9

‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’:

Schizoanalysis, Acceleration and
Contemporary American Literature

Benjamin Noys

The English comic writer and dandy Max Beerbohm once felt moved to express
his feelings towards psychoanalysis, or what he preferred to call the ‘new
pyschology’, to his friend S. N. Berhman:

‘What would they do to me?’. . . . ‘I adored my father and mother and I adored
my brothers and sisters. What kind of complex would they find me the victim of?
Oedipus and what else?’ He reflected a moment. ‘They were a tense and peculiar
family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?’ (in Cecil 1964: 480)

This amused insouciance might seem to be fatal to psychoanalysis, which tends

to find difficulty in being treated lightly. The ‘Oedipuses’ are comically reduced
to being one family among others, and a peculiar family at that. In reply the
psychoanalyst could note, no doubt to the extreme ire of Beerbohm, that the
‘tenseness’ and ‘peculiarity’ Beerbohm identifies in the Oedipuses might well be
signs of his own anxiety.
The history of literature since Freud has exemplified a relationship to
psychoanalysis that is at once intimate and antagonistic. Post-Freudian
literary writing is a veritable anti-psychoanalysis. It is no surprise then that in
constructing their project of schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari should turn
constantly to literature. This project, in Guattari’s words, aims to ‘sift . . . through
the remnants of psychoanalysis’ to find ‘new theoretical elaborations which
avoid, . . ., the reductiveness of Freudian and Lacanian formulations’ (1998: 433).
This elaboration is, however, conducted from inside psychoanalysis. Deleuze
and Guattari construct a war-machine that turns the remnants of psychoanalysis
against psychoanalysis. Ian Buchanan has pointed out that schizoanalysis is not
176 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

so much a dismissal as an attempt to ‘re-engineer psychoanalysis’ (2013: 9). This

re-engineering, contrary to the puzzlement and lightly worn disdain of Max
Beerbohm, turns on the necessity of ‘tension’.
When Deleuze and Guattari turn to writers they do not choose those writers
who have treated psychoanalysis with amused disdain, but to those who have
been closest to it, in the most agonized and tense forms: Kafka, Beckett, D. H.
Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and others. Gregg Lambert notes that Deleuze and
Guattari tend generally to choose ‘problematic writers’ (1998: 30): those who
are pessimistic, politically dubious, anguished and ‘unhealthy’, to change these
‘symptoms’ to new signs of joy, strength, and political possibility. The same is
true in regards to psychoanalysis. Those who display the most ‘exaggerated
Oedipus’, as Deleuze and Guattari refer to Kafka (1986: 9–15), are not the
most oedipal writers but the writers who offer, paradoxically, the best chance
to explode Oedipus from within. The ‘Oedipuses’ are not one family among
others, but the signature form by which capitalism tries to reterritorialize and
recode insurgent desires. In literature, therefore, re-engineering comes from an
intimacy that turns antagonistic, rupturing the oedipal structure by decoding
desire (Holland 1993).
There is, however, a certain slackening of this tension, as literary writers post-
Deleuze and Guattari turn to their work, or can be read in consonance with it.
This convergence suggests that Deleuze and Guattari’s project of schizoanalysis –
which is to ‘de-oedipalise the unconscious in order to reach the real problems’
(1983: 81) – finds itself enacted in literature. This convergence does not simply
either confirm the superiority of schizoanalysis to psychoanalysis, nor does it
simply dissolve any tensions. Instead we find a new tension. Where once Deleuze
and Guattari turned to writers to force a path out of psychoanalysis, or a traversal
to a ‘de-oedipalised’ unconscious, now writers turn to Deleuze and Guattari in
agreement. We now encounter an explicitly ‘de-oedipalised’ literature that has
learnt the lesson of schizoanalysis.

