Frank Palmeri

Department of English
University of Miami
fpalmeri@miami.edu

 

In what might be understood as tracing a paradigm shift in postmodern culture (Kuhn), practicing an archaeology of the contemporary (Foucault), or reporting on the conditions of current knowledge (Lyotard), this essay suggests that a moment of high postmodernism dominant in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has been succeeded by two forms of cultural expression that have continuities with, yet depart from, this cultural mode and stand in contrast to each other. A new structure of thought and expression that I call other than postmodern remains the less prominent and popular mode, by contrast with a late postmodernism that has been the dominant form of production in the nineties and the first years of the new century.¹ To define what is other than postmodern, the argument here focuses on the careers and works of Michel Foucault and Thomas Pynchon, noting briefly the works of others as well; by contrast, The X-Fileswill serve as an instance of the late postmodern, along with other works in the genre of conspiratorial science fiction.

 

As I understand it, postmodernism–like modernism or romanticism–combines elements of both a period and a mode. If it is defined solely as a mode of cultural expression or a set of formal features, the result is an unmooring from historical circumstances. Conversely, if it is defined solely as a period, the result is a reifying of a zeitgeist that may have little or no empirical content, and whose boundaries may be arbitrary and debatable. Thus, postmodernism encompasses a set of concerns and formal operations–including a frequent use of irony, satire, and pastiche, an interest in the layering of historical interpretations, and a strong paranoid strand–while also signifying the period from the mid-sixties until perhaps the present when most, but not necessarily all, of these features have been prominent. For the purposes of the argument here, I will focus on the significant role played in many postmodern works by paranoid visions of history as controlled by powerful but nameless forces or conspirators. As Leo Braudy has pointed out, such visions inform the novels of Pynchon, Mailer, and Heller, and we might add films such as The Conversation (1974), and television series such as The Prisoner (1968). To such a list, Patrick O’Donnell and Timothy Melley have added works by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph McElroy, and Ishmael Reed.

 

Despite the emphasis on paranoia in this essay, I do not define postmodernism solely by reference to the strength or prominence of a single element. Rather, a whole configuration of features and operations–including its relation to the cultural and political moment–is crucial in determining the cultural paradigm in which a work participates, whether modern, postmodern, or late postmodern. For example, Freud formulated an influential theory of paranoia, but his thought on the subject does not therefore become postmodern. The Freudian concept of paranoia designates a form of mental illness that has a personal, sexual etiology and meaning; by contrast, paranoia carries a central, social, and political import in the postmodern works of Pynchon, DeLillo, and others. The content of the concept differs in such cases, and so do the cultural configurations in which it plays a part. Similarly, I would not define the modern solely by reference to its reliance on the liberal humanist subject. When, for instance, works such as The X-Files and The Matrix attempt to recuperate an autonomous individual subject that has been dissolved in many ways by earlier versions of postmodernism, they do not therefore return to a modernist cultural moment; their attempted restoration takes place in the context of global conspiracy theories more powerful and ominous than the ordering structures envisioned in the narratives of Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner.

 

Jean-François Lyotard has focused on the postmodern skepticism about master narratives and totalizing ideologies; Linda Hutcheon has stressed the parodic and ironic element that pervades postmodernism, as well as its interest in history as opposed to myth. Although the focus here on paranoia in postmodernism might appear to be at odds with Lyotard’s and Hutcheon’s understandings of the postmodern, I believe it is consistent with both. In most works of high postmodernism, a vision or premonition of an all-encompassing and threatening explanatory or totalitarian order plays a significant role in the world of the narrative. But such a totalizing vision is also typically opposed by skeptical, comic, and anarchic elements that undercut or refuse to accept the legitimacy of the master narrative. High postmodern works reveal both an anxious apprehension of a newly realized and effective system of power and knowledge (beyond traditional religions or nation-states), impossible even to comprehend in its totality, but also a subversive, even parodic skepticism about such phenomena–both a fascination with and a satiric skepticism of paranoia. Lyotard’s principal argument about postmodernism is borne out, if qualified, by such a characteristic juxtaposition of opposed attitudes. Hutcheon argues throughout her book that postmodernism is paradoxical in just this way: it makes use of the forms, systems, and master narratives that it also undercuts by means of ubiquitous parody (22-36, 46, 116). As I understand it, then, a crucial feature of high postmodernism is its juxtaposition of paranoia about controlling systems of thought and action with a skeptical resistance to paranoia that can range from the wildly anarchic to the bleakly comic.²

 

I focus on the role and kind of paranoia in the works discussed here in order to distinguish modes of postmodernism from each other and from a mode of thought and representation that may stand apart from the postmodern. The late works of Foucault and Pynchon adopt a perspective–here called other than postmodern–that can be distinguished from that of their earlier works–seen here as instances of high postmodernism.³ What is other than postmodern moves away from the representation of extreme paranoia, toward a vision of local ethico-political possibilities and a greater acceptance of hybrids that combine human and machine or human and animal traits. During the same period a parallel shift occurs in other thinkers such as Levinas, Haraway, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, and Latour, whom I will consider briefly in a separate section. But first I will discuss The X-Files as an instance of late postmodernism, the dominant mode of cultural production in the last decade or more. Rather than holding to a tense equilibrium between paranoia and skepticism as does the high postmodern, late postmodernism expresses a more rigid paranoid vision that includes a reinscription of the liberal humanist subject and intense anxiety about human hybrids.
 

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Over the course of its first seven seasons, The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, presented and accumulated evidence that extraterrestrials have visited earth, and that they have probably abducted many people, if only temporarily. The mythology of the series also indicates that powerful forces high in the U.S. government (with connections to a shadowy international group) have conspired to conceal this information as well as the extent to which the government itself has made use of alien technology, perhaps as a result of an agreement with the aliens. Carter has said that the government plays the role of the “all-around bad guy” in The X-Files because of this conspiracy to deceive the American people (Carter). Such a representation of the government may help account for the popularity of the series, because it carries an appeal to both ends of the political spectrum. It can be welcomed by a vaguely and nostalgically leftist position opposed to the persecuting excesses of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover during the anti-communist years of the Cold War. But a vision of nefarious government conspiracies in the nineties–after Reagan, Ruby Ridge, and Waco–is likely to appeal just as strongly to far-right hostility to the federal government, and to feed into a historically significant strain of nativist paranoia antagonistic to foreigners and anything “unAmerican.”⁴ Crucially, The X-Files makes its protagonists FBI agents–both Mulder, who seeks to expose the conspiracy, and Scully, his generally more skeptical partner.⁵ The series thus gives evidence of a seriously divided attitude toward the American government: mistrusted on the one hand as the agent of a vast conspiracy to conceal the presence of aliens in America, yet trusted, in the persons of the incorruptible and determined individuals who work for what has historically been the most reactionary and repressive agency of domestic law enforcement.

