terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456
David Ewers
dsewers at comcast.net
Mon Jan 26 16:16:04 CST 2015
Yes, but...
Is that all humans all the time, or are some cultures more prone to fall victim to their own technology; while others - perhaps not in the same hurry to prove themselves as supernatural as opposed to natural, so less desperate to change nature - are more prone to fall victim to another (more desperate) culture's technology?
I look forward to finding out what Mr. Pynchon does with that question in America.
On Jan 26, 2015, at 1:37 PM, Keith Davis wrote:
> That pretty much sums it up.
>
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
> Sent from Beyond the Zero
>
>> On Jan 26, 2015, at 4:13 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>> The image of young Gottfried entombed within the Rocket seems to me Pynchon's most powerful expression of the complicated interface between humans and technology - humans create technology, fall victim to technology, and are inextricably part of it, willingly or otherwise.
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>
>> From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>>
>> Sent: Jan 26, 2015 9:58 AM
>>
>> To: Monte Davis , pynchon -l
>>
>> Cc: David Ewers
>>
>> Subject: Re: terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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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