Gravity again - whoa thar!

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Re: Sokal, that might have been me:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1304&msg=172302&sort=date



-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>; pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, Apr 15, 2013 4:57 pm
Subject: Re: Gravity again - whoa thar!


Dear Monte (& Rev. 76),
Not all of us on the P-list hit on the "par" that Monte refers to, and that is 
ertainly present here as well as so many other places. 
Somebody here mentioned the Sokal affair not long back and it wasn't picked up 
n, a glaring silence passing over an uncomfortable subject. By the way, out of 
hat whole affair Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote "Fashionable Nonsense: 
ostmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science", might be of interest. Also check 
ut "Theory and Reality" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Good stuff.
ciao
c otis

________________________________
From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
o: 'Rev'd Seventy-Six' <revd.76 at gmail.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
ent: Monday, April 15, 2013 5:34 PM
ubject: RE: Gravity again


 Also rather unlike any practitioner of science I know of or respect.

et used to it: that’s par for the course in characterizations of science and 
echnology (and mischaracterizations pof Pynchon’s stance w/r/t them) around 
ere.

ood post! 

rom:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of 
ev'd Seventy-Six
ent: Monday, April 15, 2013 10:49 AM
o: pynchon-l at waste.org
ubject: Re: Gravity again

....the greater risk is science itself because it knows no limits. It cannot 
in, there are no transgressions, the sacred is not a mystery but a profane 
uzzle to be solved and then exploited."
olved, then exploited?  Jeepers, harsh.  Also rather unlike any practitioner of 
cience I know of or respect.
It's not science fueling the impending apocalypse we glimpse in our rearview 
hese days, it's overweening greed.  "I need my night's blood, my funding, 
unding, ahh more, more."  Knowledge isn't dangerous, nor clarified insight into 
he workings of the spheres, it's damnfool hubris that's the hazard.
cience can't sin.  Its practitioners, I'll grant you, but not science.  Like 
eligion, science is all about limits; probing for them, determining them, 
omprehending them and, occasionally, establishing new ones.  Unlike religion, 
cience is fairly self-aware in that respect.  There's no 'sin' in knowledge 
nless your fetish is eyeballing fruit in a nervous, god-fearing fashion.  
ontrast this with the great many sins of ignorance: corporations who pay 
orrupt scientific 'authorities' to deny climate change, for example, or 
undamentalists who spin specious rules of biology for women from whole, shoddy 
loth to disguise a cromag interest in the mindless, incautious propagation of 
he species.  Science would see us as enlightened & able as angels--  and 
here's the sin in self-improvement, I ask you, long as it's not masturbatory   
-no, it's men who would prefer to graze on all of Eden like locusts.  I see P. 
rawing this line again & again
throughout GR and elsewhere.

f his literary philosophy is in essence gnostic & predicated on the idea that 
e occupy a 'fallen' universe where the living are used for the purposes of the 
ead, and I view that as a grotesque oversimplication, P also recognizes that 
he deathwish dystopia we've engineered for ourselves is as driven by bloody 
oney as fatuous reasoning.  The edge you allege he's lost is an erosion of the 
apport you felt with earlier books & now no longer perceive.  While 'lighter' 
r at least less highfalutin', esoteric fare than GR, VL & IV are very much 
bout would-be devils, dybbuks in human drapery, selling the ground from beneath 
nborn feet.  To accuse science of meddling in the affairs of god is a B-movie 
eaction.  Kekulé's dream of the benzene ring was a moment of sacred 
nspiration; 'tis the abuses his work has been put toward that're profane.

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