treehouse

Bliss comes to us in the soul, in the sentimental glimmer of an instant. A snowy branch in the blue-purple in the twilight hours–it reaches past sorrow. It spreads across the drudgery of a lifetime like warm and fragrant wax–smoothing over the shrill decades, made boring by its commonplace wounds–and finds us looking up through the pine needles. It is infinite love poured into the seconds of our lives, and finds us again because it is the one thing that might dislocate us from our triviality. It is felt through a perfect situation–the situation in which one might lose”himself” for the snowy wood, the smell of smoke, the muted tread in winter matter. We so often ask “is it real? This joy that has lasted me so long?” And often in the harsh moments that rake up against us, we remember these affects of heaven and find them shattered against the cinder block.

But dreams that stand up to any stripping wind do so not only for their passion and perfect lightness, but because they are only visible through the consciousness of complex mazes and conditions, of predicates and of possible beginnings.

The mountain rises up forever, full of glassy heath frozen in the night. The downy firs fall over an abyssal plane, extending far out to somewhere beyond forever. And I hang on the limb of a tree.

This is freedom.

an addendum: even fascists have Utopias

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.

The anagogic impulse in Jameson

Okay, I’m getting really burnt out here, so I’m going to give this one last cursory shot for the night. In the first chapter of tpu, Jameson engages with the “scholastic” exercise of Althusser’s antiinterpretive current in Marxism. (I’ve made note of his footnote on page 23 about skipping over this particular bit of the book on my “Jameson Form” note page and want to go deeper into his form in theory later.) I’ve got to admit that Althusser is still a really huge challenge for me, even on the level of reader-comprehension; but generally, Jameson’s interpretation of Althusser’s Darstellung or expressive causality (also historicism) is relatable to periodization in that it inevitably privileges one component of that particular epoch as a master-code in interpreting that given period. (Here, self-referentiality is blatant): Althusser’s mode of expressive causality is also envisioned as a type of allegorical code for the individual subject” insofar as he or she can imagine herself in direct/lived relation to otherwise transpersonal realties and the social collective logic of history” (30). Jameson then goes on to discuss the four levels of allegorical access to reality through a biblical type of formation of the four levels of allegorical placement, the fourth level ending in the anagogical.

Here, I’m going to switch from within the very specific situation of this analysis within the text and move to Jameson’s conclusion, which begins, with much ado (please see my last entry, if confused) about the need for the displaced individual subject and a remastering of even individual subject-oriented overdetermination (always within and causally absent somewhere within the structure) into a genuine subject-of-History-as-collectivity. In this sense, the displaced individual whose Althusserian (and ostensibly Derridian) variants are lost in a network of structural and therefore post-structural nonsenses, the only way “out” of this particular structural causality is through a collective identity. The term anagogical is very clearly oriented towards a type of pre-cursor to the dialectic of ideology and Utopia, because within the anagogic mode of interpretation (in an Althusserian sense) there is arrested the unmanageable Utopian impulses of a historicist/individual-based approach to Utopia. The discussion of the individual, in very crass terms, that I’ve been so worked up over, must essentially be re-considered and re-worked, even on the conceptual level of the Intellectual, which is not a disparate set of minds but a collective historical body [I have to back away even from this kind of mental leap, however, without a lot of serious contemplation]. But the anagogic mode of interpretation in a Jamesonian sense is also the pivotal moment in considering the dialectic of ideology and Utopia.

The veritable “after life” of the imagined relationship to the concrete is wholly ideological in its formal grasp (the advertisement sign that arrests the water-cooler worker into another set of false events) and the mis-managed Utopian impulse that it awakens and profits from. But, at the heart of this anagogic relationship is the essential crux of the mis-management, which can’t be “resolved” (rather, I’m not engaging in that sort of discussion here) but where the essential truth of Marxist historical materialism is present, that is, the Utopian impulse itself is the dialectical counter to ideology. Namely that, although the ideological can misappropriate desire (understood as the Utopian impulse) is invalid as a content-worthy amelioration to that original impulse and this is verifiable in the very re-creation of the event, the return to cultural management. So, while the allegorical relationship to the real does in fact appropriate reality, its very success (has ensured consumption, for example, which fails the consumer, and in-turn ensures further consumption) is in fact exposing its own weakness against the Utopian impulse that refuses reification on a social level, even if the individual is inextricably lost in a mine-sweep of causal relations.

