On Weber, Charisma and Gravity's Rainbow

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Since the issue came up again, let me drop some words on this:


The basic distinction in Weber's sociology of domination (Herrschaftssoziologie) is that
of traditional, charismatic and legal domination. In reality it's always a mix, but the
modern world with its capitalist rationalizations has a problem with charisma.

In February, me wrote/translated:


>
>  The general problem with charisma is, according to Weber, that charisma is
>  'alien to economy' ("wirtschaftsfremd"), and that's why it is doomed to die
>  in the modern world. At least in the long run ... "On this way from a stormy
>  emotional life, alien to economy, to slow entropic death under the pressure
>  of material interests is any charisma in any hour of its being, and  indeed,
>  with every passing hour to a rising degree" (Max Weber: Wirtschaft und
>  Gesellschaft, p. 661, fünfte, revidierte Auflage, Tübingen 1980: J.C.B. Mohr)
>


Even someone like Obama can spread charisma just for a couple of months, and the memory of JFK
is only shining so bright, because he died before his charisma could get routinized. In Gravity's
Rainbow, Pynchon is (intentionally?) misreading Max Weber or, better, he puts him into his own
scheme like he does with everybody else. When Pynchon writes about "the dearest Postwar hopes: that
there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma ... that its rationalizations should
proceed while we had the time and ressources ..." (p. 81), this can - though it's obviously more
about the continental hope after the/  second/  world-war - still be put into relation to Weber, namely
the end of "Politik als Beruf" where it says that politics is "ein starkes langsames Bohren von
harten Brettern mit Leidenschaft und Augenmaß". The crucial anti-charisma word here is "Augenmaß"
which literally is 'estimate of the eye' but actually more 'sense of proportion'. Here Weber is
quick to add that such a type of politician needs to be a 'leader', even a 'hero', and that -
implicitly referring to Bismarck - the possible could never have been reached, if people wouldn't
have tried to grasp at the impossible inside the world. (Interestingly enough, Badiou defines
politics as 'the art of the impossible'). My point is that Weber never spoke up against the factor
of personality, or spoke up for anonymous rationalization. Pynchon also makes, well, creative use
of Weber when he ascribes charisma to technology. Charisma according to Weber is always personal.
In the obedient devotion of the followers to "the purely personal 'charisma' of the 'leader'" we
find not only that which makes charismatic domination essentially different from the one based on
customs and the one based on laws, here also are "the roots of the concept of vocation in its most
distinguished mark", as it says in "Politik als Beruf". Think not only crowned war-lords but also
prophets and other religious charismatics. But it's always a person, not a thing that's spreading
the charisma. And if you want to apply that to an analysis of the Nationalsozialismus, you would -
as Hans-Ulrich Wehler did it again some years ago in his 'Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte' -
identify Hitler as the charismatic leader. Not so Pynchon who lets Miklos Thanatz (p. 464) say:
"'I think of the A4,', sez he, 'as a baby Jesus with endless committees of Herods out to destroy
it in infancy --- Prussians, some of whom in their innermost hearts still felt artillery to be
a dangerous innovation. If you'd been out there ... inside the first minute, you saw, you grew docile
under its ... it really did possess a Max Weber charisma ... some joyful - and/deeply/  irrational -
force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail ... they did
resist it but they also allowed it to happen(')." What's going on there? Well, in Gravity's Rainbow,
Pynchon is into the archeology of Technognosticism. Whether inspired by PKD's "The Man in the High
Castle" or not: Synthetics and space-travel are - as the Nazi example shows - essentially connected
to genocidal imperialistic warfare. And the Operation Paperclip is the realmetonymie that allows
Pynchon to draw a line from "Die Frau im Mond" to Vietnam and "the new kingdom of death" on the
freshly colonized moon ... By ascribing charisma to the V2 Pynchon is revealing the deadly fetishism
for blinky blinky toys that lurks beneath the oh so progressive enthusiasm for Weltraumraketen ---

Not much Weber left here, but who cares?




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