The University of Texas at Austin

Law in Popular Culture collection

Oklahoma City University Law Review
Volume 24, Number 3 (1999)
reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review

THE STATE LAW ENFORCEMENT APPARATUS AS AMERICA: AUTHORITY, ARBITRARINESS, AND THE "FORCE OF LAW" IN VINELAND

RICHARD E. BURKET*

       In Vineland, Pynchon turns his systems-critical eye to the legal system. His parody of the logic and operations of the "War on Drugs" offers a view of the law quite similar to that offered by the Critical Legal Studies movement. But rather than simply "uncovering" the "real" workings of the law, Pynchon instead seems more concerned with why the public has come to not only accept but enjoy and demand more and more police power and the increasingly forceful, even brutal, enforcement of the law. He locates the root of this situation in a perverse combination of paranoia and pleasure. Paranoia that law enforcement can and will arbitrarily target people simply because it furthers the interests of those who hold the reins of power breeds complacency and resignation. At the same time, media offer innumerable spectacles of the law being forcefully applied, turning them into entertainment which provides pleasurable consolation to the emptiness of resignation, resulting in demand for more such spectacles. This combination, Vineland insists, is no accident--those in power actively solicit and cultivate these responses because it facilitates the maintenance and extension of their domain and furthers their interests.

I.
    "Zoyd had come to consider the 'legal system' a swamp, where a man had to be high-flotation indeed not to be sucked down forever into its snake-infested stench. Elmhurst
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[his lawyer] cheerfully admitted that this was the case. 'Am I complaining? Do plumbers complain about shit?"'1
     The status of systems and their relations to individual agency has always been a central concern of Thomas Pynchon, and Vineland extends this concern to one system in particular: the law. While Pynchon's earlier works provide foreground for the ontological instability that characterizes systems and the uncertainty that this instability produces, Vineland examines how the ontological instability of law as a system can produce certainty rather than uncertainty. Rather than being left with proliferating possibilities, characters in Vineland are instead faced with very clear material practices that fill the void of the system's instability: arbitrary practices that further particular interests, making arbitrariness the defining quality of the "nature" of "the system." The certainty this produces manifests itself in the form of a pervasive sense of inevitability, a sort of cynically resigned paranoia, for the novel's central characters. In contrast to the way that anxious paranoia is the result of uncertainty in works like The Crying of Lot 492 and Gravity's Rainbow,3 the cynical paranoia of Vineland is the product of certainty about the law--not certainty that its procedures will be consistent, "fair," or "just"--but simply that the law will be applied, through force, in the manner most instrumental for the particular interests holding power over its enforcement. As Zoyd says, "they need to put people in the joint, if they can't do that, what are they?"4 Thus, anyone is at risk of being targeted should their prosecution (or persecution) be useful for either of what Pynchon presents as the twin ends of law: the personal interests of its agents, or the State's larger interest in order, and in maintaining and extending its domain of control.
     In other words, the cliched rhetoric that the United States is governed by the rule of law, rather than the rule of men, is shown to be a farce. The fact that law is made by and, more crucially, enforced by human beings shows this opposition to be a false one that, at best, is an attempt to minimize the role of arbitrary personal and political motives in the functioning of the legal system and, at worst (and more likely), is an intentional deception built into American ideology to mask the real

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operations of power involved in maintaining order. Instead of a disinterested, procedural form of law with some ideal of "justice," and a shared conception of "the Good," as its regulatory principles, in Vineland, we have a Justice Department that operates arbitrarily under the aegis of the "War on Drugs" to pursue personal agendas and to stifle dissent. Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor, uses his status within law enforcement to pursue a completely personal agenda. He is out to track down and control his favorite "snitch" and former lover, Frenesi Gates, and to make the life of her estranged husband, Zoyd Wheeler, miserable. He does this through various governmental agencies, using them as his own personal police force. Further, the occupation of Northern California serves not simply to eradicate illegal drugs, but is also an extension of the government's historic attempts to subvert potentially resistant enclaves of dissent. Thus, the War on Drugs is presented as merely a convenient cover story for the real war against anything that might threaten the ability of those in power to maintain and extend their domain of control.
     But Pynchon goes beyond simply noting how specific interests (rather than abstract universals) always govern the application and enforcement of the law; he also shows that this arbitrariness is not an aberration or anomaly particular to individuals like Vond and his cronies, as legal formalists and positivists might argue, but rather is precisely what makes the law effective as an instrument of social order. However, while law is an interested application of power rather than a neutral, disinterested regulatory process, it does not work only through brute force. The imposition of the State and its agents' wills in an overtly violent manner alone might foment dissent. To avert this possibility requires the hegemonization of consent that can make its subjects complicit in their own repression--make them want it, and even enjoy it. What makes the law so effective is the production of a desire for its forceful application, and for Pynchon, popular culture (television in particular) is the means through which this desire is manufactured and solicited. Potential resistance becomes the spectacle of law-in-action as the police forcefully subdue "criminals." The more force, the greater the spectacle, the more enjoyment. Ultimately, desire for the spectacles of "the Tube" extends into the "real world" resulting in the canalization of desire toward authority.
     What emerges is a portrait of late twentieth-century America in which critiques of the interestedness of law and its imbrication in relations of power are ultimately irrelevant. Pynchon insists that we already know that law is nothing without its enforcement and that enforcement is nothing

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without force; we also know that law enforcement is far from a neutral, disinterested practice. Because of the history of governmental repression during such periods as the 1930s and 1960s, a history Vineland addresses directly, in the 1980s and 1990s the situation is one in which we do not need to be told that law is subject to, indeed, perhaps constituted by, the will and interests of those in power and enforced through deception and violence. We not only know that this is the case, but we simply would not have it any other way. It is the process by which this acceptance and enjoyment has come about that is the primary focus of Vineland.

II.

     The role that force, power, and interpretation play in the operation of the legal system has been a central issue for many critiques of the law. Perhaps coincidentally, some commentators have marked 1984 as a privileged moment in the formation of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and "Law and Literature" movements--the same moment in which Pynchon sets his critique of the law in Vineland, though the insights of CLS probably have little to do with this in light of the echoes of Orwell Pynchon builds into the narrative.5 One of the central assumptions of CLS and other recent critics of law and legal theory is that legal positivism, which they see as the dominant view of law in the United States, rationalizes and justifies jurisprudential and public faith in a "false" vision of the law. These critics argue that legal positivism's claims that the law is an autonomous, neutral, disinterested, and closed system of rules cover up the "real" operations of the law which are fundamentally violent and bound up in relations of power, and the system is closed only in the sense that it manages to exclude other interpretations through its power of normative justification and ideological dominance. But Pynchon's novel, though it has certain affinities with, and echoes of, certain parts of these critiques, has at best an ambivalent relation to them, most significantly because in the era of Reagan's "law and order" policies and the dominance of conservative

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ideology, such critiques are ultimately irrelevant to those whom such critiques would purportedly benefit because they are already all-too familiar with the force of law, and have even come to enjoy it.
     Legal positivism in the vein of H.L.A. Hart, which has been dominant in Anglo-American jurisprudence, argues that the law is not merely "orders backed by threats" but rather a system of rules, a self-enclosed system that can generate its own elements and procedures as part of the process of the system's self-perpetuation. Hart argues that legal systems are based on a "union of primary rules of obligation," with "secondary rules."6 The former "are concerned with the actions that individuals must or must not do," while the latter are "concerned with the primary rules themselves. They specify the ways in which the primary rules may be conclusively ascertained, introduced, eliminated, varied, and the fact of their violation conclusively determined."7 In short, primary rules establish the initial elements of the system, and secondary rules establish the system's procedures for applying these rules, eliminating the "defects" of uncertainty, fixity, and inefficiency from primary rules. Once the "master rule" of recognition is set forth to establish the hierarchy of the elements within the system, the rest of the system's procedures logically fall into place, and these processes govern an objective application of general laws to particular cases.
     Though Hart does acknowledge the "open texture" of laws, an indeterminacy of meaning due to the inherent limitations of language, and rejects the possibility of a purely immanent, "mechanical" jurisprudence, he sees this indeterminacy as significant only infrequently, in marginal cases: "the life of the law consists to a very large extent in the guidance both of officials and private individuals by determinate rules which ... do not require from them a fresh judgment from case to case."8 The important thing, though, is that there is a system of rules in place governing the procedures for resolving these indeterminate cases by "rendering initially vague standards determinate, in resolving the uncertainties of statutes, or in developing and qualifying rules only broadly communicated by authoritative precedents."9 Thus, even though choices must still be made at some point, the system of rules prevents them from being arbitrary or interested.

