The World. Now 5% off.

1. Oneworldedness as World System

Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory, which focuses on markets in the early phases of global capitalism, assumes enhanced relevance in the post-9/11 era, in which the militarization of border patrol, information, and intelligence further compounds economic definitions of oneworldedness.¹ Wallerstein's central idea of the world as one but unequal is easily extended to a paradigm of planetary paranoia marked by cyber-surveillance, cartographies of cartels, and webs of international relationality within and outside the nation, and on the edges of legality. In its curvilinear unboundedness, the contemporary world system resembles a one-size, supranational entity that recognizes the dominance of superstates, while training its eye on the hidden relationalism among corporate conglomerates, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), underground economies, and clandestine insurgent groups. Oneworldedness is distinct from planetarity, cast by Wai Chee Dimock as a transchronological continuum of poesis that takes "the entire planet as a unit of analysis" (175) and by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Death of a Discipline (2003) as a precapitalist territorial commons respectful of alterity. It is also different from transnationalism, assigned by Etienne Balibar to new forms of world citizenship that engender open rather than closed social polities. In Balibar's work on transnational citizenship, including We the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004), borders become transitional objects rather than cordons sanitaires of exclusion. World diaspora is affirmed within and not just outside national borders (Balibar draws here on Jürgen Habermas's notion of Weltinnenpolitk). The hackneyed [End Page 365] expression "Citizen of the World" is granted new life when he refers to Netizens and antiglobalist, altiermondiste activists. And translation--treated as a lingua franca of political mediation--revokes nationalist essentialism. Building on Balibar, in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2005), I have also ascribed transnationalism to a "trans to trans" comparatism that bypasses the metropole while privileging translation between "minor" or micro-minority languages and literatures. Oneworldedness, in contradistinction to these paradigms of world systems, planetarity, and transnationalism, envisages the planet as an extension of paranoid subjectivity vulnerable to persecutory fantasy, catastrophism, and monomania. Like globalization, oneworldedness traduces territorial sovereignty and often masks its identity as another name for "America." But where globalization is an amorphous term applied to economic neo-imperialism; to projections of the world as an ideologically bicameral, yet fatally integrated single community; to the centrifugal pressure of dominant world languages and literatures (English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic); to the homogeneity of culture produced under capitalism; and to an essentially noncomparative model of comparative literature, oneworldedness, as I am defining it, refers more narrowly to a delirious aesthetics of systematicity; to the match between cognition and globalism that is held in place by the paranoid premise that "everything is connected."

American culture obviously holds no exclusive patent on oneworldedness. Jia Zhangke's 2004 film The World, Okakura Tenshin's political construct of "Asia as One," the recent coinage of "Chindia" to distinguish an emergent giant of global finance capital (China plus India), or Lydia Liu's suggestion that the proper name "China" could arguably be translated as One-world or Empire are reminders that China's claim to oneworldedness, historically and at present, is surely as great if not greater as America's.² One could even venture that "Asia" and "the West," in their rivalry for the title to oneworldedness, are obverse sides of the same coin, compounding the one-world effect by virtue of their competition for cultural hegemony.

While American literature is far from being the only national literature to privilege paranoid psychosis--think of Gogol's The Nose, Kafka's The Trial, and more recently, the novel Links (2004) by Somalian author Nuruddin Farah, and the novel Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (2001) by Czech novelist Patrik Ouredník, which compresses every historical factoid, cliché, and idée reçue into a single globular chronotype--paranoia consistently emerges as a preeminent topos in major works of the post-World War II American canon. Taken together, Thomas Pynchon's V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), [End Page 366] Don DeLillo's The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997), John Kennedy O'Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), and William T. Vollmann's fictional panoplies of conquest and fear in American history (from the Seven Dreams project to his polemical magnum opus Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means [2003]) suggest narrative articulations of oneworldedness that enshrine paranoia as the preferred trope of national allegory.³ Pynchon remains the catalyst; his invention of a literature of conspiracy steeped in the ethos of CIA operatives, McCarthyism, cybernetics, and hallucinogenic drugs takes paranoia beyond Cold War spy fiction and into the realm of a new literarity. The interior monologues of Oedipa Maas, Pynchon's addled protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, invariably construct paranoia as a world system:

Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge and/or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of that afternoon's vanity mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled, indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everything American you know, and you too sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of posthorns all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors. . . . Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut Oedipa, out of your skull.

"They," used as a free-standing sentence, confirms the cybernetic on-off, us-them circuit board to which paranoid thinking is hardwired, dissolving the discrete limits of an autonomous self, abolishing mechanisms of agency, and internalizing the schizoid "ontology of the enemy" (identified by Peter Galison with reference to Norbert Weiner's cybernetic war games).⁴ Oedipa's mind no longer distinguishes where it begins or ends, whether it posits a thought, or whether it is being thought by the network of "X number of Americans." Either way, this cognitive oneworldism is exitless. As has been oft-noted, Pynchon draws on theories of biofeedback, [End Page 367] quantum mechanics, Fibonacci sequences, behaviorism, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, black boxes, game systems, and probability theory hatched in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s by Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, John von Neumann, Oscar Morgenstern, Warren Weaver, Claude Shannon, Anatol Rapoport, and Marshall McLuhan among others. The writing of Pynchon and DeLillo, one could argue, is as much a symptom of this postwar paranoid culture as its literary archive. Their work imports into literature the mesh of cognitive modeling and conspiratorial globalism that gives rise to theories of paranoid planetarity.

