MDDM World-as-text

[Otto]

Indeed, I agree too and think that MalignD's post was extremely
well-formulated given the complexity of the topic. I appreciated especially
the point about "the frame" which is needed to develop an argument
consistently, in order to have a set of tools to interpret certain cultural
artefacts.

Furthermore it has been repeatedly stated that postmodernity has only been
the temporary state of affairs until 1989/90. I'm not sure how to *name* the
current status quo.

Robert's differentiation is very valuable too to bring a little order into
the "jargon-chaos" that seems to exist. And "Points of Departure" that
aren't "set in stone" -- that is really good said.

To me Derrida's attitude to become superseded (in fact waiting for this) one
day is only logical: "(...) a system of opposites in which neither dominance
nor submission is privileged."
(see link at the end of this post)
His condemnation of any affirmative statement that privileges one pole of
the binary is truly important to be kept in mind.

President Abraham Lincoln reminded the nation of that great truth contained
in the Declaration of Independence when he said, "We hold these truths to be
self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness."
http://www.christianparents.com/lrconst.htm

It's evident that this *not* has been the "truth" at the time he said so,
but is in its last part a very good programme to be achieved. Those rights
were not only denied to the Native Americans and Black Slaves but as we've
seen in "Mason & Dixon" to our heroes, the common people in England &
elsewhere too.

Deconstruction always begins with the breaking up of any of those implicit
hierarchies, exposing their inherent contradictions; and may be seen as my
personal starting point of criticising political and other ideologies.

What I consider very important in GR (and Pynchon's work in general) are the
reversions, conversions, metamorphoses and border-crossings (over the zero).

By the way: has this already been posted?

"DERRIDA is a complex personal and theoretical portrait of the
internationally renowned French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Best known for
generating a movement known as "deconstruction", Derrida's radical
rethinking of the founding precepts of Western metaphysics has profoundly
influenced the fields of literature, philosophy, ethics, architecture and
law, inalterably transforming the intellectual landscape of the 20th and
21st centuries.
Produced with Derrida's full cooperation and consent, the film is the most
ambitious cinematic project ever undertaken with a world-class philosopher.
Initiated by Amy Ziering Kofman, who studied with Derrida at Yale in the
80's, and co-directed by Kirby Dick and Ziering Kofman, DERRIDA is neither a
conventional film biography nor a primer on his thinking. Rather, in the
spirit of Derrida's own writing, the film investigates the concept of
biography itself and explores the nature and limitations of the cinematic
form in addressing philosophical thought.
Through the interlacing of rare verite footage of Derrida in his private
life with his reflections on deconstruction, violence, the structure of
love, the history of philosophy, and the death of his mother, the film
raises questions about the relations between the public and the private, the
personal and the theoretical, the biographical and the philosophical,
becoming a rich and moving meditation on both Derrida himself and the themes
that haunt and inspire his work."
(...)
"Another attraction is the simple pleasure of having a historic cinematic
record of such a person. Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to watch
footage today of Plato, or Nietzsche during their lifetime? A hundred years
from now, it will be just as remarkable and important to have a cinematic
record of Derrida."
http://www.derridathemovie.com/

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 9:30 AM
Subject: Re: MDDM World-as-text


> MalignD wrote:
>
> > I don't think that any one critical position is ultimately
> > correct or right--I don't know what Rob or Otto would say--
>
> Yes, I would agree with that 100%. All critical positions, all
> interpretations, all perceptions/representations of the world, are
limited,
> partial. A shorthand way of making this point is through this idea of
> world-as-text, which does figure prominently and often in Pynchon's work.
I
> agree with Otto that Pynchon's work is highly critical of any logocentric
> notion which constructs the world in terms of this or that universal and
> inviolate "truth", of those human constructs which don't permit or respect
> alternate possibilities, worldviews, *texts*.
>
> I think Derrida has stated that his own philosophical ideas will indeed be
> superseded, something which he welcomes.
>
> "The only attitude (the only politics - judicial, medical, pedagogical and
> so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly,
> cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that
> is, an effective and thus transforming questioning."
>
> http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Derrida.html
>


> And I agree also with John that the historical breach between modernity
and
> postmodernity (that breach occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, with WWII,
the
> Holocaust, Hiroshima etc), is more tangible than the aesthetic slide or
> rupture or breakthrough from Modernism into Postmodernism. The only thing
> I'd add, and John made the point himself, is that art and theory, and the
> way that we respond to these, also were irrevocably changed by the events
of
> those two decades. Many artists and philosophers consciously repudiated
what
> had come before in their respective disciplines as not being sufficiently
> committed or strong enough to foresee or prevent such catastrophes and
such
> degradation of the human "spirit". In literary terms, that Eliot and Pound
> and Woolf stand largely on one side of the historical breach, and, say,
> Pynchon and Gaddis and, I don't know, Julia Kristeva, on the other side,
> seems to me to be self-evident, and a useful distinction to make, and one
> which has been usefully made by many theorists and commentators. With
> someone like Joyce, or Nabokov, or others whose work spans across the
> breach, I think there is a perceptible development, a change in attitude
or
> perception of the place or role of the artist and the work of art in
> society, of their own travails (manifesting often as an increased level of
> self-scrutiny in and through their "texts"), as a direct, though perhaps
> unstated or even subconscious, result of the terrible events of history
> which they bore witness to. The differences between _Ulysses_ and
_Finnegans
> Wake_ exemplify this contrast between literary modernism and literary
> postmodernism imo.
>
> I don't have a problem talking about postmodernity (society and culture
> since 1945), post-Modernism (art and literature produced since 1945), and
> postmodernism or the postmodern (a trans-temporal category which brings
> together an eclectic array of thinkers and artists - in literature, the
> Cervantes-Sterne-Melville-Joyce-Pynchon line is one example - as well as
> disparate stylistic tendencies, such as that Pynchonian hyper-realism in
> representing the patently "unreal" which Bandwraith alluded to), though I
> certainly don't assert that these are prescriptive categories or set in
> stone. I think they are useful as points of departure for thinking about,
> and discussing, art and culture, and Pynchon's work in particular.
>
> best
>
>

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