The Anonymous and TP - for rich

[Matthew Cissell]

Rich,

    I hope it didn't sound like I was advocating some group action or movement 
around some imaginary creed, or much less that TP might do so. My point was 
rather that now (and for some time) if one studies or reads up on Humanism that 
person eventually comes across Petrarch. Could something like that come to 
happen to some extent with TP and anonymity?
    As for your concerns about the formalization of groups, well let's just say 
that i'm sympathetic to that point of view. I think someone once said something 
to me like, "The ideology of liberation can also become the practice of 
totalitarianism."  

MC Outis



----- Original Message ----
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 5:12:51 PM
Subject: Re: The Anonymous and TP

very interesting. but the problem will always remain with man/woman.
when folks start operating in groups even small groups there's always
the risk and a high risk that they will up the ante; when does all the
altruism flee? and it will eventually; and what started out as a high
noble cause becomes for lack of a better word, terrorism. I'm not
crypto-fascist. i'm not playing the mubarak card here ("I pharaoh need
to keep order") but I don't trust groups, any groups.

rich

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
>     Have you ever asked yourself what Pynchon reads or what news catches his
> eye? I'm interested in reading practices so I'm also interested in what people
> read, and that includes TP. Although I have no way to confirm or rule out my
> suspicions, there are things I see that I'm sure would interest him. That's 
the
> way I felt when I saw a BBC article
> (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12380987) about the group Anonymous
> attacking a private security firm.
>
>     One aspect of this that I find particularly interesting is that Anonymous,
> whether or not you agree with them and what they do, uphold the right to be
> anonymous, to be unknown so to speak. (They apparently stand in contraposition
> to certain social networks as well as the decreasing anonymity and autonomy of
> internet users.)  This is interesting to me because it seems to be a position
> shared by Pynchon. If his avoidance of the public light and his Simpson
> appearance gag (only surpassed by having Professor Irwin Corey accept the
> National Book Award prize in TP's place) are not enough to support that, then 
>we
> also have a quote from AD that may be read as warning on the 'Wharholization' 
>of
> a person through the popular media. Shortly after boarding the Inconvenience,
> Lew finds out about the CC and we get the following:
>
>
>     "But you boys - you're not storeybook characters." He had a thought. "Are
> you?"
>     "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly." Randolph supposed. "Although the
> longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell
> fiction from non-fiction."
>
>     But Pynchon is not the only one in the literary field with concerns about
> maintaining anonymity. About ten years ago a book called "Q" came out with the
> author's name given as Luther Blisset (some or many of you may be familiar 
with
> all this), it turned out, however, to be a pseudonym for a group. That group 
>has
> since written other novels but now goes by the name Wu Ming, which means "no
> name". Although the identities of the group's members are known, they 
>apparently
> avoid cameras or having their images disseminated. Sounds like someone,no?
>
>      As these writers employ strategies of absence or invisibility in order to
> maintain their anonymity and autonomy, will others start to do the same? If
> someday there is a turn against the slow erosion of the concept of the 
>sovereign
> individual's right to be anonymous (eroding down to a 1984 like world created 
>by
> users and voters rather than imposed by some dreadful Big Brother), will 
>someone
> perhaps look back to TP as one of the secular saints of anonymity, a 
forefather
> of a creed that says, 'We choose to remain unseen, to keep our inner world
> inside, we refuse to let what is private be subsumed by that which is public?
>
> οὔτις
>
>
>
>