terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456

[alice malice]

But in getting to know Nature with Technic,  we take on enormous
risks. We are no longer simple tool makers, homo faber, but modern
exploiters of the energy of Earth, energy we extract, store, and
harness. Earth is our resource. And America, that most pragmatic
people, children of Bacon, frame the Earth with our democratic dreams
of opportunity for all.

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 10:07 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the oldest conflicts in the Technology and Nature debate
> revolves around the idea of a natural order, an existing one, one that
> some say humans transform or manipulate, while others contend that
> humans reveal it.
>
> One way to view all those folks in M&D who came to America and
> expanded West is as manipulators of Nature.
>
>  Do they manipulate an existing and natural order?
>
> Are they part of this natural order or is it better to contrast them with it?
>
> Of course, we'd need a definition of Nature and that's no easy job.
>
> Nature, one might say, is everything in the universe. But humanity is
> such an insignificant spec in this definition that the actions of
> humans seem mundane and unworthy of investigation.
>
>
>
> Nature, another might say,  is the order, the existing order and the
> processes without human alternation. But if we take this second one we
> can't say much about humanity and the technologies of humans.
> Moreover, if Technology is at odds with Nature, a contradiction of
> Nature and the order of Nature, we are given a place in Nature but
> prevented from improving our place in it.
>
> If one argues that the West is just there, present, with a Natural
> order, one must admit that this is not its state when Mason and Dixon
> set out to put a line through it. The West, the mystery of America out
> there has been proclaimed useful, or potentially so, and the
> technology the men carry is an expression of this state of nature. As
> Heidegger explains with clocks and lamps in Being and Time, the tools,
> the tecnics reveal purpose in Nature.
>
> Of course later on Heidegger expounded, and tools and technic were
> given greater weight than the mere announcements of their purposes
> upon Nature. Technology circumscribes our efforts to live and know. To
> be and to know.
>
> Being, Knowing, and Meaning.
>
> Back to the meaning of Nature. Full circle, so to speak.
>
> The Tools, or equipment, Zeug is expanded to Ge-stell, to Enframe our
> modern existence.
>
> We can't now know Nature outside of technic.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> KFL> "The Rocket as such would have come anyway... People...are welcome as
>> customers, but the Ge-stell would work without them too"
>>
>> Will the Dichter explain which elf or wraith or World-Spirit or deep
>> carbon-rich stratum would have built Kummersdorf and then Peenemunde, and
>> then the Soviet and US  factories? would have allocated resources to
>> airframes and turbines and bodenplattes, managed their assembly and
>> integration, trucked the rockets to launch sites? would have talked the
>> legislatures, voters, Party committees into spending money on those
>> activities rather than others?
>>
>> It's hard to understand why Pynchon clutters M&D with Penns and Calverts,
>> Royal Societies and land-jobbers, Londoners and Geordies and Philadelphians.
>> After all, the Visto would surely have cut itself even if no European had
>> ever set foot in North America, right? Axes swing themselves, chains stretch
>> themselves, Obs write and reduce themselves, marker stones embed themselves,
>> yes?
>>
>> As a reader, I do feel and respond to -- really, I do -- the poetic and
>> rhetorical power of such abstraction, personification, and reification. But
>> when I close the book, there I am as a person on the cold hill side of
>> history, and I look around and see only people, doing what people do... and
>> that includes hallucinating Great Capitalized Motrices. On occasion, those
>> hallucinations are great literature. Much more often, they're cop-outs.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 7:11 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 26.01.2015 00:52, David Ewers wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, that's the stuff!
>>>
>>> I sort of get the impression that the presence of these Forces or Things
>>> in the Saddle (good stuff!) does some purposeful magic to Pynchon's
>>> perspective; it broadens the lens beyond the human in a way that makes us
>>> humans look sort of ridiculous, clownish in even our darkest aspirations,
>>> but more lovable and easy to root for for it.
