science, magic, madness

[Rev'd Seventy-Six]

"In Pynchon, this mass trend ['a clear movement toward dearth or,
preferably, non-humanity']  is often portrayed.... as being conscious and
malignant, perhaps because it stimulates a kindred urge of the human
psyche.  Wylie Sypher notes that 'under the guise of the death wish Freud
gave psychoanalysis its own version of the theory of entropy.  If, he says,
the tendency of instinct is toward repeating or restating an earlier
condition, than the desire to return to the inorganic is irresistable, and
our instinct is to obliterate the disturbance we call consciousness.'  In
other words, man.... seeks to become 'subject to the laws of physics'; the
death wish is 'what Freud himself called a kind of "psychical entropy"'."
--p. 48

"Whole technologies such as plastic, electronics, aircraft are spoken of as
having desperate, vampirish needs that 'dictated' the war:  *'dawn is
nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more,
more'*(GR, p. 521)."  --p. 53

"The superstitious veneration for technology gives the man with means the
stature and power of a god, even though he be in social consciousness and
insight something far less....  Pynchon argues that humankind and not
technology is responsible for the social grotesqueries that he documents so
voluminously.... he warns against the modern animism that ends in apathy.
Enzian considers here the dangers of such resignation:

'Yes but Technology only responds [....] "All very well to talk about
having a monster by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if
someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't *wanted* to
chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians?  Go
ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less
responsible-- but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the
eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless
hardons of human sultans, human elit with no right at all to be where they
are--' (GR, p. 521)

"Pynchon and Harrington both suggest that our fatalism concerning the
effects of technology may have produced a hazardous concentration of
power.  Harrington maintains that computer and cybernation in particular
'could conceivably eliminate the middle levels of executive decision' thus
creating 'an even tinier elite and a larger, [more] alienated mass' than
existed before....

"Walter Rathenau.... predicted as early as 1917 in *Von kommenden
Dingen*that autonomous and interlocking megacorporations would come to
dominate
the economy, producing their own resources and manipulating rather than
answering to the market.  Currently, they have achieved a dangerous degree
of both independence and interconnectedness.  As Pynchon demonstrates in
his tale of Byron the bulb, Their world of bureaucratic, political,
military, and corporate interlocks has developed to the point where an
event in one sector will ramify all the others.  As a consequence the
entire system moves toward inflexibility, oppressive stability or-- in
Weber's terms --'routinization'....

"One cannot say for certain to what extent Pynchon holds these views, for
at times he presents them through paranoid or otherwise unbalanced
characters.  Nonetheless, he must share the concern of such a sane &
perceptive historian of science as A.E.E. McKenzie: 'Science is now so much
an integral part of modern civilization that it is no longer merely the
private activity of individuals... It is a social function'.  However,
'most research in applied science in western countries is planned, not by
the State but by large combines or cartels....'  Pynchon asks what insures
Their socially responsible use of science and technology.  His 'paranoid'
characters may perceive a terrible reality to which the 'sane' have become
inured."  --pps. 61-4

from *'Signs & Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon & the Contemporary World'*, 1983
University of California Press
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