Zero Point

[Mark Kohut]

I also suggest that the brilliance of TRP's conceit re Descartes and the
Black Hole of
Calcutta is that that extreme subjective existence, likened to Descartes "I
think therefore I am",
 is the foundation of the suffering of modernity.

Very akin to his use of the rationalization of animal murder as a 20th
Century trope in the stockyard in Chicago---
only that one is not as original as THIS ONE....

And, dear Smoak, isn't all reflection on history after the fact(s)? i.e.
retroactive? And I might suggest not an
undoing, a return to some state of innocence but just, as in the energy use
metaphor, just a
recompression to a new starting point, intellectually conceived? Not unlike
the scientific theory that the
universe is endlessly big banging and collapsing; or in an cyclical notion
of History that it ..sorta breathes,
rises and falls, etc.

Anyway, here is the science definition that seems to provide the metaphoric
meaning
: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

And here's a guy aware and defining the lowest possible state of quantum
energy as he argues that
thoughts therefore become (some kind of) "matter"......

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-baksa/zero-point-field_b_913831.html





On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 2:10 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> Grateful for this.
>
> It strikes me that zero points are essentially only applied
> retroactively--an undoing of some kind of history, a return to some
> pre-historic innocence.
>
> Your suggestion that there's some affinity between Descartes and the
> Black Hole as having to do with subjective zero points is well taken.
>
> Extreme suffering--of which the Black Hole is perhaps one of the
> extremest ready examples--is extreme subjectivity, is often a collapse
> of the ego's fantasy-making and time-building capabilities to the
> present (like the spokes of the wheel have been removed) such that one
> perceives momentary suffering as inescapable, eternal.
>
> Extreme suffering can also deconstruct the entire complex edifice of
> your apparent self/psyche--can reduce your subjectivity to beholding
> only its own suffering and mortality. The zero point of the self.
>
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 4:47 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Amazing, sometimes, what looking up a phrase can bring one.
> >
> > Remember your Descartes? That guy who
> > thought that getting to pure existence, pure subjectivity, happened as
> soon
> > as you reflected that you were
> > at least reflecting...(I won't repeat the famous cliche).
> >
> > Well, seems that some have referred to that as the Zero Point. Of
> existence.
> > Which TRP seems to
> > use and play with with his Black Hole of Calcutta image in the section
> Smoke
> > put up for us....I mean,
> > crammed in with all those other people with nothing, nothing at all---is
> > that not pure 'existence' and subjectivity
> > only?....(well, yes and horribly NO in Thunder).   The link below shows
> the
> > above usage and then the next an extension within
> > cultural history.
> >
> > Also, remember that TRP satirizes Descartes savagely (the words always go
> > together when most write) elsewhere in his
> > work, most particularly, AtD.....the case can be made that he sees
> Descartes
> > as the fountainhead of Ultra-Rationalism
> > in philosophical history, a severed head in Murdoch's image dividing we
> > humans from our full selves,
> >  and *therefore* a major cause of the problem of modernity.
> >
> > Others have.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 5:28 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> https://books.google.com/books?id=kJRFDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA91&
> dq=descartes+fiction+of+the+zero+point&hl=en&sa=X&ved=
> 0ahUKEwjFmN2DqaDZAhWETd8KHWRjAd8Q6AEIUDAI#v=onepage&q=
> descartes%20fiction%20of%20the%20zero%20point&f=false
> >>
> >> At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England
> >>
> >> https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0813158583
> >> Rose A. Zimbardo - 2015 - ‎Preview - ‎More editions
> >> —Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs Following Blumenberg, I have
> named
> >> as “zero point” the moment in late seventeenth century English culture
> >> wherein medieval/Renaissance epis– temology collapsed under the weight
> of
> >> questions it had itself raised and simultaneously the new epistemology
> of
> >> modernism was constructed. We have briefly considered some implications
> of
> >> the process in discussing the turn to mimetic discourse in the
> Introduction.
> >> To appreciate the full extent of ...
> >
> >
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180215/e4d11c79/attachment.html>