Microsoft Word A. Stewart ma thesis Final doc
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be anything other?
To answer this question, I begin with the swerve, a motion embedded in the switchback, and evoked in passing throughout this project. The swerve is one of the originary concepts of materialist philosophy, what Althusser calls in his later work “a secret tradition” (183) that begins with the atomism of Epicurus, which contends that the world is formed by the unpredictable and anticausal collision of atoms. Even falling straight down through a void, this philosophy argues, these atoms “ deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed ,” and suggesting that matter itself, as Lucretius puts it, is “in the habit of swerving” (Inwood 66). Thus begins the philosophical undercurrent, in Althusser’s succinct cobbling together of terms, of “
history (or perhaps, an anti-history) that rejects a fixation on questions pertaining to “Reason, Meaning, Necessity and End” (Althusser 169) in favor of an exploration of everything that escapes design, resists rationalism, that assumes “the primacy of the swerve over the rectilinearity of the straight trajectory” (Althusser 190).
This “habit of swerving” evokes the same aleatory materiality involved in the inanimate acts of breakage and intrusion that Graham Harman takes up in his reconsideration of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, wherein Harman argues that one way in which things function as nonhuman agents is in the way that they break. In this way, Heidegger posits in Being & Time (without directly ascribing any form of agency to objects), “the environment announces itself afresh” (105). As my project demonstrates, this announcement or obtrusiveness, obstinacy, breakage, or troublemaking are all ways
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in which it is possible to think of the nonhuman as acting upon, resisting, and determining the experience of being-in-the-world for human actors. However, where does the human actor’s own material being come in to this? How do we swerve? How do we break? What is in question here is not the ability to choose to stray from the beaten path, nor to strategize a motion—the swerve is not a human thing in this sense—but to feel as if through the materiality of our being, we are moved, and to experience the aleatory as something that is of us, rather than something—some offense or intrusion— that happens to us.
What I think of as Vineland’s response to these questions comes in the form of its encoding of “the spilled, the broken world” (267). This is not a world of human control systems and predictable outcomes, but a world that begins with the assumption of the swerve, and then tries to find a way to fit the human in among all this spilling, breaking material discursivity. There may not be untroubled human spaces in this world, but what Pynchon does seem to suggest is that there are navigational strategies that can be deployed to allow the movement of human beings, the contribution of our own narrative meanderings, through the highly contested spaces of nonhuman assembly. Given these terms, Vineland’s switchback narrative strategy becomes, as I argue throughout this thesis, a kind of survival strategy for humans, or what I’d like to call a nonanthropocentric humanism. This seemingly contradictory term is intended to acknowledge that the human is not a privileged being that finds itself obtruded upon by the largely nonhuman assemblages that dominate the spaces of material existence, but simultaneously, that its human embodied materiality is part of the breakage, part of the spill. This suggests, in turn, much like the switchbacks of Vineland County, and the 61
desire lines cut into the grass of my campus, that even within the individual human actor, there is something that swerves, a perhaps unconscious agential materiality that does not always choose which direction it travels or sees in, that does not always move in the way that it is conditioned through repetition to move. While the nightmare aspect of this in Pynchon is the human-become-automaton—the unconscious repetition of actions sanctioned by state capitalist modernity which render the laborer-consumer’s “disassembly plausible as that of any machine” (V. 40); the body-in-war that has “taken on much of the non-humanity of the debris, crushed stone, broken masonry, destroyed churches and auberges of his city” (V. 307)—the other side of the coin is that people are, at last, at least as unpredictable as things, and that we all, humans and nonhumans alike, may move in ways that are surprising. As Ahmed puts it, “places where we are under pressure do not always mean we stay on line; at certain points, we can refuse the inheritance, points that are often lived as ‘breaking points.’ We do not always know what breaks at these points” (“Orientations” 248). Ahmed emphasizes the unconscious nature of the human swerve, falling out of line with certain material assemblages, falling in with others, causing ontological scandals (as do the Thanatoids of Shade Creek), making trouble (as do Prairie and Ché with every move they make), getting “in the way of domination” (Latour 81), or conversely, out of its way, as Frenesi does when she abandons her radical leftist roots for a life as an FBI rat.
