Extending Humanism & Heidegger's Hammer

[alice wellintown]

Finally, drawing her moral with regard to DL, with whom Takeshi is now
linked through their attempt to undo the effects of the Ninja Death Touch,
Sister Rochelle solicits Takeshi not to "commit original sin. Try and let
her just be" (166).
Rochelle's admonition to "let her just be" -- free, that is, from
impositions of notions of "good" and "evil," and from all conceptual
subdivisions and labels -- recalls Heidegger's dictum in the "Letter on
Humanism" that "every valuing, even where it values positively, is a
subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather valuing lets beings: be
valid -- solely as the objects of its doing" (228). From Rochelle's
Heidegerrian perspective, all forms of inscription -- the gun, the camera,
the phallus -- are equally guilty. All constitute forms of "enframing,"
through which the world is not encountered on its own terms but as a
standing reserve" available strictly for
use.*[11]*<http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html#11>And
all contribute toward the construction of the "world picture," the
representation whose reality replaces that of the world itself:

Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture
of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in
its entirely, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only
is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets
forth. (130)

What is necessary, Heidegger contends, is to create a kind of openness or
clearing in which Being can become present on its own terms, which can be
accomplished by humanity's maintaining combined attitudes of alert
passivity and nurturing. In Vineland, this role is taken by Zoyd, who both
nurtures his (and Frenesi's) daughter Prairie and is able to let her be.
Zoyd is a father with the qualities of a mother, a father without the
Phallus, whose penis is only a penis. He is not quite a void -- some figure
for feminine absence entirely outside the symbolic order; he is...a Zoyd:
passive but capable, a laid-back fuck-up but a good parent, out of the loop
but very much in the symbolic. And Prairie, as her name implies, is the
clearing, the opening, which Zoyd allows to come into presence and who may
become the site of a new political-sexual-symbolic order not based on the
gun, the camera, and the Phallus.
This would be a straight Heideggerian reading, for which Pynchon has
provided plenty of cues. But the book is too complex and excessive to allow
us to stop here. In the first place, Prairie is not simply a clearing. She
is also a subject, and a daughter in search of her mother -- more
importantly, as it turns out, in search of her mother's history. She is
aided and guided by DL and Takeshi, who have their own history to work
through, and who do not just let Prairie be. If Prairie is the opening out
of the closed sado-masochistic symbolic-political system embodied by Brock
and Frenesi, she achieves this status not merely through the Heideggerian
presencing suggested by Sister Rochelle's injunction. She needs the help of
a man and woman whose relation, like that of Frenesi and Brock, is mediated
by a Death Touch.
Pynchon, then, advances Sister Rochelle's Heideggerian alternative but does
not, finally, accept it. At the same time, however, Pynchon suggests the
importance of Heideggerian attitudes of withdrawal in the late 1960s as the
New Left was falling apart. For Heidegger's opposition to all forms of
"enframing" can be translated in the context of the late 60s to two
instances from popular culture: to the Beatles' quietist slogan, to "Let it
Be," and to the Rolling Stones' parodic response, to "Let it Bleed." That
is, the Heideggerian position in the late 1960s suggests attitudes both of
passive withdrawal and of terrorism.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html

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/
>
>
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