Jed Bickman

Introduction: Reading thru The Mind of Watts

 

Because of Pynchon’s incessant and dynamic irony and self-awareness, his novels are never manifestos. Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, does not wear its political agenda on its face.  Or, it wears so many meanings on its face that its face is empty. Although the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow are irredeemably caught in They-systems and despotic control, the novel as a whole is not.  It offers a unique line of escape from coercion and fascism.  This is because the novel itself is schizophrenic.  I use the terms “schizophrenic” or “schizoid” in the sense developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.[1] They resist the psychoanalytic categorization of schizophrenia, so I am not diagnosing a pathology in the novel, in Pynchon himself, or in his characters.  Deleuze and Guattari argue that schizophrenia is a product of capitalism because capital itself is schizophrenic; it can move into any identity, but tends to resist identification altogether.  Just as capital fragments labor into specialized units, the schizophrenic process is of decomposition and segmentation: molar unities are continually broken into segmentary parts.  I argue that Gravity’s rainbow follows capital into this schizophrenic process, and that the self-awareness with which it does so enables it to form a political critique that is schizoid, not revolutionary or utopian. The novel breaks down the structures that control our lives—or, even the idea that there is such a control. The novel uses a unique regime of signification to constantly enact this schizophrenic process, and in so doing, opens a space to escape from the seemingly inescapable They-systems, when simple resistance or revolution would only reinforce those systems.

In 1966, when I imagine him to have been beginning work on Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon published an article in The New York Times Magazine that showed his concern with the systemic racial oppression in America, Journey into the Mind of Watts. In it, he demonstrates a humanistic and sympathetic sensibility that comes from being engaged with the urban landscape rather than from the solitary life of the postmodern novelist.  Journey into the Mind of Watts is notable for its lack of self- consciousness; Pynchon frankly accuses the LAPD of brutality and the White world of ignorance and repression.   He speaks as an intermediary between the White world and the Black.  He cites the systemic racism of a segregated city.

Although Pynchon powerfully conveys his opinion about the treatment of the citizens of Watts, he does not adopt a revolutionary or an activist stance; his project is descriptive.  He seeks to understand the systemic power relations that create the entire situation.  he says,

The killing of Leonard Deadwyler has once again brought it all into sharp focus; brought back long-standing pain, reminded everybody of how very often the cop does approach you with his revolver ready, so that nothing he does with it can then really be accidental, of how, especially at night, everything can suddenly reduce to a matter of reflexes: your life trembling in the crook of a cop's finger because it is dark, and Watts, and the history of this place and these times makes it impossible for the cop to come on any different, or for you to hate him any less. Both of you are caught in something neither of you wants, and yet night after night, with casualties or without, these traditional scenes continue to be played out all over the South central part of this city. (Journey Into The Mind of Watts 34)

 

No one in this situation has any agency.  The cop is put in the situation by “the history of this place and these times.”  That doesn’t absolve the cop from the responsibility of pointing a gun at “you,” but the gun and the authority and “your” position were produced by an entire social structure.  By the System.  No one is in control of the play of power, which is constantly and endlessly restaged in Watts.  And although this passage demonstrates Pynchon’s concern with the large power structures of society, it equally reveals his humane concern with individual life.  The scene that he paints in this long sentence is about the life of one of the subjects of this system.  His use of the second person forces the reader to adopt his sympathy by forcing him or her to identify with the subject: it is fiercely your life at stake.  This is an important emphasis in an article that is concerned with such molar constructs as “culture.” Pynchon demonstrates that we can read the story of an entire society in the situation of an individual.

         Each individual actor of Pynchon’s Watts is caught up in a larger, irresistible System that he calls ‘culture.’ Much of the tension in Watts is due to a conflict between two different cultures operating in close proximity to each other: White culture and Black culture.  Pynchon demonstrates a broad view of what culture is—it is material as well as social, it is in modes of representation but it is also in the physical circumstances of life.  The White culture is concerned with various forms of ‘systematized folly’ and ‘Niceguymanship.’ It can afford to ignore the basic realities that Black culture is stuck with: disease, failure, violence, and death.  The physical landscape of Watts is the beginning of Pynchon’s picture of Black culture.  The broken bottles that litter the street segues into the toughness of the kids who would show no pain at the broken glass in their feet.  All this is opposed to the White world that surrounds Watts, that is characterized by Pynchon’s coinage, “Niceguymanship.” The white world is full of illusion and unreality.  It is more fantasy than reality; it is divorced from material conditions.  The White World isn’t mostly composed of The Man that’s holding down the Black world, rather, it’s full of ‘little men’ just trying to get by.

         Pynchon’s essay certainly fits in with liberal reaction to the Civil Rights Movement; it seeks to reconcile or at least familiarize the two opposing worlds with each other.  But what is innovative about his vision is how it exposes the cultural structures of coercion and power that make it impossible for any individual to step out of his prescribed racial role.  Pynchon is concerned with the subjects of the

system only because they are the symptoms of a molar social machine. A Capitalist machine.

         If this is how Pynchon viewed his political reality in the mid-60’s, it must not be a coincidence that in Gravity’s Rainbow, his characters are also irredeemably caught within a System.  Much of the novel is obsessed with the networks of paranoiac control that deny any possibility of autonomy or free will.  Whether these murky networks of coercion actually exist in the (fictional) reality of the novel, or whether they are created in the characters minds (Slothrop, for example) is completely irrelevant.  Sometimes the novel seems to hint that they are “real,” other times the reader finds him/herself convinced that they are absolutely “imaginary.”  But their importance does not come from their fictional ontology, but rather from how absolutely central they are to the novel.  How inescapable they are, especially to the characters (Slothrop).  But this is exactly what enables the reader to escape from them; to the sympathetic reader, Slothrop’s paranoid They-systems offer a self-aware critique of the power systems of the world that we inhabit, presumably alongside Pynchon himself, wherever he is. The obsessive extent to which Pynchon uses systems of coercion and paranoia forms a satire of the post-fascist power structure that commands our lives. Although the corporate paranoias of Gravity’s Rainbow are ridiculous and ironic, they seem disconcertingly familiar.

         I depended on Capitalism and Schizophrenia to guide me through my rereadings of Gravity’s Rainbow, and I was constantly struck by how well the two texts informed each other.  Both works are built out of paranoia, schizophrenia, and capitalism.  Although Capitalism and Schizophrenia was written after Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon demonstrates his awareness and respect for Deleuze and Guattari by directly alluding to them in his next book, Vineland.  After the majority of the work was done on this paper, I became aware of Stefan Mattessich’s book, Lines of Flight, which also attempts to apply the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari (specifically in Anti-Oedipus) to Gravity’s Rainbow, and his study revealed the incredible range and depth of the overlap between Pynchon and Deleuze.  Mattessich importantly uses Deleuzian thought to untangle the temporality of the novel and the obsession with death. His arguments fill in important theoretical holes with issues that I did not discuss.  Likewise, Mattessich offered very little discussion on the political and formal concerns that I have with paranoia, capitalism, and schizophrenia.

As I wrote this paper, Capitalism and Schizophrenia declared war on Gravity’s Rainbow in my head, and Gravity’s Rainbow launched an aggressive defensive effort.  On the battleground of my mind, Deleuze and Guattari sought to constantly impose themselves on every aspect of Gravity’s Rainbow, to inform every aspect of my reading.  In some respects, Gravity’s Rainbow submitted utterly to this onslaught of signification; for example, it allowed me to read through its paranoiac systems to see the despotic structures that Deleuze and Guattari describe.  The novel agreed with their theoretical link between capitalism and schizophrenia: that decoded capital is schizoid and produces schizophrenia. 

In the areas where Gravity’s Rainbow defended its autonomy, it did so by being fiction, and thereby resisting the all-encompassing systems by which Deleuze and Guattari describe political realities of signification and repression.   After all, Deleuze and Guattari seek to describe the systems that force real subjects to desire the repression of their desires, they seek to understand why escape or revolution seems to be impossible in the modern world.  But Gravity’s Rainbow is pure fiction, and it can imagine repressive paranoiac systems with many times the power of the despotic systems that control our real lives, but it can also imagine a route of escape from those systems of repression, even if that escape only arises out of the convoluted schizoid coagulations of language and form, which refuses to be simple even when it is simple.  Indeed, that route of escape is schizophrenia itself, and would not be available in a less schizoid text.  The schizophrenic line of flight does not lead to a utopia at its end—it only leads endlessly back into itself, back into its own critiques and paranoias.  This does not take away from the political functionality of the text.  The very process of reading this schizophrenic text serves to decompose the political totalities on which despotic power depends.  The text can decompose, but it cannot erect utopian thinking out of the rubble of capitalism.  This point is proven by Vineland, which is a much more conventional narrative, but ceases to be able to imagine any escape from paranoia or despotism; in Vineland, the Revolution has failed.

         Although Tyrone Slothrop and many of the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow are irredeemably caught in paranoid systems of despotic control, the novel as a whole is not.  To the contrary: the novel offers a completely unique line of escape away from coercion and fascism.  If (political) control is paranoiac, then the only escape is Schizophrenia. It is Pynchon’s writerly self-awareness and our self-aware reading that enables this schizophrenic reading. The book constantly falls apart, defies singularity and identity.  It falls apart in my hands when I read it; perhaps you have a newer copy with stronger glue in the binding.  Where a schizoid is simultaneously many people, the novel is simultaneously every genre: historical fiction, science fiction, musical, comedy, tragedy, sermon, limerick, Western, Orientalist, sado-masochist porn, and so on. 

         The schizophrenic process in Gravity’s Rainbow opens a new ground for political critique to escape the self-enforcing binary between power and revolution (this is the very binary that Vineland demonstrates to be irresistible).  It does so by deterritorializing signifiers: by detaching signifiers from their meanings, it is able to re-attach them to multiple new meanings, just as the schizoid subject attaches him/herself to multiple personas.  This enables Pynchon to build and then decompose structural constructs within his text that reveal and then undermine the structures of power.  The example of this that I use is the deterritorialization of the signifier “blackness” (“schwarz”), which is attached to race, colonial power, and sexual exploitation, but is also attached to the Rocket, the primary center of signification in the schizoid landscape of the novel.  Through this association, the signifier “schwarz” becomes a functional unit of the narrative instead of a simple signifier; some readers begin to seek it out in pursuit of narrative continuity.  But the schizoid disruption of that continuity breaks down the binary structures on which raced power is founded, and ends up providing the reader an imaginary escape from those repressive structures.

Chapter 1: Paranoia and Despotism

 

My copy of Gravity's Rainbow is a product.  As a product, it has a host of social and economic functions, and it is those functions that I want to understand in this analysis. It was originally manufactured by the printers of the Penguin Group, who were eager to use the critical success of the novel to help them increase their flow of capital, both economic and social.[2]  Likewise, it was originally created by Thomas Pynchon; the circumstances of its production have passed into the realm of mythology—the unquestioned belief is that he wrote it out longhand on engineer’s paper in Mexico while imbibing large quantities of hallucinogenic drugs.  Regardless of what his chemical composition was at the moment, he was obsessed and involved in the political situation in America, the Civil Rights movements, the cultural liberalization.  He created a unique schizophrenic machine, a unit of social signification, that Americans responded passionately to.

What is distinct about the social function of Gravity's Rainbow?  As critics note ad-nauseam in the introductory paragraphs of their essays or books, it has had a tremendous impact in many realms.  But what does it seek to do, as a text?  What is the output of Gravity's Rainbow?  I am primarily interested in using the novel as a machine that produces a unique critique of political structures in society. 

One of my assumptions in creating my argument about the function of Gravity’s Rainbow is that it exists in a specific social and historical context; although I will not delve deeply into this historical analysis, I agree with critics like Eric Meyer[3] who choose to see the novel in its social and historical context, which is twofold. The novel was published in 1973, and its composition must have spanned much of the late sixties; as Meyer argues, the novel is very much a part of the idealistic and political revolution that was taking place during that time.  On the other hand, it is a historical novel, and as even a cursory reading shows, Pynchon was very well versed in the circumstances of life in Europe during the late part of World War II.  Therefore, the novel is located at two of the most dramatic junctures in post-war history and cultural history, and it is impossible and pointless to try to disassociate it from that historical context.  Likewise, Jeffrey S. Baker[4] tried to prove that Gravity’s Rainbow was a part of the radical democratic movements of the sixties counterculture—a project somewhat parallel to my own—but he offered almost no textual analysis of the novel. 

But I must return once again to the question of the novel's productivity and functionality within that context.  I think that one of its functions is to disassemble the tendency to create molar totalities and political unities, to critique the desires that drive us to create fascisms and centers of power both in our daily lives and in our political systems.  Following Deleuze and Guattari, I will argue that it is a paranoiac reaction that allows fascisms and totalitarianships to evolve, and a schizophrenic tendency that tends to take apart large totalities.  Therefore, I will argue that the function of Gravity's Rainbow is schizophrenic; it fragments and segments every aspect of its being, its narrative, its social critique, its style and tone.  But to understand the novel’s schizophrenia, we must understand the paranoia that it is so deeply concerned with.

To begin this process, I will offer a reading of the seminal postmodern literary text, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, using the Schizoanalyitic theoretical framework outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.  Deleuze and Guattari’s theory not only describes the forces that makes the modern subject desire its own repression, it also offers some promise for a way out—Foucault called Anti-Oedipus an “introduction to the non-fascist life” (Anti-Oedipus xiii). This is one of the concerns of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I see as a fictional illustration of schizophrenic life. The subjects of the novel are caught on giant flows of capital and desire that they cannot control; they are oppressed and paranoid, and their little resistances seem alternately silly and depraved. And yet, I will argue, the awareness of repression in Gravity’s Rainbow creates a schizoid deconstruction of the structures that create that repression, and offer a line of flight away from that repression.

