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

[ish mailian]

Auerbach makes judicious use of Pynchon's historical definition of Luddism,
but his essay is not focused on the history, or Pynchon definition, but on
what Pynchon, in his Sloth essay, speculates about:

Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
of the Acedia Squad.


On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Who's the sloppy reader now? Mea maxima culpa. Second time through, I
> notice that Auerbach *does* make the IMO crucial distinction, and links to
> this excellent piece on the historical Luddites.
>
>
>   http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/
> <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/>
>
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150920/6d6f8793/attachment.html>