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

[Ian Livingston]

I don't think I'm ready to buy the "inner directed" as cybernetic. I
think of cybernetic organisms as bound to something other than their
nature, and of inner directed individuals as specifically free of that
bondage to the other. They think and work their own way through, as
per Kerouac on the Beats, as opposed to tubal-spliced generations that
followed, who take their social cues from the outer world of
Bernaisian advertising. That was the rising trend in the 50s, yes? The
market had found its way into the living room. And those who rejected
the box gathered at the jazz temples to celebrate their autonomy
together....

And is it possible that the animate is to do with the subjective,
whereas the inanimate is to do with the objective?


On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.?
>
> ---
>
> "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)
>
> ---
>
> 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
>



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"liber enim librum aperit."