Zero Point. Day Zero. Etc. (but in this case a forward-naming event)

[Mark Kohut]

>From an article on the drought in South Africa and one of Cape Town's
responses.

"Because of a historic drought, the city was nearly out of water. In June,
taps are set to run dry—an event referred to, menacingly, as “Day Zero.” If
it comes, people will be forced to queue for a daily ration of water from
guarded collection points around the city."

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 4:45 AM, Jemmy Bloocher <jbloocher at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mark,Smoke, many many thanks for this. Actually this has given me a lot to
> think about. I was unaware of the Zero Point, but not of the idea, so it’s
> great that it now has a name to the face, so to speak.
>
>
> > On 14 Feb 2018, at 19:10, 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 ...
> >>
> >>
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180215/c982ad30/attachment.html>