Accelerate the process

The convergence between the work on literature of Deleuze and Guattari, and
Deleuze, and literary writers has not gone unnoticed. Peter Hallward, in his book
Absolutely Postcolonial (2001), has traced how several postcolonial writers – Édouard
Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib, and Severo Sarduy – elaborate, to
 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 177

varying degrees and with varying degrees of awareness, a Deleuzian writing. This is,
according to Hallward, a writing of the singular (2001: 3), which returns everything
to immanence and deterritorialization in order to undo the binaries and boundaries
of colonial and capitalist power. Hallward disputes this convergence, arguing that
the dissolution of territories into a singular space of writing leads to inadvertent
collusion with the colonial project by dissolving antagonism and struggle (Hallward
2001: 1–4; cf. Hallward 2006). In a similar fashion, Jordana Rosenberg (2014; cf.
Noys 2008) has critiqued the turn to ‘molecular sexuality’ in Queer theory, which
she traces to an uncritical embrace of the speculative tendencies of contemporary
capitalism. Rosenberg retains more sympathy for Deleuze and Guattari, with their
emphasis on the social, compared to the ‘naturalisation’ of sexuality embedded
into non-human processes of molecular change celebrated by certain forms of
queer theory. Finally, we could note how Fredric Jameson’s attempts to critique
and engage with the stasis of our epoch of financialization have consistently
turned to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptuality to probe disruptive and productive
capacities (Noys 2014a). This explicitly includes a critical reengagement of literary
writers – including Wyndham Lewis (Jameson 2008), Bertolt Brecht (Jameson
1998), and Andrei Platonov (Jameson 1994) – with the libidinal economy of
Deleuze and Guattari, to re-energize the present moment.
These critical accounts all draw attention to the problematic fact that while
the work of Deleuze and Guattari, especially their account of deterritorialization,
appears to capture something of the truth of capitalism as an axiomatic
machine, this convergence can also collapse into ideological justification. Many
contemporary criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari turn on the argument that
deterritorialization and lines of flight do not indicate a means of escape, but
reinforce and replicate the tendencies of capitalism (Badiou 2000; Žižek 2004;
Hallward 2006). For these critics the schizoanalytic de-oedipalized body
without organs is not the explosion of capitalist society, but the symptomatic
form of contemporary post-oedipal ‘societies of enjoyment’ (McGowan 2004).1
This problem can be traced along one particular vector of Deleuze and
Guattari’s work: acceleration. Eugene W. Holland (1993) has stressed how
literature can engage in a disruptive decoding that pushes capital’s own decoding
to the point of collapse. He has also recently insisted that the politics of Deleuze
and Guattari can be found in ‘free-market communism’: the freeing-up of the
forces of the market that can, it is claimed, disrupt the reterritorializing forces
of capital (Holland 2011). This modelling of acceleration is found in Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), with the well-known claim that the need
178 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

might be to ‘go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding
and deterritorialisation’ and that we need ‘[n]ot to withdraw from the process,
but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche put it’ (1983: 239–40).
Acceleration moves along the lines of capital to develop an explosion point of a
line of flight that can punch through capitalism.
I have characterized and contested this modelling of revolutionary practice as
‘accelerationism’ (Noys 2010: 4–9; cf. Noys 2014b). The obvious difficulty, which
became evident to Deleuze and Guattari, was that encouraging acceleration
along the vectors of deterritorialization could both coincide with capitalism
and become outpaced by capitalism. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze
and Guattari rescind or question the desire for acceleration, arguing that the
dismantling of the ego should not be carried out with a sledgehammer but with
‘a very fine file’ (1988: 160). The drive to acceleration as solution is modulated,
if not ruled completely out of hand. This equivocal modulation is also visible
in What Is Philosophy? (1991). Deleuze and Guattari insist that the plane of
immanence is constituted through a practice that is irreducible to philosophy.
This practice requires speed, however, as ‘as long as consciousness traverses the
transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused, nothing is able
to reveal it’ (1994: 26). Here acceleration turns not so much on the forces of
capitalism, as on the force of thought itself. This infinite speed is self-referential,
a speed that refers to no world, but only to the possibilities of thought (Hallward
2006: 140–6).
This problem of acceleration can be probed in the convergence of schizo­
analysis with literature. If literature is in the process of becoming-Deleuzian,
then it confronts the same tension between critical analysis of contemporary
capitalism and reinforcement of the forms of contemporary capitalism. For
Deleuze the most fecund literature for thinking schizoanalysis, and his project
more generally, was Anglo-American writing. What he calls ‘the superiority of
Anglo-American Literature’ is predicated on a ‘line of flight’ that incarnates a
deterritorialization (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 36–76). The Anglo-American
moves at ‘breakneck speed’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 37), which always risks
reterritorialization and so the line of flight must be protected, passed on, to truly
accelerate. Deleuze carefully qualifies what this ‘acceleration’ might mean: we
can stay in place and stay on a line of flight, it must not be mistaken for simply
voyaging, and it does not lead out of this world.
These cautions do not immunize his project from the criticisms that have
been posed. Why turn to the language of acceleration at all if it runs the risk of
 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 179