 

In addition to plots concerning conspiracies to cover up alien visitations, the series devotes almost three-quarters of its episodes to horror mysteries involving the paranormal. Typically, the murderous paranormal agents are hybrids of humans and animals or humans and machines, and Mulder’s task is to contain or kill the threatening creatures by means of his intuitive, non-rational understanding of such phenomena. The series thus adopts an anxious and hostile attitude toward the human-animal-machine hybrid–very different, as we shall see, from Haraway’s ambivalent celebration of cyborgs, Latour’s exhortation that we recognize the ubiquity of hybrid objects, or Pynchon’s comic and poignant representation of hybrid creatures. In addition, the paranoid episodes indicate from the first season onward that the deepest anxiety of the series is reserved for the possibility of human-alien hybrids. The horror-based episodes thus parallel and complement the conspiracy-based episodes involving alien visitors. The recurring accounts of abduction by aliens–most significantly, the abduction of Mulder’s sister, Samantha, and later of his partner, Scully–offer parallels with the genre of the captivity narrative, which is haunted by the possible mixing of blood of different races, just as The X-Files is haunted by the possible mixing of human and alien DNA. Hostility to and anxiety concerning what is alien, hybrid, and “unAmerican” permeate the series.⁶

 

In works by Pynchon, Mailer, and others in the sixties and seventies, a paranoid vision associated with an urge to order, with science, technology, and bureaucracy stands at one pole in opposition to a tendency toward disorder and an ability to tolerate uncertainty. Eliminating this pole of anarchy and flux, The X-Files instead opposes scientific rationality to belief in government conspiracies or paranormal phenomena. However, the series consistently authorizes Mulder’s belief, both in the paranormal and in the conspiracy to conceal the alien presence, while Scully’s scientific reason almost always proves to be woefully inadequate to the phenomena they encounter. The series further suggests a close relation between belief in conspiracies and religious faith, for example by repeatedly citing Mulder’s poster of a classic grainy UFO photo carrying the caption, “I Want To Believe”; it thus renders equivalent and authorizes all the forms of belief that it considers. The X-Files also insists on the accessibility of a single, unqualified truth. The prospect of learning the hidden truth motivates first Mulder and later Scully in their efforts to uncover the government conspiracy; such a unitary and unqualified notion contributes to the epigraph for most episodes as the title sequence concludes by announcing, “The Truth Is Out There.”⁷ With this notion, The X-Files reinforces the agency of the liberal humanist subject: Mulder is the heroic individual on a quest to uncover the truth that the government has lied to the American people. The series thus updates alien invasion plots to attack human hybrids, reworks captivity narratives to include aliens in the place of native peoples, and bases conspiracy theories of the sixties and seventies on a belief in the availability of an absolute truth to an autonomous subject.

 

In my view, The X-Files exemplifies the moment of late postmodernism, strong and perhaps dominant during the last ten or fifteen years, in which paranoid visions are unrelieved by black humor, and hybrids invariably constitute threats. Early in the last decade, Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) expresses a paranoid view of a nefarious government conspiracy, the dark truth of which is unqualified by ambiguities and unmediated by irony. At the end of the decade, The Matrix (1999, the Wachowskis) foresees the reduction of human beings to a condition of dreaming vegetables by a world-ruling artificial intelligence, offering its human protagonist as the eventual savior of mankind from the hyper-intelligent machines. Such works participate in a darkly paranoid vision of government conspiracies and threatening human hybrids, the exposure of which often leads to an absolute truth or religious salvation.⁸ The freefloating temptation to paranoia of the earlier period has hardened into a requirement in these works, the autonomous individual re-emerges as a hero, and a greater and darker stylization based on film noir replaces grotesque surrealism as the mode in which the paranoid vision is typically elaborated.

 

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Several kinds of works and ways of thought besides those of Foucault and Pynchon give evidence of a movement away from high postmodernism toward what may be other than postmodern over the last twenty years. The increasing attention being paid to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas indicates a widespread questioning of essential, unified identities, and a turn to ethical considerations. According to Levinas, ethics, not ontology, constitutes first philosophy. Rather than investigating the being of the self as the origin and ground of identity, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity (1961) on the encounter with the face of the other as antecedent to being and the subject; in Otherwise Than Being (1974) he maintains that the infinite responsibility for the other precedes origin and essence. This responsibility is not assumed or willed by a self already constituted; instead, it finds itself and its meaning in proximity to the other, in putting oneself in the place of the other, in an open-ended saying rather than what is finalized and said. The pre-original responsibility for the other escapes and precedes being, definition, and identity. Although ethics concentrates on individual responsibility, in Levinas’s thought ethics does not fall mute and powerless in the realm of politics. Indeed, ethics can both inform and critique political practice and reason, as Levinas’s interviews on contemporary events indicate.⁹ Numerous books and collections of essays on his thought have appeared in the last ten to twelve years; a collection of essays on Levinas mostly by literary critics is forthcoming; and a recent special issue of PMLA was devoted to “Ethics and Literary Study” (Buell).¹⁰

 

Jacques Derrida has written two significant essays on Levinas that helped bring his work to the attention of literary critics and others in the Anglo-American world. Derrida deserves to be mentioned here not only for the impact of these essays, but also because of a turn in his own work in the last decade or so which parallels the shift that occurs in the careers of Foucault and Pynchon. Derrida’s earlier deconstructive works argue that individuals are less in control of what they write and say than they believe; accordingly, it may be more accurate to say that languages speak and write individuals than to say that writers create unique and original meanings. Systems of meaning in fact establish what can and cannot be said, and undermine any straightforward assertion, whether by a conventional or a revolutionary thinker. (For all their disagreements and differences of emphasis, the resemblances are clear between this view of Derrida and Foucault’s view of the pervasive effects of epistemes.) But in later works, Derrida has modified this rather ahistorical view in which the role of politics is unclear. In the recent Politics of Friendship (1994), he has investigated the way in which the realm of the political has been constituted by understandings of who is a friend and who an enemy. In his previous work, Specters of Marx (1993), he investigated Marx’s thought and communism as a specter not only from the past, in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but also from the future, as a claim and obligation on the present generation. He also argues forcefully there against the notion that the current triumph of market economies signifies an end to history. In both works, Derrida trains his characteristic interpretative strategies on texts of political and ethical philosophy not in order to deconstruct them entirely, but to find a way toward a fuller and more adequate idea of democracy and a greater equality of goods as well as opportunities.¹¹

