Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

[ish mailian]

One things for certain, the essays don't offer sensible clarity, or
certainty, or anything for sure. Pynchon doesn't do well in the world
of take-away talking points and bottom lines. The rabbits hole the
Luddite and Sloth essays fall into are paradoxically specific about
Modernism & Technology (yes, I've gone ahead and used the Capital T)
and the Faustian American Tragedy of Development (Berman,  Chapter
One), about the Bomb, and ambiguous, even ambivalent about the Comic
and Romantic Marxian contradictions of capitalism (Berman Chapter
Two). We fall with Alice and meet a White Rabbit with a copy of Rilke
who, as a bureaucrat is pitiful, but as myth is terrible and beautiful
and in Love with Death.

 RICHARD LOCKE, in a Review, nailed this. There are advantages to
living when the wind that the answer is blowing in is all around you.
I don't take solace in sensible clarity, but to each a peach.



On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 11:15 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Reading through this thread.
>  So far I particularly like the sensible clarity Monte brings to the essay and the intersting tangent Ish produces.  In my mind Pynchon is not talking about the specific technology but the change in status and power structures and more deeply the change in  the sense of identity and self  brought by the paradigm that defines 2 primary categories:  owner capitalist ( successful businessman) and worker/replaceable part .
> While Snow is talking about the artist/tthinker as held back ( from PROGRESS) by lack of scientific knowledge,  Pynchon, scientificly literate, is seeing  a resistance to an imposed social order that offers not so much progess as the legitimately questionable status of parts of a machine, and celebrating the spirit of the "badass”  who resists that assigned status and insists that a better bargain is possible for those who refuse to be owned and operated.
>
>  I could not help, in reading the article ish posts, feeling that there are quite a few who resist sales pitches, and that when you have the habit of resistance, the algorithms are particularly formulaic and easy to resist. But they obviously  work enough to be very lucrative science and challenge worn out ideas about decision making.   Snow looks for science education to free men from Luddism, but what frees them from the unintended consequences of selling shit as science?
>
> As to convergences, so far I have seen no examples of AI, just faster and more multimedia electronic communication and computation.  Robotics seems bent toward a kind of weaponized capital with little restraint on where they get pointed and huge investment in genetics has not turned up nearly what was expected in usable return on investment.   The bombs continue to fall, the factories are still mostly pretty miserable. Does anyone win this Snow/Pynchon argument?
>
> I admit I was a bit lazy ( a kind of personal experiment in acedia)and didn’t re read either P essay.
>
>> On Apr 13, 2017, at 6:15 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> from NYRB  APRIL 20, 2017 ISSUE
>>
>> Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind
>>
>> Tamsin Shaw
>>
>>
>> The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
>>
>>
>> We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become
>> inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral
>> economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the
>> products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and
>> the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part.
>> Aspects of human societies that were formerly guided by habit and
>> tradition, or spontaneity and whim, are now increasingly the intended
>> or unintended consequences of decisions made on the basis of
>> scientific theories of the human mind and human well-being.
>>
>> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/kahneman-tversky-invisible-mind-manipulators/
>>
>> 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?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>> -
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>
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