Sexual Types & Technics

[alice wellintown]

"Machines have always been close to magic and never far from emotion."

                         -Agostino Ramelli (1588).

Technology is a form of ACTIVITY that is fabricative, materiel product
making or object transforming, purposive (with the general purpose of
expanding the realm of the humanly possible), Knowledge-based,
resource employing, methodical, embedded in a
socio-cultural-environment influence field, and informed by its
practitioners' mental sets.                    -R.E. McGinn

Technology is the totality of artifacts and methods humankind has
created to shape our relations to the world that surrounds us,
modifying it into something that can be used and manipulated to submit
to our needs and desires.   -D. Rothenberg-

"O most ingenious Theuth, the parent of inventor of an art is not
always the best judge of the utility or inutility of
his own inventions to the users of them. "
				-Plato, Phaedrus

They are The Kartell, The Firm, The Syndicate, The Management, The
Empire, The Corporate State, The Ruling Elite or the degenerate
aristocracy, The Elect, The Studio, The Octopus, Count Dracula, and
The Adenoid. They are the Visible Hand & The Invisible Hand. They
appear under every imaginable manifestation of power.  Ultimately, all
of these are subordinated to the insatiable needs of technology.  They
are a conspiracy between human beings and techniques.
It’s fiction. Pynchon invented They.  The Firm outside the pages of GR
is or was the German-American International Firm:   I.G. Farben.

Dear Rita
Dear Rita
It’s all just theatre
Theatre & Theater
Dear Rita
Dear Rita
They are I C
They are Kold
They are Blood Thirsty Ccccccounts & Accountants
They are Arms  & the Octopus
They are Above & Below
On this side and that side
Everyplace Everything Everyone that you know
Where Gulliver & Gargantua
Talk horse sense that’s nonsense
Where reason is Candide and Taffied
And stretched
Where Alice is a wonderland walk in the dark
Screaming and streaming through smoke through a looking glass
Dear Rita
Dear
Reader
It’s all just a ball bouncing a fellow who follows a technical star
Who follows the Fall
Of the fellow
Who follows
Dear Rita
"Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare
of the human race or to any other standard, obedient
only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the
government officials and corporations executives who provide
the funds for research. "
                                        -Unabomber, Manifesto

"Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a
branch of moral philosophy, not of science."
				-Paul Goodman

The Males,  mechanistic, rational, logical, controlling, strong,
masculine while the Females are scatter-brained, lovable,
irrational, weak.

When Pointy, a "mad scientist", goes "nuts" and begins to hear voices;
his conception of the
Laboratory, and the experimental terms, “madness”, “paranoia”,
“madman”, “paranoid”, only appear to have clear and distinct
meanings in the Lab or in his Lab-view of the world. Going back to the
"idea of the opposite" for a moment. If the opposite is weakened, a
composite contradictory behavior results—the "ultra paradoxical
phase." This result, seems to render the
Pavolvian binaries a reductionist's laboratory "rule" not applicable
to the world outside the Lab where the intricate
and complex constellation of character dynamics are not so simply
brought into focus under the microscope of Pavlovian
Laboratory micro perceptions and "laws" of behavior and conditioning.
So Pointy projects this micro Lab, this reductive
simplicity onto the WAR. The War is a Lab, soldiers are very useful,
foxes are men, men are dogs, and Slothrop is "pure mechanism." The
irony twists and turns as the mad scientist is going mad. He thinks
Slothrop is a perfect madman and the madness of
Slothrop's condition is in part a result of his conditioning in a
"Lab." Near maddening Oediapa-like projections "collapse" into
"indeterminacy" and fictional miasma, but there is in GR, in this
discovered indeterminacy  a center, that holds. For many readers that
center is a political one. Not for this reader, however. The weakening
of the opposites affect characters and character dynamics  so that,
for example, Roger Mexico is in a way a spokesman for the human
qualities of kindness and Love and, the search at least, for positive
beneficent value in Love.

In Plato, madness is a "divine gift" or "blessing granted" to Man and
it flies in the face of what is only human and
the human analytical intolerance of that form of madness that
harmonizes polarities in Ritual and Myth or Religion.  In
GR these polarities are not often harmonized and the opposites that
are perceived are most often only reductive,
simplistic analogizations. So in regards to males and females, we find
that technology, in this simple polarity is
male and Nature is female and these we recognize as sexist stereotypes
of both technology and nature  and of
individuals. The relationships of male and female technology and
nature is a perversion, and analogy of male dominance
and female submission. Roger, so very important, is groping towards
freeing himself from both the process of analogizing
and the reduction of Love between man and woman to sexist stereotypes.
The stereotypes we find in GR, are of course
not simply sexist, but applied to race, religion, culture, Nature, and
all of these stereotypes and the analogized extensions
of them are countered by Love. Love individuates in the interest of
harmonizing human equality. Love is not a
domination, but an equality. So Pointy or Blicero, are good examples
of men enamored with a view of the separate but
unequal provinces of male and female and both Enzian and Polker, will,
as they pull from the warping forces of
Blicero, begin to throw off his views of sexual relationships and the
symbols associated with his view. I wonder what those dear readers,
our future YOU(s) will make of these stereotypes if the current trend
of erasing them continues? Turning to Katje, we remember that she
learned from those that "use her" that the Rocket has been "programmed
in a Ritual of Love.. at Brenschluss it is done—the Rocket's purely
feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has
submitted." Here the female role
is clearly a stereotype of the submissive or subservient mistress of
Rocket masculine "love." But this is not love,
but a submissive, self negating, morbid dependency on domination. We
find Enzian, the submissive school boy of whiteman-Blicero (twisting
irony of Pudding and Katje and the inequalities of imperialistic
ritual participation) has discovered that "love" among the white men
is "masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing."
That demands that he "enter the service of the
Rocket" an entire system won away from feminine darkness, held against
the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother
Nature...citizenship in the Zone...understanding the
Rocket...understand truly his manhood..." Enzian's view will also be
tempered as he considers Blicero--the king of the death, the dominant
position in the hierarchy is  proof of the alpha-male's masculinity,
but of course Blicero is in fact at the very top in an inverted cosmos
where the center of the earth is not Satan's domain (as it would be in
the elaborate Christian structures of Dante & Co. ), but Nature's. And
his view is also changed as he gropes towards understanding the role
the Herero may really have in the Zone. Pointy in contrast, does not
temper his views, does not grope towards harmonizing polarities, but
is stuck in his sexist views of power and control. Seeing woman as
"empty little heads" and determined to beat the other
chap, at winning, knowing the System, he says, countering Roger's
insights, "It's work, that's what it is, and there is no room for any
EXTRA HUMAN anxieties--they only weaken, EFFEMINIZE the will...und so
weiter." Pointy needs to take a few courses in feminist philosophy.