VLVL2 The Failure of Analysis

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

It's pretty clear no matter what one's overall impression
of events that occurred, or climaxed, in "the sixties" that
it was a watershed- long time coming, long time gone. It 
was not just political and social, of course, but epistem-
ological, cutting across all areas of culture, including the
scientific ways of knowing. 

This change was so extensive that it outstripped even the
ways of measuring and describing change itself and new
methods of gauging "where we are" at any given moment
were required. The old perspectives seemed to fail. A good
example of that would be the publication of GR, which none
the characters in the present novel seem lucky enough to
have stumbled upon, although the Pisk sisters probably at
least glanced at it, after the Oregon commune fizzled.

Kuhn's criteria for detecting a "Scientific Revolution," in
retrospect, seems also to have been inadequate to detect
and/or classify, i.e., analyze the magnitude of change. There
seemed to have been a failure of objectivity, if that can be
considered as consenually agreed upon ways of knowing.

During such periods, when Objectivity itself fails, the older
dispensations, dwarfed by the magnitude of what they are
in the midst of, may, paradoxically, fail to register, or, more
likely, decide that what is happening is only a minor ripple.
By Kuhn's criteria, the much popularized "new science" of chaos
and complexity, might be dismissed as a "false revolution."

The theme of "false revolution" I think, is an important one in
Vineland, but especially in the context of older perspectives
being unable to cope with the magnitude of change of which they
themselves are a part.

respectfully