Morally Neutral Knowledge (was: Frayn�s �Copenhagen�

[David Morris]

sending from this adress beacuse my hotmail is down at the moment:

>From: Bandwraith at aol.com
>
>David Morris wrote:
>>In GR Pynchon calls the scientific method (with the stand-in for that concept
being film/calculus dissection of life's continuous flow) a "pornography," a
term that is clearly not neutral.  But what are the implications of that
judgmental term on the nature of man and knowledge
>
>Do you recall where that passage was? I would like to review it's context.

P. 567

"So Slothrop is borne, afloat on the water-leas.  Like signals set out for lost
travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter
but won't interpret, not anymore.  The most persistent of these, which seem to
show up at the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so
many of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely
_wet_ gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low
horizons.  They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis.  Three
hundred years ago mathemeticians were learning to break the canonballs rise and
fall into stairsteps of range and height, delta-x and delta-y, allowing them to
grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking
midgets galloped up stairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet
growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound.  This analytic legacy has
been handed down intact - it brought the technicians at Peenmunde to peer at
Askanian films of rocket flights, frame by frame, delta-x and delta-y,
flightless themselves... film and calculus, both pornographies of flight."

And here was my take on this passage way back in my P-list Spring:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0005&msg=45798&keywords=Muybridge

Pornography akin to that by Eadweard Muybridge?
http://masters-of-photography.com/M/muybridge/muybridge_ascending_stairs_full.html

Slothrop has shut down Analysis.  For him it has become “pornography.”  But for
the rest of us such a finding that off-switch  is nearly impossible, at least
in the waking state.  The most annoying and endless round of questions a child
asks begins with a “why” and continues with another “why” in response to each
answer.  Every child has done it.

Has Slothrop surpassed Kute Korrespondences?  Has he gotten past Paranoia? 
Contrary to “a knotting into,” Slothrop’s path in the Zone seems to have been a
progressive disentanglement from all plots and allegiances.  His allegiance to
his own “identity,” especially that of his nationality, has been hard to break,
but that too seems to be waning.

So, is Slothrop moving past Analysis into another mode, and if so, what is it? 
Anti-paranoia?  I’m not sure if that’s it.  I’d call it the “Unfiltered
Experience,” which might be akin to “Nirvana,” if one can handle it.  Is
Slothrop approaching the Buddha?

Try not to think about it.
David Morris





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