Logocentrism

[jbor]

----------
>From: Muchasmasgracias at cs.com
>To: jbor at bigpond.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Logocentrism
>Date: Wed, Jun 21, 2000, 3:14 AM
>

> My question is whether it is possible to use language at all without slipping
> up in the way you are referring to.


And I guess that my answer is that this has been (one of) Pynchon's
questions too, all along.

   "My god," Saul flung up an arm. "Dehumanized? How much more human can I
 get? I worry, Meatball, I do. There are Europeans wandering around North
 Africa with their tongues torn out of their heads because their tongues
 have spoken the wrong words. Only the Europeans thought they were the right
 words."
   "Language barrier", Meatball suggested.
   Saul jumped down off the stove. "That", he said, angry, "is a good
 candidate for sick joke of the year. No, ace, it is *not* a barrier. If it
 is anything it is a kind of leakage. Tell a girl: 'I love you'. No trouble
 with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she. But that
 nasty four-letter word in the middle, *that's* the one you have to look out
 for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is noise.
 Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit."
                                                        ('Entropy' 1960)

The nexus between thermodynamic entropy and that in communications systems
(even though Pynchon plays it down in the Intro to *Slow Learner*) is a
literary ploy which also reminds me of Derrida. The NTA section in *GR*
shows that the socio-political ramifications of logocentrism et. al. were
still high on Pynchon's agenda, and the cameo of the frau who couldn't
pronounce her umlauts calling out 'helicopter' instead of 'cute-looking
robber', and the vomiting umlauts, show that he could still have fun with
it.

There are debts to Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Freud, Jung and Wittgenstein too
(in Pynchon as in Derrida), and countless others, conscious and unconscious.
That's what intertextuality is all about, but at least post-structuralist
critics like Derrida and postmodern writers like Pynchon recognise and
address the inevitability of such leakages.

The precision with which scientific micro-measurement can be conducted has
proven that the circumference of the British coastline is infinite. Or
something to that effect. So, Rule Brittania, I guess.

best



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