MDDM World-as-text

[Doug Millison]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> I disagree. An individual's perception of the world
> necessarily shapes their
> experience of the world, and vice versa. It's not
> possible to isolate
> experience from perception; no-one is able to
> experience the world in a
> vacuum, "wie es eigentlich gewesen". It's naive to
> assume that you can. 

True enough, as far as it goes.
Perception and text aren't identical, however.  Just
close your eyes and listen to music, or smell
something nice (or not so nice), or touch something --
you don't need text or words for those experiences;
you only need "text" to talk about them, analyze them,
slice and dice them, examine their truth value or
performative value or any of the million things that
thinking people do with words.  Slothop blissful in
the experience of that rainbow, finally, and then
whatever comes next for him (of which we can't really
speak, but only hazard guesses.) 

 >It's useful, and apt, to observe
> that humans constitute
> the world in a textual way.

Among many other other ways; text is not given primacy
in all cultures always, either -- a truth that
Pynchon's texts manage to point to even as they reveal
text as inadquate to capture the experience of life --
text, this manner of grasping at life and trying to
translate it into words, as ennobling and empowering
as it may be, is also alienating, leads to TV instead
of life, mediated life instead of life; the phrase
world-as-text actuallly hides the truth by flipping
what it says upside down:  it's really
text-as-world-and-word-as-fetish instead of life. 
Settling only for "text" yields a pallid imitation of
life -- you need the mindless pleasures, too, it's
both/and, not either/or.

This division -- a false dichotomy between an
insistence that the "world is text" and can be
operated upon and manipulated as text, and a "real
world" out there or in there or over there somewhere
-- lies at the heart, I think, of Pynchon's tragic
vision, that I/It separation that necessarily emerges
on the naming of something or the creation of a world
(as a  novelist creates one, in Barth's nice
restatement of a very old idea) -- it's of a piece
with the subject/object distinction that leads to
Enlightenment science based on experiment and goes all
the way down that Line to WWII and beyond, using
slaves as expendable production factors,experiments on
humans, and the rest of the grisly shaodws in GR, etc.
 A longing to bridge that gap- -- between the world
and the name of the world -- lies at the heart of that
yearning that pervades (to my ear and mind and heart)
Pynchon's work.




=====
<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

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