Pynchon & Abu Ghraib

[pynchonoid]

[...] We are unable to understand contemporary history
and the psychotic bases of American ideology because
we have not yet learned how to read Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow. I hope on another occasion to offer
an extended discussion of all that this seminal work
offers the student of ideology, the revolutionary
nature of its insight into the capitalist mind and how
it teaches us both to read and to practice the
discipline of the image. For now I must condense that
contribution into three concepts: (1) Pynchon reveals
the constitutional stupidity of official rationality
and its underlying madness; as in the fetishizing of
any and all information (as if there was a precious
secret that each inmate of Abu Ghraib could render up
to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Perle et al).
(2) The excessive actions that official rationality
necessarily gives birth to are a result of the
underlying paranoia and the desire for omnipotent
control that results. (3) This disorder is fatally
wedded to the effort to transform eros into thanatos
so that there will finally only be one thing—the
imposition of technoscientific rationality on the
entire globe. Such is the categorical imperative of
late capitalism in its Empire phase. Study of the
image remains the way to combat it because the image
reveals what it conceals. In doing so image addresses
us at those psychological and emotional registers of
our being that we are losing contact with more each
day. They can be reawakened only by desperate
measures.[...]

from:  
"The Bite of the Whip: Passion of the Christ in Abu
Ghraib"
by Walter A. Davis
http://www.counterpunch.org/davis06192004.html




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