Pynchon and fascism

[David Morris]

WOW.

Terrance,

Thank you for your best post here in a long time.  I'd just about gone numb
from the recent "world as text" mind-short (not to mention endless endless
endless explications).  I'm sure you two both know the course of this argument,
but I don't care.  Call me a redneck if you want.  I can read Pynchon quite
well without any of this.  Better without it IMHO.  This theory stuff seems
made to be a hammer fashioned to nail a claim to the wind.

David Morris

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> Paul Nightingale wrote:
> > 
> > Thanks to everyone making me work here.
> > 
> > On analysis ... I think the term would be textual analysis, bearing in
> > mind the way 'text' includes the relationship between words-on-the-page
> > and (a) what is elsewhere called context and (b) the act of reading.
> > I've mentioned P's reading of a reading in the "O's intentions" passage.
> > His writing in that passage could've been designed (I'm not trying to
> > second-guess him) as an illustration of Derrida's point that nothing is
> > outside the text. To say the real world (material actuality) is out
> > there somewhere is one thing; but the moment you think or write about
> > it, that real world is implicated in the text.
> 
> every text is the work of an author. the author can, however, be
> considered as separate from the text. since you have been talking about
> the internal determinates of the text, you are also talking about the
> author as presented by the text itself.  the text may present itself as
> the work of an author quite different from actual author of the text.
> but in any case, this authorial voice will be present throughout the
> text as determining its approach or context or point of view or
> perspective. the way in which the text presents its own authorship is
> what I call the Perspective of the text. 
> 
> every text has not only a Perspective, but a Perspective on something.
> that on which any particular text has a Perspective  is its subject
> matter, and that on which texts in general have a Perspective is
> Reality. 
> 
> Again, What kind of fiction is the Foreword? 
> 
> no reply. 
> 
> Again, the text's interpretation of the subject is its Reality. 
> 
> even fictional texts present a fictional reality, and this fictional
> reality admits of the same variations as non-fictional reality. the
> distinction presented between the reality presented by fiction and by
> non-fiction is therefore not essential here, but is a subsequent
> distinction made within one or another conception of the real. 
> 
> Reality, like the author, can be considered as external to the text, but
> since you are working (working hard while I'm hardly working) in a
> semantic  [French sémantique, from Greek semantikos, significant, from
> semantos, marked, from semainein, seman-, to signify, from sema, sign]
> context I think what you are looking for is Reality as presented in the
> text. in the semantic context all realities are realities presented in
> texts. As I said previously, if a more technical term is required, we
> can call the reality signified by the text the Signification of the
> text. 
> 
> the reality presented in the text is its interpretation of the subject
> matter. 
> 
> The subject could be something real big, like KNOWING, for example. 
> 
> How do we know? 
> 
> Again, it all go back to the Greeks? 
> 
> Knowing, Being, Meaning. 
> 
> Turn, Turn, Turn, being knowing and time and there is a time for every
> question lifted and dropped on my saw horses bending my sore knees and
> swing your hammer, Paul, in the morning. 
> 
> Now if I had a hammer
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > That is how I read (interpret?) jbor's paragraph about where the text
> > starts. In a sense it never starts and never ends, and when I said the
> > model I offered was a starting-point I didn't mean there was nothing
> > that pre-existed it in terms of reading. Call it an intervention as
> > opposed to starting-point.
> > 
> > However, Foucault does distinguish between origins and historical
> > beginnings: "What is found at the historical beginning of things is not
> > the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other
> > things. It is disparity." I suppose that "dissension" or "disparity"
> > among things is where I find my reading obsession with oppositions.
> > 
> > The 'thing' in question might be a concept like fascism, or the kind of
> > behaviour we label fascist, or the way the term is used, or the way
> > behaviour/usage changes etc. I think P writes in such a way as to
> > highlight, not so much the way such meanings come about, but rather that
> > 'we' are always implicated in such processes ... what I mean when I say
> > he's asking how we know what we know.


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