Pynchon and the Badass Luddites

To close out Luddite Week here at Rough Type, I would like to direct the Internet’s attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads across Ned Ludd’s bony face) to an article on the topic of Ludditism by Thomas Pynchon, which ran in the New York Times Book Review in that fabled year, 1984. Written nearly a decade before the World Wide Web would turn the Internet into a popular medium, the article is nevertheless entirely up to date in its description of humankind’s submergence in a superabundance of accessible data:

… we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever “beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need … the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.

Pynchon recalls C. P. Snow’s assertion, in his famous 1959 lecture about the growing divide between the “two cultures” of the literary intellectual and the scientific intellectual, that “if we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Those intellectuals, the literary types, were, said Snow, “natural Luddites.” Things have changed, notes Pynchon, in the years since Snow’s lecture:

… it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, “people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite?

Which leads Pynchon to a consideration of the possibly mythical, and definitely mystical, figure of Ned Ludd, who in 1779, as legend has it,

broke into a house and “in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged … folks would respond with the catch phrase “Lud must have been here.” By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname “King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick – every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

The twist here is that the mechanical knitting-frame had already been around for nearly two centuries, having been invented in 1589 by a gentleman annoyed that the woman he was courting seemed more interested in fiddling with her knitting needles than heeding his romantic overtures. (Which may mean that the Industrial Revolution originated in sex-craziness.) So it’s an oversimplification, Pynchon continues, to assume that Ned was ” a technophobic crazy” lashing out at a new automated device that was endangering a way of work and a way of life:

No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault … Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

Ned Ludd as Bruce Lee! Or as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill! The movie treatment writes itself.

Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery – especially when it’s been around for a while – not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work – to be “worth” that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed.

The Rough Type lawyers tell me that I’ve reached the limits of the fair-use doctrine. Which comes as a relief, since I find that the remainder of Pynchon’s essay, weaving from Frankenstein to Star Wars by way of Hiroshima, defies the blogger’s (never mind the Tweeter’s) urge to tidbitize. You’ll have to read it yourself.

But just remember this one thing if you’re ever tempted to call me a Luddite: I am not a Luddite. I am a Badass.

5 thoughts on “Pynchon and the Badass Luddites

  1. tom

    All this talk of Luddites all started with your ipad Luddite post, which spoke in terms of “progress” and “technological advancement.” With a nod to George Orwell, it may be helpful to drill down to the meanings of the words we are using.

    The American Heritage Dictionary defines progress as “steady improvement, as of a society or civilization.”

    We have long equated technological change as progress/improvement but perhaps we are entering a phase where this is no longer so. This may be especially so in areas where a single technological approach has pretty much swept all before it. Given the threat of global warming, can we still say that our near total reliance on carbon-based fuels represents progress?

    Is the increasing dominance of internet-connected screens for virtually all of our communication, learning, and information gathering progress? It is certainly a major technological change. Whether or not it is progress is another question altogether.

    Having read an advance copy of “The Shallows” and put together a compilation of research into the deficiencies of reading on a screen (www.ebookskeptic.net), I think the issue of change versus progress is ready for some healthy debate.

  2. alex brooks

    This is one of my favorite essays, but Pynchon’s crucial statement is that Ned Ludd’s struggle was not against technology; it was a social struggle. He was not against all technology as we’ve come to believe (he was not destroying printing presses or carriages, for example), he was against a moneyed class using technology to take quality of life away from the working class. He struggled, as we should still today, to identify technologies that improved quality of life, and to rebel against (violently if necessary) technology that diminished quality of life. It’s a lesson we should all study, and in this sense I proudly claim the title of luddite.

  3. Kevin Kelly

    The surprising facts of the mechanical knitting-frames that the Luddites destroyed are 1) they were not new (as Nick noted), and 2) they were not steam powered. They were human-foot powered.

    Unlike knitting needles, though, these frames (think of them as foot looms) required “capital,” or cash to purchase and they wove stockings so fast compared to needles that knitters using them drove the price of socks down.

    In almost any other regime, these knitting frames would be considered the most green, community-based, and appropriate technology imaginable.

    Keep this imagine in mind when you hear of Luddites smashing the machines!

Comments are closed.