VLVL2 (1): Television (part 3)

[Michael Joseph]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Tim Strzechowski wrote:

> continuing . . .
>
> Isaiah 2:4 locates the source of televisual culture in the sixties, the
> generation that should have been most vehemently opposed to it, but
> because of a lack of "understanding" allowed it to take over their
> lives. As Joseph Slade points out, "what happened to the Rocket in
> Gravity's Rainbow happens to television in Vineland, an instrument for
> change becomes an instrument for the status quo" (128). Miller also
> criticizes the sixties for offering no "heroic deviation from our
> culture's movement towards T.V." (8), pointing out that T.V. and its
> advertising structures were actually antecedent to, and thus complicit
> in the sixties:
>
It's a handsome argument, but unpersuasive; as the critic has asserted,
there simply isn't a systematic critique of television in Vineland. One
could even point out, in accordance with the preceding methodological
topos, that Isaiah's criticism is shaped by the same pre-given television
culture he is condemning and hence subsumed into it. PYnchon seems to be a
step ahead of his critic.


> That "youth culture," first of all, was an indirect derivative of the
> "youth market" encouraged in the Fifties, when the young acquired a
> nascent group identity from T.V. and its eager advertisers. Furthermore,
> the "counterculture" was dependent on the mass media - contrary to the
> Luddite and/or pastoral mythology of the era.

The accusation of hypocrisy ignores the blatancy of hippie and yippie
actions calculated to manipulate public reacton through the media. It also
sets up a false dichotomy, which we discussed in reference to Leo Marx's
"technological sublime," namely that one can valorize anything, even
machines, providing one can find or postulate a nostalgic antecedent for
them. Not sure what a "heroic deviation" means. Bit of a picturesque
ramble, seems to me, sorta "Oh, Pynchon's presenting the eighties as a
Reaganesque meta-televisual spectacle sort of beginning in the sixties,
and, hey, you wanna know something else? About the sixties? . . ."

> The familiar symbols and
> catchphrases of the young gained currency through films, through radio
> and television through albums and concerts deftly engineered. And
> television left its traces even on the high ground of counterculture
> ideology. (Miller 9)
>
> The sixties counterculture (if it can be prefixed "counter") failed to
> realize that by using the resources of the mass media establishment it
> would eventually be subsumed in its structures.

Creeping determinism. The existence of such a telos was not clear in the
"sixties." It is only by dint of the fact that such a thing happened can
one say that it was destined to happen or suggest that clear, unequivocal
signs predicted it and marked its unavoidability. The whole discourse of
"selling out" was redolent with an awareness that subsumption was always
and at every step a possibility, but there was also a sense of dualism,
that TV was us and not us. This subtlety is lost or suppressed - subsumed
-in this critique.


> The quintessence of this
> attitude is the 24fps film collective who believed the medium they were
> using had little to do with the message they purported to spread. It is
> this attitude of "innocence" that is genealogically linked to a 1984 in
> which social and aesthetic reality cannot be discerned from the medium;
> a situation that is portentously alluded to when Frenesi "inscribed in
> the viewfinder a TV-screen shape so you could frame a shot for the
> evening news."
>
It seems to me that, once we silt off Derrida's notion of signification
and the trace, that being is contingent upon the sign, we are left with an
untenable assertion that the fate of the 24fps film collective was
determined by the medium of film, which, in turn, served the repressive,
hegemonic forces the collective were struggling against.


> The Televisual Solution
>
> Isaiah 2:4 and Prairie are natives of a televisual world. Unlike the
> sixties leftovers of the novel, televisual reference falls from their
> lips with all the nonchalance of a proverb or a curse. At the family
> picnic Sasha tries to get Prairie to sing the theme from Gilligan' s
> Island as she did as a baby; Prairie refuses in a gesture that perfectly
> bespeaks the relevance of the televisual in her life, suggesting both
> infantility and inanity. Although Isaiah and Prairie remain constructed
> by their televisual environment, it is still an act of critical
> presumption to read the close of the novel in the tradition of the fall
> of the American dream. Elaine Safer reads the ending of Vineland in such
> a way: "The primary tone at the novel's close is that of a fallen world.
> The novel begins with blue jays bothering the dog Desmond and ends with
> their demise" (122). That Desmond has eaten the Blue Jays need not be
> read in this derogatory sense. In the text's opening the Blue Jays seem
> to represent uncertainty, and for Zoyd they are portentous of the
> destruction of the family and its home. As mentioned earlier they also
> represent the imperfection of communication into which deconstruction
> has delved. That Vineland concludes with Desmond eating the Blue Jays
> and "thinking he was home" suggests neither apocalypse nor certainty,
> only the simple dream of a shared reality, a shared homeland, a shared
> perception, significance, and history.
>
> The televisual world of Vineland is that of a naive, shared reality.

I agree that the social reality represented in Vineland is
intersubjective.

> By
> placing us within the realm of convincing "cultural artefacts," it
> precludes any critical comment upon them;

Only by the most radical of relativist arguments can one say insider
criticisms are apodictically invalid, unless one argues, fantastically,
that the author has somehow adopted for his own horizon of expression only
those comments his characters might understand.


> at the same time it situates
> new historicist critical practice in the same time slot. Vineland offers
> a version of the sixties and traces various contemporary elements of
> society back to that time, illustrated by Isaiah's claim that
> television's hegemony originated in the sixties' counterculture;
> however, it cannot offer any concrete knowledge or prescriptives for the
> present. As a result, notions of recuperation or fall remain somewhere
> behind the novel's flickering surface.
>
My sense is that the critic has adopted a methodology, New Historicism
(?), a field of study, the use of TV in Vineland, and finding that this
combination does not open up the text in any powerful way, concluded that
the text has nothing of humanistic value to offer. In this faulty view,
the final paradisiacal vision of Vineland is purely ironic, a
self-negating sign - sort of Dystopia disguised as Utopia. I'm
unconvinced. I think the affect of the book points to a different
conclusion - Prairie is not corrupted by Brock, D.L and Takeshi ramp up
their bond of mutual affection, Zoyd and Flash do not fight over Frenesi,
who re-establishes a warm, filial bond with Sasha, who turns up fit as a
fiddle, still full of piss and vinegar, and all of these feel-good
developments actually make us feel pretty good. Obviously, they savor of a
hollywood ending, but I think one can enjoy this perspective as a layer of
meaning without allowing it to govern our visceral impression of the
book's optimism. I also think that the variety of Pynchon's playful
responses to TV figures in itself as an interpretive element, in which one
can savor the variety of "intentional acts" that human beings have as a
function of being human to "presence" the world. That Pynchon doesn't
prefix any normative statement to such presencing, e.g. about the evil of
television, its repressive agency or its incompatability with satori,
allows for the possibility, and maybe even implies a belief that its
transmissions, no less than the films, tunes, cars, foods, birds,
reminiscences and dreams (low culture) that follow throughout Vineland in
serial combinations, are available to intentional acts of positive
valorization, that perhaps it is its very popularity that confirms that
through TV people do actualize exemplary moments. And possibibly in these
acts are the "notions of recuperation" the critic fails to experience?

Okay, enough from me, go away, Michael.