Forget Conspiracy

[Dave Monroe]

DeLillo, and the Conventional Counterconspiracy
Narrative," Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of
Paranoia in Postwar America, ed. Peter Knight (New
York: NYU Press, 2002), pp. 254-73 ...

"Contemporary American Literature, cinema, and
television, popular and elite, fictional and factual,
are replete with stories of conspiracy/  Most of these
stories rely on and rehearse a particular set of
assumptions, arguments, and narrative formulas.... a
threat to democratic culture and the common good. 
Resisting them is the risky business of a few heroic
individuals, often affiliated with institutions of
public order, who possess extraordinary powers, moral
as well as intellectual....  these individuals are
able to penetrate and map the conspiratorial
formations ... and then to unmask the conspirators and
thwart their ambitions.
   "This ultimately reassuring story proclaims, then,
that conspiracies exist, that they threaten to destroy
our ... way of life, and that this very way ... is
always throwing up heroes capable of defending it
against its conspiratorial others.  It tells us, in
addition, that the price of our collective 'freedom'
and perhaps even our survival is perpetual vigilance
and fiercely focused resistance.  We must never
'forget conspiracy' ....  This is ... the common sense
of conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike in our
culture ....
   "But it is not the sense one gets when one turns to
the work of two extraordinary postmodern novelists of
conspiracy, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.  It is not
that these writers deny the existence of conspiracies.
 Their fiction ... is saturated with conspiracy.  The
plot of Gravity's Rainbow ... is driven by the
protagonist's attempt to uncover a corporate
conspiracy that has shaped his life.  This conspiracy
... seems, in turn, to be part of the strucural
conspiracy of a capitalist order, which, the novel
argues, has sponsored World War II as a means of
profit enhancement, corporate consolidation, and
globalization.  Conspiracies abound in Pynchon's other
work as well ....
   "Pynchon's and DeLillo's novels tend to rehearse
and confirm many of the aspects of the 'official
narrative' of conspiracy.  But they also sharply
interrogate this narrative, suggesting that
conspiracies are constitutive of rather than
epiphenomenal to contemporary civilization, that the
recommended strategies of counterconspiracy are
designed to perpetuate conspiratorial power, not to
eleiminate it, and that, in order to resist conspiracy
at all, we must learn, paradoxically, to 'forget' it."
(pp. 254-5)

"... these novels challenge the representation of
conspiracy as an epiphenomenal aspect of contemporary
civilization and question the conventional
counterconspiracy hero's relentless preoccupation  wth
investigation, unmasking, and elimination....  In the
decisively postmodern worlds they map, democracy seems
for the most part to be little more than a mask behind
which powerful conspirators pursue their interests."
(p. 256-7)

"The conventional narrative of counterconspiracy is a
version of those grand narratives of enliughtenment
and liberation whose collapse Lyotard identifies with
the postmodern moment." (p. 257)

   "Given the grip of conspiratorial forces on
virtually every aspect of the civilization, Pynchon
and DeLillo suggest, efforts to expose and eliminate
these forces are doomed to fail...." (p. 257)

   "If analysis is so compromised as a weapon of
resistance, then a narrative of counterconspiracy that
commits one to its procedures is cruelly disabling. 
Even to begin untangling the conspiratorial web,
Pynchon repeatedly insists, one may have to embrace
modes of knowledge outlawed by the conventional codes
of counterconspiracy, which celebrate the power of
enlightened thought ... to penetrate the darkness of
conspiracy...." (p. 258)

   "The strong implication of these texts, then, is
that the directions for resistance encoded in
conspiracy fiction are instruments of conspiracy
itself, formulas that trap us in conspiracy and make
effective resistance (or separation) impossible...."
(p. 258)

   "To focus relentlessly on conpiracies and their
dismantling is, in these passages, a waste of time. 
But what else might one be doing ...?  A possible
answer surfaces in Gravity's Rainbow.... the
alternatives are frankly theistic, if in a pagan
mode....  No negative theology here: Pynchon, like
William James ... prefers to project a pluralistic
universe ....  The whole tradition of philosophical
secularism, he repeatedly sugests ... is an instrument
of an 'order of Analysis and Death' (GR, 722) that is
virtually coterminous with actually existing
post-Enlightenment civilization.  Its delimitations of
the real ... all function to keep us confined within a
fiction of the real that makes us amenable to all
sorts of manipulation and deprives us of all sorts of
resources for resistance." (pp. 258-9)

   "In Pynchon's rewritings of the counterconspiracy
narrative of entanglement, exposure, and elimination,
characters ... walk away from the project.... driven
to the brink of collapse by their efforts to unmask
and evenge themselves on the cosnpiracies that ahve
deformed their lives.  But at the moment of crisis
Pynchon's protagonists abandon the quests that
threaten to consume them.  Their surrender is not
merely strategic ....  They give up the struggle
because they are not getting anywhere, beacuse they
cannot go on, because the horizons of conspiracy have
begun to seem coterminous with those of organzied
social life itself, and because, in spite of this
afct, they have caught a glimpse of zones ... where
conspiracy ... does not define existence.  Turning
aside, forgetting conspiracy, these characters
discover new satisfactions and new resources for
survival.  These ... are frequently spiritually
inflected.  But Pynchon does not seek to loosen the
grasp of one redemptive narrative--that of
enlightenment--only to restore the authority of
another....  The promises made ... are much more
modest: a degree of autonomy, a period of invisibility
and exemption, the chance to enjoy, fleetingly, the
pleasures of caring communities ...." (pp. 260-1)

