If you want the truth - I know I presume - you must look into the technology of these matters. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. The process follows the same form, the same structure. Near the end of their conversation, he sums up his appeal to them in an especially powerful and provocative way: The medium succeeds in reaching Rathenau, who speaks at some length and gives explicit instructions to the group. What is it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?” An obscurely portentous question, one to reflect on. It might almost - if one were paranoid enough - seem to be a collaboration here, between both sides of the Wall, matter and spirit. And yet there is something else: “Generaldirektor Smaragd and colleagues are not here to be told what even the masses believe. So the interest of the corporate Nazis in Rathenau is easily explained. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority.” A philosopher, then, of a world in which government is subordinate to commerce, in which the titans of industry are the real power behind the throne: a Hegel of Taylorism. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany’s economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm-a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine.” But he was not merely a wielder of great power: “he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He had been “prophet and architect of the cartelized state. There are certain obvious reasons why these people might want to hear from Rathenau.
That Pynchon seeks the union of these two typically divergent perspectives made quite explicit in one of the most important scenes in Gravity’s Rainbow, a séance in which a group of Germans from “the corporate Nazi crowd,” makers of armaments, attempt to contact the spirit of Walter Rathenau, who had been Foreign Minister in the Weimar government until his assassination by a reactionary terrorist group, Organization Consul, in 1922. Though this truth is rarely acknowledged, a properly theological account of modernity will also be a technological account a usefully technological one will also be theological. The most distinctive element of Thomas Pynchon’s account of modernity, and the element that makes it so vital, is its uniting of theological and technological reflection.
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