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     This view of the law as an autonomous, rational system of rules has been extended and complicated in the work of systems theorists such as Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann sees systems as primarily concerned with the reduction of complexity and with theirown self-replication as relatively autonomous components of a larger social system. In his view, the conventional notion of a means/ends model for rational action by individuals does not apply to the structure of rationality in social systems. If, for Weber, a system is rational so long as it can devise a means to accomplish whatever (arbitrary) end it has at a given moment, Luhmann would replace this causation-oriented theory with a "functional systems theory" that moves beyond focusing solely on the internal ordering of systems to analyze the more complex interactions between a system and its environment. A system is not completely closed but rather is "a group of activities that is open and sensitive to its environment and that works over and compensates for environmental pressures."10 Thus, means become more important than ends, and only through an input/output model that examines the way a system "seeks out and processes inputs from the environment and sends them back ... for the sake of its self-preservation,"11 can it be effectively understood how systems work.
     From Luhmann's perspective, the ends of the system are not "domination," as Weber would have it, but are its own perpetuation and autonomy. In terms of the legal system:
Legal domination is limited only by posited, formal rules .... [which are] the most rational ... because the most elastic. For Weber, this is because it makes obedience available as a means for any arbitrary end. For systems theory, this is because it offers the best possibilities of keeping the system secure and adaptable ....12
    ....
    ... [This] free[s] the system from a concern with the motivational structure of its members, and thus with all its own personal and social conditions.... [Allowing] bureaucratic systems to focus one-sidedly on their demarcation from nonmembers.13
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In short, it allows the system to focus on its own reflexive processes for self-maintenance as a relatively autonomous system and to differentiate itself from its surrounding environment.
     Systems like the legal system, according to Luhmann, are not totally closed. They are cognitively open in the sense that they can and do adapt to their environment, but they are "normatively" (or "operationally") closed. The achievement of normative closure is the keystone of the legal system's existence as a system: for it to be autonomous, the validity of its decisions and practices must come from internal justifications. Thus, the system has built into it a recursive process by which it can attain this closure. Recursivity defines normativity only in relation to internal norms already in place as they are authorized and justified by the system itself. Because these decisions are primarily about decisions themselves rather than the resulting actions, justifying them because they conform to an internally organized process rather than any external valuation of the actions themselves, "a law of any content whatsoever can gain legitimate legal validity."14
     Because society is a highly complex environment, decision-making processes must have a complex organization to cope with it, and the processes must reflexively apply to the system to attain the level of organization and sophistication necessary to coordinate decisions. It is here, in Luhmann's view, that law becomes disentangled from ideology. Ideology is focused on the evaluation of values, the determination of what specific consequences of actions are preferable to others. In a complex environment, many values can be preferred in varying contexts, and "goal programs" are rationalized in order to reduce value conflicts. Law, on the other hand, has a different relation to ends. Positive law operates through "conditional programs" that connect specific consequences to clearly defined states of affairs; its validity depends upon providing justification for particular decisions. In complex societies, this fragments the power of the law and prevents it from being accumulated or consolidated into a coherent political power: "It can be used only for making decisions about individual questions, whose premises are always so exactly formulated that a thoroughgoing political ideology can no longer be developed from the operations of the legal system."15

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     Reducing the influence of politics, power, interests, etc., is a primary goal of legal positivists and formalists whose fundamental goal is to eliminate contingency and indeterminacy from the system. While for Hart contingency is a "defect," Luhmann acknowledges that contingency is not fully eradicable. Law is fundamentally contingent because, for an event to become a matter of law, it must first be decided whether to "'juridify' or 'not to juridify,"'16 and these decisions are based on numerous empirical preconditions. But once this decision is made, the system takes over and a chain reaction occurs, triggering clarifying interpretations and further decisions. These, incorporated into the institutionalized reflexive processes of the system, generate more and
more thoroughly articulated [interpretations that make it] easier ... to "discover" legal problems in numerous situations of everyday life and to rely upon a background awareness of possible decisions .... This routine grouping of contingent decisions into general or typical cases promotes the discreteness or relative autonomy of a special subsystem for communicating about law.17
This sets up a clear boundary across which one must cross to enter into the legal system.
     The purported result of all this is the elimination of individual agency and the influence of subjectivity on the part of those persons who are members of the system. Even the "master rule" that establishes the initial hierarchies and elements of the system does not come from outside the system in order to establish its foundation; rather, the system's "thesis" arises from within the system itself. As Drucilla Cornell notes:
For Luhmann, the thesis of law cannot be the will of the legislator; rather, the thesis is the already-in-place legal system, with its recursive system of normative, self-reproducing definitions .... Recursivity ... replaces the assumption of an a priori which could serve as an outside ground for justice by which to justify legal principles within a legal system. Without recursivity there would 
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be no self-reproducing system that could come full circle to claim itself as its own origin.18
     For both Hart and Luhmann, the law as an autonomous system of self-generated interpretation and justification is the way that law escapes the subjectivity of interpretative practice that would consign it to the realm of the political where power and interests govern decision-making. The law can be neutral and disinterested precisely because, as a system, it generates its own interpretations from within the normative procedures that define it as a system in the first place.
     Challenges to this model have emphasized the way that no interpretation is  "innocent" or neutral, and that each decision in the legal process by necessity represses other alternatives. Thus, interpretation is central to the law, and power and contingency cannot be elided because of the way that a given interpretation is predicated upon the rejection of other alternatives. As Cornell puts it, "no line of precedent can fully determine a particular outcome in a particular case, because the rule itself is always in the process of reinterpretation as it is applied. It is interpretation that gives us the rule and not the other way around."19 This, of course, results in what has been termed the "indeterminacy thesis," the insistence that a rule does not necessarily lead to a certain conclusion for a new case because, each time a rule is applied, its very applicability is the result of an interpretation (the case must be interpreted in such a way that it falls under one preexisting rule rather than another), as is the actual application of the rule to the particular case. Thus, contrary to Luhmann's claims, ideology cannot be separated from the operation of the legal system. In fact, claims that the system itself is autonomous and has its own internal rationality independent from that of its operators are, according to CLS, themselves ideological, masking the role that subjective, arbitrary, political interests play in the decision-making process.
     According to critics of positivism (and views that law is an autonomous, rational system of rules that can minimize, if not quite eliminate, the role of interpretation and subjectivity, and thus politics, ideology, and power), the indeterminacy so agonizingly admitted into the system as a "defect" by Hart, and so elaborately theorized away by Luhmann, can never adequately constrain meaning to the point where this

