V.-2 - 1: Yo-yoing versus free will

[Mark Kohut]

Dave Monroe points to (dare I say brilliantly?): 
"For some reason the children of America conceived around this time a
simultaneous and psychopathic craving for simple gyroscopes .... when
along came a group of school kids on tour to point out that these toys
worked on the same principle as a gyrocompass.  'As wha,' said
Chiclitz.  They  explained gyrocompasses to him, also rate and free
gyros." (V., Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 227)

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
response to "signals from others" [again ...] ... (22).  (Melley, p.
50)

The theory of other-direction posited nothing short of a national
crisis of agency--not only a severe decline in individual autonomy,
but  new imperative to trace human behaviors to their diverse social
origins. (Melley, p. 50)

"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)

... what Riesman calls an "internal gyroscope" (Melley, p. 52)
___________________________________________________________

I remember a brilliant 40 years older'n me friend and mentor, talk
about Reisman's concepts and influence in the sixties
...Others like Reiff, Fromm and Lionel Trilling took off from this distinction, more or less
 w some book-length commentary. 

Here's my off-the-top connection: Pynchon's embodiment and symbolization 
 of more hidden (psychic) life in most of his later fiction. Those mounds. Hidden depths of good stuff?
Does P. have 'inner-directed' as another lost ideal in his psychology of being fully human? 



 





----- Original Message ----
From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: kelber at mindspring.com
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, June 15, 2010 10:48:54 AM
Subject: Re: V.-2 - 1: Yo-yoing versus free will

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:33 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> The paranoia in GR stems, in part, from terror of The Bomb - Death From Above - as represented by the parabola.  In V., Benny Profane's consumed with terror of the mechanistic, the inanimate.  He continually finds himself on a rigid, pre-determined yo-yo path, back and forth along the east coast, back and forth on the ferry, or on the 42nd Street shuttle.  It's hard to know the exact source of his (or Pynchon's) anxiety about the inanimate. Is it the nascent fear of the military-industrial complex that crops up more explicitly in his later books?  Or does it stem from the mood of the times, when new-improved Space Age Technology was on everyone's mind (particularly emphatic, no doubt, at Boeing Aircraft), the term cyborg had just been coined in terms of engineering humans for long-term space travel, etc.?

---

See ...

Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney,
  The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character.
  New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1961 [1950].

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

Also, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0911&msg=144976

Mindell, David A.  Between Human and Machine:
  Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics.
  Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=
=3D9780801880575&qty=3D1&viewMode=3D1&loggedIN=3Dfalse&JavaScript=3Dy

http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=
=3D9780801880575&qty=3D1&source=3D2&viewMode=3D3&loggedIN=3Dfalse&JavaScrip=
t=3Dy

http://books.google.com/books?id=3DoQ7qpscuYbsC

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1003&msg=148314