“Dowsing for Links Invisible and Undefined”: The Ontological Trajectory Between Knowing and Divining in Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge

Note: This excerpt is taken from my undergraduate senior thesis, which compares Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) with his most recent novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), to examine the shift in postmodern ontology from the 1960s to the 21st century. Missing here is context regarding a recurring term I use: meta-realities. I use the term broadly to refer not only to cyber- and digital spaces but larger frames such as finance and real estate. These dimensions of reality do not replace our experience of a “main” reality—the domain in which we feel like our significant lives are led. Rather, meta-realities are depicted in Bleeding as experientially remote, fictive, or alienated. Meta-realities also function as what Jean-François Lyotard and Ludwig Wittgenstein describe as language games, wherein each game has its own set of rules that govern the use and interpretation of language, thereby directly legitimizing knowledge. As they grow more interconnected with each other and the “main” reality, these spaces form an imbrication of meta-realities—what I call Pynchon’s late ontology—where above-imbricated spaces affect lower-imbricated spaces either directly or by overlaying these frameworks of knowledge legitimation. The second half of my thesis and a portion of the introduction are supplied here.

Introduction

As the setting of Thomas Pynchon’s literary focus progresses into the 2000s, our techno-capitalist ontology is rendered as a kind of mirage between deliverance and captivity. What was once a clear delineation in The Crying of Lot 49 between a solipsistic paranoia—preserving a totalizing and disillusioned narrative—and an ineffable reality vulnerable to capitalist and corporatizing powers is now a blurred boundary in Bleeding Edge. His first novel to address the digital age, Bleeding’s now ubiquitous paranoia gives way to new spatial attempts at escape from the agendas, systems, and frameworks of control Pynchon traditionally opposes. However, while the cultural currents of Crying resonate with echoes of cyber-utopianism in Bleeding, the technological emergence of such spaces—including virtual reality and the internet—fails to offer any form of transcendental escape, whether solipsistic or, in this case, collective. Instead, Pynchon points to the cyber world not as a refuge from the real world but as a reminder, an amplification even, of the continuity between the real world and other spaces: “systems crash” and “bank accounts are looted” (345); “corporate Web crawlers” corrupt patches of virtual “sanctuar[ies]” (167); links are “cursed” with “fake pop-up ads promising health, wealth, happiness &c” (344). With this ontological shift towards an “integrated continuum” of spaces, the postmodern problem of agency and control is now framed as a process of inevitable loss. Pynchon’s characters no longer ask if they can “project a world” as they did in Crying (69); rather, they ask, with a sense of fatalism, “Does anybody get extra lives? Does anybody even get this one?” (Bleeding 403).

This shift in Pynchon’s view of the postmodern ontology as well as its profound sense of resignation is rooted in the nigh 50-year gap between the publication of Crying (1965) and Bleeding (2013). During the period leading up to Bleeding’s 2001 setting, two significant cultural and economic forces took hold: postmodernism, a disillusionment of totalizing narratives, and cyberspace, an extension of postindustrialism’s “computerisation of society” (Lyotard 7). While the intersection between the two may seem esoteric¹, their convergence lies at the forefront of postmodern concerns surrounding the legitimation of knowledge.

With the digital and informational advancements of the late 20th century—computers, telecommunications, data storage, cybernetics, programming, and automation—knowledge became a central commodity, fundamentally reshaping its cultural significance. This new commodity status altered our relationship with knowledge in two important ways. Firstly, as knowledge became transactional and “exteriorized” from the “knower,” its pervasive mode of acquisition was no longer a “training of minds”—or bildung—in a fixed body of knowledge but, instead, an accessing of information networks. Secondly, knowledge became consigned to power within specific, localized contexts. As knowledge began to be produced, exchanged, and consumed, its association with objective truth and understanding was overshadowed by its economic utility, and as a result, our perception of what constitutes legitimate versus illegitimate knowledge changed. Jean-François Lyotard describes this as the replacing of “metanarratives”—grand, overarching narratives that claim to explain all of human experience—with frameworks of “local determinism,” where knowledge becomes fragmented into distinct spaces and specific practices (xxiv). Lyotard makes clear, however, that these local contexts remain vulnerable to more localized forms of legitimation that nonetheless compromise agency. Bleeding’s protagonist, Maxine, for instance, feels compelled to abide by the “underlying rules of the fraud-investigation universe” despite losing her Certified Fraud Examiners (CFE) license years earlier (399). The “decision makers” who manage such certifications, information networks, or cultural spaces suddenly wield significant power over what is deemed legitimate within the framework of their control (xxiv). When cyberspace entered the technological ferment of the late 20th century, however, this externality of knowledge and the concern over its legitimation gave rise to cyber-utopianism.