 

1. Introduction to the Schizoanalytic Gravity’s Rainbow

Although the terms that Deleuze and Guattari use are unstable and shifting, and although in Gravity’s Rainbow no identity or body remains constant, it will be most helpful to immediately assign aspects of Pynchon’s text the characteristics of the organs of the Schizoanalytic theory.  This will enable us to understand each text better through the other; by itself, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is purely abstract—they almost never offer a structural example or illustration of the movements they discuss (they only occasionally reference some cultural production that illustrates a specific term)—and also by itself, Gravity’s Rainbow seems to many people to be an incomprehensible episodic hodgepodge without reason or structure.  The imposition of one text upon another, from the beginning of our analysis—as opposed to summarizing Schizoanalysis and then applying it to Gravity’s Rainbow—will make both texts productive (a term which will soon come into a new meaning through our analysis).  And yet the Schizoanalytic theory will require some explication before I can fully attack the text of Gravity’s Rainbow. I will simplify Deleuze and Guattari’s complex theory into a framework that will add meaning to Pynchon’s novel, but I do this with the awareness that for every character or organ of meaning from Gravity’s Rainbow that I apply to the theoretical framework of Schizoanalysis, I could just as easily chose many others from Pynchon’s universe.  With this in mind, I will use Tyrone Slothrop as the primary subject of our argument, while constantly keeping in mind that Slothrop, while an extreme case, is by no means unique in the novel—many characters share aspects of his position and personality, his paranoia and his roving instability.  And, while Slothrop is a subject, he could also be considered in many other locations in the Schizoanalytic framework; he could be seen as a desiring-machine or a body without organs, for example. In Deleuze and Guattari’s theory, nothing is mutually-exclusive or singular; everything is a characteristic that a given entity can possess at a given time.

In a Schizoanalytic conception, the subject—in our case, Slothrop—is produced by the dissonance created when the forces of desiring-production hit against the immobile surface of the body without organs. The body without organs is one of the most plastic concepts used in Schizoanalysis. It is on the surface of the body without organs that the entire schizophrenic and paranoiac drama of the subject is played out. A body without organs can be absolutely anything; it can be a territory, a despotic body, a simple object, or even a flow.   Perhaps the closest Deleuze and Guattari come to a definition of the body without organs might be in A Thousand Plateaus: “The body without organs is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also signification and a subject—occur” (A Thousand Plateaus 159). In practical function, the body without organs provides a surface, like a stage.  The surface of the body without organs is the recording surface of production. 

 To take a first pass at understanding the totality of Gravity’s Rainbow we must understand it as a full body without organs, and this understanding can help illuminate what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the phrase “body without organs.”  Although the concept of the Body without Organs seems at first so confusing and plastic to approach meaninglessness, it is a concept that describes the most real and material conditions of political life.  The body without organs must be understood in the most physical manner; a body without organs is an object, it is just that almost any object can behave as one (in some circumstances a more metaphysical object could act as a body without organs). 

It is important to begin to visualize the body without organs first at the most physical and literal level.  In this context, I want to use the example of the book itself, as a ream of paper contained between two covers—760 pages on the surface of which is recorded a process of desiring production at its most schizophrenic.  The record is at once a process and a product.  A book is a good example of a body without organs because it can help us visualize without organs; despite a book’s heft, it has no internality—it is only a continual surface on which flows of meaning roam, page after page, as endless as it needs to be, but still a finite segment.  A book is a form of the body without organs, the same as a territory can be, or the figure of a despot.  The subject, all the subjects of the book (but for the time being, Slothrop), is literally formed on the surface of this particular body without organs.  The physical book as a body without organs is a useful mode of understanding the term, my analysis will be based on bodies without organs in the fictional reality of the text.

The subject grows on the body without organs like a barnacle on a rock in the middle of a river.  Desiring-production is the fundamental movement of flows through a society; in Gravity’s Rainbow it can be seen in the movements of all the different agencies and governments that conspire to create the situation of the book: the War itself is a desiring machine, alongside all its component parts (such as the Rocket) and produces the physical space of the novel.  Slothrop’s paranoia manufactures a “They,” and it is tempting to understand Their forces as desiring-production; the one problem with doing so is that Slothrop’s “They” is much too singular, coordinated, and monolithic to account for the immense multiple flows of desiring-production.  This is because desiring-production can only occur when there is a disjunction, a malfunction of the machines that it depends on, and it is in this disjunction that desire can be produced (this is why desire is often mistaken for a lack).  The sleek, omnipotent “They” that is constructed by Slothrop’s paranoia would not allow for such disjunctions.  Desiring production is real, it is not a metaphor or an imagination, and it survives off of its flaws.  This disjunction is created by the presence of the body without organs, which interrupts the flows.

At its most basic level, the disjunction between the body without organs and desiring production creates paranoia.  The body without organs interrupts the flow of desiring-production, and between the two, on the surface of the body without organs, is created a zone of dissonance, which results in varying degrees of paranoia.  The desiring-machines attempt to break the solid surface of the body without organs, but the body without organs experiences them as a persecution apparatus.  Thus, paranoia is created on the surface of the body without organs, as one of the important zones of intensity that a schizophrenic subject must move through.  Paranoia comes before it gets projected onto a specific set of fears, and it can exist autonomously without being projected upon any specific force.  Deleuze and Guattari say, “in and of itself the paranoiac machine is merely an avatar of the desiring-machines” (Anti-Oedipus 9). The unstated implication is that if paranoia is the avatar of the desiring machines, than it is itself a productive force that can inscribe itself on the surface of the body without organs.  As we will see, Slothrop is a prime example of this; throughout much of the book, he is haunted by the most extreme paranoia, which motivates his actions as he moves over the zone. For Slothrop, paranoia is a productive force. 

This essay will rely on a binary that Deleuze and Guattari also depend on: an opposition of poles that correspond to the schizophrenic and the paranoiac, (and therefore the capitalist and the despotic): the opposition between molecular and molar.  Paranoia operates on the molar level; it creates large unities, shows that everything connects.  This is also the process of forming an empire—a process of assembly.  Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is a molecular production that breaks reality down into fragments and segments of a flow. This reveals an illuminating contradiction in my argument in regards to Gravity’s Rainbow: I argue that Slothrop, a molecular individual character within the molar totality of the novel, is paranoid, but I argue that the novel as a whole is schizophrenic.  The process of paranoia, which ought to work on the socius as a whole, here only works on the individual level, but the process of schizophrenia operates incessantly through the entire novel. In a despotic or totalitarian society, paranoia was the totalizing force that assembled unities of social production out of the partial objects—objects made partial by the schizophrenic and deconstructive forces of capitalism.  But in the social reality that Gravity’s Rainbow reflects, the partial objects are manifestations of paranoia whereas the totality can only be regarded as schizophrenic.  And yet, paranoia maintains its imperialist force over reality; it continues to unify and totalize, to recode and reterritorialize partial objects.  But the large context in which that takes place, in our case, the body of Gravity’s Rainbow is irreparably fragmented, broken into partial objects.

I will show that paranoia controls the novel on a molecular level by controlling individual characters, most notably Slothrop.  But I will show that the novel as a molar totality is itself schizophrenic, through and through.  It is a schizophrenic simulation of capitalist reality.  Schizophrenia plays many roles within the novel: I will show that Slothrop is not only a paranoiac, but instead oscillates between the two poles of paranoia and schizophrenia.  But I will also show that the entire novel is a product of capitalist schizophrenia, and that this is the only feasible way to handle the novel in a formal analysis; through the model of the schizophrenic, we understand the otherwise chaotic and nebulous form of the novel.  It is this structural confusion that I believe alienates so many readers from the book; they find themselves unable to grasp the text in any despotic sense—where the form of the book would signify a narrative—when they need to be submitting themselves to a production of a schizophrenic reality.

Before I can fully address the issues of paranoia and schizophrenia, I must describe the stage on which they are set: the body without organs. 

 

 

2. Desiring Production versus The Zone as Body Without Organs

There are countless examples of the body without organs in Gravity’s Rainbow, but by far the most structurally important is the Zone.  The Zone was created by the War—a desiring machine—and it bears the physical inscription of the war in its carefully planned devastation, so that the newly-created Zone bears no resemblance to the pre-war Germany out of which it was carved.  Geli Tripping introduces Slothrop to the pre-capitalist power arrangements of the Zone:

“It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized out here.  There have to be arrangements.  You’ll find out.” Indeed he will—he’ll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals.  Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all.  No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History.  Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted as a state as any other in the Zone these days.  Not paranoia.  Just how it is. (290-291)

 

But the Zone constitutes a specific type of body without organs, the socius.  The socius is the full body without organs of an entire society, the surface of a certain culture.  It is the surface on which desiring-production inscribes itself, and what actually makes up the socius is historically specific; it changes according to what type of society it is.  Deleuze and Guattari trace three different types of socius throughout history, but this passage from Gravity’s Rainbow reveals that the Zone includes and constitutes all of them in their entirety.  The three main forms of social organization that Deleuze and Guattari discuss exist simultaneously alongside each other within the Zone. I will use an extended analysis of this passage to discuss each type of socius and the aspects of the Zone that illustrate them.

2.1 The Primitive-Territorial

The first type of socius is the primitive-territorial type which inscribes the earth’s surface with the marks of human production.  It is in this realm that we can understand the physical realm of the Zone without relying on borders, which the very idea of the Zone rejects.  In the primitive territorial sense, the Zone is the area of Europe that was hollowed out by the War.  The War inscribed its process of production on the territory of the zone in the same way that Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘primitives’ who physically, graphically inscribe the earth itself, and, by extension, their own bodies.  This is the form of representation that predates writing; Deleuze and Guattari call it graphism.  Although Deleuze and Guattari’s is a historical analysis, graphism persists and exists simultaneously with all forms of representation: the practice of tattooing, for example, has persisted alongside other forms of signification.

The Zone as a primitive territorial socius must be understood first in geographical and geopolitical terms. It is in this sense that the Zone is within the boundaries of the fallen Third Reich.  It has an inside and an outside; thus, the part of the novel that takes place exclusively within the Zone includes the preposition: “In the Zone.”  Slothrop’s journey around the Zone can be mapped and understood in purely physical terms.

The geographical Zone can also be understood as a product of desiring-production.  The territory was created by the War, which is a molar desiring-machine.  Earlier, I said that production inscribes itself on the surface of the body without organs; nowhere is this more clear than in the Zone.  The devastation of the War is marked on every inch of the Zone; it is a landscape of partiality—walls and rooms lack roofs, everything that was private is now public, the internal external.  Slothrop has his affair with Geli Tripping in a room without a roof, which enables a bird to make Geli’s bed its native habitat. The fascism that had unified the Third Reich, made it a monolithic and paranoiac totality, has now been reduced to a schizophrenic pastiche of ruin.  The Zone, then, was created by the War; its process of production—bombing, battles—inevitably inscribed itself on the surface of the Zone. 

The War inscribed itself on the Zone in a manner that had a graphic significance, illustrating Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that primitive territorial representation is the inscription of production upon the very surface of the earth.  In a Slothropian moment, Oberst Enzian realizes:

This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all.  It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on….modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan on both sides—“sides?”—had always agreed on…yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop… […]

The bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy place exactly in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text… (520-521)

 

To Enzian, the way the War has inscribed itself on the Zone gains significance.  He believes that he is supposed to read in the wreckage a system of graphic representation which will decode a holy Text.  At first, the reader might see an apparent contradiction appears here between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of graphism as a pre-textual method of signification, and Enzian’s use of the concept of the ‘Text’ which lies at the heart of the meaning of the War, because graphism is supposed to be opposed to writing.  But a further analysis resolves this contradiction in two interlinked ways. First of all, we must understand that all forms of social organization, and thus all forms of representation, coexist in the Zone; I have artificially parsed them from one another in order to organize this essay.  In this case, we understand that Enzian sees the wreckage as an indication that there is somewhere (else) a Text, but the wreckage is not the text itself, for how could it be, when it is only wreckage?  The phrase “scholar-magicians” unifies the two modes of signification, the textual and the graphic—the scholar works with texts, the magician with graphemes, and “we” (the inhabitants of the Zone) must be both. Secondly, the graphic representation of the wreckage first decodes the Text, before it recodes it.  I mean to say that Enzian’s use of the wreckage to read (to interpret) the holy Text deterretorializes the Text because the significance of the text is no longer contained in the book, which was previously the body without organs of the Text.  The significance of the Text is now contained on the earth itself—the body without organs of graphic representation.  But then, meaning is restored back to the text itself, which can be “annotated, explicated, and masturbated.” Only after this decoding takes place does Pynchon allow for the possibility of “coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text,” a process whereby the grapheme imposes its own new meaning upon the Text; now the Text cannot be read by itself, but only through and alongside the wreckage of the Zone, which was created by a process of physical production of a desiring-machine.

 

2.2 The Barbaric/Despotic Socius

The second type of body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari describe, and which holds tremendous sway over the Zone, is the body of the despot in a barbaric/despotic socius.  This type of socius is imperialist and Statist; it is an extension of the paranoia of the despot himself, and it is his body that operates as the body without organs.  In the case of the Zone, in this sense of the socius it is not the zone itself which acts as the body without organs, but the hugely multiple agencies completing for superiority and governance in the power-vacuum created in the Zone by the war. The despotic state seeks to overcode the flows of society; that is, it seeks to inscribe its codes on the flows of the society, and does so in the name of the despot himself.  Although we do not usually consider our contemporary governments “barbaric” (perhaps we ought to, given the imperialist violence they create), this type of despotic state persists even today, although over time it has ceded more and more power to the decoded flows of Capital.

