Hey Graf Oderland, this lever thing reminded me of the paper I wrote while we were in school. It's even called "The Lever". I don't know if I gave it to you to read before, so here's the reminder of what insane correlations I was able to draw once :).
-------
The Lever
“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the Earth” Archimedes
The control revolution succeeded French bourgeois revolution in terms of achieving control in the society that was freed from the aristocratic foundation of power. The world of production and commerce, once chained by protocols of the royal court and taxes that supported the aristocracy, took the lassez faire philosophy of Adam Smith and found itself in the unknown realm of making and selling without the input of any higher force than that of the market.
One of the most important aspects of technology in general is its control potential. The wheel gave us control of the roads, but roads, in return, control our wheels. The tired horseman or chariot driver had the luxury of falling asleep while riding or driving, without the fear of an accident, because the horses knew their way. The mechanical and, later, the information society, took away the safety of relying on the instinct, and introduced the automaton as the reincarnation of Golem. Automaton is the desire for the heuristics given by man, as opposed to the heuristics given by the absent creator.
The early automatic machines were equipped with numerous levers and switches that gave their operators the chance to interrupt the process, or change it, adjusting it to momentary needs. Long programming sequences and perfection of language used to master the automatic system had one goal throughout the history – to remove as many levers as possible – to set the machine free from man and free the man from the role of operator. As much as the control was the goal, it became the burden as well.
Contemporary control systems have gained significant independence from the operator. The invention of gyroscope and its use in civilian and military applications has shifted the responsibility even more from the pilot to the system of automatic control. In theory, this is the ultimate goal of the automaton as general term for materialization of Greek tehne – to become a fully self-organizing system. The invention that gave incentive to development of automatic control systems with gyroscopes was French physicist Leon Foucault’s pendulum. Foucault’s pendulum was constructed in 1850 and it was meant to demonstrate the rotation of the earth:
The large swinging pendulum gradually rotated. Foucault argued that what was actually happening was that the plane of the pendulum’s swing remained in the same orientation in “inertial space” (that is, with respect to the fixed stars) while the earth rotated. The consequent apparent movement allowed the earth’s rotation to be seen. (McKenzie 1996, p. 32)
The application of pendulum principle in Anschuetz – Kaempfe gyrocompasses (German), Sperry (American), SAGEM (French) and Brown (British) introduced a new international Gyro culture that idealized the technology of power (Ibid., p. 37). Developments in technology of navigation reached their peak in 1930s with guided ballistic missile development in national socialist Germany with Werner von Braun’s V-2 that had an advanced gyroscope system. V-2s, constructed in underground facility Mittelwerke under Kohnstein Mountain in Harz, were featured with automatic control that left the mechanism on its own to construct a parabola-shaped route before falling on the ground, with the controlled propulsion. The supersonic rocket’s programming had a simple goal – annihilation of the target before the target could anticipate it.
In the novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Thomas Pynchon created a character of WW2 American army lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, an individual mysteriously conditioned by players in the international corporate plot to react to Imipolex G, a substance that binds him with the Nazi V-2 missiles that were falling on London in 1945. When the rocket extinguishes the propulsion on a point in the parabola-shaped flight and submits itself to gravity, Tyron Slothrop gets a hard on, his erect member being the only thing to hold on to before hearing the blast or dying in the explosion. By using Werner von Braun’s supersonic V-2 and its organic counterpart, Slothrop’s penis, Pynchon created a metaphor of the loss of control before the impact of weapon with terminal effect. The helplessness and determinism under the oppressive system that operates at the speed incomprehensible for human senses requires a counter-performance in which the only mechanism Slothrop can use is his own organic lever in hope of avoiding the inevitable:
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always collectively, had been moving towards that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet, they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they it's children. (1973, p. 244)
Only the admiration for parabola remains, the shape and design that will play a key role in resolution of Gravity’s Rainbow when the ultimate V-2 - the one marked 00000 aims for the polar axis in order to reestablish the original divine order of “Wolfzeit” (Evola 1934) or reach the Hyperborean island of Avalon or Ultima Thule – a point of universal purification in the cycle of perpetual return (Eliade 1949; Herbert 1965). The imaginary axis of the world – axis mundi (Eliade ibid.) signifies the ultimate point for achieving control. Slothrop’s subconsciously induced performance in which his penis is a striking allegory of the desire for an Archimedean switch or lever that would move the world and obstruct the inevitability of V-2’s parabola. However, in Pynchon’s novel Slothrop’s erection occurs at the moment of Brennschluss, when the rocket submits itself to the gravity and the helplessness is mutual. There are no second chances, the modern world is helpless in its self-referring language of deconstruction.
