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“the space of power” (51), “buttressed by non-critical (positive) knowledge, backed up
by a frightening capacity for violence, and maintained by a bureaucracy which has laid
hold of the gains of capitalism in the ascendant and turned them to its own profit” (52)
defines the human experience of the city.
15
As Guy Debord puts it, following the urban
theory of Lewis Mumford, “the effort of all established powers, since the experience of
the French Revolution, to augment their means of keeping order in the street has
eventually culminated in the suppression of the street itself” (122).
This suppression plays out in Vineland’s 60s flashbacks to rioting and protests in
the California city streets, in which freedom of movement and escape is slowly pared
down to nothing. In one significant passage, Frenesi finds herself trapped on Telegraph
Avenue, “halfway between the people and the police, with no side street handy to go
dodging down. Hmm. Shop doors were all secured with chain, windows shuttered over
with heavy plywood” (116). Here, capital accumulation, protection of property, and law
enforcement “carrying small and she hoped only rubber-bullet-firing rifles” (116) come
together to form a spatial assemblage in which human life is both imprisoned and
dangerously exposed. The street becomes a space for the protection and the defense of
property and commodities, the single human body in its midst out-of-place, secondary or
even tertiary in privilege to the property being protected there, and the juridical rule
which the mere presence of that body seems to violate.
The shutting down of the city street as a space privileging the human or the social is
most apparent in Pynchon’s spatial encoding of the College of the Surf, briefly The
15
As Nicholas Spencer suggests in his spatial reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, while that novel doesn’t arrive
in 1970s urban America until its final pages, “much of the narrative portrays the formation of models of
power that are realized in the abstract space of Los Angeles” (141).
45
People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, “a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll”
(204) that occupies a space at the very edge of the Californian landscape. The “clifftop
campus” (204) is quite literally marginalized in the sense that it occupies a thin sliver of
land not taken by a “military reservation,” leaving it “pressed between the fenceline and
the sea” (204) and “bracketed by the two ultraconservative counties of Orange and San
Diego” (204). Standing in, as it does, for all the campus revolutions and utopian revolts
that blossomed only to be smothered in the 1960s, the campus’s precarity and isolation
among the Titans of the military industrial complex give a sense of just how little ground
was left, “a small crescent-shaped region of good spirits in that darkening era” (208), for
American radicals and revolutionaries to defend in what, for Pynchon, is the already too-
late post-war decade of the 1960s. As the campus is surrounded by juridical and military
law-enforcers, “all lines of withdrawal” become impassable. “By the time of the last offer
by bullhorn of safe passage, every road, watercourse, storm drain, and bike path was
interdicted. All phones were cut off, and the news media, compliant as always, at a
harmless, unbridgeable distance” (203). In this image is not only the triumph of the
fascist state over 60s radicalism, but also the closing of the urban American street—the
attempt to shut down passageways of difference, resistance, non-quotidian movement—
to the human body on bike or foot or in a crowd.
In the 70s and 80s, Vineland’s urban dwellers travel by car, footpaths are restricted
to mall galleries, and every step taken is directed towards producing the good consumer
moving without struggle through the seamless shapes and objects of capitalist culture.
Prairie’s memories of mall gallery rebellion – saving her friend from a cop during “the
Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid” (327), “paralyzing the pursuit long enough to
46
sail alongside Ché, take her by the wrist, twirl her till they were aimed the right direction,
and get rolling with her the hell on out of there” (328)—create a parallel with her
mother’s impression of protesters in the street moving “smoothly between baton and
victim to take the blow instead” (117) that is more polarizing than syncretic. If earlier
generations fought the forces of state capitalism over the uses and production of space,
Prairie’s generation must settle for achieving a modicum of counter-current movement in
an environment that has become effectively dominated by the commodifying energies of
that system. Just as the space for resistance is shrunk to a sliver for the PR
3
in the 60s,
such space is nullified for all but the most mundane of rebellious practices in the urban
environment of Vineland’s 1980s. While in his articulation of the socio-spatial dialectic,
Lefebvre insists on the Marxist-utopian notion that “state-imposed normality makes
permanent transgression inevitable” (23), the world that Pynchon posits here is one in
which transgressions are absorbed as part of that system. When the streets have become
mall galleries and the town squares food courts, where might Lefebvre’s “seething
forces… still capable of rattling the lid of the cauldron of the state and its space” (23)
stage such a rattling? Acts of radicalism and rebellion have come down to petty theft in
theme malls, Pynchon seems to suggest, because the spaces of revolution—the field, the
town square, the street—have been effectively molded into inaccessible, abstract, and
fundamentally anti-societal spaces.
While Pynchon’s pessimistic vision of the closing of the city street counters
Lefebvre’s belief that the social demand on and for space will always resist “the coming
into being of a clearly defined space – a capitalist space (the world market) thoroughly
purged of contradictions” (11), the purging of the human from the urban American
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