IVIV, That co-optation theme, again? p.30

[Mark Kohut]

Alice writes of rationalization, a key concept given much meaning by Max Weber, one of TRPs influences, as Weber wrote about 'the rationalization of charisma, among much else.

Anyone have OED access, or M-W, 3rd, to give us the usage citations and growth of the word?

The sociological literature on rationalization in late modernity is articulate and provides a lens to view contemporary activities and lifestyles. 

'the process of rationalization leads to disenchantment' of the world, another key Pynchon theme, I daresay.
http://books.google.com/books?id=DznT_TbfKzMC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=define+rationalization&source=bl&ots=rmw3HWoCwd&sig=sdvXtr7RD_Lx21McIJr5TW-GMX4&hl=en&ei=qnCeSt7dA9DFlAeTg9WeDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=define%20rationalization&f=false

According to another citation, it is since 1957, that psychologist have been exploring the meaning of rationalization in individuals that Alice posted about...
 



--- On Wed, 9/2/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IVIV, That co-optation theme, again? p.30
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 8:41 AM
> Mark Kohut wrote:
> > Bigfoot talks of detaining Doc 'for his own good'. I
> am reminded of how often in other fiction P portrays the
> Powers as the ones who set-up, frame,the innocent---or puts
> out that possibility. AtD has it big as we hear how
> anarchist bombings and other acts of subversiveness,
> terrorism might have been done by the Powers supposedly
> attacked.
> 
> 1984 bombings.
> 
> Turn on the Tube or page through popular magazines; hear or
> read the term
> "rationalization." Talk show and arm-chair psychologists
> seem to like the term.  What they mean by
> "rationalization"
> is not always clear, but I think that the term
> "rationalization" surfaced sometime between W.W.I and
> W.W.II
> (?). Back then I think they used the term to denote some
> mental process or mechanism by which we humans
> unconsciously
> put a better face on our conduct or experience than the
> facts warrant. In other words, we excuse ourselves to
> ourselves by introducing a purpose and order into that
> which
> we are privately or secretly ashamed. Sometimes historians
> and cultural critics use the term rationalization when
> discussing history and culture.
> 
> Jeffrey S. Baker, in his Amerikkka Uber Alles: German
> Nationalism, American Imperialism, and the 1960s Antiwar
> Movement in Gravity's Rainbow, Critique, Summer 1999, VOL.
> 40, NO.4, 323-341, picking up on Tony Tanner's recognition
> that Pynchon (in Entropy, for example) provides metaphors
> of
> classic epistemological dichotomy-Theory or Callisto and
> Practice or Meatball, says:
> 
> Tanner's analysis points up a radically pragmatic
> political
> agenda for social change ( as reflected in the Beat's
> anarchic rhetoric), as well as a pragmatic suspicion of
> the
> theoretical and an affirmation of the experiential or
> particular. Both of these impulses embody a radically
> democratizing Emersonian politics that characterizes
> nearly
> all of Pynchon's major writings. Baker.C.323
> 
> And
> 
> Across his body of writing, Pynchon has advocated a
> turning
> away from recognized authority and affirming a
> democratization of power based on the individual's
> intrinsic
> worth, the same ideas that drove 1960s coalitions such as
> Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Philosophically,
> SDS based much of its politics and ideology on the
> pragmatic
> writings of C. Wright Mills, William James, John Dewey,
> and
> Ralph Waldo Emerson.
> 
> BTW, for the pragmatists, intelligence is in constant
> process of forming. To act, to live, to remember.
> Retention
> requires constant alertness or the  "paying attention
> to"
> and the observation of consequences. As some Stoic taught
> there exists in the young a healthy
> appetite for knowledge, open-mindedness, a will to learn,
> and courage to readjust to a changing environment, but
> these
> characteristics of Boy -scouts and youth in all nations
> are
> also easily molded and or destroyed.
> 
>  Dewey claimed that Historical rationalism, in contrast
> with
> the experimental, re-adjusting mind, turned to Reason and
> employed it with a certain carelessness, conceit,
> irresponsibility, and rigidity-- Absolutism. Just
> like the rationalizations that psychologists noted in
> individual behavior, the historical rationalism used
> Reason
> as an agency of justification and apologetics. It taught
> that the defects and evils of actual experience disappear
> in
> the rational whole of things. In other words, things
> APPEAR
> evil merely because of the partial, incomplete nature of
> experience. As Bacon noted, Reason assumes a false
> simplicity, universality, and uniformity, and opens for
> science a path of fictitious ease.
> 
> "This course results in intellectual irresponsibility and
> neglect:--irresponsibility because rationalism assumes
> that
> the concepts of reason are so self-sufficient and so far
> above experience that they need and can secure no
> confirmation in experience. Neglect, because this same
> assumption makes men careless about concrete observations
> and experiments.  Contempt for experience has had a
> tragic
> revenge IN experience; it has cultivated disregard for
> fact
> and this disregard has been paid for in failure, sorrow,
> and
> war. German rationalism was apologetic….it discovered
> profound meanings due to the necessary evolution of
> absolute
> reason. The modern world has suffered because in so many
> matters philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice
> between hard and fast opposites: Disintegrating analysis
> or
> rigid synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and
> attacking the historic past as trivial and harmful, or
> complete conservatism idealizing institutions as
> embodiments
> of eternal reason; resolution of experience into atomic
> elements that afford no support to stable organization or
> the clamping down of all experience by fixed categories
> and
> necessary concepts…"    ---Dewey,
> Reconstruction in Philosophy
> 
>