This self-referring language of contemporary theories of globalization and technology (Fukuyama 1992; Giddens 1990) has diverted its attention from the problem of the lever, or the problem of structural hierarchy that implies external control. In theories of modernity and identity and in a wider critical/cultural theory, it is assumed that the vertical and horizontal compatibility of different systems of hardware, orgware, software and lifeware is not in any way affected at the points in which they merge, that the mysterious gatekeeper should not exist or should at least have a default state of indifference, as in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967). The “merging” is considered to be an irrevocable constant. As with Bulgakov and his disguised devil in communist Moscow that pulled the trick of persuading people that he does not exist, the theory of thermodynamics has discovered another devil a long time ago - Maxwell’s demon (Beniger 1986. p. 45 ) – a mysterious being that manipulated the molecules with different velocities in the vessel filled with air. The assumption made by Maxwell was in regard to a vessel divided in two sections, A and B, with only a small hole through which the individual molecule can pass and a mysterious being that opens and closes this, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower ones to pass from B to A. The being would, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics (Maxwell 1871, pp. 308-309, as cited in Beniger 1986, p. 45).
In Gravity’s Rainbow, the integration of systems is achieved through international corporate plot that combines the industry or warfare and chemicals with the Pavlovian experiments in psychology. The unanticipated element is the lever mounted on Slothrop that possesses the ability to lead to a decoding of the process in novel’s plot. Tyrone Slothrop is taken to the underground realms where the organic lever is searching for its mechanical counterpart.
The industry of goods has removed a significant number of switches and levers from products in the fields of production, transportation, and communication where previously elaborate hardware and software has been simplified in order to address the needs of less skilled operators. The examples of that are the gradual removal of the power switch on television sets (degradation of its importance with the advent of more complex remote controllers and photo sensors), automatic transmission in automobiles that allows multitasking while driving, shift from command line (CLI) to graphical user interface (GUI) in personal computing. These changes and simplifications that required elaborate efforts and still do, have been more of a product of philosophy of connectivity than the product of the actual desire for connectivity. One part of the doctrine of the chosen instrument for global telecommunications development, established by U.S. president Wilson in 1920s, was to control the global systems by setting the standards of their operation in order to achieve vastly improved telecommunications without clear central control (Hugill 1999, pp. 226-242). This way the philosophy of connectivity advertised the need for increased connectivity, decreasing the life span of technologies in use, thus creating the perpetual obsolescence of concepts and products from all industry branches. This argument is supported by the fact that the dictionary of terms describing the global village or global city in terms of media technologies has not changed much since the advent of radio, lexicographic efforts being done only in adding the moving image component, rest remaining the same.
Electronic media, especially television, have had a tremendous impact on Americans’ sense of place. Electronic media have combined previously distinct social settings, moved the dividing line between private and public behavior toward the private, and weakened the relationship between social institutions and physical places. The logic underlying situational patterns of behavior in a print-oriented society, therefore, has been radically subverted. Many Americans may no longer seem to “know their place” because the traditionally interlocking components of “place” have been split apart by electronic media. Wherever one is now – at home, at work, or in a car – one may be in touch and tuned-in. (Meyrowitz 1985, p. 308)
The paragraph cited above can be found in similar form in any theoretical text that deals with the print society, McLuhan’s “global village”, Brzezinski’s “global city” or Giddens’s “loss of tradition in late modern society”. The literature, theory and philosophy of connectivity denies the stable points - levers mounted on the wall somewhere in the Mittelwerke- underground rocket facility in German mountains (see Williams 1990). This mystifying element of technology was observed by structural anthropology that disintegrated academically and transgressed from to literature. The fertile ground for it were the works of Jorge Luis Borges, most respectively The Aleph (1945); “Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed” (ibid., p. 2). For Borges, Aleph is the ultimate external point – nunc stans, the position from which Foucault’s pendulum moves, the only stable place in the cosmos (Eco 1988, p. 6). This is the place that Archimedes or Descartes could have used for standing with a lever, due to its ultimate stability and omnipresence, like the sacred Mount Meru, Mount Salvat or the Isle of Avalon (Godwin 1993, p. 169). The lever is the higher force situated in the well protected underground facility and is capable of disconnecting all peripheries from the center (Pekic 1989).