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could occur. Moreover, as Stanley Fish notes, the imposition of rules that constrain meanings is an act of power in itself: "It is first and last a question of power in relation to the putting in place of constraints [on interpretation]."20 Contrary to the situation of Hart, for whom plain meaning--interpretations that carry an "authoritative mark"21 that can "stand firm against interpretive manipulation--prevents the rule of law from being replaced by the "rule of persuasion .... [which would render] authority structurally unstable, embodied not in some abiding core ... but in the words of whatever person or persons happens to have sway" at any given time,22 the indeterminacy of meaning is not a "defect," but rather is intrinsic to language. "Plain meanings" simply do not exist, except as they have been forcefully asserted through interpretative acts backed by institutional power.
     From this perspective, law cannot have a fully independent mechanism for deciding between interpretations; as Hart himself acknowledges, it is practice that is the source of a rule. Proof that a rule exists is "established by reference to actual practice: to the way in which courts identify what is to count as law."23 If practice determines the rule, then the rule is a product of external, empirical factors rather than pre-existing constraints on interpretation from within the system. And if law is fundamentally grounded in practice, then it is always open to contingency and thus to power and interests, and it can never be separated from acts of force.
     Thus, Hart's claim that it is law as a system of determinate rules that stands between us and "the free use of violence"24 is revealed to have an overly simplistic concept of violence in which violence is only unauthorized violence. To cite Fish:
The force of the law is ... indistinguishable from the forces it would oppose. Or to put [it] another way: there is always a gun at your head .... the interests that seek to compel you are appealing and therefore pressuring only to the extent they already live within you, and indeed are you. In the end, we are always self-compelled, 
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coerced by forces--beliefs, convictions, reasons, desires--from which we cannot move one inch away.25
   Law, as a practice, can never be "neutral" because practice is always situated and ultimately rests on the interpretive acts of human beings. Of course there are constraints on interpretation, but these constraints are themselves products of interpretive force; their existence does not diminish the role of interpretation or force in law.
     Thus, there are always elements of arbitrariness and contingency in legal practice. Elaborate systems of rules cannot eliminate it. Nor does the development of a complex, reflexive system reduce the violence inherent to the law. This line of argument, made from various perspectives (deconstructionist, pragmatist, and others), tends to emphasize the violence and force of law in the abstract sense in that it operates through forceful acts that further certain interests over others and coercively enforces norms that do violence to the differences of certain "others." At the very base of this is the idea "that law is always an authorized force,a force that justifies itself or is justified in applying itself, even if this justification may be judged from elsewhere to be unjust or unjustifiable."26 As Derrida argues, "'enforceability' is not an exterior or secondary possibility that [is] added ... to the law" to make it operational:
The word "enforceability" reminds us that there is no such thing as law  (droit) that doesn't imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being "enforced," applied by force .... There is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or enforceability of the law without force....27
     Law not only operates through force and is predicated upon its enforceability, but the very establishment of the law can only come about through a violent performative force that declares its own existence and authorizes itself.
     But while this insight neither contradicts arguments like those of Hart or Luhmann, nor those of CLS critics (all of whom are concerned with the

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ways the system can internally justify its practices, but who disagree over the status of these justifications), responses vary widely, particularly over the issue of "justice." Hart and Luhmann see justice (in any substantive sense) as an irrelevant concept to positive law since it is a notion generated from outside the system:
To insist upon truth as a value when confronted with ideology and to insist upon justice as a value when faced with positive law make little sense if it cannot be known what precisely should be preferred and if every attempt in this direction turns ideological. The old criteria have lost their critical and innovative function.... They retain only symbolic functions: they serve to express good intentions, to appeal to good will, to express a pre-supposed consensus, and to postulate the possibility of mutual understanding.28
     Luhmann's statement on the matter is emphatic: with a "depoliticized" law that operates only at the level of particular decisions, values like "truth [or] justice ... degenerate into ciphers for indeterminate and unspecifiable complexity."29 The impossibility of a (functional) relation between law and a substantive concept of justice is not limited to positivists like Hart and Luhmann. Stanley Fish, who critiques Hart and formalist arguments at length, also sees ideas of justice as functionally irrelevant to the operation of law because they are no less contingent and indeterminate than the meanings generated by the law and thus cannot constrain interpretation any better than the system's internal rules.
     There are many for whom this argument is problematic because, they assert, it operates as a cover or mask for the real, material violence done by the law, justifying it internally without any concern for those subjected to it. The argument that justice is merely an immanent concept meaning the law has been "impartially applied to all those and only those who are alike in having done what the law forbids," with "no prejudice or interest [deflecting the administrator from treating them 'equally,"'30 can legitimate any legal practice. Defining justice and legitimacy in this manner, though, according to Robert Cover, is to privilege an internal perspective (which Luhmann insists is the only relevant view) which leaves us unconcerned

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with those who are subjected to the law and its violence; it ignores the fact that the interpretations made in the application of law result in the imposition of actual violence upon others. Cover does not argue that things could really be different, since legal interpretation in general is "a practice incomplete without violence--because it depends upon the social practice of violence for its efficacy,"31 but sees the failure of legal theorists, even those who emphasize the role of power and force in law, to be concerned with the violent practice that results from interpretation as evidence that they are being snowed by an ideology which puts them in a position "analogous to ignoring the background screams or visible instruments of torture in an inquisitor's interrogation."32
     Thus, the law's pretense of being the foundation of social unity or the privileged domain upon which the systems that structure society are built is a mask for a violent imposition of a single normative view over the diverse interests of those subject to the law; and this "imperial" violence is materially manifested in the routine operations of the law, most visibly in the sentencing of a convicted defendant:
[E]xamine the event from the perspective of the defendant. The defendant's world is threatened. But he sits, usually quietly, as if engaged in a civil discourse. If convicted, the defendant customarily walks--escorted--to prolonged confinement, usually without significant disturbance to the civil appearance of the event. It is, of course, grotesque to assume that the civil facade is "voluntary" except in the sense that it represents the defendant's autonomous recognition of the overwhelming array of violence ranged against him, and of the hopelessness of resistance or outcry.33
     While legal and cultural theorists have gone to great lengths to describe, define, and debate the connections between law, interpretation, force, and violence, Pynchon would perhaps side with the critiques of both the "metaphysical" and material violence of the law, but with one qualification: "well, duh." In the setting of Vineland, it is a foregone conclusion that law is inseparable from force. As Cover notes, "the function of ideology is much more significant in justifying an order to those who principally

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benefit from it and who must defend it than it is in hiding the nature of the order from those who are its victims."34 In the world presented in Vineland, people are only all-too-aware that they are subjects of such orders and are potential "victims," either actually or potentially. For the common person, it seems, this "unmasking" of ideology is redundant, irrelevant, because s/he has never experienced the law as anything other than the interested application of force. While a certain "postmodern" sensibility of cynicism regarding the grands recits of ordering systems is clearly invoked with the novel's setting in the 1980s, Pynchon does not claim that it has ever really been any different. We see the same relationship between the State, law, and violence in the characters' recollections of, and the novel's flashbacks to, the 1930s and 1960s. What seems to concern Pynchon above all else is not the "force of law" but rather the passive acceptance of it, and even desire for it, in the late twentieth century. The most disturbing change between the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s is not that the law has somehow "fallen" from an existence as a neutral process furthering the interests of "justice"--indeed, it has never been that--but rather the absence of any opposition to the forces being applied.
     If the 1930s and 1960s are privileged moments in Pynchon's historical consciousness as periods of struggle between the "official" vision of American society enforced by law and an alternative vision (of the "old" and "new" left, respectively), the 1980s are a moment when no other vision seems possible and resistance seems futile, or would be, anyway, if anyone bothered with it. And if, because of oppositional perspectives, law in the 1930s and 1960s needed to "dress" itself up in ideological garb about the defense of "America," the pretense does not even seem necessary anymore. Dressing up the imperial tactics of a nascent paramilitary police state as the "War on Drugs" seems half-hearted at best, merely pro forma, while those caught up in its crackdown know that this "war" has nothing fundamentally to do with the defense of the nation or even drugs. As Zoyd tells Mucho Maas after Mucho parrots official anti-drug messages:
This can't be you talking, it must be the fuckin' government, which this is all their trip anyway, 'cause they need to put people in the joint, if they can't do that, what are they? ain't shit, might as well be another show on the Tube. They didn't even start goin' after dope till Prohibition was repealed, suddenly here's all these federal 
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cops lookin' at unemployment, they got to come up with somethin' quick, so Harry J. Anslinger invents the Marijuana Menace [...]35


III.

