science, magic, madness

[Markekohut]

YES.....

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On Apr 22, 2013, at 9:56 AM, "Rev'd Seventy-Six" <revd.76 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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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