According to early scholars of cyberculture, such as Pierre Lévy, these new technologies promised a “collective intelligence” that would “increase individual autonomy and expand [our] cognitive faculties” (10, 6). While the 1960s setting of Crying is far too early for the cyber- and digital worlds explored in Bleeding, its countercultural critique of centralized institutions is reflected in this early optimism surrounding cyberspace. The vision of decentralized, collaborative knowledge and its open distribution was seen as a way to resist both metanarratives and local legitimation apparatuses that might constrain access to knowledge. Proponents like Lévy believed the corporatizing powers of Pynchon’s fictions—CEOs like Crying’s Pierce Inverarity and Bleeding’s Gabriel Ice²—were to have “no lasting effect on cyberspace” (Lévy 101). Instead, cyberspace was to transcend the postmodern crisis of knowledge legitimation by “feign[ing] the otherworldly.” The problem, however, is that the conduit for this “synthetic imagination” is always the interface of silicon, the code of dotcom companies, and the media of digital infrastructure (Liu 111). After all, the difference between a virtual autonomous space and digital real estate is a question of whose screen it is. Ultimately, the intersection between cyberspace and postmodernism—the theoretical framework of this paper—is a mutual dependence, resulting in what Alan Liu calls “an endless loop between transgressive transcendence and corrective legitimation” (111). 

Drawing on literary scholarship, poststructuralist philosophy, theory on cyberspace, and risk assessment theory, I will examine the ontological differences between Crying and Bleeding to elucidate this mutual dependence characteristic of postmodernist cyberspace fiction. My argument follows two main areas: “spaces” and “modes of knowing.” In regard to spaces, I first track how paranoia once charged the subversive, emancipatory efforts of Crying’s phenomenology, culminating in an agentive choice between the Real and the solipsistic imaginary, or the exclusive belief in one’s own perception of reality. As technology and cyber-utopianism ushered in the 2000s, the desire for a materialized version of this solipsistic imaginary inspired a decentralized proliferation of new technological spaces. Bleeding’s virtual and digital enclaves manifest, however, only as temporary autonomous zones, inevitably infringed upon and eventually recuperated into techno-capitalist frameworks of knowledge legitimation. I argue that many of these frames and spaces are nested within one another, each influencing the layers below, creating what I call Pynchon’s late ontology: an imbrication of meta-realities where, for instance, the frame of finance imposes upon the realm of virtual reality. 

In regard to modes of knowing, I argue that the epistemic opacity and reflexivity of this late ontology prompt significant shifts in how we know and whether we should attempt to know at all. The opacity of Bleeding’s knowable world encourages “tinkering” through interfaces as a mode of knowing over the “reading” of symbols and words that defines Crying’s mode of knowing. However, as Bleeding’s world is pervaded by unknown reflexive risks—the feedback of society’s interconnected systems in the form of, for example, computer glitches and stock market crashes—attempts at knowing are discouraged altogether. In its place, Bleeding introduces a new mode of knowing—or more precisely, a mode of pre-knowing—that I term “meta-sensing.” In a manner similar to divination, “meta-sensing” accesses a presupposed metaphysical field of consciousness, resembling Gilles Deleuze’s plane of immanence, to detect hermeneutical ambiguities—including “cursed” links and risky investigative leads. Through Maxine’s use of “meta-sensing” as a form of threat detection, I argue that Pynchon’s late ontology resigns from postmodernist concerns of legitimation in favor of a quest for safety above all else. Lastly, this resignation points to a broader arc of epistemic regression between Crying and Bleeding: As the complexity of technology-addled spaces grows, we find ourselves relying on increasingly atavistic modes of knowing to safely navigate our techno-capitalist reality.

[...]

On “Reading” as a Mode of Knowing

If Bleeding’s ontology—an imbrication of meta-realities—leads to this eternal anticipation of boundaries breaking and spaces encroaching, Crying’s fail-safe of retreating to a solipsistic imaginary or Bleeding’s enclaves of “synthetic imagination” no longer apply. Instead, any potential escape from larger techno-capitalist forces and, more specifically, their control of information networks and cyberspace seems increasingly improbable. The question, then, becomes less oriented toward space, or the choosing of a less affected meta-reality over another, and becomes more oriented toward the legitimation of knowledge itself. We find ourselves, as Lyotard describes, inexorably at the juncture between “‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits […] a post through which various kinds of messages pass” (15). Incapable of escaping the intentions and agendas of messaging, the postmodern subject must assess what they consider legitimate knowledge more carefully. A particularly contemporary problem, this paper turns toward Bleeding for an alternative mode of knowing that may resist the influence of legitimation apparatuses. If we do want to know, despite what the back cover suggests³, how should we know or attempt to know?