As the above passage (“it is an arrangement . . .” 290-291) illustrates, the despotic socius, which is usually a totality that encompasses all of a society, exists in the Zone mostly as an absence, which allows individual characters to assume the role of the despot.  Countless despotic bodies of various sizes comprise a pastiche-government over the Zone: the ineffectual victorious allied parties inscribe the meaning of “victory” over the zone, but fail to overcode the entire multiplicity of flows.  It is also in this realm that Slothrop himself becomes “as properly constituted as a state as any other in the Zone these days,” because in this sense, Slothrop’s paranoia causes him to inscribe his body on the Zone itself.  Slothrop, at various points but not constantly, overcodes the flows of the Zone and direct them into his own paranoid narrative.  Paranoia is at the origin of the formation of the despotic barbarian state—an imperialist government does not just naturally evolve from a primitive territorial machine, instead, it appears fully formed in the paranoid formations of the despot.  And so paranoia is not an individual pathology that a psychoanalyst would diagnose a patient with, but an investment in a social phenomenon. Paranoia lies at the base of the drive to create despotic states. 

It is in this context that we can begin to understand the rigidly segmentary politics of microfascism: in the Zone, all personal drama is political. For Deleuze and Guattari, a political entity is made up of countless segments that can be divided and subdivided all the way down to the interpersonal level, and it is on the interpersonal level that politics begins.  But as a socius becomes more fascist, those segments become more rigid; each person’s segment of the political whole must be intractably aligned with all the other segments, so that the totality can be as monolithic as possible.  This does not mean that politics is decentralized, rather, the level of centralization only dictates how rigid the segments are—a fascist society is the most rigid.  “There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche.  Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the ‘masses’” (A Thousand Plateaus 214, emphasis in original). This can certainly be seen in Gravity’s Rainbow, which defies the notion that The War is a molar totality and instead crams it into all forms of personal interaction: Roger Mexico’s pickup line to Jessica: “’My mother is the war,’ leaning over to open the door” (39).

Because the Zone itself is defined by the lack of rigid segmentarities and strong political centralization, to find examples of rigid microfascisms in Gravity’s Rainbow we must look in the section that takes place during the war.  Perhaps the best way to understand how fascism or despotism segments itself into interpersonal realities is through bureaucracy, which is how government extends its control into the lives of individuals; in Gravity’s Rainbow, we see the inside of the bureaucracy that is in charge of controlling Slothrop’s life for the first two parts of the novel. Every administrative action is controlled by paranoia.  The White Visitation is technically headed up by Brigadier Pudding, “who was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries had believed in the Chain of Being” (77).  Note the word “literal,” which refers not to a reality, but to a linguistic construct—it means he takes the Chain of Command at its word, and only then as a reality.  He is haunted by the paranoiac idea that his post at The White Visitation is the result of a “treachery high inside Staff.”  Meanwhile, Pudding is completely under the thumb of Dr. Pointsman, who has rigged up an elaborate system of sexual domination through Katje, on which Pudding is completely dependant.  Through this system, not only does Pointsman absolutely control Pudding’s desires, he literally has the power of Pudding’s life in his hands because he prescribes the antibiotics that prevent Pudding from getting sick from all the shit that Katje forces him to eat.  Indeed, Pointsman is the despot at the center of The White Visitation, which is itself an institutional segment of the British war machine.  It is significant that to see such an example of microfascism in Gravity’s Rainbow, we turn to the British side, not the Nazi side of the war; not to say that Nazis were less fascist, but Pynchon points out that any government that transforms itself into a war machine will necessarily employ a fascist means of organizing its segments in a rigid manner. 

 

2.3 Capital as a Body without Organs

There is a third type of socius in the Zone: the decoded flow of Capital, which constitutes aspects of the Zone as capitalist. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism is a unique form of society because it depends on decoded flows.  While the barbaric and imperialist states (which can and do persist in a capitalist socius) struggle to impose their code on all the flows, capitalism seeks to liberate flows from the realm of control and coding. Capital, in the most general sense of the term—perhaps, value—is the body without organs of the capitalist and the socius of Capitalism.  It is on the surface of capital that the process of production gets recorded, for example, in profit margins or stock prices. 

Unlike despotic paranoia, which acts upon the individual characters of the novel, the flows of capital act upon the novel as a whole, and all of its component parts.  Capital organizes the novel whereas despotism only informs aspects of the characters.  For this reason, we will have to leave Slothrop aside for a few pages, or at least see him as a partial object in a larger system of flows and desiring-production.

Modern capital is unstoppable, and always seeks to expand into new markets, and so it imposes itself from outside the Zone in a multiplicity of forms.  And the novel tells us that capitalism created the War and therefore the Zone; to the extent that we can subscribe to Slothrop’s conception of an omnipotent conspiracy, a “They,” we imagine Them motivated by the flows of modern capitalism.   A war is a way of decoding flows:

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.  The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.  The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.  It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War.  It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.  Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.  Organic markets, carefully styled ‘black’ by the professionals, spring up everywhere…(105)

 

This passage is a good example of the political economy that Pynchon imagines, but the important aspects of it can be found throughout the book. To name only a few examples: the pies that Slothrop helps airlift into Berlin, or the hashish that he excavates from Potsdam.  But here, the reader is told that the War was specifically designed to decode the flows of capital, and create a more open market.  This end is manifest in the Zone that Slothrop finds himself in after the war, where there is no powerful state to enforce a reterritorialization of capital.  That the Zone was created in this way was, in Pynchon’s conception, the main motivation for the War, as commanded by a vague but cohesive elite—sometimes referenced as “They,” here referenced as “professionals.”  Ideology is manufactured not as an all-encompassing social reality, but instead only as a cover for the real movements, the movement towards decoded flows.  Violence is encouraged by a conscious elite to feed the lie of history, which is used as a vehicle for ideology to interpellate the young.  Contrary to many forms of Marxist thought (as in the thinking of Althusser), Ideology does not here control history, rather it only masks the true forces at work.  Ideology is just a front for the powerful flows of capital, it is like the empty pizza restaurant on expensive real-estate that covers over a vast, nefarious black market. But even that black market is ‘carefully styled;’ everything for Pynchon is controlled by unseen but conscious forces—even decoded flows, which in a Schizoanalytic conception would necessarily defy control in the form of overcoding, are controlled by a central consciousness. 

Deleuze and Guattari would view this intelligent design of capitalist flows as an impossibility; a decoded flow is not subject to political manipulations, which amount to a code.  Here is an important point where the two texts diverge.  Gravity’s Rainbow creates a fictional world that defies the logic of capitalism according to Deleuze and Guattari.  And yet, in doing so, Pynchon reflects an important social reality.  Although flows of capital are decoded, and thus inherently beyond the social code of morality, they often act upon human beings in a hugely destructive and oppressive way.  The deterritorialized flows of capital accumulate in so few hands that it seems to the majority of the society that the economic elite does code and control capital for their own malevolent ends—and, indeed, many of them do their best to do just that, but they are driven to do so by amoral capital itself, not the inverse.  Deleuze and Guattari say, “there is not a single economic or financial operation that, assuming it is translated in terms of a code, would not lay bare its own unavowable nature, that is, its intrinsic perversion or essential cynicism” (Anti-Oedipus 247).  Capitalism produces cynicism exactly because the flows are uncoded; the machines of capitalism at their base care nothing for any sort of human emotion or morality, only about the completely neutral flow of raw capital.  It is this cynicism that Pynchon reflects when he talks about social and economic control by centralized, conscious power.  That power is so omniscient that it controls both coded and decoded flows, but as this passage illustrates, it seeks to push flows towards decoding; it seeks out free markets, not overcoding or domination like the political powers we are used to.  It is the personified spirit of capital.  And through this technique, it is the essential perversion of capital that Pynchon seeks to reflect.  And to do so, he makes an inversion that is practically impossible by our own constructed theoretical construct.  We must remember that Pynchon writes fiction.  Indeed, it is exactly this cynical ability to expose the bare flows that makes Pynchon a powerful and humorous writer.

Although the War (and by extension, the Zone) was created by capital, the War has temporarily knocked the economy of the Zone straight out of the realm of modern capitalism, and the internal systems of the Zone itself has primarily regressed back into the primitive and despotic systems.  Indeed, Schnorp—a minor character who ferries Slothrop into Berlin via balloon—tells Slothrop, “This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system.  We’re back to that again.  A second chance.  Passages are long and hazardous.  Loss in transit is part of life.  You have had a glimpse of the Ur-market” (336). This is just what the consciousness of capital that designed the war has planned; to open a new economy that is not regulated by states, but rather is capitalism in its more pure, earliest form.  Capital necessarily expands into new markets, and so by creating the Zone, the war has created an entirely virgin (decoded) market for capital.  Thus, after the war has performed its production upon the Zone, capitalism becomes a force that is imposed upon the zone from the outside; Schnorp, Säure the drug dealer, and all other entrepreneurs must begin by importing capital into the Zone. 

We will have to return to the issue of capital as a socius in the Zone when we talk about the schizophrenic nature of Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

3. Slothrop’s Paranoiac Machine

In order to understand Gravity’s Rainbow as a schizophrenic machine, we must first participate in its actions; we must parse out how it breaks down meanings.  I will later argue that the totality of the novel is schizophrenic; that the whole thing is a schizophrenic machine.  But that molar machine is produced by a vast and bewildering web of segments: of characters and events that are molecular desiring-machines.   Therefore, I must chose a molecular machine of the novel: a single functioning unit, and my analysis eventually will swim upwards along the chain of production, beginning with Slothrop and arriving at Gravity’s Rainbow.  To begin to do this, I will discuss at more length the novel’s treatment of Slothrop’s paranoia.

 

3.1 A Word on the Social Significance of this Analysis

But I am not diagnosing Slothrop’s paranoiac machine.  I am not explaining away a clinical abnormality.  Rather, I am describing forces that have pulled and shaped human social reality.  Paranoia is created because the very ground upon which we build our society resists the forces of desiring-production that builds and sustains society.  All machines, all economies, are composed of organs of desire.  And they are all created—Deleuze says ‘recorded,’ Marxists would say (re)produced—upon the surface of a body without organs.  The earth is inescapably our first, most basic and most vital body without organs; it was on the surface of the earth that our ancestors carved their first  pictographs and symbols, and we continue to record and inscribe our production upon it, to the point of catastrophic degradation.  The ecological disaster which I will live through is the result of the dissonance and paranoia created when the earth (the first, “primitive” body without organs) refuses to yield to the forces of desiring-production, and desiring-production pushes back, hard.  Capital is the body without organs of capitalism, which is the only name of its flows (remember that Capital resists all other names, and tends toward deterritorialization). Capital constantly resists the controlling (and controlled) logic of capitalism because it tends to flow toward areas of deregulation, seeking out black markets and pockets of anarchy in the economy and favoring them, building them into unwieldy tumors in the sovereignty of a capitalist state.    This activates the forces of anti-production within the machine of desire; the police and the military strike back against these unregulated economies, hard.  Witness: the war on drugs.  Or the absurd battle to assert American dominance over Baghdad.  Each of these massive human tragedies is the molar structure composed of thousands of molecular resistances and repression.  Each case is different, and more tragic alone than in accumulation.  That is why we allow them to go on; because we see them as large aggregates of uncontrollable force, not as individuations that reflect these structures.  This is the important function of literature in a society: to break down the molar totality into the molecular and the individual; to reveal microfascisms.  For Deleuze and Guattari, this is a schizophrenic process: paranoia builds totalities, the schizoid breaks them back down.   

 

3.2  Slothrop’s Formation as a Paranoid Subject

Slothrop is formed out of many simultaneous processes of disjunction, one of which is the dissonance at the meeting place of literature and society in (differing) relation to the specific cultural moments both of the authoring and of the setting.  All of these dissonances create first a paranoid subject, who as we have seen then becomes despotic, projecting himself over his world—now within the reality and logic of the novel—making himself into a body without organs, the despotic socius.

Slothrop’s formation and his conditioning is one of the great mysteries that the novel clusters around. To remind ourselves, Deleuze and Guattari tell us that the subject is formed like a barnacle on the surface of the Body without Organs by the dissonance created at the intersection of the flows of desiring-production and the unyeidling resistance of the body.  So what were the various disjunctions at work in the formation of Slothrop as a subject?  Countless.  But the primary ones were clinical, artificial; Slothrop was systematically conditioned to be the subject he is.  In the spirit of good, traditional American capitalism, Slothrop’s father sold him to Lyle Bland, an entrepreneur, who then subcontracted him out to Lazlo Jamf, the progenitor of all science in the novel. Independent of what this conditioning actually consisted of, it is first this designed construction of Slothrop into a thought-experiment made flesh that lies at the foundation of his paranoiac machine. Slothrop is constantly conscious that he was manufactured –his birth is unimportant compared to his conditioning.  Deleuze and Guattari would be pleased with how doggedly Gravity’s Rainbow resists Oedipal interpretations; although the novel emphasizes Slothrop’s puritanical heritage, his mother and father are only minor figures who relinquished their control over him to a production machine.

Rather, the issue of Slothrop’s formation depends on an alternative psychoanalytic construct; Pavlovian conditioning-response.  Pavlov advocated a highly mechanistic view of human (and equally animal) nature whereby we are all desiring-machines, capable of being manipulated through systematic environmental control.  The clinical trials that Slothrop was subjected to were an exercise in raw power for the sake of power; they were to determine how to utterly control and manipulate a subject for no other end than to understand how to control a subject through desire.  In a sense, they are the ultimate expression of totalitarian control in the novel. Pavlovian conditioning uses controlled disjunctions between stimulus and response to reform the subject in predetermined ways. The very nature of an experiment is highly totalitarian: in order to reduce the variables, the experimenter must exercise absolute control over his subject; this type of psychological experimentation seems to be an extreme example of microfascism, and it was under this clinical environment that Slothrop was formed as a subject.  The experimenter inscribes his own significance on the body of his subject: Jamf inscribed his own code of meaning on the desiring-organs of Slothrop, and because Jamf is dead by the telling of the novel, this code is completely mysterious to everyone, including and especially Slothrop.  Let us turn to Pynchon’s description of this process:

But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t.  Binary, elegant.  The job of observing it can even be done by a student.

Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.

Unconditioned response = hardon.

Conditioned stimulus = x.

Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that that x.

Uh, x? well, what’s x? why, it’s the famous “mystery stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is.  The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per year on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf reported for Infant T.’s erection. (84)

 

The text, through the reading of Dr. Pointsman, goes on to explain that usually this conditioned response is supposed to be ‘extinguished’ from the subject before he is released back into the world; but there is no way of knowing whether Jamf did so, and if he did, it could have been extinguished beyond the point of zero, so his adult conditioned response could be the negative of the one that was instilled in him as a baby.  This was the process that first formed Slothrop as a subject: he had a completely arbitrary unit of signification imposed on his penis.  Jamf inscribed x onto his body, and x could have been anything (what it was will be a central mystery of the book, one never completely resolved—but it almost certainly has something to do with the Schwartzgerat rocket or its component part, Imnipolex G).  Jamf has not only overcoded Slothrop’s body, he has also overcoded his primary organ of desire.  For the rest of his life, no one (especially himself) can be sure that Slothrop’s desires are his own; they have always been co-opted by the process of signification.  Perhaps his every movement, his every sexual encounter, his every desire, has been installed in him like a piece of software.  And this despotic coding of Slothrop’s body was completely public—not only is the experiment written about in the humor magazine, but also the length of his baby penis is common knowledge.  The importance of this cannot be overstated: from the beginning of his life, when he was sold to Lyle Bland, Slothrop had no private life—his body was the surface of inscription for all of society.  He was always-already the center of signification for an entire generation—the war generation.  So it makes a tremendous amount of sense that in his adult life, the story of Slothrop’s desiring-conquests would be the story of the War itself. 

Reasonably, all of this—the utter totalitarian control over every aspect of Slothrop’s formation as a subject, and the continual surveillance over his life—makes him paranoid, or, in Deleuzian terms, makes him a paranoiac machine.  Paranoia is an agent of molar unities—it says that everything is connected in a giant network of power.  It is an unfortunate misconception that the word “paranoia” connotes that the necessary They is an imagination or a construction; in fact, paranoia is completely independent of Their empirical reality. It happens in Slothrop’s case that he certainly does have cause to be paranoid, but not quite to the extent that he is; the novel shows us agencies, most notably Dr. Pointsman and The White Visitation, that attempt to survey and control Slothrop, and during “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering,” they do control his daily reality.  But they are not the absolute, omnipotent sovereigns of his reality the way he imagines They are. His construction of Them is most tangible in the Casino, where he stumbles into a room that has been overcoded in mysterious ways:

For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of waking he has only lately begun to suspect.

There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or manlike figure beginning to form among the brown and bright cream shadows and light here.  But Slothrop isn’t about to be let off quite so easy.  Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different.  Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us.  Never.  Two orders of being, looking identical. . .but. . .but. . . (202)

 

There follows a whimsical song called THE WORLD OVER THERE.  This passage reveals the fundamental nature of a paranoid construct as an alternative code that the subject projects onto reality, and then attributes to an utterly Other, a nearly omnipotent They.  It is a process of overcoding, of imposing a structure that makes everything connected.  In this alternative code, signifiers (the objects in the room, paraphernalia, chairs) lose their “normal” signified and become attached instead to a hidden network that unifies them into a single system of control.  Pynchon offers a good image of this hidden network in the word “rootlike”—if it was real, the system of overcoding that the paranoiac machine constructs would resemble a network of roots under an aspen grove; the unseen, subterranean connections that makes each tree part of the same organism.  As he is just fully coming into his paranoiac machine, Slothrop here at first almost convinces himself that he could see or was in the physical presence of this unknowable unity—he begins to imagine the figure of a man, or the root system.  But that would be “letting him off too easy.”  Who would be doing the “letting him off?”  What authority is dictating the shape of his paranoiac machine?  My analysis thus far has given me the license to say something along the lines of ‘since he is the paranoiac machine, and is constructing this alternative code, he is the one who has the authority to deny himself this clear object of his paranoia.’  But this would be too simple, and would be wrong given the logic of paranoia that Pynchon lays out.  The subject cannot control the paranoiac machine; in fact, once the paranoiac machine has taken hold of the subject’s body, there is no more discrete, unified subject.  The most important part of the system of overcoding produced by the paranoiac machine is that it is itself entangled in the rootlike network, perhaps even at the very center of the network—a part of the molar totality that it produced.  This robs the paranoiac machine of any autonomy whatsoever; it becomes as controlled as it has imagined itself to be.  It has no subjectivity anymore.  This is why Slothrop is “[…]buffaloed under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught in this steel pot, softening to a devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words” (389).  To paranoid, the verb form now, is the process by which you the subject is caught inside an unyielding verbal trap—a steel pot made of your own words.  The subject is violently reduced like mushroom bisque.  But it did not come to happen, it happened immediately: Slothrop’s paranoia never had subjectivity; it was not at first his paranoia; it was thrust upon him by the authorities.

 

3.3 The Paranoiac/Despotic Regime of Signs

        It is absolutely necessary for Pynchon sometimes to give Slothrop this position of the despot because it is only this type of political machine that invests language with the power to inscribe the flows that move over the socius—in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call this the signifying regime of signs (or the despotic regime of signs), and that this is one among many regimes of signs that can exist in a society.  They contend that verbal language is first the language of the despot because it is absolute and arbitrary; it imposes itself on all who use it.  In fact, Deleuze and Guattari avoid talking about ‘power’ or ‘control’ and talk instead about coding and assigning meaning.  The first use of language was to enact laws and thus to begin to overcode the flows on the body of the socius. All writing flows from a despotic signifier, and it will never escape this origin; language is first used to enslave the masses by overcoding the deterritorialized flow.  The signifying regime of signs organizes a despotic society in concentric circles: the paranoid despot himself lies at the center of all signification: he is the ultimate signified.  Since it is Slothrop’s paranoiac machine at issue here, he occupies the place of the despot—he imagines himself at the center of a paranoiac network.  In this system, all signs refer back to other signs, creating a network of signification, but at the center of that network is the despot.  The “priests” are a vital part of this social arrangement, because they interpret the signs on behalf of the despot, and thus invest the signs with meaning.  In Gravity’s Rainbow, that role of the interpreter is the text itself, which provides the reader with explanations of Slothrop’s paranoiac system: this can best be seen in the device of the “Proverbs for Paranoids.”  But according to Deleuze and Guattari, a vital component of the signifying regime is the faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treaded, and adorned by priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight into the desert” (A Thousand Plateaus 116).  There is always a line of escape in a despotic system, and that line of escape will become vitally important to my analysis of the schizophrenic regime of signs.

True to the Schizoanalytic theory, Slothrop asserts his control over language at his most paranoid moments, for example, in the White Visitation as he is locked in conversation with Hilary Bounce:

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: the innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master.

“I hope I haven’t said anything wrong.”

“Whyzat?”

“you look—“ Bounce aspirating what he means to be a warm little laugh, “worried.”

Worried all right.  By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it—there!  that’s that monster I was talking about.  –That’s no monster, stupid, that’s clouds! –No, can’t you see? It’s his feet—Well, Slothrop can fell this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities…or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening…

“It’s only a ‘wild coincidence,’ Slothrop.”

He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others.  It is a bookish kind of reflex, maybe he’s genetically predisposed—all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones—all the materials and dimensions. (241-242)

 

Slothrop feels that he is being deluded by the deliberate misuse of language—that everyone else has agreed to ‘call them other names’ when he is listening.  He imagines a linguistic plot specifically targeted at him; everyone involved got together and invented a set of code words that they would use to upset Slothrop’s ability to comprehend reality.  The novel does not confirm nor deny that this paranoia reflects reality, because the novel does not pursue any objective reality outside of paranoia.  But this passage reveals the despotic signifier in paranoia; the paranoiac feels threatened by a whole realm of signification which he is subject to and yet has no control over, and so he enacts his own system which he has despotic power over; he can decide when to insert quotation marks into the speech of others, thereby allowing himself to code his own paranoia.  In this passage, he overcodes everything that Bounce says by appropriating it into his own paranoid system.  First with the word “worried,” by which Bounce means no harm, but which gives Slothrop affirmation that there is something to be worried about.  It is Bloat’s innocence that enables him to naively throw around words like “wild coincidence” in front of a paranoiac, who will obviously see it as a halfhearted attempt to cover the truth.  But let us remind ourselves that while Slothrop becomes a center of signification—like a despot who imposes his own meaning on language—the impulse to do so was installed in him by Pavlovian conditioning that he could not control.

Pynchon’s occasional invocations of Slothrop’s Puritan serve as one demonstration that this paranoiac system of overcoding is a relative of the linguistic system of coding that Deleuze and Guattari discuss as the foundation of a despotic or imperialist socius, which is the foundation of the fascist tendency.  In this way, we are given a framework for understanding the unity of language, politics, and desiring-production.  Slothrop’s tendency towards paranoia is based in his Puritan genealogy: “it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in” (188). The continual references to Slothrop’s puritan heritage are one of the only significant emphases on his genealogy.  The Puritans came to America to impose their code on a new land; as Pynchon here points out, theirs was an imperialism of the Book, and it was fueled by the paranoia of escaping oppression and overcoding in England.  They did not come to create a land of freedom, which would decode and deterritorialize; their intolerance of other religions is a demonstration of this.  Their allegiance was to the holy Text, which gave them despotic power to impose their own code over a virgin land.  Although circumstances are variable, this is always the movement of an empire; to spread outwards and impose its own code upon previously decoded societies (or societies that have such a different code that to the imperialists that they seem decoded). 

The puritan reflex is also inherently connected to the capitalism reflex that I have argued is the source of the War in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon presents World War II not as a moral struggle for justice, but as a necessity of capital; the war decoded the flows of capital and opened a vast black market in the center of Europe.  And so the despotic puritan impulse re-emerges.  This must necessarily call to mind Max Weber’s analysis of early capitalism.  In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism[5], Weber argued that capitalism was a product of the puritan work ethic; that the system of capital originally grew out of a religious, protestant ethic. The protestant work ethic demanded that people work as hard as possible to accumulate as much capital as possible, thus changing the flow of capital in society: the accumulation of capital was the first step in decoding capital.  Before the Spirit of Capitalism took hold, Weber argues that the labor force only worked as much as it needed to make enough to survive by a traditionalist standard.  Therefore, the capital that they accumulated through their labor was immediately spent; it was not decoded, it just shifted its code from “wage” to “food” almost instantaneously.  But the puritan work ethic caused capital to accumulate in a more abstract and decoded form: money.  These first accumulations of money as uncoded capital were signs that the owner of these flows were Elect.  In Pynchon’s World War II, the Elect continue to be those who control the most decoded flows of capital.  Although Slothrop himself controls nothing, he is the descendant of the archetypal capitalist race—the protestants—and so his history is steeped in the flow of capital, which will gain significance when I argue for the force of his schizophrenic process.

Slothrop continues this “puritan” or despotic tendency to thrust his code onto the surface of the War or the ensuing Zone.  His paranoiac machine overcodes the objective reality of the novel.  A paranoiac machine always projects itself outward, seeking to make connections in order to totalize and unify everything under a despotic body.  I do not use the word “projects” in a psychoanalytic sense—which would imply that it is a delusion or a construction of a subject—since the paranoiac machine has done away with the subject.  Real political entities are built by the projection of paranoia over a socius.  One example of this overcoding is the overlay of Slothrop’s map over the London blitz:

Still Slothrop keeps his map up daily, boobishly conscientious.  At its best, it does celebrate a flow, a passing from which—among the sudden demolitions from the sky, mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laboring of nights that for himself are only idle—he can save a moment here or there, the days again growing colder, frost in the morning, the feeling of Jennifer’s breasts inside cold sweater’s wool held to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he’ll never know the daytime despondency of…. (23)

 

First we must note the precise overlap of Pynchon’s diction and Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology: both emphasize the nature of desire as a flow, which can be recorded upon a surface.  Slothrop’s flow of desire is recorded first over the actual surface of London, and then represented on the surface of his map.  Later, the Slothrop admits to the reader that there is at least a strong element of fantasy in this record of sexual conquests (302), and it becomes impossible to tell which stars represent real sexual encounters and which do not--but they all get hit by rockets.  Through their surveillance of Slothrop, the folks at The White Visitation realize that his map, which first just locates his sexual conquests, predicts exactly the hits of German rockets.  There is much debate as to why this is, and it is never resolved, but one thing is clear: it is absolutely not the result of any agency or determination by Slothrop. “Mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laboring of nights that for himself are only idle” articulately illustrates how disconnected Slothrop is from the running of the Blitz.  For him, the bombs are almost a force of nature, albeit a force of nature to be feared to the point of insanity.  Rather, what seems to be his control over the Blitz is somehow linked to his Pavlovian conditioning that formed his paranoiac machine.  We can never know how or why Slothrop’s paranoiac machine is projecting itself over the blitz, but we should understand the effect that it has within the text; we should see it not as a method of control, but as a representation.  Slothrop’s map provides a code that makes a randomized, entropic event seem unified, cohesive, and strangely rational.  The territorial location of his desiring-flows bind disparate elements into a unity.  The result of this unity is the paranoid knowledge that the rockets must not be really random, but rather controlled by a centralized, despotic, nearly omnipotent force.  This force exists in Gravity’s Rainbow; if Pynchon says that the rockets follow Slothrop’s map, then they do.

