MDDM Chapter 44 Notes & Musings

[John Bailey]

Yep, that's what I was thinking of, as usual, and also...

The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or 
Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no 
eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a 
celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical 
procedures have organized an "all-seeing power"? The totalizing eye imagined 
by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same 
scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing 
today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370 foot high tower 
that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that 
creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes 
its opaque mobility in a transparent text.

Taken from Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Cal.: 
University of California Press, 1984) p.92

The concept of the 'Celestial Eye' de Certeau explores here is tied to the 
Line as a concept, as a way of re-imagining the world from an impossible 
viewpoint. The desire to rise up, up, up, above the world, whether it be on 
ley-lines, as a duck, or flying with Emerson, or more metaphorically by 
ascending upon the wings of mathesis, abstraction and 'inhuman precision' is 
crucial to this chapter, and comes up a lot in the novel. It's also linked 
to GR, obviously. De Certeau is here talking about the city (specifically) 
but I think a lot can be gained from his stuff besides this.

>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>To: John Bailey <johnbonbailey at hotmail.com>, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: MDDM Chapter 44 Notes & Musings
>Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 22:27:26 -0800 (PST)
>
>From Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The
>Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
>Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) ...
>
>"'Annihilation of time and space' was the topos which
>the early nineteenth century used to describe the new
>situation into which the railroad placed natural space
>after depriving it of its hitherto absolute powers.
>Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of
>natural space, but on mechanical power that created
>its own new spatiality." (p.10)
>
>"The empirical reality that made the landscape seen
>from the train window appear to be 'another world' was
>the railroad itself. [...] It was, in other words,
>that machine ensemble that interjected itself between
>the traveller and the landscape. The traveler
>perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the
>machine ensemble." (p.24)
>
>"Transport technology is the material base of
>potentiality, and equally the material base of the
>traveler's space-time perception. [...] If an
>essential element of a given socio-cultural space-time
>continuum undergoes change, this will affect the
>entire structure; our perception of space-time will
>also lose its accustomed orientation." (p.36)
>
>http://www.daaq.net/bibliography/b_schivelbusch.html
>
>http://home.uchicago.edu/~jrbeebe/cinema2.html
>
>--- John Bailey <johnbonbailey at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 440: ‘Ley-lines’: s/z noted in the first read-
> > through that this term wasn’t coined until the
> > 1920s.
> >
>http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9801&msg=22892&sort=date
> >
> > The Rev’s description calls to mind (my mind at
> > least) the later railroad expansion to the West,
> > and the powerful changes in society, as well as
> > individual psychology, which it effected; as well
> > as, perhaps, the internet, the Jesuit Telegraph,
> > and other ‘imaginary’ elisions of space. The
> > implication seems to be that the Line, in fact any
> > line of this sort, is powerful precisely because it
> > allows the mind to reduce physical space to a
> > function of consciousness. Something is always lost
> > in this translation, which is why the Line is often
> > painted as a negative force.
>
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