Pynchon and Rorty

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 06:32, Dave Monroe wrote:
> >From Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist
> Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA:
> Harvard UP, 1998), Ch. 1, "American National Pride:
> Whitman and Dewey," pp. 1-38 ...
> 
>    "Snow Crash [by Neal Stephenson] capitalizes on the
> widespread belief that giant corporation, and a
> shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an
> agent for the corporations, now make all the important
> decisions.  This belief finds popular expression in
> popular thrilers like Richard Condon's The Manchurian
> Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more
> ambitious works like Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and
> Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  The view thatbthe
> visible government is just a false front is a
> plausible extrapolation from the fact that we are
> living in a second Gilded Age: even Mark Twain might
> have been startled by the shamelesness with which our
> politicians now sell themselves.
>    "Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's, and Pynchon's
> are novels not of social protest but of rueful
> acquiescence in the end of American hopes...." (pp.
> 5-6) 


Relevant to VL discussions. Good writers inform us of our fate, don't
give us a recipe for salvation. 

Not that Stephenson or Condon are that good.

> 
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/RORACH.html
> 
> A few weeks ago in the German newspaper taz an
> interview with Richard Rorty was published. His
> argument was in favor of a "more practical, more
> economically based left-wing approach to politics". He
> said that the contemporary left-wing movement in the
> USA would focus too much on ethnic-minority- and
> gender-issues, affirmative action etc., which made it
> easy for people like Buchanan to dismiss them as crazy
> extremists, confused postmodernists, homosexuals and
> atheists. (A very strange argument, I think, because
> what is Rorty's agenda? To become friends with
> Buchanan?) 

A question of strategy not friendship. A lot of people think like Pat. 

> Apart from that, he argued that US-leftists preferred
> to talk about "the system" on a fundamental level,
> inspired by, for example, Foucault or Baudrillard,
> instead of discussing worker's wages and health
> security. He called Foucault's theory of power a kind
> of philosophical or academic "gothicism" (because it
> is based upon an abstract notion of power that is
> always out to get you, I guess, just like Pynchon's
> "THEY"). The interviewer then asked him whether he was
> referring to a "Thomas-Pynchon-like
> view-of-the-world", and Rorty answered: "Exactly.
> Pynchon is absolutely typical for the concept of an
> America where nothing really is important because
> everything is artificial anyway. What he describes is
> not a real country, but a facade built by the ones in
> power." I do send this mainly as a bit of information.
> But as I do know next to nothing about Rorty, his
> philosophy and his reputation among Pynchon-readers, I
> would of course be curious as to what you think.

Rorty is talking strategy. He would like to win once in a while.
Arguments for progressive change need to appeal to majorities, not
special groups (feminists are a special group). As for theoretical
arguments, Americans--including American intellectuals--can pretty
reliably be counted on to take Pynchon and the French guys as unhelpful,
except in an academic setting. 



> 
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9708&msg=18962&sort=date
> 
> And on said "gothicism," see ...
> 
> Edmundson, Mark.  Nightmare on Main Street:
>    Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of Gothic.
>    Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.
> 
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/EDMNIG.html
> 
> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Might Rorty's point of departure from Pynchon (and
> > postmodernism generally) be that dissidence from
> > the official Left (i.e. the Democrats) is in fact a
> > vote for the Republicans? Pragmatically speaking,
> > that is.
> 
> Me, I don't blame Nader ...

I think I do.

>  
> > With Pynchon sticking firm to the line that the
> > lesser of two evils is still an evil?
> 
> But that might yet be the case ...

There's evil in the world. Get used to it :-)

> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html