photography

[Robert Mahnke]

Michael Berube's humble blog (http://www.michaelberube.com) was a holy site
in left blogosphere until he recently decided to hang up his blogging spurs
and ride some other horse, but I certainly would appreciate his ideas more
if they were translated into English.

Oddly, he doesn't include his Pynchon book (which was, I believe, his
dissertation) in the covers of his books pictured on his site.  Apropos of
not much, Chris Clarke translated Berube's most recent book into a graphic
novel.  Some explanation is here:

http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/whats_liberal_about_the_liberal
_arts1/

and the graphic novel is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/cclarke3/FileSharing6.htmlhttp://homepage.mac.com/cc
larke3/FileSharing6.html



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Dave Monroe
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 11:22 AM
To: Tore Rye Andersen
Cc: JBAILEY at theage.com.au; pynchon-l at waste.org; markekohut at yahoo.com
Subject: Re: photography

>From Micahel Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992)
...

Dwight Eddins has even suggested there is an antidote to pornographies
of flight, for "when we integrate, we return to integrity, to all that
the original, unbroken arc means by way of momentary grace, momentary
freedom, and the natural triumph of gravity" ([The Gnostic Pynchon]
1983, 78).  But this "reintegration" is itself an already performed
illusion, already part of the structure of film and calculus: both are
forms of dismemberment and reconstitution which are reassembled into
illusions of unity--in this case, unifie and continuous motion.  For
as Pynchon writes elsewhere in Gravity's Rainbow, the pornography of
film and calculus is not that they carve up originary unities, but
that they feign such unities: "There has been this strange connection
between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to
counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries--since Leibniz, in
the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up
the trajectory of cannonballs through the air" (GR 407).  (MF/CC
247-8)

In my reconstruction, then, "pornography" in Gravity's Rainbow
describes a regressive anamnesia that recreates illusory, prelapsarian
(or preliguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of dismemberment
and reconfiguration; and since nostalgia itself works by much the same
dynamic, Pynchon's "pornography" gives us fresh purchase on the
cultural critique of nostalgia as well.  His novel offers us a
veritable miscellany of macropolitical nostalgia and fantasied
"restoration" ... (MF/CC 248)

... the "falsity" of Pynchonian pornographies lies not in their
rituals of dismemberment but in their fetishistic reassemblies, not in
their cutting up of organic (w)holes but in their recomposition of
inorganic wholes that fetishize the very idea of organic wholes.  At
the very least, we should be wary of endorsing the book's various
depictions of nostalgia, return, "Diasporas running backwards" (GR
737); ideally, we should also be wary of approaching Gravity's Rainbow
as if fragmentation were a problem to be solved by critical
intervention ... (MF/CC 251)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50144