pyn quotes foucault?

[Paul Mackin]

Bill Burns asks what's wrong with Franz's rebuttal of Leni's parallel worlds
view:

>>>>Nice elaboration, Bill, of Leni's arguments from medical diagnosis and metaphor. But her proof, as you say, is only by analogy, and not by algebra as we know Franz would have preferred.  It's a mere metaphor itself. (Perhaps algebra is ALSO a metaphor, but that's another story.) Franz, the cold scientist, believes he is too LITERAL MINDED, too interested only in the OBJECT, to accept Leni's dreams. (now Franz's dreams are another matter)

In the novel (at least in this scene), Leni wins. Franz  is an unbelieving clod (not to say male chauvinist pig).  But in "real life" how many of us would want our bridges and parachutes designed by The Pynch, love him though we might?

				P. 

----------
From: 	Bill Burns[SMTP:wdburns at micron.net]
Sent: 	Wednesday, March 12, 1997 12:34 AM
To: 	pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: 	RE: pyn quotes foucault?

>Perhaps even more interestingly, Pynchon and Foucault both use the phrase
>"signs and symptoms" in important, potentially compatible ways.  On Page 90
>of The Birth of the Clinic, F. disourses on "*signs* and *symptoms*"
>(italics in original); In GR, Leni also uses the phrase when attempting to
>explain what's wrong with Franz's rebuttal to astrology: "Parallel, not
>series.  Metaphor.  Signs and symptoms.  Mapping onto different coordinate
>systems" (GR, P. 159).  I'll leave it to more knowledgeable folk to unpack
>this stuff.
>
>
>>>>>>>>Not to be too much of a party pooper, but leaving aside Foucault
for a second, Leni's use  of "signs and symptoms" seems to me  quite
straight forward in its own right within the context of the passage. She is
arguing for parallel events and is citing examples. "Signs and symptoms"
are an EXCELLENT example of an "outside" and an "inside." Or as Franz would
have it a "here" and an "out there. 
>
>Let me try to elucidate. Signs (in medical jargon) are what the
diagnostician HEARS with his stethoscope or SEES on his X-ray. They are in
other words objective facts about the patient viewed as as object. Symptoms
on the other hand are WHAT THE PATIENT TELLS the doctor. That he feels
dizzy, for example, or that her head hurts. It is very much in the realm of
the subjective. Hence, an outside and an inside.
>

I don't know if anyone has covered this, or if it's been covered implicitly
and I missed that part of the thread (Doh!), but Leni is making a
distinction between events that are causally related and those that are
correlative. Signs and symptoms, like astrological occurences and
terrestrial events, are correlative. They occur at the same time and could
be connected in some way, but one does not necessarily cause the other. In
medicine, the cause of signs and symptoms may be some pathogen. In
astrology, locations of planets in constellations coincide with other
events, but the causes are somewhere in the beyond. The diagnostician sort
of triangulates the signs and symptoms and makes an educated guess at the
cause. In astrology, the cause isn't important; the signs and symptoms are.

In the same sense, metaphor and that which is represented by a metaphor
have a correlative relationship. They do not have a necessary relationship
that we can pinpoint. It's essentially the same as all language (as far as
we can tell). The signifier is arbitrarily associated with a
signified--unless we somehow get back to the primal groundedness of the
signified (qua Heidegger).

So what's wrong with Franz's rebuttal? Perhaps argument by analogy?


wdburns at micron.net
"There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and
those who can't."