>>>
>>> It reminds me a bit of the relationship between the Greeks and their gods,
>>> except these these Forces aren't humanized (so treated more reverently in a
>>> way, fewer presumptions regarding behavior beyond the human?) and there's
>>> any rarely clear, direct communication between Us and Them (by the way, ever
>>> notice that there's no remembered conversation between Cherrycoke and either
>>> Mason or Dixon in Cherrycoke's account, even though they often found
>>> themselves in similar straits?).  So unlike the Greek gods these Things are
>>> just beyond us (to varying degrees, maybe? they do seem to have their
>>> allies...) but like a couple of those gods they do appear to involve
>>> themselves directly - if only dimly viewed through our lenses - in some big
>>> arc of human technological novelty.  Or something...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Pynchon is the poet ("Dichter") of the Ge-stell.
>>>
>>> > Heidegger applied the concept of Gestell to his exposition of the
>>> > essence of technology. He concluded that technology is fundamentally
>>> > enframing. As such, the essence of technology is Gestell. Indeed, "Gestell,
>>> > literally 'framing', is an all-encompassing view of technology, not as a
>>> > means to an end, but rather a mode of human existence".
>>>
>>> The point that Heidegger was attempting to convey with Gestell was that
>>> all that has come to presence in the world has been enframed. Thus what is
>>> revealed in the world, what has shown itself as itself (the truth of itself)
>>> required first an enframing, literally a way to exist in the world, to be
>>> able to be seen and understood. Concerning the essence of technology and how
>>> we see things in our technological age, the world has been framed as the
>>> "standing-reserve." Heidegger writes,
>>>
>>> Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets
>>> upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of
>>> ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which
>>> holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing
>>> technological.
>>>
>>> Furthermore, Heidegger uses the word in a way that is uncommon by giving
>>> Gestell an active role. In ordinary usage the word would signify simply a
>>> display apparatus of some sort, like a book rack, or picture frame; but for
>>> Heidegger, Gestell is literally a challenging forth, or performative
>>> "gathering together", for the purpose of revealing or presentation. <
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestell
>>>
>>> In the current age science is a part of technology, not vice versa as the
>>> myth of modernity has it.
>>>
>>> Now, at this point - Winke, Winke! - usually someone comes along quoting a
>>> famous sentence from Gravity's Rainbow:  "Go ahead, capitalize the T on
>>> technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible--but it puts
>>> you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of
>>> our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human
>>> elite with no right at all to be where they are—" (p. 521).  Impressive
>>> quote, nicht wahr? But when you look at it in context you will realize that
>>> it is not the author's perspective which is given words here. The sentence
>>> before goes like this: "Yes but Technology only responds (how often this
>>> argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction,
>>> among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All very well to talk about
>>> having a monster by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if
>>> someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to
>>> chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians?"
>>> First, do note the the argument is ascribed to younger members of the
>>> Schwarzkommando "especially". Then the argument is being "iterated, dogged
>>> and humorless as a Gaussian reduction." Neither youth nor humorless
>>> repetition are indicators of truth in Pynchon. And of course we would have
>>> the Rocket without "some specific somebody with a name and a penis" who
>>> wants to "blow up a block full of civilians." How could anyone deny this?
