*Question/JA on Deleuze/Totality

[Adrian Kelly]

I want to reply to several of the posts, but can someone tell
me why my reply function now sends the reply only to the sender
and not, as it did previously, to the list as a whole?
   Anyway.  On the "a-and": my god folks, it's a stutter that adds
to Slothrop's boyish charm.  What was all that about V and A?
and Wittgenstein?  If that's true, what do we make of the
"o-or"s in _Vineland_?  Are they rilly significant?
   I thought Joseph raised an important point about the trendiness
of Deleuze-Guattari/Pynchon.  Something I'm absolutely guilty of
participating in, but which horrified me when I discovered its dimensions
(eg. the Warwick Conference).  I began the countdown to thesis
burnout.  The popularity of D&G in literary studies is interesting
considering Foucaults less than tacit warning in the preface to AO.
Rhizomic thought emerges, only to creep along the edges of
(institutionalized) Totality.  D & G have become the theorists of
everything, and you're just not hep to the drive if you havn't looked
up deterritorialization in a dictionary of literary theory.  The
'problem' with D&G in regards to Pynchon, though, is that at times
AO, ATP, and GR look *as if they could have been written by the same
person* (a-and saaayy, didn't TP ["TP"?!...] spend some time in that
Paris in the early seventies?).
  Let's consider the following example; an entirely selfish gesture
on my part since it's something I've been thinking about, but I
think (and hope) that it may open up some issues for further
discussion.  What I'm focussing on is the theme of (anti)totality.
   D&G:  'Totality/molar unities are b-bad, fascist.  Multiplicity,
molecular flows, schizoid-formations good.'
  Pynchon:  Yeah but m-maybe not (?)
 Now what about that perplexing advent scene in GR:
       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
       folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans
       have engineered, ein Volk ein Fuhrer, it wants a
       machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a
       complexity.... (130-131 [I think]).

Hmm.  I guess the appropriate question is who is speaking here?
But if we can leave that aside for a moment, one-ness, totality,
ego-dissolution, choose the label, is advocated here, and
explicitly compared to the folk-consciousness of Nazi
Germany, certainly the type of molar formation that D & G
rebuke.  In Male Fantasies, Theweleit also points out that
the folk-consciousness is not to be confused with the kind of
schizoid-deindividualization that D&G advocate.  He points out
the way in which the German populace was regarded as a degenerate
mass that had to be organized into a functional (ie subservient)
unity.  The folk-con was still a hierarchical formation, supervised
by the Elect, who maintained a (technologically) hardened ego and
sense of individuality.
  I'm probably not pointing to anything that TP did not think about,
because shortly after the above passage comes this one:
        Surely for as long as there have been nights
        bad as this one -- something to raise the
        possibility of another night that could
        actually, with love and cockcrows, light the
        path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the
        boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our
        stories, all false, about who we are[...] (135?)

This (one of the best passages in GR, I think) sounds almost exactly like
the kind of intersubjective multiplicity that D&G champion.
Perhaps, in a book that dynamically inter-relates Zeros and Ones, the
juxtaposition of these two passages and their points of view is not
that suprising.  Is Pynchon acknowledging the (conditioned) reflex
to misrecognize oppressive totalities such as the folk-consciouness, or is
he 'mistakenly' associating the multiplicity advocated in the second
passage (or have I misread it?) with a totalizing fusion?  Is the overall
text itself, despite its avowedly anti-totality gesture nonetheless
totalitarian, a "'motley painting of everything that has ever been
known'" as D&G say again of capitalism in AO?  Big questions I guess.
Any thoughts?

BTW, more on Josephs thoughts re D&G and on "sounding cool" by using
them.  Using D&G in literary exposition is fine, but as long as the
use is grounded, I think, in a critical practice that supplements the
abstraction of their theory with ref. to material, historical events
that the the literary text under question engages.  (But I suppose
my own pedantry will be shot down by my dissertation committee some
day, if my thesis ever gets done  before the dozens of others who
are interfacing Pynchon with D&G write it first...)

PS  I liked the equation of Jimmy Stewart and Slothrop.  When I picture
Slothrop cinematically, I picture a young Jimmy Stewart, and sometimes
a slightly chubby Cary Grant.  Who would play Blicero and Enzian?