Pynchonesque paranoia imbued a host of films made in the 1960s and 1970s (many of them the subject of recent revivals) that cued their plot structures to patterns of narrative encirclement and psychic targeting, mushrooming out of the brains of scientists, politicians, and hapless employees. They included the original 1962 version of the Manchurian Candidate directed by John Frankenheimer; Alan Pakula's The Parallax View (1974); the Watergate classic All the President's Men (1976); Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman as a wiretapper who dismantles his own apartment in a fit of debugging mania; Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) in which Robert Redford must solve why everyone in his foreign embassy is being assassinated; and Peter Hyam's Capricorn One (1978), in which three astronauts simulate a landing on Mars to be telemetrically broadcast by NASA as part of a plot to keep a flawed space program funded. In all these films the world is large insofar as it is small, that is to say, susceptible to being shrunken to the scale of a human mind that anamorphically images the twisted byways of preemptive government intelligence operations and counter-maneuver. The films anticipate Dotcom-era visions of the all-controlling network society, typified by Manuel Castells's critique in The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (1996) of network enterprises (lateral rather than vertical corporate organizational systems), McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto (2004) a paean to information piracy whose capitalism-inverting motto is "We do not own what we produce--it owns us," as well as the late artist Mark Lombardi's diagrams of global scandals of the 1980s and 1990s that painstakingly "follow the money" through offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and pyramid schemes.

Now, as then, paranoia assumes the guise of a delusional democracy buoyed by cascading national cataclysms: the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Kent State, the FBI hunt for Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army and Weather Underground radicals, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and 9/11. As the second-term Bush administration [End Page 368] continues to act in the name of an ill-founded hypothesis that American-style democracy exports readily to Islamic countries, a new form of manifest destiny has emerged that builds on a mandate for open-ended war justified by an unfathomably deep sense of injury, a conviction that the entire life of the world would not be enough to compensate for 9/11. A group psychosis of defense has taken hold, defined by a homeland security apparatus committed to invasive forms of domestic policing; economic priorities that ensure the diversion of the world's resources to military spending; the suspension of civil liberties in Guantánamo and Iraq, top-down judicial authorizations of vote-rigging; a rampant unilateralism that flouts the Geneva Conventions and the Kyoto Protocols; and the cynical use of a "war on terror" to impose "a state of emergency" that suffers few legal restraints.

Paranoia has returned with a vengeance as the ordre du jour in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the more immediate wake of Mark Felt's revelations in spring 2005 of his role as "Deep Throat" in the Watergate era. The memory of Watergate brings back the incredible images of a Nixon White House biting its own tail: recording the very tapes that would be used to prove criminal charges and authorizing the FBI to investigate its own cover-up of the Watergate break-in. The paradigm here resembles that of the leaf insect described by Jacques Lacan, disguising itself as a leaf in order to hide from birds, thereby inviting predators that feast on leaves. Current administration policy replays the Watergate scenario insofar as it justifies its worst fears by setting up the conditions whereby those worst fears will be realized. We have been exhorted by Washington to connect the dots, to posit connections between weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the World Trade Center attacks, to see "shadowy" global networks of jihadists masking themselves as ordinary citizens, to upgrade Palestinian terrorist groups to the status of international terrorism, or to decipher what Richard A. Clarke called a "worldwide political conspiracy masquerading as a religious sect" (qtd in Raban 24).⁵ In this scheme, what we are told is connected is rivaled only by what we are asked to believe is not connected: there is apparently no link between oil and the Iraq invasion, no coincidence between electioneering politics and war, no cause--effect relationship between the media-hyped epistemology of insecurity and the abrogation of civil liberties, no common thread of sadism between Iraqi and US treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This logic of nonconnectivity condemns you as a paranoid if you suspect that the case for war is less than solid, and doubts your credibility if you fail to see that only when it comes to terrorism are all the dots connected. Ultimately, though, such connect/do-not-connect injunctions rely on the same conspiratorial logic of supranational oneworldedness. This [End Page 369] is a globalism in which there are no front lines in war, in which civilian and military cultures are interchangeable, in which quotidian gestures and words invite surcodage ("just some alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence" in the words of one of DeLillo's characters [DeLillo, Mao II 77]), and in which "thinking like the enemy" (to the point of being "thought" as the enemy would think you) locks the mind into a loop of intersubjective projection that brooks no outside world.⁶ In this picture, as the world expands to include everybody, it paradoxically shrinks into a claustrophobic all-inclusiveness. Paranoid oneworldedness obeys a basic law of entropy that posits that increased disorder diminishes available energy within the confines of a closed system.

