Cheese Danish #35

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Second, Terrence, do feel free to elaborate what you might think the
> relevance of Heidegger to Pynchon might be.  I obviously think there's a
> connection, but it's an intuition at best.  That "lifedeath" thing,
> first off, and the critique of Nietzsche (at least as elaborated by
> Krell), but, I must admit, my Heidegger is tenuous.  Have, however, been
> thinking about Mondaugen ("moon-eyes"?) and Heidegger's "The Age of the
> World Picture."  That point of view thing, the world as pictured from,
> say, the moon ...

First, I have not read David Farrell Krell, Contagion:
Sexuality, Disease and Death in German Idealism and
Romanticism. 

Second, I can't commit to hosting it but I plan to post lots
on Mondaugen when we get to Mondaugen's Story.  

You posted From David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger
and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), Chapter
Seven, "Lifedeath: Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud" (pp.
217-51). 

Sounds very interesting, no time


Third, I'm not sure what to elaborate on, to
? 
 

How about the Clock & the Street Lamp?


If my memory is working better than the rest of me, I  think
I remember that  in his early thinking Heidegger admitted to
a difference between a world that is merely present and a
world that announces its usefulness. 

I'll skip Heidegger's classic example of the hammer, being a
carpenter I like that example, but for V., the clock and the
lamp will do fine.   

In Being And Time the Clocks and the Street Lamps reveal a
purpose in nature: the moving circle of time, the cycle of
light and darkness, and the human need to keep track of the
former so that humans may manipulate the latter. But it is
the change or refinement in Heidegger's ideas that your
quotes seem to be addressing, I think, that life-death and
question of telos theme. 

First though, a little fun: From Eliot's poem Rhapsody On A
Windy Night and Mumford's Techincs and Civilization. 

Not feeling like fun, you may skip over to Heidegger. 

Twelve o'clock.
 Along the reaches of the street
  Held in a lunar synthesis,
  Whispering lunar incantations
  Dissolve the floors of memory
  And all its clear relations,
   Its divisions and precisions,
   Every street lamp that I pass
   Beats like a fatalistic drum,
  And through the spaces of the dark
  Midnight shakes the memory
  As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

  Half-past one,
  The street lamp sputtered,
  The street lamp muttered,
  The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
  Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
  Which opens on her like a grin.
		
		--T.S. Eliot

"The application of quantitative methods of thought to the
study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular
measurement of time; and the new mechanical conception of
time arose in part out of the routine of the monastery. 
Alfred Whitehead has emphasized the importance of the
scholastic belief in the universe ordered by God as one of
the foundations of modern physics: but behind that belief
was the presence of order in the institutions of the Church
itself." 
			--Mumford, Technics and Civilization

The Benedictines, the working order, were, according to
Coulton, Sombart, others, the original founders of modern
Capitalism. Mumfords says, they "gave human enterprise the
regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine
Eternity
ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human
actions."

Stencil's WORK, his quest is NOT Puritan (Weber, Brown,
Marcuse, Puritan Capitalism, Calvanism vs. Catholicism and
how about Anabaptism-Chapter Two of V. and Limbo?). 

Damned this pagination problem, V.HP(the 99 Classics). 50 or
Chapter Two part II, about 12 paragraphs in. 

Back to Heidegger now and his changes, where later in his
life Heidegger admitted that the concept of technology is
much, much bigger than the way in which instruments announce
their functions. How big is much, much bigger? Well,
technology, Heidegger concluded, was so big that it
circumscribed the ways in which we live, all contemporary
ways of living and Knowing. Technology is said by Heidegger
to enframe (Ge-stell) all of modern life. What Heidegger
sees is that technology is so pervasive, so big and powerful
(how many clocks have you got in your house? and  have you
one on your person now? and ubiquitous, powerful, important,
Big), that is relates to nature in a fundamentally different
way, even to the point where it becomes impossible to
consider nature outside of the bounds of this big,
enframing, technology. 