The postmodern mystery genre of Crying and Bleeding posits a starting point for this analysis: the modernist view of knowledge acquisition as a kind of reading. As previously mentioned, the detective role in the postmodern mystery genre of Pynchon and other postmodernist authors treats the detective role as a surrogate reader (Merivale and Sweeney 2). As Pynchon’s detective characters, Maxine and ⁴Oedipa, pursue their novel’s mystery, reading and interpreting clues, they are always a stand-in for the reader interpreting our postmodernist “reality of textuality and signs” in pursuit of knowledge (Bertens 7). Thus, any difficulty, obstruction, or flaw in Maxine and Oedipa’s investigation is Pynchon’s critique of this modernist perception of knowing and its framework of knowledge legitimation. 

Crying critiques this modernist homology between reading and knowing by presenting it as dependent on the legitimation of an authorial figure—what Oedipa refers to as “that magical Other” (Black 79, Crying 61). Oedipa invests initial trust in this homology, gradually cohering information about Crying’s mystery by following literal, symbolic, and figurative clues—or as Driblette⁵ calls it, her “interest in texts” (61). However, Pynchon’s dissemination of these clues introduces a persistent flaw in Oedipa’s “reading,” exemplifying what Joel Black describes as an “anti- or even post-hermeneutic feature” (79): the explicable yet suspect nature of Crying’s clues. Graffiti in bathrooms of bars, conversations with dying alcoholics, and misspellings of letters culminate in the almost-thereness of Oedipa’s epistemic purview. What she finds is never the coveted “Word⁶” she expects—that which holds knowledge and explains all—and is, instead, bits and pieces that are never legitimated (95). By having to rely on some elusive authorial figure—a knower of the mystery and its inner workings—Oedipa’s perpetual delay of epistemic resolution is Pynchon’s most blatant critique of this modernist view of reading as knowing. However, how Bleeding critiques this homology differs in respect to Pynchon’s late ontology.

As meta-realities, especially cyberspace and finance, impose specific paradigms of information over the knowable world, knowledge becomes increasingly specialized. Not only does Bleeding withhold the external confirmation of a “magical Other”—or, in this case, “oligarch scum”—it also fragments Maxine’s lines of inquiry into distinct “lenses” or areas of expertise, each dependent on the kind of information she is investigating (Crying 61, Bleeding 455). While Oedipa follows, what I have detailed earlier, the “vertical organization” of Crying’s ⁷paranoiadigm (Chetwynd 38), Maxine must follow the disjointed trails of Bleeding’s scattered paranoiadigm. Maxine’s clue-finding thus requires the patrons of those whose expertise lies in the specific meta-reality she is investigating: Lucas and Justin for virtual reality, Eric for the Deep Web, and Conkling, “a private nose,” for “nasal forensics” to name a few (Bleeding 202, 203). Maxine, herself, can “read” Bleeding’s world as a fraud investigator but only its “monetary substructure” (Pohlmann 21): the “daybooks,” “ledgers, logs, tax sheets,” and “rap sheets” that reflect its financial dimension (Bleeding 10, 245). “Reading” as a form of knowing, then, is increasingly discouraged not only by Pynchon’s characteristic postmodern mystery genre but by the fracturing of knowledge into specific practices characteristic of Bleeding’s ontology.

The question of how, besides “reading,” should we know is further complicated by the opaqueness of Pynchon’s late ontology, embodied in the appropriate term “front.” Bleeding’s detective characters are constantly inundated with “fronts”—“cursed” facades of buildings that are “front all the way through,” fronts of computer screens and television tubes, gazes of virtual avatars that are a “deliberate front,” and company fronts hiding illegal operations (192, 199, 407). While this series of fronts aligns with postmodernism’s repudiation of “fundamental depth models”—where the transition into postmodernity is seen as a shift from depth to “multiple surfaces” (Jameson 12)—it also implies a perceptive change in how we view the world and its information. Bleeding’s fronts are not, despite its term, devoid of depth altogether but simply hold our attention more than what lies behind them. Bleeding’s buildings, despite being all front, “stretch on for longer than the building’s outside dimensions would suggest” and are still “open to all sorts of penetration” (258). Even in her everyday commute, Maxine can seem to “forget” how the reflective surface of a bus’s windows “unaccountably transforms to volume” (102). This perceptual shift—toward a more immediate focus on the forefront of our epistemic purview—abandons the modernist notion of reading as the preferred mode of knowing, opting instead for a mode that better reflects this contemporary fixation with fronts.

