GRGR3: Discussion Opener for Section 3

[Joseph CERRATO]

Hi there,
 I've been a lurker for months here and occasionally sent a message or two, and
sometimes by mistake to your private email addresses, I must say you guys are
very impressive, which has made me both fascinated and shy, but here is my
contribution all the same 
 
Andrew writes

7)  "It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control"
    (30.26) "the Invisible Hand" (30.30) Is this a major policy in
    GR's manifesto or just a throwaway introduced merely to set up a
    sneer at psychology or 'uspenskian nonsense'? (30.31). Remember
    that `Invisible hand' becomes visible, to Slothrop at least, when
    it materialises later on with a ponting middle finger sayign this
    way to the `Rocket cartel'.

This is explicit reference to  Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market" ( the
complete quote is even clearer ("A market needed no longer be run..." 30.30) as
a kind of providence  regulating a  free-market  economy in his _ Wealth of
Nations_.
To me the passage expounds the ambiguity of  the conspiracy theory issue.
Reality being no longer controlled by a transcendental invisible ruler ( the
less harmful illusion) the alternative, believing in some form of hidden control
from within, let's call it "they" or perhaps the  "Rocket cartel", might just be
paranoid self-deception as well for those who( think they) are its victims as
for those who( think they)'re in control: "no one can do" (30.36). Everyone or
should we say everything, one becomes "parts" on the following line, is being
carried away by a system which has gone amok.. This being perhaps a
manifestation of its entropy. The apparent  rationality of the thesis, presented
as a kind of mathematical demonstration (A, B) must not, however, delude the
reader. This book  is not about disentangling, but knotting into.  What credit
is this theory worth in this setting and anyway who is in control here? "Selena.
Selena. Have you gone then?"
 Interestingly, it seems to point out at a possible other version of GR since A
and B ought to be inseparable, that would have been  told mainly  from the
hubristic- "they"  point of view.To make this clearer and to return to the
recent Moby Dick/GR  thread, I think that there are a lot of similtudes in both
books, but a big difference in the fact that Ahab's viewpoint is privileged by
Melville's narrator ( MB as a tragic epic), whereas, on the whole,  Slothrop's
viewpoint is privileged in GR, making it more like a mock-heroic epic, precisely
because we are constantly aware of the (possibly) illusory and hence more
derisive object of the quest.
This passage is also full of echoes from the previous pages, especially the last
ones of section 2 of the group reading, sometimes thematic ("What ghosts in
command?", 29.17 and "the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud..."
29.24), sometimes almost verbatim ("The Depression, by the time it came,
ratified what'd been happening"28.30 to compare to 30.32 "Putting the control
inside was ratifiyng what de facto had happened") . Could it be just a
throwaway?

Joseph