Pynchon uses the narration to interpret Slothrop’s paranoia and make it seem like the absolute and despotic law of the world that the novel creates; in doing so, it occupies the position of the “priest” in Deleuze and Guattari’s signifying regime of signs.  The structure that Pynchon uses for discussing the paranoiac machine of the book demonstrates paranoia’s inherent despotism.  He lists five “Proverbs for Paranoids” that are set off from the text but often inform the current scene.  Proverbs are a folk form of an imperative; they are not really to be questioned.  By inventing them. Pynchon thrusts Slothrop’s way of understanding his world over all interactions between characters as well as our own readings as a consumer of the novel. It will be useful for our analysis to cite all of them:

 

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. (237)

 

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master (241)

 

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. (251)

 

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek. (262)

 

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations. (292)

 

In the latter half of part II, they are quite frequent, but the last one comes just a few pages into part III (“In the Zone”).  This is indicative of a development in Slothrop in a novel that seems to offer no such thing on any level. The proverbs mostly come while Slothrop is at the Casino, where he is being trained, manipulated by The White Visitation, readied for his time in The Zone.  But he is also learning how to be a despotic agent in the paranoid system that he is locked into, how to manipulate the paranoid web, and bend it to his own advantage.  That is why the first two Proverbs come from a system of manipulating the ‘creatures,’ the lackeys carrying out the master’s plans.  By creating these rules for himself, Slothrop realizes that he can give himself some agency, some autonomy, to manipulate the outer limits of the paranoid network.  He will never get to touch the inner, totalizing force—‘the Master’—but he can tickle his clueless creatures.  But Proverbs 3 and 4 have a different tone—they are useful for guiding Slothrop through a paranoid system, but they lead the reader and Slothrop to accept submission to the paranoia, to embrace it and deal with it as part of life.  Especially Proverb 4, “you hide, they seek,” has a simplicity that leads us to understand the absolute inevitability and inescapable nature of the paranoid life, even as he is in the process of escaping Pointsman’s system of surveillance (that proverb comes at the beginning of Slothrop’s flight into the Zone). This fourth proverb hints at submission; it implies an acceptance of the paranoid system, as if Slothrop must hide because it is simply his role in a system he cannot control.  Slothrop never entirely submits, but there are plenty of characters in the book who do.  Deleuze and Guattari call the subject who has chosen submission a miraculating machine. The fifth proverb is unique because it recognizes that the paranoid machine is constructed, while still attributing reality to the ‘paranoid situations.’  Although Slothrop has been deprived of his subjectivity by his paranoiac machine, it is still his paranoiac machine; it resides in his body and guides him through life, constantly putting him in paranoid situations.  By the time we get proverb 5, Slothrop is well into The Zone, a period of the book when he seems to have much more autonomy; the White Visitation has lost track of him, and he seems to be on a relatively personal mission to find the Schwartzgerat. 

 

3.4. The Miraculating Machine

         According to Deleuze and Guattari, paranoia is only the first reaction to the dissonance at the surface of the body without organs.  Through utter submission and loss of the ego, a subject can join with the forces of desiring-production to become a miraculating machine.  For Deleuze and Guattari, this functions as a “return of the repressed” (Anti-Oedipus 17).  They cite a series of schizophrenics who reached this phase in their paranoia, from Judge Schreber to Robert Gie, about whom it was said “Since he was unable to free himself of these currents that were tormenting him, he gives every appearance of having finally joined forces with them, taking passionate pride in their total victory, in their triumph” (L’ Art Brut qtd in Anti-Oedipus 17).  They argue that it is in this unification of the subject on the body without organs and the forces of desiring production that miracles can occur—or perhaps that very unification is a miracle.

         Gravity’s Rainbow is also obsessed with the potential of submission, but it is not clear that submission always leads to a miraculating machine.  Because the novel constantly contradicts itself, it provides gestures toward the potential for submission to be a miracle, but also demonstrates how vital submission is to reproducing despotic power structures.   Here, perhaps, there is an important difference in the sensibilities of Deleuze and Guattari and Pynchon’s. Although Gravity’s Rainbow is fiction, Pynchon is dealing with a much more real system and malevolent of control—a War Machine—than Robert Gie, who was simply a delusional schizophrenic.  It is easy for Gie to join with the forces that torment him, because he made those forces up. Gravity’s Rainbow is obsessed with submission as a political construct, and it is only in this context that the recurring sado-mascochist scenes and bondage motifs of the novel can be understood. It was due to these elements of the novel that it was denied the Pulitzer Prize, and it is important to understand the political implications of these scenes, which are not simple and direct. Sometimes Pynchon provides us reason to believe in the miraculating potential of submission, but in other important scenes submission is only used to reinforce paranoiac/fascist power. 

Both the miraculating potential for S and M and the paranoiac potential of submission can be seen in the Sado-anarchist philosophy of Mikilos Thanatz:

“Ludwig, a little S and M never hurt anybody.”

“Who said that?”

“Sigmund Freud.  How do I know?  But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up?  Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one?  Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival.  They cannot be wasted in private sex.  In any kind of sex.  It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game.  There is no joy in it, only power.  I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.”

This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoritician in the Zone these days. (737)

 

Thanatz was married to Greta Erdmann, on whom one of the most hardcore scenes of domination is enacted, for the pleasure of the viewing public. Thanatz had seen sadism in its most positive light; the domination of his wife brought immense pleasure to thousands of men, and created a collective orgasm across Europe.  The theory of Sado-anarchism that he here expounds is intensely idealistic; it does not occur to him that domination and sadism could be just as easily reinforce and reproduce the Structure that he seeks to erase. There is a real hint of Deleuze and Guattari’s miraculating concept in Thanatz’s philosophy.[6] Thanatz believes that if S and M were established universally, the State would automatically wither away, but he gives no justification or mechanism for this to happen; it would occur as if it was simply a miracle, as if the spiritual power would simply be metaphysically drained out of the despotic system.  But at the same, Thanatz is acutely aware of the importance of submission in a despotic system, and therefore he ought to understand that not all S and M is enacted in a subversive mode; S and M can just as easily be used to extract the submission that the System needs to “co-opt us into its own power game.”

         But there is a real differentiation to be made between the hedonistic Sado-anarchism of Greta and Thanatz and the militaristic, authoritarian domination that Katje and Gottfried receive at the hand of Blicero/Wiesmann, which has some traits in common with the scatological domination that Katje (in the guise of the Domina Nocturna) enacts on Brigadier Pudding.  The latter two examples do not undermine the Structure, rather they reinforce and make absolute the hierarchy that is the Structure.  There is no potential for liberation when even the dominating body has no freedom or autnomy, when both subjects are locked in the same rigid system.  For example, the “Domina Nocturna” scene at The White Visitation is not controlled by the Domina herself; rather, the whole thing is an orchestrated play on behalf of Dr. Pointsman to maintain his unquestioned control over The White Visitation.  Technically, Brigadier Pudding outranks Pointsman, but what occurs at The White Visitation is entirely Pointsman’s project, and he needs to neutralize the power of the bureaucrat sent to supervise him.  Due to this nightly domination, Pointsman literally has the power to decide if Pudding lives or dies; he prescribes and forces Pudding to take the antibiotics that will prevent him from getting sick from eating excrement.  The Domina gives the reader real clues that she is not in charge of her own actions—that she doesn’t even enjoy her role: “her instructions were not to smoke” (233).  However, Pudding does enjoy it. He needs to submit; he has spent his life in submission to the British military, and he is “bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure.  They have taken him so far from his simple nerves.  They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet. . .” (234).  Again, They re-emerge in their omnipotence; it is the They-system that has denied Pudding any real hope for reality or truth, it is the rigid hierarchy of the War Machine that has denied him sensation or humanity.  This does not mean that his domination provides an escape from Them, but only serves to ensure that he must show up and enjoy his domination every night.

         It is a somewhat different situation on the other side of The War, in the Oven Game, but again the ritualized submission of a subject provides no potential either for miracles or for anarchism.  As I will discuss again in Chapter 3, Blicero/Weismann, who makes Gottfried and Katje his slaves, is the epitome of German authoritarian and imperialist control.  As opposed to the Domina Nocturna, Blicero is in absolute control of his domination, but because he is the despotic system, submission to him is not a submission to an individual, but to the War Machine itself.  Blicero is compared to a “Spanish inquisitor” (94), an authority figure who dominates subjects not for pleasure, but who represents a system of despotic oppression.  The Oven Game is based less on sadomasochist pleasure and more on ritualized imperial humiliation:

How seriously is she [Katje] playing?  In a conquered country, one’s own occupied country, it’s better, she believes, to enter into some formal, rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form or decent limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings, beatings subterfuge, paranoia, shame. . . (96)

 

This is the only potential for a positive implication of the Oven Game; it enables Katje to visualize and understand the system of fascist control that she has been placed under, and therefore allows her to understand what it would mean to escape from it.  And she does, leaving her “brother” Gottfried behind.  But given that she only escapes to the other side of the War to become utterly controlled by The White Visitation, I resist the idea that her escape from Blicero is an escape with any promise of real liberation.  She does escape from a brutal, fascist state into a slightly less malevolent bureaucratic state, but this is hardly a “miracle” or even a move towards anarchism.

 

3.5 The Inescapability of Paranoiac Systems

         I have argued the absolute inescapability of the paranoiac/despotic They-systems that control the characters of Gravity’s Rainbow.  But some of the characters, particularly Slothrop, is himself a paranoiac who creates a system of despotic signification that re-orders the reality around him into a massive paranoid network with himself at the center.  Whether his paranoid system is “real” in the book is irrelevant; all that matters is that he is inescapably controlled by it, and that he can not react against it because it controls his every movement, his every thought—even if he rebelled against it, he would do so because he had been conditioned to do so.

         But because these paranoiac systems are inescapable for the characters of the novel, the novel as a whole (and therefore the readers of the novel) can imagine an escape from these systems.  The critical self-awareness that the novel brings to bear on They-systems enables the novel to engage in a schizophrenic process of escape and decomposition, whereby the paranoid systems are only one partial object of a novel that utterly defies despotic or fascist totalities. 

 

Chapter 2: Schizophrenia and Capitalism in Gravity’s Rainbow

1. Theoretical Foundations

         Gravity’s Rainbow is a schizoid novel.  However, when I use the word schizophrenia, I have in mind a vastly different theoretical foundation than the usual psychoanalytic conception of schizophrenia as a clinical disease.  For this reason, before we can proceed with our analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow, I must explain some important aspects of schizophrenia as Deleuze and Guattari use the term.  For them, Schizophrenia is an inevitable product of capitalism in society.

Let me begin by returning to our analysis of capital as a body without organs in the zone.  We have said that capitalism tends to depend on decoded and deterritorialized (in economic terms, deregulated) flows of capital.  Capitalists tend to favor open markets and fresh territory to exploit.  This is the impulse towards laissez-fiare that accompanied modern Capitalism. And yet, everywhere we look in today’s capitalist world, capital is tied to extremely well coded apparatuses of power, like massive corporations or governments.   Such is the nature of power in a capitalist society; the goal of each individual and organization is to control the flows of capital and inscribe their own code on the surface of capital.  And yet we can continue to see the tendency of Capital to escape that overcoding—for example, in the drug market, which has created a huge bubble of capital outside of state control in an unregulated black market.  We have already seen that in Gravity’s Rainbow, it is this tendency of capital to decode itself that caused it to create the War and its product, the Zone. 

So Capital is the first form of a socius to depend on the decoding of flows, and yet a capitalist state seems to offer plenty of despotic oppression.  In fact, in Deleuzian thinking, the term “capitalist state” seems to be a contradiction in terms, and it is—the capitalist state is built on a schizoid foundation.  Because although capital itself depends on decoding and deterritorialization, a capitalist government constantly seeks to overcode all of society:

 What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. (Anti-Oedipus 34)

 

Deleuze and Guattari call the government functions of policing, lawmaking, educating, etc., functions of ‘antiproduction,’ because they seek to control and regulate the productive forces of capital.  This is the aspect of government that we are most familiar with; the official repression that so often gets confused for all repression (as if raw decoded capital alone cannot enslave a man). In Gravity’s Rainbow, the lack of any clear state authority within the Zone means that the forces of antiproduction are limited, allowing the flows of desiring-production to flow more freely.[7] 

Whereas paranoia is connected with barbarian despotism, Deleuze and Guattari argue that schizophrenia lies at the limit of capitalism, and is an unavoidable product of it. To understand why this is, we must go back into the nature of capitalism.  We understand capitalism as a chain of desiring machines who control a flow (of capital). But each one of these machines constitutes a break in the flow, a disjunction; they operate through disjunctions in the flow. I visualize these disjunctions as a necessary step in creating a commodity: one cannot package and sell and endless flow, instead, one must manufacture a singularity (what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘partial object’) that has a perimeter, a beginning and an end, that can be encased in plastic to be sold.  But there are other functions of disjunction.  The most important function of these disjunctions is that it creates desire, which is the energy that keeps production moving.  Deleuze and Guattari vehemently deny that desire is a product of a lack; lack is, instead, a necessary product or even a by-product of production (as we have seen, it can just as easily be created by the operations of antiproduction). Desire is a decoded flow that becomes the social code. Desiring-production and social-production is exactly the same thing, but under different regimes.  That social code plays into the hands of the Despotic Signifier, the paranoiac machine who assembles all the flows into a giant, molar edifice of social control.  But at the absolute limit of capitalism, the schizophrenic continually detaches the partial objects, carries them off in every direction to create a code of desire.  These two, the paranoiac and the schizophrenic, sit at opposite poles of the socius, and both the capitalist machine and the subject that it produces oscillate incessantly between the two.  

