Chaos, Fractals & GR

[WildForest at aol.com]

Date:  Tue, May 23, 1995 10:03 PM EST
From:  WildForest
Subj:  Re: Chaos, Fractals
To:      PELOVTZD at acfcluster.nyu.edu

Bonnie Surfus wrote:
 
> On Sun, 21 May 1995, Tim Ware wrote: 
> > You really can't have one without the other.  Thesis/antithesis.  The 
> > dance.  The interface.  The taming/ordering of charisma.  Systems exist 
> > between the 0 and 1, not one or the other.  Not good system/bad 
> > system--just systems.  To tame "the green uprising" into a garden is not 
> > necessarily a bad thing.  
> > 
> Well now, I'll just chime in here and say that this is what I suggest in 
> my article on _Vineland_;  that we see "not good system/bad system--just 
> systems."  In fact, the diction is very similar to Tim's (talk about the 
> interface.)  Rushdie says something about the redeeming qualities of 
> "community."  Katherine Hayles speaks of "snitches" and "families," as 
> opposing forces that operate in the novel.  I believe that the nature of 
> suggests that we see "just systems," that ultimately follow one path.  

Don't have much time to contribute to this extremely interesting topic.  I'm
off to No. Cal., Nevada, and Idaho to interview leaders of the Aryan Nation
for the Village Voice...I think I'll title the piece:  The White Visitation.
  But a few random thoughts, in case I don't make it home.

1. All systems are not equal.  A lot of that thesis/antithesis talk drummed
up by Hegel, Marx, and Feuerbach was just so much political rhetoric to give
hope to the proletariate/preterite. The counterforce is an oppositional force
to Their system, but we, the CF that is, are extremely outgunned. We are
fractions of factions against monoliths. If this collision of "opposing
forces" is a "dance," its the kind of slamdancing I used to do when the Clash
came to town.  

Whaddya mean...there are no good or bad systems?  Yeah, like for instance,
what about the LA interstate system...now that comes off pretty damn bad in
COL49, and its even worse today.  And we're not even talking about the Final
Solution or the treatment of the Herreros or the extinction of the Dodo or
polychlorinated Benzenes or New Criticism or MS Windows.  Jeepers, Kenosha
Kid, do They really think TRP stands in the middle on this?  Boy, it is the
age of the Newties.

I think Foucault's notion's about power relationships and transgressions are
much more useful in understanding what's going on in GR and VL...than, say,
chaos theory, which, to me,  represents the kind of technofetishism that is
the ultimate refuge of the nihilist and the narcissist.  (Any way Chaos
Theory is Out, Complexity Reigns...at least according to the latest issue of
Sci. American, and we know who owns a life sub. to that rag, don't we?)

2. Systems replicate and clone themselves, they struggle for dominance. Take
colonialism, corporate capitalism, industrial forestry, modern dentistry.
These are malign systems that have taken on a life of their own, that operate
beyond the control of any individual or even cartel of individuals.  Hell, IG
Farben and Shell Oil systems are bigger now than they were in the 40s.  Even
eugenics is making a comeback...look at norplant (Developed at Nordhausen by
some jive-assed mother fucker?  One wonders...)  

Tim Ware, in particular, seems anxious to exonerate systems of all kinds from
any kind of culpability in human misery.  The fault lies w/ the individual
for either using an offensive system or being used or abused by it--those
damn teenage mothers, taking advantage of the system (You can see where this
kind of thinking leads).  

I think this is demonstrably false in GR. There are (is there a better word
for it?) evil systems and institutions that are inhabited by not necessarily
evil humans, these system have their own momentum, their own intelligences,
they often operate totally independent of human will, design, or plan.  

Ontop of this systems condition behavior.  Choices are restricted, vision is
tunnelized, people get hardons just thinking about death-technologies, we are
conditioned to hate blacks and jews, view arabs as turbanheaded terrorists,
speak english, buy cigarettes.  Hell the System may even be poking around in
our DNA, playing secret sociobiological games.

If Pynchon writes another novel (and if he has to face this kind of constant
litcrit he'll probably wait another decade) I'll wager it deals a lot more
with Artificial Intelligences...this is certainly something picked up on by
some of Pynchon's better pupils, including Wm Gibson, John Shirley, Tom
Maddux, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling.

Critics, of course, defend the neutrality of systems because that's what they
spend their careers doing.  They are, As my buddy Squalidozzi sez: "obsessed
with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.  To draw
ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet.  We cannot abide that
openness:  it is terror to us.  Look at Borges.  Look at the suburbs of
Buenos Aires."

3.  I agree w/ Bonnie, Rushdie (great bit on Letterman, Salman, if yer
lurking out there), et. al. that Vineland, and GR for that matter, are at
their epicenters books about kinships, families, communities...about finding
the way home, defending the hometurf, bathing in the lifeforce.  

But are these relationships, these impulses, systems?  Well, perhaps to the
anthropologist, who would display them coldly on some kind of chart or graph,
to routinize them, overhead project them, turn the extended family, the
community of resistance into some kind of damn bureaucracy...but that's not
why I read Pynchon.  

Instead:  I ook for the contingencies, the soft connections, free-form and
fluid relationships, the temporary unions and alliances, moments of love, and
common causes... to find the occassions when "for a little while all the
fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone
cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of
coordinates from which to proceed, without even nationality to fuck it up..."

Over and out.
JSC