"Single Up All Lines"Re: The Beginnings of Infinity by David Deutsch

[alice wellintown]

Technological forces (systems of production for Marx) do not evolve
automatically in ages, Mechanic, Electric, Digital ...each one wiping
the previous age away and determining the character of the new age and
all its institutions. They evolve in lines tangled and fastened to
loose and fast fish. An historian who hopes to untangle these lines by
learning how they were cut into bits and bites will find himself like
Black Pip, a Castaway, not in Poe's malestrom, or in McLuhan's
electric whirlpool, but deeper still, where Catskill Eagles soar, down
where God's foot upon the peddle moves the loom and weaves the great
inscrutable tapestry unfathomable. There is your Narcissus. There is
the mirror of the sea!

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thanks much for this....yes, very worth encountering...I think I may......
>
> meanwhile, this seems like as good a place as any to put
> down another Pynchon-relevant McLuhan idea
>
> He stresses over and over, like a non-linear piece of music, that, in the Mechanic Age, which still exists massively
> in the Electric Age (until it wipes that away), is where the whole western world had to learn to
> deal with about everything one fragment at a time,after one fragment at a time....
>
> Piece by piece, bit by bit, all lines singled up.................
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Cc:
> Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 10:52 AM
> Subject: The Beginnings of Infinity by David Deutsch
>
> In the interest of knowing thy enemy (speaking as a Pynchonian) this guy is the supreme anti-est Luddite you are every going to want to meet.  Laszlo Jamf would approve. The goal is to see Nature gone for good. (only a slight exaggeration)
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html?_r=1&ref=books
>