     The ontological instability and uncertainty that characterizes systems of knowledge, meaning, power, and indeed perhaps all systems in general as they relate to order has been a much discussed topic in relation to the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Indeed, most of his oeuvre has emphasized the ways that various systems fail to provide certainty and security for the subject in the world; instead, they elicit fear, confusion, and paranoia. A central problem of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow in particular, is the fundamental uncertainty of just what, or who, is operating a given system. Is there some powerful person or organization in control? Is there a conspiracy? Is it all just coincidence? Do systems have their own autonomy and logic, leaving human agency irrelevant? Or is there even a system in place at all? As Molly Hite describes the situation in these novels:
     Pynchon's questing characters begin with the assumption that ...  "everything is connected ...." At some point, however, they are forced to reflect on the status of such connections. The question is always whether inferred relations are somehow inherent in reality or imposed by a consciousness that cannot "bear for long" a condition in which "nothing is connected to anything." Real relations and imagined relations turn out to have equally ominous implications. If the relations are real, they constitute an ironic argument from design testifying to the existence of a malign or at least antihuman designer .... In this case, if the quest does get at the truth about the way things are, the truth is that human beings are completely under the control of outside forces.... If the relations are imaginary ... the quest reveals nothing but a desire to discern connections among a random assembly of wholly unrelated details.... The questing hero becomes the paranoid, intuiting connections out of his own need for order ....36
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This is precisely the sort of dilemma in which Oedipa Maas finds herself in The Crying of Lot 49 when she comes up with "[t]hose symmetrical four" possibilities that could explain the strange discoveries she is not completely certain that she has made: she muses,
Either you have stumbled [...] onto a network [...] maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life [....] Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you [....] Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut [....]37
The result of this sort of ontological uncertainty regarding systems of order is a crisis in agency for the subject. The individual is unable to discern whether he or she is truly a subject or is instead subjected to some external agency or force.38
     Vineland, however, marks a distinct shift away from Pynchon's earlier concern with these relations between ontology and agency. Indeterminacy does not lead to anxiety or "agency panic" and thus to a "quest" for answers to the question of agency. Rather than questing for the source of control, characters in Vineland already know what the prime mover and ordering force of the world is: power. More specifically, the power of the State as it is wielded through law enforcement. This, of course, does not decrease the level of paranoia; it simply makes it justified, even necessary. If, in Pynchon's earlier work the uncertainty and ambiguity of systems generates paranoia over the interests, motives, and agents of power, Vineland presents paranoia as a "proper" response to the arbitrarily applied coercive, repressive power of the State as it is manifested in the late twentieth century in the form of a highly militarized and nearly omnipotent law enforcement apparatus, "the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself 'America."'39
     As Hite notes, "Vineland is Pynchon's first novel to name current political names,"40 and it explicitly identifies these names with the systems

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of domination the characters face. The "plot" is no longer anonymous and uncertain--no longer a Them, Tristero, or V.--"it's the whole Reagan program [t]o dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past."41 The Reagan 1980s, with its "War on Drugs," paramilitary State Defense Forces, Re-education Camps, and the like are described, as Paul Maltby notes, as engaged in a process of "[e]ndo-colonization--the 'pacification' and total administration of one's own population by means of intensive military-policing."42
     But contrary to Maltby's argument that Pynchon is responding directly to the  "consolidation of bourgeois-rationalist culture"43 and its "technological-rationalist ideology" to challenge the logic of "late capitalism" and its attempt to establish a "total system,"44 Pynchon's historical vision is a little broader and perhaps more synchronic. As Pynchon layers the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s through stories of various members of Frenesi's family and their leftist political struggles, he does so around what appears to be a common logic of the State as primarily interested in its own self-perpetuation by eradicating dissent and eliminating the viability of alternative possibilities for social organization. The 1980s and "late capital" are not "new" in their pursuit of this domination; they simply seem to be more effective at attaining it. And the means for this success is not the State itself but rather television as it has penetrated both the homes and minds of nearly every American, "structur[ing] the consciousness of the population, [colonizing] the universe of discourse by imposing the terms in which people understand themselves and their social reality, by fixing the coordinates of thought."45 Moreover, the fact that the State and law enforcement (which, as the quote above indicates, Pynchon emphatically collapses together46) need to go to such lengths to apply power and to make it visible belies the argument that the 1980s mark a period when the "total system" has become effectively consolidated (Maltby does not claim that this has actually occurred but that

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Pynchon presents it as having occurred). As Hanjo Berressem notes, Vineland does initially invoke a vision of a total, "closed system of infinite control," but this vision hardly remains in place for the entire novel: "the real action starts only when this infinite network of control breaks down...."47 It is because of the failure of the State to establish itself as a fully rational, total system of domination and control-- the fact that the legal system is really a swamp sucking people into it--that it needs to make its power arbitrary and spectacular; it is precisely the predictable unpredictability of the forceful application of the law that makes it effective in the absence of this rational total system.
     The first two representatives of the law encountered in the novel are both looking for the same thing, Frenesi Gates, but for vastly different reasons. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Hector Zuniga wants her to play a role in an anti-drug film,
to locate a legendary observer-participant from [... the turmoil of the 1960s ...] and bring her up out of her mysterious years of underground existence, to make a Film about all those long-ago political wars, the drugs, the sex, the rock an' roll, which th' ultimate message will be that the real threat to America, then and now, is from th' illegal abuse of narcotics.48
The film is to be part of the Reagan administration's "War on Drugs," a propaganda piece to revise history in support of current policy and depoliticize its agenda (reinterpreting left-wing dissenters as "drug abusers"), taking advantage of "the big Nostalgia Wave" to represent the end of "the best time most people from back then" ever had as a consequence of drugs and thus convert a large demographic group to Reaganism. But it is also personally motivated on Hector's part: "we're oll gonna be rich forever off this, man!"49
     Justice Department prosecutor Brock Vond is also after Frenesi, but Vond lacks any official motive. Though Frenesi remains under indictment by Vond's grand jury fifteen years after going underground, so there is, technically, an official justification for her pursuit, Vond is clearly after her

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for personal reasons. There is "something dangerously personal"50 between them. As DL describes him, Vond "is a lovelorn cop [...] the worst kind of adversary 'cause there's no rules, no codes of behavior, all bets are off, gentleman goes on abusing his power an believin' it's all in the name of love."51 Even one of his Justice Department colleagues knows that Vond's tactics, in this specific case, his Political Re-Education Program (PREP), are merely confusing sex and power games.52 Vond gets "excited just thinking about it," and he gets an erection when thinking of having Frenesi under his control in the camp. The PREP begins even before it is written into law by Congress, and Vond considers it a personal triumph, a "career coup"; it is "his baby," not just any law, but "his law."53
     But Vond's tactics, though rooted in his own desire for sex and power, are not "merely" personal; his re-education camps also serve the larger purpose of cultivating "snitches," taking persons who are "outside" of the law and turning them into agents of the law. PREP, attached as a rider to the Crime Control Act of 1970 ("by a not-so-neo fascist congressman") provides that "detainees in civil disturbances could be taken to certain Justice Department reserves and examined for snitch potential. Those found suitable might then be offered a choice between federal prosecution and federal employment"54 as informers who infiltrate radical organizations. Thus, the mechanism for mass detentions is put into place, not just to stifle dissent through incarceration but to eliminate it altogether by co-opting the dissident as a functioning member of the system.
     This, however, is the beginning of the story, not the end. These actions are part of the 1960s and its direct aftermath, part of the "Nixonian Repression."55 They only increase in scope and intensity afterwards as the nation evolves into the United States of America under Reagan. In the 1980s time frame, we have state defense forces to put down any potential uprisings in response to unpopular political actions, RICO laws that permit the government to seize property from those accused (even if not convicted) of criminal offenses (and which, of course, give law enforcement financial incentive to selectively enforce laws to acquire money and property that

