vector of desire M&D random

[Monte Davis]

Maxwell: again, my centennial homage
http://www.science20.com/monte_davis/field_james_clerk_maxwell-78111

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 2:34 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, mid-nineteenth is right on....vector in mathematics goes back to
> 1868 says Mr OED (the Organized Horse....Mr Ed was a horse, of course, of
> course, etc)....but then another citation, perhaps closer to P's use here
> from 1881...and that use is from
> Maxwell, someone we can think TRP might have directly read some of, given
> his famous demon knowledge (and in a work of cultural history a writer
> attributes to Maxwell the
> notions that most overthrew the nineteenth century scientific world mental
> order)....
>
> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 1:41 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> "In the Principia, Newton dealt extensively with what are now considered
>> vectorial entities (e.g., velocity, force), but never the concept of a
>> vector. The systematic study and use of vectors were a 19th and early 20th
>> century phenomenon."
>>
>> http://www.math.mcgill.ca/labute/courses/133f03/VectorHistory.html
>>
>> "vector" here strikes me as one of P's deliberate anachronisms.
>> Mathematicians didn't formally define it until the mid-19th century.
>> Although the idea of a directed quantity would have made sense to
>> mathematicians and astronomers after Descartes and Newton, it's unlikely
>> that in the 1780s DePugh -- even as a Cambridge student with "an early
>> aptitude with Figures" -- would have come up with that word so readily in
>> this context, or been understood so readily by the Rev'd Cherrycoke. Does
>> anyone have the OED handy for earliest citations in astronomy?
>>
>> That said, note the "as if" simile of *projection* here: Cherrycoke
>> suggests that the telescope transports us "to the Object we wish to
>> examine." Maybe even a hint of the very old idea -- abandoned in science by
>> M&D's time -- that vision entails something emitted from the eye?
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 12:19 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>
>>> random
>>>  pg 96 Vector of desire. An astronomy term? Lacan? Other reader's
>>> thoughts, insights.
>>>
>>> CH 10 CherryCoke is much more interesting to me this time around. His
>>> quote fom his unpublished Sermons is rather lovely, comparing our sense of
>>> the Divine to the earth’s sense of relation to the sun. Very Gaia
>>> hypothesis kind of thing.
>>>  We see that the adult component of the listeners coming to hear Ccoke
>>> is growing. He is getting a bit of flak from them. Is P describing a
>>> process where he, in a satiric mode, champions the marginal, the colonized,
>>> and the youn upstarts of his generation like Richard Farina who have
>>> questioned the wars and the demonization of Cuba , drawing them and the
>>> literary avant garde first as an audience, and then attracts those who want
>>> to modify the radical aspects of his satire? Because Ccoke is also a
>>> satirist, an irreverent reverend feeding salacious stories of real life to
>>> the young, but also critiquing Clairol culture, and Calvinism and
>>> connecting it to racial abuse among many other humorous cultural obs.
>>>
>>> Not many people joining in the M&D  discussion. Everyone is busy and it
>>> is a big, cumbersome book. Let’s make sure this is a safe place for
>>> newbies, and disagreement.  The structure is loose but  just join in and
>>> see what happens.
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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