IVIV (12): 195-197

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Michael Bailey:
 
> - - but I think that one place where Gravity's Rainbow ascribes some
> kind of will or intelligence to technology
> is talking about how the ruined rocket-launching place and factory
> isn't a mischance at all, it is the product
> of a process chosen consciously - famous passage, naturally I can't
> find it...(no hard copy here and no memory
> of any of the exact words to search on)

There are a couple-three such passages in the novel:
 
"The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The
track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is 
really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he
can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the
leading edges of...." (GR, 257)
 
O-or:
 
"[...] the 00001 sliding like an oiled bolt into the receivership of the
railway system, prepared for it last spring, a route only apparently in
ruins, carefully crafted by the War, by special techniques of bombardment,
to take this most immachinate of techniques, the Rocket - the Rocket, this
most terribly potential of bombardments...." (GR, 728)
 
But I'm guessing you're thinking of GR 520:
 
"Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG is *not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working
order.* Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched
on... modified, precisely, *deliberately* by bombing that was never hostile, 
but part of a plan both sides - "sides?" - had always agreed on..."
 
...and after some further speculations, the passage continues on the next
page:
 
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre,
all just to keep the people distracted... secretly, it was being dictated
instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings
and techniques [...]"
 
...which segues into the passage Monte has been pointing to: "Yes but 
Technology only responds [u.s.w.]" (521).
 
As you point out, the passage implies that the bombing pattern was chosen
consciously, but it wasn't chosen consciously by technology itself, was it?
It was chosen by the supposedly warring "sides" - meaning, one supposes,
"human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are" (521).
 
Later, the passage goes on to mention "the needs of technology", but this is
quickly modified to "a conspiracy between human beings and techniques". 
Again, those techniques, alluring as they may be, don't have a will of their
own. They need that fleshy, complicit finger to push the right or wrong button.
 
And even if the passage does perhaps contain occasional glimpses of ascribing
a will to technology ("the needs of technology"), Enzian's heated speculations 
are somewhat undercut by the narrator at the bottom of page 521:
 
"Well, yes, this is stimulant talk here, Enzian's been stuffing down Nazi
surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk
of the refinery [...] is behind them, and Enzian is on into some other
paranoid terror" (521-22)
 
As I've said, I believe the most important theme in GR is immachination, and to
me the central image of the novel is the marriage between Gottfried and the 
00000, between man and machine. But the Rocket didn't put Gottfried in that
Rocket: Blicero did, aided by Gottfried's own yearning to be taken. 		 	   		  
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