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they will keep, at least in part), the "War on Drugs" which facilitates the militarization of the police as they engage in an arms race with drug dealers and expanded search and seizure powers, and increased powers of surveillance. Yet, there is little opposition to these extensions of law enforcement power. In fact, Vond's re-education camps are ultimately defunded because they have become irrelevant in the 1980s. No longer does the "system" need to coerce people into complicity by making them an offer that they really cannot refuse: "they did a study, found out since about '81 kids were comin in all on their own askin about careers, no need for no separate facility anymore [....]"56 Vond's "li'l fuckin' army o' occupation"57 faces no resistance; at best, people like Zoyd, DL, and even Frenesi may evade it for a while, but, inevitably, it seems that they will be tracked down because of increased powers of surveillance, including the "snitch system," though even that is losing prominence in an era of highly developed surveillance technology. As Frenesi's partner Flash observes, in the age of information, "'[e]verybody's a squealer[....] Anytime you use a credit card you're tellin' the Man more than you meant to."'58
     But, more importantly, resistance seems to be impossible in any "genuine" sense because it is always already co-opted by the law. As M. K. Booker points out, alluding to Foucault's analysis of power, "Pynchon suggests that United States drug enforcement procedures are intended not to eliminate drug use, but merely to circumscribe drug users as an official Other against whom they can exercise their official power."59 Any real resistance becomes impossible because the law needs resistance if it is to have any power in the first place. And since law, for Pynchon, is primarily concerned with maintaining and extending its power over citizens, it needs ever-increasing threats (or at least the perception of them) to justify the extension of these powers. To break the law is not to challenge or resist its power but rather to reinforce it and make its enforcement seem more necessary because the law has been broken. We see awareness of this in Weed Atman's shift of perspective regarding the reasons for nonviolent opposition after he is exposed to the reality of law. Atman's original justification is "[b]ecause in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane." Later,

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however, his tone shifts to one of cynical pragmatism: violent resistance is "wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets."60 Atman has learned through experience what Vond already knows about the way law works: "Sooner or later the gun comes out,"61 bearing out Cover's insight into the way that the experience of the force of law renders ideology's "masking" function powerless.62
     Ideology's function, thus, is not to misrepresent the real but to produce desire for the real. In Vineland, the effectiveness of the State in foreclosing resistance to the law as a viable possibility is made more effective by the fact that in the "War on Drugs," as in McCarthy's Red hunting, to which it is paralleled in the novel, evidence of "crimes" is easily manufactured to create the crimes, the commission of which can then be used to justify the arrest of anyone whom the agent of the law wishes to arrest, as in the planting of a monstrous block of marijuana in Zoyd's house (a block so big that it cannot even fit through the doors). But the "War on Drugs" has an added advantage over McCarthy because it is effectively depoliticized. There can be no organized resistance or appeals to law by "druggies," unlike leftists, because drugs, as inanimate objects, are an easy "evil" to construct, not to mention lacking in constitutional protections, unlike political beliefs and speech. But Pynchon understands these two "wars" to be fundamentally the same. The "War on Drugs" evolves out of, and is an extension of, the crackdown on radicals in the 1960s (which in turn is an extension of similar practices in the 1930s) because it is an easier "war" to wage; drug users are an easier and more pervasive "Other" to create and demonize. It is easier to produce generalized sentiments of hostility toward the "criminal" than the political dissident, and thus to produce affirmative sentiments toward law enforcement and consent for its escalating use of force to fight this "war."
     The "War on Drugs," continuing over a decade after its official declaration, is still in full swing. The longer it continues without a clear victory, the more force becomes authorized to escalate it. These powers include, but are certainly not limited to, mandatory minimum sentences for possessing small amounts of drugs, heavily armed tactical squads, the use of profiles to guide traffic stops, neighborhood sweeps, and restraining

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orders that forbid alleged gang members from associating with each other in public. One power that nicely illustrates the sort of tactics and their public acceptance that concerns Pynchon, bearing out the trajectory he sets up for law enforcement development, is the increasing use of informants to obtain "no knock" warrants that allow police to enter a residence without warning. A battering ram is typically used to break down the door, followed by the in-rushing of screaming, heavily armed, and sometimes masked, police. This practice, though it conjures up images of "home invasions," as well as American stereotypes of police practices in totalitarian states, continues relatively unchallenged. It is part of the immensely popular "get tough on crime" policies, despite several recent horror stories in which the use of these warrants resulted in the brutalizing, terrorizing, and even killing of innocent people.
     The following is an account of one of these incidents in May 1998 in which police executed a "no knock" warrant at the Crown Heights apartment of Basil Shorter and his family:
    Police officers last week broke down the door of a Brooklyn apartment, guns drawn, tossed a stun grenade into the front hall and handcuffed everyone inside, including a mentally retarded 18-year old girl who was taking a shower. They were looking for guns and drugs. They found only a terrified family.
    "I thought America was invaded, that some force, a foreign force, came to kill us," said Basil Shorter .... "My family was helpless, I was helpless.
    Police officials insisted that the officers had done nothing wrong and that the raid was by the book. They said that a confidential informer had told them that drugs and guns were being sold from the Shorter's apartment ... and from another apartment ....
    ....
    Referring to the information supplied by the inform[a]nt ... Chief O'Boyle said: "What we believe at this point is that the information was good. Why would our source give us bad 
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information on one apartment and good information on the second apartment in the same building?"63
     The obvious answer to Chief O'Boyle's question is self-interest; snitches do not typically inform out of a commitment to their "civic duty." They receive monetary compensation or a reduction of their own criminal charges or sentence in exchange for information. And snitches have also been known to seek revenge. But more significantly, in Mr. Shorter's account we can clearly observe a rhetoric of war and colonialism, of an imperial conquest by a "foreign force," echoing the sense of "occupation" and "endo-colonialism" Pynchon evokes to parody and criticize the expansion of police power and the acceptable force facilitated by the "War on Drugs." Indeed, raids of this sort have increased dramatically in the last few years,64 and as these tactics have escalated, so too have incidents like the one at the Shorters' apartment. In Boston in 1994, a seventy-five year old former minister died of a heart attack after being handcuffed during a raid that turned out to be based on a bad tip. In 1997, Brooklyn police failed to find the apartment number specified by their informant, so they chose one that was similar to it, only to find a terrified mother and her two children. In San Diego in 1992, a man thought his house was being robbed and fired a shot at the intruders who turned out to be police, and who shot back, seriously wounding him. A similar incident happened in the Bronx in February 1998 when Ellis Elliot also fired on the police as they battered down his door. Police fired twenty-six shots in return, arrested Mr. Elliot, and forced him to wear his girlfriend's clothing while handcuffed in a public place to humiliate him. Officials later admitted they had gone to the wrong apartment, as they did in March 1998 when they busted in on a grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter who were watching television.65
     But while cases like these, in which innocent people are terrorized and even brutalized by police who kick down their doors unannounced, have drawn some criticism and public outcry (not to mention lawsuits), the fact

