Reading the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow ...

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 6:23 PM, alice
wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> I should like to emphasize the vital importance of the work of C.
> Wright Mills, and of studies which are frequently frowned upon because
> of simplification, overstatement, or journalistic ease - Vance
> Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, and The Waste
> Makers, William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, Fred J. Cooks The
> Warfare State belong in this category. To be sure, the lack of
> theoretical analysis in these works leaves the roots of the described
> conditions covered and protected, but left to speak for themselves,
> the conditions speak loudly enough. Perhaps the most telling evidence
> can be obtained by simply looking at television or listening to the AM
> radio for one consecutive hour for a couple of days, not shutting off
> the commercials, and now and then switching the station.
>
> see Hoberek's response to Tanner and Mattessich, Epilogue "The
> Postmodern Fallacy" pp. 1120-127,
>
> The Twilight of the Middle Class   Post-World War II American Fiction
> And White-Collar Work, Princeton University Press. 2005
>
> see The Big Clock (1948)

... not to mention, e.g., David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950) ...

>From Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in
Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000), Ch. 1, "Bureaucracy
and Its Discontents," pp. 47-79, on "Social Characters":

One of the most influential such narratives came from sociologist
David Riesman.  Shortly after World War II, Riesman made an
observation about individual autonomy that would become the basis of
many other works, both fictional and nonfictional.  "One kind of
social character, which dominated America in the nineteenth century,"
he declared, "is gradually being replaced by a social character of
quite a different sort" (rev. ed. 3).  The new, or "other-directed,"
sort of character ... was like other recently diagnosed products of
"highly industrialized, and bureaucratic America" ... (orig. ed. 20)
(Melley, p. 49)

... Riesman's new Americans seemed far less admirable than the rugged,
"inner-directed" individuals they seemed to be replacing.  The
difference between the two types ... lay not in whether they were
socially conditioned but in how frequently and from whom they received
guidance....  Inner-directed children grew up to be unique and
self-governing [cybernetic] adults.  Like the hard-working, driven
individuals of Weber's "Protestant ethic," they possessed a "rigid
though highly individualized character" (15)  allowing them to "gain a
feeling of control over their own lives" (18).  Other-directed
persons, by contrast, were easily influenced and controlled by social
pressures.  They were ... continually adjusting their desires in
rresponse to "signals from others" [again ...] ... (22).  (Melley, p.
50)

"Riesman was not alone ..." (ibid.)

"Like Whyte's organization men, Marcuse's conditioned subjects were
unable to recognize their own conditioning.  And like Riesman's
other-directed persons, they lacked an internal "gyroscope" or
guidance system.  (Melley, p. 51)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=54033

"... and in marches one Genarro, a complete nonentity, to proclaim
himself interim head of state till the rightful Duke, Niccolo, can be
located." (p. 69)

"Gennaro's costume was grey flannel." (p. 77)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58494

But back to Packard ...

The same problem of agency haunts The Hidden Persuaders, which asserts
that scientists have discovered new ways to manipulat human desire.
According to Packard, these motivational researchers ... exploit a
model of personhood derived from psychoanalysis ....  They use
packaging and display techniques .... "subthreshold effects" .... he
speculates that tehir work may lead to practices like "biocontrol" in
which "a surgeon would equip each child with a socket mounted under
the scalp" so that "subjects would never be permitted to think as
individuals." (Melley, p. 4)

For Packard, this lurid fantasy--in which "electronics could take over
the control of unruly humans"--reveals the real threat of motivational
research: it is a technology for the radical reconstruction of
persons. Even motivational reserachers themselves, in Packard's view,
are "custom-built men," barely separable from the "sample humans" on
whom they perform manipulation experiments ....  Such assumptions
generate a problem of control ....  If even the agents of persuasion
have been constructed, then who governs the system of depth
manipulation?  Indeed, if we carry Packard's view to its logical
extreme, the very idea of manipulation, in the sense of a willful
attempt to contro others, becomes obsolete, because attempts at
manipulation are themselves only products of previous manipulation.
In Packard's world, the system of depth manipulation is
self-regulating. Control has been transferred from human agents to
larger agencies, institutions, or corporate structures. (Melley, p. 5)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=53812

Also ...

the minnesota review n.s. 55-56 (2002)
Morris Dickstein with Robert S. Boynton
Between Generations: An Interview with Morris Dickstein

Some of the figures who came to interest me later, like the social
critics of the 50s—David Riesman, William Whyte—they were too tepid
and liberal for us at the time, and too popular. What fascinated us
were the more apocalyptic figures who came on the scene in the
mid-50s, roughly around the time of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization,
although I hadn't read it at the time. I was especially taken with
Mailer's "The White Negro," and most of Advertisements for Myself.
Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death was practically a sacred text to
us when it came out in 1960. I seemed to be out to confirm its message
in the papers I was writing for my English courses. I was twenty years
old. I sought out writers who would tell me that repression was bad
for you, sex was redemptive, a revolution in consciousness was
possible. We were looking for daring iconoclastic role models, outlaw
intellectuals

http://www.theminnesotareview.org/ns55/dickstein.htm

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73079

"[...] This was the style back then. The 50's and 60's were the great
age of the Big Notion: the pseudoscientific book that explained us to
ourselves and told us where we were headed, which in most cases was
nowhere good. The avatar of them all, of course, was Freud's
''Civilization and Its Discontents,'' which argued, among other
things, that we were all suffering from a kind of collective neurosis,
and picking up the theme, in addition to ''The Lonely Crowd,'' were
William H. Whyte's ''Organization Man,'' which made many of the same
points as Riesman; Herbert Marcuse's ''One-Dimensional Man,'' which
gave a Marxist twist to the argument and said that we were prisoners
of the economy; and Norman O. Brown's ''Life Against Death,'' which
said that the solution to all this one-dimensionality was more eros.
(In certain 60's grad-school circles, ''Life Against Death'' was a
very important book to get your date to read.)[...] "

Big Thinkster
By CHARLES MCGRATH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/magazine/29REISMAN.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0212&msg=73931

Thanks, Doug!  Thanks, "alice"!