VLVL2 (15): But Headed Where?

[Dave Monroe]

"What was happening to him?  He had to believe that he
was different, even as the months began to creep
by--that his release really was in the pipeline, that
he really wouldn't be inside for the rest of his life,
here along these ever-lengthening, ever-branching
corridors, with progressively obsolete wall maps of
the traffic system posted beneath the lights he knew,
though staff never admitted it, with lower-wattage
bulbs.  As his program went on,he gathered a charge of
anxiety that one day, as he looked in the mirror,
discharged in a timeless crystalline episode in which
both man and image understood that the only thing in
the pipeline anymore was Hector--heading straight down
it with only the one, call it less than one, degree of
freedom, and no way to get out.  But headed where? 
What kind of 'outside world' could they be
rehabilitating him for?  'You'll like it, Hector,'
they kept assuring him, even when he didn't ask." (VL,
Ch. 15, p. 336)


"obsolete wall maps"

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping - a pedagogical
political culture which seeks to endow the individual
subject with some new heightened sense of its place in
the global system - will necessarily have to respect
this now enormously complex representational dialectic
and invent radically new forms in order to do it
justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a
return to some older kind of machinery, some older and
more transparent national space, or some more
traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic
enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at
all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism,
that is to say, to its fundamental object - the world
space of multinational capital - at the same time at
which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet
unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in
which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as
individual and collective subjects and regain a
capacity to act and struggle which is at present
neutralised by our spatial as well as our social
confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if
there ever is any, will have as its vocation the
invention and projection of a global cognitive
mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm


"lower-wattage bulbs"

Byron the Bulb
"a bulb over his head burning all night long. He
dreamed that the bulb was a representative of
Weissmann, a creature whose bright filament was its
soul" 426-27; "a theatre marquee whose sentient bulbs
may have looked on [...] witnesses to grave and
historical encounters" 464; "The Story of" 647-55;
"Someday he will know everything, and be just as
impotent as before" 654; "electrical tidal wave" 665;
"young Jack may have had one of them Immortal
Lightbulbs then go on overhead" 688; screwed into
Gustav's kazoo hashpipe, 745

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/b.html#byron


"degree of freedom"

That measure of variability which merely expresses the
number of options available within a variable or
space. In a system with N states the degree of freedom
is N....

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/DEGREE_FREED.html


"'outside world'"

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the
double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no
longer that of a territory, a referential being or a
substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory
no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory
- precession of simulacra - it is the map that
engenders the territory and if we were to revive the
fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds
are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and
not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in
the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire,
but our own. The desert of the real itself.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html



	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs  
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover