Lines of Flight

[Dave Monroe]

>From Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: Discursive
Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas
Pynchon (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), "Introduction,"
pp. 1-21 ...

"For those bygone postwar preterites Pynchon writes
about, the 'real' presents itself as pure formality, a
text of enigmatic density in which the absence of
context implied by their elliptical condition denotes
a context of absence, an abstracted social space in
which illusion becomes primary and reference unstable.
   "This is why the central descriptive category for
the counterculture in Gravity's Rainbow might be
'escape' (with its overtone of escapism) rather than
'revolution,' a word that implies more coherence than
the various political and social movements of the
1960s (at least in the United States) were able to
sustain.  The failure of those movements to effect
substantive change in the structures of power in
America can be traced to an incoherence that seized
the idea of the political itself.  Theodore Roszak
sugests the ground for this incoherence when he
remarks that protest in the 1960s began paradoxically
'not in the failure, but in the success of a high
industrial economy.  It arose not out of misery but
out of plenty; it role was to explore a new range of
issues raised by an unprecedented increase in the
standard of living' (xii).  Affluent society meant for
its 'disaffiliated' members that rebellion could only
take the form of a complex fulfillment of that
society's desire, could only repeat its plenitude in
all the gestures of excess, satiation, or power with
which we are familiar.... no matter how outrageous,
these actions expressed the deepest superfluous
tendencies of the society they outraged, and the
critical 'exploration' Roszak claims for the
counterculture could therefore only take place in a
mode of coimplicated [sic?] experimentation that
implied an almost necessary failure, a necessary
catching up of oneself in an overflowing time, or
rather in the overflowing of time itself.
   "The principal political mode of the day, one could
argue, was an 'overstuffing' farce or folly, a
satisfaction continually tried if not gotten, an
escalation in culture of freedom, of pleasure, of
innocence, of the 'natural,' indeed of any value so
long as it ceased to be relative to its opposite,
exposing in the social field an essentially arbitrary
and differential semiotic logic.  As Fredric Jameson
argues ... this logic entails a schizoid tendency
toward pure equivalence, abstraction, or autonomy ....
 Pynchon's world finds itself dominated by what
Heidegger called 'metalanguage,' the overdetermination
not just of politics, art, science and philosophy but
of everyday life by the drive to install rationality
at the place of its (irrational) other. to make
reflection unconscious, to make the planned, the
organized, and the managed return in our dreams as the
ground of being and history...." (pp. 3-4)

   "Social movements and cultural strategies of the
1960s understood to varying degrees that the crucial
political problem consisted in finding ways to resist
this project of a metalinguistic hegemony.  Beacuse
reality is rational and idealized precisely in the act
of fixing its limit, unearthing its artifice, and
positing escape (freedom) in or as the nondiscursive
element ... resistance had to be theorized in realtion
to a (hetero)logic of capture and complicity.... 
'Cultural' revolution meant projecting the political
into a lingusitic element ....   Politics as
transfiguration ... implied a convergence in
metalanguage ....  The price of change was its
suspension in a virtual state ....  The counterculture
therefore disclosed a 'self-elusive' component ... its
refusal of dominant social order ... in effect
canceled itself out....
   "Gravity's Rainbow sets out to ramify this symbolic
dimension of the counterculture, the dreamilke empty
form legible in the time's 'mindless pleasures' ...."
(pp. 4-5)

See as well ...

Heidegger, Martin.  On the Way to Language.
   Trans. P. Hertz.  NY: Harper and Row, 1971.

Jameson, Fredric.  "Periodizing the '60s."
   Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Vol. 2.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Lefebvre, Henri.  Everyday Life in the Modern
   World.  Trans. S. Rabinovitch.  London:
   Penguin, 1971.

Roszak, Theodore.  The Making of a Counterculture.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

As well as ...

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inegs/Ekphrasis.htm

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/toc/elh65.2.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmcv008.html

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