Rilke, etc. #2

[Derek Barker]

Politics in Crisis: Arendt and Entropy

According to thermodynamics theory, closed systems, where no heat energy is
introduced from the outside, tend toward entropy; all the particles in the
system arrive at the same temperature, and when homogeneity prevails,
motion ceases.  Entropy is the measure of chaos in the closed system,
increasing as the particles in the system tend toward uniformity.   In
"Entropy," Callisto's dictation extends this idea to apply to American
culture, in which he sees a, "similar tendency from the least to most
probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a
kind of chaos."   As society approaches homogeneity, uniformity, and
normalization, humanity, individuality, and identity become meaningless.
It is in this apocalyptic homogeneous world, full of paranoid isolates and
devoid of meaning, where the chaos described by Pynchon reigns.  The
apparent structure to things is an illusion; beneath the uniform order is a
system in crisis.

The Crying of Lot 49 is filled with examples of American closed, entropic
systems.  It is set, for example, in "San Narciso," ostensibly in Southern
California, the land of planned communities, mini-malls, and freeways.
Yoyodyne is a defense contractor, which has its own internal system of
communication, and which assumes the patents of its inventors -- their
individual ideas and, as inventors, their very identities -- as property of
the monolithic corporation (Lot 49, p. 88).  And of course, the government
monopoly on mail delivery is a closed system, but it is a means of
communication used by everyone.  If these systems remain closed, if they
cannot find a source of outside energy, entropy begins to take over, and
the system -- thermodynamic, communication, or political -- stagnates.

For Hannah Arendt, America is also a system in crisis.  She does not
directly invoke the metaphor of entropy, but she, like Pynchon,
problematizes American politics as a closed system, tending toward
homogeneity, and verging on stagnation.  Arendt describes a general, global
trend towards consumerism, in which we are no longer human but "animal
laborans," slaves to the forces of necessity, caught in an endless cycle of
production and consumption.   In such a society, whether capitalist or
communist, people become alienated from each other; meaningful
communication, political dialogues, and the exchange of ideas cease as the
public, political realm diminishes in significance in the life of "animal
laborans."  Arendt argues that plurality is the aspect of the human
condition that necessitates politics -- dialogues and contestations to
negotiate differences.  In "mass society," where we are no longer citizens
but alienated, isolated consumers:

...men have become entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of
seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them.  They are
all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which
does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied
innumerable times.  The end of the common world has come when it is seen
only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one
perspective. 

The uniformity of Arendt's mass society is not an ordered, unified mass,
but isolation multiplied many times over.  Difference and identity lose
meaning; motion, communication, and politics in the plurality have ceased;
in short, Callisto's cultural "heat-death" -- entropy -- has prevailed.

Instead of pluralistic contestations in the Greek-style polis, politics in
the (post)modern age are replaced by bureaucracies; political affairs are
an administrative job rather than a civic duty.  Arendt's Eichman in
Jerusalem is a case study in bureaucratic politics under conditions of mass
society.  Eichman, she argues, was responsible for atrocities and should
have been brought to justice, but his trial missed the lesson to be learned
from his case: that Eichman was not a monster, but rather a stupid man
following orders in a bureaucratic system.   He was a former loser who took
a job in the Nazi bureaucracy, and finally found something at which he was
exceptional.  All the time, "He did his duty...he not only obeyed orders,
also obeyed the law," and he simply did not stop to think in terms of right
and wrong, and "crimes against humanity."   What Eichman did also happened
to him, and, under conditions of mass society -- entropy -- where
individuals are isolated, communication ceases, politics is handled by
bureaucracy rather than dialogue, under these conditions the same could
happen to anyone.

Pynchon's entropic worlds are also administrated by bureaucracies.
Gravity's Rainbow is filled with them.  We are introduced to Slothrop at
his office job where, "their desks are at right angles, so there's no eye
contact... Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of
bureaucratic smegma" (GR, p. 18).  Then there are the conspirators against
Slothrop, Pointsman ("control-man") and Weissman ("white-man").   Weissman
is made out to be an Eichman figure, as much a product of bureaucracy as a
sinister madman: "His desk was a litter of documents, reports, reference
books.  It was a surprise to see him less diabolical than harassed as any
civil servant under pressure" (GR, p. 427).  Pointsman is the Pavlovian
behaviorist in charge of tracking down Slothrop, and he, too, seems as
conditioned as the dogs he studies to believe in conventional science,
linear cause and effect, binaries of "zero to one" rather than "the domain
between zero and one" (GR, p. 55).  In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon
specifically invokes Eichman in comparison to the mad and paranoid Dr.
Hilarious.  Or, in the corporate sphere, consider the bureaucracy at the
Yoyodyne research and development department:

In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing in the Myth
of the American Inventor...Only one man per invention.  Then when they grew
up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like
Yoyodyne; got stuck on some 'project' or 'task force' or 'team' and started
being ground into anonymity.  Nobody wanted to invent -- only perform their
little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some
procedures handbook.  What's it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a
nightmare like that? (Lot 49, p. 88).    

Pynchon's bureaucrats do not learn, they are conditioned; they do not
think, they behave; and they do not engage in meaningful dialogues, they
just do their jobs.

For Pynchon, like Arendt, bureaucracy stifles individual thought, instead
stressing fixed rules and uniformity.  Stanley Koteks, an inventor at
Yoyodyne, remarks, "Teamwork is one word for it, yeah.  What it really is a
way to avoid responsibility.  It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the
whole society" (Lot 49, p. 85).  Arendt similarly refers to bureaucracy as
"rule by nobody."   Yet for both Arendt and Pynchon, this "rule by nobody"
is not "no-rule."  It is still a form of government, albeit one of rigid
rules, communications breakdowns, devoid of individual creative thought and
accountability.  Indeed, as Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, power
still operates in this "rule by nobody," but now it takes the form of
insidious panopticons and unseen conspiracies on the micro-physical level.
 Rather than a public critical space, government and corporate
bureaucracies are the locations of entropic politics. 

In contrast to the apathy, cynicism, and disenfranchisement of today,
Arendt remembers the "revolutionary spirit" of the founding of the
Republic.   This was an ethos of political action, civic duty, and
pluralistic engagement in the polis.  Yet the goal of the Republic was
durability, the strength to withstand change; ultimately, Arendt argues,
the institutions chosen by the Founding Fathers were incompatible with the
revolutionary spirit which made them possible.  As Arendt asks, "Should
freedom in its most exalted sense as freedom to act be the price to be paid
for foundation?"   Through representative institutions, the Founders closed
off the political sphere from the public; politics became a matter only for
the select and privileged few.  Individual votes do not matter in the
scheme of things, only the aggregate does, and votes certainly do not
translate into voices.  Arendt ponders alternatives which ultimately were
not adopted, like the Jeffersonian ward system, but she never suggests a
system that could work in the present.   All she can do now is remember the
lost spirit of revolution, political action, foundation, constitution, and
re-constitution, and ask us to do the same.