collapsing back into capitalism? The persistence of speed, even with provisos
and cautions, indicates a continuing belief in some higher production, whether
that be tracked in capitalist deterritorialization, vital capacities, or the speed of
thought. It is this energizing effect that may account for the influence of Deleuze
and Guattari today. While running the risk of replicating capitalism or, better,
capitalism’s self-image of dynamic auto-production, the drive is to find a superior
force of production. This desire includes, obviously, the productive force of
writing. The literary writer seeks to shape or ride the line of flight through the
world so as to generate a newly productive world.
To write in the lineage of Deleuze and Guattari might even be said to constitute
the form of contemporary realism, especially if we consider the prevalence and
relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal descriptions of capitalism.
While experimental writers have been closest to Deleuze and Guattari, as we will
see, this experimental writing is the writing of the reality of the present moment,
taken in the delirious forms of capitalist abstraction. ‘Realism’, in this context,
has to become experimental to present and analyse these ‘abstract machines’:
the forces of repetition, desire, and flux, which constitute our experience. To
write the present is to write this moment of hypertrophy and, often, to try to
exceed it.
If Anglo-American literature was crucial for Deleuze, it is particularly
American literature that has displayed convergence with Deleuze, and Deleuze
and Guattari. There are a number of contemporary American writers who,
explicitly or implicitly, can be linked to the Deleuzian, or Deleuze and Guattari’s,
project. These include Kathy Acker, with her Empire of the Senseless (1988), David
Foster Wallace, especially Infinite Jest (1996), in which Deleuze is mentioned,
and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). The writing and creative-
writing teaching of Gordon Lish has deployed contemporary theory, including
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), in his development of an avant-garde
formal practice.2 This is the more austere Deleuze, who forges repetition as a
weapon against representation.
There are the more obvious and famous examples of explicit influence. These
include cyberpunk science fiction, most notably the work of Bruce Sterling and
William Gibson (who is Canadian, by adopted citizenship). In Gibson’s Idoru
(1996) the eponymous virtual pop-singer is described as a ‘desiring-machine’
(1997: 178), which are ‘aggregates of subjective desire’ (1997: 178; italics in
original). The virtual ‘persona’ is constituted through the forms of desire that
coagulate to form a ‘character’. Gibson’s novel concerns that attempt by the rock
180 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

singer Rez to ‘marry’ this virtual creation. This is achieved by the use of a nano-
assembler to create a physical form of the virtual environment of the Walled
City, which had been an enclave within cyberspace: ‘A thing of random human
accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from
its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy’ (Gibson 1997: 289). This
creation mediates the ‘marriage’, and Gibson’s fiction turns on these possibilities
of the embodiment of ‘subjective desire’ and ‘consensual fantasy’. The result is an
attempt to embody ‘desiring-production’.
The signature example of convergence is Thomas Pynchon. In Vineland (1990)
there is a notorious reference to ‘the indispensable Italian Wedding Fake Book,
by Deleuze & Guattari’ (1991: 97). A fake book is a collection of musical leads
to help a performer learn new songs quickly, and is required here by the punk
band Billy Barf and the Vomitones, who have been hired to play at what may be
a mafia wedding. While this may be a throwaway reference, and contains more
than a hint of sarcasm, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997) offers a more sustained
reflection. The boundary drawing by Mason and Dixon involves cartographic
reflection that explores the constitution of the United States as territorial ‘unity’,
and the need or desire for lines of flight (Mattessich 2002: 231–45). The irony,
however, is that Pynchon’s most schizoanalytic novel is one published before his
encounter with Deleuze and Guattari and, appropriately, only 1 year after Anti-
Oedipus (1972). This is, of course, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). It is this novel that
not only converges, in advance, with Deleuze and Guattari, but also converges
and explores the problem of acceleration.

