The ugly truth of science
Bekah
bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
Wed Jun 19 14:33:38 CDT 2013
Too funny, Laura! Go for it! (Should I read Game of Thrones?)
Bekah
On Jun 19, 2013, at 8:46 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> I have to respectfully disagree, Mark. Pynchon wrote COL49 on the tail-end of his NY Beatnik phase. He may have (or did) talk to people who knew that ARPANET was just a matter of time, but Pynchon couldn't have possibly imagined the cultural impact of the internet (significantly written in lowercase). W.A.S.T.E. in COL49 had more of a hip vibe, a cool conceit (Kool Konceit?) that described an underculture (such as in Orwell's 1984) rather than a rebellion. But hypothetically written now, one could take the same story (in fact, it's been my fantasy to write a re-conceived screenplay of COL49), place it in the present day, and W.A.S.T.E. [the clandestine passing of paper (burnable, leaving no record) notes] would become the legitimate response to the NSA's surveillance of all that's virtual. Imagine strangers passing amongst themselves notes that said simply: Fuck off, NSA. Basically, I think COL49 is a book that demands to be written now. Oh, and Marx, try Game of Thrones.
>
> Laura
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Markekohut
>
>
> Great post, Kai and I'll give my answer to,the CofL49 question. NO. In thunder. perhaps only Bleeding Edge could have been he predicts playfully.
>
>
> On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> 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?
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>>
>> 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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