NP but Richard Rorty, yet could gloss (some of) visionary Pynchon, yes? (This from a review in LA Review of Books about new collection of lectures)

[Joseph Tracy]

Rorty’s description of rueful acqiescence is not an uncommon reading among Pynchon readers and critics. There is a whole body of criticism that perceives GR, ATD, BE in particular as describing a machine like momentum to western dominated civilization that allows little hope of change or even real control of these meaning-destructive , nature-destructive and therefor self-destructive habits. Heroes who confront this machine reveal its  hypcritical or simply insane nature, but there is little apart from personal dignity available from resisting it. The heroes journey ends up moving toward escape, self preservation, avoiding  pointless self immolation.
 One thing that I will assert with intensity is that Pynchon does not tell his readers what to think. He thinks and expresses authorial ideas ,  his characters think and act, and history and fictions unfold but where many authors seek to direct our emotions and interpretations, Pynchon leaves that to the reader. Its a very democratic structure. If we come away strengthened in determination to fight for change or expose insanity and criminality the novels will act as warning  about what we are up aagainst but  will not deter us and will give us some good company.  That probably is better than rueful acqiescence but living in this time I find it impossible not to understand and feel emotionally exactly what Rorty is saying. 
    I just read a biography of Peter Kropotkin, who was a tirelessly hopeful believer in humankind’s capacity to move toward cooperation and peace. What made his history most interesting was understanding that the Bolshevik violence in seizing the revolution was not inevitable; there was chance and shifting ideas and the outcome might have been different. The sad fact was that Kropotkin faltered in his own opposition to war at this critical time.  Right now the empire is faltering in a period of similar uncertainty, One of the biggest un-predictable factors will be climactic, ecological  and social devastations that will be amplified by the resulting mass migrations. Will new models of how to manage human survival and cooperation emerge? I do not think it is impossible and tend to see more hope there in tumultuous change seized by local communities and new national alliances than in attempts at reform. So far reform is just a release valve to keep people believing some kind of new new deal is possible. It might happen in Iceland but America is the heart of the problem; we are mad with war and  oligarchy, dreams of a universal police state,  sexy entertainment and denial.
   
  
  

> On Oct 29, 2021, at 5:47 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Rorty is writing about fictions, placing Pychon's under the judgment of "rueful acquiescence'
> which I did not think you would agree with....but , wrong I guess. 
> 
> His words about the situation in the real world one can agree with yet also find Pynchon's novels
> not  "rueful acquiescence" in ultimate judgment. IMHO. 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 5:03 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> Just  being emphatic about what Rorty calls plausible extrapolation. I am hardly alone or apart from many serious analysts and journalists.  Let me point out that it was not long ago several p-listers were sure Mueller was going to expose Trump collusion with Russia while I and Journalist thinkers I admire said it would fizzle for lack of evidence because it was built out of a Hillary psyop. Plenty of crimes for Trump or Bush or Obama to account for but that was obviously a dead end if you looked at the quality of the evidence. 
> 
>> On Oct 29, 2021, at 1:13 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com <mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Puzzling to me from you, Joseph, with all the powerful stuff you find and say in Pynchon. But, as we know, I don't understand you. 
>> 
>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 1:11 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
>> The correlation between how politicians vote and who funds their campaigns and the direct hand of corportions in writing legislation makes it the only plausible explanation. Rueful acquiescence seems accurate.  Even our children for sale without much of a fight.
>> 
>> > On Oct 29, 2021, at 8:56 AM, Heikki R <situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com <mailto:situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > Rorty, however, seemed to regard Pynchon as something of an
>> > anti-Emerson/Whitman/Dewey...
>> > 
>> > "Snow Crash capitalizes on the widespread belief that giant corporation,
>> > and a shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an agent for the
>> > corporations, now make all the important decisions.  This belief finds
>> > popular expression in popular thrilers like Richard Condon's The Manchurian
>> > Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more ambitious works like Thomas
>> > Pynchon's Vineland and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  The view that the
>> > visible government is just a false front is a plausible extrapolation from
>> > the fact that we are living in a second Gilded Age: even Mark Twain might
>> > have been startled by the shamelessness with which our politicians now sell
>> > themselves. Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's, and Pynchon's are novels
>> > not of social protest but of rueful acquiescence in the end of American
>> > hopes...."
>> > 
>> > From The Rorty Reader, ed. Voparil and Bernstein, Wiley-Blackwell 2010, p.
>> > 373
>> > 
>> > On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 1:14 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com <mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> > 
>> >> “I should like to make it sound attractive by dubbing it ‘American’,” he
>> >> writes with his usual dash of irony, “construing it as the idea common to
>> >> Emerson and Whitman, the idea of a new, self-creating community, united not
>> >> by knowledge of the same truths, but by sharing the same generous,
>> >> inclusivist, democratic hopes.”
>> >> --
>> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>
>> >> 
>> > --
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>> 
>> 
>> 
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>