Pornography, calculus, cinema, metaphor

[David Casseres]

Thanks for that, Monte, and yes.

Pornography is a terrifying and fascinating thing in itself; witness the
Anubis sequence in GR and Pynchon's sermon to the audience at the end of it.

But it's not a good approach to metaphor, really.  It needs the body parts,
the fluids, the outcries and heavy breathing, or it doesn't work.

On 3/7/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > "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.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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