 

A change in the critical analysis of ideologies can serve as a further instance of a shift between the sixties and the late eighties from a view of an all-encompassing system of control to a view that sees a possibility for effective ethico-political action, without relying on the subject of liberal humanism or Marxism. In Louis Althusser’s account, the process of subject formation through hailing or interpellation by an ideological system is inescapable; no position exists outside the apparatuses of ideology. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, by contrast, adopt and extend Antonio Gramsci’s exploration of the possibilities for constructing multiple, provisional, and oppositional subject positions not as a result of interpellation from above and outside. They propose that formation of such flexible subject positions will allow for the articulation in discourse of equivalences or intersecting interests among various subordinate groups. For Laclau and Mouffe, as well as for Levinas, one does not possess a pre-existing identity or subject position from which one is able to make alliances; rather, one’s subject position takes shape only in relation to one’s sympathies with other subjects. The renewed concern among social theorists in the last ten or fifteen years with exploring the workings and implications of various public spheres can be seen as congruent to the shift effected by Laclau and Mouffe in the analysis of ideologies. I refer of course to Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and the extensive work that it has generated (see, for example, Calhoun).

 

Focusing on hybrids who combine human with mechanical or animal traits, Donna Haraway’s reflections in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) constitute a significant antecedent to Pynchon’s representation of intelligent and ethical animal and mechanical creatures in Mason & Dixon. Haraway intends to move beyond a characterization of cyborgs solely as frightening monsters who signify a declension from the human. Arguing that in some ways we are all cyborgs now (177), she articulates a position that combines anxiety with an exuberant embrace of such a fractured and hybrid identity.¹² Her concern arises from the sense that the new networks of information may prove to be even more effective means of control than the older hierarchies of domination–a perhaps justified paranoia. But she celebrates the cyborg identity because she sees its hybridity as a figure for the breakdown of all kinds of boundaries and categories.¹³ By replicating rather than reproducing, for example, cyborgs undercut heterosexism; the partly mechanical cyborg also promises a “utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” (181). Significantly, Haraway devotes much of her essay that elaborates her “myth of the cyborg” to the possibilities for political action that may be opened up by the “breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine” (174).¹⁴ As in Laclau and Mouffe, these include possibilities for feminists, socialists, and women of color to recognize equivalences and form associations across boundaries.¹⁵

 

A few years after Haraway’s essay was first published, Bruno Latour argued for an even more extended understanding of hybrids as objects that include elements both of the human and the nonhuman. On this definition, everything that results from mixing human activity with nonhuman materials and beings is hybrid, including, for example, scientific laboratories, everyday tools and conveniences of technology, even phenomena such as the rise of the average temperature of the earth. Latour argues that a double movement characterizes modernity: it encourages the proliferation of hybrids, but denies their existence, recognizing only the opposed poles of nature and society. Overtly, the modern tries to keep the human and nonhuman pure and distinct, but covertly it produces a massive mediation between the two. Latour suggests we recognize that the attempt at purification never worked, and that the multiplication of hybrids has proceeded at an increasing pace. Thus, we have never been modern: we have never successfully separated nature and society, the human and nonhuman. Latour calls neither for a return to the premodern nor for an embrace of the postmodern (which he attacks for being an extreme form of modern thought), but rather for the deliberate cultivation of a “nonmodern” thought and practice that will devote its attention precisely to the kinds and implications of the hybrid objects that mediate between the human and nonhuman.¹⁶

 

I will conclude this brief survey of developments in accord with an other than postmodern paradigm by citing two popular works from the early eighties that are thus approximately contemporary with Foucault’s late writings, Haraway’s essay, and Laclau and Mouffe’s book; both works give evidence of an increased acceptance of hybrids combining human character with machines or artificial intelligence. In Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, the manufactured humans or replicants exhibit not only more intelligence and cunning, but also more emotional intensity and desire for life than do the organic humans who hunt and kill them. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the founding text of cyberfiction, all the principal human characters either have extensive mechanical implants or live significant portions of their lives in cyberspace; more importantly, the protagonist turns out to be an artificial intelligence who has for his own purposes conceived and directed the elaborate plot involving all the humans in the novel. Neither of these works grants ethical superiority to or otherwise privileges organic humans over such hybrid forms of existence. In their emphasis on hybrids and their ethics, these fictional narratives join the philosophical texts that may give evidence of an emerging paradigm.

 

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The roughly contemporaneous careers of Foucault and Pynchon (Madness and Civilization was published in 1961, and V. in 1963, with part appearing as a short story in 1961) reveal a turn from a more deterministic view of the efficacy of normalizing forces (in the case of Foucault) or of the forces of inanimacy and death (in the case of Pynchon). This shift away from the high postmodern leads to an increased resistance to paranoid totalizing and to greater possibilities for ethico-political action, even if it remains limited and circumscribed. The late works of both authors see human beings less as automata, objects of control, and more as creatures with some capacity for effective action, self-discipline, and self-control.

 

The first two dimensions of Foucault’s work are concerned with controlling systems of thought and of power. In the phase that begins with Madness and Civilization and extends through The Order of Things (1968), Foucault explores the dimension of knowledge, concentrating on what can be known and uttered in different epochs of knowledge or epistemes. In Madness and Civilization, he emphasizes that whatever lies outside the field of the rational, as that changes from one period to another, can only been seen as madness, as non-sense. In The Order of Things, he argues that the rules of formation that give a unity to any period exist outside the consciousness of those who work within the forms of knowledge of the time. In The Order of Things, he goes so far as to declare that such systems not only “evade the consciousness” of individuals, but are all-encompassing and monolithic: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (168).

 

Soon after The Order of Things, Foucault shifts his focus from systems of knowledge to systems of power. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), he lays out the essentials of a genealogical method that displaces the archaeological approach he had previously employed. Instead of giving priority to the discursive dimension as determinative, Foucault the practitioner of genealogical history concentrates on the intertwining of power and knowledge, the effects that constructions of knowledge have on the bodies of those subject to institutions such as the factory or the school. His focus in Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976) is the disciplining–the formation and constraining–of the subject by institutions of power and knowledge that include the prison and psychoanalysis. Many commentators have stressed the importance of the shift from archaeology to genealogy, from an examination of discourse to a concentration on power, and I would not deny the significant differences between the two approaches and their objects of inquiry. But there are continuities between the two as well. For one, Foucault does not abandon the analysis of discourse or knowledge in the later approach; rather, a genealogical analysis explores the workings of institutional power through the analysis of discourse, and the complex intersections of the two can often be described as the workings of power/knowledge.

