De-centered subjectivities in Pynchon’s Vineland and theorists on television

Abstract

We have seen how television assaults our subjectivity and de-centers us. Hyperreality threatens to dissolve subjectivity and to control minds; we are subjects of domination by the image and the politics that are encoded within it. The obscene and the spectacle of insignificance finally triumphs in these reality series. This also threatens to undermine agency as real life and television dissolve into one another and the line between hyperreality and reality collapses. The only agency we are assured in these situations is that of omnipresence as a voyeur, but this is an impotent and passive subjectivity. However, the path out of this radical de-centredness, as Derrida argues, is an awareness and vigilance towards the politics of memory and to politicize events alternately in a way that conceptualizes the image and thought. Our only hope for reclaiming agency hence, is a critical awareness and distance from the image that Derrida argues for.