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

  

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 madness it seems has become a bureaucratic appointment. The revolutionary who once attempted to escape the State must now perform his eccentricity for it, and the television audience which consumes his dissonance has become the condition for its official recognition. Nietzsche might have appreciated the irony of a man forced to repeat his own madness every year, except that Zoyd's eternal return has acquired a government department.

The novel follows Zoyd and his daughter Prairie through the remains of the American counterculture, whose great revolutionary eruption during the sixties has since become entangled in a bewildering number of organisations, secret arrangements, informants, government agents and even stranger associations whose precise political character remains unclear. Prairie is searching for her mother Frenesi Gates, a revolutionary filmmaker who belonged to the collective 24fps. Frenesi had filmed the rebellions surrounding the College of the Surf, an institution which its students discovered was really an elaborate property development scheme. The students declared an independent republic, the People's Republic of Rock and Roll, while the revolutionary filmmakers attempted to produce an alternative visual record of history. Yet even here, in the midst of this extraordinary experiment in collective expression, the revolution was being watched by its own members. Frenesi becomes involved with Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor whose attraction for her gradually becomes inseperable from the coercive power he exercises over the movement.

                                                         

One of the most revealing scenes occurs when Prairie watches the old films made by her mother. The images show the violent suppression of the student movement, soldiers, police, demonstrations and the increasing militarisation of ordinary American life. The camera sometimes trembles, and Prairie begins to recognise in its movements the presence of her mother's body. She can almost inhabit Frenesi's gaze, become for a moment the woman whose life she has spent trying to reconstruct. But the camera also reveals Brock Vond. In an earlier encounter Frenesi had filmed him walking through a courthouse, gradually zooming in upon the prosecutor until the very act of witnessing became a peculiar erotic fascination. The apparatus that was supposed to expose political domination had begun to produce an intimacy with its representative. Here we find something closer to our Simulacra 1, the camera which carries an extraordinary intensity across different bodies and permits Prairie to inhabit a time she never lived. Yet the same camera becomes the instrument through which Frenesi is captured by the power she intends to expose. A Simulacra 2 begins to form, where the open field of revolutionary images is reorganised around a single fascinating figure of authority.

The brilliance of this episode is that Pynchon refuses to distribute the characters into the comforting categories of the good revolutionary and the bad policeman. Frenesi is not simply revealed as an informer whose original principles were secretly false. 

She is herself divided, attracted to the very apparatus which is destroying the collectivity from which her desire had emerged. 

Brock meanwhile is hardly the unified representative of state rationality. His conduct is obsessive, sexual, erratic, frequently ridiculous. The secret networks of the state and the revolutionary underground resemble one another in their movements, their furtive meetings, their hidden loyalties, and the extraordinary pleasure each derives from knowing something that ordinary citizens do not. The revolution has its own secrets and the state its own underground. One begins to wonder whether a secret Society is a particular institution at all, or a form of relation which may be occupied by the most contradictory political forces.

This ambiguity survives even the conclusion of Vineland. Brock descends from a helicopter towards Prairie, claiming to be her real father and intending to abduct her. Prairie replies with a magnificent insult: "my blood is type A. Yours is Preparation H." Brock is subsequently recalled by the government, and eventually finds himself travelling through what appears to be the land of the dead. The family gathers together, the old revolutionaries survive, there is laughter and reunion. Surely now the novel should end with the victory of the revolutionary household? 

Yet Pynchon refuses this satisfaction. In the final pages Prairie returns to the clearing where Brock had appeared and, trembling with an attraction she herself cannot explain, invites him to return. She has escaped him, and yet some part of her continues to desire his presence. There is no triumphal destruction of the authoritarian image. The revolutionary subject remains vulnerable to its fascination. The birth of a new generation has not exorcised the desires of the old one. What remains is precisely the dissonance between a subject's political possibilities and the powers through which that subject can be seduced into becoming something else.

                                                                                   -x-

Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another transforms this problem into a rather different cinematic arrangement. Here the revolutionaries belong to the French 75, an underground organisation which attacks immigration detention facilities, banks and other institutions associated with state repression. The film opens with the spectacular liberation of detainees, and the revolutionaries appear as an almost erotic collectivity, bodies in constant movement, guns, explosions, laughter and the possibility of creating a world outside the existing political order. Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor, is the most extraordinary figure in this collectivity, an explosive revolutionary whose desire for political transformation is inseperable from her delight in violence. Her relationship with Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, eventually produces their daughter Willa, although the film later reveals that Willa's biological father is Colonel Steven Lockjaw, the military officer whose obsessive attraction to Perfidia belongs to the same terrifying mixture of sexuality and political domination that characterised Brock Vond.

Lockjaw's world is organised around the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret association of white supremacist elites whose members appear to inhabit an America located somewhere behind the visible institutions of government. Its meetings and rituals are both comical and deeply sinister. One is reminded of those secret male cults whose fantastic claims to possess an inaccessible knowledge of history are substantiated by little more than the extraordinary importance their members attach to themselves.

