TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[Monte Davis]

Thanks, this is good! I have a project today that won't permit much keyboard
time for a proper response. Until I can do that, here's something
coincidentally a propos that popped up overnight on Boing Boing (follow the
link to Storify):

 

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/what-makes-science.html

 

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Kai Frederik Lorentzen
Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2013 6:19 AM
To: Monte Davis; pynchon -l
Subject: Re: TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

 


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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