A Schizoanalysis of Gravity’s Rainbow Part I: The Body Without Organs
An introduction to non-fascist life
The question on all of our minds — by far the most pressing issue of our day — was finally asked by Morgan Jerkins in The New Republic: “Is Trump Ruining Book Sales?”
Of course, not for a certain category of book that tries to explain Trump’s win to elite liberal America — Hillbilly Elegy, our own Strangers in Their Own Land. Readers suddenly realized that there is something deep happening in America that they don’t understand. These books, good and bad, are about the White Other; the mysterious world of the “White Working Class,” even if they’re lucky to work at all these days.
I’m not sure if those types of explanations are satisfactory. Here it is, months after the inauguration; and not only have we not stopped the rise of fascism in America, the strategies we’re using to attack Trump (Russia) are giving cover and distraction from a rapid and insideous growth of fascism in every niche of our society.
Foucault called Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia an “introduction to the non-fascist life.” (Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume work composed of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus).
What more important function can a book serve?
They ask, how can we understand why people desire their own repression? Why do WE desire their own repression? Why are the democrats so horrendously self-sabotaging, and so unable to resist Trump and the autocratic malignancy he represents?
For me, though, my introduction to non-fascist life was Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. So I’ve got an old, very long, essay that reads Gravity’s Rainbow with the help of Deleuze and Guattari. I thought I’d post it here, as this political moment might be a good time to return to these ideas, even if just for myself.
I don’t think you need to have read Gravity’s Rainbow to read and get something out of this essay. You certainly don’t need to have read Deleuze & Guattari — I try to summarize and restate their ideas, as I understand them. I’m surprised by the number of smart and well-read people that haven’t read Gravity’s Rainbow — as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best novel, ever. I’m hoping that if you do read the novel, this essay will make it easier — give you some ideas to look out for, so you can more thoroughly enjoy the jokes and the horsing around that is 95% of the novel. Otherwise, I think all you need to know for this essay is that the novel takes place towards the end of WWII in Europe, and that the main character is an American named Tyrone Slothrop.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the subject — in our case, Slothrop — is produced by the dissonance created when the forces of desiring-production hit against the immobile surface of the body without organs.
Desiring-production is what runs society — it’s the reason we go to work every day, not just to get a paycheck, but the reason we need a paycheck.
The body without organs is one of the most plastic concepts used in Schizoanalysis. It is on the surface of the body without organs that the entire schizophrenic and paranoiac drama of the subject is played out. A body without organs can be absolutely anything; it can be a territory, a despotic body, a simple object, or even a flow. Perhaps the closest Deleuze and Guattari come to a definition of the body without organs might be in A Thousand Plateaus: “The body without organs is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism — and also signification and a subject — occur” (A Thousand Plateaus 159). In practical function, the body without organs provides a surface,a stage. The surface of the body without organs is the recording surface of production. A sheet of paper, a Medium.com account, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The body without organs must be understood in the most physical manner; a body without organs is an object, and almost any object can behave as one: The State of Missouri, the street, the kitchen, the plate, the keyboard, Twitter. And in some circumstances a more metaphysical object, such as “capital” or “lust” or “addiction” can act as a body without organs.
It is important to begin to visualize the body without organs first at the most physical and literal level. In this context, I want to use the example of the book itself, as a ream of paper contained between two covers — 760 pages on the surface of which is recorded a process of desiring production. The record is at once a process and a product. A book is a good example of a body without organs because it can help us visualize the without organs part: despite a book’s heft, it has no internality, only a surface. It is a continual surface on which flows of meaning meander, page after page, as endless as it needs to be, but still a finite segment, contained between covers. A book is a form of the body without organs, the same as a territory can be, or the figure of a despot. The subject, all the subjects of the book (but for the time being, Slothrop), is literally formed on the surface of this particular body without organs — he exists nowhere else, the pages of the book are his full reality. But let us be willing to plunge into that reality itself, and not limit the idea to the object of the book in our own reality.
The subject grows on the body without organs like a barnacle on a rock in the middle of a river. Desiring-production is the movement of flows through a society; in Gravity’s Rainbow it can be seen in the movements of all the different agencies and governments that conspire to create the situation of the book: the War itself is a desiring machine, alongside all its component parts (such as the Rocket) and produces the physical space of the novel.
Just like water only flows when there is a differential in energy or pressure, Desiring-production can only flow when there is a disjunction, a lack, a glitch in the machines. It is in this disjunction that desire can be produced (this is why desire is often mistaken for a lack). Desiring production is real, it is not a metaphor or an imagination, and it survives off of its flaws. Consider timed obsolescence — how could Apple function as a machine of production if its iPhones lasted forever? This disjunction is created by the presence of the body without organs, which interrupts the flows and makes them imperfect — bodies overuse the iPhones, drop them, get them wet, download spyware, etc. (The iPhone is a good body without organs in that it’s pure surface, a screen. Sure it has hardware inside, but the important thing is the surface upon which flit various intensities of data.)
