Literature, Media, Information Systems by Friedrich A. Kittler

Author:Friedrich A. Kittler [Kittler, Friedrich A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789057010613
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1997-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

1 [Tr.—The author employs the tem Sosein, meaning literally ‘to be-like-that,’ as opposed to the conventional Dasein.]

2 [Tr.—Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemein: Textstrukturierung und -interpretation nacb Schleiermacher (Frankfurt a.M.: 1977).]

3 [Tr.—Phrase appears in English in the original.]

4 [Tr.—The German verb is Präsentifizieren, which translates Jacques Lacan’s présentifier.]

MEDIA AND DRUGS IN PYNCHON’S SECOND WORLD WAR

For David Welbery

In the fall of 1983, the German Press Agency released the following bulletin:

CSU [Christian Socialist Union] leader and Bavarian Prime Minister Strauss has publicly disclosed that according to “fairly reliable sources,” the German Democratic Republic has been at work for some years reconstructing underground installations dating from the Third Reich, in which atomic rockets will be stored. Strauss stated at an international conference hosted by the Hanns-Seidel Foundation that the majority of these “natural defenses” are located beneath a solid layer of rock, 300 to 400 meters below the earth’s surface, so as to ensure adequate security of the atomic weapons.1

What the German Press Agency neglected to state was that these “natural defenses,” specifically those in Nordhausen in the Harz region, had already been employed as sites for the stockpiling and mass production of rockets. Whereby the SS20s in their rock bunkers or the Pershing missiles on our national highways2 only signify the trajectory, or the rainbow, of an eccentric homecoming.

1. War

Gravity’s Rainbow, the arc of gravity, describes the flight trajectory of the V-2 rockets that were launched from sites in Holland or Northern Germany and flew over the German-Allied front towards metropolitan targets like London and Antwerp during the last six months of the war—September 8, 1944, through March 27, 1945.3 Gravity’s Rainbow is also Thomas Pynchon’s attempt to read the signs of the time as a novel. Despite any post-war fantasies,4 these signs were written by the last world war, the “mother”5 of the technologies that have effected us, as well as the notion of Postmodernity that “threatens the idea of cause and effect itself” (56).

The V-2, the first liquid-fuel rocket in the history of war, developed from an engineer’s toy to a production-stage superweapon through the work of Wernher von Braun and the Military Research Institute of Peenemünde; and in Pynchon’s inexhaustible fiction, it even anticipates at the end of the war—according to Braun’s blueprints—the manned spaceflight of our time. The rocket occupies, therefore, the focal point of a novel that reads our signs. At the far end of the horizon of the novel or the theater of war, the parallel development of American weapons technology turns up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (480, 505, 539). One need only replace the conventional explosives of the V-2—resulting from the ignition of a metric ton of Amatol (96, 312) before impact (a suggestion made by Hitler himself6)—with Uranium or Plutonium as the rocket payload in order to be current with the state of affairs in 1985. At the same time that a confidential military document of the German high command dated October 15, 1942, proposed “atomic decay and chain reactions” as a possible means for

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