 

In addition, regimes of knowledge and power both exist apart from the control or even the consciousness of those who participate in them; their sway is totally effective and unchallenged.¹⁷ The history of their transformations is punctuated by dramatic discontinuities, ruptures that are frequently sudden and nearly complete. No agency, group, identifiable force, or combination of causes directs alterations such as the shift described in Madness and Civilization from the practice in the middle ages of allowing the mad to wander from town to town, to the opposite practice beginning in the mid-seventeenth century of restricting their movement by confining them. Similarly lacking any clear cause is the transformation of punishment from a spectacle of the sovereign power writing on the body of the condemned, to the inculcation of control through the constant discipline of self-observation and self-regulation. Indeed, Foucault grimly observes that attempts to reform a system of excessive punishment may have contributed not to a liberating result but to the development and imposition of more effective, more internalized means of control. Foucault indicates an interest in ethics and resistance to the micrological workings of disciplinary power as early as The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), but from that work through the writing of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he finds it impossible to locate and specify how one might evade or resist the disciplinary forces that both form and constrain the subject.

 

However, even in such an uncompromising vision of knowledge or power as effecting total control, we may see elements of opposition to other forms of control. The opposition in Foucault’s works to traditional master narratives such as Marxist historiography, humanist intellectual history, and liberal narratives of progress can be seen as a parodic overturning of previous paradigms of knowledge. From this point of view, the sudden ruptures, extreme discontinuities, and failure to account for change in Foucault’s histories would have a satiric effect on established histories of progress. Foucault also makes frequent use of a satiric rhetoric of extremes; such satiric inversions resemble the parodic skepticism that is juxtaposed in other works of high postmodernism with paranoid visions of controlling systems.

 

Pynchon’s early and middle works, from V. through The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to a culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), express a vision similar to Foucault’s of a controlling regime just behind events and just outside perception or consciousness, which facelessly directs history, providing the possibility of unifying widely dispersed phenomena. In V., Stencil pursues evidence of Victoria Wren, Veronica the rat, the kingdom of Vheissu, and the theft of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus all as pieces of what he conceives of as “the century’s master cabal” (226). Throughout his paranoid quest for order and Benny Profane’s non-paranoid reveling in disorder and disconnectedness, the evidence accumulates that, whether under the sign of V. or not, the century’s hallmark is the declension from the animate to the inanimate, from the human to the mechanical, from the living to the dead. In Lot 49, the history of postage stamps, the decimal calendar of the French Revolution, Jacobean tragedy, a World War II battle in Italy, and a southern Californian real estate development all give evidence of the force called Tristero, and Tristero, whether it exists or not, points to a pattern of dispossession in America. In Gravity’s Rainbow, behind the war, behind the oppositions mobilized to make war, behind the nation-states of Germany, England, the U.S.S.R., and the United States, Slothrop, Enzian, and others see another order of force, designated sometimes as They, which may have staged the war in order to expand their markets or in order to find supplies and uses for their technologies. “They” are linked throughout with the chemical company I.G. Farben, as well as with Krupp, General Electric, Shell Oil, and other multinational conglomerates (Tölölyan 53-64).¹⁸ As the narrative voice says, “The real business of the War is buying and selling. The murder and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals…. The true war is a celebration of markets” (105).

 

In Gravity’s Rainbow, They are associated with a historical plot that leads to death, particularly through the instrumentality of science, a descent as in V. from the human to the inanimate and the mechanical, the controlled. In V. the disassembly of the Bad Priest of Malta–with her glass eyes, gold teeth, sapphire navel, and artificial limbs–provides a striking instance of the replacement of the human by the inanimate. The Rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow stands as the realization, the emblem, and the acme of this urge to death: at the end of the novel, the young Gottfried, encased in the tip of the V-2, becomes one with the Rocket as it rises and then falls to earth, bringing death both to him and to those on the ground below. Each of the controlling phenomena in the early and middle works of Pynchon–V., Tristero, They–eludes or remains on the horizon just outside full consciousness or complete apprehension. Still, each novel suggests that these structures have directed the course of history and continue to provide its motive force. In relation to all such anonymous forms of historical control, human beings take on the attributes of automata whose behavior, movements, even desires and thoughts may have been programmed or controlled.¹⁹

 

In all these cases, little opportunity exists to challenge, evade, limit, or change such regimes. Each work presents a pair of opposites either of which is unattractive if taken singly. The obvious alternative in V. to Stencil’s obsessive ordering is the randomness and disorder of Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew. The only clear alternative to the ominous significance of Tristero in Lot 49 is the possibility of no meaning at all. The only consciously chosen alternative to Them in Gravity’s Rainbow is the Counterforce, which through its resistance soon comes to mirror its opposite–the Force, Them. Slothrop ultimately evades the controlling force of the multinationals through his dispersion or scattering, but this does not appear to be a course that others can choose; it just happens, fortuitously, to Slothrop.

 

It is true that Pynchon also depicts Europe after the war as a place where international cartels find it difficult to control events, because nation-states and other forms of order, including capital markets, have collapsed. In the Zone, only spontaneous and temporary forms of identity and order emerge, and a kind of dangerous and beautiful anarchy reigns. Still, the Zone itself is temporary, and the authentic and crazy human contacts it encourages give way as traditional forms of social and political order are reimposed. Sites of carnival inversion, such as the Plechazunga celebration, cannot be sustained. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon reflects that even on the personal level, an extreme lack of connectedness may be impossible to tolerate for long (434). Throughout these early and middle works, Pynchon resists authorizing either an ominous order or meaningless disorder; he implies instead that it is necessary if almost impossible somehow to combine the urge to order and meaning with a skepticism that recognizes the fruitfulness of disorder and unpredictability.²⁰

 

In the later careers of both Foucault and Pynchon, the vision of powerful regimes that control and direct history beneath people’s consciousness and beyond their ability to act effectively gives way to an ethics that might through self-discipline evade disciplinary subjectification (in Foucault’s thought) or to a political ethics of local resistance to the enslavement of Africans and the killing of native people (in Pynchon’s work). In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault begins to distance himself from the idea that discursive regimes are monolithic; there he argues against a “totalitarian periodization” according to which at a certain time and in a certain culture, “everyone would think in the same way” (148). Instead, different paradigms of thought and practice coexist and overlap. Epistemological shifts affect one area of discourse and not others, as well as some groups or individuals and not others (175). In addition, in his work on governmentality in the late seventies, Foucault sees not only the growth of disciplinary governance, but also a resistance to governance, an art of not being governed so much, or in a certain way, which develops alongside and in resistance to the art of governing (“What is Critique?” 28). He pays renewed attention to Enlightenment thinkers as agents of such critique who pursue possibilities for self-governance and self-formation.

