The Salvation of Europen

Dave Monroe davidmmonroe at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 28 11:28:32 CDT 2001


"'The salvation of Europe,' Konrad says, 'depends on
communication, right?  We face this anarchy of jealous
German princes, hundreds of them scheming, infighting,
dissipating all of the Empire's strength in their
useless bickering.  But whoever could control the
lines of communication, among all these princes, would
control them.  That network could someday unify the
Continent.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 164)

>From Richard Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge
and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993), Ch.
4, "The Archive and Its Double," Sec. iii, pp. 141-52
...

"The strangest and most influential text to come out
of the First World War, T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars
of Wisdom (1926) ....  Lawrence was the first to move
outside of the nineteenth-century equation of military
inelligence with geography....  After the First World
War geography lost its central position ....  a new
magic epistemology in which intelligence could take as
its domain not just what could be said, written and
enumerated ... but what could not be said, what was
unsayable, unwritable, even unthinkable.  The new
magic epistemology sought out the edges of enunciation
where the the normal and normative shaded into the
paranormal and parapositive...." (p. 142)

This final section of Thomas's book, by the way, is a
taken up largely with a discussion of Gravity's
Rainbow ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0106&msg=990&sort=date

Thanks again, Otto, for bringing it to our attention
...


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