Interfaces and Tinkering

This front-oriented perception arises from the popularization of computer interfaces and, fittingly, their frontend user experience. With the 21st century’s emergence of cyber- and digital spaces, Slavoj Žižek notices a perceptive “change to the symbolic” that user interface apparatuses fail to entirely account for. The interface styles of popular computer lines at the turn of the century, such as Macintosh, transfigure the “written orders” characteristic of a textual-centered “reading” of the world to “simple mouse-clicking in iconic signs” (Žižek). Although her expertise resides in the fraud-related, Maxine cannot help thinking in terms of interface, debating at moments if “its time at last to CD tilde home⁸” (Bleeding 311). The cost is a false epistemic saturation: Because the Real⁹ cannot be approached entirely by its iconic simulations, the necessary continuity between the interface and our everyday environs inappropriately compensates and fills in the “gaps in the symbolic” (Žižek). These gaps, in their inexplicable nuance, would enable access to the Real as they perforate a conventional perception of the world. The result is an incongruity between the radical alterity of the Real and the illusory iconicity of the interface, forming a front-oriented illegibility. When Maxine resurfaces out of the interface of finance, the Real thus turns “into a spreadsheet she can’t follow” (Bleeding 463). 

Accustomed to this incongruity between the Real and an interfaced experience, the postmodern “reader” of information begins to prefer a mode of knowing that is through, rather than behind, the screen. The world of the 21st century is technologically mediated to such an extreme that the user “renounces the endeavour to grasp the functioning of the computer” and accepts that “he is thrown into a non-transparent situation” (Žižek). The antiquated mode of knowing that “reads” the world as a perfectly legible text, uncovering an inherent depth within its words, loses relevance for the user of interfaces. Rather, the user no longer pursues knowing what Žižek calls “the modernist universe”—the universe of hidden functions, of what lies behind avatars, websites, and screens. Instead, the postmodern subject, a quasi-user of the world’s many interfaces, must act in “the mode of tinkering,” or “bricolage”¹⁰ (Žižek). Unless they have an expertise within a certain meta-reality, such as Maxine and finance, the characters of Bleeding resort to this form of trial-and-error through the interfaces at hand. Almost instinctively, they assume that unknowns can be uncovered through a brute-force search, as though everything is discoverable simply by “finding and clicking on an invisible link on the screen” (Bleeding 109). Encouraged to tinker through interfaces, the postmodern subject no longer breaches epistemic fronts; rather, they “trust the phenomena” in front of them as an assessment of their environs (Žižek).

This trust in our technological phenomena reflects a postmodern mode of knowing that is liberated from modernist frameworks. Whereas the mechanistic reasoning of modernism required the following of “some pre-established general rules,” the tinkering of interfaces is a groundless testing of the tools in one’s immediate situation (Žižek). Just as a user of a hypertext clicks on links, icons, and menus to “find his bearings,” the tinkerer tests his tools in a largely stochastic, iterative process: the first tool is chosen at random and then, if unsuccessful, each subsequent tool is chosen based on the empirical results of the previous tool tested. The results, experienced firsthand by the tinkerer, are therefore free from the biases of rules, directives, guidelines, and expectations. Bleeding is unapologetic in tinkering’s emancipation of modernist thought and frequently has Maxine poking fun at metanarratives and other pre-postmodernist legitimation apparatuses, asking facetiously: “Why not go off-Torah and choose a passage from, I don’t know, Tom Clancy?” (392). The novel even showcases the logical shortfalls of following such modernist legitimation, wherein even the specialized fluency of a character in Bleeding can lead to severely misread messages where interfaces might otherwise suffice. Maxine, who is unafraid to “improvise a MILF-night routine,” can easily misinterpret a T-shirt reading “UTSL” as an anagram for “LUST or possibly SLUT” when it is a Unix¹¹ acronym for “Use The Source, Luke” (Bleeding 221, 69). Avoiding this failure of applying the wrong meta-reality “lens” (i.e., interpreting programming culture through the language of sex work), tinkering is therefore a specific reaction to the illegibility and unknowability of today’s ontology—which, in other words, is a series of meta-realities accessed primarily through interfaces.