In the zone

Gravity’s Rainbow, appropriately, defies rational summary, but concerns the

picaresque adventures of Tyrone Slothrop as he makes his way through World
War II. Unknown to Slothrop, the erections he achieves before the German V-2
rocket attacks, which allow these attacks to be tracked, are the result of childhood
Pavlovian conditioning to the plastic sheathing Imipolex G used in the weapon
(see Sharpe 2007). Slothrop pursues a quest to discover this fact, against
the various conspiracies that nest the novel, before ending his quest in the
‘zone’ – the fragmented and terrifying landscape of occupied Germany.
The novel, like the work of Deleuze and Guattari, is boundup with the
‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s (Deleuze 1985: 142). This discourse implies a war
 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 181

within the war between the forces of ‘control’ (Deleuze 1992) and various forms
of escape and resistance. In Pynchon’s novel the war itself is the conspiratorial
agent par excellence or, to be more precise, the use of the war by various systems
of control to accelerate technological development:

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to
keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs
of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war. (Pynchon 1975: 521)

In a thesis derived from Max Weber, the war is a driver for rationalization, which
develops ‘abstractions of power’ (Pynchon 1975: 81). This truth is recorded in
various forms in the novel by these systems of control. In a manual on file in the
US War Department, it is stated that the violence of war is a spectacle of distraction
for the masses, while ‘[t]he true war is a celebration of markets’ (Pynchon 1975:
105). The journal ‘Paranoid Systems of History (PSH), a short-lived periodical
of the 1920s whose plates have all mysteriously vanished, natch’, suggested that
German hyper-inflation was a stimulus ‘simply to drive young enthusiasts of the
Cybernetic Tradition into Control work’ (Pynchon 1975: 238).
How do we counter the malignant acceleration of control? The suggestion
in Pynchon’s novel, which is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion to
‘accelerate the process’, is that to counter acceleration at the service of control
we seem to need a superior acceleration. This is not simply the acceleration
of technology, but lies in an equivocal attempt to rupture and explode the
constraints of control. This is incarnated in Slothrop’s attempt to evade the
systems of control. One of his pondered solutions seems to coincide with what
Deleuze and Guattari call an ‘absolute decoding of flows’ (1983: 271):

It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back – maybe that
anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences
are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared,
depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates
from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality
to fuck it up. (Pynchon 1975: 556)

The word ‘preterite’ refers to a tract by Slothrop’s Puritan ancestor, which

distinguishes between the elect and preterite, with Slothrop identifying with the
preterite. Katherine Sharpe argues that the world of the preterite is the counter-
cultural world of resistance to the elect of control (2007: 39). In this moment
Slothrop envisages a utopian end to all divisions, including between resistance
182 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