 

In the eight years following the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality perhaps the most significant shift in Foucault’s thought occurs. In Foucault’s earlier thought, there is no clear means of resisting reigning forms of thought or systems of power. It is impossible to think outside what is made utterable by the epistemological frameworks of a time, nor is it possible to alter or reform normalizing disciplinary institutions. In essays and interviews from the mid-seventies, Foucault argued that there must be sites of resistance to power, but the difficulty was to locate and specify them. To resolve the crisis that his thought had reached after adding the investigation of modes of power to the analysis of forms of knowledge, Foucault moved into a third phase or dimension. This third dimension–which did not replace the first two but carried forward the results of the earlier researches–concerned processes of subjectification.²¹ Foucault reconceived and rewrote the later volumes of the History so that they focus primarily not on problems of truth and power, but on an analysis of how one becomes a subject, of one’s relation to oneself, of ethics understood as an art of shaping one’s life (“Concern” 255-56, “Preface” 336, “Return” 243).

 

According to these works, effective action does not occur only in anonymous, culture-wide discursive and institutional realignments. Instead, as he says in discussing the later volumes of the History of Sexuality, Foucault now sees the history of cultural forms as a reservoir of ideas for shaping one’s life, a “treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on that cannot exactly be reactivated” from other societies such as that of the ancient Greeks, but which “can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what’s going on now and to change it” (“Genealogy” 350). These last two points are crucial: Foucault now sees a possibility for maneuvering away from disciplinary constraints of knowledge, power, and subjectification not by means of opposing or evading an external totalizing force, but rather through adopting a disciplinary relation to oneself–the self-imposed discipline of an ethos or way of life. One who pursues such an art of living, “ethics as a form to be given to one’s behavior and life” (“Concern” 263), assumes responsibility for self-governance, for one’s own formation and subjectification. The result is not a return to the ahistorical possessive subject of liberal humanism.²² One who pursues such an ethical self-governance does not do so outside historical and cultural determinations; rather, such a project depends on knowing where we are–to what point our thought and actions have come–so that one can attempt to form oneself in another way.²³ For instance, presumably today, as in the eighties, Foucault would see such awareness involving a move away from moralities based on systems of rules and regulations, and toward a post-Christian ethics (“Aesthetics” 49-50).²⁴

 

Just as we can observe both continuities in and divergences between Foucault’s earlier investigations of regimes of truth and power and his late focus on subjectification and ethics, we can see continuities in and divergences between the vision of powerful impersonal forces in Pynchon’s earlier works and in his later Vineland (1990) and Mason & Dixon (1997). In Vineland, the attitude toward paranoia departs from the pattern established in Pynchon’s first three novels, but it does not entirely coincide with that in Mason & Dixon. No shadowy conspiracy of multinational or historic proportions lurks behind individual actions and historic events in Vineland.²⁵ Instead, two repressive efforts in America’s history contribute largely to shaping the concerns of the narrative. The first of these is the attack on labor unions in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and in Hollywood during the anti-communist blacklist. The second instance is the attack on liberals, unions, drugs, and the poor by the Reagan administrations in the eighties (embodied in the novel by the Republican prosecutor Brock Vond). Neither of these efforts is hidden, secret, or unknown to standard histories, even if one of the aims of the later moment was to repress historical memory of the earlier one.

 

However, in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon represents the world of the 1760s and of the eighteenth century generally as already largely shaped by shadowy transnational institutions. The question of where the boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania should be fixed aligns Calverts and their Catholic followers against Penns and their Quaker and Protestant partisans, leading eventually, perhaps, to a world-wide conspiracy of the Jesuit order–viewed as ruthless, rational, and authoritarian–against the equally world-wide reach of the British East India Company, which is interested in any extension of technical knowledge with commercial applications for the expansion of overseas markets.²⁶ Moreover, not only others in the novel, but Mason and Dixon themselves wonder whether they were put forward by these two opposed but overarching forces: the Anglican astronomer Mason perhaps named by the Royal Society and the Astronomer Royal, Maskelyne, brother-in-law to Clive of India; the Quaker surveyor Dixon perhaps ironically named by his teacher Emerson, himself a friend of Father Le Maire, one of the Jesuits who laid out two degrees of latitude in a straight line from Rome to Rimini.

 

However, such speculations are repeatedly undermined by their outlandishness, mocked by a tongue-in-cheek tone and deflating puns. For instance, when they are already well advanced in their project and Dixon suggests that perhaps “we shouldn’t be runnin’ this Line…?” (478), Mason shares some of his “darker Sentiments” with his partner; Mason supposes that the Astronomer Royal may be a spy transmitting the daily Greenwich observations to French Jesuits who line up the numbers and analyze them like a kabbalistic text until they reveal a mysterious message. When Dixon responds with his own version of a “likely Conspiracy… form’d in the Interest of Trade,” it is clear that he doubts the existence of a Jesuit scheme, just as Mason disputes the relevance of the East India Company. But Dixon goes on to press Mason about evidence of trade with the spice islands:

 

“Can you not sense here, there,… the Scent of fresh Coriander, the Whisper of a Sarong…?”
“Sari,” corrects Mason
“Not at all Sir,– ’twas I who was sarong.” (479)

 

On this deflating note, the two-page section with its consideration of vast conspiracies breaks off. Mason and Dixon’s discussions of possible conspiracies usually become absurd in this way and stop abruptly, lead nowhere, or otherwise fail to reach even a tentative conclusion.²⁷

 

A much more committed conspiracy theorist is the feng-shui master and megalomanical captain Zhang, who believes that the Jesuits serve as agents for aliens who have visited earth and departed, leaving behind instructions to mark the planet with long straight lines as signs carrying an unknown message (601). But the alternative to such paranoid flights of order is not, as it was in earlier works, an equally intolerable state of meaningless disconnection and disorder. Instead, many characters in the novel acknowledge the central position that Zhang articulates–that the boundary line effects an unnatural gouging of the earth by scientific rationality–without taking it to the paranoid lengths that he does (see Cowart, “Luddite” 361). Despite a world-wide system of Jesuit telegraphs and the transnational trading posts of the Company, no system of control in this novel carries the realistic possibility of being as all-encompassing and effective as the fantasized or depicted controlling regimes of history in Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and The Crying of Lot 49. In Mason & Dixon, such systems are undercut by the extremists who embrace them. Acknowledging the force of Zhang’s criticism of the line does not mean that Mason and Dixon become obsessed questers like Stencil in V. or mad scientific authorities like Blicero/Weissman and Pointsman in Gravity’s Rainbow. Rather, the position of Mason and Dixon more nearly resembles that of Oedipa Maas, who comes to see more than she saw at first, to whom revelations happen which may or may not add up to evidence of a wide-ranging conspiracy, but which are nevertheless historically significant and demand an ethical response.

