Pornography, calculus, cinema, metaphor

[Monte Davis]

> "This analytic legacy 
> has been handed down intact - it brought the technicians at 
> Peenmunde to peer at Askanian films of rocket flights, frame 
> by frame, delta-x and delta-y, flightless themselves... film 
> and calculus, both pornographies of flight."

> > "Form is henceforth divorced from matter.  n fact, matter 
> as a visible 
> > object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which 
> > form is shaped.

> They were moving into a world where places were being 
> homogenized, where a network of machines and the corporations 
> behind them were dispelling the independence of wilderness, 
> of remoteness, of local culture, a world that was experienced 
> more and more as information and images...

OK. While I have loved that passage in GR -- and the metaphorical structure
in which it's embedded -- as much and as  long as anyone, I gotta say it's
creaking under the load that gets piled on it.

The fundamental conceit is that a frame of movie film or a dt in calculus is
"pornographic" because it abstracts a snapshot from a continuum (implicitly
valorized), the way pornography abstracts more or less fetishized body parts
(or arousal, or orgasm) from a complete and interactive erotic experience
(implciitly valorized). That's a fascinating and fertile insight. And *in
the context of GR* -- where Askania high-speed cameras and the calculus of
trajectories and death-dealing rockets are brought together in artful ways,
ending in a movie theater in the final dt -- it is powerfully persuasive.

But when I put the book down and think about that implicit valorization,
things get more complicated, at least for me. I wonder: I know what good
erotic experience is, and will take it over pornography every time I get the
choice... but what *is* that holistic, unmediated experience of flight that
is its counterpart in this metaphor? I'm  not a bird or butterfly or bat,
and neither is Pynchon. It is not self-evident that an Askania film is
inherently a more "pornographic" representation of flight than, say, Ode to
a Skylark. (If you look closely, that rascal Shelley made his poem out of
<gasp> discrete WORDS!)

As an old fan of Kenneth Burke and Clifford Geertz, I take it for granted
that we are symbolic to our bones, that we have lived in a second-hand world
of culture and language and memory since long, long before there was
mathematics or technology... that in fact, that's what it is to be human. So
when Solnit starts her lament, or Holmes wields his sarcasm (which she seems
to miss entirely), I hear Wordsworth's "we murder to dissect," I hear Keats'
"unweaving the rainbow" -- and I'm not buying. 

I think our alienation from Nature or Being or (insert your favorite
valorized _ding an sich_ here...) began long, long before the Romantics,
long before technology or capitalism or agriculture. I think it began when
life started modeling the universe in lumps of fibrous jelly -- so at this
late date, it's kind of silly to run around discovering again and again:
"OMG! This (and this, and this) is just... just... oh, I can hardly bear
it... a *representation* of the Real Thing!"

(I think I just blew my chance at an endowed chair in postmodern cultural
studies. I'll live.)