and power (‘without elect, without preterite’), and entrance into an anarchic
space deterritorialized, or depolarized, of all binaries.
In the case of Slothrop this involves a disintegration of what Deleuze call the
‘sensory-motor schema’ (Deleuze 1989a: 40). Deleuze’s Cinema books trace how
this schema, which is organized by selection and coordination, breaks down
to the point that characters ‘find themselves condemned to wander about or
go off on a trip’ (Deleuze 1989a: 41). This is the fate of Slothrop. Deep in the
zone he starts to fragment and shatter under the shearing pressures of control
and resistance: ‘he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell–stripped.
Scattered all over the zone’ (Pynchon 1975: 712; italics in original). If ‘[Deleuze]
ruins any merely creaturely coherence’ (Hallward 2001: 14), then so does
Pynchon. The accelerative forces tear Slothrop apart, to the point that ‘Some
believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their
own. If so there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present population are offshoots
of his original scattering’ (Pynchon 1975: 742). If control operates, as Pynchon
and Deleuze and Guattari suppose, by imposing territorialization and the oedipal
grid, the line of flight involves an accelerated fragmentation to the point of the
‘body without organs’, in which the self is radically deterritorialized.
The difficulty is to imagine how such fragmentation can amount to resistance.
Is Slothrop’s disintegration the gate to an existence beyond control, or a
dispersion that lacks any capacity to make significant resistance? (Sharpe 2007:
40). The line of flight, which leaves Slothrop ‘oscillating in the cleft between this
world and nature’ (Pynchon 1975: 740), is only one brief and fleeting moment.
This ‘oscillation’ can only, it seems, be resolved into acceleration beyond such
binaries. The difficulty is then that the destabilization of Slothrop threatens a
collapse that cannot cohere on a line of flight. This would be a collapse, instead,
into what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a black hole’ (1988: 224). This terminus in
‘absolute decoding’ seems to leave no leverage on the present.
This problem, in which the fleeting moment of absolute decoding appears
only to quickly disappear, is also true of the zone itself. The ‘zone’ can only briefly
prefigure a depolarized space as a vanishing mediator, or even utopian moment,
between the end of the war and the reterritorialization of states in its aftermath.
The fences only went down for a brief moment, before being re-erected.3 This
is especially true of the post-war binary of the Cold War, in which nuclear and
cybernetic forces were channelled into the constitution of two mirrored blocs.
This is the time of Pynchon’s writing of the novel, which inhabits a retrospective
nostalgia for a depolarized moment now past. So, at the level of the individual
 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 183

and at the level of the collective, even if the individual becomes a collective (as
does Slothrop), acceleration seems to disappear or become exhausted. The result
is the reconstitution of a perpetual war between the forces of control and the
counterculture, which always ends in defeat for the counterculture.
We can pair Slothrop’s dispersive ‘solution’ with that of another character:
Gottfried, who is sealed into the final operational V-2 (numbered 00000), which
is fired at the end of the novel. If Slothrop is the figure of disintegration, then this
is the terminal scene of machinic integration. Gottfried has been the masochist
lover of the Nazi Captain Blicero. This relationship has involved a fantasy of
incestuous and masochistic sex between Gottfried and his pseudo-sister and
‘silent doubleganger’ Katje, orchestrated by Blicero (Pynchon 1975: 102). These
scenes include Gottfried ‘in highest drag’, equipped with a fake vagina lined
with razor blades that Katje has to cut her lips and tongue on to ‘kiss blood-
abstracts across the golden ungesoed back of her “brother” Gottfried’ (Pynchon
1975: 95). Gottfried inhabits a ‘becoming-woman’ that offers a parody of the
vagina detanta – the consuming image of absorption and transformation. This
submission of Gottfried within the masochistic scenario prefigures his ultimate
submission to the V-2 rocket as mode of technological acceleration.
Here Pynchon is in a ‘Jungian frame of mind’ (Pynchon 1975: 276). It was
Jung who suggested that we might escape Freud’s Oedipus complex through
embracing the possibility of a rebirth through incest that would connect us with
a primal symbol of the mother. Jung argued that the myth of rebirth through
incest involved a ‘night sea journey’ in a return to the womb to achieve rebirth
(Kerslake 2004: 147). Gottfried is encased in the rocket and in the womb-like
enclosure of a shroud made from the plastic Imipolex G. The sister-incest fantasy
of his masochist linkage to Katje is doubled and repeated in the machine-incest
fantasy of the night-flight.
Without being aware of Deleuze, we could add that Pynchon is also in
a Deleuzian frame of mind. What Deleuze added to Jung’s analysis was the
suggestion that the fantasy of rebirth through incest was a masochistic fantasy
(Deleuze 2004). Deleuze argued that masochism is ‘a perverse realisation of the
fantasy of incest’ (Kerslake 2004: 135, italics in original). Deleuze provides us
with an explicit way in which to link Gottfried’s submissive sexual masochism to
the de-sexualized submission to machinic integration in his night-flight journey.
Rather than simply collapse into submission to the order of Nazi politics or
technological control, Pynchon poses the disturbing possibility of a traversal of
control through submission. Read alongside Deleuze’s analysis of masochism,
184 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

