I’m most interested in Fredric Jameson’s discussion of ‘expression’ and its reliance on the centered subject. He suggests that postmodernism solves the problem of alienation by doing away with the subject entirely, which means forgoing expression. But it’s interesting that Jameson seems to quickly replace the concept of ‘expression’ with an interest in feelings, emotions, and affect. The ‘waning of affect,’ for Jameson, is tantamount to the complete loss of expression. I think this is because Jameson privileges alienation as an appropriate display of emotion, while the ‘euphoria’ that replaces alienation is inappropriate to the late capitalist socioeconomic situation. Euphoria, then, reifies the prevailing economic logic. It’s not a stretch to consider this view a bit dour. For Jameson, the centered subject acts as an anchor that keeps one from drifting, providing a stationary place from which one can begin the project of cognitive mapping, Jameson’s antidote to postmodernism. I don’t think many people would argue against cognitive mapping – after all, what’s the matter with attempting to create “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system”? – but what happens when someone actually attempts such a mapping? I think Thomas Pynchon shows us in The Crying of Lot 49, and in the process challenges Jameson’s perspective by problematizing cognitive mapping. The novel begins with a jokey quality that steadily dissolves into the anxieties that attend an unrewarded search for epistemological certainty. In the early going, the story of the Peter Pinguid Society (rife with the same or’s or possibly’s in the DeLillo story we read in class) exemplifies the sort of euphoric free-floating indeterminacy Jameson criticizes. But the novel takes a turn when Oedipa tries to root out the truth about Trystero/W.A.S.T.E. Her attempt to gain a sense of her ‘place in the global system’ reads like the kind of dark descent that only an anchor can provide. In other words, the attempt to map so alienates her that it becomes ridiculous. Despite the darkness of the descent, we realize that her object is a mysterious postal service, after all. This zany detail allows the novel to poke fun at the uses of committed alienation – in direct opposition to Jameson’s tack (i.e. taking seriously the euphoria of postmodernism). This opposition condemns the novel to charges of political what-me-worryism, but it also opens up a sharp critique of the attempt to totalize society or ‘euphorize’ alienation.