What are the implications of this? There are many, and here
it will difficult not to oversimplify and piss some people
off or introduce a bunch of Heidegger's terms and their 
translations
..but Heidegger considered this enveloping of
the world by technology as a stage in  preparation of human
fulfillment that has always been with us and a revealing of
the earth, to "set free unto its own prescensing."  The
release of the Earth unto itself ( this is one area of
interest,  we can get into the role of language and
revealing,  and what Pynchon says about this), is
accomplished with language, it is through language that
nature is revealed to Man and it also through language that
nature is transformed into material.  

For Heidegger, technology is neither an instrument of
freedom nor an object alien to being human. Instrumentality
unveils aspects of nature. The clock, the lamp reveal, the
human makes, even Katje's windmills reveals that the wind
may turn wheels of stone to grind grain.

 I am reminded here of Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging", where
the spade cutting the earth reveals the poetic in the earth
and the movement of the spade and the man are what to
Heidegger would be a primordial activity that becomes more
intuitive, an extension of the human, with time and
proficiency, but for Heidegger the spade also discloses the
rich black soil below the surface of the earth's crust,
reveals what is inherently earth and may be of use to
humans, but the tool, the spade here is involved in a direct
interaction between Man (in this example, Heaneys's Father
digging) and a specific natural feature of the earth. 

		"Digging"
             

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.

        Under my window, a clean rasping sound
        When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
        My father, digging. I look down

        Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
        Bends low, comes up twenty years away
        Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
        Where he was digging.

        The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
against the inside
        knee was levered firmly.
        He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
        To scatter new potatoes that we picked
        Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

        By God, the old man could handle a spade.
        Just like his old man.

        ... 

        The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
        Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
        Through living roots awaken in my head.
        But I've no spade to follow men like them.

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests.
        I'll dig with it.

        1966 from "Death of a Naturalist" 

			--Seamus Heaney 

However, when it comes to Modern Technology, the interaction
is quite different. In the Modern world we extract energy
(oil, although thinking of Heaney's father again, Potatoes
are fuel for the rocket, or booze for an Irish wake) from
the earth. We put it in a big tanks, store it for use at
another time, war perhaps. Nature was once thought of as the
energy we needed to live, the womb that brings life, the
goddess that we can suck from, but with the modern
technological perspective, the earth is not the women buried
in the earth in GR, the energy flowing with lifedeath
fecundity, but a source of this energy, this new energy,
needed for war and survival. An energy source, a material
trasnformed, and thus now having  a meaning apart from
nature. We remove it, we move it, store it, and plan with it
how we will transform it and use it to transform. The
rivers, most of the rivers in the world, are no longer
considered as the course of water, the life system, the
dynamic landscape and so on, but are now considered for what
or how much they can generate, how that energy, with the
language of gigawatts say, may be stored, moved. The impact,
one of them any way, is progression of human concerns as
viewed from (perhaps the only perspective allowed or
available to humans?)  the human perspective enframed. 

Perspective: 

"Construct an elevator from the elevator's point of view." 

Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn't that be that
black box?"

	--Colson Whitehead's Intuitionist  

Heidegger is careful not to condemn human making itself. It
is the enframing essence of technology that he rails
against, the way in which we have constructed; a way that
endangers other ways of constructing because it works so
well unto itself. 

The comprehensive enframing forecloses the possibility of
conceiving of or discovering its own limitations within the
huge confines circumscribing modern life and knowing. We
don't learn from Heidegger how it is that technology took
the steps from directly revealing the forces of nature to
transforming what those forces mean by placing them in a new
framework of the resources extracted, stored, retrieved.
What brought about enframing? Was it a sudden blaze, a
standing erect? What? He doesn't say, GR says, Nature is
locked up (JAMF) behind a doors and the only key we can use
to open the doors to nature are those keys that open nature
to use, we cannot discover nature, it's "shining forth",
"its truth", and besides, in Pynchon we have locks without
keys because we toss anything of value, the keys overboard
or forget them, like Bianca.   Its as if the technology of
Modern life, the microscope or the particle accelerator and
the telescope or the Hubble deny, because of their powerful,
pervasive, success, their Bigness, the uncertainty, the
faith we might say, the magic, the Intuitionist's
perspective, required for other less verifiable modes of
apprehending the world. 

"The sense of historic importance is the intuition of the
universe as everlasting process, unfading in its deistic
unity of ideals." 

			--Alfred Whitehead