Unknown Unknowns and Reflexivity

A problem arises with tinkering, and “trusting the phenomena,” however: Bleeding’s imbricated world is reflexive and any attempt at knowledge or prediction risks catastrophic consequences. The assimilation of interfaces in the 21st century leads to a misguided expectation that everything will fall into safe, iconic patterns. As we willingly surrender to this decline of symbolic efficiency, we begin to navigate an opaque world without, as Jodi Dean describes through Lacanian terms, “a big Other to ground and secure us” (11). The big Other, in this sense, is none other than the ineffable gaze of the Real upon our systems, an omniscient authority that our symbolic orders are always reconciled with (Lacan 129). The presumption of a big Other acts as a protective “cover,” reminding us we should have “knowledge of the outcome” before attempting anything of consequence (Dean 11). Without it, however, we tend to underestimate the reflexivity, or feedback, of our actions as we assume there is a continuity of minimal risk as we transition from interfaces to real life. When Maxine, for instance, rendezvous with Windust¹² in the hopes of exposing an underground connection to Ice, she meets with two Windusts: a Windust in DeepArcher¹³, his avatar a “younger version of himself, a not-yet-corrupted entry-level wise-ass,” and a Windust in RL, a federal operative who “destroys entire governments” to enforce foreign policies (Bleeding 406, 245). Overlooking the fact that she “can’t get the two stories to connect,” Maxine fails to anticipate Windust’s eventual death at the alleged orders of an unknown governmental higher-up and, even worse, an unknown phone call threatening her kids (244, 409, 411). Maxine’s endeavor for knowledge, before learning of anything verifiable or revelatory, is what risks her family’s safety and forces her to “dummy up,” turning away from the mystery entirely (416). As if there is an “invisible karmic bureaucracy” to our bids for knowledge, Bleeding’s ontology cautions against a mode of knowing altogether (390).

Beyond our efforts to know something in the present or past, our attempts at prediction have the chance to backfire with unknown dangers in Pynchon’s new ontology. Contemporary science and technology play this predictive role due to the increasingly less pertinent need to know the inherent, total assessability of inquiry. Ulrich Beck describes a new “fatalism” of risk assessment in the “techno-scientific civilization” of postmodernity, where estimability now substitutes the calculability of more traditional risk assessment. Firstly, the reflexive society of today compounds “the actual consequences of the results” beyond the sphere of influence where scientists or, in the case of Bleeding, programmers reside (Beck 171). Lucas and Justin coded DeepArcher only aware of the risks nascent to programs at the time—“backdoor” security risks and illegitimate “random-number sources”—and not the para-programmatic risks of hungry “vulture capitalists” and the unmanageable influx of users upon going open source (149). Secondly, as the known “possible effects,” the risks that are encompassed by the “inherent taboo zones” of already established practices, have become more and more estimable, the “actual consequences have become more and more incalculable” (Beck 171). It has become normalized that the prediction of known unknowns sufficiently accounts for risk and that the creation and use of “bleeding-edge technology […] no proven use, high risk” is not only “crazy shit VCs go for” but safe as long as it is “relatively unhackable” (78, 135). In Bleeding, the risk of inquiry is most apparent when characters pursue the financial mystery of hashslingrz¹⁴. When Lester disappears, for instance, “whatever he saw that he shouldn’t’ve, the visitation that meant his end rising spooky and vaporous above the spreadsheets of secret cash flow, was something that couldn’t be allowed out among civilians” (460). Lester’s awareness that whatever omen visited him would only channel new dangerous lines of inquiry for other characters epitomizes Bleeding’s assertion that, as Dean puts it, inquiry today is “pushing us to recognize not only that there are unknown unknowns, but that these unknowns can and will have massive, unforeseen effects” (9). 

The enormity of these effects is compounded by today’s imbrication of meta-realities, wherein our epistemic attempts and actions can result in chain reactions on a societal scale. While the world of meta-realities is opaque, it still creates “situations of high volatility and low predictability” akin to the free market (Dean 12). Just as assets in the market tend to move in tandem, so do the systemic failures of meta-realities: Bleeding is still haunted by the Y2K bug and the fear that “computer glitches may destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in assets within an hour” (Pohlmann 5). Pynchon’s insertion of “11 September”, an eerily unfamiliarized alternative to the more notorious appellation of “9/11”, is the largest example of unknown unknowns and the scope of their effects. In an untraceable concatenation of events, the 2001 tragedy ripples into the decline of stock prices, the failure of Princeton’s random number generators, a “window of vulnerability” in DeepArcher, the “collateral casualty” of irony in news columns, and the reunion of parents walking their children to school “regardless of age or latchkey status” (Bleeding 342, 355, 335, 321). In other words, Bleeding’s reflexivity is a “reflexivity that goes all the way down,” where the lofty status of a terrorist attack in, perhaps, the meta-reality of national security can trickle down to even the banning of “fictional reading assignments” in the meta-reality of school boards and local communities (335). This new reflexivity of the unknown and unpredictable—ignored by our interfaces, rooted in our insufficient risk assessment, and compounded by the imbrication of our meta-realities—characterizes the fundamental danger in Pynchon’s new ontology.

