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

[Dave Monroe]

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

> Nowadays, Benny's fear of being in a close relationship with the inanimate (such as Rachel was with her car)seems particularly prescient, as our computers and phones become less like tools and more like prostheses.  Was Pynchon picking up on this futuristic vibe when he reported to work at Boeing each day?

---

>From Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: American Novel
in the Age of Television (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2006), Ch. 2,
"Machine," pp. 58-97:

   In both V.'s Benny Profane and Gravity's Rainbow's Tyrone Slothrop
... the reader encounters a represented falling off of human agency in
the face of contemporary technologies, a dehumanization that results
directly in a misdirection or deterioration of the "natural"
functioning of sexuality and desire--most particularly masculine
sexuality and desire.  This relationship is complicated, however, by a
further outgrowth of the relationship between humans and machines: the
individual longing to efface all traces of human agency, to achieve a
more machinelike state.  This desire for a dehumanized inanimate
equilibrium ... is repeatedly represented ... as a consequence of the
too-close relationship between "ma" and machine, leading not simply to
the objectification of man by machine, or of the human individual in
his encounters with dehumanized others, but instead to a kind of
self-objectification in which the subject comes to understand and
desire a deeper existence as a machine.  (pp. 69-70)

http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/11/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence

http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/12/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence

http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1005&msg=149122