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

[Mark Kohut]

"Ah, the old questions, the old answers!"---Hamm in ENDGAME.

Well, didn't want to resurrect Heidegger but, hey, as he is always
saying.......where's the saddle come from?

All I was saying was P's text which reads " the emprise of Forces
invisible, yet possessing great Weight and Speed, which contend in
some Phantom realm..."....

Could mean psychic forces such as grip crowds; Freud's death wish thru
N.O.Brown, yes?

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> So the current digitalization of world-society could be stopped by
> individual and/or organizational agency?!
>
> No fucking way.
>
> In a recent publication - Irrnisfuge. Heideggers An-archie (Berlin 2014) -
> Peter Trawny pointed out that Heidegger's 'depowering' (Entmächtigung) of
> the modern subject is the main reason why his thoughts are contradicted with
> such an amount of aggression.
>
> We like to think of ourselves as sovereign subjects with a huge spectrum of
> possibilities which enables us to change the run of (macro-societal) things.
> For the enlightenment of the 18th century this was the newest hottest shit.
> Kant's "Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit"
> and all that. But even back then - and Mason & Dixon is not exactly the book
> to convince me of the opposite - this was largely an illusion. In the 21st
> century it is nothing but ideology. The Counterforce can give interviews to
> the Wall Street Journal, ----  it cannot defy the logic of Raketen-Stadt.
>
>
>
> On 26.01.2015 14:36, Monte Davis 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.
>>
>> -
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -
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