Meta-Sensing in a Desert of Links

However, as much as Bleeding cautions against inquiry and prediction, the novel insists there was an ephemeral throughline to the events that lead up to September 11 and, therefore, some elusive, cabbalistic method to anticipate the repercussions of our reflexive society. Numerous meta-realities elicited clues to the prefiguration of September 11, from the “sudden abnormal surge of put options” on the stock of United Airlines to the “faces already under silent assault” from a week earlier, evincing some “Y2K of the workweek” to come (315, 312). DeepArcher’s source for random numbers, the RNGs (random number generators) used for Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, begins to “depart from randomness” the night of September 10th through the 11th before “just as mysteriously everything went back to near-perfect random again” (341-342). This lapse in what would otherwise be a “natural” or expected randomness is studied by the Global Consciousness Project:

When human consciousness becomes coherent, the behavior of random systems may change. Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunneling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. We calculate one in a trillion odds that the effect is due to chance. The evidence suggests an emerging noosphere or the unifying field of consciousness described by sages in all cultures. (Nelson)

Whether Pynchon is claiming the literal existence of a preternatural “unifying field of consciousness” or not is up to the degree to which he is sincere about the unmediated nature of this noosphere. While it may be easier to justify, perhaps, that the ever-communicative techno-capitalist society of today—where stock interests, political agendas, and link clicks snowball into larger socioeconomic effects—functions practically as a noosphere, Bleeding suggests that something within consciousness itself can predict or induce the anomalies of words, numbers, and symbols Pynchon’s characters are usually met with. 

Horst, a “stiff with a gift,” is capable of sensing this flow of conscious interests in the market, enjoying a “nearly error-free history of knowing how certain commodities around the world will behave, long enough before they themselves do” (320, 21). However, Horst’s ability does not sense the numbers themselves but rather “just follows along” the conscious intentions that necessarily exist prior to any changes in stock indices (320). This unmediated quality to Horst’s sensing is best understood as the “incessant to-ing and fro-ing” of all potential thought through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s plane of immanence. Unlike a practical noosphere, which requires the communicative mediums of globalization, the “plane” does not exist materially and refers not to a physical, digital, or specifically cultural space (as meta-realities are) but is a single, continuous field that all our potential thought¹⁵ flows through (Deleuze and Guattari 35, 36). If we consider Bleeding’s noosphere as an entanglement of globalized informational systems, rather than a metaphysical construct, it is, therefore, an instantiation of a subset of the plane’s potential thought. In this practical noosphere, potential thought is materialized and disseminated as knowledge, information, or data through communicative networks—most notably, the so-called Web. In the plane of immanence, however, those more consolidated forms of thought—concepts, propositions, and opinions—appear, according to Deleuze and Guattari, as pauses, condensations, and stagnations in the plane’s endless flow of potential. Horst’s foresight, then, is more akin to a sensing of these eddies and vortices, emerging from the river of “infinite thought” as the trending opinions of stock traders. Operating at a more immanent level than more concrete modes of knowing, this sensing differs from Oedipa’s search for the “Word;” instead, it detects the potential anomalies in shared thought before they manifest as legible, textual expressions: Horst’s prescience is likened not to anything solid, but to a “series of windswept places, […] the aggregate a wintry blankness [Maxine] can’t read” (Bleeding 298). What is perhaps a pre-epistemic mode, I offer this ability to sense an “irregular contour” or “halt” to the shared flow of potential thought as Pynchon’s answer to Bleeding’s precariously reflexive ontology and its repercussive unknowns and unpredictables.

With the decline of modernist thinking and thinking through interfaces as viable tools to navigate the risk of Bleeding’s ontic structures, Pynchon suggests a new phenomenological direction through Maxine’s use of this sensory mode. No matter what locality she is in, Maxine’s noir-detective smarts, “Mom ESP”, CFE sense, and “yenta reflexes” grant her forays into the dangers and ambiguities of meta-realities akin to clairvoyance (117, 178). I will call this mode of sensing meta-sensing. I use the prefix meta¹⁶ not only to designate meta-senses as acting above the constraints of other modes of assessment as well as above the boundaries of meta-realities but to place it in contradistinction with mechanistic reasoning, legitimized by pre-established rules, and tinkering, encouraged through contemporary interfaces. Meta-senses are unique in that they avoid the reflexive risks of those attempts at knowing; rather, meta-senses do not ascertain any concrete knowledge and instead prioritize assessing the reflexive ebb and flow of consciousness inherent to the plane of immanence and instantiated as the inner and outer workings of meta-realities. Unlike the binary of Crying, granting agency through the grandiose choice between a solipsistic imaginary and an irreformable reality, Bleeding’s phenomenology offers a more local choice: Trust our meta-senses and resign from that paranoid desire to know or continue to risk danger at the behest of unknown unknowns.

