And the Sign Said...

[Steelhead]

Do we need any more evidence that Mr. Pynchon was a close and critical
reader of Monsieur Foucault (that Maoist Luddite with a fondness for
leather strappings and silk pantyhose)?  Try this passage from the Order of
Things (published in France, by an odd coincidence, the same year as COL49,
was published in NY):

It is here that knowledge breaks off its old kinship with divinato.  The
latter always presupposed signs anterior to it:  so that knowledge always
resided entirely in the opening up of a discovered, affirmed, or secretly
transmitted, sign.  Its task was to uncover a language which God had
previously distributed across the face of the earth;  it is in this sense
that it was the divination of an essential implication, and that the object
of its divination was divine.  From now on, however, it is within knowledge
itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function; it is from
knowledge that it will borrow its certainty or its probability.  And though
God still employs signs to speak to us through nature, he is making use of
our knowledge, and of the relations that are set up between our
impressions, in order to establish in our minds a relation of
signification.  Such is the role of feeling in Malebranche or of sensations
in Berkeley; in natural judgement, in feeling, in visual impressions, and
in the perception of the third dimension, what we are dealing with are
hasty and confused, but pressing, inevitable, and obligatory kinds of
knowledge serving as signs for discursive kinds of knowledge which we
humans, because we are not pure intelligences, no longer have the time or
the permission to attain to ourselves and by the unaided strength of our
own minds.  In Malebranche and Berkeley, the sign arranged by God is the
cunning and thoughtful superimposition of two kinds of knowledge.  There is
no longer any divinatio involved--no insertion of knowledge in the
enigmatic, open, and sacred area of signs--but a brief and concentrated
kind of knowledge:  the concentration of a long sequence of judgements into
the rapidly assimilated form of the sign.  And it will also be seen how, by
a reversal of direction, knowledge, having enclosed the signs within its
own space, is now able to accomodate probability; between one impression
and another the relation will be that of sign to signified, in other words,
a relation which, like that of succession, will progress from the weakest
probability towards the greatest certainty:

__The connection of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect,
but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified.  The fire which I see
is not the cause of the pain I suffer upon my approaching it, but the mark
that forewarns me of it. [Berkeley, a treatise concerning the principles of
human knowledge, 1710]__

The knowledge that divined, at random, signs that were absolute and older
than itself has been replaced by a network of signs built up step by step
in accordance with a knowledge of what is probable.  Hume has become
possible.