Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

[Mark Kohut]

Well, since we are going back and forth, this more than answers my question but perhaps does not yet answer it, dunno. I thought the question referring to the quote about 'the language of nature' proved the quote right quite clearly when applied to Mason & Dixon's work. With, of course, lots of other meanings to their work and that book. Therefore as "original sin", it isn't. 
 
One clue to me was no hint of satire about their work. Not so true of the math--most of?--the math in AtD, it seems to me.
 
And I did rescind my use of the phrase "mechanization of nature" but replaced it with a theme we all had a consensus on---the rationalization
of the world ala Weber. This theme pervades his work lifelong, we all might agree, and is explicitly stated in AtD. 
 
My working notion is that TRP embodies in the text values judging when things go, or are, "wrong"--among much else. Savage satire is one way: He does it with History, with sexual relationships, with the ways people interact. I think he might be doing it with much of the math. Love and sex are beautiful too yet
he sets off his vision of their beauty with lots of satire of same. 
 
Anyway, I know the last opinion re some/many of TRPs readers does not apply to me as stated even if it is true of  most of TRPs 'literary' readers.
Which I am not so sure it is, but who cares except sociologists of reading? (I originally started reading him because he was a writer who used such [MS &T]and my education and self-education contained such as well. Most literary types I know who have read him do not look down on, or are afraid of,  math and science. Those are all the literary types who do not read or stop out of reading Pynchon. )  .....
 
I feel defensive re that last stated opinion, correct feeling or not, and could add some ad hominem bona fides but that seems, well, ad hominem, irrelevant beyond anything I've already revealed about my reading and knowledge and the sources of my perspective.
 
Perhaps it is enough to stop now, where a lot of us agree on lots yet where some of us can agree to disagree on other aspects. Or, maybe i should
stop now but, of course, open-ended general assemblies are not closed off by anyone on this list. 
 

From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: 'Mark Kohut' <markekohut at yahoo.com>; 'Kai Frederik Lorentzen' <lorentzen at hotmail.de>; 'Matthew Cissell' <macissell at yahoo.es>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
Cc: 'Prashant Kumar' <p.kumar at physics.usyd.edu.au> 
Sent: Monday, August 6, 2012 10:14 AM
Subject: RE: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon


MK> “is what Mason & Dixon are doing able to be described under your 'book of nature is written in the language of mathematics" quote and meaning?”
 
Mason & Dixon are surveying: capturing one set of relationships (spatial, quantitative, trigonometric, almost-but-not-quite planar) among places on the earth’s surface. Their baseline will then provide  trustworthy starting points for more surveying (and eventual mapping) north, south, and west of the line. 
 
HOW do they do it? Narrowly construed, by cutting paths through the forest to create longer sightlines for their transit, and using that to construct a chain of linked triangles and benchmarks from Philadelphia to the Ohio territory. 
 
WHY do they do it? Narrowly construed, because the authorities of colonial Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware want a shared scheme by which to systematically and consistently grant or sell land to settlers, tax it, know who’s responsible for maintaining which lengths of road, etc. (NB that many of the colonies’ charters said “the northern/southern boundary is a line at such and such latitude, extending indefinitely westward from the Atlantic coast… “ with the intention of going into more detail later.)
 
Stig’s axe, the Vistos, the trigonometry, are Pynchon’s *synecdoche* for the entire New World/colonial (and prospective USA) enterprise: the importing and imposition of European practices of land ownership, geographically defined government sovereignty, “slave states” and “free states,” Huck Finn in the tall marijuana trees vs. sivilization, usw. To me, that’s not essentially different from Hawthorne’s synecdoche of village (society, law, church, marriage) vs. forest in The Scarlet Letter. Or from Fitzgerald’s synecdoche of vision: “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh green breast of the new world…” Cue what those Dutch sailors envisioned: bustling Nieuw Amsterdam harbor, homesteads up and down the Hudson, an endless wealth of beaver pelts coming from the interior, the Long Island Expressway. Cue all the associations of vision and desire re: breasts. Cue New Worlds, new beginnings,
 reinvention,  Gatsby.
 
The optics of Netherlanders’ eyeballs, like the metes and bounds of 17th-C. Salem village, like the distribution of nontrivial zeros in Riemann’s hypothesis, had no agency, autonomy, or inevitability in themselves. When William James writes “…your ‘things’ realize the consequences of the names by which you classed them,” he’s playing with the metaphor of word magic (wizards’ power comes from knowing the True Names), not endorsing it. 
 