The risk that tinkering poses in a society of reflexive risk—where “the fates of unreflective click-happy users are altered for the worse”—is absent when meta-senses are used in a threat-related context (Bleeding 345). Whereas tinkering requires the user to commit to an available option or tool, which risks reflexive uncertainty, meta-senses circumvent this commitment by triggering as an extrasensory alert before any mediation through interfaces takes place. These alerts represent the “immediate, perpetual, instantaneous exchange” of thought with that shared plane of immanence—what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “lightning flash” (Deleuze and Guattari 38)—and breach the text as similarly disruptive, comical alarm noises: “whoopwhoopwhoop,” “a game-show buzzer,” or simply “intuition alert” (36, 280, 59). During a conversation, they grant a Maxine moonlighting as a detective insight into some clandestine piece of information that the person she is probing is not letting on. Like an infra-red camera scanning artifacts invisible to the human eye, meta-senses capture hermeneutical ambiguities—those immanent condensations of potential thought—that are often overlooked by a character’s ordinary senses. Since these artifacts exist with a pre-thought or “pre-philosophical” status, they are discarded in those “gaps in the symbolic” that interfaces fill in, making them undetectable by the customary tinkering of today (Deleuze and Guattari 40). In respect to that aforementioned “noosphere,” the extrasensory nature of Maxine’s meta-senses allows her to detect these artifacts without triggering any reflexive feedback, as she is not sending out a conscious influence or message when her senses are alerted. Safety, then, is not achieved by influencing those around her but is managed by avoiding the ambiguous dangers she is alerted of: Maxine’s “post-CFE/ESP alarm,” for instance, tells her the potential danger in the relationship between Lester and Ice before Lester admits it (Bleeding 156). Forewarning Maxine of the potential dangers of Bleeding’s world before they transcend into an instantiated reflexivity, meta-sensing thus avoids the random, click-committed risks associated with tinkering.

What is meta-sensed, then, is more of a suspicious datum for assessment than knowledge in its postmodernist sense, legitimized by incumbent criteria of the “‘knower’s’ interlocutors” and subject to the interests of “decision makers” (Lyotard 19, xxiv). In contrast to the latter and its preferred method of mechanistic reasoning, Maxine’s subconscious detection of ambiguities is never reconciled with a legitimation apparatus. Because the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical, the irregular flow of “unthought” Maxine is alerted of is not knowledge¹⁷, or knowledge which is awaiting an appraisal of status, but something existing a priori the search for knowledge: The movement of thought as a “turning toward” (Deleuze and Guattari 59). Whereas knowledge, in its traditional sense, is transcendental and seeks a destination outside the “flatness” of the plane (in the form of a stable, external truth), this “turning toward” is precisely intransitive. Rather, the ambiguities appear to Maxine as “directions,” “intuitions,” and, at most, investigative leads—far from any verifiable, evidential knowledge. As such, Maxine’s sleuth-related “antennas” activate at the notice of such a vague ambiguity—a “semimischevious look,” a “WASP eyebrow routine,” or no particular catalyst at all (Bleeding 187, 64, 280)—that legitimation of the catalyst for Maxine’s comical alarms itself is out of the question and, instead, Maxine chooses to trust her senses. When she is not bearing the risks of a particular lead, Maxine’s self-protection policy, then, is not the knowing recognition of traditional signs of safety that would legitimate a modernist thought process but merely the sensing of a potential lack of safety in the lines of inquiry immediate to her. Whereas Crying’s Oedipa still relied on those pre-established signs—feeling safe only when recognizing “customary words and images” like “cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars”—Maxine ensures her safety by avoiding those off-putting directions she senses, before any form of knowing takes place. Meta-sensing is thus immune to the problems of modernist thought by modulating that search for knowledge, potentially biased and binding, into a search for safety removed from any transcendental form of legitimation.

