The Anxiety of Obsolescence

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Anxiety of Obsolescence
> The American Novel in the Age of Television
> Kathleen Fitzpatrick
>
> http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/11/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence
>
> http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/12/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence
>
> http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/

Chapter 2: Machine

    Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
          —Donna Haraway

At an early moment in Thomas Pynchon’s V., the reader is introduced to
the members of the Whole Sick Crew, a loose coalition of alienated
youth cavorting about 1955 Manhattan. As the narration emphasizes,
each member of the Crew participates in an “exhausted impersonation”
of bohemian artiness, a kind of Beat-lite, in which aesthetic and
social rebellion fail to find either a stable position to revolt
against or a sufficiently shocking “new.” Slab, for instance, is the
Catatonic Expressionist painter who hopes that his work will be “the
ultimate in non-communication”; Melvin plays an endless stream of dull
liberal folk songs; and Raoul writes for television while “keeping
carefully in mind, and complaining bitterly about, all the
sponsor-fetishes of that industry” (56). Thoroughly bourgeois
revolutionaries all, the Crew’s self-declared Sick-ness mostly
manifests in excessive alcohol intake and painfully hip name-dropping,
thus bearing in common with the much later Generation X slackerdom a
premature sense of exhaustion, an absence of the critical potential
once thought to be inherent in ironic alienation. The cause of both
the alienation and the impotence from which this group suffers (and
from which, by extension, an entire culture may be said to suffer) is
most explicitly announced in the figure of Fergus Mixolydian, a fringe
member of the Crew. Fergus, described as the self-proclaimed laziest
person in New York, is more-or-less comatose throughout the novel; his
projects, complex as they are, aim at nothing more than furthering his
slothfulness. Fergus produces, for instance, through a careful and
rigorous adherence to scientific procedure, a series of chemical
reactions that inflate a balloon marked with a giant “Z,” which he
ties to his bedpost as a marker of his lethargy. This bizarre
admixture of the uselessly productive culminates in Fergus’s invention
of “an ingenious sleep-switch, receiving its signal from two
electrodes placed on the inner skin of his forearm. When Fergus
dropped below a certain level of awareness, the skin resistance
increased over a preset value to operate the switch. Fergus thus
became an extension of the TV set” (56). Much like the other members
of the Whole Sick Crew, who strive ambitiously for the appearance of
alienation, Fergus’s labors are aimed at their own undoing. In this
regard, Fergus’s literal interface with the television set is not that
different from Raoul’s: each maintains a careful connection to the
medium while feigning disdain; each becomes a willing functionary of
the machine. Understood in this way, Fergus’s transformation into a
human remote control merely exaggerates the Crew’s disaffected torpor.

The inclusion of the technology of television in this particular
circuit is no accident, however. The alienation figured throughout V.
in literally dozens of references to “decadence” and “inanimation” is
specifically a response to the omnipresence of machines, and the
troubled relationships between those machines and the humans with whom
they interact. In Fergus’s case, the relationship between man and
machine is a direct wiring-in, but this physical connection and the
torpor it makes possible—signified by the “Z” thought-balloon, lifted
directly from cartoons—are only a literal rendering of the general
couch-potato syndrome into which so many intellectuals have imagined
the United States sinking. While Fergus may, through his sleep-switch,
become an extension of the TV set, the relationship of the average
viewer to the set in the popular imaginary is not much different. Like
Fergus, like Raoul, those who connect themselves to the television set
become inescapably part of its workings. Thus, one of the dangers
represented by the tube in the novel of obsolescence, made strikingly
visible in Fergus’s sleep-switch, is this much-too-literal bringing
together of human and machine, a coupling destined to confuse one
category with the other.

Despite the reminders of numerous critics—Donna Haraway, Anne Balsamo,
Judith Halberstam, and Ira Livingston, to name but a few—that we are
all already cyborgs reliant upon pacemakers, contact lenses, Cochlear
implants, and e-mail accounts for our day-to-day existence, the
literal linkage of Fergus’s connection to the machine remains
predominantly the stuff of fiction. Recently, however, scientists have
begun exploring the neuromotor possibilities presented by such
interfaces. In June 2000, for instance, the New York Times reported on
a wiring together of the organic and the mechanical that resulted in
what it termed an “artificial animal” (see Sorid). Dr. Sandro
Mussa-Ivaldi, working with a team of scientists from the United States
and Italy, succeeded in connecting part of the brain of a lamprey with
a small robot, resulting in two-way communication between the organic
and mechanical halves of this “animal.” “The aim of the research,”
according to the Times, “is to untangle the mysteries of brain signals
and to see how the brain’s circuits change and adapt to different
stimuli.” The newspaper of record was unable to avoid commenting on
the “eerie” nature of the experiment, however, despite its own
assessment of the researchers’ ostensibly reasonable purposes. In
seeking a justification for this test’s weirdness, the article turns
to Steve Grand, CEO of Cyberlife Research, a company described as
“trying to create forms of synthetic life.” Says Grand: “People are
sometimes fearful that artificial life research will reduce us all to
machines and explain away our souls. . . . On the contrary, I believe
it will give us a new understanding and a new respect for ourselves,
as the most sublime machines in the known universe.”