2. Paranoia Theory

Paranoia, I am suggesting, underwrites a one-worldist paradigm that differs from transnational or global ascriptions of world-systems theory in fully realizing the psychotic dimension of planetarity. Unlike Habermas's rationalist and decidedly unpsychotic model of universal communicative reason or Peter Singer's pragmatic, utilitarian idea of "one world" as the basic unit for ethics--built on morally enlightened calculations of how to distribute fairly the earth's common property and global environmental, economic, legal, and social responsibility--paranoia as world-system signals the dark side of planetary utopianism. Planetary utopianism views the globe as an ecology of potentia and aims to enhance rather than ransack human languages, natural reserves, and institutions of socioeconomic justice.⁷ Oneworldedness, by contrast, adheres to an ethics of remote responsibility that refuses acknowledgment of the "butterfly effect" (the chaos theory principle that tracks how a desire for a product in one part of the world may be linked to a damaged ecology in another part of the world). Oneworldedness imagines the planet as subject to "the system" and wants to disable plans of escape. It fails the optimists (left or right) by endorsing the idea that there are legitimate reasons to be paranoid in a world bent on civilizational self-destruction. More importantly still, it matches the circular form of the globe--imagined as a smooth surface allowing the unimpeded flow of capital, information, and language--with the tautological truism that theory is paranoia; an intellectual entrapment in logic that is mimetic of the object of analysis. As Leo Bersani has observed, "The theoretician distrusts the theorizing activity of paranoia--as if the 'truth' of paranoia might turn out to be that theory is always a paranoid symptom" (181). [End Page 370]

No one better grasped the political implications of this symptom than Jacques Derrida. In his diagnosis of the "autoimmunity" syndrome in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), Derrida discerned "an implacable law: the one that regulates every autoimmunitary process. As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own' immunity" (qtd in Borradori 94). He maintained further, "What will never let itself be forgotten is thus the perverse effect of the autoimmunitary itself. For we now know that repression in both its psychoanalytical sense and its political sense--whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy--ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm" (99). The autoimmune complex describes a systemic self-attack that remains inexplicable unless one accepts the logic of death as a preprogrammed call for the life cycle of a body to end or unless one accepts the paranoid reasoning that stipulates that the subject is targeted by mechanisms of an inevitable global catastrophism. Paranoia captures, in these terms, the systematicity of world systems--its folie raisonnante or rationalism of systematized delusion.⁸ Very much a symptom of what it critiques, paranoia theory might be said to refer to a delusional model of subjective recognition that apprehends itself in global schemata.

Derrida's autoimmune syndrome draws on a long history of paranoia theory with roots in Freud's 1911 case study of Judge Schreber ("Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia"); Gatian de Clérambault's notion of erotomania (encapsulated in the phrase "The Queen of England Loves Me"); Georges Bataille's gloss of Salvador Dali's 1929 painting The Lugubrious Game; Lacan's 1932 thesis De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (based on the case of his Saint-Anne patient Aimée, who imagined persecutory women in the place of the feminine imago); and Melanie Klein's "paranoid position" built upon the primal aggression of bad objects. Exhibiting a structural logic that is circular, auto-referential, internally self-verifying, and fixed by an Archimedean point both within and outside of its generic set, paranoia reinforces unipolar thought, specifically, a model of oneness as allness. If God is another name for intellectual unipolarity, the paranoid theorist will be God by devising a system of omniscience capable of binding everything into coherence, thereby rendering discrepant orders of signs mutually intelligible or pantranslatable.

In his seminar of 1955 on the psychoses, Lacan posed the question, "Must all thought necessarily perceive that it's thinking of what it is thinking?" (Lacan 35). The delusional structure of [End Page 371] thought--giving rise to endless mirroring--defines not only the paranoid character of knowledge but also the condition of subjective rivalry with intellectual globality; the subject's jealousy of an alienating object--thought--that threatens to subsume or englobe it entirely. Commenting on one of his schemes of psychosis, representing a relay between "two egos" (small o and small o prime) that disrupts the subject's communication with the big Other, Lacan implies that paranoia is a problem of "speaking to oneself with one's own ego," or in Aristotle's terms, "thinking with one's soul" (14). It is as if the circuitry connecting voids blocks access to the world or stands in for what passes as the world system. Alain Badiou articulates this model of mind in philosophical terms as "an operator of torsion" conceptually derived from Spinoza's "closed ontology" (Badiou 84). Using the concept of the ultra-One to anchor the ontology of the multiple, and positing being as subtraction from the jurisdiction of the One, Badiou formulates an impersonal mathematical ontology that brings us back to crucial questions posed by Lacan in seminar III: "Where in the signifier is the person? How does a discourse hang together? Up to what point can a discourse that seems personal bear, on the level of the signifier alone, a sufficient number of traces of impersonalization for the subject not to recognize it as his own?" (Lacan 269). Lacan was bent on locating that turning point of impersonalization. He spends an entire week "looking for something in the area of the personal pronoun that would give you an image in French of the difference between je, I, and moi, me in order to explain to you how the subject can lose mastery of them, if not contact with them in psychosis" (261). This "elusive something" may be the knot or "resistant nucleus" of paranoia that marks the psychotic origins of the subject (3). In an extended gloss on Schreber's case, Lacan calls the nucleus a "quilting point" and associates it with fear of the father: "Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It's the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively" (268). Lacan also describes paranoia in terms of the effect of speaking in a foreign language that one does not understand: "If it's ever possible for someone to speak in a language that he is totally ignorant of, we can say that the psychotic subject is ignorant of the language he speaks" (11--12). There is something distinctly conspiratorial in this idea of a subject speaking in tongues, out of range of self-translation, located in the foreign country of himself or herself.

