It is easy and tempting to dismiss Neal Stephenson’s 1999 techno-thriller Cryptonomicon as 900+ pages of a tedious, boring nerd writing about tedious, boring nerds. But underneath the convoluted Indiana Jones plot of stolen Nazi gold, the bloated prose loaded with unneeded adjectives and distracted by unwanted details, and the mini-lessons in mathematics, cryptography, computers, and Greek mythology (all passages where Stephenson is in his element, and the best parts of the book), there lies a surprisingly relevant and prescient observation about the modern condition that was a decade ahead of time.
Stephenson spends several sections of the book lampooning post-modernism and literary criticism, but the novel itself carries a powerful and intentional subtext message on the state of contemporary masculinity.
One of the chapters describes the rite of passage for boys in a tribe of islander head-hunters: they are made to spear a captive bound to a tree to signify their entry into manhood. This contrasts sharply with the descriptions of the life of Randall “Randy” Waterhouse, the novel’s protagonist. Waterhouse’s life is undirected and passive, free of threshold moments and clear stages. He graduates university but does not leave academia. He blunders into a relationship but it goes nowhere. He finds his career because he gets distracted from his job.
This is contrasted sharply with his grandfather, a WWII code-breaker, and the other WWII military characters the grandfather interacts with. The WWII men (and Stephenson takes pains to point out that they are Men) may not be completely in control of their destinies, being bound by society to obey military orders, but Stephenson makes clear that they have complete agency in how they carry out those orders. In stark contrast, Randy is a co-founder of his own company, but his actions are dictated by a series of mysterious and ill-posed questions, bullying by shareholders, and a constant fear of lawsuits.
Waterhouse’s grandfather may have been an idiot savant, but is portrayed as being essentially macho: having dangerous and exciting war-time adventures, nonchalantly holding his own in meetings with top British war-time brass, frequenting whorehouses, having affairs with German she-spies, pursuing the woman he has chosen directly and unapologetically. Even in terms of his work, the grandfather demonstrates mastery and creativity - mastery of both applied and pure mathematics, creativity in proving new theorems and advancing the mathematical state of the art.
By contrast, the grandson does technical support of other people’s computers, focuses his career on studying and administering (baby-sitting) other people’s Unix systems, and doing some vaguely-defined configuration of Internet routers - the digital equivalent of the trades such as plumbing and masonry (even machining is more creative than being an MCSE). Sitting in business meetings related to his company, he is intimidated by what he perceives to be big bad Asian gangsters. By half-way through the book, the closest the grandson comes to adventure is a 3-day long jeep ride through the jungle, which he painfully documents in a 6-page long whiny diatribe on lack of air conditioning and comfortable bedding.
Given that the target audience of Stephenson’s techno-thrillers is male techies much like the protagonist, it would be cliche to expect Randy to overcome his lack of agency and take control of his life. As the action progresses, the protagonist seems to get a bit less whiny (although this is never directly pointed out by the author). You’re left expecting that Waterhouse will redeem himself and rise up to the WWII generation’s legacy, but in the climactic action scene, the only people pointing guns at the bad guy are Randy’s love interest and a priest, one of the original members of the WWII action-hero cast. Meanwhile, Randy’s thinking:
“…the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means… Randy feels certain, all of a sudden, that he’s got the mental stance now. But he doesn’t have the means.”
In this one passage, Stephenson has managed to describe the passive, narcissist creed: what matters is not what you do, but that you think of yourself as someone who can do. It is precisely this rationalization that keeps the men represented by Randy from attaining manhood. For someone who has spent hundreds of pages drumming up nostalgia for the mythical real He-men of the WWII generation, Stephenson completely misses the point of what made them men. At least he avoids a plot cliche.
But Stephenson more than makes up for it by going overboard with another one: the geek male love interest.
Amy is a young, half-Asian, tomboyish, “bad-ass” babe with major daddy issues, and an even more “bad-ass” Navy SEAL for a daddy. Waterhouse himself flat-out states he thinks the girl is more courageous and physically fit than he is. We are then expected to believe that his year-long obtuse, chaste, and apology-filled courting changes her attitude towards him from a thinly-veiled contempt to him being (literally) pursued half-way around the world by her in a fit of jealousy. The ultimate passive American nerd fantasy!
The gender role reversal plays out most strikingly in a climactic sex scene between Amy and Randy - a scene that would be an unambiguous depiction of rape if the gender roles were reversed. The backdrop is the classic American mating grounds of the automobile, but the way events unfold is startling. Amy, without saying anything, forces herself into the car atop the just-woken Randy, then without conversation “moves suddenly and decisively,” not even bothering to take off her panties, “she sits down on him, hard… Then she stops moving - daring him.”
What is most bizarre is that prior to this scene Amy is a virgin.
Far from offering a sensible solution to his perceived problem with contemporary male masculinity, Stephenson seems to suggest that what modern herbivores need to become men is to be sexually humiliated by aggressive, dominant virgins.
For a long time ordinary individuality - the everyday individuality of everybody - remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privelege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation… [Writing] is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use… In certain societies, of which the feudal regime is only one example, it may be said that individualization is greatest where sovereignty is exercised and in the higher echelons of power. The more one possesses power or privelege, the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions… In a system of discipline [on the other hand], the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent… The moment that saw the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status… [substituted] for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man…
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp.191-193
Quoted in Manuel de Landa, War in the age of intelligent machines, p. 261
A house is a machine to live in. —Le Corbusier
A house is a mineralized human exoskeleton. —De Landa
Plato spoke of Forms casting shadows as an allegory, but it just occurred to me that quasicrystals (I’ve done some work on them for during my bachelor’s studies) are literally just shadows of higher-dimensional regular lattices.
Surprisingly, I think this observation serves to validate not Platonic idealism, but the New Materialism of Deleuze - in particular when you consider Manuel de Landa’s commentary on Deleuze’s concept of the virtual.
The right of the master to give names extends so far that we could permit ourselves to grasp the origin of language itself as an expression of the power of the rulers: they say “that is such and such”; they seal every object and event with a sound, and in the process, as it were, take possession of it. —Nietzsche, On the origin of morals
Death was never the natural partner of life, but of sex. Once we were able to create truly novel life, through genetically distinct children, we sacrificed our own.
http://quorareview.com/2011/02/09/sex-death-and-anonymity-on-quora/
Ее навещали люди, которых она никогда не знала и с которыми не хотела бы знакомиться: юнцы, одетые с нарочитой небрежностью и упивавшиеся своей небрежностью, как коньяком; воодушевление у них было тщательно отмеренное и никогда не выходило из определенных рамок. И когда такие люди появлялись у нее, она уже знала, что где-то готовится очередное исследование о современной лирике.
Heinrich Böll. Haus ohne Hüter. Авт.сб. “Самовольная отлучка”. Минск, “Мастацкая литаратура”, 1989.
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