May 5, 2023, a.p. bookstore/Callie’s, Berlin
Technologies installed in the most secret realms of the self, a war that doesn’t end so much as mutate into a set of socio-industrial projects, conspiracies nested in conspiracies, a culture which is both a playground for human desire and an abject ruin — not a summary of the last five years’ news, but a snapshot of the content of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow.
Organised by David Musgrave and John Douglas Millar, The Exploded Map was a celebration of the novel’s 50th year, and comprised of screenings and discussions around art, technology, politics, fiction, truth, and the future.
The Exploded Map
1. Too much
Gravity’s Rainbow is too much. There are too many characters, too many incidents, too many narrative strands, too many words. It’s too disgusting (to win the Pulitzer Prize), too male, too confusing, too complex, too depressing.
It reaches into, and pulls material out of, its characters in ways that are bizarrely excessive, even by the psychically invasive standards of the novel. Tyrone Slothrop’s subjectivity is an industrial byproduct of his infant conditioning on the erectile plastic Imipolex G. Pirate Prentice is required to loan his capacity for fantasy, his private mind, for the benefit of more politically significant others. Captain Blicero, whose baroque, eroto-sadistic designs require a specially adapted V2, has gone the other way, and his psyche has spilled out into the world, become the horizon of the rocket-haunted, abject real. The Schwartzgerät, the black equipment, that Slothrop and others obsessively track turns out to be a plastic fairing which will house his paramour Gottfried within a modified V2. Blicero has turned the world into his own ‘sadistic map’, and taken others with him, leaving ‘a tarry kind of waste’ in the dead space beyond.
The entire civilisation the book evokes is too much, an overbearing, perverted force that pushes the toxic, extractive, oil-powered agenda of a typographically and economically capitalised They deep into individual subjectivity.
2. Too little
But from another perspective there is something astonishingly simple about Gravity’s Rainbow. There is a distinct, diagrammatic common denominator, something which is not particularly cryptic, and which at least three of Pynchon’s longer novels share. Whatever else slips under the radar, the title foregrounds the basic arc of the V2, or any projectile — a parabola describes mathematically, y = x2, its failed escape from Earth’s pull. This shape could almost serve as the title, only the words ‘Gravity’ and ‘Rainbow’ complicate the equation, knot it into the wild landscape of natural language. This shape is a near inversion of the letter V, the title of Pynchon’s first book, published in 1963. Mason and Dixon is Pynchon’s 1997 novel about the surveyors who drew the official line that divides Pennsylvania and Maryland, north and south, and guess what? It’s a flipped L-shape which, if you rotate it about 180 degrees, gives an asymmetrical V. If you combine them all it’s possible to see them all as straight, or virtually straight, lines inflected in some intuitively, if not actually, simple way.
This would just be a cute observation if these forms were trivial in relation to the works they title. But they’re not — they’re absolutely central. V refers to a historically mobile, problematically female character, and functions as a continually redirected sign that points to nothing. The Mason-Dixon line is the virtual structure that links the episodes of the novel of almost that name literally and thematically, and separates the US ideologically into North and South. At the very end it becomes by implication an image of a fishing rod cast into the vastness of America — ‘We can fish there,’ the last line reads, ‘You too.’ They all embody something thematically compelling in Pynchon’s work, and Gravity’s Rainbow in particular — the siren-like appeal, the ambiguous valency, of reductive abstraction.
Many commentators dispute the more general importance of the parabola in Gravity’s Rainbow, but let’s entertain it first. The path of the V2s that fall on London from their launch site in Peenemunde are only the start. On a domestic scale, the bananas grown and consumed on the rooftop of the Army digs in Chelsea of the opening chapter are rocket-shaped from the front, a little like stretched parabolas in lateral view. More globally, incidents seen on the way ‘up’ reappear on the way back ‘down’ in near symmetries — inverted, reversed, decayed.
At the broadest structural scale, Slothrop’s paranoia peaks in a post-war Berlin hacked up by the Allies into the speculative Zone, when he is most conscious of his exploitation by the father who sold him for psychological research, by the burgeoning military-industrial complex, by various even shadier socio-political interests whose forms he and we can never quite grasp — all the motivations and compulsions that have propelled him there in the first place. But this ratcheted-up anxiety subsequently begins to wane. Slightly beyond halfway, after the fuel of his paranoia is exhausted and he hits his own Brennschluss, he doesn’t care about these narratives of control anymore, almost misses the support they offer, and achieves a sort of freedom in his freefall. At final appearance Slothrop ceases to be an integral being at all — the most consistent and clearly drawn character of the book becomes a rumour, a distributed personality fragmented into many other of the Zone’s occupants, as though the outer casing of his conditioning has ruptured, and he’s disintegrated on descent.
