Pornography & Technics & Death

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2000 Lycidas at worldnet.att.net wrote:

> Yes, I think Pynchon's Luddite addresses this. Perhaps the
> passage you are searching for is GR.167 ('life' ) or GR.567
> ("imitation of flight")? The technological quest (the cure
> for cancer with computers, Luddite) creates a pornography
> through imitation that is confused with AND substituted for
> what it imitates.

Yes, I think these are relevant passages. Thanks. 

I always like to keep it firmly in mind that the binarisms
indispensible in expressing these ideas (imitation/real;
artificial/natural; mechanical/organic; technological/primitive)
necessarily HAVE TO resolve themselves into each other--because Nature
and the Real don't ever go away. Though a technologic breatkthough in
curing cancer will be artificial and mechanical it will have to work
hand in hand with the organic to have any success. For the treatment to
be a technological success the patient must continue to live on in his
own god-given primitive biology. For what it's worth.

 
> 
> 
> In terms of a ship of fools or damned. either or and but
> not, some kind of paradoxical dialectic involving the law of
> contradictions I guess, but  take one side at a time, a ship
> of the damned I say.
> 

Wonder if "The Flying Dutchman" might be a good model. No pun on Charles's
last name intended :-)

			p.