Oneworldedness as a subject position depends on the kind of self-estrangement that Lacan most famously associated with the mirror stage. Heavily indebted to Henri Wallon, the theory of the [End Page 372] mirror stage came to light in 1936 as an extension of Lacan's 1932 paranoia thesis. Shuli Barzila has observed that "The basis of all interhuman relations, according to Lacan, is a paranoid identification with the specular counterpart" (114). "All human knowledge," Lacan wrote in Seminar III, "stems from the dialectic of jealousy, which is a primordial manifestation of communication." Mining the homonymic play between tuer (to kill) and tu es (thou art), Lacan claimed that "In all imaginary identification, the tu es, thou art, ends in the destruction of the other, and vice versa, because this destruction is simply there ... in what we shall call thouness." "Paranoia," says Shuli Barzilai, glossing Seminar III, "is the certain outcome of the mirror stage" (114). For Jean-Michel Rabaté, this "outcome" becomes the basis for "Lacan's paranoid modernity," grounded in "a system of signs . . . that betray the creative function of desire underpinning their production" and compel the subject to put himself "under the domination of the sadistic super-ego through an expected punishment but also with a view of getting rid of an idealized image of oneself projected in another person" (Rabaté 20). It is important to retain, then, that the Lacanian subject is posited in terms of a destructive, persecutory misrecognition of itself, a combination of wounded narcissism and masochistic submission to the symbolic order that propels subjective ontology to the brink of psychosis. Forged at a moment in the 1930s in which Lacan and his teacher Alexander Kojève were planning to coauthor a philosophical account of the rise of political dictatorship in Europe, the theory of the mirror stage preserves the trace of specular punishment and of psychic aggression in the formation of the I. The mutation of delusional persecution into a world system is performed like conceptual high art in Lacan's Seminar on "The Purloined Letter."⁹ Here paranoia grows out of the insistence of the signifying chain which explains away the inconsistencies of experience. Taking off from Heidegger's poetics of ontological disclosure, Lacan suggests that Dasein's reason for existence lies in the subject's ability to identify with the "reason" of the symbolic. He reads Poe as an instruction manual in how to think like the symbolic, or rather in how to decipher the system by which the symbolic thinks you. The true subject of Poe's tale, Lacan suggests, is the training it provides in thinking oneself into the place of the Other. Using techniques of mimetic ratiocination, the subject brings to term the latent paranoia of subjectivity, its autruicherie (a multiple homonymic play on autrui and chérie, or "other-darling," tricherie, meaning deception and duperie, and autriche, ostrich). Autruicherie shows the subject "trapped in the typically imaginary situation of seeing that he is not seen" and complements Lacan's notion of dehiscence--the process whereby subjectivity is sucked out and transmuted into the environmental [End Page 373] surround through psychasthenic mimesis (modeled after Roger Callois's entomological theory of camouflage) (Lacan, Seminar on "Purloined" 61).¹⁰

In DeLillo's Underworld (1997), one could say that acronyms function as subjective camouflage according to the Lacanian model. "You can't fight a war without acronyms" says one of DeLillo's characters, "and where do these compressed words come from? They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe" (606). Like "white noise" which provides a seemingly anodyne acoustic backdrop to everyday life, acronyms and advertisements encrypt ominous subliminal messages that direct consciousness from some nonlocation. So in Underworld the slogan "Better Things for Better Living. . . . Through Chemistry" limns an invisible directional impelling the Du Pont Chemical Company into alignment with an underground terrorist group from the 1960s that has commandeered a radio station to publicize a fertilizer bomb recipe made from farm-supply nitrate (602-03). Recalling the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on the Alfred Murrah Federal building orchestrated by Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols, Underworld plots the coordinates of oneworldedness on a temporal stratum emphasizing the historical predictors that connect the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1960s counterculture, and the Oklahoma City attack. "I look at the Lucky Strike logotype and I think target" (122) says Underworld's protagonist, a waste manager who has learned about the loops of capitalism and history, subject and environment, from a CEO who figured out that because "true feeling flows upward from the streets, fully accessible to corporate adaptation," he could harness the "rhetoric of aggrieved minorities to prevent legislation that would hurt our business" (119).

3. Paranoid Fiction

In contrast to literary transnationalism--identified by Dimock with the plurilingual dissemination of codes, genres, styles, or ideas across the borders of time and territorial sovereignty--oneworldedness might be described as a relatively intractable literary monoculture that travels through the world, absorbing difference. DeLillo's first novel Americana (1971) both illustrates and ironically exposes how a group of "trendexers," young advertising executives, invent a monoculture that can be marketed to the country and the world at large. Seated in slick office towers on Madison Avenue, New York's advertising and media firms of the 1960s produce generic America for the slice-of-life commercial: "[A] recognizable scene in a suburban home anywhere in the USA" (DeLillo, Americana 272). [End Page 374] DeLillo is particularly alert to the way "American" asserts itself as a monoculture through an idiom of speech, or a habit of self-marketing, or an attitude of low-grade paranoia hovering like a pollution layer over the landscape. Underworld opens: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful" (DeLillo, Underworld 11).