which emphasizes how submission can engender a new politics ‘beyond the
father’ (Deleuze 1989b: 100), this suggests another mode of escape.
Deleuze argues that this rebirth through masochism promises the rebirth of a
world-historical ‘new man’ (Deleuze 1989b: 95; Kerslake 2004: 136). In a parody
of Hegel, the world-historical individual is not the tragic figure of power but
the one who has submitted to a masochistic fusion with the machine. While we
might, as with Slothrop’s dispersion, regard this fusion as fatal or impotent, in a
schizoanalytic reading the surrender or submission generates a new power. The
tension of submission is, however, retained in Pynchon’s novel in the tension
of Gottfried’s ambivalent status. Is he pilot or passenger? While the pilot might
direct a line of flight, the passenger submits to it: ‘Stuff him in. Not a Procrustean
bed, but modified to take him. The two, boy and Rocket, concurrently designed’
(Pynchon 1975: 751). The fusion is, appropriately, a masochistic or quasi-sexual
fusion: ‘They are mated to each other, Schwarzgerät and next higher assembly’
(Pynchon 1975: 751). This ‘assemblage’ is uncomfortably poised in terms of the
myth of the new world-historical figure that a schizoanalytic reading would
desire – between the fused traversal of power and fused submission to power.
In the description of the ascent of the V-2, Pynchon writes: ‘The victim, in
bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape’ (1975: 758). The
‘escape’ is temporary, only the moment of the abolition of gravity, which ‘dips
away briefly’ (Pynchon 1975: 759). At this moment of the highest arc of the V-2
the ‘escape’ is figured as a ‘whitening’: ‘a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite’
(Pynchon 1975: 759). In this moment Nazi racial politics ambiguously implode
as we find sunlight, at the peak of the rocket’s arc, ‘rarefying the Caucasian pallor
to an abolition of pigment’ (Pynchon 1975: 759). This ‘abolition’ suggests the
kind of ambiguous racial delirium that characterizes the breakdown of Daniel
Paul Schreber, poised between revolutionary desire and ‘fascist investments’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 364). In this moment the world-historical figure
emerges as this abolition, suspended at the point of the arc before Brennschluss
(the cessation of fuel burning) and the fall of the rocket to detonate on a cinema.
It is fiction that provides the possibility of suspension, as the rocket never falls.
The difficulty, however, is to imagine what is expressed in this world-historical
figure of rebirth? The line, or arc, of flight presents a fleeting glimpse of the new,
which recedes from the stage of history.
Deleuze’s ‘attempt to harness the pathogenic forces of modernity to other
possible world-historical ends’ (Kerslake 2004: 144) remains at the heart of his
project and of his work with Guattari. From Deleuze’s early Jungian evocations,
 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 185

to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘schizophrenic’, on to the promise of the Cinema books

of a ‘people to come’ where the people are missing (Deleuze 1989a: 224), the
work clears the stage for the emergence of the new. This inaugural function
makes evident the convergence with Pynchon. In the case of Slothrop and
Gottfried, the moment of acceleration to this new figure is strangely stalled in
different forms of terminal disintegration; in the dispersion of the zone or in
the condensed moment of impact. This is the difficult equivocation that haunts
the rebirth of the world-historical figure. The line of flight leads to a rebirth
or decoding that promises to achieve a state beyond acceleration, into what
Pynchon calls the ‘depolarised’. The difficulty is that this involves a slackening of
tension in terms of an achieved ‘absolute decoding’ where no code remains to be
decoded and no territory remains to be deterritorialized. This is evident in the
difficulty in presenting such a moment, which is only left implied. It seems that
any production of the world-historical would, of necessity, betray acceleration
and decoding. While we might strive towards an ‘absolute decoding’, an ascent,
like the V-2 rocket, this is only a moment before the inevitable descent, and
falling back.