The loss of account for points at which the communication between different systems can be disconnected through switch or a lever in the context of Pynchon’s novel, has made an automatism of the system look even more deterministic than it actually is. The “post-historical world”(Fukuyama 1992) and the “world beyond tradition” (Giddens 1990) are the common descriptions for a literary and theoretical stand that claims full connectivity abilities as a result of “the chosen instrument doctrine” that has turned the world in Brzezinski’s global city and a global periphery. In addition, the theories of hegemony in global system observe that is positioned in the subterranean realms of national and ethnic archetypes, where every system that is allegedly assimilated still has an underground Mittelwerke.
Maxwell’s demon is an equivalent of perpetual motion and perpetual energy that both Borges in Aleph and Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum share. The esoteric point that controls the flow of energy and therefore is external to the phenomenon of entropy is an antipode to the deterministic theories of global communication which are centered around the works of Fukuyama and Brzezinski, but even more, around the theory of Rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) that envisioned a self-organizing and a self-regenerating root system whose parts could survive the death of other parts, by regenerating from the spots of cut-off. The theory of Deleuze-Guattari has been applied mostly in poststructuralist explanations of the nature of the hypertext and Internet. The self-sustainability of its parts is a constant, but a constant from which another one is derived and that is the mandatory connectivity of the part with the demon that will always manipulate the lever in favor of the merge i.e. the indifferent or non-existent gate-keeper. The Internet as a relatively new phenomenon under scrutiny has been given attributes of rhizomatic network by the poststructuralist theories, with a certain amount of glorification of the lack of switch that would be able to disintegrate the world network of computers. This may have been the case when Internet was still “riding” on the back of public switched telephone network, as a network of public or dedicated access servers. At that time, Internet had lower level of priority than the main purpose of the telephone network – voice and fax. Since the lines were not dedicated to Internet, there was no dedicated switch that would relieve the telephone network of its stowaway, the Internet, without affecting the functionality of old public switched telephone network. Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture (2004) makes an argument for a significant difference between the early days of the network when it belonged to enthusiasts and its broadband era in which the corporate sector took the best part, both in service and content providing.
The argument of the article arises here. The switch or the lever is no longer an abstract literary construct as in the case of Tyrone Slothrop, but a category that opposes the philosophy of connectivity and contemporary sociology of globalization and hegemony. The lever is of the archetypal nature as argued in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (1967) in which the influence of Jungian philosophy provided structuralism with the stigma of being too literary, as it was the case with another structuralist – Marshall McLuhan. This stigma has come from the Levi-Strauss’s effort to achieve the “depayssement” (displacement for the objective observer) in Cartesian sense - the place on which to position the lever of Archimedes.
The lever is the gatekeeper mechanism between the merging parts. It represents the set of archetypes that every part possesses and brings in the process of integration of ethnic groups of different national systems of communication (literature and arts, media, education, trade). While neglected by the poststructuralist and critical realist theory, the lever is present in the magic realism of Julius Evola (1934) and Ernst Juenger (1932; 1951), in Jungian psychology, Mircea Eliade’s history of religion, and in the literature of exhaustion;
As Barth construes it, the literature of exhaustion thus represents a highly intellectualized maze-making, the more arcane the better, for the purpose of exhausting possibilities for meaning. Barth singles out Jorge Luis Borges, the librarian-author, who devises intricate fictional labyrinths out of the storehouse of accumulated cultural and historical artifacts. In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon mentions Borges as a builder of labyrinths, networks, and conspiracies, built to be exhaustive, and laid out to exhaust the abilities of those characters trapped in them. They are fictions of encyclopedic metaphor. (Slade 1974, p. 242)
This literature of encyclopedic nature, frequently called postmodernist, attempts to recognize (or invent) the existence of safety mechanisms between the parties in communication; cultures or individuals. In passive opposition to theories of modernization and globalization, the encyclopedic principle draws back on Jungian collective memory that constructs archetypal levers and switches that launch V-2 rockets or suicide bombers. The lever as a link with the ultimately stable point in the universe (Aleph) is a literary mechanism in works cited, that attempts to displace the human agent on a ideally objective esoteric spot. The passivity of argument that literature of exhaustion makes and intellectual aggressiveness that perpetuates theories of globalization and rhizomatic model of communication do not allow us to observe them in the arena where a theory death match would produce a winner. In the same way that the human agency of Tyrone Slothrop retreats to the subterranean realms, the agency of the encyclopedic approach retreated to the literary forest just as Juenger’s Waldgaenger did and refused to enter in a open battle, opting for intellectual guerilla war, where levers are still the ultimate warfare.
