Is Pynchon antirationalist? (part 7)

[o j m]

continued...
         Osbie explains this counter-sensibility as clearly as he can. 
“Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We don’t have 
to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of 
expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves 
inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart” (638). This strikes me 
as a distinctly postmodern version of fallibilistic pragmatism. When one 
story becomes untenable, violent, or incapable of adequately interpreting 
an arranging the data of the world, a new, better account must be adopted. 
This is precisely what we see in the emergence of the Counterforce. Roger 
tries to understand the import of Osbie’s statement, and when he begins 
wondering why the We-system isn’t “at least thoughtful enough to interlock 
in a reasonable way, like They-systems do,” Osbie responds (he has the 
strange habit of answering questions that other characters think, but never 
say aloud), “That’s exactly it [
] They’re the rational ones. We piss on 
Their rational arguments. Don’t we
Mexico” (638-639)? By now, I hope it is 
apparent that what is at stake here in Osbie’s statement is a confrontation 
of rationalisms: it isn’t that the Counterforce are simply 
antirational--only They would consider them antirational--but that Our 
rationalism is systematically different than Theirs.

More later, when I catch my breath, on what, exactly, "pragmatic 
fallibilism" is--and why it and the epistemology generated from it are 
different and, in my view, better alternatives, than poststructuralism.

best,
O.

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