unlikely utopians (was Are They?)

[jbor]

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>From: Muchasmasgracias at cs.com

> Whoever wrote that line about Reagan (it was you, calbert, right?) seems to
> be relieving themself of the burden of saying who's doing well and who's
> fucking up.  We are not all fucking up in such a blanket way as "We R They",
> ominously cool as that sounds.  Everything after such a statement seems
> doomed to incoherence.  What room is left to address how wacko Reagan's
> political career has been?

Not to shout you down or make you cry or anything, not intentionally anyway,
but you're fucking up big time. The "We R They" formulation was Mike
Weaver's inaccurate paraphrase of what I'd written:

   "They" isn't a personal pronoun in *GR* at all: it signifies systems and
   institutions in which *we* are implicated, which *we* accept and
   perpetuate. *"They"* 'r' Us.

While I do have a lot of time for Mike Weaver's idealism (and that of
Fourier, Marx, Gramsci et. al.) -- his vision of the generation of "a We
system capable of supplanting Their system (i.e. capitalism) with a far more
creative and nurturing way of life" -- my point was that, *for Pynchon in
his texts*, these We-systems (eg. the Trystero, W.A.S.T.E., the
Schwarzkommando, The Counterforce, the "Floundering Four" even) are just as
doomed to bureaucratic squabbling, corruption, and reinvention as an
oppressive They-system, as the They-systems which they are seeking to
supplant. This, imo, is the political vision of Pynchon's fiction, and it's
one I tend to agree with. Any "utopia" -- whether actual or theoretical --
soon becomes a dystopia. Even the most "ideal" of all these mooted utopias
would end up becoming a stagnant and dull place to live.

The discussion on 638-9 between Roger and Pirate is an important one in this
context. Roger mistakes Milton Gloaming as one of "Them", and Pirate
corrects him. He explains that a "We-system" is a "contrary set of delusions
... about ourselves", delusions which have been "officially-defined" (by
"Them") and accepted "out of expediency" by us. Both Roger and the narrative
agency are confused:

     It's a little bewildering -- if this is a "We-system," why isn't it at
   least thoughtful enough to interlock in a reasonable way, like
   They-systems do?
      "That's exactly it," Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide,
   alarming grin, "*They're* the rational ones. We piss on Their rational
   arrangements. Don't we . . .  Mexico?"
     "Hoorah!" cry the others. Well taken, Osbie.

But Osbie is *answering the narrator*. The *unvoiced narration is heard* as
dialogue by Osbie and "the others" (and by the reader, of course): thus does
Pynchon's literary mode subvert logic, novelistic conventions, reveal the
duplicity of same, and thereby exemplify the political message of his text.
It's rationalism, that ol' Enlightenment project again -- all the
simple-minded black and white moralising and sermonising -- which is at the
heart of the system as he portrays it. The "They" in *GR* are those who are
deluded into believing and accepting the rationalist worldview, but they are
mere minions, "the system" is its (not "Their") monster.

Human perspectives are singular: "political" perspectives presume to an
objectivity which individuals simply cannot and do not possess, and are
bound to be blinkered, solipsistic. It's so so simplistic, not to mention
subjective, not to mention unproductive, to make assertions about "who's
doing well and who's fucking up". The fact that Reagan started to sound more
and more like a fool actually worked against the system's interests, ditto
Nixon's Watergate fuck-up. If anything these two bozos sped up the collapse
of the political hegemony, only to see it superseded by the current
media/corporate hegemony. But it's hegemony that's the problem, not which
particular faction possesses it at any given time.

best