the avatar of the desiring machines, than it is itself a productive force that can inscribe itself on the surface of the body without organs. As we will see, Slothrop is a prime example of this; throughout much of the book, he is haunted by the most extreme paranoia, which motivates his actions as he moves over the zone. For Slothrop, paranoia is a productive force.
This essay will rely on a binary that Deleuze and Guattari also depend on: an opposition of poles that correspond to the schizophrenic and the paranoiac, (and therefore the capitalist and the despotic): the opposition between molecular and molar. Paranoia operates on the molar level; it creates large unities, shows that everything connects. This is also the process of forming an empire—a process of assembly. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is a molecular production that breaks reality down into fragments and segments of a flow. This reveals an illuminating contradiction in my argument in regards to Gravity’s Rainbow: I argue that Slothrop, a molecular individual character within the molar totality of the novel, is paranoid, but I argue that the novel as a whole is schizophrenic. The process of paranoia, which ought to work on the socius as a whole, here only works on the individual level, but the process of schizophrenia operates incessantly through the entire novel. In a despotic or totalitarian society, paranoia was the totalizing force that assembled unities of social production out of the partial objects—objects made partial by the schizophrenic and deconstructive forces of capitalism. But in the social reality that Gravity’s Rainbow reflects, the partial objects are manifestations of paranoia whereas the totality can only be regarded as schizophrenic. And yet, paranoia maintains its imperialist force over reality; it continues to unify and totalize, to recode and reterritorialize partial objects. But the large context in which that takes place, in our case, the body of Gravity’s Rainbow is irreparably fragmented, broken into partial objects.
I will show that paranoia controls the novel on a molecular level by controlling individual characters, most notably Slothrop. But I will show that the novel as a molar totality is itself schizophrenic, through and through. It is a schizophrenic simulation of capitalist reality. Schizophrenia plays many roles within the novel: I will show that Slothrop is not only a paranoiac, but instead oscillates between the two poles of paranoia and schizophrenia. But I will also show that the entire novel is a product of capitalist schizophrenia, and that this is the only feasible way to handle the novel in a formal analysis; through the model of the schizophrenic, we understand the otherwise chaotic and nebulous form of the novel. It is this structural confusion that I believe alienates so many readers from the book; they find themselves unable to grasp the text in any despotic sense—where the form of the book would signify a narrative—when they need to be submitting themselves to a production of a schizophrenic reality.
Before I can fully address the issues of paranoia and schizophrenia, I must describe the stage on which they are set: the body without organs.
2. Desiring Production versus The Zone as Body Without Organs
There are countless examples of the body without organs in Gravity’s Rainbow, but by far the most structurally important is the Zone. The Zone was created by the War—a desiring machine—and it bears the physical inscription of the war in its carefully planned devastation, so that the newly created Zone bears no resemblance to the pre-war Germany out of which it was carved. Geli Tripping introduces Slothrop to the pre-capitalist power arrangements of the Zone:
“It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements. You’ll find out.” Indeed he will—he’ll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted as a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. (290-291)
But the Zone constitutes a specific type of body without organs, the socius. The socius is the full body without organs of an entire society, the surface of a certain culture. It is the surface on which desiring-production inscribes itself, and what actually makes up the socius is historically specific; it changes according to what type of society it is. Deleuze and Guattari trace three different types of socius throughout history, but this passage from Gravity’s Rainbow reveals that the Zone includes and constitutes all of them in their entirety. The three main forms of social organization that Deleuze and Guattari discuss exist simultaneously alongside each other within the Zone. I will use an extended analysis of this passage to discuss each type of socius and the aspects of the Zone that illustrate them.
2.1 The Primitive-Territorial
The first type of socius is the primitive-territorial type which inscribes the earth’s surface with the marks of human production. It is in this realm that we can understand the physical realm of the Zone without relying on borders, which the very idea of the Zone rejects. In the primitive territorial sense, the Zone is the area of Europe that was hollowed out by the War. The War inscribed its process of production on the territory of the zone in the same way that Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘primitives’ who physically, graphically inscribe the earth itself, and, by extension, their own bodies. This is the form of representation that predates writing; Deleuze and Guattari call it graphism. Although Deleuze and Guattari’s is a historical analysis, graphism persists and exists simultaneously with all forms of representation: the practice of tattooing, for example, has persisted alongside other forms of signification.
The Zone as a primitive territorial socius must be understood first in geographical and geopolitical terms. It is in this sense that the Zone is within the boundaries of the fallen Third Reich. It has an inside and an outside; thus, the part of the novel that takes place exclusively within the Zone includes the preposition: “In the Zone.” Slothrop’s journey around the Zone can be mapped and understood in purely physical terms.
The geographical Zone can also be understood as a product of desiring-production. The territory was created by the War, which is a molar desiring-machine. Earlier, I said that production inscribes itself on the surface of the body without organs; nowhere is this more clear than in the Zone. The devastation of the War is marked on every inch of the Zone; it is a landscape of partiality—walls and rooms lack roofs, everything that was private is now public, the internal external. Slothrop has his affair with Geli Tripping in a room without a roof, which enables a bird to make Geli’s bed its native habitat. The fascism that had unified the Third Reich, made it a monolithic and paranoiac totality, has now been reduced to a schizophrenic pastiche of ruin. The Zone, then, was created by the War; its process of production—bombing, battles—inevitably inscribed itself on the surface of the Zone.
The War inscribed itself on the Zone in a manner that had a graphic significance, illustrating Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that primitive territorial representation is the inscription of production upon the very surface of the earth. In a Slothropian moment, Oberst Enzian realizes:
This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this exrefinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on….modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan on both sides—“sides?”—had always agreed on…yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholarmagicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop… […]
The bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy place exactly in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text… (520-521)
To Enzian, the way the War has inscribed itself on the Zone gains significance. He believes that he is supposed to read in the wreckage a system of graphic representation which will decode a holy Text. At first, the reader might see an apparent contradiction appears here between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of graphism as a pre-textual method of signification, and Enzian’s use of the concept of the ‘Text’ which lies at the heart of the meaning of the War, because graphism is supposed to be opposed to writing.
