MDDM World-as-text

[David Morris]

>From: MalignD at aol.com
>
>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 act of naming" is a big subject in GR, and for good reason, at least 
according to Lacan.  The act of naming is an act of substituting the primary 
psychic response to a real-world experience with a word, for the purpose of 
mastering the experience, gaining control of the emotion, desire, fear 
therein.  This is directly related to the substitution of an erotic charge 
with a fetish one is able to control.  "The World as Text" in this context 
represents the most primal way a human being becomes volitional and vocal.  
In Freudian terms filtered through Lacan, the act of symbolizing is the same 
as the act of language, and both are repressions of an emotional concept now 
mastered by The Word, The Metaphor.

I'd say Lacan's "world as text" is very "useful" (thanks, Malign'd) artifice 
to used in understanding Pynchon.  Norman O. Brown's trilogy pointed me 
toward Lacan, and Brown is very pervasive in GR.  Both are centrally 
concerned with the psychic function of the Metaphor, so it is no surprise 
that Pynchon is influenced by them, is it?

David Morris

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