"Autism, Thomas Pynchon, and Capitalism as Cosmic Law"

[pynchonoid]

I don't recall seeing this mentioned on the p-list
before; my apologies if somebody already brought it
up.


[...] I was in high school or junior high when my
sister, two years younger than me, brought home a book
on autistic children for a school project. I didn't
read it, but the pictures fascinated me at the time
and stayed with me for years. They were drawings made
by a boy named Joey, an autistic patient of Bruno
Bettelheim's at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School
in Chicago where Bettelheim treated autistic children
during the 1950s and 60s. The drawings showed how Joey
perceived himself and his bodily functions to be
attached to machinery -- to be machinery in fact. This
struck a primaeval chord in me somehow, as if Joey's
experience had been mine in the distant and forgotten
depths of childhood. Though I have never been autistic
nor suffered from a serious mental disorder, it all
seemed uncannily familiar, as if I had been through a
morbid stage such as Joey's and forgotten it.

Years later I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on the works
of American novelist, Thomas Pynchon, and in the
course of reading Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, again I encountered a description of
Bettelheim's patient, Joey. After reading The Empty
Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self
(1967) by Bettelheim, I came to see connections, not
only between autism and the work of Pynchon, but
between autism, Pynchon, and the philosophical
underpinnings of capitalism. All three evoke
disturbing evidence of a modern humanity subverted by
machinery, with an underlying imperative of Cosmic Law
driven by despair and paranoia.

Pynchon's first three novels describe a world in which
technology and its corresponding capitalist structures
are manifestations of what might be called a general
autism, wherein society and its individuals act in
ways similar to those of clinically autistic children.
General autism is ruled by an imperializing Cosmic
Law, a law which proclaims, as Bettelheim put it, "you
must never hope that anything can change." This law
spreads like an infection by means of its
imperializing paranoia, inspired in the observers of
the autist. Pynchon's novels constitute a critique of
capitalism and its technological manifestations and
suggest that a collective autism underlies the drive
for materialistic and technological consumption in
capitalist society.</i></blockquote>

...continues: 

Autism, Thomas Pynchon, and Capitalism as Cosmic Law
by James W. Horton
http://kmareka.com/horton.htm


=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


	
		
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