Readings:
Beniger, James (1986) The Control Revolution : Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Borges, Jorge Luis (1945) Aleph. in The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. New York: Dutton (1970)
Bulgakov, Mikhail (1967) The Master and Margarita. London: Collins and Hardwill Press
Eco, Umberto (1988) Foucault’s Pendulum, New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Eliade, Mircea (1949) The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or Cosmos and History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press (1974)
Evola, Julius (1934) The Revolt Against the Modern World. Inner Traditions International (1995)
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Godwin, Joscelyn (1993) Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Grand Rapids (MI): Phanes Press
Herbert, Frank (1965) Dune. Philadelphia: Chilton Books
Hugill, Peter J. (1999) Global Telecommunications Since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Juenger, Ernst (1932) Der Arbeiter. Stuttgart (Germany): Ernst Klett Verlag
___________ (1951) Der Waldgang. Stuttgart (Germany): Ernst Klett Verlag
Lessig, Lawrence (2004) Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1967) Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books
McKenzie, Donald (1990) Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Jane's Strategic Weapons, Janes Publishing
Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press
Pekic, Borislav (1989) Atlantida: epos. Novi sad (Yugoslavia): Solaris (1997)
Pynchon, Thomas (1973) Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking
Slade, Joseph W. (1974) Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner Paperback Library
Wiliams, Rosalind (1990) Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press
Amazing, I just don't have the courage to look back at the papers I was writing at that time. Especially since I can vaguely remember the paper I wrote for that class (I think), when my Musilophilia was in one of its periodic waxing phases (I've been in one of those again, over the summer), and I'm sure the paper was complete jibberish.
What a ride this paper is, "insane correlations" or not. I'm trying to muster up something to say, but because it's late here and it's relevant, I'll just say this - there's a new biography out on Von Braun, in case you haven't heard.
4 comments:
Hey Graf Oderland, this lever thing reminded me of the paper I wrote while we were in school. It's even called "The Lever". I don't know if I gave it to you to read before, so here's the reminder of what insane correlations I was able to draw once :).
-------
The Lever
“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the Earth”
Archimedes
The control revolution succeeded French bourgeois revolution in terms of achieving control in the society that was freed from the aristocratic foundation of power. The world of production and commerce, once chained by protocols of the royal court and taxes that supported the aristocracy, took the lassez faire philosophy of Adam Smith and found itself in the unknown realm of making and selling without the input of any higher force than that of the market.
One of the most important aspects of technology in general is its control potential. The wheel gave us control of the roads, but roads, in return, control our wheels. The tired horseman or chariot driver had the luxury of falling asleep while riding or driving, without the fear of an accident, because the horses knew their way. The mechanical and, later, the information society, took away the safety of relying on the instinct, and introduced the automaton as the reincarnation of Golem. Automaton is the desire for the heuristics given by man, as opposed to the heuristics given by the absent creator.
The early automatic machines were equipped with numerous levers and switches that gave their operators the chance to interrupt the process, or change it, adjusting it to momentary needs. Long programming sequences and perfection of language used to master the automatic system had one goal throughout the history – to remove as many levers as possible – to set the machine free from man and free the man from the role of operator. As much as the control was the goal, it became the burden as well.
Contemporary control systems have gained significant independence from the operator. The invention of gyroscope and its use in civilian and military applications has shifted the responsibility even more from the pilot to the system of automatic control. In theory, this is the ultimate goal of the automaton as general term for materialization of Greek tehne – to become a fully self-organizing system. The invention that gave incentive to development of automatic control systems with gyroscopes was French physicist Leon Foucault’s pendulum. Foucault’s pendulum was constructed in 1850 and it was meant to demonstrate the rotation of the earth:
The large swinging pendulum gradually rotated. Foucault argued that what was actually happening was that the plane of the pendulum’s swing remained in the same orientation in “inertial space” (that is, with respect to the fixed stars) while the earth rotated. The consequent apparent movement allowed the earth’s rotation to be seen.
