MDDM World-as-text

[MalignD at aol.com]

This string seems to have gotten so hopelessly frayed that I don't know how 
to begin to join it, other than to attempt to define my own point of entry.

Can one think the world?  That, it seems to me, is the question behind the 
idea of world-as-text and I think the answer is "no."  One can think *about* 
the world; one can reflect on one's experience of the world as made available 
through one's senses; but thinking about the world, about anything, having a 
consciousness of the world beyond the moment-to-moment, is a matter of words: 
 world as text.  

To simplify grossly, but I hope not incorrectly, Derrida's insight was that 
words don't adhere to things nontextual; rather, words take their meaning 
from all the words that they are not.  A crude analogy is a dictionary where 
every word's definition is a series of other words that are, in turn, defined 
by yet other series of other words, etc., to the last word the dictionary 
contains and defines.  Hence, again, world-as-text.  

The question as it relates to this board (as I see it) is not whether this 
argument is exclusively correct, rather whether it is useful.  If one 
considers literature or, specifically, the works of TP in this light, does 
one gain insights that would otherwise not be gained?  I think the answer is 
clearly yes.

Is Pynchon speaking to this subject?  I can't know his intent, but one must 
consider that GR's surface is a gaudy and self-proclaiming distraction from 
any reader's attempt to ignore it.  It replicates and imitates movies, comic 
books, stage musicals, etc.  Its character names are self-consciously absurd; 
organizing principle is layered over organizing principle, etc.  And a great 
debt to Joyce--another scrim through which to read GR.  There's no one on 
this board who needs to be told any of this.  But Pynchon has certainly made 
it difficult to pursue the story (stories) told without being kept forever 
mindful of the artifice which contains it/them.  World-as-text seems an 
entirely useful and appropriate position from which to investigate.

As for Rob Jackson and now Otto being resistant and rigid in his/their 
position[s], I think that working solely from a particular critical point of 
view allows rigor in developing an argument, not so easily achieved 
otherwise.  I don't think that any one critical position is ultimately 
correct or right--I don't know what Rob or Otto would say--but I don't see 
how a critical position can be developed and held at all if one doesn't frame 
one's argument consistently.  Even should the end result be to abandon a 
position as limited and incorrect, I don't see how one could do even that 
with assurance if there were no consistency along the way.  

It's in that light that I read Rob's posts.  If he is insistent and 
challenging, even prickly, the insistence and challenge, it seems to me, are 
to *his* point of view as well as to the one he disagrees with, in that the 
entirety of his argument is always on the line and at risk.  It's why I find 
his posts usually worth the time to read.  It's not that I always agree with 
him.  Indeed, it is when I disagree that his posts are most often useful, in 
that, because his position is clearly stated and rigorously argued, it's a 
means for clarifying my own.  

He apparently has, from time to time, hurt some people's feelings.  That is 
not the same, however, as saying his arguments are ad hominem.  I rarely find 
them so and, when I do, they have usually been provoked.  (To be told one's 
argument is full of holes is not to be attacked personally if, in fact, the 
argument is full of holes.)