Corporatizing Life in a World System with Thomas Pynchon: “Networks of Interest” and Dispersed Organization

Early in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow, a medium performing a séance channels from the “other side” a comment on the dispersed nature of control in markets:

A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable.¹

Such illusions of human control free market capitalism’s “Invisible Hand,” the voice claims, result not only in crises or catastrophes, but more chillingly faith in human control of a complex global economy. When the global economic recession of 2007–8 hit, the Invisible Hand certainly got hogtied. The US Federal Reserve (the Fed) and Treasury used up to $13.3 trillion in public monies, bonds, and other financial mechanisms to protect overleveraged private companies from bankruptcy ostensibly to prevent the economic system itself from collapsing.² Money was floated to floundering financial institutions to counter the toxic assets created by overleveraged securitization mechanisms in the abstract and speculative services of financial capital.³ The Fed managed the economic “contagion” by orchestrating a series of mergers to create entities purportedly even bigger than “too big to fail.” Rather than dispersing financial risk, the federal government helped consolidate it in the name of control by using public monies and deferring any stringent regulations to protect an elite grouping of companies, saving “free market” capitalism paradoxically by fostering monopolies.⁴ The 2008 economic crisis repeated what other crises in 1870, 1890, 1907, 1929, 1973, 1987, 1989, 2000, and so forth bring to the fore in the US context: the public assumes the risk and uncertainty of private enterprise in moments of crisis, but in stable moments profits are kept privatized. Whereas the financial bailouts were frequently described as historical and unprecedented, I will argue that such crises are remarkably familiar for readers of Thomas Pynchon thanks to his historical imagination and critique of corporatism.

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow diagnoses and critiques corporatist processes by focusing on the symbiotic relationship of statist organizations and commerce with the IG, the Interessengemeinschaft, translated as “networks of interests” or “communities of interest.” The IG represents a cartel-like system of organization: a monopoly of vertically and horizontally integrated industries that are to be self-sufficient and self-regulating corporate entities incorporated into a transnational network. The historical company IG Farben, most famous for developing Zyklon B gas for the Nazi death camps, provides the model for Pynchon to describe complex integrative forces that transcend the nation-state and challenge the limited ways we understand organization as structured and cumulative. IG Farben had its own banks, research institutions, and patent offices in global business centers, and functioned as a transnational network of variegated statist and economic organizations within several different nation-states that created populations of workers and consumers of its products and services.

This essay interrogates with Pynchon the interesting synergy between economic and governmental forces, where both play a symbiotic relationship that might best be described as corporatist, a physical process of consolidation through paradoxical differentiation. Corporatism is the bringing together of business, workers, variegated lobbying interest groups (military, economic, social welfare, housing, health care, educational, and so forth), and the federal government to plan and conduct courses of action in society, synthesizing cultural, economic, and governmental sectors. In sum, corporatism embodies the relationship of different constituencies, or to use the more common term, stakeholders, in the crafting of civil society, a process that I contend has a long and unthought history. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow offers a novel way to reimagine corporatism’s complex, flexible systems of control, consolidation, and paradoxical fragmentation.

Pynchon has been prosaically called the postmodern author...