Thoroughly postmodern Pynchon

[jbor]

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>From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (lorentzen-nicklaus)
>

>   you can only make sense of this "finite number of words" because there is
that
>   "never-ending chain of signifiers". this is, in fact, the basic structure of
>   any kind of --- "meaning" (according to luhmann a self-transcending
>   processing of information under conditions of the difference of actuality
and
>   the - literally - endless sky of possibilities).


And, of course, "V" is precisely that signifier which "finally dissolves in
a never-ending chain of signifiers that always escapes an ultimate
categorical meaning" which Collado-Rodrigueza is referring to.

In this novel Pynchon demonstrates the way that the signifier itself is
always already a sign made up of a signifier and signified (and so on into
infinite regress) with "V" (and with the Kilroy-"sign" in Ch 16 as well). In
this he pre-empts the critique of Saussurean semiotics in both structuralism
and post-structuralism (eg. Barthes, Bakhtin etc)

http://www.wsu.edu/~fa331/barthes2.htm

Collado-Rodrigueza's essay also provides a very good summary of the who, how
and why of postmodern philosophy as it is manifested in Pynchon's work: the
"sustained critical subversion of categorical binary thinking" in
traditional philosophies (i.e. Plato, the "medieval Scholastics", the
thinkers of the Enlightenment etc), and the way that "the new physics and
postmodern culture began to demolish their discriminatory implications" in
the second half of the twentieth century.

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/collado24.htm

best