This habit of swerving, which Pynchon assigns not only to nonhuman matter but also to that which is matter in humans and that which tangles with the Titans of Vineland, is a form of resistance that constitutes a nonanthropocentric humanist survival strategy. It is aleatory, contingent, the opposite of predictable, quantifiable, or controllable, but these
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are features that also what makes it useful to the humans of a nonhuman-centric world. In writing the switchback, then, Pynchon writes that which escapes us in our own material being, and that which connects us most physically and intractably to “the spilled, the broken world.” Importantly, this does not make humans the helpless pawns of the aleatory, of fate, of the Titans, but rather, all the more responsible for small actions that reverberate out into the webs of causal implication we can barely imagine, barely, in the grips of the rectilinear, the narrative straight shot, stand to look back on. What, then, finally, does a nonanthropocentric humanism look like? • Anchored in the materiality of human being, it sees the connections between that materiality and the materiality of nonhuman bodies. It acknowledges the elements of human materiality that escape the control of the human mind. • It is limited in its opportunities for agency; however, it finds those opportunities within and among assemblies of human and nonhuman actors. Simultaneously, it resists and troubles systems of domination and control that seek to overstep the limits on agency dictated by the other actors in a given assembly. • It is spatially aware, and sensitive to the large-scale contests that create spaces of protection and/or exposure of the human body. • It is phenomenologically flexible, open to perspectival shifts and anticipative of disorientating situations that require radical swerves in perception and navigation. It avoids adherence to hegemonic systems of control and political stasis. • It is temporally flexible, in that it acknowledges the presence of multiple and competing histories (and even possible futures), encoded into the spatio-material present that humans occupy.
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• It is, above all, a strategy of movement, of thinking human material being in movement through space and time, of the impacts of that movement, and of the opportunities and risks inherent in the movement between and among titanic assemblies of actors. The implication in Vineland, and in Pynchon’s entire corpus, is that these spatialized determinants may be the limits of what any humanism can propose in a nonanthropocentric cosmos which, perhaps inevitably, takes on a tinge of the sinister given the very facticity of material being, of the unavoidable movement that takes us from birth to death. In one of Vineland’s last paragraphs, there is a strange scene in which Pynchon describes The unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners into Time’s wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless predators who’d once boarded Takeshi’s airplane in the sky, the ones who’d had the Chipco lab stomped on, who despite every Karmic Adjustment resource brought to bear so far had simply persisted, stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate, following through pools of night where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all but the direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be bought off for any but the full price, which they had never named. (383) Contained within this sequence is Pynchon the mystic, the existentially stunned philosopher for whom ultimately, every strategy of narrative negotiation and survival fails. This scene is a reminder that Pynchon’s work never deals in the realm of the exclusively material, because all the nonhuman agential matter in the world will not
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suffice to explain away the “unrelenting forces” that follow us always “through pools of night where nothing else moved.” These forces, like the unsignable bomb, haunt the periphery of all Pynchon novels, and they cannot be ignored in any consideration of his work. What role they play or what price they demand is never clear. The only thing that Pynchon shares about these forces is the certainty that they pursue us, “as a body,” a nonhuman assembly with a constitution and politics all its own, and which, in a sense, come to define the human as that which is the pursued other whose inscriptive authority—its “attempts to bargain or accommodate”—is always unable to bridge the discursive gap between itself and the world from which it is set apart by the ideality of its sign systems. Under these conditions, the political stakes are shifted, and the question becomes one not of how we bring nonhuman actors into our world, but rather, how we find a way into a world without us. How change the terms of the pursuit in order to become participants in a politics that we have not authored? Under these conditions, humanism becomes a contestable and marginal scrawl, a weird and private code that has pushed us to the edge of being, and that must now find the means of negotiating some “way to return” (VL 379).
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Works Cited
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Bumas, E. Shaskan. “The Utopian States of America: The People, The Republic, and Rock and Roll in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” Arizona Quarterly 52.3 (1995): 149-175. Print. Clarke, William. D. “’It’s My Job, I Can’t Back Out’: The ‘House’ and Coercive Property Relations in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” Pohlman. 185-211. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear. New York: Metropolitan, 1998. Print. Debord, Guy. “The Society of the Spectacle.” 1967. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1994. Print. Dehaene, Michiel, and Lieven De Cauter, eds. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in
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Ostrander, Madeline. “Awakening to the Physical World: Ideological Collapse and Economic Resistance in Vineland.” Abbas. 122-138. Outka, Paul. "Posthuman/Postnatural: Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Lemenager, Hiltner, and Shewry. 31-48. Pöhlmann, Sascha, ed. Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. ---. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Harper, 1999. Print. ---. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin, 1987. 2006. Print. ---. Mason & Dixon. New York: Penguin, 1997. Print. ---. V. 1963. New York: Harper, 1989. Print. ---. Vineland. Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1990. Print. Schaub, Thomas H. “The Environmental Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Ecological Context.” Pynchon Notes 42-43 (1998): 59-72. Print. Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. London: MacMillan, 1988. Print.
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After Utopia: The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. 139-178. Print. Tabbi, Joseph. “Pynchon’s Groundward Art.” Green, Greiner, and McCaffery. 89-100. Tölölyan , Khachig. “War as Background in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983. 31-68. Print. Wikipedia contributors. "Floods in California." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 4 Jul. 2012. Web. 12 Jul. 2012. Yüklə 408,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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