TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 13.06.2013 00:38, Monte Davis wrote:

> Is it possible that at the same time he is suspicious and minatory and 
> worried about science and technology (and he is, like so many other 
> writers),  he is also (like very few others in literary fiction) 
> really /interested//**/in it? Attracted to it? Even fascinated by it? 
> Concerned to show us some real, important human values that come to us 
> /through/, even /because of/, math and science and technology?

How math, science and technology can bring us "real, important human 
values", I do not see. I'm not saying this polemically, and there are 
certainly good things - antibiotics have been mentioned - about 
scientific modernity. Or, as Jesse says when Walter shows him how to 
cook up the shit right: "WOW ... /Science/!"  But "values"? How? Ain't 
modern science - and I'm talking here about hard, or, as Paul Mackin 
puts it, "real science" - a self-referential functional system 
completely unreachable for something as old-fashioned as values of the 
"real, important human" kind? We do not have to come to a consent on 
this. But I really would like to hear - and please note that I'm not 
Alice - from you a detail or two on the criticism on science one can 
doubtlessly find in Pynchon. The thing is that he's not simply "worried 
about science and technology ... like so many other writers"; to Pynchon 
the pitfalls of science-based control are a key issue. I don't find this 
in, say, Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy. It's plausible to say that 
Pynchon's attitude towards modern science's war against ambivalence 
became more relaxed in the second phase of his work, but in the first 
three novels the theme is central, imo. Pointsman makes his points, 
Schoenmaker finds his clients. And Dr. Hilarious can continue his 
concentration camp experiments under civil conditions in context of MK 
Ultra. These motives - all based in the real history of the 20th century 
- do unfold a fundamental criticism regarding modern science and its 
lack of values. I'm not discussing here - though we might come to this - 
whether the loss of human values is a necessary product of social 
differentiation, as Luhmann ("Modernity has more advantages /and/ more 
disadvantages than any other society before") puts it, or whether this 
could be avoided by different forms of political organization. Just that 
much: "Keep cool and care!" won't do. That Pynchon is "attracted" to 
modern science is certainly right; even after the successful publication 
of /V/ he wanted to complete his scientific education with a math grade 
from Berkeley. But, as already said, how to get from Pynchon's 
fascination by science to any kind of 'scientific value generation' to 
be found in the texts themselves, is not clear to me. What I find 
instead, especially in /Gravity's Rainbow/, is the tendency to connect 
the progress of science to deadly war technology. Not only in the case 
of rockets or nuclear weapons, yet regarding modern science as such. 
"There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the 
rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement for at least 
two centuries --- since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, 
used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs 
through the air" (GR, p. 407). It's not really "the German mind", it's 
science ---



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