BtZ42. History, Cold War, point of no return.

[Monte Davis]

At several places in AtD there are references to the routine use of complex
numbers (which have both real and imaginary components) in analyzing and
designing alternating-current electrical circuits and power systems.

 Quite a few observers at the time commented on that as what Wigner in 1960
would label "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural
sciences" (Wigner 1960) -- i.e. "pure" mathematics that turned out, decades
later, to be just the tool scientists and technologists needed.

One could even speculate that "imaginary" might be a flag for a rich schema
linking Kit's relationship to (1) hands-on electrical technology and (2)
Yashmeenian math/philosophy with, e.g., the Chums' relationship to (1)
history-book history and (2) alternate worlds of Chicago 1893, boys'
adventure, time travel, anti-Earth etc.

Except, of course, that math and science and technology in Pynchon are
always and everywhere death-identified, unnatural, and threatening, so
let's just note that "imaginary numbers help Vibe crush the masses" and
move on.

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On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 10:05 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Laura wrote, kindly asking me directly a question 'cause I keep bloviating
> about AtD: (please all,
> this question is for all of us)
>
> Laura:
> "I see GR as Pynchon's attempt to find that point - zero point, point of
> no return, Brennschluss - where the Cold War was set in motion. He knew, of
> course, that he'd have to go back much earlier. In GR, it's already too
> late. In ATD and M&D he digs deeper. I can't offhand think of any examples,
> but it seems to me that in ATD, he's presenting alternate routes that might
> have been taken - Tesla, the Quaternions - Mark K., can you help here? Even
> in Bleeding Edge, there's at least a vision of what might have been."
>
> I would say that Yes AtD offers many thematic branchings of possible
> alternate routes--by breadth of embodied themes. Perhaps not so localized
> in time nor place but in a kind of Iceland Spar of Alternate History, such
> as different sources of energy, a different world if there were no
> imaginary numbers (metaphorically ), much other kinds of world richness
> (and justice)...all presented conceptually, not via much arguable real
> history, as I think of it.
>
> But AtD is also, as we have all said, a presentation of modernity, (some
> of) its global effects and the consequences of. I have always thought
> 'around 1870" as the earlier time in question, and I found this for this
> post:
>
> Wikipedia:
>
> Charles Baudelaire <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire> is
> credited with coining the term "modernity" (*modernité*) in his 1864
> essay "The Painter of Modern Life," to designate the fleeting, ephemeral
> experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has
> to capture that experience. In this sense, it refers to a particular
> relationship to time, one characterized by intense historical discontinuity
> or rupture, openness to the novelty of the future, and a heightened
> sensitivity to what is unique about the present (Kompridis 2006
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#CITEREFKompridis2006>, 32–59).
>
> As an analytical concept and normative
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(philosophy)> ideal, modernity is
> closely linked to the ethos <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos> of
> philosophical and aesthetic modernism
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism>; political and intellectual
> currents that intersect with the Enlightenment
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment>; and subsequent
> developments as diverse as Marxism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism>
> , existentialism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism>, modern
> art <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art> and the formal
> establishment of social science
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science>. It also encompasses the
> social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, and shifts in
> attitudes associated with secularisation and post-industrial life
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_life> (Berman 2010
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#CITEREFBerman2010>, 15–36).
>
>
> Regarding the direct Cold War question: I don't see it at all in AtD since
> we know of
>
> the huge balloon-based Russo-US Chums' 'State' or Whatever--, a
> transnational Alliance of some kind--- that the book builds to.
>
>
> But, one smart reader, David Cowart, I think, in a lit essay I once
> read----which is probably in his book or reworked into his book, which I
> have not read---did argue this: V is not set in the middle of the 50s for
> nothing, at the tail end of McCarthyism---where national 'spying' on the
> other was patriotic--and around the Suez Crisis for nothing. He argued that
> as we thought about Pynchon's vision of America (the US of A, as Jochen
> more precisely prefers), we must start there not with* Lot 49 *nor even *The
> Secret Integration*.  Because Cold War fifties, the Bomb and Everything
> Else.
>
>
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