IVIV (12): 195-197

[Robin Landseadel]

The fact is, Terrance's posts on "technological agency" are pointing  
to a central theme in Pynchon's work. The problem is that Terrance is  
not as articulate as he thinks he is—usually his themes dribble off  
into an effusious, Professor Irwin Corey styled web of misdirection.  
Still, by directing us to this passage, Terrance gets down to cases:

		"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 by the needs of technology . . . by a
	conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
	something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, 'Money
	be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,'
	but meaning, most likely, *dawn is nearly here, I need my
	night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more*. . . . The
	real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among
	firms -- it was only staged to look that way -- but among the
	different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their
	needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .

		Yes but Technology only responds (how often this
	argument has been iterated, dogged and humorles as a
	Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando
	especially), 'All very well to talk about having a monster by the
	tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some
	specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't *wanted* to
	chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of
	civilians?  Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if
	 it'll make you feel less responsible -- but it puts you in with the
	neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our
	stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human
	sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are --'"
	(V521)

The theme of technological agency, the degree that the needs of  
technology are unconcerned with the fate of humanity—this happens to  
be one of the great Science Fiction themes and one that Young Tom took  
up with a certain diabolical glee early on.

Gather together science and Science Fiction related themes in  
Pynchon's novels, those elements in fiction and "real life" that enter  
into Tom's view of so-called "Technological Progress" and   
autobiographical patterns start to leak from the texts—"I was  
initially seduced by Tom Swift, I thought I was being patriotic by  
learning hard science/joining the Navy/working for Boeing. It wasn't  
until I swallowed that Owsley and had these visions of endtimes that I  
realized that I was suckered into destroying the only home I ever  
knew, and now it's too late—my home's no more." I suspect the  
Sortilèges in Tom's life pointed him towards modes of living/thinking— 
those forks in the road—that could have led him back to the garden.

There is a despairing aspect to Inherent Vice, an awareness that it is  
already too late. Doc's acid-induced vision of Los Angeles filling up  
with water, Sortilège's visions of the great submerged city, the  
awareness that this has all happened before—we were given these  
warnings a long time ago but we were too greedy or distracted to pay  
attention, to do anything when we could, and now it's too late—well,  
that's something someone of a scientific mind could have told us all a  
long time ago. Terrance's term—Paleotechnic—the way he points to echos  
of the age of coal in Gravity's Rainbow display essential elements of  
climate change—not simply temperature elevation, but spiritual  
sickness as well—I'll say it, that's brilliant. This is all necessary  
information, these are central messages in Pynchon. Too bad Terrance's  
latent hostility constantly undercuts his erudition and knowledge.

Relinquishing those presumptuous "WE" 's with the use of the more  
responsible and accurate "I" would be a good start in the direction of  
less contemptuous discourse. Of course, Terrance is more concerned  
with maintaining a certain kind of boiling, roiling and combative  
debate than actually illuminating these texts—it's a pissing contest  
he wants to continue, and it's a pissing contest he intends to win.

On Nov 5, 2009, at 5:14 AM, John Carvill wrote:

> << Tore:
>
> ...And I am constructing a reading that points a finger
> at Technology, the vast Moloch, the many-headed monster that  
> interferes
> with our lives and our planet in so many unpleasant ways, but a  
> reading
> which also points out that that monster wouldn't be moving at all if  
> we
> didn't have our hands up its ass.
>>>
>
> Well put!
>
> And once we get our hand up its ass, we soon find it has its hand up
> our ass, and so on. Kinda like Kekule's snake dream, 'cept we're
> awake.
>
> That passage of GR, and GR in general, and Pynchon in general, does of
> course work on many levels, a fact which cuts both ways. One one hand,
> that's why we like Pynchon so much, at least in part; but the downside
> is that the multi-levelled, allusive, amorphous nature of the text
> (and what's being said in it) allows for people to spin it any way
> they choose, and if taken to extremes this spinning can reach the
> point where all discussion is pointless, where trying to argue
> for/against a given interpretation becomes simply absurd. And that
> point, or somewhere well past it, is where I tend to find Alice's
> posts landing, a lot of the time.