Lit Crit 2007 [Postmodern Blowback]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Thanks for all your comments, links, usw. All the talk about mirroring, 
representation, the alchemical potential of photography, all this applies 
to AtD in spades [in Tarot, Spades transmute into swords, representing 
air and the intellect in a rather Apollonian fashion]. This link is 
helpful—at the very least easily applicable to Pynchon's writing:

     Other than Postmodern?--Foucault, Pynchon,
     Hybridity, Ethics

     Frank Palmeri
     University of Miami
     fpalmeri at miami.edu

     © 2001 Frank Palmeri.
     All rights reserved.

     . . . .postmodernism encompasses a set of concerns and
     formal operations--including a frequent use of irony, satire,
     and pastiche, an interest in the layering of historical
     interpretations, and a strong paranoid strand--while also
     signifying the period from the mid-sixties until perhaps the
     present when most, but not necessarily all, of these features
     have been prominent. For the purposes of the argument here, I
     will focus on the significant role played in many postmodern
     works by paranoid visions of history as controlled by powerful
     but nameless forces or conspirators. As Leo Braudy has pointed
     out, such visions inform the novels of Pynchon, Mailer, and
     Heller, and we might add films such as The Conversation (1974),
     and television series such as The Prisoner (1968). To such a
     list, Patrick O'Donnell and Timothy Melley have added works by
     Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick,
     Joseph McElroy, and Ishmael Reed. . . .

     . . . .High postmodern works reveal both an anxious
     apprehension of a newly realized and effective system of power
     and knowledge (beyond traditional religions or nation-states),
     impossible even to comprehend in its totality, but also a
     subversive, even parodic skepticism about such phenomena--
     both a fascination with and a satiric skepticism of paranoia. 
     Lyotard's principal argument about postmodernism is borne out, 
     if qualified, by such a characteristic juxtaposition of opposed
     attitudes. Hutcheon argues throughout her book that
     postmodernism is paradoxical in just this way: it makes use of
     the forms, systems, and master narratives that it also undercuts
     by means of ubiquitous parody (22-36, 46, 116). As I understand
     it, then, a crucial feature of high postmodernism is its
     juxtaposition of paranoia about controlling systems of thought
     and action with a skeptical resistance to paranoia that can
     range from the wildly anarchic to the bleakly comic.[2]

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1palmeri.txt

This essay by Jean Baudrillard has many lines that can apply to "Against the 
Day." One must seriously wonder if Our Besotted Author is deliberately 
imposing self-consciously postmodern effects [too much time in front of 
"The Simpsons", perhaps?] in Against the Day. Someone somewhere else 
[an early review, as I recall] points out how AtD is often a Parody of Pynchon. 

Simulacra and Simulations
 
from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 
ed. Mark Poster 
(Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), 
pp.166-184.

          If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation 
          the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire 
          draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering 
          the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map 
          becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible 
          in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, 
          bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, 
          returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double 
          ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then 
          have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete 
          charm of second-order simulacra. 1

          Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror 
          or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a 
          referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a 
          real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer 
          precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that 
          precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that 
          engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it 
          would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the 
          map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here 
          and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, 
          but our own. The desert of the real itself. . . .

. . . .and I believe this has a bit to do with the "deserts of the real" found 
in 'Against the Day', journeys down into and through the sands in search of 
Shambhala. Perhaps even more on-point are the footnotes to the first 
paragraph—what with the "witch's trick" of photographic reproduction having 
an extraordinarly high profile in AtD:

          1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting 
          foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like 
          a witch's trick - and more generally before any technical apparatus, 
          which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin 
          to the uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery 
          at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be 
          detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced 
          at will (cf. The Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image 
          of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the 
          intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind 
          of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image 
          in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, 
          who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus 
          secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of 
          technique, McLuhan) and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted 
          -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the 
          world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes 
          something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: 
          simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is 
          still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, 
          of control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive 
          statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation 
          of black image.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

     Glenn Scheper
     What thinking's hot? 400 papers. Lots of code, map, metaphor...

Here's another pointer to a po-mo take on concepts circulating throughout AtD:

     Andrea Albrecht, 
     “Literary and Philosophical Negotiations of 
     Maps and Codes: Heinrich Hertz, Ernst Cassirer, 
     Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil”

     From a mathematical point of view coding is based on the concept 
     of a “map”, which associates to a set of objects other objects called 
     images. For example, a scientific model can be considered as a 
     map which encodes empirical facts in formulae. While premodern 
     scientists thought that science strives to imitate and copy nature, 
     modern scientists like Heinrich Hertz argued, that scientific images 
     need not resemble the empirical facts, just as an encoded message 
     bears no resemblance to the original.

     This modern concept of mapping quickly became a ferment within 
     cultural theory and literature: Referring to Hertz’ analysis, Ernst 
     Cassirer argued in “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” that 
     mathematical and non-mathematical language share a 
     common semiotic ground which gives insight to the symbolic 
     character of human speech. Following this Neokantian proposal, 
     Walter Benjamin and Robert Musil studied semiotic systems which 
     do not represent reality in a mimetic way, but provide “images 
     without resemblance” (“Bildsein ohne Ähnlichkeit”) or “non-
     sensual resemblance” (“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit”). While 
     Benjamin’s philosophical writings focused on the differences 
     between mathematical and lingual codes, Musil used in his 
     novel The Man Without Qualities mapping as a formative 
     concept for his theory of emotions.

     Analyzing these examples, the paper shows how the rigorous 
     mathematical concept of maps penetrated the exact sciences 
     around 1900, found its way into literature and philosophy, and 
     became a fruitful paradigm for an interdisciplinary reflexion of 
     representation and language. 

     andrea.albrecht at gmail.com
     Dr. Andrea Albrecht (German Dept., UC Berkeley)
     http://www.slsa07.com/proposals.html

     Kai Frederik Lorentzen:

     [from Kai's cited link, "Gilles Deleuze on film, in 
     Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon", Adrian Chan]:

     Deleuze describes these cinematic worlds as crystals, each having 
     a kind of genetic purity, or organizational structure. What grabbed 
     my attention were the numerous similarities between the role Iceland 
     Spar plays in the book and this description of the crystal image. 
     The notion that the characters have an actual and virtual image 
     corresponds with the book's constant population of ghosts, the 
     doubling, the bilocations, deja vus, and so on. Even the references 
     here to mirrors, and the Venetian mirror and multi-sided mirors is 
     particularly weird. The Serpent, postcard, Augustinian Illumination 
     are even mentioned! 

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/2007/01/gilles-deleuze-on-film-in-against-day.html