Nodes and flows

In a 1984 essay, Pynchon remarked that ‘since 1959, we have come to live among
flows of data more vast than anything that world has seen before’ (Pynchon
in Burn 2003: 19). It is obvious to read Pynchon’s novels as expressions and
navigations of these vast data flows. This cartographic impulse is visible already
in Gravity’s Rainbow, with the ‘zone’ becoming the space, or non-space, of
accumulated data and its potential mapping. Tyrone Slothrop’s wanderings, and
his own dispersion, are an expression of a cartographic mapping that succeeds,
if that is the right word, by coinciding with the zone itself in an ‘anarchic
distribution’ (Deleuze 1994: 47). If, as in Borges’ parable, the map coincides with
the territory, here this produces a fragmentation and dispersion that starts the
flows moving again.
Pynchon’s mapping, like a schizonanalytic cartography, at once condenses and
explodes, stays in place and stays in flight. The difficulty is how this cartographic
impulse is connected to the demand of acceleration. Neither the acceleration
of disintegration nor the acceleration of integration seems to promise enough
capacity for resistance or for purchase on these flows. Instead, in both cases,
186 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

we coincide with the flows better to accelerate with them and, it is claimed,
beyond them. It is this utopian or futural dimension that has come to seem
problematic, as the line of flight loops back in its realization to embody the
present. The utopia of excessive acceleration does not accelerate beyond a world
dominated by the state and capital, but can only embody its contradictions and
forms. In this moment utopia comes to coincide with dystopia, and the looped
line of flight leaves us back where we started. This disorientation marks the
contemporary moment, as trace receding possibilities of resistance in the face
of a global capital stuttering in crisis.
The gambit that the looping line of flight returns us to the present could be
seen as the signature move of Nick Land’s retooling of Deleuze and Guattari’s
accelerationism. In Land’s writings of the 1990s, which also might be included
in this convergence of Deleuze and Guattari with the literary, the embrace of
capitalism as the only embodiment of the line of flight became absolute (Land
2013). Land stripped out the critical elements that remained in the project to
grasp acceleration as the only possible solution to the impasses of his moment.4
Convergence was to be celebrated as the truth in all its consequences. It might
not be a surprise that Pynchon, especially Gravity’s Rainbow, and cyberpunk
fiction were both resources deployed by Land to generate his theoretical fictions.
In this case dystopia was embraced, drawing from the more nihilist elements
of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), to strip out the residual moral and
affirmative moments of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. While this had
the benefit of a certain rigour, the result was an integration into capitalism
without reserve. This integration credited capitalism with powers of production
and innovation that now, post-2008, seems dubious at best.
The literary convergence with schizoanalysis and acceleration is not quite as
smooth as Land’s accelerationism, and more interesting for that. It is the friction
that exists in the literary realization of a schizoanalytic and accelerationist vision
that suggests that schizoanalysis is not simply a solution for the problems of
the present. In a fashion truer to Deleuze, schizoanalysis is better thought of
as the means to pose new problems: ‘True freedom lies in a power to decide, to
constitute problems themselves’ (Deleuze 1991: 15). This shift involves moving
away from the celebration of schizoanalysis as the line of flight that escapes the
problems of the present or its condemnation as mere synchrony with the lines
of flight of contemporary capitalism (Hallward 2006: 162–3). It is neither the
good object to be introjected nor the bad object to be expelled, to use Melanie
Klein’s language. To shift away from the realization of schizoanalysis is to turn
 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 187

towards it as a problem of the cartography of tendencies and counter-tendencies.