>>> Modern societal machination ("Machenschaft" in Heidegger's sense) goes back
>>> to the  mathematization of science and the corresponding closing of the
>>> modern mind. "Monads don't have windows," as Leibniz says. Method is ruling
>>> more and more, and by the 1950s Heidegger saw even (academic) philosophy
>>> replaced by cybernetics. The sentence quoted ad nauseam here to argue
>>> against a 'structural' reading of technology in Pynchon is not directed
>>> towards the reader, it is - do note the address "brother"! - part of the
>>> inner debate of the Herero Schwarzkommando and formulated from a specific
>>> character perspective, not from the author's general one. And although there
>>> are reasons for the members of the Schwarkommando, the younger ones
>>> especially, not to subscribe to a 'structural' view of technology but to
>>> develop instead a rhetoric of self-empowerment which makes themselves feel
>>> more male and "responsible," it is not at all something which would make us
>>> understand technology better. Neither von Braun nor Hitler were responsible
>>> for the Rocket as such. The Rocket as such would have come anyway. The logic
>>> of enframing, manifesting itself also in the unfolding economization of all
>>> things on earth, leaves out nobody and nothing. And that's a leitmotif in
>>> Pynchon. The author's own perspective in context of the passage in question
>>> is most definitely closer to the one formulated in the paragraph before: "It
>>> means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all
>>> just to keep the people distracted ... secretly, it was being dictated
>>> instead by the needs of technology ... by a conspiracy between human beings
>>> and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying,
>>> 'Money be dammed, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,' but
>>> meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my
>>> funding, funding, ahh more, more ... The real crises were crises of
>>> allocation and priority, not among firms----it was only staged to look that
>>> way---but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft,
>>> and their needs which are only understood only by the ruling elite ..."
>>> People with names and penises who wanna blow up a block full with civilians
>>> are of course welcome as customers, but the Ge-stell would work without them
>>> too.
>>>
>>> With Bleeding Edge, Pynchon takes his Songs of the Ge-stell to the digital
>>> dimension.
>>>
>>> (On the War Machinery do also see chapter 12 of A Thousand Plateaus by
>>> Deleuze & Guattari, who are, mockingly or not, mentioned by Pynchon in
>>> Vineland, p. 97. Since the English edition was available since 1986
>>> (chapter) bzw. 1988 (whole book), Pynchon perhaps had a look at it while
>>> writing parts of Mason & Dixon. That his interest in French philosophy
>>> hasn't stopped becomes obvious by the appearance of Lacan in Bleeding Edge.
>>> Whether you like this or not.)
>>>
>>> On Jan 25, 2015, at 2:31 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>>
>>> To your point:
>>>
>>> p. 39 "the emprise of Forces invisible yet possessing great Weight and
>>> Speed, which contend in some Phantom realm......"
>>>
>>> As in that build-up of 'forces' in AtD before WW1, TRP sees war as a
>>> Force of its own. As Emerson was to write with broader meaning a
>>> century later, "Things are in the Saddle and ride Mankind".
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 4:36 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Guernica didn't occur to me directly when I was reading, but now that you
>>> mention it I did get a 'Guernica Feeling'.
>>>
>>> Rambling of lessons more abstract...(or just difficult for me to
>>> effectively
>>> put into words):
>>> Again, to me this scene was filled with suggestions that the Affaire des
>>> Frégates was exactly that: an affair between two ships, with their
>>> respective personalities, proclivities, reputations etc. as prime
>>> movers...
>>> and the humans almost as components of rigging and guns.  It's as if we
>>> humans create the conditions (the machinery, and all its philosophical
>>> underpinnings...), but things have ways of taking on lives of their own
>>> (as
>>> in taking on board, while we build the ways?).
>>> And the Invisible Gamesters, are they (all, or all still) human?  Or am I
>>> just being paranoid?
>>>
>>> On Jan 25, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>>
>>> just a couple more "associations' when one reads a genius.
>>>
>>> p.38. "the Ship's hoarse Shrieking, a great sea-animal in pain, the
>>> textures
>>> of its Cries nearly those of the human Voice when under great Stress"
>>>
>>> 'hoarse Shrieking of The SEAHORSE...i cannot be the only one who sees
>>> the screaming Guernica horse here, amiright? ....
>>>
>>> A--and if this is War--it is--and it brings the nearness of black
>>> Panic and bowel
>>> evacuation, we get a hint of shattered nerves, which had lots of names
>>> down
>>> to
>>> post-traumatic stress disorder. sometimes, way back, it was called, linked
>>> to
>>> Homesickness (in the West) as soldiers got hit far from home and
>>> wanted to go back.
