The Age of the Crisis of Man by Greif Mark

Author:Greif, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THOMAS PYNCHON AND TECHNOLOGY

At the beginning of this study, for the world crisis with its bull’s-eye centered on the early 1940s, concentric rings spilling outward, I identified four areas of concern for the intellectuals of the crisis of man: philosophy, history, faith, and technology. Each generated its own set of complex questions.

The last area in a way seems the simplest in its afterlife. Does technology change human nature by altering man’s habits, his body, by conditioning him, by fitting him to the machine? Or does it even make man obsolete by superseding his puny strengths or threatening to vaporize him from the earth, as a bomb-wielding species? The question of the consequence of technological growth remains the one we have most actively on our agenda today. It is a question no one will fail to understand if you ask it. No one will ask for qualifications or think your inquiries pretentious or out of the ordinary.

In part, it remains so obvious because there seems little difficulty about knowing what technology is, while definitional complications arise when one asks what human nature is. After midcentury, technology included factory presses and assembly lines, dynamos and centrifuges, automobiles and bombs—all tangible, all still slightly disconcerting. In earlier chapters on the intellectual discourse of man, especially in discussing the German discourse on technology, it has been clear that technology had been considered in another way, too: as existing also in techniques of human organization, reaching their nadir in fascist and totalitarian coordination. This organizational critique, too, had survived, albeit in altered form.

By the cusp of the 1960s, the technological discourse had changed both in its mechanical and organizational dimensions. In America, high technology had come home from the factory and been domesticated. The dishwasher, laundry machine, electric refrigerator, and countertop appliances gave the kitchen or back pantry the hands-free mechanical processes of the factory. Broadcast technology, after the rise of TV to ubiquity and the proliferation of portable transistor radios, confirmed a sense of thralldom to electronics that now followed Americans wherever they went. Meanwhile, in the real factory, automation had replaced mechanization or industrialization as the great looming threat or herald of liberation for the American worker. Industrial robot arms would replace sinewy human arms. Self-regulating machines, taking their own temperature, calculating and adjusting their own readiness, would obviate the need for human monitors. The new computers could do calculations that far outran human cognition. When automated systems and complex electronics performed the most difficult tasks (but also, perhaps, narrowed the channels of the worker’s initiative), such new autonomy might free men, might make them obsolete, or might—to the most foresighted prognosticators—redirect Americans into a new evanescent labor, of managing, marketing, broadcasting, and advertising the fruits of these self-running factories, before going home to enjoy the private technologies awaiting them on the Formica of their suburban homes.

This caricature belonged to both the exuberant futurists and Cassandras of the time. The technology-as-organization narrative of the discourse of man, meanwhile, became through the 1950s

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