Mishakes & Chomsky/Foucault and whatever....

[Paul Mackin]

Would be inclined to agree that if there WERE any key to Gravity's
Rainbow  (note the use of the subjunctive to indicate an eventuality
contrary to fact) it would be the question: is there anyway out of the
human condition as we now experience it?  Some experiencing it more than
others of course. But anyway what I wanted to say was that even in the
1961 preface to Eros and Civilization which my copy happens to contain
Marcuse was already leaving readers with the distinct impression that
there was no foreseeable way of moving from repression to nonrepression.
I quote:

I have sufficiently (and perhaps unduly) stessed the progressive and
promising aspects of this deveopment in order to be entitled to
accentuate here the negative: the events of the last years refute all
optimism. The immense capablities of the advanced industiral socity are
increasingly mobilized against the utilization of its own resources for
the pacification of human existence. All talk about the abolition or
repression, about life against death, etc., has to place itself into the
actual framework of enslavement and destruction. Within this framework,
even the liberites and gratifications of the individual partake of the
general suppression . Their liberation, instinctual as well as
intellectual, is a political matter, and a theory of the chances and
preconditions of such liberation must be a theory of social change.


            P.

Dave Monroe wrote:

> Without wanting to detour yet again into Gravity's
> Rainbow (must ... read ... Mason & Dixon ...) this is
> one of the more interesting, intriguing even, posts
> I've seen here since MalignD's hypothesis concerning
> the ultimate Impolexization of Tyrone Slothrop ...
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0104&msg=54838&sort=date
>
> --- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >
> > [Fopucault's] Method is clearly Agonistic.  This is
> > one of the reasons [...] he has been compared with
> > Nietzsche.  Rabinow notes that F's basic metaphor is
> > one of battle and not conversation. We could say,
> > Agonsitic and not Dialectic. Rabinow also claims
> > that F is "resolutely and consistently anti-Hegelian
> > and anti-Marxist" in the area of history, that is, F
> > rejects a general and dialectical theory of history.
> > This is partly because F, like Pynchon, who
> satirizes
> > dialecticians in GR--Marx, Brown, Hegel, Plato,
> > sees and seeks no way out (see Norman O. Brown
> > another Dialectician who seeks a way out of
> > Freud's Agon--eros and thanatos). And for both
> > Pynchon and F, seeking a way out is the greatest
> > danger.
>
> Again, my impression is, in GR, TRP had second
> thoughts about NOB's polymorphous perversity along the
> lines of, say, H(erbert)M(arcuse's) own apparent
> reconsideration (albeit, here, not quite repudiation)
> of his similar, earlier wretched excesses (i.e.,
> Mindless Pleasures? ).  See that "Political Preface"
> to the 1966 2nd ed. of Eros and Civilization ...
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48845&sort=date
>
> > Also of interest here, Chomsky, like McLuhen,
> > Norbert Wiener may be considered Luddites, but all
> > three seek a way out through technological means,
> > faulting political institutions and THEM. F does
> > not, as Rabinow puts it, attribute the practices of
> > objectification to the orchestration of "some
> > unseen actor." We could say, here I would disagree
> > again with Thomas Moore's wonderful study of the
> > scientific influences in GR, that P brought these
> > texts into his texts even if he never bought into
> > them, Or, even if he did, his fiction does not.
>
> Which reminds me, on the gothicism of, say, power, or
> ideology, as "unseen actors," see ...
>
> Edmundson, Mark.  Nightmare on Main Street:
>    Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of Gothic.
>    Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.
>
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/EDMNIG.html
>
> Okay, finally catching up on the List here.  Now to
> get on with the novel ...
>
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