VLVL2(3): The Tostada Procedure

[Dave Monroe]

"He ordered the Health Food Enchilada Special and
Hector had the soup of the day, cream of zucchini, and
the vegetarian tostada, which upon its arrival he
began to take apart piece by piece and reassemble as
something else Zoyd could not identify but which
seemed to hold meaning for Hector.
   "'Lookit that, lookit your food, Hector, what have
you done?'
   "'At last I'm not droppín it all over the place,
includín my shirt, like I was out in some parkín
lot.'"  (VL, Ch. 3, p. 25)

"Grinning--a stretched and terrible face.  It was the
closest Hector got to feeling sorry for himself, this
suggestion he liked to put out that among the fallen,
he had fallen further than most, not in distance alone
but also in the quality of descent having begun long
ago concentrated and graceful as a sky diver but--the
tostada procedure was minor evidence--he growing less
professional the longer he fell, while his skills as a
field man depreciated."  (VL, Ch. 3, p. 29)

"fallen" = preterite?  tragic?  But note as well ...


"to take apart piece by piece and reassemble"

Main Entry: anal·y·sis 
Pronunciation: &-'na-l&-s&s
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural anal·y·ses  /-"sEz/
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, from analyein to
break up, from ana- + lyein to loosen -- more at LOSE
Date: 1581
1 : separation of a whole into its component parts
2 a : the identification or separation of ingredients
of a substance b : a statement of the constituents of
a mixture
3 a : proof of a mathematical proposition by assuming
the result and deducing a valid statement by a series
of reversible steps b (1) : a branch of mathematics
concerned mainly with functions and limits (2) :
CALCULUS 1b
4 a : an examination of a complex, its elements, and
their relations b : a statement of such an analysis
5 a : a method in philosophy of resolving complex
expressions into simpler or more basic ones b :
clarification of an expression by an elucidation of
its use in discourse
6 : the use of function words instead of inflectional
forms as a characteristic device of a language
7 : PSYCHOANALYSIS

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

Cf. ...

"There has been this strange connection between the
German mind and the rapid flashing of successive
stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two
centuries since Leibniz, in the process of inventing
calculus, used the same approach to break up the
trajectories of cannonballs through the air."  (GR,
Pt. III, pp. 406-7)

   "Three hundred years ago mathematicians were
learning to break the cannonball's 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 midges galloped
upstairs 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 brough the technicians at
Peenemunde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket
flights, frame by frame, delta-x by delta-y,
flightless themselves ... film and calculus, both
pornographies of flight." (GR, Pt. III, p. 523)

>From Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers:
Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992) ...

"Dwight Eddins has even suggested there is an antidote
to pornographies of flight, for 'when we integrate, we
return to integrity, to all that the original,
unbroken arc means by way of momentary grace,
momentary
freedom, and the natural triumph of gravity' ([The
Gnostic Pynchon] 1983, 78).  But this 'reintegration'
is itself an already performed illusion, already part
of the structure of film and calculus: both are forms
of dismemberment and reconstitution which are
reassembled into illusions of unity--in this case,
unified and continuous motion.  For as Pynchon writes
elsewhere in Gravity's Rainbow, the pornography of
film
and calculus is not that they carve up originary
unities, but that they feign such unities: 'There has
been this strange connection between the German mind
and the rapid flashing of successive stills to
counterfeit movement, for at least two
centuries--since Leibniz, in the process of inventing
calculus, used the same approach to break up the
trajectory of
cannonballs through the air' (GR 407).
   "In my reconstruction, then, 'pornography' in
Gravity's Rainbow describes a regressive anamnesia
that recreates illusory, prelapsarian (or
preliguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of
dismemberment and reconfiguration; and since nostalgia
itself works by much the same dynamic, Pynchon's
'pornography' gives us fresh purchase on the cultural
critique of nostalgia as well.  His novel offers us a
veritable miscellany of macropolitical nostalgia and
fantasied 'restoration': in its American version, the
myth of the virgin land ...." (pp. 247-9)

"... the 'falsity' of Pynchonian pornographies lies
not in their rituals of dismemberment but in their
fetishistic reassemblies, not in their cutting up of
organic (w)holes but in their recomposition of
inorganic wholes that fetishize the very idea of
organic wholes.  At the very least, we should be wary
of endorsing the book's various depictions of
nostalgia, return, 'Diasporas running backwards' (GR
737); ideally, we should also be wary of approaching
Gravity's Rainbow as if fragmentation were a problem
to be solved by critical intervention ..." (p. 251)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50144&sort=date

And see as well ...

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch1.htm

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch2.htm

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch3.htm

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch4.htm

In the novel Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon uses
the term "pornography" to denote modes of
representation and reproduction which fragment
continuous experience into discrete, quantifiable,
replicable units -- modes of representation/
reproduction which simulate fluid movement while
relying upon discontinuous, static elements. Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow focuses chiefly upon two specific
varieties of such "pornography": calculus and film. It
is clear, though, that Pynchon's definition of
"pornography" would apply equally well to digital
information processing (or, indeed, to any mode of
representation which can be mechanically reproduced).
Like a movie, which approximates continuous motion by
speedily scrolling through a series of discontinuous
static images, and like pornography, which relies upon
the dismantling of a (usually female) body, digital
technology splinters unified experience into an array
of pixels, samples, or bits. 

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/porn.htm

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/top.html

The societal effects of the technological exhumation
and circulation of dead matter are reinforced by the
implementation of mathematical "Analysis" in Gravity's
Rainbow. Whereas Rocketry components are derived from
the inorganic chemistry of the benzene ring, the
Rocket's flight trajectory is made possible by the
"analytic legacy" emanating from the calculus of
Leibniz. However, calculus (and film) are "flightless
themselves" and are instead "pornographies of flight."
In expressing the desire for real and living flight,
Leibniz's dream of reducing the world to the ones and
zeroes of binary code actually produces a simulation
or pornography of flight.

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/spencer24.htm

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