>>> That Equator ceremony started as a marker for being for the first time
>>> so far from home.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dissolution, Noise, and Fear. Are these part of "the Lessons more
>>> abstract"
>>>
>>> the Rev 'went on to draw' from his Encounter with 'absolute black panic'.
>>>
>>>
>>> A Sum-up of the horrors of war
>>>
>>> as presented in fiction from, O, the Iliad (where it is also a Glory)
>>>
>>> and War & Peace
>>>
>>> and All Quiet on the Western Front and al the others I don't know and
>>>
>>> probably in a battle scene or
>>>
>>> three in O'Brian's Aubrey--Maturin series.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I think science traveling by war machine, in your phrase, science an
>>>
>>> Enlightenment good, is a key Pynchon resonance/theme.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 8:01 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> The other side of the coin (...this one works with the idea of the Line as
>>>
>>> another of Pynchon's War/Science-wrought projections "[o]f forces less
>>>
>>> visible...", I think...):
>>>
>>>
>>> That the question isn't why the l'Grand eventually split so much as why a
>>>
>>> scientific expedition would get so bloody in the literal first place.
>>>
>>> Maybe, just as Science was understood to travel by war machine, so it was
>>>
>>> considered to be part of the war machinery itself (even Mason and Dixon,
>>>
>>> running messages...).  After all, does it make sense for a wartime
>>> military
>>>
>>> to replace its guns with scientific equipment, if science isn't seen as a
>>>
>>> weapon?  Advantageous peace might be a military objective, but I can't
>>>
>>> imagine even Enlightenment generals working to replace the art of warfare
>>>
>>> with the art of surveying.
>>>
>>>
>>> The laissez-passer reminds me:  I was reading a bit about the HMS Seahorse
>>>
>>> that sailed during the 1760s.  It was damaged during a 1778 battle with a
>>>
>>> French squadron led by the le Brillant (maybe why the Seahorse bucked at
>>> the
>>>
>>> HMS Brilliant in M-&D-?).  The French squadron included the frigate
>>> Sartine.
>>>
>>> Two weeks after the battle the Seahorse captured Sartine, which
>>> subsequently
>>>
>>> became the HMS Sartine.
>>>
>>> Anyway, it got me thinking maybe the laissez-passer for scientists was for
>>>
>>> the same reasons we gave Nazi scientists jobs instead of death sentences:
>>>
>>> not because of how peaceful they are as people, but rather how useful they
>>>
>>> are as weapons, should they be captured.
>>>
>>>
>>> BTW, a young Horatio Nelson was assigned as midshipman to this very HMS
>>>
>>> Seahorse, through the influence of his uncle, Maurice Suckling.  Suppose
>>>
>>> Maurice is related to Darby?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jan 23, 2015, at 3:11 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Maybe a bit too science-specific -- before "total war" came into fashion,
>>>
>>> many kinds of cross-border social and cultural links continued while the
>>>
>>> kings and princes marched around. (Passports didn't become routine until
>>>
>>> WWI, remember.) But the Enlightenment definitely boosted, as the
>>> Ranaissance
>>>
>>> had, the idea of scholarship -- and then science -- as above the fray.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Clearly, it seems to me, Pynchon is "saying' that if combat, war,
>>>
>>> killing was turned aside because science.....then he is, at least,
>>>
>>> showing science as a hopeful thing out of the Enlightenment here in
>>>
>>> the late 1700s. England and France were the Western World
>>>
>>> at war so...................
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 4:58 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Here's an account of a French Transit of Venus expedition that set sail
>>>
>>> shortly before the Seahorse expedition. Lots of similarities, in terms of
>>>
>>> being undergunned and over-cargoed:
>>>
>>>
>>> By and large, things did not go as well for the French expeditions.
>>>
>>> Alexandre-Gui Pingre left Paris on November 17, 1760, for his
>>>
>>> destination of the island of Rodrigues, viewing his forthcoming voyage
>>>
>>> with foreboding. This despite another remarkable novelty of the times.
