Autism, Thomas Pynchon, and Capitalism as Cosmic Law

by James W. Horton

I was in high school or junior high when my sister, two years younger than me, brought home a book on autistic children for a school project. I didn't read it, but the pictures fascinated me at the time and stayed with me for years. They were drawings made by a boy named Joey, an autistic patient of Bruno Bettelheim's at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago where Bettelheim treated autistic children during the 1950s and 60s. The drawings showed how Joey perceived himself and his bodily functions to be attached to machinery -- to be machinery in fact. This struck a primaeval chord in me somehow, as if Joey's experience had been mine in the distant and forgotten depths of childhood. Though I have never been autistic nor suffered from a serious mental disorder, it all seemed uncannily familiar, as if I had been through a morbid stage such as Joey's and forgotten it.

Years later I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on the works of American novelist, Thomas Pynchon, and in the course of reading Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, again I encountered a description of Bettelheim's patient, Joey. After reading The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (1967) by Bettelheim, I came to see connections, not only between autism and the work of Pynchon, but between autism, Pynchon, and the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism. All three evoke disturbing evidence of a modern humanity subverted by machinery, with an underlying imperative of Cosmic Law driven by despair and paranoia.

Pynchon's first three novels describe a world in which technology and its corresponding capitalist structures are manifestations of what might be called a general autism, wherein society and its individuals act in ways similar to those of clinically autistic children. General autism is ruled by an imperializing Cosmic Law, a law which proclaims, as Bettelheim put it, "you must never hope that anything can change." This law spreads like an infection by means of its imperializing paranoia, inspired in the observers of the autist. Pynchon's novels constitute a critique of capitalism and its technological manifestations and suggest that a collective autism underlies the drive for materialistic and technological consumption in capitalist society.

History of Autism

In the 1950's, L. Kanner described childhood autism as,

This description fits Joey quite well. Joey is particularly fascinating because of his bizarre relationship to so-called "machinery" which he made out of cardboard, tape, radio tubes, and strings used to represent electrical wires. This machinery "lived" him, as he put it, taking care of his bodily functions such as breathing, defecating, and eating. The machines or "preventions" even ran his body while he slept. They expressed his fears and desires, but though they acted as protectors for him, they were also "crippling compulsive defenses" (Bettelheim 244).

Cosmic Law and Autism

What Bruno Bettelheim calls the "Cosmic Law" of the autist seems to be at the heart of autistic activity, and though it may not be its origin, it is this law which feeds the paranoia of the autists in Pynchon's fiction, and which imperialistically helps to spread autism.

Bruno Bettelheim's work is now considered seriously flawed in its understanding of the causes of autism. The prevailing view now is that autism is caused by physiological and not psychiatric factors, although which physiological factors (such as heredity, or viral infections, for example) and to what extent each is significant is much debated. Bettelheim tended toward an explanation which disqualified neither nature nor nurture, but which tended to stress the importance of the latter, especially the interaction of mother and child (Bettelheim 69 ff., 125 ff., 385-405). Though Bettelheim is careful to indicate that parents, especially mothers, have been blamed too much for the autism of their children, the case histories he presents often show parents lacking in affection for their offspring. Bettelheim points out that in some of these instances the parents themselves are dealing with psychological problems, and that if parental behavior is a factor in the child's autism, the parents nonetheless are not necessarily morally culpable.

Bettelheim describes how an ordinary problem such as difficulty in breast-feeding might cause an unusual level of withdrawal on the part of an autistic child. This withdrawal in turn may greatly distress the mother, making her feel, for example, that she has failed as a parent, and causing her in turn to withdraw from the child. In turn, the child withdraws still further, and a vicious circle is begun, culminating in childhood psychosis.

In Bettelheim's view, the situation of the autistic child seems to spring from hopelessness born of experience, but after this, a turning towards hopelessness to avoid the pain of thwarted hope. "The view is therefore proposed that infantile autism is a state of mind that develops in reaction to feeling oneself in an extreme situation, entirely without hope" (Bettelheim 68). Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, likened autism to the experience of camp prisoners:

The despair of the autistic child gives rise to the Cosmic Law, since the child is also in constant fear of imminent death. The Cosmic Law also has the effect of destroying time for the autist -- the autistic child loses awareness of past events and has difficulty imagining future events. In effect, the Cosmic Law is where the child turns to hopelessness to ward off disappointment. Bettelheim described this phenomena as follows:

