ATDTDA (5): The American Corporation

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Dave quoted:

>"'Evolution.  Ape evolves to man, well, what's the next step--human
>to what?  Some compund organism, the American Corporation, for
>instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal
>personhood--a new living species, one that can out-perform most
>anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or
>powerful he is.'" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 147-8)

- which reminded me of this quote from the story "New Rose Hotel" by William 
Gibson (who reads Pynchon and whom Pynchon reads):

"Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's come here to identify the planet's 
dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do 
you think he pics? I probably shrugged.
    The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is 
information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual 
lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form." (p. 129 in my edition of 
'Burning Chrome')

Gibson was evidently pleased by this idea, which recurs in a very similar 
manner in his 'Neuromancer':

"Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the 
multinationals that shaped the course of human history, transcended old 
barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You 
couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were 
others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access 
the vast banks of corporate memory." (Neuromancer, p. 203)

Both Gibson quotes point back to Pynchon's treatment of the same theme in 
GR. Gibson's admiration for Pynchon is well-established, and throughout his 
carreer, Gibson has sprinkled a number of Pynchon references in his novels. 
The zaibatsu quotes may not be deliberate references, but there are surely 
echoes to similar passages in GR. The idea of the zaibatsu as a "structure 
independent of the individual lives that comprise it" recalls this 
description from GR of what Sir Marcus, primping his curls, calls 'The 
Operation':

"...the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the 
self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But 
here there is no whining, here inside the Opertaion. There is no lower self. 
The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. [...] No joy, 
no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his 
place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain...." (GR, 616)

Cf. also an earlier description of the State, where Tchitcherine thinks of 
his namesake:

"There was a long-term operator [...] believing in a State that would 
outlive them all, where someone would come to sit in his seat at the table 
just as he had slipped in Trotsky's -- sitters would come and go but the 
seats would remain" (GR, 338)

In both of these quotes, as well as in the Gibson quotes, the 
corporation/zaibatsu/organisation/state is described as some sort of living 
structure, a pattern comprised by individual lives, but independent of these 
lives - other lives can just as easily fulfill their intended function in 
the larger living structure.
On the face of it, this seems to connect to Pynchon's idea of life itself as 
an "assertion-through-structure" (GR. 10) in the face of Death, where "the 
living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human 
face down ten or twenty generations" (GR, 10) - as Pynchon notes, "it is not 
often Death is told so clearly to fuck off". Structures and patterns, then, 
as life's way of keeping entropy/death at bay. Pynchon (and Gibson) may have 
found this idea in cybernetic godfather Norbert Wiener's 'The Human Use of 
Human Beings', where Wiener says:

"It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone 
of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and 
the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the 
momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with 
our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are 
not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves." (HUoHB, 96)

Wiener, as Gibson and Pynchon in the quotes above, focuses on the pattern 
rather than the material which constitutes this pattern. The 
pattern/structure is the essential thing here, the pattern is life, and I 
suspect that Wiener's idea is one of the important ideas behind Pynchon's 
and Gibson's comparison of corporations with organisms. Gibson seems to take 
the idea at face value - corporations *are*, in a sense, alive - but Pynchon 
seems much more skeptical of the idea he himself invokes. There are several 
instances in GR where we hear that the similarity between organic life and 
certain man-made institutions and structures is only that: a similarity. 
Witness Walther Rathenau (courtesy of Peter Sachsa) at a seance in Berlin, 
as he discusses whether I. G. Farben is really alive:

"But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from 
death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you 
can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not 
resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor. [...] You think you'd rather 
hear about what you call 'life': the growing, organic Kartell. But it's only 
another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the 
more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. [...] The persistence, then, of 
structures favoring death." (GR, 166-67)

The Other Side has always been good for some deep insights in Pynchon's 
work, and Rathenau's statements here seem to cut to the chase, not only with 
regard to I. G. Farben, but also w/r/t to The American Corporation of AtD: 
only seemingly alive, but in reality a very clever robot.

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