Technology: making humanist arguments almost irrelevant

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Fri Jun 7 05:33:37 CDT 2013


In _Wilderness City_ Clontz explores Pynchon and Ellison. Worth a look. In
any event, Clontz turns back to the Watts essay. And there it is. The
reality of the white world, of Weissmann, of Blicero vs. the un-reality,
myth-making.

Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind
is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The
jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through
the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun,
hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.

>From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts--and, in a
curious way, besieges it-- looks like those jets: a little unreal, a little
less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs
to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists
chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as
old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is
basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant
aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara,
to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for,
unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled,
are the only action in town.
Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by contrast,
a pocket of bitter reality. The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was
to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was
supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went,
too.

Watts is tough; has been able to resist the unreal. If there is any drift
away from reality, it is by way of mythmaking. As this summer warms up,
last August's riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some
talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of
cops away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man's power,
either with real incidents or false alarms.


On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:16 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> Yes. It is the cornerstone.  Again, Eddins, in my opinion, wrote the most
> important book on Pynchon to date, in Gnostic Pynchon, and, I alluded to
> The Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide, and specifically to the essay by Coffman on
> Bogomilism, Orphism, and Shamanism, and we can turn back to P's readings of
> the Sacred and Profane, Eliade & Co. ... and other texts that inform GR,
> and when we do we see a definite position on the environment and the Earth,
> and that science is, in P's novels,  a corrupted cult that seeks to act as
> a political force, a gnostic cult, as Eddins argues using Voegelin's
> _Modernity Without Restraint_, that worships virtualization, that is
> opposed to labor and to craft, to work with the hand and the tool, with
> direct contact with the Earth, and that the culmination  of this modernity
> without restraint will cause the intentional or accidental destruction of
> the planet, and that powerful use of computers, to control the earth, to
> replace it, to shape it in our own image, has made of most of the sacred
> spaces on the surface, a wasteland, a motherboard from our scatterbrained
> Mother Earth.
>
>  More powerful technologies, more Science, Big Science and Big Data will
> only serve the project to fashion the Earth to serve human control,
> rebuilding, remapping the world to fit the rules, the laws of regularity
> and efficiency, of speed and the other virtues of the machine. Modern
> anti-Humanism loves the machine, as Winston Smith,  because they are driven
> to solve, to force into logic, to map, but can't abide a mystery.
> Anti-humanism can't locate value outside its technologies.  How can we
> imagine something outside the order of our lives?
>
> Have you read Patrick Heelan?
>
> http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/heelanp/?Action=ViewPublications
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Alice,
>>
>> This is a nice reminder-find again. As one who has made a bit of an
>> argument about P p'raps
>> Actually dissing technology and science more than some think, I think
>> this excerpt can be more easily seen as one in which P expresses fear about
>> " State" ( or THEY ) power....( keeping the truth that WE are also the THEY
>> ) more than disses technology, in my opinion today....
>>
>> BUT the line in this that strikes me today is...." Making humanist
>> arguments almost irrelevant"
>> Wow......that is some phrase from TRP......what do we think it means (
>> deeply)?
>>
>> Is this line a cornerstone of your argument about TRP's beliefs?
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jun 6, 2013, at 4:48 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making
>> humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too
>> distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in
>> Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip
>> was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the
>> wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a
>> development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old
>> 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.
>> > from the Foreword to 1984
>>
>
>
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