Atdtda35: What he was seeing was anybody's guess, 990-995 #3

[alice wellintown]

 from

Authoritarian and Democratic Technics

Lewis Mumford


At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of
absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were
restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their
technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less
strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new
drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional
stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system
might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic
reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology,
itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes,
authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given
it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The
inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the
pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar
myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their
increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and
compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems:
particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at
whatever eventual co st to life.

Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this
authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most
serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes
actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor
purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.



On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Paul Nightingale
<isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Frank’s trance follows exclusion as Indians are ‘casting strange looks at
> one another and avoiding everybody else’s eyes’. Even within the narrative
> that unfolds (taking him back to ‘the same version of ancient Tenochtitlán
> that El Espinero’s cactus had once taken him to’), ‘details [are] somehow
> withheld from him’. The ‘Frank’ that passes beneath the arch is one he can
> observe as another: cf the writing of hallucination on 924-926. Eventually
> Frank must interpret (‘it slowly became clear to him’, 994) the ‘vision’ to
> make it fit in with the perceived reality of ‘the indicative world’. Cf
> Günther’s ‘telephone exchange’ analogy. Consequently he finally leaves
> Mexico, accepting the kind of advice he rejected at the start of the chapter
> on 982.
>
> At the top of 995, Frank is back in Denver and we find that he has been
> sending money home: these financial transactions have made the journey far
> more easily than Frank himself. His foregoing experiences are now
> represented as entries on a bank statement, one that confirm his status as
> employee in various situations. That he thinks he is ‘getting paid for being
> stupid’ underscores the sharp contrast between the factual and the
> subjective.
>