(McKenzie 1996, p. 32)
The application of pendulum principle in Anschuetz – Kaempfe gyrocompasses (German), Sperry (American), SAGEM (French) and Brown (British) introduced a new international Gyro culture that idealized the technology of power (Ibid., p. 37). Developments in technology of navigation reached their peak in 1930s with guided ballistic missile development in national socialist Germany with Werner von Braun’s V-2 that had an advanced gyroscope system. V-2s, constructed in underground facility Mittelwerke under Kohnstein Mountain in Harz, were featured with automatic control that left the mechanism on its own to construct a parabola-shaped route before falling on the ground, with the controlled propulsion. The supersonic rocket’s programming had a simple goal – annihilation of the target before the target could anticipate it.
In the novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Thomas Pynchon created a character of WW2 American army lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, an individual mysteriously conditioned by players in the international corporate plot to react to Imipolex G, a substance that binds him with the Nazi
V-2 missiles that were falling on London in 1945. When the rocket extinguishes the propulsion on a point in the parabola-shaped flight and submits itself to gravity, Tyron Slothrop gets a hard on, his erect member being the only thing to hold on to before hearing the blast or dying in the explosion.
By using Werner von Braun’s supersonic V-2 and its organic counterpart, Slothrop’s penis, Pynchon created a metaphor of the loss of control before the impact of weapon with terminal effect. The helplessness and determinism under the oppressive system that operates at the speed incomprehensible for human senses requires a counter-performance in which the only mechanism Slothrop can use is his own organic lever in hope of avoiding the inevitable:
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always collectively, had been moving towards that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet, they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they it's children.
(1973, p. 244)
Only the admiration for parabola remains, the shape and design that will play a key role in resolution of Gravity’s Rainbow when the ultimate V-2 - the one marked 00000 aims for the polar axis in order to reestablish the original divine order of “Wolfzeit” (Evola 1934) or reach the Hyperborean island of Avalon or Ultima Thule – a point of universal purification in the cycle of perpetual return (Eliade 1949; Herbert 1965). The imaginary axis of the world – axis mundi (Eliade ibid.) signifies the ultimate point for achieving control. Slothrop’s subconsciously induced performance in which his penis is a striking allegory of the desire for an Archimedean switch or lever that would move the world and obstruct the inevitability of V-2’s parabola. However, in Pynchon’s novel Slothrop’s erection occurs at the moment of Brennschluss, when the rocket submits itself to the gravity and the helplessness is mutual. There are no second chances, the modern world is helpless in its self-referring language of deconstruction.
This self-referring language of contemporary theories of globalization and technology (Fukuyama 1992; Giddens 1990) has diverted its attention from the problem of the lever, or the problem of structural hierarchy that implies external control. In theories of modernity and identity and in a wider critical/cultural theory, it is assumed that the vertical and horizontal compatibility of different systems of hardware, orgware, software and lifeware is not in any way affected at the points in which they merge, that the mysterious gatekeeper should not exist or should at least have a default state of indifference, as in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967). The “merging” is considered to be an irrevocable constant. As with Bulgakov and his disguised devil in communist Moscow that pulled the trick of persuading people that he does not exist, the theory of thermodynamics has discovered another devil a long time ago - Maxwell’s demon (Beniger 1986. p. 45 ) – a mysterious being that manipulated the molecules with different velocities in the vessel filled with air. The assumption made by Maxwell was in regard to a vessel divided in two sections, A and B, with only a small hole through which the individual molecule can pass and a mysterious being that opens and closes this, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower ones to pass from B to A. The being would, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics (Maxwell 1871, pp. 308-309, as cited in Beniger 1986, p. 45).
In Gravity’s Rainbow, the integration of systems is achieved through international corporate plot that combines the industry or warfare and chemicals with the Pavlovian experiments in psychology. The unanticipated element is the lever mounted on Slothrop that possesses the ability to lead to a decoding of the process in novel’s plot. Tyrone Slothrop is taken to the underground realms where the organic lever is searching for its mechanical counterpart.
