Olsen, Philip Edmond

Set at the end of the 1960s in Southern California, Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice (2009)
is a nostalgic and parodic take on the hard-boiled crime genre. With a nebulously defined search for an
erstwhile lover and intimations of foul play from global corporations, its conventional plot construction has
led most critics to view the frequency with which its private eye protagonist, Doc Sportello, consumes and
distributes cannabis while detecting as a hyperbolic motif designed to accentuate the ostentation of the
book’s stylistic parody. This thesis argues that Inherent Vice uses cannabis as a symbolic embodiment of a
way of thinking about exchange that effectively circumvents the problems Pynchon perceives to be posed
by capitalism. Inherent Vice represents a stylistic departure for Pynchon in that, by advocating the repeated
institution of small-scale economies of gift exchange, it offers a specific proscriptive ethical guideline for
readers wishing to resist capitalism.

In the 1960s, the French Communist thinker Louis Althusser undertook to reorient capitalistic
societies toward realizing socialist ideals. However, Althusser envisioned a self-sustaining capitalist state
placing, through ideological state apparatuses, seemingly insurmountable limitations on constituents’ ideas
and actions. In brief, his characterization of social phenomena as revealing a constructed ideology favoring
the state, itself supporting the economy, seems to have contradicted his revolutionary goal. This thesis
argues that communication theory, as explicated by the Canadian theorist Anthony Wilden, provides a
framework capable of rectifying Althusser’s theory of the state to meet his goal of creating a society whose
citizens are free from state control. Althusser thought undoing ideological apparatuses began with their
identification, proceeded through their disruption, and concluded with their transformation. Wilden’s theory
of morphogenic systems, conceptualizing “resistance” to ideological structures as “noise” in the “signal” of
the state apparatus, shows that generating noise permits political actors to foster morphogenesis in a
“repressive” state.