gnostic and Gnostic

[jbor]

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>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: gnostic and Gnostic
>Date: Tue, Dec 19, 2000, 10:17 PM
>

> "Pomo" = "postmodernism," I
> presume, but, again, postmodernisms, not  Postmodernism, and not to be
> confused, conflated, confounded, elided, whatever with deconstruction(s,
> not ...), which is what you seem rather to want to put into play here,
> but ...

Deconstruction and postmodernism can most certainly be conflated in the work
of many postmodernists: Derrida, Lyotard and Pynchon, to name three.

> But is "that any religion is a logocentric system which ... excludes all
> other" points of view and so forth really what is "shown," by Pynchon,
> "pomo," or deconstruction?   The deconstructive move, at least, would
> here be rather to demonstrate, to "show" (de- + monstrare, "to show")
> how said "religion," far from "excluding all other points of view," is
> rather structured, mutually determined by all said "other points," how
> said "religion" bears the traces of all said "other points," how its
> presumed (self-)Presence is structured by, bears the traces of, all
> those absented "others" ...

There is more to most postmodernisms and deconstructive analyses than simply
the demonstration of intertextuality, surely? It isn't *just* a "game". This
is only one *type* of postmodernism, as you note in your opening sally.

>
> "Its very nature"?  Quite an essentialization for an alleged
> deconstruction ...

In being logocentric and exclusivist, religions, by their very nature, do
not exercise deconstructive strategies, nor are they postmodern. It *is* in
their nature to view themselves in this "us and them", or "Self and Other"
kind of way. That is how they are "constructed".

> But I belive the point has long been here (there, everywhere),
> gnosticism(s, not ...), religious, philosophical, sociological,
> political, scientific, whatever, as "us v. (all of) them" "system(s)"
> par excellence, relentlessly positing said "binary systems," that
> alienated, indifferent-to-hostile, paranoia-inducing cosmos (and yet,
> that divine trace within the fallen matter of that abjected flesh ...).

There is no object to this "sentence". You never quite seem to make this
phantom "point" of yours.

> "Alarming"?  Why, when, where, how so?  What are the stakes here, then?

It's alarming because the same sort of dismissive small "c" christian
descriptor would not be bandied about. In setting up a "gnostic" v. not
gnostic (i.e. Christian, and thus right, or good, or better than "gnostic")
binary equation, such criticism entirely misses (one of) the point(s) of
Pynchon's fiction imo.

best