But a further analysis resolves this contradiction in two interlinked ways. First of all, we must understand that all forms of social organization, and thus all forms of representation, coexist in the Zone; I have artificially parsed them from one another in order to organize this essay. In this case, we understand that Enzian sees the wreckage as an indication that there is somewhere (else) a Text, but the wreckage is not the text itself, for how could it be, when it is only wreckage? The phrase “scholar-magicians” unifies the two modes of signification, the textual and the graphic—the scholar works with texts, the magician with graphemes, and “we” (the inhabitants of the Zone) must be both. Secondly, the graphic representation of the wreckage first decodes the Text, before it recodes it. I mean to say that Enzian’s use of the wreckage to read (to interpret) the holy Text deterretorializes the Text because the significance of the text is no longer contained in the book, which was previously the body without organs of the Text. The significance of the Text is now contained on the earth itself—the body without organs of graphic representation. But then, meaning is restored back to the text itself, which can be “annotated, explicated, and masturbated.” Only after this decoding takes place does Pynchon allow for the possibility of “coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text,” a process whereby the grapheme imposes its own new meaning upon the Text; now the Text cannot be read by itself, but only through and alongside the wreckage of the Zone, which was created by a process of physical production of a desiring-machine.
2.2 The Barbaric/Despotic Socius
The second type of body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari describe, and which holds tremendous sway over the Zone, is the body of the despot in a barbaric/despotic socius. This type of socius is imperialist and Statist; it is an extension of the paranoia of the despot himself, and it is his body that operates as the body without organs. In the case of the Zone, in this sense of the socius it is not the zone itself which acts as the body without organs, but the hugely multiple agencies completing for superiority and governance in the power-vacuum created in the Zone by the war. The despotic state seeks to overcode the flows of society; that is, it seeks to inscribe its codes on the flows of the society, and does so in the name of the despot himself. Although we do not usually consider our contemporary governments “barbaric” (perhaps we ought to, given the imperialist violence they create), this type of despotic state persists even today, although over time it has ceded more and more power to the decoded flows of Capital. As the above passage (“it is an arrangement . . .” 290-291) illustrates, the despotic socius, which is usually a totality that encompasses all of a society, exists in the Zone mostly as an absence, which allows individual characters to assume the role of the despot. Countless despotic bodies of various sizes comprise a pastiche-government over the Zone: the ineffectual victorious allied parties inscribe the meaning of “victory” over the zone, but fail to overcode the entire multiplicity of flows. It is also in this realm that Slothrop himself becomes “as properly constituted as a state as any other in the Zone these days,” because in this sense, Slothrop’s paranoia causes him to inscribe his body on the Zone itself. Slothrop, at various points but not constantly, overcodes the flows of the Zone and direct them into his own paranoid narrative. Paranoia is at the origin of the formation of the despotic barbarian state—an imperialist government does not just naturally evolve from a primitive territorial machine, instead, it appears fully formed in the paranoid formations of the despot. And so paranoia is not an individual pathology that a psychoanalyst would diagnose a patient with, but an investment in a social phenomenon. Paranoia lies at the base of the drive to create despotic states.
It is in this context that we can begin to understand the rigidly segmentary politics of microfascism: in the Zone, all personal drama is political. For Deleuze and Guattari, a political entity is made up of countless segments that can be divided and subdivided all the way down to the interpersonal level, and it is on the interpersonal level that politics begins. But as a socius becomes more fascist, those segments become more rigid; each person’s segment of the political whole must be intractably aligned with all the other segments, so that the totality can be as monolithic as possible.
This does not mean that politics is decentralized, rather, the level of centralization only dictates how rigid the segments are—a fascist society is the most rigid. “There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the ‘masses’” (A Thousand Plateaus 214, emphasis in original). This can certainly be seen in Gravity’s Rainbow, which defies the notion that The War is a molar totality and instead crams it into all forms of personal interaction: Roger Mexico’s pickup line to Jessica: “’My mother is the war,’ leaning over to open the door” (39).
Because the Zone itself is defined by the lack of rigid segmentarities and strong political centralization, to find examples of rigid microfascisms in Gravity’s Rainbow we must look in the section that takes place during the war. Perhaps the best way to understand how fascism or despotism segments itself into interpersonal realities is through bureaucracy, which is how government extends its control into the lives of individuals; in Gravity’s Rainbow, we see the inside of the bureaucracy that is in charge of controlling Slothrop’s life for the first two parts of the novel. Every administrative action is controlled by paranoia. The White Visitation is technically headed up by Brigadier Pudding, “who was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries had believed in the Chain of Being” (77). Note the word “literal,” which refers not to a reality, but to a linguistic construct—it means he takes the Chain of Command at its word, and only then as a reality. He is haunted by the paranoiac idea that his post at The White Visitation is the result of a “treachery high inside Staff.” Meanwhile, Pudding is completely under the thumb of Dr. Pointsman, who has rigged up an elaborate system of sexual domination through Katje, on which Pudding is completely dependent. Through this system, not only does Pointsman absolutely control Pudding’s desires, he literally has the power of Pudding’s life in his hands because he prescribes the antibiotics that prevent Pudding from getting sick from all the shit that Katje forces him to eat.
Indeed, Pointsman is the despot at the center of The White Visitation, which is itself an institutional segment of the British war machine. It is significant that to see such an example of microfascism in Gravity’s Rainbow, we turn to the British side, not the Nazi side of the war; not to say that Nazis were less fascist, but Pynchon points out that any government that transforms itself into a war machine will necessarily employ a fascist means of organizing its segments in a rigid manner.
