Well, Pynchon seems to have

[Markekohut]

Well said as usual...but I have always read the line about " artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics ( as) something for all good Luddites to look forward to"...as a statement  that THOSE things will be more things Luddites will be resisting ( if they have the will)...

My best differing perspective resides in my short post about the whole ( possible) scientific age of modernity which Pynchon savages a lot......and he goes deep enough to indict (with Empsonian ambiguity and a complex view of we human beings' role) ways even the scientific method contributed to that modern world view, in my opinion. 

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 4, 2013, at 11:49 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> No, we don’t disagree. Of course Pynchon does ask very uncomfortable questions about what we make of our technologies and vice versa. He does show us people who impose on others, and embrace for themselves, a variety of dehumanizations. But I don’t see him reifying or ascribing agency to science and technology; in fact,  when he seems to do so, it’s almost always a parodic setup to prove that in fact the agency remains with us:
>  
> It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology… I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…
>             …Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “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…”
>  
> As for the Luddite essay: NB that the title is a question, not an exhortation (“Join me at the barricades, my fellow Luddites!”) -- a hint, perhaps, that he doesn’t have a pat answer? NB how he emphasizes  that the historical incidents labeled “Luddite” were  in fact good old “open-eyed class war,” directed *not* at a new technology but at machinery that had been around for 200 years. NB that he’s very explicitly ambivalent about whether information technology, the dominant or at least highest-profile technology of our own time, favors the Firm or the Counterforce (it yields Wikileaks and Twitter flash mobs as well as Total Information Awareness). NB that his projected convergence of “the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics” is – surprise! -- not a coming Dark Age of techno-horror, but instead “certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to.”
>  
> If people want to namecheck Pynchon as validator for a simplistic and ill-informed anxiety about Science and Technology as cosmic forces somehow independent of people with genitals, neuroses, politics, and ideologies, I can’t stop ‘em: a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Me, I like him for his complex and well-informed anxiety – *and* fascinated attraction, *and* wonder, and all his other responses to science and technology.
>  
>  
>  
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Markekohut
> Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 6:15 PM
> To: Monte Davis
> Cc: pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: Well, Pynchon seems to have
>  
> We don't disagree, I think.....complex he is fer sure....one reason I do read and reread...
>  
> But I did write " some anti-technology and anti-science stuff".......key qualifier for me here
> Is " some"......part of that complexity.
>  
> Once again, few of his contemporary writers of fiction, near peers, alluded to Ludditism
> Favorably in a non-fiction piece, his own opinion,and I have pointed to some perspectives
> On math and science in Against the Day this last still-unfinished read.....
>  
> You're one of the best defenders of science on this list and really illumine Parts where P
> Shows his aware-love......
>  
> But the other side exists too, I aver. 
>  
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