Lit Crit 2007 [Postmodern Blowback]

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Has anyone read anything by Kathy Acker, and, if so, what do you recommend?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: 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