Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

Sun Apr 9 22:07:36 CDT 2017

Monte's take resolves otherwise Pynchon-perceived Luddite idiocy.
Basically capitalism is the real villian. As such, regulation of that free
hand might seem the answer.  But with Pynchon any top-down solution would
be suspect. Thus anarchy is at play.

David Morris

On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 5:19 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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-really-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/books/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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