suggestions for col49 and theory of systems

[Dave Monroe]

By the way, Philipp, you, anyone familiar with ...

Siegert, Bernhard.  Relais: Geschicke der Literatur
   als Epoche der Post, 1751-1913.  Berlin: Brinkmann
   und Bose, 1999.

_________.  Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the
   Postal System.  Trans. Kevin Repp.  Stanford:
   Stanford UP, 1999.

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=3236%203238%20

http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/kulturtechniken/personen/siegert/siegert.html

"Someone who knew that America is a legacy, something
to be pased along, has written all this down much
better than the writer of these pages might have done;
hence, The Crying of Lot 49 could not possibly become
the object of this study.  Literay scholarship
conducted as the analysis of media and discourse must
come to a halt before the researches of Oedipa Maas
because those researches are its own.  The empire is a
postal system, and that empire is war....  The empire
of posted objects, the world that is everything that
is the case, is distorted, inetrrupted, irreducibly
nonactual: it is metaphorical.  The name of the
'metaphoric catastrophe' is Tristero...." (pp. 2-3)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59042

Also ...

"In order to curb extensive corruption in th imperial
postal system, which always was tantamount to
conspiracy against the empire, Diocletian created an
imperial secret service, the scola agentum in rebus,
and placed the postal administration under its
authority.  Eventually, under Theodosius and Honorius,
the use of the postal system by private persons was
even punished by death.  Since the network of the
cursus publicus was coextensive with the orbis
terrarum, banishment to Pontus meant being transported
beyond the limes of the world for Ovid.  While the
Tristia are laments over the loss of postal
connections, the Epistulae ex Ponto use the medium of
literature to decry the catastrophe in the postal
system.
   "Postal systems are instrumenta regni."  (pp. 6-7)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58991

And, on the V-mail in Gravity's Rainbow ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0101&msg=52671

And see as well ...

Bauhaus Universität Leipzig
Wintersemester 2003/04

Geschichte und Theorie der Kulturtechniken
Hauptseminar Prof. Dr. Bernhard Siegert

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0501&msg=95499

Bernhard Siegert:
Maxwell und Faschoda
Pynchons Enden der Geschichte

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0404&msg=90282

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