From the Annals of Science- a lost citation?

[jporter]

Hmmm. Sounds like a process that gradually transforms the living past in all
its daft and merry uncertainty into a system or dialectic of competing
signs, until finally, god forbid, it is "reduced to a certainty"... i.e.,
objective and dead.

jody

> From: "jbridel1" <jbridel1 at home.com>
> Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 01:53:29 -0400
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: Re: From the Annals of Science- a lost citation?
> 
> I'm pretty new to this, but has anyone considered Harold Innis' " A Plea For
> Time" a paper that was presented to the University of New Brunswick in 1950.
> In it, Innis forwards the notion that information mediums, and their
> institutional masters, control time conceptions.  The more immediate the
> medium, the more immediate the priorities of the society it works within.
> The past is a programme on the History Channel and atrophes away, the
> present  (day trading nowadays, or whatever) is everything. He contrasts
> this with the priorities of older societies (Hellenistic, Byzantine as
> examples) that viewed the maintenance of its institutions far more
> importantly than the benefit of immediate society or the trends that arose
> in it. He then relates this to the developments of new forms of media
> (hieroglyphs, cuneform, papyrus, moveble type, pulp paper, radio etc..) and
> how these have shortened the length of time it takes new information to be
> delivered.
> 
> This can be found in Innis' work "The Bias of Communication", (Unversity of
> Toronto Press, 1951)
> Innis was a contemporaty of Marshal Macluhan ( love 'im or 'ate 'im) and saw
> media progressions as conjoined to the progressions of the West.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: jporter <jp4321 at IDT.NET>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 11:50 PM
> Subject: From the Annals of Science- a lost citation?
> 
> 
>> This may be rather old hat for some p-listers, but it was new to me. In
>> 1978, six years before Pynchon's luddite/C.P.Snow article appeared in the
>> NYTBR, Daniel Simberloff- while Professor of Ecology at Florida State
>> University, published in the journal: _Perspectives in Biology and
> Medicine_
>> an article entitled:
>> 
>> Entropy, Information, and Life: Biophysics in the Novels of Thomas
>> Pynchon
>> 
>> The article begins:
>> 
>> "In 1959 C.P. Snow wrote, 'A good many times I have been present at
>> gatherings of people who... are thought highly educated and who have...
> been
>> expressing their incredulity at the illliteracy of scientists. Once or
> twice
>> I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could
>> describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was
>> also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scienctific
>> equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'  Even if Snow's
>> efforts left the gulf separating scientist from humanist intact, Thomas
>> Pynchon's novels- V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow- have
>> informed a later generation of some elementary thermodynamics. This paper
>> shows that Pynchon's work develops a complex biophysical metaphor which
>> originates in the relationship between thermodynamics and information and
>> proceeds to incorporate the thermodynamics of life."
>> 
>> And, the article goes on to do just that. It's fascinating not only in
> that
>> respect, however, but also because of the reference to Snow's "Two
> Cultures
>> and the Scientific Revolution" article six years prior to the publication
> of
>> "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite," while at the same time specifically linking
> it
>> to the works of Thomas Pynchon.
>> 
> 
> 
>