All these are synecdochic hooks on which a writer hangs centuries and continents of meaning. I submit that the same is true for math, science and technology in Pynchon. I submit that to leap from those metaphors to the conclusion that “Pynchon believes that MS&T (or the mathematization of nature) equals original sin” is an example of Poirier’s “imagination enslaved by its own plottings.” But in this case, the plottings aren’t Pynchon’s own, but those of an ingrained ignorance, disdain, and/or fear of math, science and technology in a large subset of the literary culture. It’s sloppy reification and projection: “That stuff bores/intimidates me, and without it there wouldn’t be dark satanic mills and the Bomb and BP oil spills and global warming, so I’ll blame it for everything that I don’t like since Eden.” 
 
From:Mark Kohut [mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 8:07 PM
To: Monte Davis; 'Kai Frederik Lorentzen'; 'Matthew Cissell'; pynchon-l at waste.org
Cc: Prashant Kumar
Subject: Re: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon
 
yes, I have come to think my citation of 'the mathematization of nature' within AtD is not very helpful....I too hastily ran it together mentally
with the consensually famous-enough 'rationalization" of the world ala Weber: "In sociology, rationalization refers to the replacement of traditions, values,and emotions as motivators for behavior in society with rational, calculated ones."..math can be part of that but as one part not as "mathematization
of nature", I guess (as I am not sure I could describe 'mathematizaion of nature' without more definitional work) . 
 
Q: is what Mason & Dixon are doing able to be decribed under your 'book of nature is written in the language of mathematics" quote and meaning? 
Is this, perhaps, (just) one reason there is no mocking of their good work? Perhaps another pivot point in TRPs lifelong embedded metaphoric
use of math (and science)?---that is the 'mocking' begins with other math/science uses?
 
My emphasis rests more, I repeat myself, ,so I repeat myself, on how much of the math in AtD is satirized, could not in the book even come close to
'mathematizing nature' and so is nowhere near nature at all.
 
One final remark that could take us down new rabbit holes---or which you might think is coming from me already deep inside mine--I am trying to
get TRPs vision so I can get all the nuances, waves and wrinkles in AtD and to that end I still think it very possible---even if the math/scientists think
it wrong---that TRP may have written about math from Wittgenstein's 'radical' position.
 
 
 
 
 
From:Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: 'Mark Kohut' <markekohut at yahoo.com>; 'Kai Frederik Lorentzen' <lorentzen at hotmail.de>; 'Matthew Cissell' <macissell at yahoo.es>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
Cc: Prashant Kumar <p.kumar at physics.usyd.edu.au> 
Sent: Sunday, August 5, 2012 3:48 PM
Subject: RE: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

Interesting -- I liked the Burtt book when I read it in  the 1970s, but hadn't made the Cornell connection, for which thanks.

Be careful about reading too much into "the mathematization of nature," which doesn't really go as far as it might sound beyond Galileo's "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics," or the William James I quoted earlier. The math begins as (and for most scientists remains) a maximally precise, compact *language*, free of the distracting connotations and ambiguities of natural language, in which to summarize relationships among natural attributes. It's powerful, because if you've captured a relationship correctly you can use the math to find or predict quantities you can't measure directly or haven't measured yet (the duration of the solar eclipse at Amarillo, TX in 10,455 CE). Also, of course, there's an enormous, richly interconnected toolkit of "pure" math entities and operations, many developed entirely independent of natural science, that you can get to by agreed-upon transformations from an original, simple mathematical
 formulation -- and damn if they don't turn out to describe/predict the real world, too! (cf. Prashant's earlier reference to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".)

A few scientists and some philosophers take the Platonic leap beyond math as language and toolkit to math as the fundamental reality, or at least some sort of privileged essence. I suspect it's that (along with the fact that modern physics has increasingly probed domains where there *isn't* any natural-language "paraphrase" of the math involved)  which rubs many math-averse humanists the wrong way. I don't subscribe to it myself, and sometimes wonder if it's not just a very sophisticated version of "if all you have is a hammer..."        

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2012 8:18 AM
To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen; Matthew Cissell; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

Cassirer's major work: 
"It is the first work, in fact, to develop a detailed reading of the scientific revolution as a whole in terms of the “Platonic” idea that the thoroughgoing application of mathematics to nature (the so-called mathematization of nature) is the central and overarching achievement of this revolution. And Cassirer's insight was explicitly acknowledged by such seminal intellectual historians as E. A. Burtt,"

Burtt was at Cornell most of his career and while TRP was there. His Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science was even in paperback in the sixties. I posted it on the wiki as a possible real influence on TRP for AtD at least. The mathematization of nature may be a way to state some thematic notions within AtD, imho and the puncturing of all kinds of Platonic-like ideas is a lot of what is going on in AtD. 

From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, August 3, 2012 6:53 AM
Subject: Re: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon


On 01.08.2012 00:19, Matthew Cissell wrote:

> As a person whose background is so heavily informed by two very different fields it is not unthinkable to speak of TP as straddling the Two Cultures gap

Like Cassirer in philosophy?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cassirer/
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