MO's Visions on the Shuttle.GC

[Terrance]

Otto Sell wrote:
> 
> >Pynchon's characteristic amalgamation of religious and scientific material
> (...) cannot be understood by extra-textual
> reference.<
> 
> I agree if I may put an *only* between *understood* and *by*.

Mo man tai.  trans. No problem. 


> 
> Isn't "Pynchon's amalgamation" something that can be compared to/is putting
> the emphasis on -  the modernization process described by Weber which
> "systematically displaces religious  institutions, beliefs, and practices,
> substituting for them those of reason and science" - only that Pynchon does
> so to make us aware of what had happened (and how) - sometimes inverting the
> process in his fiction like for example re-introducing superstition into
> science and bureaucracy (GR 33), showing that the effort to eliminate all
> fairytales, establish the exclusiveness of scientific knowledge, is a
> fairytale in itself, the former "esoterical" knowledge being replaced by the
> scientific knowledge which becomes esoterical itself by being "restricted to
> scientifically trained elites" - every knowledge restricted to a certain
> group can be called esoterical structurally even if its *content* is called
> scientific. 

I agree, and I think he takes it a step further, knowledge
is esoterical/elite Information disguised as knowledge
(Plato) and so,  for example,  the scientist in GR are
presented as knights and priests,  the Blood of Christ--the
Holy Grail, who seek to dominate others with  Information
about a new plastic and the sex lives of citizens.