 

In The Crying of Lot 49, whether Tristero actually exists or whether Oedipa has become paranoid finally becomes a moot question in the face of the undeniable evidence of dispossession in America that Oedipa comes to recognize (Palmeri 993). In Mason & Dixon, such questions as whether Mason is being used by the East India Company or Dixon by the Jesuits remain undecidable, but also become moot in the face of the growing conviction that the line constitutes a perhaps indefensible wounding of the earth’s surface that benefits only land speculators. Both Mason and Dixon finally acknowledge that “the Line is exactly what Zhang and a number of others have been styling it all along–a conduit for Evil… by its nature corrupt, of use at Trail’s End only to those who would profit from the sale and division and resale of Lands” (701). Such a conviction constitutes a moderate position between paranoid certainties and mindless obliviousness that is not excluded from this novel as it was from Lot 49 (136).

 

At one point after the line has been run, Dixon, like Oedipa, moves beyond a concern with the particulars of various conspiracies and plots by which they may have been used to observe that the common elements in all their postings have been slavery and dispossession, and that perhaps they should acknowledge their participation in these enterprises (682-93). Mason and Dixon thus possess a significant capacity for critical reflection and for ethical action. In the first section of the novel, while in South Africa, despite the constantly eroticized atmosphere, both of them refuse to sleep with and impregnate slave women as the South Africans want them to do, because they would only be making further slaves for the Dutch (61-67). Once they are in America, but before the running of the line, Dixon accompanies Mason to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where twenty-six unarmed Indians seeking protection in a jailhouse were massacred not long before. There Dixon argues with the murderous Lancastrians, earning Mason’s respect (343), then each separately visits the site and hopes that the killers meet a just judgment (346-47). Later, in Baltimore, after the line has been completed and the Quaker Dixon has seen too much of slavery both in Capetown and in America, he stops a slave-trader from whipping a group of slaves, turns the whip briefly against the trader, and frees the slaves, while Mason watches his back (698-99). Such episodes as these do not change the system of slavery in South Africa or the American South, nor do they prevent the dispossession and killing of native people in America. But they demonstrate that Dixon and Mason have the capacity to act ethically, that they are not entirely controlled by an all-engrossing system of power and thought in their time; they can act against the system, even if their action is local and limited in its effects.

 

Such an ethos may not provide as elegant a means of evading control as does Slothrop’s disappearance in Gravity’s Rainbow, but it is more accessible to those who live paraliterary lives, outside fictional narratives. The actions of Dixon and Mason point to the possibility of a political ethics that is not identical with but may be compared to Foucault’s late ethics of self-discipline. Crucially, Pynchon’s protagonists do not retreat to a private world of purchasable comforts where they might deny their involvement in the larger world. Their local ethical action may not proceed as far as Foucault would want in dismantling the humanist subject, but they move in the same direction by challenging rather than embracing the oppressive systems of their time, neither denying their responsibility nor exaggerating their effectiveness.

 

There is one other notable way in which Mason & Dixon revises the representation of systems of control in the earlier novels. Especially in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon analyzes the declension from the human to the mechanical, the colonizing of the living by the inanimate, the making of human beings into automata by systems of scientific knowledge and power. Vineland presents a view of human-machine hybrids which stands apart from the view in the earlier novels and more closely resembles what will come in Mason & Dixon. In the earlier novel, “Tubefreaks” such as Hector Zuñiga or Zoyd Wheeler who act and think in imitation of the characters in television programs appear as colorful, slightly eccentric characters, not victims of an ominous conspiracy to liquefy the brains of Americans. But perhaps the most important evidence in Vineland of the beginnings of a reversal in Pynchon’s representation of hybrid creatures comes from his depiction of the Thanatoids. These characters–who after death continue to exist, eat, sleep, dance, and talk, only at a slower rate than the living–revise the representation of the living dead as frightening, threatening zombies. In fact, they are mostly gentle, and include some of the most decent and sympathetic characters in the novel. Like the Tubefreaks, they occupy a middle ground between the living and the dead or the real and the unreal that produces not danger and anxiety so much as a muted and sorrowful desire.

 

In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon proceeds much further by representing hybrid forms such as mechanical animals who take on the attributes of living creatures–intelligence, speech, a sense of justice, even a capacity for love. The movement in this novel reverses that in the early works by proceeding not from the human to the mechanical, but from the mechanical to the sentient. It is difficult to name all the intelligent animals and articulate machines in Mason & Dixon. They include not only conversing chronometers, but the celebrated, witty, and dangerous Duck of Vaucanson, whose involvement with the expedition contributes its one love story to the novel, and who also constitutes one of its moral centers, when she observes the “minor tho’ morally problematick part” (669) that Mason and Dixon play in world history. I would also note the numerous intelligent and ethical animals in the novel–from the gigantic Golem who protects the mad poet, Timothy Tox, and who “takes a dim view of oppression” (490), to the electric eel who could kill those who touch him when he is exhibited, but chooses benevolently not to. Dogs play a significant role in the narrative both early and late. The Learned English Dog, also known as Fang, may have met an untoward end, perhaps having taken his own life as a result of too trustingly conversing with humans. Later, a dog named Snake warily keeps his own counsel when Mason asks about his old friend Fang. Near the end of the novel, in the guise of another younger dog, Fang visits Mason and Dixon when they have returned to England, letting them know as they sleep that when the two of them are together, he will be with them (757). The mechanical Duck, the electric eel, the learned and thoughtful dogs, as well as the other hybrid creatures that figure in the novel, whether mechanical or animal (such as Zepho the beaver-man), are unlike most of those hybrid machine-creatures who were associated with control, lack of choice, and death in the earlier novels. These later mechanical and animal creatures exhibit life, wit, and moral intelligence. Instead of humans becoming automata, these automata and animals have become their own moral agents.²⁸ The possibility these hybrids have of choosing to act ethically in solidarity with others confirms the moderating of the paranoid vision that dominates Pynchon’s earlier novels.

