BtZ42/12 - Acronyms, Pudding's recipes, and a projective test

[Mark Kohut]

Some densely lyrical writing in this section about war, the horrors of. And
a linking  'explanation' of this "systematic death" with
Western 'rationalization', 'rationalist-corporate rapacity' as Fowler is
always saying. Max Weber invoked here and for much more. Including, of
course, the danger of charisma and the bureaucratic institutionalization of
....well, almost everything in civil societies.

In another major work, *Politics as a Vocation
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation>*, Weber defined the
state <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)> as an entity that
successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence> within a given
territory". He was also the first to categorise social authority into
distinct forms, which he labelled as charismatic, traditional, and
rational-legal. His analysis of bureaucracy
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy> emphasised that modern state
institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational-legal_authority>.

Weber, one of his most famous relevant pieces. In which he asserts the
State is founded on violence; in which he asserts that the leader, the
charismatic individual is the opposite, rises out of, the bureaucratic
mass. And much more:
http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Politics-as-a-Vocation.pdf


Here is a wikipedia summary of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation




On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 1:53 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> The last episode consisted mostly of Pirate's quickie, but this episode is
> much longer and packed with information.
>
> Summary:
>
> We're introduced to the White Visitation, in the fictional town of Ick
> Regis - somewhere in the Dover region. The White Visitation originally
> housed a mental asylum, from which one patient, Le Froyd escaped and leapt
> to his death in the sea. Now it houses the remnants of SHAEF (the
> American-led Supreme headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, relocated
> from London to Versailles by this time) in the form of various British and
> American groups it umbrellaed - PWE (British - Political Warfare
> Executive), PWD (American/British - the Psychological Warfare Division),
> SOE (British - the Special Operations Executive), and PISCES (fictional -
> Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender, which
> encompasses everything from Pointsman's ARF - AbreactionResearch Facility
> to a laundry-list of psychics, spiritualists and flakes). Basically, the
> assorted stealth and propaganda wings of the British and American armies,
> providing ample space for all of our various characters to rub shoulders.
>
> The fictional BBC propagandist, Myron Grunton (oink, oink), is
> broadcasting (hopefully) disturbing reports to Germans about the existence
> of the Schwarzkommando - Herero commandos who survived the German genocide
> and are now in German - doing what? Grunton has two sources to stoke these
> racist anxieties in the enemy: Pirate, in one of his SOE missions into
> Germany (possibly the one where he rescued Katje?) reports that there is
> some Herero involvement in the secret-weapons program; and generalized info
> obtained from Slothrop - "willing to go under light narcosis to help
> illuminate racial problems in his own country." [Aha! now we see how
> Pointsman was able to get Slothrop under the needle]. What better source of
> racism is there than the good old US of A?
>
> We meet Brigadier Pudding - in charge of the funding for all of these
> schemes, and therefore, has to be at least superficially tolerated by
> Pointsman et al). He's in his 80s, suffering from a mixture of WWI-induced
> battle fatigue and senility. Amidst flashbacks to horrifically brutal and
> incompetent battles in which his orders led to a wastage of only 70% of his
> unit, Pudding prattles on to the bored assemblage of White Visitation
> factions about - recipes? Perhaps this is when the idea for Pudding's
> special meal, later in the book, is hatched?
>
> Dr. Rozsavolgyi (sorry - too lazy to hunt down the special symbols -
> stupid, smug Yank that I am) a Hungarian refugee who works within PISCES in
> some capacity, and Pointsman discuss the latest test in store for Slothrop.
> A projective - i.e. free-form - test whose results can't be faked or
> compromised like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. But still
> structured, insists Pointsman: "We want to expose Slothrop to the German
> rocket …"
>
> The episode ends with a grotesque list of the design features of the
> building that houses the White Visitiation - sort of the architectural
> equivalent of the Banana Breakfast, in terms of surreal excess.
>
> LK
>
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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