Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

Tue Apr 11 09:46:06 CDT 2017

*The academic debates of the 60s clustered around two names. Charles
Killingsworth, the Labor economist from Michigan State, and the Keynesian
Walter Heller, who advised JFK and LBJ. Killingsworth emphasized the need
for massive retraining and Heller advised tax cuts and deficits would do
the job, the latter being what passed for Keynesianism in those days. K
later urged tax increases when 70s inflation started raising its ugly head.*

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 7:23 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> A brief history at Wiki:
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#20th_century
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 10:45 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Things haven't been so heated about automation taking away jobs since the
> > '60s.
> >
> > Rather than those technologies based on physical science, the ones based
> on
> > the social science are the sine qua non.
> >
> > Economies of scale for Ludd;
> >
> > The behavioral science of persuasion for us moderns.
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 6:18 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 sea
> >>>>>> Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
> >>>>>> So we, boys, we
> >>>>>> Will 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?
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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