Regardless of the contradiction inherent in Grand’s assessment (humans
are more than machines—we’re the best machines), his sense of the
anxiety produced by a technology that encroaches upon life is
strikingly accurate. As is Mussa-Ivaldi’s own response to concerns
about the creepy nature of his work: “It has echoes of a literary
kind,” he acknowledges (Sorid). Indeed, as the Western cultural
obsession with technology has grown over the last two centuries, so
has a parallel cultural terror; machines of all varieties, of all
levels of complexity, have long troubled the literary imagination.
Television of course introduces another dimension to this novelistic
technophobia; when the machine to which humans seem to be so drawn is
a representing machine, one that performs the narrative function of
fiction while ostensibly encouraging passivity in its audience, the
threat of dehumanization inherent in the machine becomes a direct
threat to the existence of a reading public.[1] Thus the importance of
Fergus’s self-invention as remote control: this literal manifestation
of the television watcher’s lassitude underscores a perceived
decadence in U.S. culture, a decay directly responsible for the
novel’s—and not incidentally, the novelist’s—marginalization.

Representations of technology in the novel of obsolescence are thus
unavoidably imbricated with concerns about the contemporary state of
the act of reading. Moreover, the danger implied in the technologized
decline of reading is imagined to be a specifically political danger.
A reading public, as critics including Neil Postman and Sven Birkerts
argue, is an active, involved, invested public, a true democratic
citizenry taking serious part in public discourse.[2] As the textual
forms of such public life come to be replaced by televisuality, the
give-and-take of discourse yields to the one-way stream of
representation, inducing passivity in a once-active public sphere. And
as such representing machines further expand their influence over the
work of communication, mediating all forms of political knowledge, the
individual is led to identify not with the ideas expressed or with the
people expressing them, but with the machines themselves. This
technologized political life, in undermining the act of reading,
creates a precondition necessary for fascism not only by naturalizing
a mechanical control over public discourse, but also by alienating the
individual from his own humanity, leaving him manipulable, impotent.

My use of the masculine, both in pronoun form and in the metaphor of
impotence, in conjunction with this amorphous notion of “humanity” is
no accident. While there is an unquestionable link between masculinity
and the development of technology, in these representations the
humanity that is alienated through its dealings with technology is
inescapably masculinist, bound up in centuries-old tropes of the
liberal subject as both rugged individualist and committed citizen.
Through the decadence it ostensibly produces in that liberal subject,
technology becomes one among many social forces that threaten the
subject with feminization; anxieties about mechanical alienation thus
participate in the same line of historical discourses as the frontier
myth and the “genteel tradition” that disrupted it.[3] Representations
of technology in the novel of obsolescence, then, indicate at once
anxieties about the current state of reading and anxieties about the
current state of masculinity. To borrow Timothy Melley’s useful phrase
from Empire of Conspiracy, the “agency panic” induced by such
“influencing machines” as television is inevitably gendered, as the
agency imagined to be draining away is always masculine, and the
vacuum that it leaves behind is likewise imagined to be feminine (see
Melley, esp. 32–37). In this manner, the question of an alienated
“humanity” serves as a foil for concerns about a decentered,
fragmented masculinity.

In this chapter, I approach these questions of the interrelationship
of the anxiety of obsolescence and cultural technophobia in the novels
of Thomas Pynchon, with particular attention to the implications these
representations bear for our understanding of gender and sexuality.
These novels, most particularly V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and Vineland,
are engaged in the progressive business of reanimating a too-passive
reading public by means of a thoroughgoing critique of the political
couch-potatodom into which the United States has gradually declined.
This activism comes at the expense of the feminine, however, which is
too easily conflated with the technologies that threaten human agency.
Notes

[1] The entire line of contemporary cultural studies is aimed at
overturning this belief in the passivity of participants in popular
culture, Here is a representative notion from John Fiske’s Television
Culture: “Pleasure for the subordinate is produced by the assertion of
one’s social identity in resistance to, in independence of, or in
negotiation with, the structure of domination. There is no pleasure in
being a ‘cultural dope’” (19).

[2] On the relationship between reading and democracy, see Davidson,
Introduction; and Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America.

[3] On the frontier myth, see Turner; Santayana.

http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/2006/04/chapter-2/