aleatorist

the dictionary

2007-05-14T19:33:00.001-07:00

Langue et parole. The OuLiPo would approve. "Abominable snooow-man" is my favorite.

Manuel DeLanda at European Graduate School - 2006 I/VIII

2007-05-02T04:14:00.001-07:00

Manuel DeLanda lecturing about the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, logic, meaning, and the understanding of geometry and mathematics in an open lecture at European Graduate School EGS, Media Studies department. Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2006. (((Thanks to Naxos @ Inmanencia! Keep twittering!)))

Max Headroom Pirating Incident (11-22-87)

2007-04-27T14:23:00.001-07:00

During a broadcast of the Dr. Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock" on WTTW Chicago Channel 11, on Sunday November 22nd, 1987, at around 11:15pm, a Video "Pirate" wearing a Max Headroom mask broke into the signal and transmitted one of the weirdest, unauthorized things ever to hit the Chicago airwaves.

"End of literature, which is made up of sentences."

2007-04-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

“I will learn how to compute on my typewriter,” writes an inmate of Gugging. Alan Turing did nothing else. Instead of learning his public school’s prescribed handwriting, he reduced typewriters to their bare principle: first, storing or writing; second, spacing or transferring; third, reading (formerly reserved for secretaries) or computing discrete data, that is, block letters and figures. Rather than conclude that humans are superior, as did his colleague Godel, with whom he jointly refuted the Hilbert program (in support of a complete, consistent, and decidable mathematics, that is, a mathematics that could in principle be delegated to machines), Turing was suicidal—in life as well as in his job. He dropped the unpredictable in order to relieve mathematicians of all predictable (or recursive) functions and to construct the machine that Hilbert had presumed as a formalism. The hypothetical determinism of a Laplacian universe, with its humanist loopholes (1795), was replaced by the factual predictability of finite-state machines.

Turing, with an eye toward “computers and guided projectiles,” predicted good times for men, programmers, and mathematicians. But it was a strange kind of mathematics into which he imported the elegance and complexity of classical analysis. What disappeared in the split-up of binaries was not only the continuity of all graphs and trajectories examined since Leibniz, and which Fourier’s theory and Edison’s phonographs simply followed. What was much more drastic than such primitive step functions was his crucial innovation: the abolition of the difference between numbers and operational symbols, data and commands. For even if numbers stood for data relationships, the signs + or – were still inhabited by a human spirit who appeared to give the command to add or subtract. Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine, however, converted these (and all other) letters into their monotonous rows of binaries. In machine language, the command ADD is neither a human enunciation nor a letter symbol, but just one of many series of bits…It was not Godel’s humanist belief but rather his simple trick of Godelization that once again emerged victorious: only after commands, axioms, or, to put it briefly, sentences had been converted into numbers were they as infinitely manipulable as numbers. End of literature, which is made up of sentences.

...

Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit interception. Of all long-distance connections on this planet today, from phone services to microwave radio, 0.1 percent flow through the transmission storage and decoding machines of the National Security Agency (NSA), the organization succeeding SIS and Bletchley Park. By its own account, the NSA has “accelerated” the “advent of the computer age,” and hence the end of history, like nothing else. An automated discourse analysis has taken command (Kittler 263).

Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, a Novel

2007-04-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

When I was twenty-three, it began to be possible for me to escape my parents. I started to remember directly, not just through writing, all that happened to me. A sailor is a man who keeps on approaching the limits of what is describable.

I was wild. My brother was the first man who helped me. I spent an increasing amount of time in his apartment.

There Paul Rendier took my virginity. Fucking enabled me to cast off my past; red gave me the authority to be other than red.

Once I had fucked, the only thing I wanted was to give myself entirely and absolutely to another person. I didn’t and don’t know what this desire means other than itself.

After Rendier, I threw myself into every bed as a dead sailor flings himself into the sea. My sexuality at that time was separate from my real being. For my real being’s an ocean in which all beings die and grow.

The acceptance of this separation between sexuality and being was an invention of hell.

What dominated me totally was my need to give myself entirely and absolutely directly to my lover. I knew that I belonged to the community of artists and freaks not because the anger in me was unbearable but because my overpowering wish to give myself away wasn’t socially acceptable. As yet I hadn’t asked if there was someone named me.

At this time I first read de Sade. Perusing The One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom exulted and horrified me; horror because I recognized myself, or desire.

Loneliness, and my kind of life, in Russia physically deteriorated me to such a point that I almost died.

From that time onward I have always felt anxiety based on this situation: I need to give myself away to a lover and simultaneously I need to be always alone. Such loneliness can be a form of death. My brother found me in Russia and brought me back to New York.

I first attempted to dissipate my anxiety by deciding to fuck and be fucked only where there could be no personal involvement. I traveled on trains, like a sailor, and made love with men I encountered on those trains.

My attempt failed. Friends said about me, “She’s on her way to dying young.” But I wanted, more than most people, to live, because just being alive wasn’t enough for me. Wildness or curiosity about my own body was showing itself as beauty. My brother placed as much importance on sexuality as I did. When I met Bourenine at one of the orgies my brother gave, I was ready to try again to give myself to another, to someone who was more intelligent than me and a committed radical.

Anxiety turned into a physical disease. Bourenine said that he wanted to save me from myself, my wildness, my weakness. He made me feel safe enough to try to give myself to him.

I became so physically weak that I stood near death. When Bourenine believed that I might die, he began to love me. I began to hate him, yet I worshiped him because I thought he protected me. My gratitude has always been as strong as my curiosity, as is mostly true in those who are wild (15-16).

bjork - bachelorette

2007-04-25T01:18:00.001-07:00

arborescence makes me shmaltzy. i suppose i should write that book now.