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remains that the tactics themselves continue pretty much unchallenged by the public. If the raids had turned up some drugs or guns, then public reaction would likely be approval, satisfied that police are making society safer and doing their job well. In an era in which "the criminal" has become the privileged "Other" of American society and perhaps the most potent political slogan is to "get tough on crime," acceptance of such tactics is not particularly surprising. And while some excesses and abuses of force are ascribed to "mistakes," "accidents," or "rogue" individuals, much of what in the past would probably have been deemed excessive uses of force has become precisely "by the book," institutionalizing and normalizing tactics that conjure up popular American images of "Third World" dictatorships or totalitarian regimes which operate under the rationalization that the ends justify the means, as long as "order" is the end. And the public is all too willing to swallow police justifications, such as that of New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir who insists that "[j]ust because we don't find drugs does not mean we hit the wrong door," as long as he, at the same time, credits these tactics for the decrease in crime that has occurred over the last several years.66
     Even more than viewing these tactics as justified by their (alleged) results, the public seems to thoroughly enjoy the spectacle of aggressive, "tough" cops brutalizing suspects (who are of course called "criminals"). They witness the unending parade of "real-life" cop shows such as COPS, America's Scariest Police Chases, America's Scariest Police Shoot-outs, America's Wildest Police Videos, as well as the more conventional cop dramas such as NYPD Blue, Law and Order, and Homicide. They witness all the films about police hunting down and violently apprehending and interrogating suspects, in which the police always triumph, more often than not by using a substantial amount of force. The violent application of legal force has become a spectator sport in which the public is a vicarious member of the law enforcement "team," reveling in the "victories" and the way police kick some ass. Snitching has also been elevated to a sort of public participatory sport through such shows as America's Most Wanted which exhort us to inform on people we may know or see and programs like "neighborhood watch" where residents keep an eye out for "suspicious looking people." This not only replaces police surveillance with the public's own self-surveillance, but turns the public into instruments of law enforcement, extending the law's force, and the sense of power that

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accompanies it, to ordinary people (tellingly, America's Most Wanted's subtitle is "America Fights Back"). Children in school are encouraged to turn in their parents for drug use, and "video vigilantism" runs rampant, with video cameras, both hidden and openly wielded, everywhere, waiting to capture some scene worthy of selling to a tabloid or a FOX special or, perhaps even better, worthy of handing over to the police for evidence. Snitching is no longer an act one keeps secret or that is reviled by the public (as in the old-fashioned notion of the "stool pigeon" or "rat") but rather a mode of "heroism" to be lauded on television.
     From the way Pynchon describes the 1980s, these developments would seem to be the logical continuation of the larger trajectory he tracks from the 1960s. As David Cowart puts it, Vineland
reveals how the nation has allowed an earlier passion for justice to go dead, to be co-opted by a conservative backlash ....
    ... [As] America veered from a liberal to a conservative bias, from the New Frontier and the Great Society to "Reaganomics," from hordes of student demonstrators to whole undergraduate populations majoring in business, from Yippies to yuppies.67
     By setting up a narrative movement from a time of utopian yearnings and possibilities to their foreclosure, from movements concerned with "social justice" to the irrelevance of any ideal of justice, Pynchon flirts with the sort of bad hippie nostalgia that commentators on the left have always found "reactionary" in its longing "for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present."68 Indeed, Vineland has been criticized for offering a nostalgic picture of the 1960s, an erstwhile hippie, druggie utopia that sets up an edenic picture of the past before its "fall" into the neo-Orwellian world of the 1980s. Alec McHoul has called the novel's politics "a 60s nostalgic quietism .... [A] wistful nostalgia for a moment in the late '60s or early 70s' when it could all have been put to rights,"69 and Alan Wilde sees it participating in the nostalgia of its characters: "By locating the ideal in the lifetime of his characters, Pynchon betrays again his

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nostalgia for the regretted time before the eclipse of 'the analog arts ... by digital technology."'70 With scenes like the one in which Zoyd and his lawyer Elmhurst discuss the seizure of Zoyd's house through RICO statutes, where Zoyd, shocked that the burden of proof is on him to prove his innocence, bemoans, "'[w]hat about 'innocent till proven guilty'?"' to which Elmhurst replies, "'[t]hat was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment,"'71 there is certainly room for such suspicions. However, the context in which this exchange occurs makes it difficult to identify its tone as simply nostalgic.
     The discussion does not just bemoan a lost, more ideal past, but sharply critiques the present on its own terms as well, not just in relation to some mythic past. Elmhurst describes the RICO law's intentions "as old as power," and comments that it does not really matter whether Zoyd grew the marijuana that was planted in his house because the system is arbitrary and rigged:
"You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land."
    "Wait--I wasn't growin' nothin'."
    "They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?"
    "[... How can we win?"
    "Get lucky with the right judge."
    "Sounds like Vegas."
    The lawyer shrugged. "That's because life is Vegas."72
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The "legal system" is presented here as totally unsystematic, with the outcome dependent upon luck. The existence of a crime is also dictated by interests, not by objective rules classifying behavior. It is all about power, and there is nothing the subject of the law can do to resist it. And this is problematic not because at some other time things would have gone differently-- at this point in the novel, we have already seen how the law works similarly in the past, with Vond's rigged grand jury in the 1960s, round-ups of leftists in the 1930s, and the like--but because there seems to be no imaginable alternative or way to resist it. It is accepted as simply the way things work, as we see in Elmhurst's response to Zoyd's challenge to his seemingly gleeful attitude toward the situation: "you mean ... life isn't Vegas?"73 It is the successful "interpellation" of the public by Reagan's "law and order by any means necessary" ideology that receives criticism here; and Zoyd's naive claims that life is not Vegas is not privileged, for life in the 1980s really does seem to be Vegas, especially where the law is concerned. Rather than simply bemoan this situation in relation to a "better" past, Pynchon is more concerned with how this situation has come to be.

IV.

     In contrast to those who see the novel as nostalgic, a number of critics have argued that Vineland is the most historically conscious of Pynchon's novels, noting how it identifies and critiques the causal factors behind the changes that permitted the 1960s to evolve into the 1980s. Berressem argues that Vineland, in contrast to Pynchon's earlier novels, "constantly asks how political power operates and what its effects are."74 Rather than portraying the subject's tragic inscription within power or the ultimate emptiness of the term, Vineland foregrounds "the complicity between the subject and power."75 Others, such as Paul Maltby and Deborah Madsen, have analyzed the way Pynchon attributes the source of this complicity to popular culture, particularly television.76 James Berger, though, provides the most penetrating analysis of the role of nostalgia in Vineland. He sees it as being deployed to critique the present and its bad nostalgia, nostalgia that

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has facilitated the sort of complicity and quiescence Maltby and Madsen discuss. Vineland's nostalgia
is not a conventional nostalgia for idealized sites of origin. Its concern, rather, as it returns to the 1960s from the vantage of the Reagan 1980s, is how cultural memory is transmitted, and it portrays the ideological distortions, marketing strategies, and the variety of nostalgias through which Americans in the 1980s apprehended the 60s.77
     While Booker also sees Vineland as a critique of 1980s nostalgia which views the 1960s as a time of lost wholeness when the fragmentation of late capitalist culture was already fully under way, at the same time, he privileges Vond's analysis of 1960s radicals as infantile escapists yearning for discipline.78 This has been a problematic trend in discussions of Vineland more generally which accept Vond's version of the 1960s as Pynchon's version of the "real." Vond is described as having the genius
to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting the story, Brock saw the deep [...] need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.79
     Brock sees them as "mild herd creatures [...] who'd feel [...] much more comfortable behind fences. Children longing for discipline."80 To accept this claim, however, is not only to privilege the voice of a character