 

Although Pynchon’s representation of animals as ethical agents might appear isolated and anomalous, in fact one of the most distinctive lines of inquiry in contemporary philosophy concerns the ethical status of animals. Peter Singer, for example, has argued that in ethical deliberations the suffering of other species should count equally with similar kinds of suffering experienced by human beings (Animal Liberation 9), and that it is wrong to kill animals who can anticipate the future, because their death deprives such animals of future enjoyments (Practical Ethics 93-105). Tom Regan similarly makes the case that all animals who can be understood as being “subjects of a life”–and not just human beings–have inherent value, and a right to have that value respected. Rosemary Rodd maintains that many species of animals possess traits–such as the capacity for suffering and anticipating the future, consciousness, and a sense of self–on the basis of which we assign ethical value to human beings.²⁹ Both in Disgrace and in The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee questions the morality of killing animals in order to eat them. In responding to Coetzee and extending his reflections, Barbara Smuts has argued for the significance of interpersonal relations between humans and animals (Lives of Animals 107-20). Thus, far from being idiosyncratic, Pynchon’s concern to represent animals as ethical agents engaged in interpersonal relations with humans actually participates in an active and continuing philosophical conversation–one that first emerges around the same time as the late works of Foucault in the late seventies and early eighties.

 

Mason & Dixon thus joins Foucault’s later work in moving from an earlier vision of regimes of power that preclude choice and change to a vision of a self-disciplined subject and of some limited ethico-political agency.³⁰ Although Foucault and Pynchon ascribe to agents in their late works an ability to distance themselves critically from their historical present, such a limited critical agency does not derive from a return to a humanist (Foucault) or purely human (Pynchon) individual subject. Rather, it is the late postmodern that is committed to recuperating the liberal individual: The X-Files and The Matrix, for example, posit a global conspiracy so that a heroic individual agent can save human beings from becoming hybrids with machines or aliens. By contrast, Foucault, Pynchon, Haraway, Laclau and Mouffe, and the other than postmodern thinkers, are interested in the opposite of such a return to the autonomous individual subject; they are investigating subjectification and subject positions, trying to propose ways that people can participate in forming themselves as local ethical and political agents. Their turn away from paranoid or conspiratorial visions accompanies the turn away from the liberal individual subject; moreover, as they decline to idealize the unmixed human self, they are more open to hybrids combining humans with animals or machines. Beside those discussed so far, other contemporary thinkers are also attempting to work out what forms of political and ethical agency can be pursued based on a fissured or incomplete subject rather than the unitary subject of liberal humanism (see Butler, Laclau, Zizek). Still, it is important to recognize that The X-Files and other examples of late postmodernism participate in the dominant form of consumer culture, encouraging a private consumer self. The other than postmodern thought of Foucault, Pynchon, and those who similarly challenge such privatizing subjectification remains a less prominent, emerging formation.

 

By drawing attention to divergent strands in the contemporary cultural matrix, this essay hopes to contribute to an understanding of a question to which Foucault returned repeatedly: the question of “what our present is,” of where we are now. Among the possibilities that we face I have sketched two. Late postmodernism, paranoid about global and high-tech systems of control, also remains committed to a consuming subject formed in the interests of such multinational conglomerates. What is other than postmodern, by contrast, explores how we might form subject positions not through private consumption, but through local ethical and political action. It may be important today to resist fantasies that define all but one of us as politically powerless, as well as the attempt to restore a pure but illusory human identity in opposition to machines, aliens, or animals. As Foucault famously wrote at the conclusion of The Order of Things, “man,” the unmixed, abstract human being, “is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (387).

 

Notes

 

I would like to thank Terry Reilly, who organized the session “Reading Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon” at the 1998 MLA, at which an early version of this essay was presented; Jeffrey Nealon, for extensive and helpful comments which led to strengthening the argument here; and Nancy San Martín and Michael Sinowitz, for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the essay.

 

1. On the use of the terms residual, emergent, and dominant in the analysis of changes between epochs, see Williams 121-27.

 

2. According to Melley, paranoia in postwar culture arises from “agency panic,” an urgent anxiety about whether individuals control their own actions. In most instances, such a concern leads to a recuperation of the autonomous self (89); I would see such works as examples of a late postmodernism. However, as Melley argues, in writers such as Foucault, Pynchon, and Acker, the radical challenge to individual agency stands without reinscription of the autonomous subject (102); I see these works presenting an alternate view that is other than postmodern.

 

3. In Wising Up the Marks, Timothy Murphy characterizes William Burroughs as “amodern” because his work stands outside both modernist and postmodern modes of writing. Burroughs’s attempt to dissolve the subject because it serves as a system of control finds parallels in the projects of both Foucault and Pynchon. However, since the earlier work of Pynchon and Foucault has been closely identified with postmodern writing and thought, I believe that “other than postmodern” indicates more accurately than “amodern” the context of the direction taken by their late work.

 

4. For a brief overview of nativist paranoia in nineteenth-century America, see Hofstadter.

 

5. Jodi Dean believes that it is not significant that Mulder is an FBI agent because his relation to much of the bureau is largely antagonistic (206). However, the identity of the two protagonists is established in the title sequence for each episode only by their FBI identification badges. Moreover, Mulder and Scully are far from being rogue agents: they are often supported by Assistant Director Skinner; and they obtain crucial help in many of their cases from the bureau.

 

6. Because the green smoking “blood” of the aliens is toxic to most humans, the aliens can serve as figures not only for foreigners but also for those who are HIV positive: although they are impossible to identify visually, contact with their blood can be fatal to the previously healthy.

 

7. By virtue of the open-endedness of the multi-year series, The X-Files also continually defers a final, unambiguous revelation of that truth.

 

8. A quartet of novels by Dan Simmons that begins with Hyperion (1989) and concludes with The Rise of Endymion (1997) also participates in a late postmodernism. Like The Matrix, these novels present a powerful artificial intelligence network as controlling future human history; like The X-Files, they foresee a return to Catholic belief. Simmons presents a sympathetic view of a human-machine, but only because the character chooses human mortality and love over mechanical indestructibility.