There are countless examples of the body without organs in Gravity’s Rainbow, but by far the most structurally important is the Zone. The Zone is Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war — the setting for most of the novel. The Zone was created by the War — a desiring machine — and it bears the physical inscription of the war in its carefully planned devastation, so that the newly-created Zone bears no resemblance to the pre-war Germany out of which it was carved. Geli Tripping introduces Slothrop to the pre-capitalist power arrangements of the Zone:
“It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements. You’ll find out.” Indeed he will — he’ll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted as a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. (290–291)
But the Zone constitutes a specific type of body without organs, the socius. The socius is the full body without organs of an entire society, the surface of a certain culture. It is the surface on which desiring-production inscribes itself, and what actually makes up the socius is historically specific; it changes according to what type of society it is. Deleuze and Guattari trace three different types of socius throughout history, but this passage from Gravity’s Rainbow reveals that the Zone includes and constitutes all of them in their entirety. The three main forms of social organization that Deleuze and Guattari discuss exist simultaneously alongside each other within the Zone.
The Primitive-Territorial
In the territorial sense, the Zone is the area of Europe that was hollowed out by the War. The War inscribed its process of production on the territory of the zone in the same way that Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘primitives’ who physically, graphically inscribe the earth itself, and, by extension, their own bodies. This is the form of representation that predates writing; Deleuze and Guattari call it graphism. Although Deleuze and Guattari’s is a historical analysis, graphism persists and exists simultaneously with all forms of representation: the practice of tattooing, for example, has persisted alongside other forms of signification.
The Zone as a primitive territorial BwO must be understood first in geographical and geopolitical terms. It is in this sense that the Zone is within the boundaries of the fallen Third Reich. It has an inside and an outside; thus, the part of the novel that takes place exclusively within the Zone includes the preposition: “In the Zone.” Slothrop’s journey around the Zone can be mapped and understood in purely physical terms.
The geographical Zone can also be understood as a product of desiring-production. The territory was created by the War, which is a molar desiring-machine. Earlier, I said that production inscribes itself on the surface of the body without organs; nowhere is this more clear than in the Zone. The devastation of the War is marked on every inch of the Zone; it is a landscape of partiality — walls and rooms lack roofs, everything that was private is now public, the internal external. Slothrop has his affair with Geli Tripping in a room without a roof, which enables a bird to make Geli’s bed its native habitat. The fascism that had unified the Third Reich, made it a monolithic and paranoiac totality, has now been reduced to a schizophrenic pastiche of ruin. The Zone, then, was created by the War; its process of production — bombing, battles — inevitably inscribed itself on the surface of the Zone.
The War inscribed itself on the Zone in a manner that had a graphic significance, illustrating Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that primitive territorial representation is the inscription of production upon the very surface of the earth. In a Slothropian moment, Oberst Enzian realizes:
This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on….modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan on both sides — “sides?” — had always agreed on…yes and now what if we — all right, say we are supposed to be Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop… […]
The bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy place exactly in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text… (520–521)
To Enzian, the way the War has inscribed itself on the Zone gains significance. He believes that he is supposed to read in the wreckage a system of graphic representation which will decode a holy Text. At first, the reader might see an apparent contradiction appears here between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of graphism as a pre-textual method of signification, and Enzian’s use of the concept of the ‘Text’ which lies at the heart of the meaning of the War, because graphism is supposed to be opposed to writing. But a further analysis resolves this contradiction in two interlinked ways. First of all, we must understand that all forms of social organization, and thus all forms of representation, coexist in the Zone; I have artificially parsed them from one another in order to organize this essay. In this case, we understand that Enzian sees the wreckage as an indication that there is somewhere (else) a Text, but the wreckage is not the text itself, for how could it be, when it is only wreckage? The phrase “scholar-magicians” unifies the two modes of signification, the textual and the graphic — the scholar works with texts, the magician with graphemes, and “we” (the inhabitants of the Zone) must be both. Secondly, the graphic representation of the wreckage first decodes the Text, before it recodes it. I mean to say that Enzian’s use of the wreckage to read (to interpret) the holy Text deterretorializes the Text because the significance of the text is no longer contained in the book, which was previously the body without organs of the Text. The significance of the Text is now contained on the earth itself — the body without organs of graphic representation. But then, meaning is restored back to the text itself, which can be “annotated, explicated, and masturbated.” Only after this decoding takes place does Pynchon allow for the possibility of “coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text,” a process whereby the grapheme imposes its own new meaning upon the Text; now the Text cannot be read by itself, but only through and alongside the wreckage of the Zone, which was created by a process of physical production of a desiring-machine.