2.3 Capital as a Body without Organs
There is a third type of socius in the Zone: the decoded flow of Capital, which constitutes aspects of the Zone as capitalist. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism is a unique form of society because it depends on decoded flows. While the barbaric and imperialist states (which can and do persist in a capitalist socius) struggle to impose their code on all the flows, capitalism seeks to liberate flows from the realm of control and coding. Capital, in the most general sense of the term—perhaps, value—is the body without organs of the capitalist and the socius of Capitalism. It is on the surface of capital that the process of production gets recorded, for example, in profit margins or stock prices.
Unlike despotic paranoia, which acts upon the individual characters of the novel, the flows of capital act upon the novel as a whole, and all of its component parts. Capital organizes the novel whereas despotism only informs aspects of the characters. For this reason, we will have to leave Slothrop aside for a few pages, or at least see him as a partial object in a larger system of flows and desiring-production.
Modern capital is unstoppable, and always seeks to expand into new markets, and so it imposes itself from outside the Zone in a multiplicity of forms. And the novel tells us that capitalism created the War and therefore the Zone; to the extent that we can subscribe to Slothrop’s conception of an omnipotent conspiracy, a “They,” we imagine Them motivated by the flows of modern capitalism. A war is a way of decoding flows:
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. 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 provides 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 they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled ‘black’ by the professionals, spring up everywhere…(105)
This passage is a good example of the political economy that Pynchon imagines, but the important aspects of it can be found throughout the book. To name only a few examples: the pies that Slothrop helps airlift into Berlin, or the hashish that he excavates from Potsdam. But here, the reader is told that the War was specifically designed to decode the flows of capital, and create a more open market. This end is manifest in the Zone that Slothrop. finds himself in after the war, where there is no powerful state to enforce a reterritorialization of capital. That the Zone was created in this way was, in Pynchon’s conception, the main motivation for the War, as commanded by a vague but cohesive elite—sometimes referenced as “They,” here referenced as “professionals.” Ideology is manufactured not as an all-encompassing social reality, but instead only as a cover for the real movements, the movement towards decoded flows. Violence is encouraged by a conscious elite to feed the lie of history, which is used as a vehicle for ideology to interpellate the young. Contrary to many forms of Marxist thought (as in the thinking of Althusser), Ideology does not here control history, rather it only masks the true forces at work. Ideology is just a front for the powerful flows of capital, it is like the empty pizza restaurant on expensive real-estate that covers over a vast, nefarious black market. But even that black market is ‘carefully styled;’ everything for Pynchon is controlled by unseen but conscious forces—even decoded flows, which in a Schizoanalytic conception would necessarily defy control in the form of overcoding, are controlled by a central consciousness.
Deleuze and Guattari would view this intelligent design of capitalist flows as an impossibility; a decoded flow is not subject to political manipulations, which amount to a code. Here is an important point where the two texts diverge. Gravity’s Rainbow creates a fictional world that defies the logic of capitalism according to Deleuze and Guattari. And yet, in doing so, Pynchon reflects an important social reality. Although flows of capital are decoded, and thus inherently beyond the social code of morality, they often act upon human beings in a hugely destructive and oppressive way. The deterritorialized flows of capital accumulate in so few hands that it seems to the majority of the society that the economic elite does code and control capital for their own malevolent ends—and, indeed, many of them do their best to do just that, but they are driven to do so by amoral capital itself, not the inverse. Deleuze and Guattari say, “there is not a single economic or financial operation that, assuming it is translated in terms of a code, would not lay bare its own unavowable nature, that is, its intrinsic perversion or essential cynicism” (Anti-Oedipus 247). Capitalism produces cynicism exactly because the flows are uncoded; the machines of capitalism at their base care nothing for any sort of human emotion or morality, only about the completely neutral flow of raw capital. It is this cynicism that Pynchon reflects when he talks about social and economic control by centralized, conscious power. That power is so omniscient that it controls both coded and decoded flows, but as this passage illustrates, it seeks to push flows towards decoding; it seeks out free markets, not overcoding or domination like the political powers we are used to. It is the personified spirit of capital. And through this technique, it is the essential perversion of capital that Pynchon seeks to reflect. And to do so, he makes an inversion that is practically impossible by our own constructed theoretical construct. We must remember that Pynchon writes fiction. Indeed, it is exactly this cynical ability to expose the bare flows that makes Pynchon a powerful and humorous writer.
Although the War (and by extension, the Zone) was created by capital, the War has temporarily knocked the economy of the Zone straight out of the realm of modern capitalism, and the internal systems of the Zone itself has primarily regressed back into the primitive and despotic systems. Indeed, Schnorp—a minor character who ferries Slothrop into Berlin via balloon—tells Slothrop, “This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We’re back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-market” (336). This is just what the consciousness of capital that designed the war has planned; to open a new economy that is not regulated by states, but rather is capitalism in its more pure, earliest form. Capital necessarily expands into new markets, and so by creating the Zone, the war has created an entirely virgin (decoded) market for capital. Thus, after the war has performed its production upon the Zone, capitalism becomes a force that is imposed upon the zone from the outside; Schnorp, Säure the drug dealer, and all other entrepreneurs must begin by importing capital into the Zone.
We will have to return to the issue of capital as a socius in the Zone when we talk about the schizophrenic nature of Gravity’s Rainbow.
