MO's Visions on the Shuttle.GC

[Terrance]

I think that we have discussed Edwin A. Abbott's *Flatland*,
A Romance Of Many Dimensions. In any event, while I was
riding the Shuttle, a Huge German dude showed me some
diagrams from that book. Chapter 6? 

"Ineluctable modality of the visible"? I always thought that
was a trick, like those fingers through the gate of
perception and that Joyce was talking about his Own Drunken
Father who sold his son's De Anima to buy a drink. Poor
Jimmy
his eye
cover one eye and walk flatly
reading
Aristotle beneath a street lamp
absurd name, an ancient
Greek
wings of wax melting the clocks of perception


In any event, I think it is wise not to over emphasize the
importance of scientific tropes at the expense of the MORE [
;-) ]important religious and mythical imagery in TRP's
fiction. 

I think that the groom waits at the alter in V. not because
of the Church, but because V wants HIM all to Herself. I
don't think Harry Potter can hold a candle to TRP's irony on
this one: "Homesick for myself, for her...."  see Adrienne
Rich's Transcendental Etude. 


Turn back to the last episodes in GR where the text is
deliberately fragmented. TRP is moving away from Eliot,
Joyce, Conrad, even Melville, but the fragments are shored
"against" these great works and NOT the seven collapsed
imperial hills or rubrics (Dis)constructed by  Ihab Hassan
;-).

In GR Steve Edelman provides a notable example of Pynchon's 
characteristic amalgamation of religious and scientific
material. What TRP  forms is a  fictional complexity that is
idiosyncratic and cannot be understood by extra-textual
reference. Not that A Companion is not useful, or reading
TRP's sources uninteresting, but
.sources and such, well
they never appear in TRP's fiction outside of his influence
and the influence of other fictionalized ideas. Here is a
big one:  


MO and Secularization & Rationalization 

 At the most abstract level of analysis, modernization leads
to what Max Weber called "the disenchantment of the  world."
It eliminates all the superhuman and supernatural forces,
the gods and spirits, with which nonindustrial  cultures
populate the universe and to which they attribute
responsibility for the phenomena of the natural and
 social worlds. In their place it substitutes as the sole
cosmology the modern scientific interpretation of nature. 
Only the laws and regularities discovered by the scientific
method are admitted as valid explanations of  phenomena. If
it rains, or does not rain, it is not because the gods are
angry but because of atmospheric conditions,
 as measured by the barometer and photographed by
satellites.   Specifically, modernization involves a process
of secularization; that is, it systematically displaces
religious  institutions, beliefs, and practices,
substituting for them those of reason and science. This
process was first  observable in Christian Europe toward the
end of the 17th century. (It is possible that there is
something  inherently secularizing about Christianity, for
no other religion seems to give rise spontaneously to
secular
 beliefs.) At any rate, once invented in Europe, especially
Protestant Europe, secularization was carried as part of 
the "package" of industrialism that was exported to the
non-European world. Wherever modern European cultures  have
impinged, they have diffused secularizing currents into
traditional religions and nonrational ideologies.
 Although secularization is a general tendency or principle
of development in modern societies, this does not imply 
that religion is driven out altogether from society. Against
a deep background of tradition, it inevitably leaves  many
religious practices in place and may even stimulate new
ones. Religious rituals, such as Christian baptism
 and church weddings, persist in all industrial societies;
the church may, as in England and Italy, continue to play 
an important moral and social role. The majority of the
population may hold, however insecurely, traditional 
religious beliefs alongside more scientific ones. There may
even be, as in the United States, waves of religious
 revivalism, involving large sections of the population.  It
is nonetheless true that all such religious phenomena, real
as they may be in the lives of believers, lose their
 centrality in the life of the society as a whole. As
compared with their place in traditional society, they 
increasingly take on the character of marginal, even
leisure-time, activities. They no longer embody that
crucial  legitimating power that religious activities have
in all nonindustrial societies. The religious establishment
is aware  that to confront the modern state too openly is to
risk disestablishment, as in France, or even, as in
communist  societies, dissolution. Baptisms and church
weddings persist as much for social reasons as from belief
in their  religious significance.
 Secularization is but one manifestation of a larger
cultural process that affects all modern societies: the
process of  rationalization. While this process is
epitomized by the rise of the scientific worldview, it
encompasses many  more areas than are usually associated
with science. It applies, for instance, to the capitalist
economy, with its
 rational organization of labour and its rational
calculation of profit and loss. It applies also to artistic 
developments, such as the rational application of the
geometry of perspective in painting and the development of 
a rational system of notation and rational harmonic
principles in music. For Max Weber, the most careful student
 of the process, it referred above all to the establishment
of a rational system of laws and administration in modern 
society. It was in the system of bureaucracy, seen as the
impersonal and impartial rule of rationally constituted 
laws and formal procedures, that Weber saw the highest
development of the rational principle. Bureaucracy meant
 a principled hostility to all traditional and "irrational"
considerations of person or place, kinship or culture. It 
expressed the triumph of the scientific method and
scientific expertise in social life. The trained official,
said  Weber, is "the pillar both of the modern state and of
the economic life of the West."

 Weber was aware that bureaucracy has two faces. It can also
be despotic and irrational in actual operation. The  triumph
of the principle does not guarantee its strict performance
in practice. Rationalization is a process that  operates at
the highest, most general level of social development. It
would be surprising if its effects were to be  found in
every nook and cranny of modern society. Everywhere one
should expect to find the persistence of  nonrational and
even antirational attitudes and behaviour. Superstition is
one example; the occasional rise of  personal, charismatic
leadership breaking through the rationalized routines of
bureaucracy is another. These should
 not be thought of simply as vestiges of traditional
society. They are also the expressions of essential needs, 
emotional and cultural, that are in danger of being stifled
in a scientific and unillusioned environment.

 Weber stressed another significant point. Rationalization
does not connote that the populations of modern  societies
are, as individuals, any more reasonable or knowledgeable
than those of nonindustrial societies. What it  means is
that there is, in principle, scientifically validated
knowledge available to modern populations, by which
 they may, if they choose, enlighten themselves about their
world and govern their behaviour. In practice, as Weber 
knew, such knowledge tends to be restricted to
scientifically trained elites. The mass of the population of
a  modern society might in their daily lives be relatively
more ignorant than the most primitive savage, for the
savage  usually has a comprehensive and working knowledge of
the tools he uses and the food he consumes, whereas  modern
man may well use an elevator without the slightest idea of
its working principle or eat food manufactured  in ways and
with materials of which he is totally unaware.  

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