Horst & Pynchon & late capital

[alice malice]

Pynchon is an artist. His business is to produce beautiful books and sells
them. He is married to a famous book agent, so the family is in the
business of producing and publishing and marketing fiction and poetry and
so on. It seems a good marriage, a successful business. But as artist, as
agent of things beautiful, the family has to live in the wold we live in
where aesthetic production is fully integrated into commodity production
generally: "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever
more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater
rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural
function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation"
(Jameson).

Jameson gos on to say:

Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of
institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and
grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts,
architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in
the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated
relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary
flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of
multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly
contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena
have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple
one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the
point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this
whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and
superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and
economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout
class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and
terror.

*Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism*

This famous excerpt from Jameson seems to fit our recent discussion.

I can see how Windust and Maxine are entangled in postmodern late
capitalism, in  Neo-Liberalism and its co-dependent late late Leftism, and
Maxine falls into the architectural themes, the towers, but Pynchon and
Horst are Flatirons, and remain, as much as that is possible, producers of
raw and rare commodities.  While both move closer to the towers, to the
chip makers and whiz kids of science tech and their murdering allies, both
slothfully withdraw, preferring the comic mask and the humor of boyz.
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