Herbert Spencer

[Scott Badger]

Charles A:
> Pynchon's works have a good deal less to do
>with paranoia and its cousins than it does with the issues of systems
>and their pathologies.

Sebastian D:
>Very interesting that Spence had this peculiar conception of some
>metaphysical sort of _primum mobile_ underlying all change . . . It has
>a kind of a whiff of warped thermodynamics about it . . . It seems to be
>the obverse of entropy . . . The "absolute force," like entropy, has a
>dis-organizing effect (upsetting homogeneity), but this leads to . . .
>higher forms of organization . . . more complex systems (???!!!).

I second Charles' notion and also suggest that Pynchon's Systems (social
systems: Law/Government, Religion and Commerce) exhibit the trend toward
greater organization that Sebastian mentions. An increasing density of
structure, perpetual development/re-development within a bounded space,
which, taken to its extreme, leads to a state where everything *is*
connected (a *state* of conspiracy) and the possibilities for Control bloom
and for Freedom disappear. A state that, in its fully organized form of
perfect energy/information exchange, with no entropic loss (every rocket
fired does _exactly_ the damage intended), might be called.....what?
cold-death? But, unlike entropy, there's no great credit built up -- God
knows when and how :-) -- to carry this process of systemization forward.
The "primum mobile" is bought with our own efforts, a substantial investment
of resources solicited by the
heavily marketed threat of impending social disintegration and collapse. In
Pynchon's books, we are invited to witness, and perhaps question, this
structuring both, as it trends "across history" and, at the point of
inception; in spaces cleared by war or revolution.

Scott Badger