Trobriand Islanders

[Cometman]

Mr John Doe wrote:
> Hahahahaha.....the writer
>has no clue - 

you sound so sure.  I read the passage and it just sounded over my
head, or else a parody of jargon.  Thanks for actually working on it.

> Logocentric = essentially "word" or if you
>want, "speech" centered...something...so, so far
>something is word-centered...next we find that the
>Heisenberg principle is being analogized to something
>in or of language in some way.

I get,rather: "Pynchon's work refutes" the Heisenberg principle being
logocentrically equated to Schroedinger's Cat...
does that mean the actual cat itself (Ding an sich), or the famous
Paradox of the Cat?
The refutation of that equivalence is in accord with your reminder that
"physicists know that this rule does NOT
apply to large-scale entities such as people or even
popcorn" - and although Pynchon mentions, for instance, hipsters using
the term Critical Mass out of context, and although to some extent
literature involves a lot of playing with ideas suggested by (but not
rigorously proven by) new scientific notions, here the original author
of the notorious paragraph - I think - was saying that Pynchon is
taking a stand that the (metaphoric) indeterminacy of life as we
observe it DOES NOT indicate that at a given moment we are both alive
and dead until we measure it. 

>.what is the
>author imagining when he cokks up this comparison?

--- it is somewhat cokked up, I think...the part where it says "in
subsequent chapters" yet the introductory sentence said the theme
pervades all his work.

>That's the crucial issue...if you can't be held
>responsible to explain what you mean when you sling
>hip discipline-specific argot and specialist language
>around, then you can't be taken seriously

i'm sure i don't always want to be taken too seriously anyway, YMMV

>...then we have th wonderfull
>stinkball " ...a postdialectic paradigm that includes
>culture as a whole"..

postdialectic would be good, for my purposes.  That whole "thesis
antithesis synthesis" is way too adversarial for me, at least in its
first phases.  
But what is the next way to paradigmize in a progressive direction? 
(Using the term "post-" something would imply that the something's
insights have been absorbed and made standard practice)
Aha - include culture as a whole.  Holism.  Right-brain stuff.  "Try to
design something that way and have it work" said Franz Poekler
somewhere in response to Leni's impulses in that direction, didn't he?

>..sure it's not jus' a piece of a certain
>culture...or mebbe the aspects of dance of the
>culture, such as it is, of the Trobriand
>Islanders?....

What have you got against the Trobriand Islanders?  Is NATO going to
invade them next?  Is Kissinger en route to them to win another Nobel?

>wow...culture as a whole...what a
>concept...what are the rest of you picturing when that
>hollow notion zings past your visual field? I
>wonder....

Insofar as I take the paragraph seriously, I see a synaesthetic
representation of my gestalt which by virtue of my kinship with all
matter could include concepts of culture as a whole as a subset of that
greater fractal -- this is specifically post dialectic in that I don't
need to initially oppose anybody before arriving at a more meaningful
state of mind (-:

... at the end of the manifesto the writer went on to say
It 
>> could also be said that Pynchon suggests the use of
>> the subtextual  paradigm of 
>> consensus to modify reality. >>

well, heck, the subtextual paradigm of consensus PRE-dialectic meant
that your group would run into another group with the opposite idea,
and you'd have to fight it out before "growing your ideational
facility" - whereas POST-dialectic would be that your group, while
arriving at consensus, would incorporate the inevitablity of opposing
data into its consensus and be able to adapt without conflict; Karl
Popper, no, who was the big "Mr Paradigm" - Kuhn?

Okay, I didn't work any, um, subtextuality into that either.  And
"fatal flaw" was a lot more emphatic than the mere "refutation" I
posited.

- damn, it's getting late.  And the Oneirine is kicking in.

Was the manifesto a spoof?

- --- MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> <<The primary theme of the works of Pynchon is the
> fatal flaw, and subsequent 
> meaninglessness, of the Logocentric equivalence of
> the Heisenberg principle 
> and Shroedinger's cat. In subsequent chapters the
> subject is contextualised 
> into a postdialectic paradigm of context that
> includes culture as a whole.  It 
> could also be said that Pynchon suggests the use of
> the subtextual  paradigm of 
> consensus to modify reality. >>
> 
> Finally, someone who agrees with me.  The
> logocentric equivalence and the 
> postdialectic paradigm.  
> 
> I was beginning to think I was nuts ...