DeLillo follows Pynchon in affirming the Americanness of literary oneworldedness: both, one could say, write paranoia theory as literature, translating paranoia into an exportable national literary form. Literary paranoia is undoubtedly most effective when not overtly themed, but Pynchon consistently breaks this rule. Bersani notes that his characters "repeatedly refer to themselves as paranoid. There is the hitch: since when do paranoids label themselves paranoid?" (179). In The Crying of Lot 49, a Beatles wannabe rock group in southern California calls itself the Paranoids, Oedipa Maas psychoanalyzes herself as a paranoid (too much kirsch in the fondue at the Tupperware party is adduced as the explanation for why she has been named executor of Pierce Inveterarty's estate), and a shrink named Dr Hilarius threatens his staff with a gun, stating that he never took LSD because he prefers "to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are" (Pynchon 111). While these caricatural treatments of paranoid society are highly amusing, it is in the fabric of figural language that paranoia is most ingeniously embedded. In the opening paragraph of The Crying of Lot 49, a slammed hotel door in Mexico is put into relation with an obscure western-facing slope of Cornell University's library, this with a bar of Bartók's music, and this with a bust of Jay Gould. Here, and symptomatically throughout the book, systematicity is engendered by defying the odds against it. Radically ungleich elements are coerced into kinship, mobilizing the voids of noncomparability that resist metaphor's forçage. Pynchon frequently inverts these voids into solids that serve as visual connectors in a panorama. Take the sprawl of San Narciso, for example: "Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway" (13). What is paranoid here is the doubling of cognition and world-making. A conceptual cluster or generic set is taken apart--laid out as disparate components--and snapped back into place like file-leavings by a magnet. The magnet is paranoid thinking, which assigns logistical purpose and relation to random effluvia.

Pynchon reinforces paranoid relationality through verbal equations that manipulate orders of information. Urban sprawl = capitalism = drugs. In Oedipa's mind, the inside circuit card of a transistor radio becomes part of the same loop as "the ordered swirl [End Page 375] of houses and streets" which "from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate" (Pynchon 14). The "intention to communicate" anchors oneworldedness in the transcendent systematicity of a higher order of programmed intelligence. When Oedipa drives to a motel called "Echo Courts" featuring a sign with the lewd image of a nymph that reminds Oedipa of her own image, she becomes aware of a "concealed blower system that kept the nymph's gauze chiton in constant agitation" (16). Fascinated by the spectacle, she stands in the parking lot "watching the artificial windstorm overhead toss gauze in five-foot excursions. Remembering her idea about a slow whirlwind, words she couldn't hear" (16). This animistic technology acts as the universal programmer of the subject--a self-referential paranoia machine that (mis)recognizes everything as an omen or fateful piece of intelligence. Later in the novel, Oedipa extends this paranoid technology of subject formation to cognition and the workings of metaphor:

She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's ploughshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening around the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe the fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, outside, lost.

In overinterpreting the significance of the abbreviation for delirium tremens, Pynchon's character paves the way for DeLillo's obsession with the occult value of signifiers within ordinary language. DeLillo builds oneworldedness out of brand names and trademark logos, what the literary philologist Leo Spitzer treated as "linguistic innovations" in reference to product labels like Sunkist or Kodak that acquire the status of new nouns.¹¹ When the supermarket loudspeaker in White Noise announces: "Kleenex Softique, your truck's blocking the entrance," Kleenex Softique, like the brand monikers "Dacron, Orlon, Lycra Spandex" (DeLillo, White Noise 36) or the commercial mantra Coke is it, or the name "Elvis," demonstrates totemic value as carriers of "psychic data" (37). A toxic storm of media messages commingles with the environmental rays [End Page 376] and fumes "closely woven into the basic state of things" (asbestos, microchips, chlorine, insulation) (35). They send stimuli to the cerebral cortex which cause strange feedback; as when (in Underworld) a sniper, in reaction to "voices" picked up on TV, shoots randomly at strangers. Frank Lentricchia, writing on Libra, argues in this vein that the novel "does not finger a conspiracy as much as it incarnates a cultural scene of action in the electronic society within which assassination is one of the extreme but logical expressions of the course of daily life" (Lentrichhia 205). In White Noise even the bank PIN number serves as a passkey into "the networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies" (DeLillo, White Noise 46). Where White Noise documents the discharging of covert information like acid rain over popular consciousness, The Names (1992) treats acronyms like wormholes that open up one systemic universe to another. Letters become the Babelian cipher of a geographically diffused Hellenism that spills over the historical, territorial boundaries of Greece to negotiate "cultural rates of exchange in a globalized market" and to affiance possible worlds of espionage and political intrigue (Gourgouris 293). A terrorist cell whose members are bonded in their pledge to eliminate tourists whose alphabetic initials match those of Greek or Middle-eastern villages is thus linked--by signifier alone--to the CIA and its dummy risk management company.¹² In Underworld, the same conceit of paranoid reading is applied to the famous birthmark on Gorbachev's forehead, which is scrutinized as a compass to future military hot spots:

"You should train an eye on the mark on this Gorbachev's head, to see if it changes shape."

