Inherent Vice, Aproductivity, and Narrative

Overwhelmed and Underworked: Inherent Vice, Aproductivity, and Narrative Miles Taylor A Thesis in The Department of Film Studies Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Film Studies) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada May 2020 © Miles Taylor 2020 Signature Page This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Miles Taylor Entitled: Overwhelmed and Underworked: Inherent Vice, Aproductivity, and Narrative And submitted in Partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Film Studies) Complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final Examining Committee: Examiner Luca Caminati Examiner Mary Esteve Supervisor Martin Lefebvre Approved by Marc Steinberg 2020 Rebecca Duclos Taylor iii Abstract Overwhelmed and Underworked: Inherent Vice, Aproductivity, and Narrative Miles Taylor This thesis proposes an artistic mode called aproductivity, which arises with the secular crisis of capitalism in the early 1970’s. It reads aproductivity as the aesthetic reification of Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, a peculiar form of philosophy that refuses to move forward, instead producing dialectics without synthesis. The first chapter examines the economic history aproductivity grows out of, as well as its relation to Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “The End of History.” After doing so, the chapter explores negative dialectics and aproductivity in relation to Adam Phillips’ concept of the transformational object. In the second chapter, the thesis looks at the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice (2009), as well as the 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of the same name. It offers a reading of the two as allegories for life under late capitalism, with particular focus on the breakdown of narrative and the search for something that will make sense of a world where the logics of capitalism no longer function correctly. Taylor iv Acknowledgements First thanks must go to my parents and grandparents, who have supported me unconditionally as I’ve tilted at various theoretical windmills. Every written text reveals the author’s epistemological origins, and this thesis is no different. My mother’s belief in storytelling and father’s lawyerly love of argumentation are etched across this paper. Furthermore, this thesis would be markedly less clear without my grandfathers’ regular cross-examinations. Even at 91, his lucidity is enviable. My grandmother taught me about cards and Calder, how to blow bubbles and analyze a painting. My understanding of ‘culture’—however one might understand such a loaded term—would be lacking without her. Within the context of the thesis itself, I must thank Sarika Joglekar and Riley O’Shaughnessy for rewatching Inherent Vice with me, allowing me to talk through ideas in real time. They, Elena Altheman, Tanvi Rajvanshi, and Jonatan Campbell all put up with me droning on about Adorno for the past two years, a fate some might call worse than death. Donovan Stewart constantly pushes me to read more philosophy, and the sections on Teddy (as we jokingly refer to him) benefitted greatly from our various conversations over the years while wandering through Berlin or San Francisco or Atlanta. The portion of this thesis on the modern economy could not have been written without Nicholas Oxford, who keeps me apprised and up- to-date on every new scam masquerading as a start-up. WeWork may be bankrupt, but its stupidity will live on in our hearts. The opening and conclusion of the paper grew out of conversations with Jenson Lowry about contemporary music. Thank you to Matt Ellis; most of the ideas on narrative and late capital in this thesis originated in our conversations at the GCB. He has been a guide through the world of academia, and the person most responsible for my intellectual development over the past five years. I owe him immensely. He also graciously took the time to read an early draft of the subsection on the end of history. Jacque Khalip introduced me to the writing of Adam Phillips and the concept Transformational Object, and you could likely trace the seeds of this thesis back to his class “On Boredom.” If the seeds originated under Khalip, they germinated in Gertrude Koch’s graduate seminar on realism, where I first wrote about Inherent Vice. I was an undergraduate she didn’t know, and yet she did not hesitate to invite me to join the class. When working on this thesis, I emailed her asking where I could find a translation of her paper “Mimesis and Bilderverbot.” She Taylor v sent back not only the English translation, but also the Portuguese and French editions, just in case I