The Fascist Playbook IX: Dissonance or what 'One Battle After Another' Misses that Pynchon gets

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    There is perhaps a strange similarity between Antigone and the fate of the revolutionaries in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), a novel which recently acquired a second life through Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Both works are concerned with the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing a revolutionary subject from the conditions through which he or she becomes its opposite.  Vineland begins in California in 1984, where a certain Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, must perform an annual act of public insanity in order to continue receiving disability benefits. This year he has decided to wear a woman's dress and attack a bar with a chainsaw, a performance which must be witnessed by television cameras if he is to continue being recognised by the welfare state as a lunatic. Unfortunately, the bar has been gentrified, the loggers have developed expensive tastes and his entire performance has been moved by somebody else to another location. Even ...
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Foucault on Matter Out of Place

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 'that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately, in the lawless and uncharted dimension of the heteroclite; and that word should be taken in its most literal etymological sense; in such a state, things are "laid," "placed," "arranged" in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them all. Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and ,not only the syntax wit which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to but also opposite one another) to "hang together." This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: They run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias ... dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of language at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences'. 

The Order of Things- Pg 48

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