Max Weber's Critique of The Protestant Work Ethic and the Cosmic Law

The Calvinist doctrine of predestination resembles the autist's Cosmic Law in that nothing can change: you are either saved or damned and there is nothing you can do about it. In this light, one can think of the Puritan as one who begins his spiritual life by desperately seeking signs of God's love for himself, but for whatever reason, does not succeed in finding these signs. Eventually, in order to stop the agony of looking for God and not finding him, (which is felt as a rejection) the Puritan tells himself his eternal fate is sealed and that he can change nothing. As Joey gave up seeking affection from his parents and retreated to machinery to escape his pain and deaden his rage, the Puritan escapes into his famous work ethic. Work becomes for the Puritan what Joey's machines were for him: a crippling set of arbitrary rules which ultimately effect nothing. Of the protestant work ethic Max Weber says,

The transcendentality of this end resembles the transcendent nature of Joey's machinery laws and toilet training laws. Bettelheim relates how, because of the thoroughly impersonal way in which Joey was treated by his parents in all things, he did not learn his toilet training through any sense of wanting to please or avoid displeasing his parents. Unlike healthy toilet training, no mutuality was involved. To defecate when and where told was a transcendent law. Likewise, in the Puritan consciousness, salvation by faith (from grace) is stressed to the point where all human endeavor threatens to be futile. At the same time, that the Puritan must nonetheless behave in certain ways (i.e. he must be virtuous) is adamantly maintained, despite this apparent futility. Likewise, Joey's mechanical preventions could be seen by any outside observer to be clearly useless and debilitating, but just as Joey exercised great vigour in these preventions, so did Puritans in their incipiently futile labours. Just as Joey's parents did not respond to his toilet training in any personal or sensible way (that is, by expressing pleasure or displeasure) the god of the Puritans seemed equally capricious and indifferent.

Weber has also pointed out that in the Calvinist view, good works, as signs of saving grace, were a way to distract oneself from fear of the afterlife (Weber 115). Hence, work functions in the Puritan economy in the same way as one of Joey's mechanical preventions: as Puritans avoided the fear of hell through work, so Joey avoids the fear of disappointment and death by alienating himself from people and feelings with his preventions. It would seem reasonable to suspect therefore, that capitalism, as the secular inheritor of Puritan work attitudes, might also be a vast and systematic autistic prevention: a system of capital-as-machinery.

Additionally, one of Marxism's most common criticisms of capitalism is that it ignores history, and attempts to believe that its conception of economic "laws" and "human nature" are in fact eternal verities which can never change. This may indeed be the kind of bourgeois spiritlessness that Kierkegaard rejected, and we can see capitalism as an autistic attempt to stop time. This autistic trait is reported by Bettelheim, who asserts that in order not to hope that anything will change, the autist must indeed stop time itself.

Paranoia and the Cosmic Law

Bettelheim's The Empty Fortress takes on a distinctly Pynchonesque tone of paranoia when the author discusses the fascination Joey's caregivers experience in observing him and his machine-like ways. Bettelheim speculates on the larger context of the therapists' reactions:

Here we have not only a gothic science fiction question about the potential dangerous autonomy of machines, but a Marxist issue of the means of production controlling that production over and above human interests. Most immediately, the above quotation is an illustration of what Kanner said: "the autistic child forces the people in his world to be even more obsessive than he is himself." The autist, therefore, even if unwittingly, behaves as a kind of imperialist of autism, spreading obsession to others which we can see as paranoia.

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

There are several striking and disturbing similarities between Bettelheim's The Empty Fortress and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Both texts illustrate the process of how autism is spread and imply that it manifests itself in human relationships to capital and machinery.

The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon's second novel can be seen as a tightly written piece of California absurdist, film noir, detective paranoia. The young Oedipa Maas, though not literally a detective, plays the role of one as she tries to track down something called "The Trystero,"an entity revealed to her in tantalizing clues left in the estate of capitalist mogul Pierce Inverarity, her former lover. The Trystero seems to be some kind of dispossessed system of communication possibly dating as far back as the 13th century, having overtones both of cruel nihilism and hopeful revolution.

