NP's "is it ok to be a luddite?"

[Monte Davis]

Auerbach is usually very good, but here --yet again -- we have Pynchon
dragged in as saying "the Luddites were all about machines and technology."
As I noted here last winter:

***
Re Christy Burns' "Postmodern Historiography" (and looking forward to
Mason's recollections of weavers vs, clothiers in the Golden Valley, 207
passim)

Once again, in Burns' note 2, we see the Luddites' activities described as
"the vehement workers' rebellion against the advance of machinery..." along
with a reference to David Cowart, who (in TP and the Dark Passages of
History) describes Pynchon's 1984 essay "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" as "a
meditation on distrust of technology."

And once again I wonder why, if  that's really what the essay says the
Luddites were about in 1811-1816, Pynchon would clutter its exposition with
distractions such as

"...much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long
been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle
Ages..."

"whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged - this had been going on,
sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710..."

",,,the target even of the original assault [Ned Lud's] of 1779, like many
machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology.
The stocking-frame had been around since 1589... [and] continued to be the
only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years... And Ned Lud's
anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly."

"The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had
been putting people out of work for well over two centuries."

Golly, those Luddites must have been awfully stupid not to have noticed
"the advance of machinery" for so long. Or maybe the Luddites' activities
were not what Burns, Cowart, C.P. Snow, and so many others project upon
them, but exactly what Pynchon calls them:

"They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men
who did not work, only owned and hired... [they were] trade unionists ahead
of their time... It was open-eyed class war."

***

IOW,  the Luddite disturbances were actually about a concentration of
capital arising from changing markets and business models: where previously
a lot of small local clothiers had dealt with a few weavers each, now a few
large clothiers -- not neighbors, but increasingly in far-off cities -- had
much more concentrated power over (and systematically lowered the rates of)
all the weavers in a district. The Luddites smashed machinery *not* because
it was new, *not* because it was in and of itself putting them out of work,
but because it was what they could reach of the bosses' assets.

I recognize that it's much too late to change the consensus that "Luddite =
anti-technology,", but given that TRP was at pains to show that he *did*
understand what the Luddites were about, it annoys me to see him -- and
sloppy readings of that essay -- enlisted in the general misunderstanding.


On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 9:49 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/09/luddism_today_there_s_an_important_place_for_it_really.single.html
>
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