A sketch of Pynchonian politics

[Phil Wise]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jane O' Sweet" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 6:58 AM
Subject: Re: A sketch of Pynchonian politics


>
>
> Phil Wise wrote:
>
>
>  I wonder if that's similar to the structure of the free
> trade argument - that people the world over either they open
> up and grab some of that action or remain terrorised.  Of
> course, Pynchon is relatively silent on this, at least up to
> M&D, which I don't know well enough to comment on, but the
> similarity is quite striking.
>
> Me:
>
> The similarities, if there are any, are dependent upon that
> mass death, right? What is that mass death?

For Pynchon it is in the war.  Today, its ante has just been upped by
Dubya's clumsy diplomacy, but it is also possibly the mass deaths (briefly
alluded to perhaps in Vineland) required in Chile to establish Pinoche's
economic miricle there, the systematic destruction of union organisers and
leftist politicians in Central America and South East Asia (especially
Indonesia) using death squads to establish and consolodate friendly right
wing administrations there in the 1970s and 1980s, it might be activities in
Columbia (perhaps), or the thousands dying each day (according to a UN
report last year) as a result of IMF/World Bank policies.

>
>  "Capitalism" it was said here, and repeated, "is not an
> ideology".  Evidence of a totalising system's ideological
> nature would be erased, for that evidence invites heresy,
> disagreement, and contest, porovides an "unsettling
> blackness".
> >
> > It is unlikely that Pynchon is an all-the-way Marxist, because the
providential notion of the perfection of society through the rise of the
proleteriat led to totalitarianism in the USSR.
>
>
>
> Maybe he simply agrees with Weber on Marx and then, because
> P is interested in Religion as politics/economics, he wove
> Weber's (perhaps voegelin, spengler?) into his comparative
> religion studies and his freud/jung/brown/marcuse? Maybe?
> There are three books, besides Sasuly that would have given
> him the presidential advisor, academics, so on...
>
Maybe...