The Cosmic Law and paranoia operate in this novel more or less as they do with Joey. For example, here is Lot 49's description of the Puritan Scurvhamites, who see the Trystero as an appropriate symbol of the "opposite Principle" or "brute automatism":

There is great similarity between these fictional Puritans and the historical Increase Mather. In his discussion of the use of wheel imagery in Mather's Doctrine of Divine Providence, Richard Forrer echoes the Scurvhamite passage just quoted. Mather may not seem quite as dark and morbid as the Scurvhamites here, but something of the same obsessive-mechanical mood is struck:

The Scurvhamite leap from the machine run by good to the machine run by evil may not be such a big leap if Mather's God is as irrational and arbitrary as He seemed in our earlier quotation of Forrer. Mather therefore sheds light on the Scurvhamites' self-destructive tendencies. Their having viewed the universe as mechanical indicated that their autistic tendencies existed even before they left their sect. With the Scurvhamites we see not only the morbid fascination with machinery that parallels the therapists' morbid fascination with Joey as machine, but seduction by the Cosmic Law ("the gaudy clockwork of the doomed" or "brute automatism that led to eternal death"), the presence of paranoia, and, as these are puritans we are talking about, at least the potential for an autism/capitalism connection.Pierce Inverarity's situation as capitalist is similar to Joey's as autist. Inverarity's situation in Lot 49 sounds much like what Bettelheim says of Joey: "[s]ince the world he found did not grant him even a small measure of autonomy, he created a separate, unique world of his own" (Bettelheim 233). Joey creates this world, only to disappear in it, to be less powerful than one of his own machines. Likewise, Pierce "dies" (though we don't know for sure whether he is dead, which means he seems to inhabit a mysterious state resembling autism) and seems to become the emptiness at the middle of his fortress of capital. He has little or no self, yet his empire lives on. Oedipa, Pierce's ex-lover, ponders their relationship:

What does this frenetic and pointless activity mean? Among other things, it means that the market "lives" Inverarity as Joey's machines "lived" him. Pierce's motto of "keep it bouncing" has connotations of the obsessive plate-spinning activity of autistic children, or of Joey's fascination with repetitive rotary motion in the form of propellers and fans. Pierce rejects Oedipa's inadequate love in favor of his own world. Forced by Pierce's legacy into a state of autistic obsession, Oedipa asks herself: "[s]hall I project a world?" (59) a question suggesting that she has been captured by the autist's mystique just as the therapists are by Joey. Oedipa is compelled to follow up every clue that has to do with the Trystero system encoded in Pierce's will, for though he is absent, he is exceedingly powerful. The Trystero he leaves behind, a system of bizarre clues, significations and silences that Oedipa has not decoded even by the end of the book, reminds us that the autist practices, as Kanner says, "either mutism or the kind of language that does not seem intended to serve the purpose of interpersonal communication." Indeed, not only does Pierce's language not inform Oedipa in any clear way, it manipulates and imperializes her through the paranoia which is now a characteristic aspect of their relationship.

Both Joey and Pierce Inverarity are autistic machine inventors -- the difference is that Inverarity's machine is capital. As Bettelheim asserts, Joey was "run by machines that were both created by him and beyond his control" (234). This sounds much like any of a number of science fiction stories where a great robot or computer is created by a mad genius and runs amok. Joey is such an autistic inventor, and so is Pierce. Though Pierce may be less explicitly technological in his doings, both inventors create intricate systems of interrelating cause and effect, mechanisms of control, organization, production and consumption which serve a deep personal need whether through the mechanisms of technology or those of the market.

V.

The paranoid reaction to such frightening machines is endemic in Pynchon's first novel, V. (1963). "[D]o machines still serve our human purposes, or are they cranking away by now without purpose? Even more unnerving: are they working away for their own ends which we no longer know or control?" (Bettelheim 238). The machines of Pierce and of Joey are both of this mysterious order, and so is the machinery of Lady V.

The three chief characters in V. are Benny Profane, a "schlemiel" who is afraid of machines because he is always victimized by them, Herbert Stencil, a self-depersonalizing man, and the entity he searches for, the Protean semi-inanimate Lady V. herself. In V. we find autism manifesting itself in machinery, and as before, the Cosmic Law and paranoia also play their role. Lady V., much like Joey and his machines, is "lived" by her artificial body parts -- parts used to replace the originals which she has deliberately removed. However, Lady V.'s mechanical self-objectification also has an imperializing mystique, as in Kanner's comment about the autist's power to force others to be even more obsessive than himself. Lady V.'s relationships, however more complicated and Byzantinely political, are on this manipulative level. She becomes a thing and treats others as things on a regular basis.

