Abstract
‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ proclaims the introduction to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii). This chiastic statement lies at the core of this work’s account of a fundamental incompatibility between enlightenment’s goals of ‘liberating human beings from fear’ (the freedom that Adorno and Horkheimer believe is inseparable from enlightenment thinking) and the simultaneous state of ‘the wholly enlightened earth’ as ‘radiant with triumphant calamity’ (DoE, 1). The key to grasping this interrelation of enlightenment and myth lies in the depiction of nature, to which one subsection will here be dedicated. Nature, for the longest period, was deemed to hold a degree of enchantment; it was intrinsically meaningful. The abstracted tales that correlate to such a foundationalist stance are myths. Conversely, at the dawn of the Age of Reason there began a progressive disenchantment of nature: ‘[f]rom now on, matter was to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties’ (DoE, 3). The world and all aspects therein were available to be used and understood; there was no longer any intrinsic meaning: ‘[o]n their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning’ (3). This disenchantment of nature is termed enlightenment.
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Notes
The best summary of this process, which will not be repeated verbatim here, is in Alison Stone, ‘Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (1 March 2006): 231–53, doi:10.1177/0191453706061094 (accessed 16 January 2014).
For instance, the replication of nature in Boyle’s laboratory and whether this constitutes the facts speaking for themselves. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 28–9.
Douglas Keesey, ‘Nature and the Supernatural: Pynchon’s Ecological Ghost Stories’, Pynchon Notes 18–19 (Spring-Fall 1986): 84.
Gabriele Schwab, ‘Creative Paranoia and Frost Patterns of White Words’, in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 99.
Tom LeClair, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 36–48.
Robert L. McLaughlin, ‘IG Farben and the War Against Nature’, in Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1990), 335.
Thomas Schaub, ‘The Environmental Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Ecological Context’, Pynchon Notes 42–43 (Spring-Fall 1998): 59–72.
Christopher K. Coffman, ‘Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and Spatial Grounds of Pynchon’s Ecological Ethic’, in Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, ed. Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 112.
Tony Burke, De Infantia Iesu Evangelium Thomae Graecae (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 303–4; none of the many Greek and Latin sources scoured and translated by Burke feature the rabbits mentioned by Pynchon.
Kathryn Hume, Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 18–19.
An aspect also explored by Doug Haynes, ‘Under the Beach, the Paving Stones! The Fate of Fordism in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 1 (2014): 1–16 doi: 10.1080/00111619.2011.620646 (accessed 20 January 2014)
Rob Wilson, ‘On the Pacific Edge of Catastrophe, or Redemption: California Dreaming in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice’, Boundary2 37, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 224, doi:10.1215/01903659-2010-010 (accessed 16 January 2014).
Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 46.
William M. Lamers, The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 17.
Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications et al., Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999), 173.
Peter Salus and Vinton G. Cerf, Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 26.
To find reference to Culler, one has to dig deep into internet history. The following comprehensive internet histories, for instance, have no mention of his role: Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications et al., Funding a Revolution; Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (London: Pocket, 2003).
Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 10.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh (London: Verso, 2007), 194.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 470.
Robert W. Witkin, ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate” Jazz?’, Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (1 March 2000): 151.
Luc Herman and John M. Krafft, ‘Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 1 (2007): 6, doi:10.1353/tsl.2007.0005 (accessed 16 January 2014).
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Perennial Fashion — Jazz’, in The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 269; Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 477;
for critique, see Theodore A. Gracyk, ‘Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music’, Musical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (1 December 1992): 536.
See Brian Priestley, Chasin’ The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker (London: Equinox, 2007), 27.
Krin Gabbard, ‘Images of Jazz’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 336.
J. Tate, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow: The Original Soundtrack’, Pynchon Notes 13 (October 1983): 8.
Bruce Johnson, ‘Jazz as Cultural Practice’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 98; see also Alain Locke, ‘The Negro and His Music’, in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77–80.
For instance Dick Hebdige, ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’, in The Subculture Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2007), 121–31; Dave Laing, ‘Listening to Punk’, in The Subculture Reader, ed. Ken Gelder, 448–59.
Brian Southall, 90 Days at EMI (London: Bobcat Books, 2007), 52.
George H. Lewis, ‘The Creation of Popular Music: A Comparison of the “Art Worlds” of American Country Music and British Punk’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 19, no. 1 (June 1988): 42.
See Edward Harvey, ‘Social Change and the Jazz Musician’, Social Forces 46, no. 1 (1967): 34–42, doi:10.1093/sf/46.1.34 (accessed 16 January 2014).
Geoff Stahl, ‘Tastefully Renovating Subcultural Theory: Making Space for a New Model’, in The Post-Subcultures Reader, ed. David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 27.
Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 104; Stahl, ‘Tastefully Renovating Subcultural Theory’, 298.
Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (London: Routledge, 1999), 159–60.
See, perhaps most recently, David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 116.
Erica Weitzman, ‘No Fun: Aporias of Pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, German Quarterly 81, no. 2 (March 2008): 185–202, doi:10.1111/j.1756-1183.2008.00016.x (accessed 16 January 2014).
See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 118–19.
William Donoghue, ‘Pynchon’s “Hysterical Sublime”’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52, no. 4 (2011): 453, doi:10.1080/00111610903567438 (accessed 16 January 2014).
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso Books, 2011), 89.
Thomas Schaub, ‘The Crying of Lot49 and Other California Novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37.
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Eve, M.P. (2014). Art, Society and Ethics: Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Aesthetic Theory and Pynchon. In: Pynchon and Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405500_7
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