- Beyond Anarchist Miracles:The Crying of Lot 49 and Network Aesthetics
Exiled Mexican anarchist Jesús Arrabal delivers the most affecting anarchist vision in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). In the wee hours of the morning, in the midst of a surreal scene of chance encounters and uncanny recognitions, Jesús Arrabal addresses protagonist Oedipa Maas:
You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, señá, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle.1
Although it is tempting to conclude that Lot 49 offers the same rueful faith in anarchist miracles as Jesús Arrabal, I contend that the novel recognizes and is insistently troubled by its politically regressive and anachronistic implications. It is regressive precisely because it is so miraculous. Understood as "automatic," the revolution takes place "without effort," in the absence of any political struggle. Worlds collide, and "the soul's talent for consensus" simply takes over. Thus Jesús Arrabal's anarchist miracle, like Christian eschatology, is a license for withdrawal from politics altogether. We need only wait for worlds to collide.
Jesús Arrabal's anarchist miracle is also anachronistic because it depends upon the existence of separate and discrete worlds— [End Page 583] "another world" and "this one"—as the prerequisite for revolutionary cataclysm. However, rather than giving us "another world" to ignite revolutionary potential in "this one," Lot 49 gives us a proliferation of networks that are always already interconnected. Rather than posing one network against another in the name of revolution, then, Pynchon's novel explores the potential for anarchist transformations inherent in network interconnectivity. In the process, Lot 49 registers two attendant ways in which anarchist conceptions of revolution in the 1960s diverge from their modernist predecessors: (1) revolution transforms from a finite, cataclysmic event into a processive practice that takes place over time and, (2) the networks through which neoliberalism exercises its power complicate anarchist identifications of the state as the seat of domination.2 As it registers these developments, Lot 49 struggles with and against the very quiescence implicit in Jesús Arrabal's "spontaneous" and "automatic" anarchist miracle.3
The novel's effort to locate the potential for anarchist revolution in the material conditions of network interconnectivity takes place at an historical moment that significantly exacerbates the challenge. Specifically, Lot 49's effort to forge an anti-capitalist anarchism on the basis of network interconnectivity is ensnared by its recognition of the political and economic networks deployed by the New Right in the mid-sixties California in which the novel takes place. Though California is the emblematic site of sixties counterculture, it is also ground zero for the generation of the New Right and the place where neoliberal policy first expressed itself as Reaganomics.4 It is within this context that the political implications of the novel's focus on underground postal networks comes into view, for conservatives in California built their movement precisely by exploiting the US mail system.5 As Mike Davis writes, "[t]he extensive mailing lists that William S. Warner collected for Goldwater were a revolutionary step forward in … providing the resources for it to survive and grow as a network of institutionalized single-issue movements and multipurpose umbrella groups" (Prisoners of the American Dream, 168). Two years after Goldwater's bid for the presidency, that very network of movements and umbrella groups forged through the mail was powerful enough to carry Reagan into the governor's mansion in Sacramento. Thus the New Right gained its power precisely by adopting the network formation that anti-capitalist anarchism continues to identify with its own spontaneous, decentralized, and nonhierarchical principles of self-organization and governance.6 Even more than its anti-government rhetoric...