Police, Paranoia, and Theater in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

The modern police systematically investigates the citizen without special prompting. It is an agent that ceaselessly follows traces wherever they lead and distrusts everyone.1 One consequence of the emergence of the modern police, famously analyzed by Michel Foucault, is the increasing internalization of police control: the omnipresent modern police extends its disciplining power to the internal fabric of the modern subject. More than simply investigating everywhere and everything, the police burrows its way into the heart of the citizen.2 This process is captured most vividly in what Louis Althusser calls his “little theoretical theater,” a street scene in which the subject is constituted by virtue of being addressed by the state: “Hey, you there!”3 The agent doing this calling, who acts for and on behalf of the state and therefore enacts the Ideological State Apparatus is none other than the “most commonplace everyday police.” This Althusser-Foucault view might be called the interpellative-disciplinary theory of the subject, according to which the modern subject is constituted by the modern police.