3. Slothrop’s Paranoiac Machine
In order to understand Gravity’s Rainbow as a schizophrenic machine, we must first participate in its actions; we must parse out how it breaks down meanings. I will later argue that the totality of the novel is schizophrenic; that the whole thing is a schizophrenic machine. But that molar machine is produced by a vast and bewildering web of segments: of characters and events that are molecular desiring-machines. Therefore, I must chose a molecular machine of the novel: a single functioning unit, and my analysis eventually will swim upwards along the chain of production, beginning with Slothrop and arriving at Gravity’s Rainbow. To begin to do this, I will discuss at more length the novel’s treatment of Slothrop’s paranoia.
3.1 A Word on the Social Significance of this Analysis
But I am not diagnosing Slothrop’s paranoiac machine. I am not explaining away a clinical abnormality. Rather, I am describing forces that have pulled and shaped human social reality. Paranoia is created because the very ground upon which we build our society resists the forces of desiring-production that builds and sustains society. All machines, all economies, are composed of organs of desire. And they are all created— Deleuze says ‘recorded,’ Marxists would say (re)produced—upon the surface of a body without organs. The earth is inescapably our first, most basic and most vital body without organs; it was on the surface of the earth that our ancestors carved their first pictographs and symbols, and we continue to record and inscribe our production upon it, to the point of catastrophic degradation. The ecological disaster which I will live through is the result of the dissonance and paranoia created when the earth (the first, “primitive” body without organs) refuses to yield to the forces of desiring-production, and desiring-production pushes back, hard. Capital is the body without organs of capitalism, which is the only name of its flows (remember that Capital resists all other names, and tends toward deterritorialization). Capital constantly resists the controlling (and controlled) logic of capitalism because it tends to flow toward areas of deregulation, seeking out black markets and pockets of anarchy in the economy and favoring them, building them into unwieldy tumors in the sovereignty of a capitalist state. This activates the forces of anti-production within the machine of desire; the police and the military strike back against these unregulated economies, hard. Witness: the war on drugs. Or the absurd battle to assert American dominance over Baghdad. Each of these massive human tragedies is the molar structure composed of thousands of molecular resistances and repression. Each case is different, and more tragic alone than in accumulation. That is why we allow them to go on; because we see them as large aggregates of uncontrollable force, not as individuations that reflect these structures. This is the important function of literature in a society: to break down the molar totality into the molecular and the individual; to reveal microfascisms. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is a schizophrenic process: paranoia builds totalities, the schizoid breaks them back down.
3.2 Slothrop’s Formation as a Paranoid Subject
Slothrop is formed out of many simultaneous processes of disjunction, one of which is the dissonance at the meeting place of literature and society in (differing) relation to the specific cultural moments both of the authoring and of the setting. All of these dissonances create first a paranoid subject, who as we have seen then becomes despotic, projecting himself over his world—now within the reality and logic of the novel—making himself into a body without organs, the despotic socius.
Slothrop’s formation and his conditioning is one of the great mysteries that the novel clusters around. To remind ourselves, Deleuze and Guattari tell us that the subject is formed like a barnacle on the surface of the Body without Organs by the dissonance created at the intersection of the flows of desiring-production and the unyeidling resistance of the body. So what were the various disjunctions at work in the formation of Slothrop as a subject? Countless. But the primary ones were clinical, artificial; Slothrop was systematically conditioned to be the subject he is. In the spirit of good, traditional American capitalism, Slothrop’s father sold him to Lyle Bland, an entrepreneur, who then subcontracted him out to Lazlo Jamf, the progenitor of all science in the novel. Independent of what this conditioning actually consisted of, it is first this designed construction of Slothrop into a thought experiment made flesh that lies at the foundation of his paranoiac machine.
Slothrop is constantly conscious that he was manufactured –his birth is unimportant compared to his conditioning. Deleuze and Guattari would be pleased with how doggedly Gravity’s Rainbow resists Oedipal interpretations; although the novel emphasizes Slothrop’s puritanical heritage, his mother and father are only minor figures who relinquished their control over him to a production machine.
Rather, the issue of Slothrop’s formation depends on an alternative psychoanalytic construct; Pavlovian conditioning-response. Pavlov advocated a highly mechanistic view of human (and equally animal) nature whereby we are all desiring-machines, capable of being manipulated through systematic environmental control. The clinical trials that Slothrop was subjected to were an exercise in raw power for the sake of power; they were to determine how to utterly control and manipulate a subject for no other end than to understand how to control a subject through desire. In a sense, they are the ultimate expression of totalitarian control in the novel. Pavlovian conditioning uses controlled disjunctions between stimulus and response to reform the subject in predetermined ways. The very nature of an experiment is highly totalitarian: in order to reduce the variables, the experimenter must exercise absolute control over his subject; this type of psychological experimentation seems to be an extreme example of microfascism, and it was under this clinical environment that Slothrop was formed as a subject. The experimenter inscribes his own significance on the body of his subject: Jamf inscribed his own code of meaning on the desiring-organs of Slothrop, and because Jamf is dead by the telling of the novel, this code is completely mysterious to everyone, including and especially Slothrop. Let us turn to Pynchon’s description of this process:
But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student. Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab. Unconditioned response = hardon. Conditioned stimulus = x. Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that that x.
Uh, x? well, what’s x? why, it’s the famous “mystery stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is. The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per year on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf reported for Infant T.’s erection. (84)
The text, through the reading of Dr. Pointsman, goes on to explain that usually this conditioned response is supposed to be ‘extinguished’ from the subject before he is released back into the world; but there is no way of knowing whether Jamf did so, and if he did, it could have been extinguished beyond the point of zero, so his adult conditioned response could be the negative of the one that was instilled in him as a baby. This was the process that first formed Slothrop as a subject: he had a completely arbitrary unit of signification imposed on his penis. Jamf inscribed x onto his body, and x could have been anything (what it was will be a central mystery of the book, one never completely resolved—but it almost certainly has something to do with the Schwartzgerat rocket or its component part, Imnipolex G). Jamf has not only overcoded Slothrop’s body, he has also overcoded his primary organ of desire. For the rest of his life, no one (especially himself) can be sure that Slothrop’s desires are his own; they have always been co-opted by the process of signification. Perhaps his every movement, his every sexual encounter, his every desire, has been installed in him like a piece of software. And this despotic coding of Slothrop’s body was completely public—not only is the experiment written about in the humor magazine, but also the length of his baby penis is common knowledge. The importance of this cannot be overstated: from the beginning of his life, when he was sold to Lyle Bland, Slothrop had no private life—his body was the surface of inscription for all of society. He was always-already the center of signification for an entire generation—the war generation. So it makes a tremendous amount of sense that in his adult life, the story of Slothrop’s desiring-conquests would be the story of the War itself.