The Barbaric/Despotic
The second type of body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari describe, and which holds tremendous sway over the Zone, is the body of the despot of a barbaric/despotic body (wO). This type of socius is imperialist and Statist; it is an extension of the paranoia of the despot himself, and it is his body that operates as the body without organs. In the case of the Zone, in this sense, it is not the zone itself which acts as the body without organs, but the hugely multiple agencies completing for superiority and governance in the power-vacuum created in the Zone by the war. The despotic state seeks to overcode the flows of society; that is, it seeks to inscribe its codes on the flows of the society, and does so in the name of the despot himself. Although we do not usually consider our contemporary governments “barbaric” (perhaps we ought to, given the imperialist violence they create), this type of despotic state persists even today, although over time it has ceded more and more power to the decoded flows of Capital.
As the above passage (“it is an arrangement . . .” 290–291) illustrates, the despotic socius, which is usually a totality that encompasses all of a society, exists in the Zone mostly as an absence, which allows individual characters to assume the role of the despot. Countless despotic bodies of various sizes comprise a pastiche-government over the Zone: the ineffectual victorious allied parties inscribe the meaning of “victory” over the zone, but fail to overcode the entire multiplicity of flows. It is also in this realm that Slothrop himself becomes “as properly constituted as a state as any other in the Zone these days,” because in this sense, Slothrop’s paranoia causes him to inscribe his body on the Zone itself. Slothrop, at various points but not constantly, overcodes the flows of the Zone and direct them into his own paranoid narrative. Paranoia is at the origin of the formation of the despotic barbarian state — an imperialist government does not just naturally evolve from a primitive territorial machine, instead, it appears fully formed in the paranoid formations of the despot. And so paranoia is not an individual pathology that a psychoanalyst would diagnose a patient with, but an investment in a social phenomenon. Paranoia lies at the base of the drive to create despotic states.
It is in this context that we can begin to understand the rigidly segmentary politics of microfascism: in the Zone, all personal drama is political. For Deleuze and Guattari, a political entity is made up of countless segments that can be divided and subdivided all the way down to the interpersonal level, and it is on the interpersonal level that politics begins. But as a socius becomes more fascist, those segments become more rigid; each person’s segment of the political whole must be intractably aligned with all the other segments, so that the totality can be as monolithic as possible. This does not mean that politics is decentralized, rather, the level of centralization only dictates how rigid the segments are — a fascist society is the most rigid. “There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the ‘masses’” (A Thousand Plateaus 214, emphasis in original). This can certainly be seen in Gravity’s Rainbow, which defies the notion that The War is a molar totality and instead crams it into all forms of personal interaction: Roger Mexico’s pickup line to Jessica: “’My mother is the war,’ leaning over to open the door” (39).
Because the Zone itself is defined by the lack of rigid segmentarities and strong political centralization, to find examples of rigid microfascisms in Gravity’s Rainbow we must look in the section that takes place during the war. Perhaps the best way to understand how fascism or despotism segments itself into interpersonal realities is through bureaucracy, which is how government extends its control into the lives of individuals; in Gravity’s Rainbow, we see the inside of the bureaucracy that is in charge of controlling Slothrop’s life for the first two parts of the novel. Every administrative action is controlled by paranoia. The White Visitation is technically headed up by Brigadier Pudding, “who was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries had believed in the Chain of Being” (77). Note the word “literal,” which refers not to a reality, but to a linguistic construct — it means he takes the Chain of Command at its word, and only then as a reality. He is haunted by the paranoiac idea that his post at The White Visitation is the result of a “treachery high inside Staff.” Meanwhile, Pudding is completely under the thumb of Dr. Pointsman, who has rigged up an elaborate system of sexual domination through Katje, on which Pudding is completely dependant. Through this system, not only does Pointsman absolutely control Pudding’s desires, he literally has the power of Pudding’s life in his hands because he prescribes the antibiotics that prevent Pudding from getting sick from all the shit that Katje forces him to eat. Indeed, Pointsman is the despot at the center of The White Visitation, which is itself an institutional segment of the British war machine. It is significant that to see such an example of microfascism in Gravity’s Rainbow, we turn to the British side, not the Nazi side of the war; not to say that Nazis were less fascist, but Pynchon points out that any government that transforms itself into a war machine will necessarily employ a fascist means of organizing its segments in a rigid manner.
Capital
There is a third type of socius in the Zone: the decoded flow of Capital, which constitutes aspects of the Zone as capitalist. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism is a unique form of society because it depends on decoded flows. While the barbaric and imperialist states (which can and do persist in a capitalist socius) struggle to impose their code on all the flows, capitalism seeks to liberate flows from the realm of control and coding. Capital, in the most general sense of the term — perhaps, value — is the body without organs of the capitalist and the socius of Capitalism. It is on the surface of capital that the process of production gets recorded, for example, in profit margins or stock prices.
