Emily S. Apter

[alice malice]

Emily Apter's essay offers a useful breakdown of different ways in
which we might conceive of the world as one, as a unified field of
interconnected events, objects, and phenomena. Leaving aside the more
utopian visions of planetarity and transnationalism, Apter turns her
attention to "one-worldedness," which, in a memorable phrase,
"envisages the planet as an extension of paranoid subjectivity."
Everything and everyone is connected, but not in the way you had
hoped--instead, even the most ordinary and banal manifestations of your
normal life conceal a terrible and monstrous conspiracy. The T-shirt
you are wearing, for example, is merely the visible manifestation of
an ideological veil concealing the sweatshop labor that produced it in
Los Angeles or Sri Lanka; your cheerful, smiling, next-door neighbor
is merely the bourgeois mask that hides a functionary of the World
Bank; even the unusually mild autumn weather you have been enjoying is
a manifestation of global warming brought on by over a century of
capitalist exploitation of the environment.

The examples I have just outlined are typical of a specifically
leftist paranoid one-world worldview, one whose tacit emphasis is on
paralysis: I cannot do anything--buy a T-shirt or a cup of coffee, wave
at my neighbor, or even enjoy the weather--without "feeding the
machine" of one-world interconnectedness, the vast network of
exploitation and surveillance that I thought I stood outside of. In a
world governed by the "butterfly effect" (a notion that emerged from
chaos theory attempting to model the weather, in which a butterfly
flapping its wings in, say, Kyoto, could cause a storm in Brazil a
week later), every seemingly banal and insignificant action is loaded
with an immense and vertiginously unknowable secret meaning, with
"unintended consequences." I thought I was buying a cup of coffee, but
I was really working a South American peasant to death. This is, of
course, the logic of "always worse" (exemplified in the film The
Butterfly Effect (2004) and a whole series of other science fiction
films about time travel), in which every attempt to rectify the
current situation leads to an even worse outcome. In this vein, it is
no surprise that a writer such as Pynchon returns again and again to
the idea of entropy: the laws of thermodynamics dictate precisely that
"it always gets worse," that the total disorder or entropy will always
increase until the universe suffers "heat death," where every
structure, no matter how elementary, is dissolved into an eternally
unchanging, lukewarm pabulum. Quite literally, every action or
intervention has the unintended consequence of speeding up (if only by
a miniscule amount) the arrival of this heat death. With these kinds
of long-term prospects, why take any action at all?

his, of course, is not the right-wing response to a paranoid one-world
worldview, or at least not that of the current right wing. As Apter
rather brilliantly notes, "what we are told is connected [by the Bush
administration, such as Sadaam Hussein and 9/11] is rivaled only by
what we are asked to believe is not connected: there is apparently no
link between oil and the Iraq invasion." This view leads to a
simultaneous demand for action (invasion, internment) and submission
to authority--albeit with a twist. Governed by paranoid thinking, the
right wing perversely acknowledges, even insists, that systems of
authority are permeated throughout by moral corruption, liberal
incompetence, double agents, secret jihadists, and so on (indeed, the
David Horowitz "network" model--see
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org--proposes an unbroken anti-American
continuum between, say, John Kerry [or Barbara Streisand, for that
matter] and Osama Bin Laden). Clearly, obedience must be to the "true
leader," recognizable precisely through his total freedom from all
doubts--the true leader appears ever more like an automaton, free from
the necessity of thought. Perhaps nothing captures the essence of this
thinking more than the Fox network show 24, whose formal conceit
(tracing out, in the course of twenty-four episodes, the twenty-four
hours of "real time...

From: American Literary History
Volume 18, Number 2, Summer 2006
pp. 390-393 |

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

American Literary History 18.2 (2006) 390-393

Robert A. Rushing


On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Michael Bailey <mikebailey at gmx.us> wrote:
> De gustibus etc...Monte's disquisition was my favorite post in an enjoyable
> thread. Rather than a noose, it seemed like a good springboard, capsule
> descriptions matched against the conspiracy concept.
>
>
>
> alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I also lost my reference for Emily S Apter, but here is an excerpt
>> fromn the Abstract that may be of use to the current discussion.
>>
>> I think Joseph has provided a very good thesis, overall, and there is,
>> as your link, Dave M, to the Archives proves, much in the P-Industry,
>> P-related theory stuff, to support his Thesis.
>>
>> While I applaud the discussion, generally, Monte's attempt to toss a
>> giant noose around Pynchon's career is a distraction from Joseph's
>> more focused and developed TS. David M's line of reaonsing about the
>> Human Condition is very good on this line and he should add to it.
>>
>> OK, back to bad TV.
>>
>> Like globalization, oneworldedness traduces territorial sovereignty
>> and often masks its identity as another name for "America." But where
>> globalization is an amorphous term applied to economic
>> neo-imperialism; to projections of the world as an ideologically
>> bicameral, yet fatally integrated single community; to the centrifugal
>> pressure of dominant world languages and literatures (English,
>> Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic); to the homogeneity of
>> culture produced under capitalism; and to an essentially
>> noncomparative model of comparative literature, oneworldedness, as I
>> am defining it, refers more narrowly to a delirious aesthetics of
>> systematicity; to the match between cognition and globalism that is
>> held in place by the paranoid premise that "everything is connected."
>>
>> American culture obviously holds no exclusive patent on
>> oneworldedness. Jia Zhangke's 2004 film The World, Okakura Tenshin's
>> political construct of "Asia as One," the recent coinage of "Chindia"
>> to distinguish an emergent giant of global finance capital (China plus
>> India), or Lydia Liu's suggestion that the proper name "China" could
>> arguably be translated as One-world or Empire are reminders that
>> China's claim to oneworldedness, historically and at present, is
>> surely as great if not greater as America's. One could even venture
>> that "Asia" and "the West," in their rivalry for the title to
>> oneworldedness, are obverse sides of the same coin, compounding the
>> one-world effect by virtue of their competition for cultural hegemony.
>>
>> While American literature is far from being the only national
>> literature to privilege paranoid psychosis--think of Gogol's The Nose,
>> Kafka's The Trial, and more recently, the novel Links (2004) by
>> Somalian author Nuruddin Farah, and the novel Europeana: A Brief
>> History of the Twentieth Century (2001) by Czech novelist Patrik
>> Ouredník, which compresses every historical factoid, cliché, and idée
>> reçue into a single globular chronotype--paranoia consistently emerges
>> as a preeminent topos in major works of the post-World War II American
>> canon. Taken together, Thomas Pynchon's V...
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 1:11 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0106&msg=56489
>> >
>> > On Tuesday, March 11, 2014, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System
>> >> Emily S. Apter
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/quand-meme/
>> >> -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> >>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l