The Science of Collapse

[ish mailian]

Yeah, maybe I had a bad teeth day yesterday, so a bit too cynical, as
you say, but if on the one hand Pynchon has characters and narrators
describe the clear cut Levitttowned suburban sprawl, and the  white
washed and plastic, and sanitized street, the xerox carbon copy
architecture, the bleached and bland Truman Show set, where no mystery
and no Other, and no otherworldly haunts persist, in trees, in secret
integrations not integrated mathematically, he also has characters who
long for, yearn for, search for, hope for, dream of, other spaces, but
these dreamers are often mad, demented, compromised, carrying the
sickness of Love for Death, a kind of Romanticism that is Tragically
Integrated and Calculated, a Faustian builder of the Cross Bronx
Expressway of the Passover over Watts. While the sculptor, with waste,
and what is abandoned as waste and unwanted, erects a mystery, a
gothic garbage cathedral, he is mad, an immigrant, a street dweller,
like the bums Benny encounters after all the commuters have left the
City. His is a tapestry tower that may move an Oedipa to tears, and
that lives as long as it is unfinished, a mystery, but it will be a
condo-complex or carted off to a museum or fenced in and co-opted by
the city fathers.

The Priests who, like the Priest in Achebe's _Arrow of God_,  are
useless, blind astronomers gazing nostalgically, and the Scientists,
haunted by irrational mystery and madness, these Cult members, these
characters who long for the Perhaps, for the Return, for a glimpse of
the Utopian, of the Possibility, of an Anarchistic Moment, are treated
not so much as figures of satire, but elegiacally.

So Peirce ...like Chardin.

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 11:58 AM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Despite my skepticism over Pynchon's later focus on off the grid utopias in Vineland, AtD and IV, I think he isnt as cynical as you say. Smaller-scale anarchism, rooted to local spaces, where vibrant ecosystems can be fostered for the betterment of members as well as the local flora, fauna, etc. is not mentioned for satirization. The more regretful, longing (and at times quite beautiful) passages in the later books are quite the reflection of what could/should have been. In some ways, it is rather sad we seem to be heading towards the conditions by which Pynchon's earlier books were written.
>
> rich
>
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 10:58 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Easy target of a P satire, they are Romantics who insist that they
>> have a Spiritual relationship to Earth even as they are excited by its
>> collapse.  P might make them sexual deviants too. Like the Empty One
>> of GR, or addicts, hooked on game shows,  green tea and avocados.
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 5:00 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > this has much resonance for Pynchon readers I think
>> >
>> > *https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/
>> > <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/>*
>> >
>> > *Collapsologie*—or, as Servigne and Stevens define it, the “applied and
>> > transdisciplinary science of collapse”—proposes to free environmentalist
>> > thought from the linear or progressive understanding of history implicit in
>> > such faiths as “sustainable development,” “green growth,” or the energy
>> > “transition.” The story of human societies, which Servigne and Stevens
>> > suggest is ultimately the story of their interactions with their natural
>> > environments, is circular. The pendulum of human history swings between
>> > moments of our being harmoniously embedded within natural processes and
>> > periods of population concentration, political centralization, and an urge
>> > to transcend the earth’s resource constraints. We develop economies of
>> > scale, agglomerate extractive industry on a grand scale, but ultimately
>> > overexploit our natural foundations.
>> >
>> > “We must prepare small-scale, resilient bio-regions,” Cochet told me, on
>> > the scale of only a few thousand inhabitants. Economic circuits must be
>> > scaled to local ecosystems and resources, eschewing global supply chains.
>> > Visions of the good life that are predicated on unlimited mobility and
>> > expanding human wants must be replaced by an ethics of rootedness, the joy
>> > of living and working in a defined space. Our assumption of history as an
>> > unending process of centralization and unification—toward the universal
>> > state—is running up against an ecological wall
>> > --
>> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l