TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[alice wellintown]

You sure read like Alice to me. But what do I know?


On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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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