Frenesi, Art and Machine and Pseudo-Radical Jargonism

[Derek Barker]

Might it occur to anyone that long soliloquoys on Frenesi's relationship
to such academic (in more ways than one) categories as "art," "machine,"
"conflicting possibilities," and "organic experience" might in fact be part
and parcel of the failure of 60's political-intellectual radicalism which
Pynchon is trying to problematize?  Even if we accept this reading 
from T. Flatulence - er, Flaherty - the real question is, what is the point?
  
I worry that over-analysis leads to the same problem of entropy as does
postmodernism in general: in the attempt to construct many categories
to accomodate "difference" and "conflict," we construct so much jargon
that no single term has any particular significance.  I realize I'm new
to this listserv, and my problem is less with this post than with the
goings-on
in general.  But the point remains: Pynchon-criticism of this sort to me
seems to be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - exactly the problem
with the intellectual left that Pynchon seems to be problematizing.
  
Though I agree that Pynchon generally resists simplistic readings,
I think Meg's reading (to paraphrase: "Frenesi sucks") is on target,
and to read too much more into it misses the real message.  

As they say, folks, this isn't rocket science (GR referential pun intended).

At 03:24 PM 1/24/99 -0500, you wrote:
> What is Frenesi? Perhaps she’s “just a cold and lonely lovely work of
>art,” and perhaps she is a machine. In Art, the machine is an instrument
>with manifold and conflicting possibilities. Frenesi can be viewed as is
>an examination of these conflicts and how they contributed to the
>failure of the 60s revolution.  The machine may be used as a passive
>substitute for experience; it may be used to counterfeit other forms of
>art; it may be used in its own right, to concentrate and intensify and
>express new forms of experience. When the machine becomes a surrogate
>for primary experience, it only serves to debilitate. Just as the
>telescope is worthless unless the eye is sharp, so all mechanical
>apparatus of the arts depend on the cultivation of the organic,
>physiological, and spiritual aptitudes that they are extension of. The
>machine can not replace or shortcut the necessity of organic experience.
>A camera can no more reveal the truth than know what truth is. For
>Frenesi, the life she views or captures on film is real and organic and
>the organic she experiences is film. All of her relationships are
>mediated by a machine she can not separate from and from which she can
>not separate experience.  In business, industry, and government, the
>machine replaces humans by reducing them to automation. In art, however,
>the machine can only extend and deepen human functions and intuitions.
>If the camera eliminates the impulse to see and the radio does away with
>the impulse to play instruments, the machine leads to a lapse of
>function and ultimately to paralysis. The machine, however, is not
>really the problem. Frenesi is not simply a machine, she is also art,
>and the failure of the sixties to integrate art and experience. In the
>abdication of her spirit and her betrayal of other souls, she cooperates
>in the perverse triumph of the machine as both a passive substitute for
>life and counterfeit of other arts. “Weed, the cameras only a machine
,”
>and so forth, movie sincerity.
>
>Terrance
>
>