Pynchon’s Arcadian Slap

Death in Arcadia is a reminder that although you may have to imagine the world differently in order to see the world you are in, the site of that imagining still belongs to the world that you cannot otherwise see.” Malcolm Bull, NLR “Green Cabinet, White Cube” Issue 62.

Since I have no art background and my mind is particularly dull after my junior year, I’m incapable of writing an intelligent entry on Malcolm Bull’s essay in NLR. I have that syndrome that my tutees get at the writing center when they fill up with the steam of frustration and anger at the task of passage analysis. “But I understand it!” They always say; and of course, they really don’t, not fully, else they would have something to say on it. That’s sort of where I am… and could I really imagine my own situation had I not my student? I can’t even say anything about utopias and dystopias, the way Bull wants me to, I just can’t. It’s too vulgar to say that they depend on each other, that they are mutally parasitic, and I’m far to agitated to throw it all to the wind in a dainty phrase about ‘the dialectic.’

Damnit, if I’ve learned one thing, it’s what a fool I’ve been, and what foolish things I’ve written down. I want to strive for some top-down method of understanding the world and terms… I’ve asked my more educated friends for charts, for simplifications, for broad thematic understandings. But I was completely ridiculous for thinking that I could simplify anything… and for this essay, I am extremely frustrated because I don’t understand, because I do understand parts, but what is Bull saying about utopias? about art?

A possible definition of Arcadia at the article’s conclusion:

the place that is presupposed when we try to get a vantage point on the world from outside it, but, as such, a presupposition that also has an excluded presupposition.

Hopelessly bound together is the utopian within the real space of imagination so that the imagined utopia cannot in fact be the utopia. What is the function of the utopian? More than a negated space in culture and theory, or popular imagination, what does theutopian “cube” allow us to access from the point of dystopia?

Crudely, there is no outside. In Pynchon’s Vineland, for example, the various utopian sites are Arcadian in that they cannot exist as a cube without already inscribing their own deaths as imaginary cracks in dystopia. The developers come to Vineland because of the very pure qualities that make it unlike the beach smogged out ghettos, the over developed and over determined super cities (some with names, some without). Vineland’s survival rate is zero in classical terms… it’ll get paved over, it’ll get built on. Goodbye green, hello cube.

And so maybe what the landscape of Vineland finally offers us isn’t nihilistic reading of 21st century development or inevitable dystopic triumph, but a conquering of our silly purist fears and feelings about the utopian principle in “repression.” What we find is that there is an insistence in the techno-waves and the freeway overpass, there is an imagined space and unity that the reader accesses through the narrative space.

In class, there was a lot of concern that these imagined energy fields and utopian sites in the novel (forgive me, left my book in New Brunswick) don’t have readily available human dummies, waiting to be inhabited by the reader like a blow up sex doll. The classical trope of utopia faded away, was in fact penetrated by the developers, who’d found a way to pave over the green shit, the swamp shit, and market it as a liveable wilderness.

The utopian space shifted, not disappeared, and this shift is misimagined because of the way we have misappropriated the utopian ideal within literature. “It’s beautiful, but there are no people.’ On the freeway, the dripping oil tank by the gas station, the bleeding light into the propane stained air–the reader is present in these events. The lack of human presence exposes the reader’s desire for a typical modernist proto-type character who ostensibly functions/reacts within the work the way the reader should/would otherwise function, but cannot. Pynchon rejects this trope and actually remasters this effect–

Instead of reaching the Arcadia from the overdetermined dystopian space of the reader’s location, the Mobility is transfered into Vineland as the “original” state that Bull refers to, in order to prove that its utopian counter-space is still in existence.

But I’m so angry about it!