         Although I am not denying that there is a clinical disorder called schizophrenia, I am here treating schizophrenia as a social and textual process of decomposition and multiplicity on the surface of a body without organs.  That process is, however, embodied in a schizophrenic subject (Deleuze and Guattari love to cite Judge Daniel Schreber as an example of this).  We must then understand some of the characteristics of the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic subject, created on the surface of the body without organs, passes through various intensities as he roams over the surface.  Each of the surfaces becomes connected with a different identity.  But the identities are not of the subconscious as a psychoanalytic perspective would argue; instead, each identity is a mere signification.  The schizophrenic subject names him or herself according to the zone of intensity he or she is experiencing at the moment.  But history, culture, and race is already distributed over the surface of the body without organs, and so the identifications that the schizophrenic makes are always historical, and always raced: “I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Heliogabalus and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a Templar, I was my father and I was my son” (Anti-Oedipus 85). (notice how a psychoanalytic or Oedipal identity is included among a multiplicity here; Deleuze and Guattari sought to construct an argument by which psychoanalysis was only seen as part of the picture). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said “Every name in history is I” (Qtd in Anti-Oedipus 21).[8] The schizophrenic experiences universal history in the form of delirium. It will be within this context that we can understand racial identity and blackness in Gravity’s Rainbow in Chapter 3.  This is one way that the schizophrenic takes desiring-production (and with it, social production) apart and reproduces history within the realm of the molecular.   We recognize this in aspects of Slothrop’s being; he moves through multiple identities like Ian Scuffling, the Kenosha Kid, and Rocketman with ease, but in name only.  But as we will see, this is not the only role for Schizophrenia within Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

2. The Schizophrenic Sign

         Just as the representative mode of the primitive territorial machine was graphism and the representative mode of despotism was writing, so the representative mode of schizophrenia is simulation.  Therefore, if schizophrenia lies at the limit of capitalism, than schizophrenic simulation lies at the limit of capitalist representation. Schizophrenics merely simulate identities, and they do so within the world of the surface of the body without organs; they can only be by being someone or something else.  Capitalism is illiterate; it depends on decoded flows.  Thus the simulation of the schizophrenic is a form of writing without despotic signifiers: “a writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real.  It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine.  The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice” (Anti-Oedipus 87). The schizophrenic simulation created by a capitalist socius is the closest one can get to “the beating heart of reality.” This is because Reality is a production of the desiring-machines.  This does not make it any less real—we are not entering The Matrix here.  It is simply an understanding that machines are material objects that manufacture a material reality, and that reality is physically very different than one produced by another type of socius. 

For Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is a process of simultaneity; the subject feels the impact of many differential zones of intensity at once, and thus creates multiple differential identities for himself at once.  Instead of identity being a matter of “either/or,” it is a matter of “either/or…or…or…or” without restricting or excluding one from the other (Anti-Oedipus 76).  Immediately, this could be said of Slothrop, who acquires countless names and identities throughout the novel. The same could be said of the schizophrenic use of language; where one sign or packet of signs has countless simultaneous meanings.  Or, conversely, where one meaning has multiple signs that refer to it; all the names of all the identities of a schizophrenic will refer back to the schizophrenic subject him or herself, and the same is true of the schizophrenic sign. 

By this notion of simultaneity, Gravity’s Rainbow is rife with schizophrenic signs. This is the linguistic equivalent of how we tend to imagine clinical schizophrenia: a subject identifies him or herself with many different personages.  The example that I would like to analyze, that I believe sets a formula for schizophrenic language throughout the novel, is the Kenosha Kid episode from Part I.  Pynchon begins the episode with six numbered fragments that all employ different meanings of a single sentence.  Because layout is important to this section, instead of citing passages from this section, I will use scans of my copy of the book, with an addition from page 62:

[Cont. pg 62:] stick that needle in my vein, Slothrop, snap to!

 

The phrase “you never did the Kenosha Kid” is always presented in the same word order, but its meaning is manipulated.  In the first instance, it is a response to a (somewhat paranoid) query from Slothrop: “Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?”  In this instance, the Kenosha Kid is an identity; there is a person named the Kenosha Kid.   So we immediately have a schizophrenic formation of identity layered on top of what will immediately become a schizophrenic linguistic formation; in (2), the “Kenosha” becomes a dance step, and the “kid” becomes a different identity, the smartass youth.  (2.1) illustrates that the schizophrenic formation must not always be so starkly opposed to itself; a subtle shift serves to attach a previous meaning to a new signifier—the dance that was once the “Kenosha” is now the “Kenosha Kid.”  This is an important illustration that under a schizophrenic regime of signs, the confusion flows both ways; a single meaning can attach to multiple signs, just as multiple signs can refer to the same meaning.  In (3), the “Kenosha Kid” is given another identity, a despot at the center of the Slothrop Affair, a figure of the “They” of Slothrop’s paranoia.  In my reading, the Kenosha Kid retains this despotic character in (4), where he becomes the omnipotent despot at the center of a regime of signs; “he gave us in fiery letters across the sky all the words we’d ever need, words we today enjoy, fill our dictionaries with…” This is the origin of the sign as an arbitrary set of signifiers given to us by a despot under whose regime Slothrop rebels by questioning: “you never did ‘the,’ Kenosha Kid!” meaning that the Kenosha Kid forgot to impose his own significance upon that most common and fundamental word, ‘the.’  It is also in (4) that the text becomes self-aware, and gives the reader the setting in which the rest of the episode is to be told.  Slothrop is undergoing drugged interrogation at the hand of PISCES, which is one of the organizations in Slothrop’s paranoiac plot.  This frame story illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s description of schizophrenia as “either/or…or…or,” multiple identities.  Slothrop is either in the ‘reality’ of being interrogated by PISCES, or he is dancing (2), or he is an employee (3), etc.  With initial awareness, Slothrop begins the process of struggling to awaken: “snap to, Slothrop.”  But not before lapsing back into his schizophrenic linguistic delusions in (5).  There follows one of the most humorous and memorable episodes in the novel: Slothrop narrates to his interrogators at PISCES the story of his journey down the toilet and into an alternate reality in pursuit of his lost harmonica.  I will address this episode at more length later. At the end of this episode, Slothrop returns to the Kenosha Kid, for a seventh variation on the phrase:

In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the connection he’s traveled all this way to see.  The face is as weak as a house-dog’s, and its owner shrugs a lot.

Slothrop: Where is he?  Why didn’t he show?  Who are you?

Voice: The Kid got busted.  And you know me, Slothrop.  Remember?  I’m Never.

Slothrop(peering): You, Never? (A pause.) Did the Kenosha Kid? (71)

 

Here again we see another schizophrenic identity of the Kenosha Kid.  But this passage also gives another illustration of the ease and wit with which Pynchon employs schizophrenic language: the “connection” is not only a drug dealer, but also a textual connection, back to the beginning of the episode.  This pun is one example of how intensely Pynchon interweaves textual self-reflection into the story—the story constantly refers back to itself.  This self-referentiality gives the novel another vital component in its schizophrenic nature: along with all the other identities that the text signifies, it also signifies itself.  Or, rather, because Slothrop has been seeking out the signifier “The Kenosha Kid”—a textual connection to the beginning of the episode—the text has only ever signified a search for itself.

3. The Schizophrenic Regime of Signs

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that, language is a construction of the paranoiac, imperialist or despotic socius.  For them, language was first used to express a legal system and exercise control over a polity.  But in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari offer a counter to the paranoid despotic regime of signs; they argue that a line of escape for a sign is available—a sign detaches itself from the despotic signifier at the center of the regime, and proceeds outwards, creating its own passional (but not despotic) regime.  Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the paranoid Pharaoh and the passional Hebrew; the Hebrews follow a line of escape out of the despotic system, and in so doing, they create a new regime of signs that is based on a prophet, who is authoritarian but not despotic, because he does not thrust an interpretation upon the people. Deleuze and Guattari call that point where signs escape the despotic regime the point of subjectification, because it is the point where the sign is liberated from an absolute referent, and thus made subjective. Where before signification depended on the face of the despot at the center, now the prophetic book becomes the body of the regime of passional signs: here comes the holy book.  The holy book either gets rid of the interpretation that was vital to the signifying regime, or it displaces interpretation inside itself.  Either the text must be taken at its authoritative word, or the text can be interpreted only within its own system of logic.  Here Deleuze and Guattari take a rare swing at the avant-garde: “[…] all of these platitudes so dear to the avant-gardes, which cut the book off from its relations with the outside, are even worse than the chant of the signifier.  Of course, they are entirely bound up with a mixed semiotic.  But in truth they have a particularly pious origin.  Wagner, Mallarme, and Joyce, Marx, and Freud: still Bibles” (A Thousand Plateaus 127).

The passional sign is the first state of exception under a despotic signifying regime.  The phrase "the state of exception" and the logic of exception under a despotic regime was formulated by Giorgio Agamben[9].  The starting-place of his argument is the idea that the despot himself gains power because only he has the power to declare a state of exception from the rule of law; as exemplified by the idea within a state of a "state of emergency" in which the constitutional or foundational rights that the state claims to hold dear are suspended.  The paradox of sovereignty is: "I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law" (Agamben 15).  From there, the sovereign can go about the business of interiorizing everything else within the logic of law—here Agamben quotes Deleuze and Guattari, "sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing" (A Thousand Plateaus 445).  The state interiorizes even the exception simply by defining it as such, forcing the exception to exist only in relation to itself. This type of exception must be presented as (but not necessarily be) a reaction to a threat to the people and stability of the state.  For example, although Hitler came to power through constitutional means, in order to solidify his power, he needed to declare a state of emergency in which he could assume absolute control.  He presented this state of emergency as a necessity given the threat posed by the Jews (the internal scapegoat) and the Western powers (the external threat).  Deleuze and Guattari include the scapegoat as a vital component of their despotic regime of signs because a despot can only gain the power to be outside the law through a relation of exception.

I argue that this relation of exception is exactly the relationship of the despotic regime of signs to the passional regime of signs (the passional is the exception to the despotic).  Always, despotism looms in the distance, the repressive origin of all textual signification, but the passional regime removes itself from despotism by one degree.  Agamben seems to agree: he argues that in order to have a denotation under the rule of law, it must also be meaningful in all that it does not denote, and, by extension, the language of the law can only be law because there is an alternative sense in which it is nonjuridicial.  As I understand Deleuze and Guattari, the passional regime of signs provides just this type of exception to the language of law by replacing despotic, legal signifiers with a passional, authoritative system of signs.  That passional system of signs follows exactly the same route of escape that was created for it by the necessity of a scapegoat in the despotic state; just as the system of legal signification presupposes a previous nonjuridicial regime of signs (in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari discuss a short list of regimes of signification that preceded the despotic, i.e the graphic), so the passional regime of signs presupposes a despotic regime that created a place in society for it to exist—a route of escape.  In Homo Sacer, Agamben says,

Just as in occurrence of actual speech, a word acquires its ability to denote a segment of reality only insofar as it is also meaningful in its own not-denoting […] so the rule can refer to the individual case only because it is in force, in the sovereign exception, as pure potentiality in the suspension of every actual reference.  Just as language presupposes the nonlinguistic as that with which it must maintain itself in a virtual relation (in the form of a langue or, more precisely, […] in the form of a discourse whose actual denotation is maintained in infinite suspension) so that it may later denote in actual speech, so the law presupposes the nonjuridicial […] as that which maintains itself in a potential relation to the state of exception. (Agamben  20-21)

 

To restate his argument in Deleuzian terms, Agamben argues that the despotic regime of signs presupposes a passional regime (“actual speech”), thus the despotic regime depends on a state of exception from itself.  Only through this relation of exception can the rule of law create signification in a sovereign system.  Hence, the escape from the despotic regime is not really an escape because it only enables the despotic regime to exist.  And the despotic regime constantly internalizes its elements, so even the element of escape is part of the despotic system.

So is the schizophrenic use of language that I describe in Gravity’s Rainbow an example of this passional regime of signs?  Is Gravity’s Rainbow a holy text?  It is tempting to think so, because it clearly does not employ a despotic system of signification where a signifier has a clear and predefined relationship to the signified.  Indeed, Pynchon offers a parody of this system in Slothrop’s puritanical (“bookish”) tendency.  Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari would probably say that the novel is an example of the passional, post-signifying regime of signs.  I assume that they would argue this given that they have already lumped all of modernism—including and especially novelists like Joyce—into this regime of signs.  But I would disagree with them.  I believe that Gravity’s Rainbow operates under a new regime of signs, that I call the schizophrenic or schizoid regime.  There is room in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory for a new regime of signs: they are very careful to say that they do not offer a comprehensive list of all possible regimes.

Because the schizoid regime has no predetermined relationship of exception to the despotic regime, it could also be conceptualized as a path of escape from the passional regime.  The passional regime is always locked in a binary with the despotic that forbids it from ever being genuinely revolutionary.  But the schizoid regime is a real escape.  Therefore, the schizoid regime is an escape from the passional regime of signification, because it resolves the fundamental contradiction inherent in the passional regime.  In this mode of looking at it, the passional regime is an escape from the despotic, but the schizoid is an escape from the passional. It is important to return here to the text of Gravity’s Rainbow to see how the text understands this logic, beginning with the paranoiac and working through the states of exception.

I have argued that a paranoiac system of despotic control guides Slothrop.  That paranoiac system is dependant upon a regime of signification that depends on binary opposites; for example, the binary differentiation between the elect and the preterite. This vocabulary has its roots in Slothrop’s puritan heritage, which I have already argued is a signifier of his despotic/paranoiac tendency.  The American puritans adopted the Calvinist belief in predetermination, in which a human was either saved or damned by God before he or she was born.  But the culture of the puritans depended on an all-important system of signification between the material world and the divine: material success achieved through hard work was the absolute signifier of Election, and so each member of the socius worked hard to prove to each other that he or she was saved.  Molly Hite[10] makes the assumption that the Elect are the They at the helm of the paranoiac system.  That assumption seems to be borne out by the text: Pynchon does tend to refer to the elect as those in power and the preterite are on the periphery or are under control. In the Nazi séance at which Rathenau makes his pronouncements, for example, “Only certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter’s sitting room.  The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving their hands…”(163). Pirate (544), Slothrop (590), and Enzian (316) all identify themselves as preterite; they each feel themselves used by the They-system.  This type of thinking is embedded in a despotic regime of signs which structures a paranoiac society. 