 

9. Totality and Infinity was first published in 1961, about twenty years before most of the works that I characterize here as other than postmodern. But a crucial thinker or writer often proves to have anticipated a later development by several decades or a generation. For example, Borges published his postmodern Ficciones in the late thirties and early forties, about two decades before the emergence of an identifiable postmodernism. Similarly, Beckett’s trilogy (Murphy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, 1951-53) and plays such as Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957) give evidence of many traits of postmodernism when it is still emergent and before it becomes a dominant form of cultural production.

 

10. See also Nealon’s Alterity Politics, which makes use of Levinas’s thought in constructing its argument for a politics based on a response to the other rather than on the identity of the self.

 

11. On the political and ethical implications of Derrida’s deconstruction, especially in Specters and Politics, see Critchley 83-105, 143-82, 254-86.

 

12. For another view of hybrids such as cyborgs, see Hayles, who emphasizes that human embodiment remains crucial and undeniable even in virtual realities.

 

13. Haraway’s celebration of what she sees as cyborg identity is not widely shared, but some other ambivalently positive depictions of cyborgs can be located in works of the last fifteen years. One might cite, for example, the T100 cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) who returns from the future a second time not to destroy but to protect the future savior of humanity from an even more advanced, more predatory cyborg.

 

14. In a view that parallels the one suggested here, David Simpson sees Haraway and other scientists like her as searching for something “more than the academic postmodern” (167).

 

15. Paul McCarthy argues for the need for a turn to political-ethical concerns in postmodernism, taking texts by Deleuze and Guattari as his touchstones for such a shift. In terms of the present argument, we might see in the human desiring machines and bodies without organs of Deleuze and Guattari another significant positive instance of hybridity between humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari also seek to move beyond a paranoid culture based on the control of the Law to a more nomadic and resistant form of existence.

 

16. Latour employs “nonmodern” (47 and 134) by contrast with an idea of modernity that has been dominant for the last three and a half centuries. I concur with his call to recognize the importance of hybrid objects. However, my understanding of what is other than postmodern diverges from Latour’s “nonmodern” thought in that it turns away from a postmodernism that has been dominant only during the last thirty-five years, but not from Western thought since the middle of the seventeenth century.

 

17. In Foucault’s thought, control results from a force internal to the system; by contrast, in works such as The X-Files, the source of the conspiracy is external to the system. This contrast helps clarify the distinction between the high postmodernism of Foucault’s early writings and the more rigidly formulaic late postmodernism of The X-Files.

 

18. Berressem observes that Foucault’s theory of power from the mid-seventies “presides for long stretches over the poetics of Gravity’s Rainbow” (206).

 

19. McConnell argues that in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon recommends an increased awareness of our involvement in sado-masochistic power relations as a means of reducing their sway, just as, at about the same time, Foucault seeks to make visible previously invisible structures for disciplining the subject (164).

 

20. Molly Hite argues similarly that although Pynchon’s questing protagonists are obsessed with extremes, the opposition between absolute order and absolute meaninglessness does not exhaust the possibilities; connections may link some phenomena, but not all. As Hite points out, acceptance of either extreme deprives characters of ethical agency, so the difficulty in Pynchon’s first three novels is to locate absent or elusive middle grounds. McHoul and Wills maintain that Gravity’s Rainbow is post-rhetorical in the sense that no rhetorical figure or genre will account for the way the text works. They see any dualism in the text being overridden or leveled by becoming in its turn the first term of another opposition–between the original pair and a material substance or toponym that exceeds or combines the opposed elements of the first pair. They find a close relation between this practice of Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow and what Derrida analyzes as the workings of the supplement (52-63); I see in this pattern in Pynchon’s narrative a satiric leveling of hierarchies that is related to the exclusion of middle grounds. Francisco Collado-Rodriguez argues that throughout his novels, Pynchon interrogates the law of excluded middles; I will argue that Mason & Dixon offers more concrete examples of possible middle grounds between unacceptable extremes than do the other novels.

 

21. Deleuze sees a greater distance and discontinuity between the second and third phases of Foucault’s thought than between the first two. He says, for example: “You can say why he passes from knowledge to power, as long as you see that he’s not passing from one to the other as from some overall theme to some other theme, but moving from his novel conception of knowledge to an equally inventive new conception of power. This applies still more to the ‘subject’: it takes him years of silence to get, in his last books, to this third dimension” (92; see also 105).

 

22. Deleuze maintains repeatedly that Foucault’s focus on the processes of subjectification does not involve a return to the liberal humanist subject, but rather suggests the need for an historically aware process that takes the ethical work-in-progress away from the ends for which cultural institutions seek to form subjects, for example, as possessive individuals and consumers (Negotiations 95, 106, 115, 118).

 

23. As Paul Veyne notes, Foucault does not argue that an ancient ethos can be resuscitated and inserted unchanged in the modern world; rather, a personal ethos based on a care for the self might be one element of an ethical response to the question of the present.

 

24. Perhaps the closest model for the kind of ethical action Foucault calls for would be the project Nietzsche ascribes to “we knowers,” the “good Europeans,” whom he characterizes at the conclusion of The Genealogy of Morality as “heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-overcoming” (116-17). Christian belief having been overcome by a Christian morality grounded on the will to truth, the latter must overcome itself in a new ethos which will paradoxically be an outgrowth of and stand in opposition to the will to truth. Similarly, Foucault sees the forces of disciplinary society being countered by an ethos that is a form of disciplinarity yet also works in opposition to it–an ethos of self-governance based neither on the will to truth nor on the regulative morality tied to it.

 

25. Cowart sees Pynchon combining postmodern techniques and modernist concerns in Vineland (“Attenuated” 182).

 

26. Rather than setting Mason & Dixon in a pre-industrial past in order to allow his protagonists greater agency, Pynchon thus shows the potential for international plots and paranoia to be as present in the mid-eighteenth as in the mid-twentieth century.

 

27. David Seed discusses signs of conspiracies in Mason & Dixon (94-95).

 

28. In a reading that sees Mason & Dixon as both critiquing and participating in processes of subject formation, Thomas H. Schaub suggests that the speaking animals constitute futile attempts to speak outside the ubiquitous shaping effects of ideology (197-98).

 

29. For an argument against animal rights and the moral status of animals, see Carruthers.

 

30. In the last pages of Mason & Dixon, Pynchon makes a number of references to Foucault’s works, especially The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish. See Mason & Dixon, 723 (“Mathesis”) and 742 (“panopticon”). Collado-Rodriguez notes what he believes are some references to Foucault in Mason & Dixon (500).

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