MDDM World-as-text

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 7:45 PM
Subject: Re: MDDM World-as-text
>
>
> 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."
>
>

On the Premises of Postmodernism

"Tonight he feels the potency of every word:
words are only an eye-twitch away from
the things they stand for." (GR 100)

>
>
>
>     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."
>

Cannot find the German version of this quote.

>
> 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."
>

"Diess ist der eigentliche Phänomenalismus und Perspektivismus, wie ich ihn
verstehe: die Natur des thierischen Bewusstseins bringt es mit sich, dass
die Welt, deren wir bewusst werden können, nur eine Oberflächen- und
Zeichenwelt ist, eine verallgemeinerte, eine vergemeinerte Welt, - dass
Alles, was bewusst wird, ebendamit flach, dünn, relativ-dumm, generell,
Zeichen, Heerden-Merkzeichen wird, dass mit allem Bewusstwerden eine grosse
gründliche Verderbniss, Fälschung, Veroberflächlichung und Generalisation
verbunden ist."
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/nietzsch/wissensc/wissen06.htm

> 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.
>

I agree and I suspect that P. had Nietzsche in mind when he lets GR open in
the middle of Pirate's dream.

> 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.

Nietzsche about Postmodernism (is it possible?):

"How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of
error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds
out of selfishness? or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust?
Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse;
the things of highest value must have another, peculiar origin - they cannot
be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world from
this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the
intransitory, the hidden god, the 'thing-in-itself' - there must be their
basis, and nowhere else."
This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which
give away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in
the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this
"faith" that they trouble themselves about "knowledge," about something that
is finally baptized solemnly as "the truth." The fundamental faith of the
metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to
the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the
threshold where it was surely most necessary - even if they vowed to
themselves, "de ornnibus dubitandum."

For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and
secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the
metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates,
only provisional perspectives perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from
below, frog perspective as it were, to borrow an expression painters use.
For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it
would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life
might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even
be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things
is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to and involved with
these wicked, seemingly opposite things - maybe even one with them in
essence. Maybe!

But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes? For
that, one really has to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers
such as have somehow another and converse taste and propensity from those we
have known so far - philosophers of the dangerous "maybe" in every sense.

And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up."
http://www.cwu.edu/~millerj/nietzsche/bge1.html

PIRATE NIETZSCHE PAGE
http://www.cwu.edu/~millerj/nietzsche/

Great day, gonna feed my goldfishes now, out there in the artificial world
of my pond.

Otto

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