engleski

Thomas Pynchon: Military-Industrial Speed-Space and Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead

The enormous speed-up in the existential rhythm of individuals as well as societies over the last four decades has forced large numbers of people to live in an economic, technological and social culture alien to them because they are unable to keep up with its pace of change, faced with, as Alvin Toffler argues: “future shock [which] is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society” (Toffler 1970:13). This article deals with the culture of speed detected within Thomas Pynchon's novels, tracing the military- industrial “speed-space” and urban America, the dominating powers of the western world. The military-industrial complex and acceleration of temporality are the core of the postmodern society according to Virilio, with time moving so fast that he calls it “speed, ” featuring technology in its center, whose forces reshape our world, coordinating the transformations implemented by electronic communications, long- range atomic weapons systems, cybernetics, media such as television, film, newspapers, and so on. What we call the “culture of information” has brought about a gradual but unceasing fragmentation of individual consciousness, weakening the role of the subject as the coordinating agent of time and space, the obvious result being the loss of historical consciousness, but also inability to distinguish the real from the fictive. The speed of the sophisticated weaponry is so accelerated that the response time is now so short, the decisions seem left to a computer. The hyperspeed of these decisions makes humans seem impotent, which is elaborated within Pynchon's opus, depriving characters/us of the time necessary for reflection. Facing nuclear deterrence on a daily basis, it seems that the inanimate has taken over the role of the animate, as computers “decide” whether to fire, while humans/characters have a sense of imprisonment, are full of resignation and let themselves be controlled and directed by the incomprehensible forces of corporations and bureaucracies that seem to govern this particular space-time. The cradle of this military-industrial complex is America—the most powerful of all nations/conglomerates, promoting a certain way of life and culture— with urban America as a side-effect, mirroring de-centered cities, scattered businesses of industrial subsidiaries, repetitious housing, and national diversity that merges and therefore becomes more uniform with time.

Thomas Pynchon ; speed-space ; Paul Virilio ; military-industrial complex

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