So that in addition to immunity from the law, another selling point for hiring on would turn out to be this casual granting of the wish implied in the classical postcollegiate Dream of Autumn Return, to one more semester, one more course credit required, another chance to be back in school again–yes, as long as it was paid for in services useful enough to them, the FBI even put you on the time machine if that’s what you wanted, is how heavy those coppers were even back in those days.
Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Rube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this sotry, Brock saw the deep– if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They’d only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.” (268-69)
Vineland
Spending some quality time with Pynchon changes a lot of easy pre-suppositions about his writing style, about his philosophical point of view, and about his engagement with “nostalgia;” but what Vineland really conducts is an exhaustive search for the Utopian in all of its hiding places. And for that very reason, Pynchon is also irrevocably engaged with the American ideological “apparatus” (although this suggests a structuralism that I’m not at all implying). The casual granting of the Dream of Autumn Return exposes that even fascists have Utopian impulses that must be managed. Well, if in fact the lesser participants, or “symptomatic” characters like Frenesi are not properly fascist, they are at least indoctrinated into a system of exchange that acknowledges a security-blanketed space between family and government.
I think that the real killing point here is not at all that there is a sort of ideological blinder. Brock knows his opponent because he shares in the same impulse. Who was it exactly who got to play out postcollegiate fantasies if it wasn’t Vond, himself? Often times, there’s a sort of idealized causalist relationship that the Left has with the Right. This might be a fragment of a certain type of pre-causal, even structural conception of the Left, but really, what Pynchon really seems to be hazarding is a type of admission. What if, against all of our hopes and fears, that the blind Utopian impulse, the impulse to rebel, to “youth revolution” in the 60s really was just “unacknowledged desires for” order? This isn’t a vlaue judgement on the absolute status of the Utopian impulse in itself, but the way in which ideology is permeated in the Left as it is the Right, as an interchangeable weapon, as always an ideological apparatus that contains the Utopian. In granting the wish to return to the university, DOJ Polical Intelligence Office is already completing the first half of “immunity.”
What about the university is more appealing from an outside perspective than its implications for social immunity? The attitudes, the desire to be more than a profession or a strictly quantifiable unit of (ever-increasingly imaginary) production in a larger cog of production and free time, are rarely offered outside the limits of the university. This is no poster for Experimenting in College; what I’m talking about is a real and hard look at life that can’t be immediately quantified in dollar amounts, where there is at least an opportunity (perhaps if only heuristically) to learn for learning’s sake. In a university setting, we see a doubled effect of what Pynchon narrates as the Utopian purblind effect. In the university, it is possible to imagine that the Utopian agents of the university are safeguarded and “passed down” through a process of inversion: the students revert into an ever-extending time-capsule that we call graduate school, and with much holdings back of the gates, manage to preserve this or that period and specialization only to represent it as a real alternative, which it cannot be in late capitalism (this is the place where if I were writing an essay I would write another essay and then cite it in a footnote). So, what I mean to demonstrate here is that the Utopian purblindness cannot take into account the ideological apparatus that in fact dominates it at every turn; so that “finding a crack” is impossible, or at very best, unsustainable, because it can always be reintegrated into the ideological apparatus through previously “unacknowledged desires.” These “desires” are of course more than just a notable feature of Western Capitalist Culture, but rather the foundation for a world economy.
What Brock Vond–indeed, what post-sixties ideology–is really commensurate with is the project of re-remembering the real revolutionary impulse that in its truest form destroys ideological and dogmatic binds for a Utopian sense of being as an already-read bedtime story about ideological massage and transmission. When Pynchon says “if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family,” that exposes an alternate Dream. Up to this point, it’s relatively difficult for an already-Left reader to walk away from the projects of revolution (in Pynchon’s terms) without a type of nostalgia, or at the very least without a desire to defend nostalgia and impulse.
The dangerous thing about Impulse here is not that the Utopian will always crumble into the fold of the dominant ideological apparatus, but that it somehow always locates itself in a Left that imagines itself to exist outside of it. In that sense, Pynchon’s discussion of the Dream of the Autumn Return is not answerable in mashed terms of DOJ nor in the campus revolutionaries of the Film Collective. In fact, what this passage really gets at is the all too strongly commensurate ideological undercurrent in the 1960′s counterculture.
So the question, for Pynchon and for the university (maybe even revolution) more generally, becomes a question of impulse and of Reckoning With the Opposition. I don’t think that many people on the Left would seriously contemplate an Enlightenment Style of ideological stripping: even if this stripping were somehow spontaneous possible (the systematic deconstruction of a capital universe) still always presupposes a type of re-arming or educating. And here we see tactical parallels with Vond’s Political Reeducation Project. The university can only become a true Utopia once is comes to terms with its own qualifications in capital society. The possibilities and Dream of the Autumn Return are only secured as far as the semester that binds us, and we are bound by the “one more course credit required.” But even that validation is a dead give away to the fact that we are all in essence a type of Thanatoid cloud in the dusty hallways, ever more expensive to study in and ever fewer positions to transmit what really might be the only thing to save us.
And why had Vond left too suddenly? The morning after a night of adolescent dream-flirtation bore Praire out into the forest and the small, shimmering meadow. The power trip was over, the dream was just a ghost memory–she wouldda fallen for it the same as maybe her mom did.