"Changes shape? It's always been there."

"You know this?"

"What, you think it recently appeared?"

"You know this? It's always been there?"

"It's a birthmark," Brian said.

"Excuse me but that's the official biography. I'll tell you what I think. I think if I had a sensitive government job I would be photographing Gorbachev from outer space every minute of the day that he's not wearing a hat to check the shape of the birthmark if it's changing. Because it's Latvia right now. But it [End Page 377] could be Siberia in the morning, where they're emptying out their jails."

He looked at his cigar.

"Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots."

Then he got to his feet with a certain effort.

"And when the cold war goes out of business, you won't be able to look at some woman in the street and have a what-do-you-call-it kind of fantasy the way you do today."

"Erotic. But what's the connection?"

"You don't know the connection? You don't know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?"

According to the conspiratorial logic of "connect the dots," global leaders serve as pivots that swivel the superpowers into position as a single national entity. Oneworldedness, in this guise, results from the collapsing of dual empires into one world system. United by a common planetary threat, we glimpse a superstate that might be dubbed the "Soviet States of America" or "People's Republic of USA." This is precisely what is suggested in Mao II by the book's fixation on the Warhol silkscreens of Chairman Mao or the Coke II signs plastered over Beirut, whose intense red color establishes uncanny links to posters from the Cultural Revolution. Communism and capitalism, democracy and terrorism, totalitarianism and religion, cults and family values, these bipolar systems are assimilated into one template.¹³ The Moonies and baseball become adjacent sides of an ideal of "world family" (DeLillo, Mao II 16). "They call us a cult" says Mao II's Karen reproachfully as she lapses into a chant intended to bring "everyone deeper into oneness" (9), but even after she has been deprogrammed her search for oneness remains intractable, displaced into her devotion to a writer whose radical political sympathies have forced him underground.

DeLillo shows the peculiarly American way in which the yearning for oneness or a common world culture is culturally expressed. Not by chance does he place the scene of a Moonie mass wedding in a baseball stadium bathed in "American sunlight" (Mao II 3) or, in Underworld, select the World Trade Center as a vulnerable site of national hubris "rising at the southern rim, the towers siamesed [End Page 378] when you see them from this angle, joined at the waist by a transit crane" (Underworld 487). With uncanny prescience, developed into a signature style of prophetic realism, DeLillo figures the Towers as an almighty point de repère or needle-dial of New York's fatal destiny.

The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building--about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.

"I think of it as one, not two," she said. "Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?"

As seen through the eyes of the artist Klara Sax, the World Trade Center emblematizes the reciprocal model of the gaze associated with the fear of an "I" that sees itself as other in the other's reflective screen. This dédoublement is underscored by the neologisms "twin-towering" and "siamesed," suggesting a paradoxical one-ness in two-ness, or generic multiplicity. DeLillo's numbers, like his letters, are decipherable within the confines of a national epic that both challenges and confirms the paranoid imaginary of a distinctly American oneworldedness. In DeLillo's world system, the underlying spirit of corporatism places on a continuum such diverse social sectors as cults, business and marketing organizations, law enforcement, and terrorism.¹⁴

4. Visualizing Oneworldedness

Portrayed as "under construction," the Towers epitomize a 1960s-era vision of the American world system whose twenty-first-century analogue is cyberspace. Wark opens A Hacker Manifesto with an information-age parroting of the Communist Manifesto, replacing modern architecture with pure abstraction as the symbolic measure of oneworldedness: "A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes, be they ruling or ruled, revere it--yet fear it. Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed" (001). Wark's one-world is [End Page 379] haunted by the counter-economy of hacking. Hackers are the "specters" haunting the interlocking institutions of state, army, company, and community. The hacker class is an invisible "we" and this "we" is everywhere. "We are the abstractors of new worlds" (002) he alleges, even if "we don't quite know who we are" (003). Inverting formulas of possessive individualism, Wark maintains that what "we" produce owns us. The "other" is one's own labor, it would seem, the sole conferee of self-property. Wark uses paranoia as a model of radical self-ownership rather than as a metaphor for the mirror function of cyberspace. It is this second type of appropriation that one finds, say, in Slavoj Zizek's commentary on von Schelling's 1813 essay Die Weltalter (Ages of the World), in which he argues:

[T]hat cyberspace effectively realizes the paranoiac fantasy elaborated by Schreber, the German judge whose memoirs were analyzed by Freud: the 'wired universe' is psychotic insofar as it seems to materialize Schreber's hallucination of the divine rays through which God directly controls the human mind. In other words, does the externalization of the big Other in the computer not account for the inherent paranoiac dimension of the wired universe? [. . .]" With reference to the mirror relationship between the dispersed "me" and my mirror image, this means that, in the wired universe of Virtual Reality, my mirror image is externalized in the machine, in the guise of a stand-in that replaces me in cyberspace, so that the body that is 'mine' in 'real life' is more and more reduced to an excremental remainder.