Maybe I’m forcing that reading onto Slothrop. But I think the novel wants me to. I’ve identified more near-symmetries than it would be interesting to list, but one of my favourites is the reappearance of octopus Grigori in the novel’s final section. We know Grigori has been trained at a government institute, the White Visitation, to respond to the double or triple agent Katje at the start, but she only gets to see the films of his conditioning as she wanders the dismantled, post-War vacated version of that place at the close. What’s important to note is that via this and countless other self-mapping details, the book tempts us to perceive it as massively parabolic experience. The siren call is sometimes subtle, sometimes insistent.
Stephen C Wiesenberger, author of the hugely useful A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, takes issue with those who identify the whole structure as parabolic, and claims instead that it is a circle, or mandala. He cites an embedded structure of Christian calendrical events — an elegant, coherent observation which grows out of his forensic examination of the book’s dates. He’s not alone in rejecting the importance of the parabola as a structure, and to some extent I agree. Perhaps it’s something of a red herring (after all, its original title, Mindless Pleasures, has nothing to do with them).
But if we’re to treat Gravity’s Rainbow, and indeed any novel, strictly as a shaped, engineered structure, it’s neither a circle nor a parabola — it’s a line. In my most-read edition, one roughly 3.4km long and 2mm high. All novels are very long strings of signs and spaces somewhat arbitrarily broken into blocks. Sometimes other artefacts like diagrams or photographs are sequenced in too, but this line is a normative feature. Any higher-level structure is an effect of the author’s coding and reader’s decoding of those signs. To say that one decoding is the ‘right’ one in Gravity’s Rainbow is to ignore both this low-level structure, common to all novels and functionally almost invisible, and also an even higher order structure, special to Gravity’s Rainbow.
3. Generative burr
Lines are essentially bodiless abstractions, and life is made of solid, surprising flesh. A parabola is a neat, correct depiction of the path of a projectile in the abstract. By contrast, the temperature of a V2 following this curve in the real conditions of the atmosphere and at very high speed — when air, for example, begins to behave like a liquid — is the kind of calculation necessary to make it actually work. That calculation produces a complex, entirely non-intuitive squiggle when plotted as a graph. This reminds us that all of our culture’s materials in the end come out of and (with scant exceptions) return to the air-veiled Earth, which has no interest in neat diagrams or maths.
In Gravity’s Rainbow the relationship between abstraction and the concrete, material and social real is critical and generative. It certainly isn’t a rejection of mathematics or the analytical — it’s more than half in love those reductions. The writing frequently finds a sensuous moment in mathematical and technical explanations, and maps the fuzziness, the preterite warmth, and the distant sense of the wholeness of the Earth, back onto those abstractions. We learn that Lyle Bland, who is Slothrop’s uncle and an extractive capitalist complicit in the infant Slothrop’s sale to the psychologist Laszlo Jamf, undergoes a startling conversion to a Masonic and Kabbalistic worldview. He drifts away from the ideology that has determined his place in the social world, and succumbs to a mystical interpretation of the synthetic materials so important to the novel and the 20th century. For him, disposable items of consumer junk, plastic goods, are the lowest shadows of this mystical reality, synthesised from the rainbow of chemicals latent in the Earth’s substance. The V2 is a sort of apotheosis of the relationship — the ultimate construction of ‘coal-tar Kabbalists’, the most spectacular symbol of synthetic, extractive logic.
Another side effect of this fleshing of abstraction is that Gravity’s Rainbow displays an unusal empathy with inanimate things. Products, the industrial children of the cold logic of demand, supply, cost and profit, warrant long lyrical passages, such as a sequence early on devoted the material reincarnation of toothpaste tubes as weaponry, releasing ‘phantoms of peppermint’ on their journey. Much later, Byron the immortal lightbulb subverts the aims of the historically actual international cabal of manufacturers, the Pheobus Cartel, who strategically shortened bulb life in the name of profit. Byron outlives his allotted time and attracts the attention of the cartel’s investigators, meanwhile marvellously illuminating Everything and attaining a seer-like status amongst his lightbulb peers. But he is also inert and powerless. He resembles Kafka’s peripheral and eternal Odradek, only instead of being passively swept around a house in Prague, Byron is slotted into the total grid of industrial power and culture — the landscape of his impotence is vast. Perhaps Pynchon’s bulb is a skewed self-portrait, the essential figure of the artist-writer. The name is something of a clue.
The diagram, the calculation, the vector, the parabola are never complete accounts of the real. They stand instead for an ideal, a proof, a useful or brutal shortcut. In Gravity’s Rainbow the parabola is an ekphrastic referent, a container for the project of civilisation so far, one which in 1945 has not yet turned into a line of flight out from the gravity of Earth. Under this technical rainbow, inside the parabola, is the secular, human earth of our extractive, industrial world order. Outside is mystery, God, nature, the universe. We are allowed the odd peek of some reassertion of the natural over the forced, symbolic and synthetic — would-be nature-witch Geli Tripping senses the effort involved in humankind ‘holding down the green uprising’, being ‘only nearly as strong.’
