acker waz Re: Lit Crit 2007 [Postmodern Blowback]

[Charles Baldwin]

I've read Acker and teach her frequently (as well as Pynchon, sometimes
in the same course). For p-listers, I'd say _Empire of the Senseless_ 
or _Don Quixote. These to me resonate most clearly with TRP's work. That
being said, in general I'm not sure that I see Acker in relation to
Pynchon - well, Acker saw literary precursors as Burroughs, Ballard to a
degree, surrealist, Sade, others, so there'd be ways of going from those
references to TRP, but it would take some work.

The Grove selections of essentials is ok but probably better to try a
single work. 

It's wonderful challenging stuff. 

There's a decent interview from 1988 on the Dalkey Archive site that
gives some intro and context for Acker.

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_acker.html


Sandy Baldwin
West Virginia University
Associate Professor of English
Director of the Center for Literary Computing
www.clc.wvu.edu

url=www.as.wvu.edu/~sbaldwin
skype=sandy.baldwin88

>>> Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 09/22/07 8:56 AM >>>
Her Don Quixote is thought to be the 'best" or most ambitious anyway,
I've heard.
  Can't argue against starting with Great Expectations as recommended
but you have learned
  there is an "Essential Kathy Acker" from Grove?
   
  and at least another work like this one:                     17.     
                                  Interpreting Radical Metaphor in the
Experimental Fictions of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon and Kathy
Acker (Studies in Comparative Literature, 43) by Victoria De Zwaan
(Hardcover - Feb 2002)    Buy new: $99.95    3 Used & new from $99.95

kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
  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 
>helpfulâ€*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 
>
> Â* 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 
>paragraphâ€*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 Hertzâ€* 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 Ã*hnlichkeit†) or “non-
> sensual resemblance† (“unsinnliche Ã*hnlichkeit†). While 
> Benjaminâ€*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





       
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