Atdtda29: You really must come to Trieste, 808-812

[Paul Nightingale]

[808.7-13] "Who? Not that kind old gentleman."

"Not Habsburgs exactly. Prussophiles, I suppose is what I men. Lovers of
might. They want to preside over the end of the world. But now you really
must come to Trieste."

She laughed. "Appropriate. Here they call it a Jewish city."

"Oh in Vienna," Cyprian replied, "they think Shanghai is a Jewish city."

"Well, actually ..." she began.


But the sentence is never finished (Pynchon Wiki's speculations
notwithstanding). When next we meet Yashmeen, following Cyprian's meeting
with Ratty in Graz, she is en route to Trieste ...


[811.1-3] Leaving the Sudbahn, she gazed backward at iron convergences and
receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the
complete ensemble of "free choices" that define the course of a human life.


Cf. Foucault's take on power and free will:


When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions
of others, when one characterises these actions as the government of men by
other men--in the broadest sense of the term--one includes an important
element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only
insofar as they are "free". By this we mean individual or collective
subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds
of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behaviour are available.
When the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relationship of
power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains, only
when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape. (In this case
it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently,
there is not a face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom as mutually
exclusive facts (freedom disappearing everywhere power is exercised) but a
much more complicated interplay. In this game, freedom may well appear as
the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition,
since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent
support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance power would be
equivalent to a physical determination).

The power relationship and freedom's refusal to submit cannot therefore be
separated.


From: Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power" in Power, Essential Works Vol
3, James D Faubion ed, Penguin, 2002, 341-342.


Consider Weber's definition of action as being:


... human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it
as subjectively meaningful: the behaviour may be either internal or
external, and may consist in the agent's doing something, omitting to do
something, or having something done to him. By 'social' action is meant an
action in which the meaning intended by the agent or agents involves a
relation to another person's behaviour and in which that relation determines
the way in which the action proceeds.


From: Max Weber, Selections in Translation, WG Runciman ed, Cambridge UP,
1978, 7.


And then Cyprian, having left Theign and Venice behind:


[812.21-23] But as his own train headed across the Mestre bridge, bound for
Trieste, all he could consider with any clarity was Yashmeen, dreading what
he was now obliged to tell her.