Politics vs Art
Mark Kohut
mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat May 7 05:36:53 CDT 2016
THIS is one of TRP's deepest critiques, perhaps, of Western rationality.
The Either-Or, binary thinking, excluding the middle.
There is a larger conception of rationality but......we don't have it here.
On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rationality isn't rational either, since it's based on duality, the
> concept of either this or that.
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
> > On May 6, 2016, at 6:32 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The behavioral finance school, you all know the famous Nobel recipient
> > from Yale, Robert J. Shiller, is not the first to challenge the
> > efficiency of markets. P's satire mixes and mashes the priests with
> > the scientists and statisticians, linguists and economists and
> > artists...with the cooks, nuts, cranks, poor crippled bureaucrats and
> > charismatic maniacs, etc... challenging rational market theories,
> > sure, and all other theories, including the west's theory of western
> > rationality, exposing the rationalization of Pavlovian politics, as
> > described in Pynchon's slick critique of the madness that ensued
> > post-9-11 once bombs were dropping in our neighbors. That Orwell had
> > the balls to call his war government fascists...well....Pynchon hasn't
> > got such balls, not in prose anyways, but GR is not about the
> > holocaust because its about US, us USA people mostly, though it
> > clearly pulls on our Puritan and European roots, it's about Amerika.
> >
> > The Housing Market Still Isn’t Rational
> >
> > Economic View
> >
> > By ROBERT J. SHILLER JULY 24, 2015
> >
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/upshot/the-housing-market-still-isnt-rational.html
> >
> >> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Hyper-technically, the Auschwitz complex -- almost 50 camps in all and
> >> hybrid,as you say -- was originally a concentration camp (Auschwitz I)
> for
> >> Polish political prisoners, added the Auschwitz II-Birkenau cluster as
> >> prison then extermination camp for Jews and Gypsies, then added
> Auschwitz
> >> III-Monowitz as slave labor camp for IG Farben's synthtic-rubber
> factory..
> >> which is why Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and a skilled chemist, survived
> at
> >> Monowitz rather than dying at Birkenau. Mixed priorities...
> >>
> >> Why not follow up on your sense that P's "systems...markets" message
> "can't
> >> really digest the insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology"? Why not
> >> question yout implicit premise that systems and markets are by their
> nature
> >> sane and rational? Recall my earlier point on Blackett's "you can't run
> a
> >> war on gusts of emotion": that the German V-weapon campaign and the
> US-UK
> >> city-bombing campaign *were not rational uses of economic and military
> >> resources,* no matter how much technology and organization went into
> them.
> >> They were supposed to be answers to "how do we win the war?", but in
> fact
> >> were answers to "how do we HURT THE ENEMY?" They were highly organized,
> >> rationally implemented gusts of emotion. Likewise, all those trains
> taking
> >> Jews to the death camps could have more profitably been supplying the
> >> Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front -- except that the felt threat from the
> Jews
> >> was beyond or beneath rationality, deeper and darker than that from the
> Red
> >> Army.
> >>
> >> Remember how Prof.-Dr, Jamf prizes the bold, lion-like ionic bond
> *seizing*
> >> electrons over the wimpy sharing of the covalent bond (Viking 577)?
> Remember
> >> "a conspiracy of human beings and techniques" crying like a vampire "I
> need
> >> my night's blood, my funding, my funding, ahh"(521)?
> >>
> >> Rather than saying Pynchon *couldn't* deal with the Holocaust directly
> >> because he'd chosen an approach based on the primacy of rational
> systems,
> >> markets, cost/benefit calculations, etc... consider the possibility that
> >> he's questioning how rational they really are. The peculiar horror of
> the
> >> Holocaust, after all, was not mass murder -- Rwanda or Cambodia or the
> >> partition of India will do for that -- but the *juxtaposition* of mass
> >> murder with an "advanced" European nation's highly organized, systematic
> >> implementation. You propose that people using technology and
> rationality to
> >> do insane things poses a problem for Pynchon in GR; I think it's at the
> >> heart of the book.
> >>
> >>> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 9:42 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> one of the major misconceptions about the Holocaust and mass murder is
> >>> that most people think only of Auschwitz which technically was not a
> death
> >>> camp say like Treblinka was. Dora was not a death camp either--they
> were
> >>> work camps in essence, horrible in any case. still broadly speaking we
> can
> >>> include such camps as part of the Holocaust if our definitions expand
> on a
> >>> broader definition of extermination in its myriad forms (gas, labor,
> rape,
> >>> etc). So, yes Pynchon does address that in Dora.
> >>>
> >>> The missing bit from GR which I think Pynchon cant adequately utilize
> >>> directly w/r/t to the Holocaust is that there was no logical reason
> for such
> >>> mass murder from an economic point of view beyond appropriating space.
> If
> >>> you build up your message as Pynchon does about Them and systems and
> >>> repressions and markets and link them all up, it cant really digest the
> >>> insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology which underpinned much of
> its
> >>> actions in the East.
> >>>
> >>> i guess what I'm saying is hybrid camps like Auschwitz or outright
> labor
> >>> camps like Dora where there was an economic benefit for Germany or
> perceived
> >>> to be (many projects were failures) are easier to explain than outright
> >>> death mills like Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. maybe that's one reason for
> >>> Pynchon's 'aloofness' on the subject
> >>>
> >>> just my two cents
> >>>
> >>> rich
> >>>
> >>>> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:32 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> But WHERE does GR "depict the Holocaust?"
> >>>>
> >>>> David Morris
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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