AtDDtA(15): A Space No Longer Entirely Readable

[Dave Monroe]

  "Inside the campus athletic pavilion, a vast dormitory space had
been created, aisled and numbered, accessible by way of complicated
registering procedures and color-coded tickets of identification....
After lights-out, a space no longer readable ..." (AtD, Pt. II, p.
408)


>From Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), Ch. 1, "The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism," pp. 1-54 ...

I am proposing the motion that we are here in the presence of
something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is
that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space,
have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in
the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the
subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this
new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual
habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space
of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore-like many of the
other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks stands
as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our
sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps
ultimately impossible, dimensions.

[...]

.. this latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace has finally
succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body
to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually,
and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. And
I have already suggested that this alarming disjunction point between
the body and its built environment--which is to the initial
bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of space craft
are to those of the automobile--can itself stand as the symbol and
analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our
minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and
decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught
as individual subjects. (pp. 38-9)

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/authors/jameson/postmod6.html

http://www.dukeupress.edu/

And note as well those "telegraphic messages" (e-mail?) "circulated"
by "soft-voiced pages," that "mysterious timetable and system of menu
changes" (browser?), and the "semi-secret flights of stairs," "softly
carpeted conduits," (circuits?) and that "sequence of doors and
hallways" (the internet?) (AtD, Pt. II, p. 408) ...

A "great global multinational and decentered communicational network,"
indeed ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet


"ukulelists playing and singing in the dark"

ukulele
26; The ukulele, sometimes spelled ukelele (particularly in the UK) or
uke, is a chordophone classified as a plucked lute; it is a subset of
the guitar family of instruments, generally with four strings or four
courses of strings; 323; 450; 550; 551; 554; 566; 678; 684; 866;

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=U

Cf. ...

"Since their Hawaiian escapades a few years previous (The Chums of
Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna), Miles had become an
enthusiatic ukulelist ..." (p. 15)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114445

And thanks again, Robin ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114517

Ukuleles also appear in Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason &
Dixon. According to Jules Siegel's article, "Who is Thomas Pynchon,
and why did he take off with my wife?", Pynchon himself played the
ukulele in college.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25#Page_15