Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

[John Bailey]

Wot Monte sed.
There's also been a massive resurgence of "Robots are Coming to Take Your
Jobs" stories in the media of late. Same thing - displaces the
responsibility away from the businesses preferring automation and the
minimisation of human labor costs onto a mythic army of androids we've been
primed to imagine by fiction and film. It's the same as explaining offshore
outsourcing as "Bangladeshis are Coming to Take Your Job."
I think classifying Pynchon as a Systems Novelist makes even more sense
when you read his essays, rather than the fiction.

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 12:44 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don't resist at all Pynchon's kinship/affinity for the Luddites --
> especially for  Ned Ludd himself as Badass folk hero, which is his route
> into the subject. But Pynchon reminds us four times in the essay that their
> struggle was not against new machinery (it had been in their homes and
> workshops for generations), but against the Birmingham and Manchester
> "cotton capitalists" who could put together hundreds of those machines and
> water or steam power under one roof. Those economies of scale, that newly
> enlarged bargaining power, swept away a 150-year-old, decentralized
> "letting-out" system of craft textile production, tilting the playing field
> so that workers who had been independent contractors had no choice but to
> become employees.
>
> Historians have known this all along, but the broad-brush pop version
> (which is what "Luddite" came to mean over time, and what C.P. Snow
> invoked) conflates the *scale and economic organization* of a technology
> with the technology itself. Some think that's a quibble; I don't, because I
> see a lot of very deliberate stitching back and forth across that
> distinction throughout Pynchon's work.
>
> ...And because every day I read heated arguments -- say, about Big Data
> and social media and online privacy and NSA/Google/Facebook -- which get
> hopelessly confused as people slide back and forth between 'technology is
> doing this to us' and 'we're allowing/paying specific organizations with
> specific agendas to do this to us.'
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 5:49 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for reposting. Yeah Pynchon obviously goes out of his way to
>> demonstrate (or even generate) a more complicated idea of Luddism than
>> simply anti-tech.
>>
>> Do you resist the idea that Pynchon demonstrates some kind of affinity
>> for or even kinship with Luddism as you understand him to understand it?
>>
>> So to use some of your phrasing, let's replace Luddite (adj.) with
>> "[anti] concentrated capital and market power" in the end of the sloth
>> essay...
>>
>> "Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
>> increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in
>> [ANTI-CONCENTRATED-CAPITAL-AND-MARKET-POWER] 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."
>>
>> So then Pynchon's--and maybe history's--more informed sense of what
>> Luddite means/meant eventually catches up with the popular anti-technology
>> sense anyway, at least so long as we are in the age of technology,
>> resisting which looks for now an awful lot like resisting concentrated
>> capital and market power?
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 3:42 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Nothing to contribute beyond another pitch for my own reading -- that
>>> however we use the label now, the historical Luddites mobilized *not*
>>> against technology -- the same that they and their grandparents used
>>> routinely -- but against concentrated capital and market power. And thjat
>>> Pynchon knows that. As I wrote 9/2015:
>>>
>>> **
>>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea
>>> lly-fought-against-264412/
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 3:38 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Typed my way through a brief attempt to understand or at least meditate
>>>> on these two essays in tandem upon a revisit of them yesterday...
>>>>
>>>> Maybe not worth your time, but if anybody's interested in reacting or
>>>> offering any insight, I imagine it'll be worth mine. The maybe-finite
>>>> resource of my time, that is.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Luddite essay here: http://www.nytimes.com/b
>>>> ooks/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
>>>>
>>>> Sloth here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-
>>>> sloth.html
>>>>
>>>> Luddite essay is '84. Sloth '93.
>>>>
>>>> End of the Luddite essay:
>>>>
>>>> If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will
>>>> come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and
>>>> development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all
>>>> converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest
>>>> of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is
>>>> certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God
>>>> willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take
>>>> comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously
>>>> improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear
>>>> identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary
>>>> origins. It begins:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *As the Liberty lads o'er the seaBought their freedom, and cheaply,
>>>> with blood, So we, boys, weWill die fighting, or live free,And down with
>>>> all kings but King Ludd!*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The last two paragraphs of the Sloth essay:
>>>>