         The use of this vocabulary of predestination appears to leave very little possibility of resistance or revolt on the part of the preterite; they are not the masses or the workers of revolutionary theory, but rather the hopeless and the totally controlled.  But this is not the uniform assertion of the text—rather, the Preterite have the power of exception over the Elect.  This is according to Slothrop’s first American (and Puritan) ancestor, William Slothrop:

“That’s what Jesus meant,” whispers the ghost of Slothrop’s first American ancestor William, “venturing out on the Sea of Galilee.  He saw it from the lemming point of view.  Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could hve been no miracle.  The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table. (554)

 

Slothrop objects that the Puritans didn’t have jigsaw puzzles, to which William can only say “Aw, shit,” a joke, but a joke with a schizoid textual function: the text refuses to attempt a logical system to unify anachronistic elements.  William Slothrop’s philosophy holds no promise of liberation, only offers a predestined universal binary that implies that the elect are just as important as the preterite to the cosmic system.  Without Slothrop, the paranoid They-system would have no one to control.  “Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart.  How can Jesus be the exception?” (555).  The rule of William Slothrop’s system is the exception—William Slothrop's rule itself demonstrates the power of Agamben's state of exception.  Everything must have its exception which allows it to exist.  This is vital to an understanding of the structures of power in the novel: power is derived from the state of exception, power is a reaction to a series of threats to itself.  The war itself is a state of exception, and it allows governments on both sides to transform themselves into totalizing War Machines.

         The novel itself presents this rule of exception, but it is the self-conscious exception to the rule of exception which gives a place to the schizophrenic signifier, the escaped regime of signification which does not reinforce the despotic structures of power; the exception to William Slothrop and Agamben’s rule that all power is derived from the exception.  We have seen that the novel constantly resists any totalizing tendency, and therefore there must be the possibility of escape within the logic of the novel:

 And yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel’s Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us. . . something will. So the permutations ‘n’ combinations of Pudding’s Things That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Gödel’s Theorem, don’t give Hitler an outside chance.  So, when the laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the “S-Gerät” Slothrop thinks he’s been chasing like a grail.  And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around in Germany even now—the Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate. (275)

 

Pynchon is right in likening Murphy’s Law to a layman’s Gödel’s Theorem; the theorem comes in two parts, the first of which is that for every consistent arithmetic theory that produces a true statement there is an alternative statement that is true and yet is not provable within the logical system of the theory.  The second part of the theorem follows from the first part: any theory is only consistent if it includes a statement of its own inconsistency.  This provides the foundation for ideas like William Slothrop’s: in order for God to save, there must be some that God does not save.  As this passage points out, it is the exception which is central to the novel; it is the S-Gerät that Slothrop chases, not just any old rocket.  The point that the Schwarzkommando is the escaped term of “the black scapeape we cast down from Lucifer” is so important to the novel that we will have to leave it aside until we can give a full treatment of blackness in the next section.  Power is derived from its exception.  But to demonstrate that Gravity’s Rainbow follows and illustrates the theoretical arc I laid out in the last section, then we must understand that the novel argues that the rule that all power is derived from exception must have an exception.  There must be an element that escapes the totalizing structures of power without reinforcing it. This is the origin of the schizophrenic regime of signification, which is not only an exception to the rule of the despotic regime, but an exception to the passional regime, as well.  Deleuze and Guattari argued that the passional regime followed the line of flight out away from the despotic regime, and thereby became the Other term which reinforces the existence of the despotic regime; they provided examples of this from the canon of modernity: Freud, Marx, etc.  But the schizophrenic regime of Gravity’s Rainbow is the exception to the rule of exception.  Deleuze and Guattari would call this an extremely high degree of ‘deterritorialization,’ because it distances itself so far from any regime of signs that is already coded by the structures of power.

If Gravity’s Rainbow poses itself as an exception to the rule that power is derived from the state of exception, it must posit an absolute and divine system that has no exception, because the exception to Gödel’s Theorem would be a theory that has absolutely no exceptions, that is always true.  This is exactly why the paranoiac They-system plays such a huge role in the novel; although I am arguing that the schizophrenia of the novel as a whole offers some escape from despotic rule, within the logic of the narrative itself—within the paranoiac machine of Slothrop—there is absolutely no escape.  By emphasizing this system of absolute control, Gravity’s Rainbow proves itself an exception to the rule that power comes from the state of exception, and thereby achieves a degree of secondary deterritorialization or escape that is generally unavailable to the passional cries for revolution from modernist thinkers in the Marxist tradition, for example.  It is important to remember here that the desire that fuels the paranoiac system of social control in the novel is the desire for decoded capital ("the real business of the war is buying and selling"); so the point of escape (for Deleuze the point of subjectification) from the law of exception is the schizophrenic force of decoded capital. 

It is important that the escape from the passional regime of signs is only made possible by self-awareness; it is the awareness of itself as the exception to the rule that 'power is built on the state of exception' that gives the novel a high degree of deterritorialization.  This is why the above passage is vital to this understanding of the novel; it is aware of itself as an open system, as a system of exceptions, and here tells the reader as much.  In an important move of self-awareness, the paragraph from which I have cited above opens as a critique of cultural criticism:

“Yeah, well,” as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, “you know, he did love her, folks.”  Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people…even interviews with King Kong Kulstists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam…and yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider […] (275)

 

Pynchon here mocks the modern approach to cultural theory that above all claims that the critic is ‘authoritative’ and thus absolutely exhaustive.  He makes this criticism within his own cultural production that critics would later call “encyclopedic” (Hite 96).[11] In no unclear terms, Pynchon here tells the reader and would-be critic that any totalitizing attempt on his own novel will necessarily fail, as Mitchell Prettyplace (a real critic of King Kong) would.  Prettyplace’s theory rests on a statement that claims to be axiomatic, but is in fact an assumption that could be wrong (what if he didn’t love her, folks?).  Pynchon then tells the reader that the only axiomatic of his own production would be Gödel’s Theorem, and the ensuing play on the exception to the rule of exception.

         This self-referentiality fuels the parodic nature of the novel, which is a vital component in its schizophrenia. It is untrue to say that nothing in Gravity’s Rainbow should be taken seriously, but it is impossible to untangle satire from belief because Pynchon constantly refers every belief or ideology back to itself, making it seem ridiculous. Here is yet another point that I could choose almost any passage as an illustration of, so I will do so:

“Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct.  Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted…of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? (214)

The text constantly references this type of cultural knowledge outside itself, and in so doing calls attention to itself as a text.  This passage is almost just a citation—a citation of a very well rehearsed theme of the American consciousness.  The internalization of the ideology of manifest destiny is a bit too real to become a cliché; the expanse of the American West still dominates the American consciousness, but Pynchon can be familiar enough about it to allow just a hint of dismissiveness into his tone (‘artists nobody ever heard of’).  The language of this passage is a parody of Modernist writers like Fitzgerald (and specifically the end of The Great Gatsby), but it is not simply a parody of the writing, but of the idea.  Although Pynchon’s language is rich throughout the book, phrases like “when the land was still free and innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct” stick out as being particularly sickly-sweet, calling attention to itself as clichéd language about a clichéd idea.  However, Pynchon is a social critic and a political writer, and he would never discount the political importance of the idea of manifest destiny—just because it is worn out does not mean that it isn’t powerful.  But he maintains his ironic tone by invoking sexual and misogynistic language: “purity begging to be polluted…virgin sunsets to penetrate and foul.”  Passages like these constantly call the reader’s attention to the act of textual production itself to remind them that they are consuming a cultural artifact, a product of a society and of desiring-production.  In this way, the novel stays within its own text, even while it alludes to an entire tradition worth of cultural production.

It is important to differentiate the schizophrenic regime of Gravity’s Rainbow from the passional regime of modernity because they do not have the same function as machines of social production.  The passional sign follows the same line of escape that a scapegoat under a despotic regime follows, only instead of a single subject escaping from the despotic regime, it is a sign or an entire packet of signs. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not address this, I have argued, using Agamben, that because its path was created by the despotic regime, the passional regime has a function within the despotic regime that it has departed from. It occupies the place of the scapegoat within the despotic system.  The despot can always refer to the people who live under the escaped sign as the “enemy,” and this serves a vital function in his regime.

On the other hand, the schizophrenic regime of signs uses as its line of escape the decoded flows of capital.  The despotic state still lies at the center of signification, even in a modern, capitalist society; I have tried to demonstrate that a despotic state tries to control and overcode the flows of capital in its own society, but that sometimes a flow of capital will escape its overcoding, and a deterritorialized market will open up—like a black market, or like the open market of The Zone.  It is this escaped flow of capital upon which the schizophrenic sign rides away from the despotic signifier.  Because of this, the schizophrenic sign has no purpose, even as a counter-example, to the despotic regime.  Instead, it serves to dismantle the despotic regime, piece by piece, slowly decoding the paranoiac legal edifice that the despot has built. 

The schizoid regime of signs, then, offers the possibility for a genuine escape from the despotic system, and thus offers genuine revolutionary potential.  Although they do not explicitly acknowledge the existence of a schizoid regime of signs in Capitalism and Schizophrenia[12], they do believe that implicit in the schizophrenic escape is the power of a revolutionary force, and it is this function that I am looking for in Gravity’s Rainbow.  In Anti-Oedipus, they say,

The schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away at and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, everywhere setting the molecular charges that will explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape, at each point ensuring the conversion of schizophrenia as a process into an effectively revolutionary force. (Anti-Oedipus 341)

 

It is not the schizoid himself who is revolutionary, rather, it is the schizophrenic process which breaks down the molar totality into its segmentary parts that is revolutionary. That process exposes the absurdity and meaninglessness of some of the signifiers that the structures of power are built upon; later on, I will demonstrate this operation with the signifier of blackness.  Simultaneously, the schizophrenic process decouples the signifier from the signified.  As Deleuze and Guattari say, the process deterritorializes signifiers.  This removes the political power of those signifiers.  And, as they point out in this passage, the schizophrenic decomposition of a society allows room for other escapes; people, ideas, and flows of capital that were locked within the social body are set free and form their own schizophrenic lines of escape.

I must take a moment to clarify how this argument differs from that of Deleuze and Guattari.  Although schizophrenia is absolutely central to their analysis (the title of their project is Capitalism and Schizophrenia), the term and the idea “a schizophrenic regime of signification” is my own extension of their linguistics. They do not spend too much time on the issue of capital as a point of subjectification—one paragraph on page 130 of A Thousand Plateaus—so I am not challenging the bulk of their argument.  To address this issue, they rely on the thinking of Louis Althusser, who they dismissed in Anti-Oedipus.  For Althusser, capital is always tied to a social assemblage, to an organization of power, and therefore, Deleuze and Guattari conclude, a system of passional signs that uses capital as its point of subjectification must act in the service of this organization of power.  However, the confluence of Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier writing on the decoded and deterritorialized nature of capital combined with my reading of Gravity’s Rainbow leads me to believe that the assemblage or organization of power that Althusser describes is not capital itself, which is nothing but a decoded flow, but rather the system of coupled machines which manipulates and confines that flow.  Capital is not inherently in the service of the organization of power in a “capitalist” society, but rather it seeks to escape to territories that are decoded.  This is exactly the situation of The Zone in Gravity’s Rainbow; the forces of Capital, seeking decoding and deterritorialization, created a war which hollowed out a great Zone in the middle of Europe that would be free from exactly this organization of power which seeks to overcode it.  This is what makes Gravity’s Rainbow schizophrenic rather than merely passional: its point of subjectification is the act of decoding capital (the war).  We could imagine a different set of passional signs that would have as its point of subjectification a movement of capital that was still confined by Althusser’s assemblage of power, and the passional regime that resulted would still serve the interests of that assemblage.  But in Gravity’s Rainbow, we have a way out; this new schizophrenic regime of signs offers new possibilities for social critique that escapes the old problem that all revolutionary sentiment ends up reaffirming and clarifying the power-structures that it fights against.

         Perhaps this seems utopian and unrealistic.  However, it is not yet a political theory; it is only a mode of textual analysis. So, I will now demonstrate that first Gravity’s Rainbow is a schizophrenic text that performs this process of decomposition, then I will give an example of how this process is revolutionary. 

 

4. Capital and Schizophrenia in Gravity’s Rainbow

         I have argued that Gravity’s Rainbow is schizophrenic because it is a product of capital; that is, in order to escape the regime of first the despotic and then the passional signifier it follows the path of an escaped and renegade flow of capital.  It achieves this through being aware of itself as a product of capital. Again we must remind ourselves that Gravity’s Rainbow is fiction, and the completely uncoded capital that it imagines is little more than a thought experiment; in reality, capital is always controlled and overcoded by the forces of antiproduction. Earlier in this essay I argued that all the forms that a socius can take—all modes of political organization—exist side-by-side in the Zone, but that it was the flow of capital seeking a decoded market that created it through the machine of the war.  One difference between the forces of capital that Pynchon imagines and the real ones that Deleuze and Guattari’s reflect is that Pynchon’s capital is conscious.  We could say that he personifies capital, but the personage is always hidden—it is part of the They that controls Slothrop and every other character.

Gravity’s Rainbow is uniquely a product of capitalism because it reproduces the schizophrenic movement of decoded capital in its own structure. I have said that schizophrenia is the process of decoding the molar totalities, and we have said that capital necessarily tends toward decoding and deterritorialization, and therefore schizophrenia is linked with capitalism, and necessarily lies at the limit of capitalism.  I have touched on the aspect of the novel tracing the process of decoding and deterritorializing capital in the creation of the Zone, but I have not yet fully unpacked this part of the analysis.  I will argue that the act of reading Gravity’s Rainbow performs a similar production; it tends to decode rather than to code, it deterritorializes both the reader and the setting of the novel itself. 

