MDMD(4) p.123 small re-write

[Vaska]

>From Jody: 
>Paul, in response to Matt:
>[snip- points about science and literature- see original post] [another snip]

>I read "essential Term" as a recognition that the
>enslavement of one group by another is inconceivable without the threat of
>death, and therefore, the gallows are essential. But I also hear the
>allusion to math/science, not as vague, but as quite BLATANT. Yet it is an
>"against the grain" allusion.  [....]

>And therein the rub, and the brillance of Pynchon...to the practitioners of
>slavery, the gallows are an essential term of both the real and the
>symbolic sort. Slavery is impossible without the constant threat and means
>of execution.  In the minds of the slavers, however, the process has been
>reduced to a calculation in human (in-human?) terms. The life of another
>slave becomes the calculated price of doing business...plug in the numbers,
>and decide how many and how often to kill, to keep the profit margin
>reasonable.

This last bit could make a kind of "market-driven" sense if you're talking
about slave-traders, although it'd be interesting to know how often this
actually occurred in practise.  I.e. was/is a periodical killing-off of
slaves by the traders a regular means of regulating that market?  Or were
the other ways of keeping the supply low enough [to boost up the prices] the
more frequent and less costly measure?  For slave-owners, however, the only
margin of profit was/is in keeping the slaves just sufficiently well-fed and
[marginally] healthy to do the labour they're assigned.  No profit in
killing them off; the real advantage is in keeping that cross or those
gallows firmly in their minds.  

This type of instrumental logic -- the inhuman calculus of exploitation --
ties in to all sorts of imperialist projects, too: perhaps even beginning
with the "go forth and multiply" injunction, a kind of necessary prelude to
going out and taking over the territories inhabited by those not "chosen" to
own them.  There's that incredible line somewhere in Faulkner about the
utter insolence, I think he says the "outrageous presumption," of man's
belief that he can possess a piece of earth, that it can be his to own.
And, getting back to the starting point: one doesn't need either math or
science for any of this: animals manage their own imperialistic and
slave-holding projects quite nicely without it....

Vaska