Reasonably, all of this—the utter totalitarian control over every aspect of Slothrop’s formation as a subject, and the continual surveillance over his life—makes him paranoid, or, in Deleuzian terms, makes him a paranoiac machine. Paranoia is an agent of molar unities—it says that everything is connected in a giant network of power. It is an unfortunate misconception that the word “paranoia” connotes that the necessary They is an imagination or a construction; in fact, paranoia is completely independent of Their empirical reality. It happens in Slothrop’s case that he certainly does have cause to be paranoid, but not quite to the extent that he is; the novel shows us agencies, most notably Dr. Pointsman and The White Visitation, that attempt to survey and control Slothrop, and during “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering,” they do control his daily reality. But they are not the absolute, omnipotent sovereigns of his reality the way he imagines They are.
His construction of Them is most tangible in the Casino, where he stumbles into a room that has been overcoded in mysterious ways: For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of waking he has only lately begun to suspect.
There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or manlike figure beginning to form among the brown and bright cream shadows and light here. But Slothrop isn’t about to be let off quite so easy. Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical. . .but. . .but. . . (202)
There follows a whimsical song called THE WORLD OVER THERE. This passage reveals the fundamental nature of a paranoid construct as an alternative code that the subject projects onto reality, and then attributes to an utterly Other, a nearly omnipotent They. It is a process of overcoding, of imposing a structure that makes everything connected. In this alternative code, signifiers (the objects in the room, paraphernalia, chairs) lose their “normal” signified and become attached instead to a hidden network that unifies them into a single system of control. Pynchon offers a good image of this hidden network in the word “rootlike”—if it was real, the system of overcoding that the paranoiac machine constructs would resemble a network of roots under an aspen grove; the unseen, subterranean connections that makes each tree part of the same organism. As he is just fully coming into his paranoiac machine, Slothrop here at first almost convinces himself that he could see or was in the physical presence of this unknowable unity—he begins to imagine the figure of a man, or the root system. But that would be “letting him off too easy.” Who would be doing the “letting him off?” What authority is dictating the shape of his paranoiac machine? My analysis thus far has given me the license to say something along the lines of ‘since he is the paranoiac machine, and is constructing this alternative code, he is the one who has the authority to deny himself this clear object of his paranoia.’
But this would be too simple, and would be wrong given the logic of paranoia that Pynchon lays out. The subject cannot control the paranoiac machine; in fact, once the paranoiac machine has taken hold of the subject’s body, there is no more discrete, unified subject. The most important part of the system of overcoding produced by the paranoiac machine is that it is itself entangled in the rootlike network, perhaps even at the very center of the network—a part of the molar totality that it produced. This robs the paranoiac machine of any autonomy whatsoever; it becomes as controlled as it has imagined itself to be. It has no subjectivity anymore. This is why Slothrop is “[…]buffaloed under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught in this steel pot, softening to a devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words” (389). To paranoid, the verb form now, is the process by which you the subject is caught inside an unyielding verbal trap—a steel pot made of your own words. The subject is violently reduced like mushroom bisque. But it did not come to happen, it happened immediately: Slothrop’s paranoia never had subjectivity; it was not at first his paranoia; it was thrust upon him by the authorities.
3.3 The Paranoiac/Despotic Regime of Signs
It is absolutely necessary for Pynchon sometimes to give Slothrop this position of the despot because it is only this type of political machine that invests language with the power to inscribe the flows that move over the socius—in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call this the signifying regime of signs (or the despotic regime of signs), and that this is one among many regimes of signs that can exist in a society. They contend that verbal language is first the language of the despot because it is absolute and arbitrary; it imposes itself on all who use it. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari avoid talking about ‘power’ or ‘control’ and talk instead about coding and assigning meaning. The first use of language was to enact laws and thus to begin to overcode the flows on the body of the socius. All writing flows from a despotic signifier, and it will never escape this origin; language is first used to enslave the masses by overcoding the deterritorialized flow. The signifying regime of signs organizes a despotic society in concentric circles: the paranoid despot himself lies at the center of all signification: he is the ultimate signified. Since it is Slothrop’s paranoiac machine at issue here, he occupies the place of the despot—he imagines himself at the center of a paranoiac network. In this system, all signs refer back to other signs, creating a network of signification, but at the center of that network is the despot. The “priests” are a vital part of this social arrangement, because they interpret the signs on behalf of the despot, and thus invest the signs with meaning. In Gravity’s Rainbow, that role of the interpreter is the text itself, which provides the reader with explanations of Slothrop’s paranoiac system: this can best be seen in the device of the “Proverbs for Paranoids.”
But according to Deleuze and Guattari, a vital component of the signifying regime is the faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treaded, and adorned by priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight into the desert” (A Thousand Plateaus 116). There is always a line of escape in a despotic system, and that line of escape will become vitally important to my analysis of the schizophrenic regime of signs. True to the Schizoanalytic theory, Slothrop asserts his control over language at his most paranoid moments, for example, in the White Visitation as he is locked in conversation with Hilary Bounce:
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: the innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master.