Though they imagine the psychic functions of cyberspace quite differently, Wark follows Zizek in affirming the subject as "remainder" of the virtual. Cyberspace insofar as it is a space of advanced capitalism depends on the subsumption of subjective self-property, but the "vectoral," a loosely and spontaneously associated organization of revolutionary hackers (the consummate manipulators of abstraction) breaks into the virtual data-bank and re-appropriate "ownness" (Max Stirner's Eigenheit).¹⁵ Quoting Zizek-- "the thing can only survive as its own excess"--Wark declares with polemical fury: "The vectoralist class puts its snout into the trough of the surplus on the basis of an ever more abstract, and hence more flexible, form of property than the pastoralist or the capitalist class" (175). Wark's army of invisible guerillas acts in the name of a "collective becoming" with full exercise of "virtual powers" (340). The hacker's objective is to trigger capitalism's autoimmunity syndrome (such that it programs its own end), while ensuring that information and deprivatized property circulate freely on the World Wide Web. [End Page 380] The <Cyber.com/munist::Manifesto>, authored by Richard Barbook but framed as the work of a collective whose link is The Hypermedia Research Centre at Britain's University of Westminster, activates the cyber-revolutionary program in its anti-media-conglomerate politics. In as succinct a way as one can imagine, the manifesto lays out a code of ethics for a new-world order in which gift replaces commodity, disclosure replaces enclosure, piracy replaces copyright, fluid replaces fixed, process replaces product, open source replaces proprietary, free download replaces digital encryption, latest remix replaces original recording, abundance replaces scarcity, friendship replaces alienation, post-humans replace New Soviet Man, network communities replace market competition, and cyber-communism replaces e-commerce.¹⁶ The manifesto qualifies, to paraphrase Yates Yeadon McKee, as a "neosituationist experiment in alternatives to neoliberal capitalism linked to an expanded network of activist counter-publicity ... including gift-giving as a tactic to defamiliarize the logic of the market."¹⁷

Antimarket cyber-communism emerges as the tain of capitalism's paranoid mirror; both are world systems that are everywhere and nowhere, and reliant on their formal invisibility to mobilize paranoid projections as a social imaginary. It is a credit to the acuity of the artist Lombardi that he devised ways of making visible this highly elusive relationality of the virtual world, mapping unseen economies that contour the globe. In a series of diagrams assembled in his 2003 "Global Networks" retrospective at the Drawing Center in New York and based on information and statistics mined from public databases, Lombardi transforms corporate and political scandals into cartographies of conspiracy. He charts capital flow using a system of delicate skeins, arrows, and hubs that indicate the paths of illicit money transfers, laundering operations, and offshore accounting. The BCCI is thus revealed in a compromising web of connectedness to the Saudi Bank of Paris, Osama Bin Laden, the Houston Main Bank, and George H. W. Bush. Whether it is Meyer Lansky's Financial Network circa 1960-78, Oliver North's Iran-Contra operation of 1984-86 (Figs 1 and 2), the Keating S&L debacle of 1978-90, or the Harken Energy scam of 1979-90, Lombardi's maps of corporate kleptocracy literally illustrate how all the dots are connected in ways that were always suspected, but rarely worked out in such detail. Little surprise, then, that FBI representatives appeared at the opening of his posthumous retrospective and expressed their incredulity that an artist with access only to information in the public domain, and working without a computerized database, could have plotted the scandals with such accuracy.¹⁸ Rumors also flew that the artist's apparent suicide was actually a murder, motivated by any number of parties whose illicit finances he had exposed. The [End Page 381]

circulation of money shows the theft of your property (and by extension, your self-property) within a paranoid world system. Lombardi, as it were, "capitalizes" Lacanian paranoid subjective destitution as a global schemata, and in the process he shows the "truth" of paranoid [End Page 382] fears of hostile take-over by some nameless, boundless other. His drawings could be visual captions to parts of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as when the Shell oil corporation is described as having "no real country, no side in any war, no specific face or heritage; tapping instead out of that global stratum, most deeply laid, from which all the appearances of corporate ownership really spring" (qtd in Bersani 182). The diagrams are just as applicable to DeLillo's Underworld, particularly parts of the epilogue (appropriately titled "Das Kapital") in which we find such phrases as: "Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced" (785). DeLillo ironically appropriates the corporate lingo of "capital flows" and "transnational links," subtly preempting the language a critic might use to describe the genre of cyber-spatial oneworldedness into which American fiction has graduated. In Underworld, DeLillo would seem to update his "old economy" of paranoia-inducing trademark acronyms (represented by the allusion to "L.S./M.F.T.: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco") with the new Internet name domain economy (one example from the text: http://blk.www/dd.com/miraculum). As if securing his own place as inaugurator of this new national form of the novel, DeLillo introduces the character-type of the Netizen; a taciturn teenage computer addict named Jeff who is described as a "lurker": "He visits sites but does not post. He gathers the waves and rays. He adds components and functions and sits before a spreading mass of compatible hardware. The real miracle is the web, the net, where everybody is everywhere at once, and he is there among them, unseen" (808). Jeff emerges as the prime suspect in the murder of a twelve-year-old runaway, habituée of a homeless community in New York known as "The Wall." But Jeff the Netizen could just as easily escape suspicion under the possible alias of Sister Alma Edgar, a nun dedicated to dispensing food and medicine to the Wall's populace. She herself passes as a dopplegänger of J. Edgar Hoover, and like Jeff she moves through society in and as an invisible habit:

In her veil and habit she was basically a face, or a face and scrubbed hands. Here in cyberspace she has shed all that steam-ironed fabric. She is not naked exactly but she is open--exposed to every connection you can make on the world wide web.