 Lockjaw wishes to be admitted into this Society, although his relationship with Perfidia and the existence of his mixed-race daughter threaten the racial credentials upon which his membership depends. The defender of racial purity has found himself entangled in precisely the relationship his ideology excludes. He must eliminate the evidence of his own desire in order to become the pure subject that the society demands. Here the Black Hole of identification acquires an almost perfect form. The more elaborate his submission to the racial ideal, the more violently he must destroy those parts of his own life which contradict it.

The Christmas Adventurers are never fully exposed as a transparent organisation whose hierarchy and operations can be neatly accounted for. 

Their power circulates through military institutions, private arrangements, hired killers and rituals of membership. What is striking is the extraordinary banality of their final treatment of Lockjaw. 

Having survived the pursuit of the revolutionaries and the collapse of his own operation, he is admitted into the organisation, only to be quietly poisoned in an office. The man who imagined that membership would complete his existence discovers that the Society has no need for him. The organisation continues without its most enthusiastic applicant. There is something wonderfully ridiculous in a cult whose greatest accomplishment is to transform a deranged military officer into disposable office equipment.

And yet Anderson's film makes a decisive departure from Pynchon in the treatment of the revolutionary family. During the extraordinary final chase across the undulating desert highways, Willa is pursued by one of the society's assassins. She uses an old revolutionary password to distinguish friend from enemy, and when the pursuing man cannot answer she shoots him. Bob eventually arrives, and Willa turns her gun upon the man who has raised her. She demands the password and finally asks, "Who are you?" The answer is the culmination of the film's political drama. Bob identifies himself as her father, and the two embrace. 

The biological connection to Lockjaw has been displaced by an ethical and affective relation which survives the collapse of revolutionary organisation. At the end Willa prepares to join another protest, now carrying something of her mother's revolutionary inheritance, while Bob returns to the difficult ordinariness of being a father.

The film therefore preserves the opacity of the secret society while giving the revolutionary family a much more determinate resolution. The State may continue, the clandestine right-wing networks may reproduce themselves, the revolutionary movement may have lost its first generation, but the daughter can inherit its unfinished project through a relationship of care. 

Where Prairie's last encounter with Brock leaves her caught in an unresolved attraction to authoritarian power, Willa is permitted to recognise and reject its claim upon her. 

One might describe this as the difference between a novel which leaves the subject exposed to the full ambiguity of its desires, and a film which allows the subject to recover a coherent political future. 

It would however be premature to call this an absolute liberation. Willa too has learned to survive by killing, reproducing in a different register the revolutionary violence of her mother. What has been resolved narratively remains capable of becoming another problem in the life that follows. The name of the movie after all promises one battle after another, and the very Simualcrum of revolutionary continuity may itself become another means through which a new identity is secured.

There is another particularly interesting reversal here. 

In Vineland, the extraordinary networks of kinship, sex, betrayal, political commitment and clandestine association cannot finally be reduced to the domestic family. Pynchon allows the family to survive while retaining all those relations which threaten its integrity. Anderson, on the other hand, appears to discover in the family a means of continuing the revolution after the collapse of its institutions. Yet his family is itself revolutionary precisely because it refuses biological determination. 

Bob is Willa's father through the repeated acts of protecting, raising and remembering her, while Lockjaw's claim to biological paternity produces only the terrifying absurdity of a man who wants his own daughter eliminated. 

We might recall Das here, and her argument that culture is born again through ordinary relations which continue after the spectacular destruction of a social world. The revolution returns through the father who remains, through the daughter who survives, through the letter that arrives too late. But this is also the point at which we should remain suspicious of the consolations of domesticity. The revolutionary family may preserve dissonance, or it may become the last acceptable Identity through which dissonance is once again enclosed.

                                                                -x-

                                                       

This brings us finally to Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2009), perhaps one of the most remarkable literary attempts to produce a world in which dissonance is no longer a contradiction awaiting resolution, but the very condition through which experience becomes possible. 

The novel follows Larry 'Doc' Sportello, a perpetually stoned private detective in Los Angeles around 1970, whose investigation begins when his former girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth appears unexpectedly at his home. She has become involved with the wealthy property developer Mickey Wolfmann and believes that a plot is being formed to have him committed to a psychiatric institution. Already the ordinary categories of detective fiction begin to dissolve. The victim is a millionaire property developer, whose empire depends upon the destruction of neighbourhoods, while his associates include white supremacist bikers, corrupt policemen and a peculiar collection of people whose social positions seem to change whenever Doc attempts to establish who they really are.

