Science Against the Day Labor

[alice wellintown]

Readers of Pynchon works know that his first novel includes the incredible
story of an engineer who travels to Africa. That story, and the astounding
short, "The Secret Integration" are satires of the use/abuse, and
ultimately, the disaterous failure of science and math to plumb the
complexities of life and to use its abstractions to order and control, to
silence, and make a pornography of,  the beautiful songs of Earth.

So how, in P's development did we get to GR and Blicero. Well, we need to
look into CL49. The inventor, the scientist, the inventor, the
bureaucrat-engineer.

Before we do, let me say that I was glad to see P take up Labor in Vinland.
I had argued that this was his theme, but until VL showed up, it was a
difficult thesis to support. But I was, as were many, disappointed in this
work, as I have been in all of his california works, and, as I suspect I
will be in BE.


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> If God does not, as Milton sez in his famous sonnet, exact day labor light
> denied, this hasn't prevented men from exacting day labor from men, light,
> and even life, denied. Science was not much around to make safe the lives
> of the working men and women we read about in AGTD. Empirical practice was
> the method adopted, trial and selection, the railroad, the mines, the
> textile mills, these had not science, and many lives were lost because
> safety valves were not devised or employed to protect workers from
> exploding steam machines. Sure, science would have made things safer,
> better, if not for the workers, for the bosses  and their bosses, but for
> safety it was the men who worked the mines the factories who improved the
> work, the conditions, the safety. Even the laws of mechanical motion were
> not trumped by these pragmatic and practical men who worked, for the most
> part, without math or the scientific method. But once science began to
> apply its method, like a man with a hammer who sees a nail in every grain
> of sand, science applied its "scientific" method to every inch of man and
> to every hair and every grain of sand. And so, science, systematically,
> took over, from religion, from all other institutions of culture, and to
> all inquires, to thought itself, to every mode of investigation, and it
> claimed to have a better method for advancing all human persuits and
> objectives, even the destruction of all human pursuits and objectives.
> Moreover, not satisfied with using tools, extensions of human power, to
> improve the human lot, to add human tools and science to the existing
> patterns of life, as, say a farmer with a tool in his hand, science
> fashioned organisms, including man, for machaniisms, for machines. So, the
> huge farms, where science applied its method to plants and animals, and the
> huge hospitals (white visitation) where science applied its methods to
> human minds, and the huge, world wars where it applied its killing
> machines, machines that a man might fly in, if he were fashioned to it and
> not the other way round. This is Blicero's launch!
>
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