Pynchon and commuters...

[Jan Klimkowski]

Oliver Xymoron wrote:
>It's interesting to me that TRP created the Thanatoids
>and coined a name for them, apparently unaware
>that such people already existed.

TP not aware of the existence of "nihilistic young subcultures"?  I find 
that kinda hard to believe...

Oliver also writes:
>I find very little in the article to suggest that Pynchon
>has an irrational fear of technology to any degree.

Does a deep ambivalence towards technology constitute an irrational fear?
What's the flip, the mirror insult, of "irrational fear" - a rational 
embracing of technology?

The great dream of such as Stewart Brand was to take Technology away from 
Them and make it ours, provide all of us who want it with access to tools. 
 Smash the mainframes and march into a realm, a world, that we make and 
constantly remake ourselves.  That's one attitude towards Technology which 
is very American and very appealing.  The successors of 24fps will come from 
cyberspace.

In the "Luddite" article however we find the following:
"By 1945, the factory system - which,  more than any piece of machinery, was 
the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution - had been extended 
to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and 
the death camps, such as Auschwitz.  It has taken no major gift of prophecy 
to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and 
before too long.  Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply 
out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited 
range and accuracy.  An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to 
seven- and eight-figure body counts had become - among those who, 
particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies - 
conventional wisdom."

I believe Duffy is doing some original research on Walter Rathenau, and I 
feel that in the Rathenau-thru-Sachsa scenes (p164-67 GR) we catch glimpses 
of Pynchon's sense of the deeper relationship between elemental substances, 
technology, and secular ambitions of control.  The elements may have their 
own logic and dynamic but They will always try to control and bend that 
logic to Their own short term, secular interests.  Or, alternatively,  maybe 
They are sometimes usurped by Their own Systems, carried along by the logic 
and dynamic of Systems they think are working for them but which, like 
Zhluub and the RayGun, they can really only ride.

This is why, for instance, all talk of a global freemarket is hogwash - or 
diversionary tactics.  There can be no global freemarket because They and 
Their systems have too big a distorting effect on the free flows of goods 
and labour and capital we are all meant to worship.

Above, Pynchon argues that the path from the advance in scientific knowledge 
of Oppenheimer et al to the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation 
was a direct consequence of the Systems which have been historically 
dominant throughout the period at which that scientific breakthrough was 
made.  Scientific knowledge and technologies may have their own inherent 
logic and dynamic, but in the short term Their Systems have a stronger logic 
and dynamic.  With nanotechnology almost upon us, and Global Empires still 
thrashing and twitching away,  it is my humble opinion that TP cannot be 
anything but ambivalent towards Technology.

Transnationally
jan