terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness in the transit of Planet Pynchon

[David Ewers]

That too!  

I love how Pynchon's fiction accommodates so many angles of approach, including (or particularly) opposite ones; and how almost obscenely fertile it is for open-minded interpretation (...like those multi-breasted statuettes, only in book form...).


On Jan 26, 2015, at 9:56 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> "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.
>>> 
>>> -
>>> 
>>> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 

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