Schizoanalysis and its literary avatars would no longer be treated as sites to
accelerate beyond the present, but as moments that encode that present and its
contradictions. Thinking with and against schizoanalysis becomes a crucial task.
This is true both of our reading of literature and our understanding of politics, if
these two can be separated.
The case of Pynchon suggests this necessity. His writing of Gravity’s Rainbow
lies poised on the re-inception of control: with the fading of the counterculture,
capitalist crisis, and the emergence of neo-liberalism. The work tries to grasp this
moment, between insurgent desire and capitalist reterritorialization by trying
to grasp an earlier moment of the convergence of the forces of production and
destruction. If the end of the war was a fleeting moment of the slackening of control,
then it provides a mirror (through a glass darkly) of the struggles and protests of
the’60s. The general tendency of Pynchon’s fiction to provide diminishing returns
is, perhaps, a sign of the difficulty of the task of continuing in the wake of this loss.
The élan of Gravity’s Rainbow work is moderated or consumed in the difficulty of
operating an oppositional schema of control and counterculture in our present
moment. Hence Pynchon’s turns back further to the past to find the moment of
original sin in the form of coding and control (Mason & Dixon, Against the Day
(2006)) or his attempts at a genealogy of the present in the crises of the counter-
culture (Vineland (1990), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013)). The
tension of an oppositional schema persists but is only complicated as Pynchon’s
grapples with the fluidity and capacity of the forces of control that he had traced.
In this grappling, his work loses some of its utopian energy and the tension of a
dichotomy of control and resistance. Instead a new space of control emerges that
operates through modulation, fluidity, and claims to acceleration.
This is also true of the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. In his
reflection on Foucault, Deleuze noted that a difficulty emerged in dealing with
the problem of how ‘transversal relations of resistance continue to become
restratified’ (1988: 94). The ‘impasse’ is not simply an impasse of Foucault’s
conceptualization of power, but an impasse ‘where power places us’ (Deleuze
1988: 96). It is this impasse which, as we saw, Deleuze and Guattari also tried
to confront in A Thousand Plateaus. In the fading of the protests and global
movements of ’68 (and after), in the resurgence of capitalism unleashed, a new
attention to the complexities of struggle emerged. Similarly to Pynchon, a
decline in utopian energy takes place, with the problem of resistance posed but
not satisfactorily resolved.
188 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature

To grasp our present moment involves attention to the capacity of the language
of acceleration, flows, and lines of flight, not as the means to escape but as equivocal
sites of the ideological and material assemblages of control. Schizoanalysis would
then have to rethink how it operates within these tensions and forces. Instead
of the great politics of revolutionary desire versus fascism, there are a series of
contradictory moments that require a cartographic attention. The literary forms
convergent with schizoanalysis attest to this cartographic impulse, and the
tensions of trying to maintain the tension necessary for the moment of revolt or
resistance. The accelerative moment may have passed, attested to by the stuttering
lurching of capital in global crisis. Instead of the need to reinvent acceleration, to
re-enchant ourselves with the powers of production and destruction, the mapping
out of the contradictions of these desires offers a different line of flight.

Notes

1 This diagnosis of a ‘post-oedipal’ society has mainly been elaborated by Lacanian

theorists, although it echoes Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979). This
accounts for the proximity of these accounts to Deleuze and Guattari, although for
Lacanians this is a sign of a new pathology, while for Deleuze and Guattari, it is a
possibility of liberation (see Žižek 2004: 80–7).
2 I owe this reference to David Winters and Alec Niedenthal, with thanks.
3 This ‘vanishing’ position is also true of ‘DeepArcher’, the free and anarchic virtual
environment existing in the ‘Undernet’ of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013). This
space exists between the military origins and corporate future of the Internet, and
the novel ends with it being made freely available before corporate takeover.
4 Contemporary accelerationism, which we could call second-wave (after Land)
or third-wave (if we include Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard)
accelerationism, attacks Land for this collapsing. They suggest that Land mistakes
speed for acceleration, and so can only endorse the order of capitalism (Williams
2013; Srnicek and Williams 2013). By splitting acceleration from speed, and from
capitalism, the result is that it is difficult to grasp just what is being accelerated.
This seems to leave contemporary accelerationism without a subject.

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