Unlike despotic paranoia, which acts upon the individual characters of the novel, the flows of capital act upon the novel as a whole, and all of its component parts. Capital organizes the novel whereas despotism only informs aspects of the characters. For this reason, we will have to leave Slothrop aside for a few pages, or at least see him as a partial object in a larger system of flows and desiring-production.
Modern capital is unstoppable, and always seeks to expand into new markets, and so it imposes itself from outside the Zone in a multiplicity of forms. And the novel tells us that capitalism created the War and therefore the Zone; to the extent that we can subscribe to Slothrop’s conception of an omnipotent conspiracy, a “They,” we imagine Them motivated by the flows of modern capitalism. A war is a way of decoding flows:
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled ‘black’ by the professionals, spring up everywhere…(105)
This passage is a good example of the political economy that Pynchon imagines, but the important aspects of it can be found throughout the book. To name only a few examples: the pies that Slothrop helps airlift into Berlin, or the hashish that he excavates from Potsdam. But here, the reader is told that the War was specifically designed to decode the flows of capital, and create a more open market. This end is manifest in the Zone that Slothrop finds himself in after the war, where there is no powerful state to enforce a reterritorialization of capital. That the Zone was created in this way was, in Pynchon’s conception, the main motivation for the War, as commanded by a vague but cohesive elite — sometimes referenced as “They,” here referenced as “professionals.” Ideology is manufactured not as an all-encompassing social reality, but instead only as a cover for the real movements, the movement towards decoded flows. Violence is encouraged by a conscious elite to feed the lie of history, which is used as a vehicle for ideology to interpellate the young. Contrary to many forms of Marxist thought (as in the thinking of Althusser), Ideology does not here control history, rather it only masks the true forces at work. Ideology is just a front for the powerful flows of capital, it is like the empty pizza restaurant on expensive real-estate that covers over a vast, nefarious black market. But even that black market is ‘carefully styled;’ everything for Pynchon is controlled by unseen but conscious forces — even decoded flows, which in a Schizoanalytic conception would necessarily defy control in the form of overcoding, are controlled by a central consciousness.
Deleuze and Guattari would view this intelligent design of capitalist flows as an impossibility; a decoded flow is not subject to political manipulations, which amount to a code. Here is an important point where the two texts diverge. Gravity’s Rainbow creates a fictional world that defies the logic of capitalism according to Deleuze and Guattari. And yet, in doing so, Pynchon reflects an important social reality. Although flows of capital are decoded, and thus inherently beyond the social code of morality, they often act upon human beings in a hugely destructive and oppressive way. The deterritorialized flows of capital accumulate in so few hands that it seems to the majority of the society that the economic elite does code and control capital for their own malevolent ends — and, indeed, many of them do their best to do just that, but they are driven to do so by amoral capital itself, not the inverse. Deleuze and Guattari say, “there is not a single economic or financial operation that, assuming it is translated in terms of a code, would not lay bare its own unavowable nature, that is, its intrinsic perversion or essential cynicism” (Anti-Oedipus 247). Capitalism produces cynicism exactly because the flows are uncoded; the machines of capitalism at their base care nothing for any sort of human emotion or morality, only about the completely neutral flow of raw capital. It is this cynicism that Pynchon reflects when he talks about social and economic control by centralized, conscious power. That power is so omniscient that it controls both coded and decoded flows, but as this passage illustrates, it seeks to push flows towards decoding; it seeks out free markets, not overcoding or domination like the political powers we are used to. It is the personified spirit of capital. And through this technique, it is the essential perversion of capital that Pynchon seeks to reflect. And to do so, he makes an inversion that is practically impossible by our own constructed theoretical construct. We must remember that Pynchon writes fiction. Indeed, it is exactly this cynical ability to expose the bare flows that makes Pynchon a powerful and humorous writer.
Although the War (and by extension, the Zone) was created by capital, the War has temporarily knocked the economy of the Zone straight out of the realm of modern capitalism, and the internal systems of the Zone itself has primarily regressed back into the primitive and despotic systems. Indeed, Schnorp — a minor character who ferries Slothrop into Berlin via balloon — tells Slothrop, “This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We’re back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-market” (336). This is just what the consciousness of capital that designed the war has planned; to open a new economy that is not regulated by states, but rather is capitalism in its more pure, earliest form. Capital necessarily expands into new markets, and so by creating the Zone, the war has created an entirely virgin (decoded) market for capital. Thus, after the war has performed its production upon the Zone, capitalism becomes a force that is imposed upon the zone from the outside; Schnorp, Säure the drug dealer, and all other entrepreneurs must begin by importing capital into the Zone.
This pure, empty market is the wet-dream of the capitalist, and it is this desire that drives the tremendous impulse toward “free trade” in today’s political economy — this is why we have the TPP, NAFTA, TiPP, etc.
Part II will take us into the depths of paranoia