Herbert Stencil, more than any other character, is invaded by paranoia on Lady V.'s account. Reacting like the Scurvhamites to the mechanical Trystero, Stencil displays autistic tendencies and entrancement by Lady V.'s autistic mystique. He spends his life searching for Lady V. and veering toward autism through what he calls "[f]orcible dislocation of personality" (V. 51). This involves the avoidance of the first person pronoun (a common autistic practice) and the constant assumption of an identity other than his own. His annihilation of self is very much like the practice of autists, who, despite their megalomania, have very little sense of self. Stencil has an ambivalent "approach and avoid" philosophy towards Lady V., much like that of the incipiently autistic infant to the mother during breast-feeding difficulties.

Clearly, the Lady V./Stencil relationship is parallel to the Trystero/Scurvhamite, Pierce/Oedipa, and Joey/psychiatrist relationships. In each case, the latter member of the equation is imperialized by paranoia because of the former member.

Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is widely regarded as Pynchon's most important work and is a vast, sprawling beast of paranoia wherein the "brute automatism" is even less clearly defined. The protagonist of Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, is on a quest in a world of inhuman and dangerous forces. He is apparently looking for the 00000, or original V-2 rocket.

We encounter what is possibly this 00000 only once in the novel. That is where Gottfried, the submissive lover of Captain Weissman, is ritualistically bound and put inside the rocket in a special womb-like chamber called the Schwarzgerät. The rocket is launched, like all the others, and he is presumably killed.

Gottfried's immachination in the V-2 rocket is much like Lady V.'s connection to inanimate body parts. In Gravity's Rainbow, Gottfried is virtually part of the rocket, encased fetus-like in the womb-like Schwarzgerät of Imipolex: "[t]hey are mated to each other, Schwarzgerät and next higher assembly" (751). The rocket is in control of Gottfried, and naturally to his own detriment. Significantly, psychotherapist Frances Tustin speaks of "autistic objects" which serve the purpose of self-encapsulation. The wound of separation from the parental figure is found by the child to be so painful that it is covered over, so to speak, by the sensual stimuli of a hard object, such as a toy the child constantly grips firmly. With the child's consciousness wrapped up in this toy, the child is removed from the world into a self-encapsulated state. Gottfried's Imipolex shroud and Lady V.'s prosthetics are reminiscent of this. If we extend the concept of the autistic object to things which are not predominantly tactile in their application, the strong parallels between the autistic object and Joey's machines or Pierce's business empire are also evident.

Considering the nature of the corporate world in Gravity's Rainbow, Gottfried is also "capitalized," or made part of the machinery of capital in being immachinated. Since the rocket is a product of (among other things) corporate schemes and interests, it is plain that in being wedded to the rocket Gottfried is also being wedded to capital and made as much a piece of its machinery as of the rocket machinery itself. Note also what happens to the rocket which encapsulates Gottfried: it works best in destroying itself. Joey also crashes and explodes his machines, and is most human (and most dangerous) when he does so:

On such occasions Joey would shout words such as "crash" or "explode." "[F]or much of the first weeks he neutralized our voices with 'Bam!', his most frequent reaction when spoken to" (Bettelheim 254). Joey explodes whenever his machines fail or disconnect. Likewise, when the disconnection of the rocket occurs at Brennschluss, that part of its trajectory where it runs out of fuel and tips over, it then begins to descend to its target for the inevitable explosion.

Tyrone Slothrop

The themes of being immachinated and capitalized are taken to an extreme in the case of Tyrone Slothrop. Tyrone Slothrop's bondage to the rocket is just as strong as Gottfried's and includes even more of an economic dimension. As an infant, Slothrop is sold by his father to the CIA and the rocket cartel in order to be conditioned, Pavlov style, into a mechanical relationship with the rocket. Note that though we have Laszlo Jamf here as a mad genius figure, he seems inessential. There is little indication that he is the prime mover in whatever plot is using Slothrop. It is as if the mad genius's role has been systematized and bureaucratized into a committee or machine which performs the same function.