The most interesting of these transformations concerns the Golden Fang, an organisation whose name passes through the novel as though it were a rumour that had become the substance of the world. At first it appears to be a mysterious schooner, then a holding company, then a heroin cartel, then a network connecting dentists, property developers and intelligence operations. Every time Doc believes he has located its essential identity, another institution appears through which the name must be understood. It is as though the conspiracy possesses no final body of its own. It can become a ship, a business corporation, a criminal enterprise, a medical practice or an apparatus of political repression, without any of these forms exhausting the others. The detective is no longer discovering the single criminal hidden behind a series of clues. He is discovering an extraordinary capacity for one arrangement to pass into another. Even the fascist and the hippie are not always safely separated, for the same economic and institutional relations can pass through both of their worlds.

One of the most striking episodes occurs when Doc encounters Sparky, a young computer enthusiast working with an early electronic network. Sparky describes a future in which information about people will become increasingly recoverable and permanent. The network will make escape itself difficult, and eventually everybody might find themselves under surveillance. "It's all data. Ones and zeros. All recoverable. Eternally present." Here the emerging machinery of information threatens to convert every experience into an identifiable and reproducible position. The strange freedom of the fugitive, the person who changes names, disappears, invents another life or simply becomes unrecognisable to the people who once knew him, is threatened by an apparatus which remembers everything. It is perhaps the most perfect description of Simulacra 2, the capture of a world of innumerable possible transformations within a system where every transformation must ultimately be attached to a recoverable identity.

Yet the novel ends with one of Pynchon's most beautiful descriptions of a quite different kind of collectivity. Doc is driving along the Los Angeles freeway when a thick fog descends across the road. The signs disappear, the distance between vehicles becomes impossible to judge, and even the ordinary dimensions of space begin to lose their certainty. The cars gradually form a line, each driver following the taillights of the vehicle ahead. Nobody knows the others, nobody has organised the procession, and nobody possesses a complete view of the road. 

Pynchon describes the improvised arrangement as "a caravan in a desert of perception."  A temporary community has emerged from the suspension of the very co-ordinates through which ordinary movement is organised. 

\There is no revolutionary Party, no secret council, no heroic leader and no need to establish the identity of the person in the next vehicle. Each driver continues only because another unknown person maintains the relation before him. As the road branches some vehicles disappear into the fog, others enter the procession, and Doc imagines the possibility of continuing indefinitely towards a world where even the distinctions between national identities might dissolve.

This is perhaps the most compelling image of Simulacra 1 in the three works. What constitutes the collectivity is its capacity to sustain a relation without finally identifying the persons who occupy it. The drivers are not united by a common ideology, and their connection lasts only as long as the fog and the need to cross it together. Yet something has occured which cannot be reduced to the intentions of any one participant. 

A temporary territory has been produced, a relation which permits movement where individual perception has become insufficient. It is also a fragile territory. A driver may lose the taillights ahead, the fog may thicken, the road may suddenly end, or somebody may mistake an approaching vehicle for a safe continuation. There is no guarantee that the collectivity will survive its own movement.

Perhaps this is where the birth of culture must finally be located, in the extraordinary dissonance through which a person encounters the limits of the identity already assigned to him, and finds in that encounter the possibility of another relation. But dissonance is neither a moral virtue nor a revolutionary destination. It can be cultivated into an increasingly elaborate system of prohibitions and identifications, just as it can become the occasion for a collective experiment whose participants do not yet know what they might become. The emergence of fascism therefore cannot be understood simply as the absence of revolutionary desire. It is one of the ways in which desire itself may be organised, when the intolerable movement of dissonance is captured by the promise of a final and absolute identity.

The task then is to maintain dissonance as a burgeoning Territory, a provisional ground from which one might suddenly explode into another way of living, speaking and relating, without mistaking the territory for a final homeland. It must be sufficiently consistant to permit departure, and sufficiently open to survive the transformations which departure produces. 

Dissonance can only be built from extimate sociality, as I have been pointing out right through this blog series.

We cannot always hope to build revolutionaries communes, revolutionary society must give way to the ephemeral commune, to forms of sociality that are not always long term. 

Capital feeds on long term emotional investments. It is baffled by extimacy. Dissonance is a practice of extimacy. Dissonance as I have already shown in the case of Antigone is produced through a non-linear relation to the self. And as such the so called philosophical opponents in the moderns and the post-moderns there is agreement on this fact. It is only the philosophy of the ordinary that really clings to fascistic impulses. It is when we say 'this is normal' that we have really given up, and some parts of us remain like this fixed, permanently and undead, purely involuntary. Hegel retains in himself the Spinozist impulse, to always push oneself to the point that one 'does not know what a body can do', to never territorialize our cosmology and ontological view of life. 

For there is always the possibility of another return, another relation, another unexpected configuration of the real. And there is always, equally, the danger that this movement will fold upon itself, that every new intensity will be made to signify the same thing, until the entire world of possible relations collapses into the black hole of an Identity from which nothing can escape.

Nothing is decided because we feel good about it. Morality is what died with modernity, and we must come to the point where we move past this loss.