Maxine & the metaphysics of technological neutrality or Who ain't a Slave of Science-Capitalism (Burns)

[Mark Kohut]

Fiona,
 
I, for one, love all of these salient essays (and parts of essays) on 
Pynchon's work.  From this one I pull out this:
 
"The chant of self-denial that, through
repression, elicits a yearning for extremes of indulgence emerges
repeatedly in Pynchon's novel.[7]"
 
to say it is a baseline theme of N.O. Brown's HyperFreudianisn, so to speak, a book
we "know' influenced TRP, nicely pointed to in Gravity's Rainbow by a famous essay.
 
 
 
 

From: Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, December 1, 2013 9:38 AM
Subject: Re: Maxine & the metaphysics of technological neutrality or Who ain't a Slave of Science-Capitalism (Burns)


Another C.L Burns essay here, this one on M&D.

Indeed, capitalism seems here to work off of an extreme oppositional
dichotomy: that of moralism (Puritan) bound resistantly to an urge to
transgress all morals. The chant of self-denial that, through
repression, elicits a yearning for extremes of indulgence emerges
repeatedly in Pynchon's novel.[7] And lust is only one aspect of
limitless desire in this tale of national "origins." In this prescient
history, capitalism is a compulsive American trait, and episodes of
eager consumerism and entrepreneurial manipulations of desires
proliferate. Humorously, Pynchon "predicts" America's collapse into
opportunism; as a band enlightens Dixon,

this Age sees a corruption and disabling of the ancient Magick.
Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon the global
Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks,--these are the last poor fallen and
feckless inheritors of a Knowledge they can never use, but in the
service of Greed. The coming Rebellion is theirs,--Franklin, and that
Lot,--and Heaven help the rest of us, if they prevail. (487-88)
Benjamin Franklin's writings have arguably shaped early American
entrepreneurial consciousness, in its best and worst lights.[8] And in
this America, lawyers also abound, as Mason is warned by his family,
who jokingly tell him that "ev'ryone needs Representation, from time
to time. If you go to America, you'll be hearing all about that, I
expect" (202). Pynchon's poke at litigiousness seems to be an
extension of his mockery of many Americans' commercial opportunism and
their monetarily motivated sense of rights. Pynchon's point may simply
be that a particularly intense form of desire lies at the root of
American identity itself, with its tensions between pragmatism and
metaphysics, its cynical commercialism combined with youthful vision.
Moreover, Pynchon constitutes the historical desire (and its narrative
effects) not merely as subjectivized or psychologized; he understands
it as this parallactic construct, which is measured and split between
two roots or objects, defying will and clarification of any singular
agency.[9] This parallax draws on a series of oppositions, not only
between Mason and Dixon, but also between the future's backward glance
(its historical gaze) and the point at which it intersects with a
historical moment or event. Each present perspective (of past events
and narrated histories) is always in a tense dialogue with some
distant or distinct point. In this way, parallax also suggests a
particular configuration, wherein historical agency, compelled by the
desire to narrate history and formulate identity, must mediate its
willful and subjective vantage point with that of some other,
radically distant point-of-view in order to produce a true "measure"
of the past.





http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html>
> see
>
> Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts
>
>  edited by Shannon Eileen Hengen
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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