MDDM World-as-text

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:.
> >
> > As I noted, "text", in the definition we've been
> > using here, isn't confined
> > to words.
> 
> Then it's not much of a distinction, if "text" expands
> to include all of human experience -- it's lost it's
> distinctiveness as "text", and thus loses most of its
> explanatory power.

Well, Robert did include thinking as well as expression in his formula.
His notion that we can't think minus a "text" sounds a bit like
Nietzsche's consciousness. Only in N's formula, We think all the time,
but what arises to consciousness does so only as  "text." 





    In 'The Gay Science',  Nietzsche
  surmises that consciousness has come about or developed from
  the necessity to communicate. He argues that from the
  start, communication was useful to humans  and
  that it developed only in proportion to the degree of this
  need. For Nietzsche, conscious meanings that
  arise from the need to communicate are superficial. 


He says, 

"Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing
  it, the thinking that arises to consciousness is only the
  smallest part of this-the most superficial and worst
  part-for only this conscious thinking takes the form of
  words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact
  uncovers the origin of consciousness." 


So for N, the world of which we become conscious is merely a surface-and
sign-world. 
  
Again, in 'Gay Science' Nietzsche says, 

"Owing to the nature of
  animal consciousness, the world of which we can become
  conscious is only a surface-and sign-world, a world that is
  made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes
  by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general,
  sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great
  and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to
  superficialities, and generalizations."    

What of the world we don't become quite conscious of? Sort of that world
we read about in so many of P's tales. For example, the world a
character may visit when not quite conscious or awake. A world mixed
with dream or dream & something in the atmosphere or in the wind? That
would be something like N's "thinking continually without knowing it",
but in Pynchon, this continuous stream of thinking is loaded up with
historical facts. 

These may be considered the stuff of some "collective thinking" that the
narrator falls into, a place, a space, a past, he/she can't quite
remember, has no right in, save the right of imaginative anxiety or
historical care...and so on.