For the preterite, for us, the unchosen of the global technical order, there is no mystical transcendence or spiritual return of nature. The acid abstraction, with elegant or brutal success, rules.
4. The new ‘They’
During an early chapter we witness a séance undertaken by the group known as PISCES — it’s an acronym, Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender. ‘Whose surrender,’ we are told, ‘is not made clear.’ This occultist activity is nested controversially in the general scientific workings of the White Visitation. Milton Gloaming is performing a statistical analysis of the word use of those on the other side, and the most commonly used word, he informs Jessica Swanlake, surprised that she should even need to ask, is ‘death’. This scene plays out a split in the history of the study of the mind. Freud’s insights into the unconscious have had the deeper impact on the arts — psychoanalysis is a narrative science, based on a holistic understanding of individual psychic development, even if each psyche is patterned and stratified in non-unique ways.
For psychologists who want the footing of hard science, who want to do things with psychology, this allusive, narrative approach is not enough. Something else grows in parallel to psychoanalysis, a psychology that rejects Freudianism, even before the fact, as so much unscientific storytelling. Pavlov, Raymond Cattell (who developed personality factor analysis), B.F. Skinner and their descendants have a different programme. Quantitative psychology involves the analysis of large sets of responses to create structures of reference, such as the OCEAN personality index used by Cambridge Analytica to collate personality profiles, or useable tools, like Skinner’s schedules of reinforcement. This, not therapy focussed on the individual, is the driver of social media technologies, and, some would reasonably argue, creates the scaffolding of our social and political world. The aim of a quantitative psychology is to make responses classifiable, predictable, manipulable — in the case of social media, for the benefit of corporations who profit from knowing how consumers will respond to their products.
The 1945 of Gravity’s Rainbow is already steeped in this sort of psychic accounting. We’re given Slothrop’s classification within the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index, he’s a ‘calm imperturbable’, an interesting label for a character whose key actions generally stem from paranoia. And always behind the horizon, the primal Jamf/Imipolex G experiment brackets everything, even if we never see the data. Slothrop’s whole social existence is predicated on an abstraction, a control vector, the calculated and measured stimulus-response dyad that’s always beyond his horizon (he never learns that he’s also being used to research racial containment strategies for the US government). Gravity’s Rainbow is highly unusual in taking this branch of psychology as a muse.
It’s also prescient. What seems paranoid in Gravity’s Rainbow is just business today. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon aggregate our responses to their stimuli, and either directly exploit or sell them to those who can profit from the information. Shoshana Zuboff can give you all the sorry details in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. ‘Paranoia’ means, literally, ‘outside mind’; our mental responses to online experiences now exist in datasets on servers, a ‘shadow text’ we have no access to. We are, it seems, set up to be Their minutely responsive dogs, to borrow Jaron Lanier’s implicitly Pavlovian analogy. It’s as though it’s the White Visitation’s lead behavioural scientist Ned Pointsman, not his ultimately uncontrollable subject Slothrop, whose personality has fragmented, producing the countless sub- or para-Pointsmans of our current techno-global Zone.
It's one of the few dated aspects of Gravity’s Rainbow that another of the Firm’s employees, Roger Mexico, the probabilist thinker of the inbetween, is cast in opposition to Pointsman’s stimulus-response determinism, and winds up aligned with the Counterforce, the resistance to his original masters, to They. Mexico’s inbetween fuzziness that breaks Pointsman’s worldview has, however, been happily co-opted by the current incarnation of They. Algorithms used for your Instagram feed don’t have to work on you specifically, in a strict stimulus-response way, because they work at scale. You might be invulnerable to some or all of its nudges, you might never buy that Motorhead t-shirt or gravitate to influencer X, but statistically enough people will that you have no choice but to live in their world. Probability creates its own determinism in the end. And it’s always for sale.
Another of Pointsman’s working limitations is that Slothrop doesn’t navigate the Zone with a mobile phone in his pocket, a smartwatch on his wrist or a laptop at a makeshift desk, thus betraying his body, his thoughts and his desires a thousand times a day through their operation. He’s just not visible enough. It’s to the great benefit of all the derived, conceptually corrected Pointsmans of the current global order that this problem has been overcome. Almost everyone, almost everywhere, for the bare reward of admittance to social reality, tacitly consents to be tracked. When you walk into a shop, facial recognition software drops you seamlessly into an unknown database; a kitten video converts you to a string of code on a hard drive near the Arctic Circle. We have to work unreasonably to avoid becoming anonymous characters in a paranoid control fantasy, to resist being reduced to fragments of Their exploded map.
David Musgrave, May 2023