         Gravity’s Rainbow is about schizophrenic machines.  The War is a schizophrenic machine, and the Zone that it produces is schizoid.  The War is schizophrenic because it was created from capital; it is a machine because it is a social production.  Indeed, the War is an assemblage of machines, all connected to themselves to make a paranoid totality.  And so, the war is also paranoiac.  It imposes itself over everything, and transforms production and signification in its own image. Here it becomes clear that, even though I have presented paranoia and schizophrenia as opposites, they usually accompany each other, as binaries tend to do.  After all, the paranoid-schizophrenic is a common diagnosis in psychoanalysis.

According to the novel, the real business of the war was to create open, decoded markets. In the chaos of the destruction left by the war is the liberation of capital from logic and law ("The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled 'black' by the professionals" (105)). As we have seen, the war machine exists to change the flow of capital through Europe; each part of the machine disrupts, conjoins, or welds together segments of capital, which Pynchon imagines as a conscious force which craves deterritorialization.  That deterritorialization is realized in the recording process of war production on the body without organs: the War records its every move through its mark of devastation and wreckage on the Zone.  The war’s product is just this record of its process, leftover after that process has stopped: the Zone itself.  The Zone is a schizophrenic space where all despotic signification is broken down into molecular units: there is no real centralization of authority, and none of the segments of the Zone seem to quite fit together. 

The War is itself a molar machine, an assemblage of desiring machines, which unifies all segments of society in a totalizing manner inevitably reminiscent of the rigid structure of fascism. During World War II, all of Europe was mobilized as part of the war effort, from the home front outwards and inwards (for much of Europe, the home front was indiscernible from the front lines).   In the first part of Gravity’s Rainbow, until VE Day roughly at the end of part II, each of the characters has his own place in the War Machine. Most of that part of the novel takes place within the British War Machine.  Pirate’s job is to have other, more important people’s fantasies for them; Slothrop’s job is to investigate the wreckage of the rockets, and so on.  This creates the nature of the War itself:

The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together.  The war does not appear to want a fold-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fϋhrer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity…Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so cast and aloof is it…so absentee. Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really.  There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life.  At “The White Visitation” there’s a long-time schiz, you know, who believes that he is World War II. (130-131)

 

But for the rest of the book, the War is treated as a consciousness, as an entity with some mysterious agenda. Whatever its agenda, the function of the machine is the same; the War machine divides, subdivides, creates partial objects.  This passage illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the function of schizophrenia as the process of breaking down, decoding, and deterritorializing.  In the context of war, this is usually simply called destruction.  As Pynchon here points out, this is contrary to the fascist ideologies of the war machine which claim to seek unity and compliance.  At once, Pynchon points out two dynamics in the nature of wartime propaganda: first, that it is only propaganda, and two, the difference between the product and the process of war.  The process of war demands absolute compliance from its component parts—all the human and technical machine that work for the war must behave as a totality, but the end result of that process is chaos and destruction, fragmentation and segmentation.  The nature of war is so schizophrenic that it can be simultaneously omnipresent and completely absent, as well as molar (in its social formation) and molecular—molecular as in the schiz who believes that he is World War II. 

Whether or not the War itself is an awareness, it is certainly a process that records itself on the surface of the territorial socius.  This is a theme of the novel that recurs again and again—remember Enzian thinking that the wreckage of the oil refinery had been created with a purpose and a motive, that the war had finally realized the true potential of the factory, and that the entire war had been fought with the purpose of creating that specific form of material devastation in that particular  place.  In fact, the devastation caused by the war was not only located in that one refinery, but all throughout the Zone:

The War has been reconfiguring time and space in its own image.  The track runs in different networks now.  What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of… (257)

 

Slothrop treats the War as a conscious entity.  Its intentions are governed by the flow that runs through its veins: capital.  But the ways of capital are mysterious, because they constantly escape coding.  The devastated railroad system now connects various chaotic segments of black markets; they shape the space of the Zone in a chaotic way that cannot make sense to any individual human observer.

         The product of the war is the Zone. It is on the surface of this schizophrenic socius that the middle chunk of the novel takes place—and in this part of the novel, the schizophrenia of the Zone controls the schizophrenia of Pynchon’s language. The Zone is a completely deterritorialized open market.  I have already mentioned that Pynchon refers to it as the early days of capitalism, the Ur-market.  I have not, perhaps, emphasized the prevalence of the black market in the Zone, which is the mode of survival for many characters, including, at times, Slothrop. The novel presents a series of black-market barons like Von Göll and Säure, who play the black market well enough to amass a private empire, which gives each of them private power--each are, like Slothrop, "as properly constituted as a state." In the completely decoded market of the Zone, everything becomes a commodity--the inflation of the German currency has rendered paper money useless, and so the black market works on a collective bartering system.  One interesting discussion of this takes place between Semyavin and Slothrop in Zürich:

"First thing you have to understand is the way everything here is specialized.  If it's watches, you go to one cafe.  If it's women, you go to another.  Furs are subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others,  Same with dope: Stimulents, Depressants, Psychomimetics...what is it you're after?"

"Uh, information?" Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie...

"Oh.  Another one." Giving Slothrop a sour look. "Life was simple before the first war.  You wouldn't remember.  Drugs, sex, luxury items.  Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term 'industrial espionage' was unknown.  But I've seen it change--oh, how it's changed.  The German inflation, that should've been my clue right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin [...]"

A tragic sigh.  "Information.  What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"

"I thought it was cigarettes."

"You dream" [...] "It'll get easier.  Someday it'll all be done by machine.  Information machines.  You are the wave of the future." (258)

 

The first part of this passage calls to mind Deleuze and Guattari's description of the action of schizophrenia as the process of segmenting a totality into molecular parts; of dissassembly.  This is the action of uncoded capital; in the black market, the economy is segmented into ever smaller parts, so that everyone can get a piece of the action.  Over time, some players like Von Göll will amass a larger segment then other people, and in so doing will begin the process of re-coding the loose flow of capital and assembling his own structure of power.  But at this point, early in the novel, before V-E day, the market is completely decoded.  As Semayvin points out, the decoding and deregulation of the German market occurred during the interwar period with the massive inflation of the Reishmark, about which the novel tells us: "The theory was going around at the time that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts" (285).  Stinnes was the international financier before the war whose vast assets included, at one point, Slothrop.  So the novel tells us that Inflation occured because Stinnes and company were trying to bail out Germany from war debts; in other words, they were trying to dissassociate capital from the State apparatus.  In a capitalist state, the goverment tells the people that capital only has worth because of their guarantee behind the currency, but the truth is that capital, in a form other than paper currency, can exist in any social context, as we see in the above passage--capital can be anything from information to cigarettes without any association with the state.  And so the inflation was the first big step in decoding and deregulating the German economy by breaking the link between capital and official currency, which then became another commody because you "used them for toilet paper" (284).  And then the War came and wiped out the state completely.  By the time of Slothrop and Semayvin's conversation, the idea that the German state would be involved in the economy was out of the question; the state was just another (large) consumer to feed its war machine.  And so in Zurich ("neutral" switzerland, another aspect of decoding and deterritorailization), the medium of exchange is information--language.  This importantly reinforces my point that the language of Gravity's Rainbow is given meaning by the flow of escaped capital; just like capital, language can no longer depend on the State (the law) for meaning, nor is it passional, like the bible.  Instead, it gains meaning through its value as capital; capital that has been liberated and has no relation at all (even a relation of exception) from the despotic regime.  In an “information economy” language (information) is given signification by capital, because a piece of information has an attached price. It is important to note that this decoded market is not a state of anarchy; Squalidozzi the Argentine imagines that it could become an anarchic utopia, but it is not the prevalence of capital as its own schizophrenic structure which prevents the molarization necessary for communalism, the foundation of most anticapitalist anarchist thinking.

 

 

5. The Schizophrenia of Structure in Gravity’s Rainbow

“The Kenosha Kid” pages above also illustrate a schizophrenia of form that will serve as a model for understanding the molar schizophrenia of the novel.  This is why I wanted to use scans of the pages instead of a typed quote: this passage reveals how quickly and unhesitatingly Pynchon skips between literary forms.  The passage begins as a correspondence in letter form between The Kenosha Kid and Slothrop.  Within the context that is later revealed to us—that Slothrop is under a sodium-amytal induced series of delusions—the letter form seems initially to make no sense: people may have visual delusions, auditory hallucinations, even verbal hallucinations, but to hallucinate in such a rigorously structured textual form seems unlikely.  The letters emphasize impeccable letter-form, with the address in the right place on the page.  On one level, this can be rationalized as an illustration of Slothrop’s highly developed textual or bookish sensibility.  But on another level, it serves only to illustrate the schizophrenia of the assumptions that Pynchon seems willing to make: the forms that he chooses to write in seem to have a relationship of exclusion or resistance to the content of those forms.  Additionally, the speed with which he is willing to transfer between forms is itself schizophrenic, because it gives the text itself multiple identities. 

In the space of these three pages, the text breaks into song twice.  The continual breaking up of the text into poetry and song makes the text more structurally schizophrenic: first of all, it physically and visually breaks the text into segments that do not fit together.  This can be seen here in the Kenosha Kid pages where the “Snap—to, Slothrop!” poem acts to rip the reader and Slothrop away from his linguistic delusions and into the reality of the PISCES interrogation—it breaks the form that Pynchon has begun of numbered episodes. 

Some of the most jarring schizes between forms come when the text randomly breaks out into a musical number, for example “The World Over There” (203) about paranoia, “Pavlovia (Beguine)” (229-230), “Loonies on Leave!” (259-260), and “Victim in a Vacuum!” (414-415). There are many other songs and poems dispersed through the text—many of them are very clever, but I chose these examples because they are completely without context in the text: either it is unspecified who is actually singing, or the actors/singers of the song are brought on and off the text just for the song-and-dance number, as in “Loonies on Leave!”  The effect of these unannounced musical numbers is to suddenly shift the form of the text to become a musical stage—they make it impossible for the reader to take Pynchon’s world seriously, just as we do not take the world of a musical seriously, because of the absurdity of everyone breaking out into choreographed song with no warning whatsoever.  This absurdity also ensures that musicals are only every about musicals, no matter what their storyline (just as Gravity’s Rainbow is only ever about Gravity’s Rainbow).  But, as Heikki Raudaskoski[13] points out, citing Richard Dyer, the musical form comes with a utopian feeling of communalism and togetherness, a feeling of optimism.  Pynchon parodies this utopian sensibility with the subject matter of his musical numbers, with dark lyrics like “Just a slave with nobody to slave for” (414).  Together, this creates a fantastic example of the schizophrenic dissonance of forms that creates the entire structure of the novel. 

These formal strategies add up to make the entire novel schizophrenic; the totality of the novel defies totalization.  Every reader of the novel realizes this, and struggles with it.  There is something slippery about it; even though it is humorous, engaging, and rich, in parts it tends to repel the reader’s attention.  The novel presents itself as a vast network, a representation of an entire fictional social reality.  Hundreds of characters emerge and return and yet never resolve themselves.  Unlike a hypertextual novel, this is not a closed network in any way; many characters defy connections within the plot of the novel.  Many plotlines are left unresolved and many characters are lost to time.  So on this level, it is easy to understand why I call Gravity’s Rainbow a schizophrenic novel.

By Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of schizophrenia, a schizophrenic names him or herself differently depending on the zone of intensity he or she experiences on the surface body without organs.  As the flows of desiring-production hit against the unyielding body without organs, the zone of dissonance on the surface of the body without organs creates differential levels of intensity, much like atmospheric pressure differs on the surface of the earth.  The schizophrenic subject travels across the body without organs, through these different zones of intensity, and each zone becomes associated with a different name, a different identity.  But in this case, there is no single subject—this is not about Slothrop alone—but rather an entire novel that meanders over its own pages through differential zones of intensity.  In this case, in place of multiple identities, the novel takes on multiple forms throughout its course. This novel encompasses a huge range of other genres and forms of text. So instead of the multiple identity-formation of the schizophrenic subject, a schizophrenic novel constructs itself in a multiplicity of forms, some of which entirely escape generic classifications, and others of which insist on their genre (like the musical) to the point that they exhaust the form.

 

6. The Erotobotization of the Rocket

The War was a machine of social production, assembled out of thousands of desiring machines. I have been treating the term “desiring production” as almost synonymous with the term “social production,” and that is exactly what they are—almost synonymous.  Social production is desiring production, but set under a different regime. A regime is the code (political, cultural, linguistic) that governs the process of production.  This is a more precise way of saying that desiring production is the same thing as social production but on a different scale.  Deleuze and Guattari make the point that art often functions by exploding or ignoring the difference in regime: “Art often takes advantage of this property of desiring-machines by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring-production is used to short circuit social production […] Dali’s method of critical paranoia assures the explosion of a desiring-machine within an object of social production” (Anti-Oedipus 31). Gravity’s Rainbow twists this formulation by using a technical machine as a synecdoche for a social machine: the Rocket to represent the War. It explodes a social machine within an object of desiring-production.  That is to say, the novel seeks to show that the War—usually conceived of as a machine of social production—is actually driven by desire.  The novel operates by attributing desire to the War machine, its component parts, and its products.  I will call this device erotobotization: the attribution of desire to a machine.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, the machines of war are desiring-machines, whether they are human or not.  For Deleuze and Guattari, sex is just an interlinking of desiring-machines, a mechanical coupling to facilitate the exchange of fluids.  Gravity’s Rainbow literalizes this idea, over and over again.  For example, Major Marvy and his men are always accompanied by limericks about having sex with machines, which are too good to resist quoting:

There was a young fellow named Crockett,

Who had an affair with a rocket.

If you saw them out there

You’d be tempted to stare,

But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it! (305)

 

There was a young fellow named Hector

Who was fond of a launcher-erector.

But the squishes and pops

Of acute pressure drops

Wrecked Hector’s hydraulic connector. (306)