Once Maxine turns away from the mystery, her meta-sensing shifts from extracting leads to probing the unknown unknowns inherent in the reflexivity of Bleeding’s ontology. Pynchon relates this use of meta-senses to the pseudoscientific practice of dowsing, where a divining rod senses the vibrations of the earth to locate groundwater: A Maxine crossfaded into a DeepArcher “desert” tries “to pick her way across, dowsing […] for links invisible and undefined” (403). The analogy imbues meta-sensing with the connotations of the occult, where the practitioner communes with an external cosmic or spiritual force, entirely independent of the querent. The ritual then is non-reflexive: Just as a divining rod senses vibrations in the ground without sending its own, meta-senses detect ambiguities without sending a conscious influence that may compound into further unknowns—like a specious detective lead or a click on a “cursed” link might. Bleeding renders dowsing, and meta-sensing, as a means to reroute for safety in what is described as “survivalist country,” that limbo space found in cyber- and virtual realms populated with unknown redirects to either a secure, autonomous domain or irretrievable danger (malware, adware, phishing attacks, scams, etc.)  (403). Maxine’s dowsing of these URL risks is contrasted with “wildcatting,” where a prospector “strikes oil” by drilling straight into the ground but nevertheless risks “an enormous gusher […] burst[ing] into flames” (404). The wildcatter in this allegory is none other than the epistemically greedy—those whose paranoid desire to know, and to profit, eclipses any warnings and leads to the repercussive dangers, the “cursed” links, and the fiery “gushers,” of Bleeding’s precariously reflexive ontology. Pynchon’s alternative of dowsing, or meta-sensing, allows a newly mature Maxine—one jaded with mystery and uninterested in paranoia—to play diviner, intuiting omens and sensing “vibrations” to guide herself without intervening in that instantiated world of human consciousness. 

A Return to Divination

If Pynchon’s new phenomenology is a return to some form of divination—resigned from that pursuit of knowing and outside that realm of reflexive consciousness—a question remains: Does this new mode of sensing bestow the same agency inherent in the binary choice of Crying’s phenomenology? The answer lies in Bleeding’s descriptions of Maxine’s dowsing:

She pauses in the uneasy melismas of desert wind. Suppose it’s all about losing, not finding. What has she lost? Maxine? Hello? To put it another way, what’s she trying to lose? (403)

Whereas the solipsistic imaginary of Crying’s choice desperately sought an autonomous refuge beyond the grasp of institutional and epistemic influence, Bleeding warrants a philosophy of immanent preservation rather than transcendental escape. As the number of notational spaces and reflexive risks—those “curses” permeating our hypertexts—increases in today’s ontology, we continue to march towards “a futurity of imprecise schedules and reduced options” where, at most, a temporary autonomous zone such as the internet, virtual reality, or social media is found (402). What is not lost, however, is a sense of agency against the same narratives Crying decried. Despite its connotations of prophecy and oracles, in dowsing, “there’s no story line, no details about the destination, no manual to read, no cheat list” (403). That postmodernist battle for epistemic control—over language, narratives, legitimation—is foregone in Bleeding and instead meta-sensing is that shamanistic “cheat code” to navigate the world today without risking agency. It is less like knowing, inextricable from narrative frames, and more like a sensorial sifting—a volitional recognition of filled-in hermeneutical ambiguities before the influences of hegemonic powers, historical arcs, and despotic injunctions come to mind. It is a call for immanence in our thought and immediacy in our access to information, to interpret without reference to a transcendental frame, to assess an unknown path without committing to memory a map at all, to commune with the world without the “lengthy exchanges of signs and countersigns” (Deleuze and Guattari 37, Bleeding 404). Bleeding’s agency, then, is found not in the choosing between different narrative alter-lives but in the resigning from an epistemic mode that risks legitimation altogether. 

In the trajectory between Crying and Bleeding in Pynchon’s oeuvre, Bleeding is the moment “not when ‘everything changed’” but “when everything was revealed”—not as some “grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death” (340). As paranoia is normalized in our lives, as meta-realities imbricate over one another, as computerization alters how we access the Real, and as society’s reflexivity compounds the material effects of our conscious thoughts, the horizon of the knowledge we can safely desire—behind the screen and risk-free—shrinks and beyond its edge is a void “approaching with wary and lethal grace” (194). When even predictive attempts can channel lines of inquiry in dangerous directions, a mode of assessment toward something post- or pre-knowing is prioritized. My argument, therefore, agrees with Žižek in that there appears to be an inverse relationship between the increasing complexity of technology, marked by the emergence of new spaces, and an atavistic regression in epistemic modes. In other words, as we move toward an ontology of immense, imbricated risk, we are forced to return to “premodern ‘concrete thought’” in the form of tinkering and, beyond that, a phenomenology of immanent sense akin to divination, only removed of its spiritual sincerity (Zizek). The night can no longer be dispelled by a cry for knowledge; instead, our techno-capitalist future serves as a “midwatch whose purpose is to turn whoever’s out in it into a blind dowser of the unknown” (404).