There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site [End Page 383] leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password--world without end, amen.

But she is in cyberspace, not heaven, and she feels the grip of systems. This is why she is so uneasy. There is a presence here, a thing implied, something vast and bright. She senses the paranoia of the web, the net.

DeLillo mines the most sinister connotations of the open-source feature of the net to render cyberspace a menacing form of paranoid planetarity. Like Pynchon, he uses networks and information technology to confect a narrative prototype of oneworldedness that doubles as the nation-form of the late-century American novel.

5. Conclusion

Many authors and artists have devised ways to register late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century oneworldedness. Some have used the episteme of technological literacy to write cyberspace as a sci-fi, postnational, subcultural epic (Samuel Delaney); some have used the computer's link feature to experiment with hypertext (Robert Coover); and others have aesthetically repurposed the medium of programming code (John Klima, Mark Amerika). DeLillo and Pynchon, however, were the trailblazers in devising fictive worlds adorned with psychic allegories of everyday life in the military-industrial-academic complex and governed by patterns of legal and illegal corporate relationality. The particular kind of planetarity imagined by Pynchon, DeLillo, and, later, Wark and Lombardi prompts us to read as novels or aesthetic diagrams the financial and political webs of connectedness unfurling in the news on a daily basis. China--North Korea--Japan--America (one strand of the world system of nuclear politics); Saudi Arabia--America--France--Britain--Spain--Germany--France--Afghanistan--Israel (Al Qaeda and the politics of oil); Enron--California energy crisis--Halliburton--Iraq--Vice President Dick Cheney (oil wars and the gamed world system of the energy economy); Texas redistricting--Tom Delay--Rabbi Daniel Lapin--Bush lobbyist Jack Abramson--Native-American Casinos--Americans for Tax Reform PAC--Northern Mariana Islands (Lobby-gate) (Fig 3); Ohio Bureau of Worker's Compensation--Bush campaign contributor and rare coin dealer Tom Noe--MDL Capital Hedge Fund ("Coingate"). These conspiracy strings and countless others like them stretch around the globe, ceaselessly updating themselves in the form of [End Page 384] evermore outrageous deals, and joining together far-flung ganglia to form a world system anchored by the politics of paranoia.

The particular kind of paranoid planetarity imagined by Pynchon and DeLillo--a prophetic realism organized thematically around what Timothy Melley has termed "an empire of conspiracy" in his 2000 book of the same name--prompts further critical reflection on the status of "big" comparative paradigms in the humanities (epic, tragedy, realism, modernism, and postmodernism) that achieve hegemonic heft by lending themselves to international translation. Such paradigms, even when they are critical of what they represent, ironically come to embody national imaginaries that are then imposed on the world at large. What makes the fiction of Pynchon and DeLillo so intriguing as an illustration of literary oneworldedness is that it has become exemplary of the postwar-American literary world system. It is work that exports a singularly American style of one-world thinking even as it revels in taking apart the [End Page 385] commercial manipulation of the global psyche by American consumer capitalism. Product placement and brand advertising, treated as purveyors of mind control and as constitutive elements of paranoid plot structure, have only served, ironically enough, to consolidate the symbolic capital of American literary postmodernity.

Writing about Pynchon in a 2005 issue of Book Forum, DeLillo remarked, "The scale of his work, large in geography and unafraid of major subjects, helped us locate our fiction not only in small anonymous corners, human and ever-essential, but out there as well, in the sprawl of high imagination and collective dream" (DeLillo, Untitled 30). What I have tried to suggest here is that the world system mapped by Pynchon and DeLillo's psychogeographical "out there" coincides with an American paradigm of oneworldedness hatched in the 1960s at the zenith of Cold War paranoia. It is this American-style pattern of delusional democracy (given new impetus by the second Bush administration's consistent derailment of efforts to reduce poverty, pollution, disease, economic equality, and global standards of justice) that, in the view of philosopher Peter Singer, obstructs the possibility of an ethical one-world. Singer's world citizens, abstracted from history and nation, would be bound together by a common dedication to distributive justice on a planetary scale. In a complementary vein, Etienne Balibar seeks to redeem oneworldedness through an ethic of transnational citizenship that would bolster international law, soften borders as zones of hospitality, and pluralize politics by wresting the right to representation from the class of elites. In Balibar's framework, to "transnationalize" is an active verb connoting a utopian planetarity and that would apportion (within actually existing nations) the right to citizenship and economic welfare in equal measure to all humans. To transnationalize American literary studies in these terms, following a distributive ethics of justice, would entail using paranoia politically to weaken the system of delusional democracy that keeps America in the grip of a homogenized cultural program. To transnationalize American literature (and its criticism) would entail breaking "the system" that aligns American monoculturalism with unipolar thought, unilateralist politics, and a distinctly noncomparatist approach to "global" literary studies.