The ugly truth of science

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

With quoting this sentence from Marx, which I recently read in a diary 
of Ernst Jünger, I implied the suggestion to focus - at this point of 
the debate - on science & technology /in literature/. Your question, in 
this regard not untypical for certain tendencies of the discussion, 
appears to me unhistorical and, thus, pretty hard to discuss. Marx' 
question, in contrast to this, is a concrete one. But it's not as simple 
as your answer to it does suggest. It's not about being in favor or 
against technology from a romantic point of view. As you know, Marx 
considered the optimal development of "the means of production", and 
this contains not only technology yet also theoretical science, as a 
necessary condition for communist society. And so he was never a Luddite 
but - in this a typical child of the 19th century - an admirer of 
science and its liberating potential. The question of Marx cannot even 
been answered with a simple "No!" While there is great fictional war 
literature written by contemporaries living with about the same 
technology as the warriors they write about - take Grimmelshausen's /Der 
abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch /(a picaro novel, dt. 
Schelmenroman, about the Thirty Years' War, published in 1668), or 
Mailer's /The Naked and the Dead/ -  it is, for a great writer, 
absolutely possible to reconstruct the wars and the violence of former 
times. Cormac McCarthy, although living with TV and the Bomb, was able 
to picture the violence of a former century vividly in his novel /Blood 
Meridian/. So I guess it's not impossible that an author, playing in the 
league of Homer, could succeed in creating something like the /Iliad/ 
while already living in a world that knows gunpowder. The question of 
Marx asks /how/ new technology changes our perception in general and the 
writer's imagination in particular (this is, btw, exactly the approach 
Kittler applied to Pynchon's work); it also hints at the rationalization 
of war which makes archaic rage, so central to the /Iliad/, look more 
and more old-fashioned. (The counter-position is marked by James Hillman 
who, in his last book /A Terrible Love of War/, says that it's one and 
the same archetype triggered again and again, no matter whether we talk 
about the Trojan War or US-interventions in Iraq.) With view on Pynchon 
you may also ask: Could /The Crying of Lot 49/ have been written in a 
world that already knew the Internet?


On 18.06.2013 18:25, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> Nor were armored knights amused by the longbow, or for that matter by 
> peasants trained to hold a line of pikes.
>
> *From:*Kai Frederik Lorentzen [mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de]
> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 18, 2013 12:15 PM
> *To:* Monte Davis; pynchon-l at waste.org
> *Subject:* Re: The ugly truth of science
>
>
>
> "Could Homer's /Iliad/ have been written in a world that already knew 
> gunpowder?"
>
> Karl Marx
>
> >>… 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?”<<
>

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