But for Tyrone, things are quantitatively, even qualitatively different from what they are for previous characters we have discussed. Difficult and desperate as Lady V.'s and Inverarity's situations are, we can see nonetheless that they participate to some extent deliberately as mad and evil geniuses in their own immachination and capitalization. They sit, as it were, like spiders in the middles of web-worlds of their own making, and ostensibly, at least, are in control. In Gravity's Rainbow, however, mechanization and capitalization of the individual are taken entirely out of the individual's hands -- at least in the case of Tyrone. Human agency is removed from the human and deposited in the techno/economic system. It is this system which conditions Tyrone in early infancy to his attachment to the rocket. It seems, therefore, that Slothrop is destroyed not by his own autism as much as by someone else's. He is conditioned and destroyed by capital and technology -- structures which seem to have exceeded the control of those who make and inhabit them. Therefore, not only do capital and technology manifest autism, they produce it.

A Final Word from Weber

The machinery of capitalist acquisition becomes humanity's autistic object. The rocket is reified and explosive capital. The rocket runs humanity, machines run humanity in Joey's system, and money runs humanity in capitalism. This is autistic reversal of causality, instituted by people in order to avoid the pain of non-acceptance from God. Perhaps the capitalist law of acquisition for its own sake is really another version of the autist's Cosmic Law of "you must never hope that anything can change." Both lead to essentially loveless activity. The Cosmic Law in Tyrone's case means in effect that love is not possible.

Pynchon's first three novels reflect a larger reality, which is that autism is the root of techno-capitalism, wherein machines and money control and usurp people. Worldwide, machines and capital take over, rendering more and more people spiritually and physically destitute. Taken as a unit, humanity is retreating from itself, becoming a zero ensconced by the empty fortress of machines and capital. Such a life, spent purely in pursuit of self-defense with self-defense as its reason for being, is a worthless life and self-destructive ("He who finds his life will lose it"). The fascistic salute to the "survivor" is not in effect a tribute to same, but a wicked assault on life itself -- a dark joy which has no purpose but to spread the rule of the Cosmic Law, the rule of death, everywhere.

Now let us broaden our scope a little. The worlds of Gravity's Rainbow and of capitalism are paranoid, and both think that there is nothing in their control.

In this context, we can see the forced worldly wisdom of the capitalist epithet, "it's a dog eat dog world out there" as a nihilistic gesture whose roots may well be in Puritan notion of a world irrationally disconnected from human effort: i.e. anything can happen no matter what you do, the universe does not favor the good, maybe even the opposite is true, and everyone and everything is unalterably against you. Bettelheim elaborates:

This paragraph connects autism and paranoia--a connection that can easily be put into a metaphysical context in Gravity's Rainbow. In autism, capitalism, and paranoia, nature or what is "out there" is against you. Therefore, autism, capitalism, and paranoia evince a fundamental lack of faith. One can even speculate that every philosophy might be divided into one of two different types: one of faith and one of distrust. Contrast "you must never hope that anything can change" with the Biblical quote from Matthew: "with God all things are possible." Perhaps this is the key binary underlying Pynchon's work, especially Gravity's Rainbow. It is not "order" versus "anarchy" according to the glib binary so common in Pynchon criticism, but faith in God versus despair and autism.

Joey puts his hope in machines, as does Lady V., as do the Puritans described by Forrer, Weber, and in Lot 49, as do capitalists who leave all to the "natural" machinations of the market. What is most important is a kind of despair behind all this. To put one's faith in machinery of any sort is an act of despair and deceit no matter how it disguises itself. In effect, one has submitted oneself to a machine teleology -- "machine teleology" being a contradiction in terms, a never-ending spinning like the autist's top. One's faith has been placed in an end which is not an end but a meaningless eternity.

But it is not only the individual who is autistified -- society itself is an autist. "Group autism" is no paradox if, for example, humanity can otherwise be the body of Christ, or united in some form of fellowship. Autistic capitalist society, therefore, does not simply manifest this autism through the self-encapsulating behaviour of isolated individuals. Individuals turn each other into machines. This implies an outside to which capitalism is the inside. Capitalism calls itself "nature" (just as Joey thinks machines are all and treats them like natural functions of his body) and naturalizes itself, thus pretending there is nothing outside itself (when it is more true that there is nothing inside this empty fortress). Capitalism is nature, according to capitalism, and therefore not capitalism at all. Capitalism does what autism does, it rubbishes (as Tustin might put it) the other, and in this instance the other is both humanity and God.

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James W. Horton is a Canadian novelist and freelance writer. He is looking for a publisher for his novel, FALKENHAYN. It is a leftist magical realist story about aerial combat in World War One, and the German Revolution. James Horton may be contacted at jwhorton00000@yahoo.ca.