Cognitive Fictions

[Dave Monroe]

More from Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (Mpls: U of
Minnesota P, 2002), Ch. 2, "Mapping the Cor(e)tex(t):
Thomas Pynchon," pp. 25-53 ...

"In passages addressed to 'everybody' in Gravity's
Rainbow, Pynchon had already anticipated the
sentimental, 'virtual' communities imagined by later
proponents of the Internet, and he also worked through
a conception of hypertextual connectivity that would
bring the isolated reader into immediate contact with
all other readers on a globally linked network.  What
such largely spatial utopias neglect however is the
necessarily temporal condition of media, which retain
... the mythical function of an archive, a place where
the voices and inscriptions of people now absent or
dead can go on circulating.  Accordingly, in Vineland,
rather than seeking to extend communications spatially
over the surface of the globe, Pynchon projects an
imagined dsicursive community downward in space and
back in time, to the mythical Yoruk and their realm of
the dead .... the voices speak 'without ever allowing
the briefest breath of silence.  All these voices,
forever' [Vineland 370].  This is not a positive
representation of a recoverable community but another
belated and infinitely proliferating connectivity,
suggesting that the underground people will never be a
community that can be consciously realized....
   "For a humanism that wishes to read signs of
community in a multivoiced and multicultural past, the
implications remain disturbing: when consciousness,
like corporate power, is itself composed of a
collection of partially connected modules or media,
what resistance is possible?  And when all information
is archived for eternity, as if spoken words never
allowed to fade, what communication is possible?  
Just as cognitive theories of the modular mind inquire
no self, the proliferating connections among voices
and identities in Pynchon's two most recent novels
require no community.  These things can develop and
grow on their own, evidently, in an expanding archive
that never needs to take form in an individual mind.
Yet this does not mean that the novels reject the
ideal of community itself, or consciousness, or
communication--only their representations.  And if
this crisis of represnttaion spells further distress
for liberal hopes of a corporately defined,
symbolically mangeable, cognitively mappable and
undying world community. Pynchon does not exclude the
possibility of (or fail to imagine) collective
formations outside the corporate register.  Indeed,
the ability of intersubjective communities to stay in
touch while refraining from their own public
self-representation may be the condition of their
persistence within the expanded Symbolic of the
contemporary media environment.
   "The relevance of this conclusion to Pynchon's
founding decision to withhold his public identity
should be apparent.  Authorial absence ned not be
reclusive, countercultural, or noncommunicative. 
Neither is it the stance of a belated American
aristocrat descended from colonial Pyncheons. 
Withdrawal is rather a condition for sharing the work,
even as consciousness needs to insulate itself from
its enabling modules, networks, and working media of
perception to exist.  An author who closes himself off
from the mass media can still remain open to the media
environment, however.  Indeed, Pynchon's privacy could
well be--like consciousness in its self-containment--a
way of 'broadening possible environmental contacts'
(Luhmann, Social Systems 37), a way of expanding
oneself out into cultural areas not yet
represented--not yet fixed, commodified, and made
exchangeable in a controlled economy." (pp. 52-3)

Citing ...

Luhmann, Niklas.  Social Systems.
   Trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker.
   Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995 [1984].

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