Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

[Paul Mackin]

Anarchy's a great idea but it needs a business plan.

On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 11:07 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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