“I hope I haven’t said anything wrong.”
“Whyzat?”
“you look—“ Bounce aspirating what he means to be a warm little laugh, “worried.”
Worried all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it—there! that’s that monsterI was talking about. –That’s no monster, stupid, that’s clouds! –No, can’t you see? It’s his feet—Well, Slothrop can fell this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities…or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening…
“It’s only a ‘wild coincidence,’ Slothrop.”
He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others. It is a bookish kind of reflex, maybe he’s genetically predisposed—all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones—all the materials and dimensions. (241-242)
Slothrop feels that he is being deluded by the deliberate misuse of language—that everyone else has agreed to ‘call them other names’ when he is listening. He imagines a linguistic plot specifically targeted at him; everyone involved got together and invented a set of code words that they would use to upset Slothrop’s ability to comprehend reality. The novel does not confirm nor deny that this paranoia reflects reality, because the novel does not pursue any objective reality outside of paranoia. But this passage reveals the despotic signifier in paranoia; the paranoiac feels threatened by a whole realm of signification which he is subject to and yet has no control over, and so he enacts his own system which he has despotic power over; he can decide when to insert quotation marks into the speech of others, thereby allowing himself to code his own paranoia. In this passage, he overcodes everything that Bounce says by appropriating it into his own paranoid system. First with the word “worried,” by which Bounce means no harm, but which gives Slothrop affirmation that there is something to be worried about.
It is Bloat’s innocence that enables him to naively throw around words like “wild coincidence” in front of a paranoiac, who will obviously see it as a halfhearted attempt to cover the truth. But let us remind ourselves that while Slothrop becomes a center of signification—like a despot who imposes his own meaning on language—the impulse to do so was installed in him by Pavlovian conditioning that he could not control.
Pynchon’s occasional invocations of Slothrop’s Puritan serve as one demonstration that this paranoiac system of overcoding is a relative of the linguistic system of coding that Deleuze and Guattari discuss as the foundation of a despotic or imperialist socius, which is the foundation of the fascist tendency. In this way, we are given a framework for understanding the unity of language, politics, and desiring-production. Slothrop’s tendency towards paranoia is based in his Puritan genealogy: “it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in” (188). The continual references to Slothrop’s puritan heritage are one of the only significant emphases on his genealogy. The Puritans came to America to impose their code on a new land; as Pynchon here points out, theirs was an imperialism of the Book, and it was fueled by the paranoia of escaping oppression and overcoding in England. They did not come to create a land of freedom, which would decode and deterritorialize; their intolerance of other religions is a demonstration of this. Their allegiance was to the holy Text, which gave them despotic power to impose their own code over a virgin land. Although circumstances are variable, this is always the movement of an empire; to spread outwards and impose its own code upon previously decoded societies (or societies that have such a different code that to the imperialists that they seem decoded).
The puritan reflex is also inherently connected to the capitalism reflexthat I have argued is the source of the War in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon presents World War II not as a moral struggle for justice, but as a necessity of capital; the war decoded the flows of capital and opened a vast black market in the center of Europe. And so the despotic puritan impulse reemerges.
This must necessarily call to mind Max Weber’s analysis of early capitalism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that capitalism was a product of the puritan work ethic; that the system of capital originally grew out of a religious, protestant ethic. The protestant work ethic demanded that people work as hard as possible to accumulate as much capital as possible, thus changing the flow of capital in society: the accumulation of capital was the first step in decoding capital.
Before the Spirit of Capitalism took hold, Weber argues that the labor force only worked as much as it needed to make enough to survive by a traditionalist standard. Therefore, the capital that they accumulated through their labor was immediately spent; it was not decoded, it just shifted its code from “wage” to “food” almost instantaneously. But the puritan work ethic caused capital to accumulate in a more abstract and decoded form: money.
These first accumulations of money as uncoded capital were signs that the owner of these flows were Elect. In Pynchon’s World War II, the Elect continue to be those who control the most decoded flows of capital. Although Slothrop himself controls nothing, he is the descendant of the archetypal capitalist race—the protestants—and so his history is steeped in the flow of capital, which will gain significance when I argue for the force of his schizophrenic process.
Slothrop continues this “puritan” or despotic tendency to thrust his code onto the surface of the War or the ensuing Zone. His paranoiac machine overcodes the objective reality of the novel. A paranoiac machine always projects itself outward, seeking to make connections in order to totalize and unify everything under a despotic body. I do not use the word “projects” in a psychoanalytic sense—which would imply that it is a delusion or a construction of a subject—since the paranoiac machine has done away with the subject. Real political entities are built by the projection of paranoia over a socius. One example of this overcoding is the overlay of Slothrop’s map over the London blitz:
Still Slothrop keeps his map up daily, boobishly conscientious. At its best, it does celebrate a flow, a passing from which—among the sudden demolitions from the sky, mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laboring of nights that for himself are only idle—he can save a moment here or there, the days again growing colder, frost in the morning, the feeling of Jennifer’s breasts inside cold sweater’s wool held to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he’ll never know the daytime despondency of…. (23)
First we must note the precise overlap of Pynchon’s diction and Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology: both emphasize the nature of desire as a flow, which can be recorded upon a surface. Slothrop’s flow of desire is recorded first over the actual surface of London, and then represented on the surface of his map. Later, the Slothrop admits to the reader that there is at least a strong element of fantasy in this record of sexual conquests (302), and it becomes impossible to tell which stars represent real sexual encounters and which do not--but they all get hit by rockets. Through their surveillance of Slothrop, the folks at The White Visitation realize that his map, which first just locates his sexual conquests, predicts exactly the hits of German rockets. There is much debate as to why this is, and it is never resolved, but one thing is clear: it is absolutely not the result of any agency or determination by Slothrop. “Mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laboring of nights that for himself are only idle” articulately illustrates how disconnected Slothrop is from the running of the Blitz. For him, the bombs are almost a force of nature, albeit a force of nature to be feared to the point of insanity. Rather, what seems to be his control over the Blitz is somehow linked to his Pavlovian conditioning that formed his paranoiac machine. We can never know how or why Slothrop’s paranoiac machine is projecting itself over the blitz, but we should understand the effect that it has within the text; we should see it not as a method of control, but as a representation. Slothrop’s map provides a code that makes a randomized, entropic event seem unified, cohesive, and strangely rational. The territorial location of his desiring-flows bind disparate elements into a unity. The result of this unity is the paranoid knowledge that the rockets must not be really random, but rather controlled by a centralized, despotic, nearly omnipotent force. This force exists in Gravity’s Rainbow; if Pynchon says that the rockets follow Slothrop’s map, then they do.
