echanics, this is known as a turbulent period.

While the new physics drastically altered our ordinary conception of time and space, Against the Day appears to narrativize how the convergence of knowledge, capital and power in advanced industrial society has reshaped space-time into its own, rational and singular reality. The corresponding reconfiguration of the real eventually amoun ts to historical negation, the denial of all possible alternative developments. In one of the more obscure passages in Gravity s Rainbow (1973), the ghost of Walter Rathenau suggests that if the corporate state truly is the inevitable nex t step in time s unfolding, it would seem that our late capitalist culture presents itself a s history s only logical outcome.2 Most strikingly, this view has already been championed by such neoconservative thinkers as Francis Fukuyama.3 Yet the proces s of historical negation, taken together with the recurring allusions to the pure science of time in Against the Day, gives rise to an interesting parallel if contemporary society heralds the end of linear history, it has colonize[d] time 4 itself. In this essay I intend to clarify how Pynchon thematizes the late capitalist colonization of t ime in Against the Day by focusing on the novel s more extra-rational passages, most notably those involving the Trespassers, time-travellers from the inevitable fut ure seeking refuge from a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty the end of the capitalistic experiment (AtD 415). As will be made clear, the alternative views on time held by the novel s Anarchists, Quaternioneers and shama ns might illustrate how the metaphysical or irrational serves as a counterweight to the wholly rationalized scientific worldview of capitalism gone awry. In his recent study of Pynchon s politics, Samuel Thomas highlights the everdeepenin g understanding of the real price of capitalism, [the] ever-more unflinching and sophisticated engagement with violence in Against the Day.5 The level at which Pynchon engages with anarchist ideology is striking, yet it can b e argued that anarchism is but one of many alternative views present in the novel which attest to the Luddite yearning in Pynchon s fiction. Molly Hite usefully suggests that the value systems underwriting Pynchon s novels are informed by the counter-cultural writings of the late 1960s, often inspired by the arguments of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.6 According to counter-cultural theorist Theodore Roszak, the scientific imperative at the root of contemporary society has engendered a wholly bureaucratized technocracy in which every individual derives a personal identity from his or her expertise, causing the ge neral public to find itself enmeshed in a gargantuan industrial apparatus it admires a nd yet cannot comprehend.7 The resulting feelings of paranoia and moral ambiguity are present throughout Pynchon s fiction, but Heinz Ickstadt has argued that Pynchon s 2Pynchon, Gravity s Rainbow, 166 7. The novel is hereafter parenthetically referred to as GR. 3Fukuyama, xi. 4Pynchon, Against the Day, 131. The novel is hereafter parenthetically referred to as AtD. 5Thomas, 156. 6Hite, 39 40. 7Roszak, 205 6.