>>>> Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious
>>>> concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away
>>>> from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life
>>>> really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a
>>>> beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal.
>>>> The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of
>>>> God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Does this seem like an evolution in his thinking from the Luddite
>>>> essay?
>>>>
>>>> He's so--even in his nonfic--exploratory, proceeding by a kind of
>>>> thinking-at-speed logic, but also ambulatory, wandering, without apparent
>>>> destination, toying with different ideas, tones...
>>>>
>>>> So while I'm both (for better or worse, not really purposely but
>>>> inevitably) always studying Pynchon for lessons in how to live and think,
>>>> I'm also always hesitant to decisively identify too much explicit opinion
>>>> or ideology.
>>>>
>>>> But I usually come out of the Luddite essay--or at least look back on
>>>> it--feeling like he's kind of pro-Luddism, or at least entangling Luddism
>>>> with certain lineages and inclinations that he might either note with some
>>>> affection or even identify with. Basically it feels like it has some note
>>>> of endorsement to it.
>>>>
>>>> The sloth essay I usually look back on with the idea that he's offering
>>>> a kind of defense/endorsement of sloth, a kind of passive resistance to
>>>> capitalistic/only-forward time, to the treatment of time as a finite and
>>>> exploitable resource. But actually his movement through it is complicated.
>>>> It is sometimes the way I remember it. But then it's also other things. He
>>>> initially frames it as one of Aquinas's seven deadlies. Aquinas calls it
>>>> acedia. Pynchon seems to formulate his idea of it primarily from this
>>>> vantage point.
>>>>
>>>> Here are the different mentions of acedia in the essay.
>>>>
>>>> 1) "Acedia" in Latin means sorrow, deliberately self-directed, turned
>>>> away from God, a loss of spiritual determination that then feeds back on in
>>>> to the process, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and
>>>> depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way
>>>> of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort.
>>>>
>>>> 2) Between Franklin's hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville's
>>>> doomed scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of early America,
>>>> consolidating itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia was in
>>>> the last stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition.
>>>>
>>>> 3) BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street"
>>>> (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was
>>>> now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robber-baron
>>>> capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia.
>>>>
>>>> 4) In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily
>>>> political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil
>>>> policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of
>>>> the 1920's and 30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam
>>>> era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction
>>>> alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the
>>>> effort involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing
>>>> good present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass
>>>> them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has
>>>> never lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as
>>>> outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price,
>>>> a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience
>>>> faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest.
>>>>
>>>> 5) Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended? Another
>>>> possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond acedia at all, but
>>>> that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue, television, and is
>>>> seeking other, more shadowy environments -- who knows? computer games, cult
>>>> religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities -- ready to pop up
>>>> again in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the cheap.
>>>>
>>>> And 6) happens in the last paragraph I pasted above. I guess looking at
>>>> it now it doesn't necessarily seem like TRP's really abandoning or shifting
>>>> his identification with/endorsement of/sympathy for Luddism. Maybe he's
>>>> even saying, as we're increasingly defined by technology, Luddism becomes a
>>>> more logical, potent, holy, common(?), effective(??) kind of sloth than
>>>> ever before.
>>>>
>>>> Really maybe he's saying sloth was once--in the Age of Miracles--an
>>>> inhibition to a vividly felt/engaged experience of the world, but now, in a
>>>> less holy world, sloth isn't despairingly turning away from the holy but
>>>> from the unholy/unholiness.
>>>>
>>>> So by a weird kind of divergent and antagonstic evolution, sloth gets
>>>> decoupled from its "acedia" origins and becomes a resistance to some old
>>>> ghost-half of itself. Despair against despair. A face and its mirror image
>>>> turning away from each other.
>>>>
>>>> But was it that original coupling of sloth and acedia itself--the
>>>> turning away from the holy--that led out of the Age of Miracles? Or maybe
>>>> as Aquinas would have it, it was 1/7 of the story.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Do you see much movement in TRP's thinking over the 9-yr publication
>>>> gap between these two things?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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