"... this 'postsecular' aspect of Pynchon's and
DeLillo's counterconspiracy thinking ...." (p. 261)

"But the spiritually inflected strategies for
resistance and survival they elaborate resonate with
thhe work of certain impeccably secular critics of
contemporary conspiracy: with Fredric Jameson's
representation of the postmodern crisis of effective
resistance as a crisis of distantiation, for instance,
and with Foucault's call for a politics of self-care."
(p. 261)

"In other words, having lost our bearings, our bodies,
and our minds, we correctly suspect our own strategies
of resistance as being nothing more than expressions
of that total conspiracy against which we are
attempting to struggle." (pp. 262-3)

"But this does not mean that the texts are uniterested
in offering us any suggestions whatsoever for dealing
with the conspiratorial systems they depict.  On the
contrary, they explore a whole range of strategies
...." (p. 264)

   "Gravity's Rainbow starts off in the manner of a
conventional counterconspracy thriller...." (p. 264)

"Traced across the text is the suggestion that what
must be dismantled, if one is to recover some element
of autonomy, is nothing less than the self itself, at
least in its Western, rational form.
   "Thus Slothrop begins to think of himself not as a
heroic adversary to the conspriacy that has entangled
him, but as its creature, an occupied being....  He
stops moving so fast and begins practicing the kind of
inner stilling of the engines of analysis and
interpretation that is central to a number of Eastern
projects of dismantling ....  The shift makes him more
generous ... and empathetic ....  He becoes, in fact
... a prototypical hippie ...." (pp. 265-6)

"His self 'stripped' away, he becomes, as it were,
invisible: 'It's doubtful if he can ever be "found"
again, in the conventional sense of "positively
identified and detained"' (GR, 712)." (p. 266)

"Perhaps, Pynchon suggests, the evry logic of
self-formation in this culture, the logic of
patriarchy and the Oedipal battle, renders Western men
conscripts in the army of empire .... then liberation
from Europe's imperial 'order of Analysis and Death'
(GR, 722) becomes, as generations of leftist
psychoanalysts have suggested, a matter of
self-unmaking.  But for Pynchon, as for DeLillo,
spiritual disciplines may be bettr equipped to effect
this process than those of that discipline that is
familiarly known, after all, as 'analysis.'" (p. 266)

"Although these strategies are marked as religious ...
the characters are not conscious of their derivation
....  This situation changes, though, in Pynchon's
Vineland ...." (p. 269)

"Pynchon argues, in Vineland, that the radical
movements of the sixties failed precisely bacuse most
radicals were still deeply childish in their impulses
and appetites.  And he suggests, through his depuction
of D.L., that one way to address such obstacles is
through certain forms of dsiciplined spiritual
formation.
   "But in practicing such discipline, Vineland
suggests, one also comes to see the struggle
differenty, less as an inevitably frontal clash ...
than as an ongoing effort to take a distnce from
powers whose defeat will be achieved, if it is
achieved at all, only in the fullness of time.  For
Pynchon, the strategy of direct confrontation is
suicidal ...." (p. 271)

   "The suggestion, here, is not that it is foolish to
fight back: there are 'those you must resist' (V, 127)
....  It is that the way to resist effectively, over
time ... is to distribute one's attention between that
whichj one opposes and that which one cherishes." (p.
271)

"There's a tradition that's being traced here, from
the Eastern texts in which Emerson first encountered
the notion of karma ... through radical
Transcendentalism itself, to the pragmatism of James
... and into the bloodstream of American
radicalism.... the full burden of transformation does
not fall ... on a few individuals acting in the few
moments before all is lost.  It si better, Pycnhon
suggests ... to acknowledge one's relative
powerlessness and to trust in the assistance provided,
periodically, by the way of things itself.
   "Whether such trust is warranted in any
metaphysical sense, James and (I think) Pynchon would
claim, is beside the point.  What the trust offers is
a kind of parole from the prison yard of secular
artionalism, in which it is all up to us, we are
always overpowered, and there is never enough time. 
Better to risk forgetting conspiracy, turning away and
in, even losing onself in dreams of an ethical
universe, than to condemn oneslef to such a regime.
   If Pynchon and DeLillo call on us to 'forget
conspiracy ....  The spiritually inflected model of
sustainable resistance they tarce emphasizes
self-transformation rather than social revolution, teh
discover of sites of refuge rather than the capture of
power....  All this may simply be a reflection of ...
exhaustion and intellectual desperation endemic to a
historical moment .... But one could argue, instead,
that Pynchon and DeLillo articulate the impulses of a
genration that has been compelled to rethink .. and
that is trying to imagine community, resistance, and
even the cosmos differently." (p. 272)

http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?cPath=13&products_id=2801

Andd see as well ...

Knight, Peter.  Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy
   to the X-Files.  New York: Routledge, 2001.

http://www.routledge-ny.com/books.cfm?isbn=0415189772

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58981&sort=date

McClure, John A.  Late Imperial Romance.
   London and New York: Verso, 1994.

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