needed them. It is rare to meet someone so brilliant and generous. Phil Rosen’s classes introduced me to film theory, and he was constantly patient as I misunderstood he and his colleagues’ ideas. Thank you to Yulia Glushneva for leading the thesis workshop and providing feedback on clunky early drafts. Thank you to the rest of the workshop—Patrick Woodstock, Claire Grey, Cole Armitage, and Victoria Berndt—for reading the overly-long passages I kept sending in. Masha Salazkina went above and beyond in her meetings with me about my research proposal, spending hours helping me figure out what exactly I wanted wonder. Special acknowledgement must go to Martin Lefebvre, who was immensely helpful as a supervisor, constantly pushing me in new and interesting directions. Finally, I want to thank my sister for always keeping me honest. I love you, Alix. Taylor vi Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 A Note on Form 5 The Constellation 7 CHAPTER ONE 11 Introduction 11 Outlining a Economic History 12 The End of History 23 Negative Dialectics, Aproductivity, and the Transformational Object 29 Negative Dialectics 31 Aproductivity and Adorno’s Aesthetics 36 CHAPTER TWO 46 Marlowe and the Doc 47 Illusions of Detecting 51 Uncertain Endings 56 Computational Futures 58 Voices in the Karmic Thermals 59 Modernity and Universalized Time 59 Modernity, the Contingent, and Film 61 Time after Industry 63 Sortilège’s Seconds 65 Inside/Outside 69 Swimming Circles in the Sea of Time 71 Broken Down Linearity 72 Taylor vii Uneventful Particulars 74 False Subjectivity and Filmic Enunciators 75 Land Plots 81 Scenic Moves 89 The Highway 90 Learning From Las Vegas 94 May Day 97 Public Space 99 Utopia Lost 101 Gordita Beach: Site of Searching 104 Arrapentimiento: Systems of Collapse 112 Lemuria, The Absent Alternative 116 Utopia Banned 121 Profit Perversions 122 Messianic Waves 125 Lost Capitalists 131 CONCLUSION 136 WORKS CITED 141 Taylor 1 Introduction “Yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire . .” -Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009) There is a sound tormenting my generation, a spacey reverb that has infiltrated and overtaken contemporary music, expressing itself in the hazy guitarwork of mainstream rock and the ghostly drums and wavy beats of rap and R&B. The 70’s echo in the noise, George Harrison’s extended riffs and Brian Eno’s ambient albums haunting us. But the sound does not strike me as “hauntology” in Mark Fisher’s understanding of the term. To Fisher, hauntology involves a return to the popular modernism of the seventies because they were the last time an alternative was formulated in culture, when a “popular modernism” built on the structures of social democracy longed for a utopian future that went beyond our world (“What is Hauntology” 18). Hauntology is the product of a world that does not exist. Rather, the reverb seems to me an attempt to capture the atmosphere we live in, one where events from the past suffuse the present.1 It is no surprise that the sound’s dominance coincides with “vibe” re-entering the popular lexicon. As people struggle to explain what current music is expressing, “it’s a vibe” has become a catchphrase. What is the vibe being conveyed? Some mixture of being both engulfed and abandoned, being stuck in a world where things are constantly happening but no one is doing anything. Song lyrics are filled with “again” and “already’s,” reflecting a situation where everything has already happened and the alternatives have been foreclosed. These two aspects—the 70’s ghostly presence and the “vibe” described above—strike me as linked. The turn to the 70’s in the contemporary moment is a recognition of kinship, that something similar to now was happening then. This provokes two interrelated questions, which together form the basis of my thesis: Why is there this turn to the 1970’s, what connects that 1 Reverb, short for reverberation, refers to when a sound continues on after it has been produced. Taylor 2 decade with our present? And, more importantly for my work (considering I am a film scholar, not a political economist), what happens to film and literature and their narratives in these moments? In regards to the first question, I follow the work of Endnotes to argue that in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, we enter into a “secular crisis of capitalism.” As I argue in chapter one, at that time, capitalism reaches a point where it seems it can no longer expand. From the 1980’s to the late 2000’s, this is more or less obfuscated by neoliberalism, which combines finance capital with an ideology Fisher calls “business ontology” (Fisher CR 17).

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