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whom the novel presents as a "wacko," a "criminal fascist," and "a nut case leading a heavily armed strike force,"81 but also to generalize all 1960s radicals as being like Frenesi.
     Moreover, references to Frenesi's fetish for authority, desire to live outside of history and the world of cause and effect, and other qualities that are linked to her betrayals and ability to work within the system despite her left-wing origins, come after she has been "popped" by Vond--after she's been co-opted. Her uniform fetish (comically manifested in her desire to masturbate while watching CHiPs)82 comes from being interpellated by the representations of police on television. Even Zuniga, a DEA agent, is described as being interpellated by such images, "these Tubal fantasies [...] relentlessly pushing their propaganda messages of cops-are-only-human-got-to-do-their-job, turning agents of government repression into sympathetic heroes."83 This facilitates the acceptance of increasing police violence and the circumvention of the rules of law: "Nobody thought it was peculiar anymore, no more than the routine violation of constitutional rights these characters performed week after week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American expectations."84 And, importantly, the description of her uniform fetish comes from her mother, Sasha, as a means to explain away Frenesi's betrayals: explaining it via a brand of determinism that diminishes her responsibility for her actions and permits Sasha to feel sorry for her rather than angry and betrayed, it was "as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control."85 Surprisingly, perhaps, Sasha's theory fits in nicely with Vond's. Her idea "that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping [...] every time the troops came marching by"86 is only another version of Vond's theory of radicals as children wanting discipline and authority.
     Pynchon presents these sentiments as consequences of, or excuses for, Frenesi's co-optation, not contributing factors; they are ways for her (and others) to attribute and cope with her actions once they have begun. It is not

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her desire for authority, a uniform fetish, or even desire to live outside of time that makes her vulnerable to Vond; rather, it is an idealism grounded in abstract universals to which she pays lip service, coupled with a failure to conceive of the consequences of her own individual actions. Frenesi is fundamentally a follower, and this same quality leads her to participate in both the revolutionary establishment of the "People's Republic of Rock and Roll" (PR3) with Weed Atman and Vond's movement to suppress it. Her thought process leading up to her co-optation is described as follows:
Not that she would have said she was working for Brock, exactly. When he took copies of the footage she shot, he paid no more than the lab costs. She told herself she was making movies for everybody, to be shown free, anywhere there might be a reflective enough surface ... it wasn't secret footage, Brock had as much right as anybody.... But then after a while he was not only seeing the outtakes, but also making suggestions about what to shoot [...] and the deeper she got into that, the deeper Brock came into her life.87
It is Frenesi's lack of commitment to any specific agenda dictated by her own set of principles that makes her an easy mark for Vond. She accepts an ideology without any analysis of what it means or entails, and applies it uncritically (literally, in fact), and just goes with the flow until it is too late. As her mother notes:
Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube [...] making for the first time a connection between the far-off images and her real life, it seemed she had misunderstood everything, paying too much attention to the raw emotions, the easy conflicts, when something else, some finer drama the Movies had never considered worth ennobling, had been unfolding all the time.88
     The fact that once she's inside the system her complicity is explained away by uniform fetishes and desire to flee responsibility only proves the effectiveness of the State to colonize her (and others') consciousness so that everything is seen from the position of a radically detached individualism

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lacking a sense of agency. Even her most fundamental drives and desires are taken over by the State as ideology seeps into her unconscious via television to produce a desire for authority, to be an agent operating for someone else.
     Thus, Vond's analysis is not a description but a strategy; it is what he wants people to believe, for once this view sinks in, he has people at his, and the State's, mercy. We see this strategy on the part of the State in the often- discussed opening scene of the novel in which Zoyd performs his yearly ritual of leaping through a window in front of television cameras in order to receive his mental disability payment from the government. Zoyd, dressed in garish drag and wielding a chainsaw, presents a freakish image of the former 1960s radical, a deranged drug user who must be corralled by law enforcement. Of course, the entire scene is scripted by the State: the location and time are dictated, his check is contingent upon his compliance, and the media are called in advance, not to mention the fact that, this time, the glass is not even real.
     In this way, Pynchon emphasizes the way that images of rebellion are always already co-opted by the State, for this "threatening" image only advocates for the need for the police to have more power to protect the public from this chainsaw-wielding maniac. Further, it contributes to the "War on Drugs" in which the drug user is constructed as infantile, deranged, insane, dangerous, and in need of control. Additionally ironic in this episode are the interspersed exchanges between Zoyd and Zuniga in which Zoyd refuses to become an informant. Though Zoyd has technically resisted Zuniga's attempts to "pop" him so far, Zuniga
kept coming back, each time with a new and more demented plan, and Zoyd knew that one day, just to have some peace, he'd say forget it, and go over. Question was, would it be this time, or one of the next few times? [... It was like being on "Wheel of Fortune."89
Since Zoyd was never one of the political radicals like those in the PR3 but rather a "turn on and drop out" hippie who simply wanted to be high and left alone, his "escapist" logic here, giving in just to get Zuniga off of his back, is not in any way a contradiction. It simply attests to the way some 1960s "radicals" were not as radical as they may have thought--drug use,

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free love, etc., is not a challenge to a State premised on individualism and consumption. Zoyd uses words like "fascist" to describe the government, but he does not bother to challenge it or try to resist it; he simply evades it as much as possible. Not to mention the fact that, despite his protest to the contrary, he has not really avoided becoming an agent of the State law enforcement apparatus: his "defenestration" performance, paid for with his disability check, shows him really to be working for the State whether he admits it or not.
     By positioning the radicals as children desiring discipline, Vond and the State put them in a position of being invited to seek refuge within the arms of the "national Family"; but this covers up the fact that this invitation is really, more often than not, coercion. Frenesi does not run willingly into the arms of the State. She is slowly manipulated until she is in over her head, until she has contributed to Weed Atman's murder. She is then offered an existence where she can live without consequences, without guilt, so long as she does what she is told and can locate responsibility outside of herself. This life is not one of her own seeking, but she can hardly refuse it once it is offered. Just as the State has taken her agency away by seducing and manipulating her into becoming its agent, it then offers to absolve her of responsibility for her actions, both past and future, leaving her no reason to desire to leave this "embrace."
     Treating the opposition as children is to take away the agency that they might have, a powerful construction that brings them under the thumb of the State not by overt force but willingly. But the force that is masked by this strategy is revealed for the violence that it is in Zoyd's encounter with Vond when he is jailed on drug charges. When Zoyd sarcastically responds to Vond's strange demands to pull back his upper lip, look up at the ceiling, etc., as Vond makes a Lombrosian examination of the "criminal," Vond dismisses Zoyd's resistance as mere childishness: "'I had hoped for a level of serious and adult conversation, but maybe you've spent too much time in the infant world [...] maybe this will have to be simplified for you."'90 This "simplification" is Vond telling Zoyd that his ex-wife is none of his concern and threats to take away his daughter, followed up by a beating to convey the full meaning of the "conversation."
     This form of "nonjudicial motivation" intervention,91 the violent reinforcement of Zoyd's "infantile" status as powerless, is, ultimately, what

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the law is all about in Vineland. And while most of the force is a bit more subtle, operating through representations rather than direct physical force, it is not any less effective. It is this fear of force, not a paranoid fear, but a realistic, justified one, that Pynchon identifies as the primary means by which law maintains order. Because the law is not, and cannot be, a fully autonomous, closed system that operates through the impartial application of determinate rules, law is, at root, a Weberian system of domination. But the most important element of the "system" is not its ability to "rationally" utilize a formal system of rules to pursue any arbitrary end but rather the irrational "rationality" of its operation, the arbitrariness of its application by interested agents of the law, coupled with its ability to enforce constructions of reality that can remove any sense of agency from its subjects and canalize desire toward authority rather than individual freedom. But contrary to theorists such as those from the CLS movement who insist upon the need to "unmask" the role of force and ideology in the operations of the legal system, for Pynchon, there is no such need for exposure. The true "genius" of the law is not its ability to conceal the violence of its operations but rather its ability to take advantage of popular culture to make this unnecessary by manufacturing a desire for the violence and force of these operations. Thus, opposition is not rendered difficult but is erased from the field of desired possibilities.

