Trobriand Islanders

[John Doe]

umm...well..yeah...I got the thrust that Pynchon
himself is not maintaining that the analogy is valid;
frankly, I'd be very surprised if we asked him in
person what he thinks of such an analogy and he
replied that he did thinks it's just ducky...what I
was having fun with is trying to 'make sense' of what
the article's author THOUGHT he had in mind, phrase by
phrase, not in toto....if I had to put my money where
my mouth is, I'd bet lotsa dough that pynchon doesn't
think much of the broader assumptions of Derridean
critical theory...it's replete with passages like the
one excerpted;the authore isn't reeeeerallly thinking
- he's just concatenating cool pseudo-concepts that
don't hang on any clearly developed ideas " ....these
Heideggerian tranforms of the lastly logocentric
Dasein in Clippinger's text betray Foucauldian
resonances of a total-culture matrix that struggles to
excise itself - via the reflexive parole of the
character's dialogue - from the Jamesian prescripted
incarceration by verbality, and hence the ellision of
any gender-wrought Lacanian extrusion of apolitical
'personas' is obvious..."like the preceding, which I
just made up off the top of my head, and which,
inceidentally, is similar in essence to the famous
Sokal's Hoax paper he submitted to a Lit Crit journal
which fooled the publishers into believing he actually
meant any of the arbitrary blather in that
paper....same shit...'Lacanian extrusion of apolitical
personas' or 'Foucauldian resonances' are about as
meaningfull as Twinkie aircraft carrier overshoe word
association football....

--- Cometman <cometman_98 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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 ...
> 
> 
> 



	
		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com