Pynchon uses the narration to interpret Slothrop’s paranoia and make it seem like the absolute and despotic law of the world that the novel creates; in doing so, it occupies the position of the “priest” in Deleuze and Guattari’s signifying regime of signs. The structure that Pynchon uses for discussing the paranoiac machine of the book demonstrates paranoia’s inherent despotism. He lists five “Proverbs for Paranoids” that are set off from the text but often inform the current scene. Proverbs are a folk form of an imperative; they are not really to be questioned. By inventing them.
Pynchon thrusts Slothrop’s way of understanding his world over all interactions between characters as well as our own readings as a consumer of the novel. It will be useful for our analysis to cite all of them:
Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. (237)
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master (241)
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. (251)
Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek. (262)
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations. (292)
In the latter half of part II, they are quite frequent, but the last one comes just a few pages into part III (“In the Zone”). This is indicative of a development in Slothrop in a novel that seems to offer no such thing on any level. The proverbs mostly come while Slothrop is at the Casino, where he is being trained, manipulated by The White Visitation, readied for his time in The Zone. But he is also learning how to be a despotic agent in the paranoid system that he is locked into, how to manipulate the paranoid web, and bend it to his own advantage. That is why the first two Proverbs come from a system of manipulating the ‘creatures,’ the lackeys carrying out the master’s plans. By creating these rules for himself, Slothrop realizes that he can give himself some agency, some autonomy, to manipulate the outer limits of the paranoid network. He will never get to touch the inner, totalizing force—‘the Master’—but he can tickle his clueless creatures. But Proverbs 3 and 4 have a different tone—they are useful for guiding Slothrop through a paranoid system, but they lead the reader and Slothrop to accept submission to the paranoia, to embrace it and deal with it as part of life. Especially Proverb 4, “you hide, they seek,” has a simplicity that leads us to understand the absolute inevitability and inescapable nature of the paranoid life, even as he is in the process of escaping Pointsman’s system of surveillance (that proverb comes at the beginning of Slothrop’s flight into the Zone). This fourth proverb hints at submission; it implies an acceptance of the paranoid system, as if Slothrop must hide because it is simply his role in a system he cannot control. Slothrop never entirely submits, but there are plenty of characters in the book who do. Deleuze and Guattari call the subject who has chosen submission a miraculating machine. The fifth proverb is unique because it recognizes that the paranoid machine is constructed, while still attributing reality to the ‘paranoid situations.’ Although Slothrop has been deprived of his subjectivity by his paranoiac machine, it is still his paranoiac machine; it resides in his body and guides him through life, constantly putting him in paranoid situations. By the time we get proverb 5, Slothrop is well into The Zone, a period of the book when he seems to have much more autonomy; the White Visitation has lost track of him, and he seems to be on a relatively personal mission to find the Schwartzgerat.
3.4. The Miraculating Machine
According to Deleuze and Guattari, paranoia is only the first reaction to the dissonance at the surface of the body without organs. Through utter submission and loss of the ego, a subject can join with the forces of desiringproduction to become a miraculating machine. For Deleuze and Guattari, this functions as a “return of the repressed” (Anti-Oedipus 17). They cite a series of schizophrenics who reached this phase in their paranoia, from Judge Schreber to Robert Gie, about whom it was said “Since he was unable to free himself of these currents that were tormenting him, he gives every appearance of having finally joined forces with them, taking passionate pride in their total victory, in their triumph” (L’ Art Brut qtd in Anti-Oedipus 17).
They argue that it is in this unification of the subject on the body without organs and the forces of desiring production that miracles can occur—or perhaps that very unification is a miracle. Gravity’s Rainbow is also obsessed with the potential of submission, but it is not clear that submission always leads to a miraculating machine. Because the novel constantly contradicts itself, it provides gestures toward the potential for submission to be a miracle, but also demonstrates how vital submission is to reproducing despotic power structures. Here, perhaps, there is an important difference in the sensibilities of Deleuze and Guattari and Pynchon’s. Although Gravity’s Rainbow is fiction, Pynchon is dealing with a much more real system and malevolent of control—a War Machine—than Robert Gie, who was simply a delusional schizophrenic. It is easy for Gie to join with the forces that torment him, because he made those forces up. Gravity’s Rainbow is obsessed with submission as a political construct, and it is only in this context that the recurring sado-mascochist scenes and bondage motifs of the novel can be understood. It was due to these elements of the novel that it was denied the Pulitzer Prize, and it is important to understand the political implications of these scenes, which are not simple and direct. Sometimes Pynchon provides us reason to believe in the miraculating potential of submission, but in other important scenes submission is only used to reinforce paranoiac/fascist power.
Both the miraculating potential for S and M and the paranoiac potential of submission can be seen in the Sado-anarchist philosophy of Mikilos Thanatz:
“Ludwig, a little S and M never hurt anybody.”
“Who said that?”
“Sigmund Freud. How do I know? But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.”
