Extending Humanism & Heidegger's Hammer

[alice wellintown]

This article brings Heidegger, Pynchon, and Kehlmann into dialogue with one
another in an effort to show how they each critique, in remarkably similar
fashion, the conceptual as well as physical lines of demarcation that
mathesis inflicts upon the world.

http://complit.dukejournals.org/content/63/2/142.abstract

In many ways, the centerpiece of *Lines of Flight* is the three lengthy
chapters devoted to *Gravity's Rainbow*, and it is here that Mattessich
examines again the issue of Pynchon's humanism, a view for which he has
little sympathy. Curiously, his interpretive practice proves rather more
fulsome and referential than his theory would seem to permit. While taking
up various urgencies promoted in *Anti-Oedipus* and Deleuze's monograph on
masochism, he also manages an insightful examination of the provenance of
Puritan ideology in America and its implication in the novel, as well as
discussions of period-specific issues. Far from demonstrating that Pynchon
"applies a representationalist desire to the 'truth' of
antirepresentationalism" in the novel, his reading effectively engages the
novel's portrayal of racism, cultural imperialism, corporate hegemony, and
bellicosity, among other things (93).

http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/view/7811/8868


On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 6:38 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Comprehending that the proliferation of means brings about the
> disappearance of the ends, we have become preoccupied with rediscovering a
> purpose or a goal. Some optimists of good will assert that they have
> rediscovered a Humanism to which the technical movement is subordinated.
> The orientation of this Humanism may be Communist or non-Communist, but it
> hardly makes any difference. In both cases it is merely a pious hope with
> no chance whatsoever of influencing technical evolution. The further we
> advance, the more the purpose of our techniques fades out of sight. Even
> things which not long ago seemed to be immediate objectives - rising living
> standards, hygiene, comfort - no longer seem to have that character,
> possibly because man finds the endless adaptation to new circumstances
> disagreeable. In many cases, indeed, a higher technique obliges him to
> sacrifice comfort and hygienic amenities to the evolving technology with
> possesses a monopoly of the instruments necessary to satisfy them. Extreme
> examples are furnished by the scientists isolated at Los Alamos in the
> middle of the desert because of the danger of their experiments; or by the
> would-be astronauts who are forced to live in the discomfort of
> experimental camps n the manner so graphically described by Jungk.
>
> But the optimistic technician is not a man to lose heart. If ends and
> goals are required, he will find them in a finality which can be imposed on
> technical evolution precisely because this finality can be technically
> established and calculated. It seems clear that there must be some common
> measure between the means and the ends subordinated to it. The required
> solution, then, must be a technical inquiry into ends, and this alone can
> bring about a systematization of ends and means. The problem becomes that
> of analyzing individual and social requirements technically, of
> establishing, numerically and mechanistically, the constancy of human
> needs. It follows that a complete knowledge of ends is requisite for
> mastery of means. But, as Jacques Aventur has demonstrated, such knowledge
> can only be technical knowledge. Alas, the panacea of merely theoretical
> humanism is as vain as any other.
>
> "Man, in his biological reality, must remain the sole possible reference
> point for classifying needs," write Aventur. Aventur's dictum must be
> extended to include man's psychology and sociology, since these have also
> been reduced to mathematical calculation. Technology cannot put up with
> intuitions and "literature." It must necessarily don mathematical
> vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to
> mathematical treatment must be excluded - because it is not a possible end
> for technique - and left to the sphere of dreams.
> Who is too blind to see that a profound mutation is being advocated here?
> A new dismembering and a complete reconstitution of the human being so that
> he can at last become the objective (and also the total object) of
> techniques. Excluding all but the mathematical element, he is indeed a fit
> end for the means he has constructed. He is his essence. Man becomes a pure
> appearance, a kaleidoscope of external shapes, an abstraction in a milieu
> that is frighteningly concrete - an abstraction armed with all the
> sovereign sings of Jupiter the Thunderer.
> from Ellul's TS
>
> The Hammer
> http://hammer.ucla.edu/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130611/42cb201a/attachment.html>