The ugly truth of science

[Monte Davis]

An afterthought: Think about how many times over the years you’ve seen the lines I omitted for space below –

 

“dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…” 

 

quoted as evidence of Pynchon’s satiric hostility to IG Farben/Krupp/GE/Shell/ICI, to the military-industrial-R&D complex of 1945 (and 2013), to Technology itself. The voice is the voice of a vampire, right? And vampires are evil, right? Q.E.D.

 

Now: in the same book he gives us King Kong, the Schwarzkommando, the White Visitation’s play on German fears of blackness, Major Marvy’s racist ravings and his castration, rag-poppin’ Malcolm X, etc. etc…. 

 

And we don’t say “Pynchon is a racist,” or “Pynchon reveals his pervasive fear of Africans’ and African-Americans’ righteous revenge.” We recognize that he is writing about projection… about whites’ and Europeans’ and Germans’ mythologized fears… about an Other that is shot through with ambivalence. (Who brought Kong to NYC? Who tormented him? And in the end, for all the sexualized horror of a nubile blonde in that big black fist, wasn’t it Beauty that killed the beast?)

 

But when he gives us Technology as a vampire – a creature just as mythical as King Kong, just as compound of fear and attraction and grudging identification, just as shot through with ambivalence (see prime-time TV for all the personable, hot, misunderstood vampires anyone could want)…

 

Why, that’s just Pynchon harshing on his target, Technology. Move along, nothing to see here.

 

Mm-kay… anything wrong with this picture?

 

Foax, I’m going to start now to do what I should have had the sense to do all along. I’m going to stay out of generic discussions of “Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Good or Bad?”

 

… or “Scientists: Noble Benefactors of Mankind or Robotic Fascist Vanguard of Doom?”

 

… or “Would Power and Wealth and Preterition Have Played Nicely if They Hadn’t Had Pointy Sticks, Metal, Gunpowder, Calculus, Steam Power, Electric Utilities, Behavioral Psychology, Nuclear Weapons, IT, and Genetic Engineering?”

 

I know I instigated some of them, and have jumped into others, and I apologize. God knows there are whole libraries about that, and many other places online to discuss that – some with more knowledgeable and eloquent discussants than me or thee.

 

>From now on I ’m going to try to deal with those Big Questions only as reflected and refracted in Pynchon’s fiction, and as Pynchon’s fiction has shaped my own take on them. 

 

I didn’t write those long posts on Eden/Arcadia, the Romantics, and the “Two Cultures/Luddite” memes because I have anything fresh to say about them as such. I was groping toward an understanding of why so many Pynchon readers and critics are quick to recognize aspects of Pynchon that are aligned with the “literary intellectuals’” culture (per C. P. Snow) and its critiques of the scientists’ and technologists’ culture … and why they miss or deny aspects of Pynchon that point the other way, or are ambivalent, or undermine/transcend the “two cultures” dichotomy entirely.    

      

That’s where I have questions and ideas that weren’t chewed to pulp a long time ago. That’s where I’ll try to stay. 

 

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Monte Davis
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 11:01 AM
To: 'Christopher Simon'; 'Joseph Tracy'; 'P-list List'
Subject: RE: The ugly truth of science

 

CS> Talking about potential misuse of powerful technologies as a fault of "science"… is shifting the blame and missing the point.

 

Yes. That’s why I keep coming back to Enzian’s meditation in the ruined IG Farben factory near Hamburg (pp. 518-520 in the Penguin trade pb). It’s a marvelous example of Pynchon’s supple voice, sliding in and out of a character’s consciousness, in and out of multiple authorial stances, arguing with itself. First it reifies technology as an autonomous, irresistible force hungering for its funding like a vampire for blood. WWII and global capitalism are just a sideshow for the rubes:

 

“…this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war [...] The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but  among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite […]”

 

Then reified Technology denies its own agency and responsibility (some Alice in Wonderland paradoxing going on here):

 

“Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), ‘All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—‘ ”

 

NB that here we, too are, engaged are in the P-list’s longest-running “dogged and humorless argument.” Have some ersatz coffee, Christopher; I think there are few drops of that godawful potato schnapps left to give it a kick. 

 

One faction of readers takes the first part of the passage as “what Pynchon really thinks,” and either ignores the second part or responds with: well, Technology *would* say that, wouldn’t it? Like Verbal Kint sez in The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”

 

I’m inclined to the opposite view: that the second part is closer to what we should take away, and the first part a “dance of the seven veils”: if you think you’ve seen through War and Capitalism to the real villain in Technology, you’re falling for the same shuck and jive all ovcr again. You’re neutered – useless – and in fact HELPING the elite, by playing their misdirection game. NB that in the movie, little lame Verbal Kint *was* the master criminal himself, and got away scot-free by building up imaginary Keyser Soze. In fact, the Devil’s greatest trick was to say “Hey, look over there! Isn’t that the Devil?”

 

Until you stop ranting about Technology (and Conscienceless Scientists) and start asking who paid for the research, who wanted the engineering, who built the factories, who got good jobs there, how we were snookered into voting for the people who set the appropriations, and how do we restructure our social world to stop incentivizing bad shit in technology *and* politics *and* finance and more… 

 

In short, all the messy boring work of responsible citizenship, which is a lot less fun than trading passionate passages from R.D. Laing and Norman O. Brown about the inhumanity of Science.

 

“We have to look for power sources here,” Pynchon goes on, “and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid . . . we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function. . .”

 

Is that a parodic voice? Is Pynchon using it just to say “poor deluded techno-victim Enzian, even now he can’t break out of his technology paradigm?” I don’t think so. I think it’s another example of what I called Pynchon’s “weaving in of scientific ways of thinking” with a positive valence. 

 

When I read it, I don’t hear: “Oh, we are doomed unless we reject soulless Technology and allow our natural goodness and loving kindness to re-emerge.”

 

I hear: “We have to look around us,  and analyze causes and effects, and understand better how the world works That way, we just might figure out how those fuckers took it away from us… and take it back.”

 

So yeah… scapegoating Science or Technology *is* shifting the blame and missing the point. Even worse than that, it’s counterproductive. It’s chasing Keyser Soze. It’s what the Devil *wants* you to do.  

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