>>>
>>> Although Britain and France were locked in bitter battle, the Academie
>>>
>>> Royale des Sciences had appealed directly to British authorities to
>>>
>>> grant
>>>
>>> Pingre a laissez-passer, a letter instructing all British naval and
>>>
>>> military
>>>
>>> personnel "not to molest his person or Effects upon any account, but to
>>>
>>> suffer him to proceed without delay or Interruption." This was indeed
>>>
>>> granted, although since sea battles tended to exchange gunfire first and
>>>
>>> civilities later, if at all, Pingre's misgivings were not misplaced.
>>>
>>> The transit party sailed on the Comte d'Argenson, a warship that found
>>>
>>> itself with less than half its normal complement of guns in order to
>>>
>>> extend its cargo capacity to that needed for the expedition. (There had
>>>
>>> been a heated dockside argument over the baggage, Pingre arguing
>>>
>>> furiously that seven or eight hundred pounds was not too much for an
>>>
>>> astronomer!) To the horror of all on board, a group of five British
>>>
>>> warships was sighted only one day out from port. To allow full play of
>>>
>>> its remaining guns, the ship's crew tore down the temporary cabins that
>>>
>>> had been erected for Pingre's companions, the latter and their
>>>
>>> belongings being flung unceremoniously into Pingre's cabin for the
>>>
>>> time being. Fortunately, though, a combination of suitable winds, the
>>>
>>> long winter night, and the captain's skills allowed the Comte to slip
>>>
>>> away unmolested, and everyone settled down to the remaining four
>>>
>>> months of their voyage.
>>>
>>>
>>> ttp://www.mdlpp.org/pdf/library/SeahorseMdTransitofVenus.pdf (posted
>>>
>>> previously)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Monte Davis
>>>
>>>
>>> Subject: Re: terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way
>>>
>>> to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> A bell rang when I read this Pynchon passage in 1997: I was sure I'd
>>>
>>> read somewhere, long before, about Napoleon himself using the French
>>>
>>> captain's words, or very similar phrasing, w/r/t letting some expedition
>>>
>>> pass, returning some naturalist's specimen collection that had been
>>>
>>> captured, or the like. But I've never tracked it down, nor did it turn up
>>> in
>>>
>>> the 1997 or 2001 group readings here. (Nor do I know of any answer to your
>>>
>>> question about how the French captain would have known of M&D's presence,
>>>
>>> other than Pynchonian conspiracism about the the higher levels of Them,
>>> e.g.
>>>
>>> IG Farben,  Shell, GE et al. carrying on despite the distraction of WWII.)
>>>
>>> FWIW: In 1813, when Great Britain was at war with Napoleon's France,
>>>
>>> English scientist Humphry Davy traveled freely on the Continent and in
>>> Paris
>>>
>>> collected a prize and medal funded by Napoleon for the best work on
>>>
>>> galvanism. (While not common, such interactions were not unknown in other
>>>
>>> fields of scholarship as well as science.) Davy remarked to an associate:
>>>
>>> "But if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science
>>> are
>>>
>>> not. That would, indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should
>>>
>>> rather, through the instrumentality of the men of science soften the
>>>
>>> asperities of national hostility." Quoted in Gavin de Beer, The Sciences
>>>
>>> Were Never at War (1960).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 11:10 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Which brings up the question of why the l'Grand turned away. Was it
>>>
>>> really, as Smith (filtered through Cherrycoke) reported, "France is not at
>>>
>>> war with the sciences?" If so, how did they eventually figure out,
>>>
>>> mid-attack, that this was a scientific expedition? Was Smith able to get
>>> the
>>>
>>> letters of passage over to the other captain? Kind of seems there should
>>>
>>> have been some identifying marker - a sail with a sun and two crossed
>>>
>>> telescopes instead of the skull and bones? - to prevent attacks before
>>> they
>>>
>>> started.
>>>
>>> -
>>>
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l