This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoritician in the Zone these days. (737)
Thanatz—another alais for Blicero—was married to Greta Erdmann, on whom one of the most hardcore scenes of domination is enacted, for the pleasure of the viewing public. Thanatz had seen sadism in its most positive light; the domination of his wife brought immense pleasure to thousands of men, and created a collective orgasm across Europe. The theory of Sado-anarchism that he here expounds is intensely idealistic; it does not occur to him that domination and sadism could be just as easily reinforce and reproduce the Structure that he seeks to erase. There is a real hint of Deleuze and Guattari’s miraculating concept in Thanatz’s philosophy.2 Thanatz believes that if S and M were established universally, the State would automatically wither away, but he gives no justification or mechanism for this to happen; it would occur as if it was simply a miracle, as if the spiritual power would simply be metaphysically drained out of the despotic system. But at the same, Thanatz is acutely aware of the importance of submission in a despotic system, and therefore he ought to understand that not all S and M is enacted in a subversive mode; S and M can just as easily be used to extract the submission that the System needs to “co-opt us into its own power game.”
But there is a real differentiation to be made between the hedonistic Sado-anarchism of Greta and Thanatz and the militaristic, authoritarian domination that Katje and Gottfried receive at the hand of Blicero/Wiesmann, which has some traits in common with the scatological domination that Katje (in the guise of the Domina Nocturna) enacts on Brigadier Pudding. The latter two examples do not undermine the Structure, rather they reinforce and make absolute the hierarchy that is the Structure. There is no potential for liberation when even the dominating body has no freedom or autnomy, when both subjects are locked in the same rigid system. For example, the “Domina Nocturna” scene at The White Visitation is not controlled by the Domina herself; rather, the whole thing is an orchestrated play on behalf of Dr. Pointsman to maintain his unquestioned control over The White Visitation. Technically, Brigadier Pudding outranks Pointsman, but what occurs at The White Visitation is entirely Pointsman’s project, and he needs to neutralize the power of the bureaucrat sent to supervise him. Due to this nightly domination, Pointsman literally has the power to decide if Pudding lives or dies; he prescribes and forces Pudding to take the antibiotics that will prevent him from getting sick from eating excrement. The Domina gives the reader real clues that she is not in charge of her own actions—that she doesn’t even enjoy her role: “her instructions were not to smoke” (233).
However, Pudding does enjoy it. He needs to submit; he has spent his life in submission to the British military, and he is “bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet. . .” (234). Again, They re-emerge in their omnipotence; it is the They-system that has denied Pudding any real hope for reality or truth, it is the rigid hierarchy of the War Machine that has denied him sensation or humanity. This does not mean that his domination provides an escape from Them, but only serves to ensure that he must show up and enjoy his domination every night.
It is a somewhat different situation on the other side of The War, in the Oven Game, but again the ritualized submission of a subject provides no potential either for miracles or for anarchism. As I will discuss again in Chapter 3, Blicero/Weismann, who makes Gottfried and Katje his slaves, is the epitome of German authoritarian and imperialist control. As opposed to the Domina Nocturna, Blicero is in absolute control of his domination, but because he is the despotic system, submission to him is not a submission to an individual, but to the War Machine itself. Blicero is compared to a “Spanish inquisitor” (94), an authority figure who dominates subjects not for pleasure, but who represents a system of despotic oppression. The Oven Game is based less on sadomasochist pleasure and more on ritualized imperial humiliation:
How seriously is she [Katje] playing? In a conquered country, one’s own occupied country, it’s better, she believes, to enter into some formal, rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form or decent limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings, beatings subterfuge, paranoia, shame. . . (96)
This is the only potential for a positive implication of the Oven Game; it enables Katje to visualize and understand the system of fascist control that she has been placed under, and therefore allows her to understand what it would mean to escape from it. And she does, leaving her “brother” Gottfried behind. But given that she only escapes to the other side of the War to become utterly controlled by The White Visitation, I resist the idea that her escape from Blicero is an escape with any promise of real liberation. She does escape from a brutal, fascist state into a slightly less malevolent bureaucratic state, but this is hardly a “miracle” or even a move towards anarchism.
3.5 The Inescapability of Paranoiac Systems
I have argued the absolute inescapability of the paranoiac/despotic They-systems that control the characters of Gravity’s Rainbow. But some of the characters, particularly Slothrop, is himself a paranoiac who creates a system of despotic signification that re-orders the reality around him into a massive paranoid network with himself at the center. Whether his paranoid system is “real” in the book is irrelevant; all that matters is that he is inescapably controlled by it, and that he can not react against it because it controls his every movement, his every thought—even if he rebelled against it, he would do so because he had been conditioned to do so.
But because these paranoiac systems are inescapable for the characters of the novel, the novel as a whole (and therefore the readers of the novel) can imagine an escape from these systems. The critical selfawareness that the novel brings to bear on They-systems enables the novel to engage in a schizophrenic process of escape and decomposition, whereby the paranoid systems are only one partial object of a novel that utterly defies despotic or fascist totalities.
No one, to my knowledge, has commented on the irony that a novel that so effectively critiques the imperialist, omnipotent force of corporations should so immediately and readily be surrendered to one of the largest American publishing houses. It is so surrendered because in order for the novel to achieve its own productive agenda, it has to be read and internalized by at least some segment of the public, and the best resources for marketing and distribution of novels come with the largest corporate publishing houses.
Notice the little dig that Pynchon makes here on Freud; Pynchon would have agreed with Deleuze’s anti-psychoanalytic perspective. This allusion is ironic because Freud provided an important theoretical basis to think that S and M, and especially child molestation (which is what Thanatz is going for in this scene), really does hurt people. With Thanatz’s offhand answer to Ludwig’s query, he mocks the psychoanalytic project.