The industry of goods has removed a significant number of switches and levers from products in the fields of production, transportation, and communication where previously elaborate hardware and software has been simplified in order to address the needs of less skilled operators. The examples of that are the gradual removal of the power switch on television sets (degradation of its importance with the advent of more complex remote controllers and photo sensors), automatic transmission in automobiles that allows multitasking while driving, shift from command line (CLI) to graphical user interface (GUI) in personal computing. These changes and simplifications that required elaborate efforts and still do, have been more of a product of philosophy of connectivity than the product of the actual desire for connectivity. One part of the doctrine of the chosen instrument for global telecommunications development, established by U.S. president Wilson in 1920s, was to control the global systems by setting the standards of their operation in order to achieve vastly improved telecommunications without clear central control (Hugill 1999, pp. 226-242). This way the philosophy of connectivity advertised the need for increased connectivity, decreasing the life span of technologies in use, thus creating the perpetual obsolescence of concepts and products from all industry branches. This argument is supported by the fact that the dictionary of terms describing the global village or global city in terms of media technologies has not changed much since the advent of radio, lexicographic efforts being done only in adding the moving image component, rest remaining the same.
Electronic media, especially television, have had a tremendous impact on Americans’ sense of place. Electronic media have combined previously distinct social settings, moved the dividing line between private and public behavior toward the private, and weakened the relationship between social institutions and physical places. The logic underlying situational patterns of behavior in a print-oriented society, therefore, has been radically subverted. Many Americans may no longer seem to “know their place” because the traditionally interlocking components of “place” have been split apart by electronic media. Wherever one is now – at home, at work, or in a car – one may be in touch and tuned-in.
(Meyrowitz 1985, p. 308)
The paragraph cited above can be found in similar form in any theoretical text that deals with the print society, McLuhan’s “global village”, Brzezinski’s “global city” or Giddens’s “loss of tradition in late modern society”. The literature, theory and philosophy of connectivity denies the stable points - levers mounted on the wall somewhere in the Mittelwerke- underground rocket facility in German mountains (see Williams 1990). This mystifying element of technology was observed by structural anthropology that disintegrated academically and transgressed from to literature. The fertile ground for it were the works of Jorge Luis Borges, most respectively The Aleph (1945); “Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed” (ibid., p. 2). For Borges, Aleph is the ultimate external point – nunc stans, the position from which Foucault’s pendulum moves, the only stable place in the cosmos (Eco 1988, p. 6). This is the place that Archimedes or Descartes could have used for standing with a lever, due to its ultimate stability and omnipresence, like the sacred Mount Meru, Mount Salvat or the Isle of Avalon (Godwin 1993, p. 169). The lever is the higher force situated in the well protected underground facility and is capable of disconnecting all peripheries from the center (Pekic 1989).
The loss of account for points at which the communication between different systems can be disconnected through switch or a lever in the context of Pynchon’s novel, has made an automatism of the system look even more deterministic than it actually is. The “post-historical world”(Fukuyama 1992) and the “world beyond tradition” (Giddens 1990) are the common descriptions for a literary and theoretical stand that claims full connectivity abilities as a result of “the chosen instrument doctrine” that has turned the world in Brzezinski’s global city and a global periphery. In addition, the theories of hegemony in global system observe that is positioned in the subterranean realms of national and ethnic archetypes, where every system that is allegedly assimilated still has an underground Mittelwerke.
Maxwell’s demon is an equivalent of perpetual motion and perpetual energy that both Borges in Aleph and Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum share. The esoteric point that controls the flow of energy and therefore is external to the phenomenon of entropy is an antipode to the deterministic theories of global communication which are centered around the works of Fukuyama and Brzezinski, but even more, around the theory of Rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) that envisioned a self-organizing and a self-regenerating root system whose parts could survive the death of other parts, by regenerating from the spots of cut-off. The theory of Deleuze-Guattari has been applied mostly in poststructuralist explanations of the nature of the hypertext and Internet. The self-sustainability of its parts is a constant, but a constant from which another one is derived and that is the mandatory connectivity of the part with the demon that will always manipulate the lever in favor of the merge i.e. the indifferent or non-existent gate-keeper. The Internet as a relatively new phenomenon under scrutiny has been given attributes of rhizomatic network by the poststructuralist theories, with a certain amount of glorification of the lack of switch that would be able to disintegrate the world network of computers. This may have been the case when Internet was still “riding” on the back of public switched telephone network, as a network of public or dedicated access servers. At that time, Internet had lower level of priority than the main purpose of the telephone network – voice and fax. Since the lines were not dedicated to Internet, there was no dedicated switch that would relieve the telephone network of its stowaway, the Internet, without affecting the functionality of old public switched telephone network. Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture (2004) makes an argument for a significant difference between the early days of the network when it belonged to enthusiasts and its broadband era in which the corporate sector took the best part, both in service and content providing.
