Pornography, calculus, cinema, metaphor

[David Morris]

Of course all you say below is correct.  The Adam & Eve myth
symbolizes the advent of consciousness in mankind, self-awareness and
critical judgement, or in the terms of that GR passage, "Analysis."
So "Being" without "Analysis," that pure unmediated state before the
fall of Man, is unattainable, but many still seek it.  It is the state
that Slothrup attains when he becomes the naked and bearded Mr.
Natural (but what will he do when Winter comes?).  It's funny that the
word "analysis" (the origin of all pornographies in GR's world) is
also the word for what one does when laying on a Freudian couch.  Did
Freud believe it was possible to be healed of all repression?  I don't
think so.  GR is steeped in a reconsideration of Freud (and the issues
raised in your objection below) via Norman O. Brown's _Life Against
Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959)_.  I don't think
Pynchon wants you to "buy" anything (there is no solution), just to
contemplate it all...

David Morris

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