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ENDNOTES
*  Richard Burket is a Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

1. THOMAS PYNCHON, VINELAND 359 (1990).

2. See THOMAS PYNCHON, THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966) (1986).

3. See THOMAS PYNCHON, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW (1973).

4. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 311.

5. See, e.g., Robin West, Communities, Texts, and Law: Reflections on the Law and Literature Movement, 1 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 129, 146-56 (1988); IAN WARD, LAW AND LITERATURE: POSSIBILITIES AND PERSPECTIVES 10 (1995). For discussions of Vineland and Orwell's 1984, see E. Shaskan Bumas, The Utopian States of America: The People, the Republic, and Rock and Roll in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, ARIZ. Q., Autumn 1995, at 149, 163; M. K. Booker, America and Its Discontents: The Failure of Leftist Politics in Pynchon's Vineland, 4 LIT: LITERATURE, INTERPRETATION, THEORY 87, 89 (1993).

6. H.L.A. HART, THE CONCEPT OF LAW 91 (1963).

7. Id. at 91-92.

8. See id. at 130-32.

9. See id.

10. NIKLAS LUHMANN, THE DIFFERENTIATION OF SOCIETY 38 (Stephen Holmes & Charles Larmore trans., 1982).

11. Id. at 39.

12. Id. at 45.

13. Id.

14. Id. at 94.

15. Id. at 117.

16. Id. at 125.

17. Id. at 126.

18. DRUCILLA CORNELL, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE LIMIT 124 (1992).

19. Id. at 101 (footnote omitted).

20. STANLEY FISH, DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY: CHANGE, RHETORIC, AND THE PRACTICE OF THEORY IN LITERARY AND LEGAL STUDIES 5 (1989).

21. HART, supra note 6, at 93.

22. FISH, supra note 20, at 5.

23. See HART, supra note 6, at 104-05.

24. See id. at 167.

25. FISH, supra note 20, at 520.

26. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority", in DECONSTRUCTION AND THE POSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE 3, 5 (Mary Quaintance trans., Drucilla Cornell et al. eds., 1992).

27. Id. at 6.

28. LUHMANN, supra note 10, at 119.

29. Id. at 120.

30. HART, supra note 6, at 156.

31. Robert Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 YALE L.J. 1601, 1613  (1986).

32. Id. at 1608.

33. Id. at 1607.

34. Id. at 1608.

35. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 311-12 (Since Thomas Pynchon is known for his use of the ellipse, the ellipses inserted by the Author are in brackets [....).

36. MOLLY HITE, IDEAS OF ORDER IN THE NOVELS OF THOMAS PYNCHON 15  (1983) (quoting THOMAS PYNCHON, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW 703 (1973)).

37. PYNCHON, supra note 2, at 170-71.

38. For an exemplary study of this crisis in agency, see Timothy Melley, Bodies Incorporated: Scenes of Agency Panic in Gravity's Rainbow, 35 CONTEMP. LIT. 709 (1994).

39. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 354.

40. See Molly Hite, Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland, in THE VINELAND PAPERS: CRITICAL TAKES ON PYNCHON'S NOVEL 135, 153 n.30 (Geoffrey Green et al. eds., 1994).

41. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 265.

42. PAUL MALTBY, DISSIDENT POSTMODERNISTS: BARTHELME, COOVER, PYNCHON 176 (1991). The term and concept of endo-colonization are drawn from PAUL VIRILIO & SYLVERE LOTRINGER, PURE WAR 91-102 (Mark Polizotti trans., 1983).

43. See MALTBY, supra note 42, at 18.

44. See id. at 34.

45. Id. at 176.

46. See PYNCHON, supra note 2, at 170-71.

47. HANJO BERRESSEM, PYNCHON'S POETICS: INTERFACING THEORY AND TEXT 207  (1993).

48. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 51.

49. Id.

50. Id. at 102.

51. Id. at 265.

52. See id. at 270.

53. See id. at 268.

54. Id.

55. Id. at 71.

56. Id. at 347.

57. Id. at 103.

58. Id. at 74.

59. See Booker, supra note 5, at 92.

60. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 229.

61. Id. at 240.

62. See Cover, supra note 31, at 1608.

63. Michael Cooper, Scared Family Says Police Raided the Wrong Home, N.Y. TIMES, May 8, 1998, at B1 (emphasis added).

64. See Michael Cooper, Raids, and Complaints, Rise as City Draws on Drug Tips, N.Y. TIMES, May 26, 1998, at A1. In New York City alone, warrants for drug searches more than doubled from 1994 to 1997, rising from 1447 to 2977, most of which were "no knock" warrants.

65. See id.; see also Cooper, supra note 63, at B1.

66. Cooper, supra note 63, at B5.

67. David Cowart, Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon's Vineland, in THE VINELAND PAPERS: CRITICAL TAKES ON PYNCHON'S NOVEL 3, 12 (Geoffrey Green et al. eds., 1994).

68. David Lowenthal, Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't, in THE IMAGINED PAST: HISTORY AS NOSTALGIA 18, 21 (Christopher Shaw & Malcolm Chase eds., 1989).

69. Alec McHoul, Vineland: Teenage Mutant Ninja Fiction (Or, St. Ruggles' Struggles, Chapter 4), 26-27 PYNCHON NOTES 97, 100 (Spring-Fall, 1990).

70. Alan Wilde, Love and Death in and around Vineland, U.S.A., BOUNDARY 2, at 166, 171 (Summer 1991) (quoting PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 308). Wilde, however, does not see the novel as only nostalgic, noting that "[in problematizing ... the decade's longings, Pynchon simultaneously problematizes his own." Id. at 172, though ultimately he chastises Vineland for "its refusal of the existential commitment it ponders only to evade." Id. at 180. For perhaps the most sharply disapproving reaction, see Brad Leithauser's review which scathingly states: "How delightful it is as one's joint-passing youth is now revealed to be no mere idyll but Wow! Neat! The stuff of great art." Brad Leithauser, Any Place You Want, N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS, March 15, 1990, at 7, 10.

71. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 360.

72. Id.

73. Id.

74. BERRESSEM, supra note 47, at 206.

75. Id. at 207 (referring to Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard's concepts of power).

76. See MALTBY, supra note 42, at 174-84; DEBORAH L. MADSEN, THE POSTMODERNIST ALLEGORIES OF THOMAS PYNCHON 114-34 (1991).

77. See James Berger, Cultural Trauma and the "Timeless Burst": Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland, 5 POSTMODERN CULTURE 6,  4 (May 1995) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text- only/issue.595/berger.595>.

78. See Booker, supra note 5, at 97. See also FREDRIC JAMESON, POSTMODERNISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM (1991), whose analysis of late capitalism provides the foundation for Booker's claim.

79. PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 269.

80. Id.

81. Id. at 69, 58, 103.

82. See id. at 83.

83. Id. at 345.

84. Id.

85. Id. at 83.

86. Id.

87. Id. at 209.

88. Id. at 81-82.

89. Id. at 12.

90. Id. at 298.

91. Id. at 301. 

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