The argument of the article arises here. The switch or the lever is no longer an abstract literary construct as in the case of Tyrone Slothrop, but a category that opposes the philosophy of connectivity and contemporary sociology of globalization and hegemony. The lever is of the archetypal nature as argued in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (1967) in which the influence of Jungian philosophy provided structuralism with the stigma of being too literary, as it was the case with another structuralist – Marshall McLuhan. This stigma has come from the Levi-Strauss’s effort to achieve the “depayssement” (displacement for the objective observer) in Cartesian sense - the place on which to position the lever of Archimedes.
The lever is the gatekeeper mechanism between the merging parts. It represents the set of archetypes that every part possesses and brings in the process of integration of ethnic groups of different national systems of communication (literature and arts, media, education, trade). While neglected by the poststructuralist and critical realist theory, the lever is present in the magic realism of Julius Evola (1934) and Ernst Juenger (1932; 1951), in Jungian psychology, Mircea Eliade’s history of religion, and in the literature of exhaustion;
As Barth construes it, the literature of exhaustion thus represents a highly intellectualized maze-making, the more arcane the better, for the purpose of exhausting possibilities for meaning. Barth singles out Jorge Luis Borges, the librarian-author, who devises intricate fictional labyrinths out of the storehouse of accumulated cultural and historical artifacts. In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon mentions Borges as a builder of labyrinths, networks, and conspiracies, built to be exhaustive, and laid out to exhaust the abilities of those characters trapped in them. They are fictions of encyclopedic metaphor.
(Slade 1974, p. 242)
This literature of encyclopedic nature, frequently called postmodernist, attempts to recognize (or invent) the existence of safety mechanisms between the parties in communication; cultures or individuals. In passive opposition to theories of modernization and globalization, the encyclopedic principle draws back on Jungian collective memory that constructs archetypal levers and switches that launch V-2 rockets or suicide bombers. The lever as a link with the ultimately stable point in the universe (Aleph) is a literary mechanism in works cited, that attempts to displace the human agent on a ideally objective esoteric spot. The passivity of argument that literature of exhaustion makes and intellectual aggressiveness that perpetuates theories of globalization and rhizomatic model of communication do not allow us to observe them in the arena where a theory death match would produce a winner. In the same way that the human agency of Tyrone Slothrop retreats to the subterranean realms, the agency of the encyclopedic approach retreated to the literary forest just as Juenger’s Waldgaenger did and refused to enter in a open battle, opting for intellectual guerilla war, where levers are still the ultimate warfare.
Readings:
Beniger, James (1986) The Control Revolution : Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Borges, Jorge Luis (1945) Aleph. in The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. New York: Dutton (1970)
Bulgakov, Mikhail (1967) The Master and Margarita. London: Collins and Hardwill Press
Eco, Umberto (1988) Foucault’s Pendulum, New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Eliade, Mircea (1949) The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or Cosmos and History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press (1974)
Evola, Julius (1934) The Revolt Against the Modern World. Inner Traditions International (1995)
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Godwin, Joscelyn (1993) Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Grand Rapids (MI): Phanes Press
Herbert, Frank (1965) Dune. Philadelphia: Chilton Books
Hugill, Peter J. (1999) Global Telecommunications Since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Juenger, Ernst (1932) Der Arbeiter. Stuttgart (Germany): Ernst Klett Verlag
___________ (1951) Der Waldgang. Stuttgart (Germany): Ernst Klett Verlag
Lessig, Lawrence (2004) Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1967) Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books
McKenzie, Donald (1990) Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Jane's Strategic Weapons, Janes Publishing
Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press
Pekic, Borislav (1989) Atlantida: epos. Novi sad (Yugoslavia): Solaris (1997)
Pynchon, Thomas (1973) Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking
Slade, Joseph W. (1974) Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner Paperback Library
Wiliams, Rosalind (1990) Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press
Amazing, I just don't have the courage to look back at the papers I was writing at that time. Especially since I can vaguely remember the paper I wrote for that class (I think), when my Musilophilia was in one of its periodic waxing phases (I've been in one of those again, over the summer), and I'm sure the paper was complete jibberish.
What a ride this paper is, "insane correlations" or not. I'm trying to muster up something to say, but because it's late here and it's relevant, I'll just say this - there's a new biography out on Von Braun, in case you haven't heard.
http://www.amazon.com/Von-Braun-Dreamer-Space-Engineer/dp/0307262928/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-0906989-5302053?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192596132&sr=8-1
Here's a better link to the von Braun bio.
Post a Comment