Microscopic

2007-04-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

"All life forms have their own way of communicating. You can't even imagine how many languages there could be in our galaxy. Microscopic is a performance that tries to capture some sort of universal language. With hypnotic music and kaleidoscopic video material we bring you to a domain where there are no secrets. The creatures communicate with light and colour. They are silent and have no purpose. They are just beings flowing around, knowing all there is to know. (Montevideo, live cinema)."

Oedipa, perverse

2007-03-27T00:25:00.000-07:00

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varos: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried.
[...]
What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from the outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

in the studio

2007-03-09T20:02:00.000-08:00

I was trying to explain why I was so excited about the idea of painting from Mylar film reflections: Singularities in the surface reorganizing the figure itself! Constant-mean curvature portraiture! BwOs! and my friend said, "Well, hell, you can be Deleuze to my Bacon." If only!

parallax view

2007-03-03T17:54:00.001-08:00

Maybe I'm too stressed, but I see Zizek in this Swedish prog metal video made from NASA footage. It's very Virilio, too. I especially enjoy the jellyfish parachutes at the end of the transmission.

anaglyphs

2007-02-23T21:31:00.000-08:00

Blog post does not come with free 3-D glasses, but if it did…

There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed difference; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplifications of limitation and opposition … As for opposition, it represents in turn the second-order power, where it is as though things were spread out upon a flat surface, polarized in a single plane, and the synthesis itself took place only in a false depth—that is, in a fictitious third dimension added to the others which does no more than double the plane. In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear limitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free difference. Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organized oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions. Stereoscopic images form no more than an even and flat opposition, but they depend upon something quite different: an arrangement of coexistent, tiered, mobile planes, a ‘disparateness’ within an original depth. Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary. It is no use rediscovering depth as a third dimension unless it has already been installed at the beginning, enveloping the other two and enveloping itself as third. Space and time display oppositions (and limitations) only on the surface, but they presuppose their real depth far more voluminous, affirmed, and distributed differences which cannot be reduced to the banality of the negative. It is as though we were in Lewis Carroll’s mirror where everything is contrary and inverted on the surface, but ‘different’ in depth. We shall see that it is the same with every space: geometrical, physical, biophysical, social, and linguistic…There is a false profundity in conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of the ox—the eye of the dialectician dreaming of a futile combat? (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition).

Mouffe, On the Political

2007-02-20T17:22:00.000-08:00

This is an older post from a previous instance of this blog, recycled at the encouragement of a new reader, and also to refresh some thoughts bouncing around my head for a chapter in progress:

Just fresh from reading Chantal Mouffe’s, On the Political, and I have mixed feelings about the book. The moments I find most useful are her critiques of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and their concept of the multitude. She suggests their depiction of the multitude is utopian and ultimately maintains the status quo by glossing over politics at the local level:

Hardt and Negri take for granted that the immanent powers of the multitude will defeat the constituted power of the empire. Not surprisingly, they never pose the question of political articulation among the different struggles; indeed this is the very question that is foreclosed by their perspective. According to them, the fact that all those struggles do not communicate, far from being a problem, turns out to be a virtue since ‘precisely because all these struggles are incommunicable and thus blocked from traveling horizontally in the form of a cycle, they are focused instead to leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level’ … No need to worry any more about how to articulate a diversity of movements with different interests and whose demands might be in conflict. In that way, the central question of democratic politics, the question which the anti-globalization movement needs urgently to address – how to organize and across differences so as to create a chain of equivalence among democratic struggles – this question is entirely vaporized (112-113).

Mouffe goes on to conclude:

Hardt and Negri’s vision of a globalized smooth space, like the cosmopolitain perspective, fails to appreciate the pluralistic nature of the world…Their idea of an ‘absolute democracy’, a state of radical immanence beyond sovereignty, where a new form of self-organization of the multitude would replace a power-structured order, is the postmodern form of longing for a reconciled world – a world where desire would have triumphed against order, where the immanent constituent power of the multitude would have defeated the transcendent constituted power of the state, and where the political world would have been eliminated. Such a longing, whatever its version – liberal or ultra-left – prevents us from grasping what is the real challenge facing democratic politics at both the domestic and the international level: not how to overcome the we/they relation but how to envisage forms of construction of we/they compatible with a pluralistic order (115).

Following this rethinking of "we/they" in a more complicated light than one triumphant order replacing another, Mouffe cites Niklas Luhmann’s observation that modern democracy requires a “splitting of the summit,” that is, a clear divide between the government and the opposition in order to maintain the illusion that citizens can chose different ways of organizing society. Like the choice between Coke and Pepsi, these are false dichotomies that serve to maintain the status quo. She also cites Richard Rorty as a prime example of similar ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’:

For Rorty, politics is something to be deliberated about in banal, familiar terms. It is a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms and compromises and democracy is basically a question of people becoming ‘nicer’ to each other…Democratic politics consists in letting an increasing number of people count as members of our moral and conversational ‘we’. He is convinced that , thanks to economic growth and the right kind of ‘sentimental education’, a consensus can be built worldwide around liberal democratic institutions…Like Habermas, he wants to retain the vision of a consensus that would not imply any form of exclusion and the availability of some form of realization of universality (88-89).

Mouffe insists we need to break from moralistic choices and reaffirm the “political,” and points out the hypocrisy of Habermasian neo-liberalism by showing how the notion that human rights and rational consensus are singular concepts that span all cultures and can easily become the sort of moralistic rhetoric we see in George Bush’s use of terms like “axis of evil.”

Broadly speaking, one can distinguish a neo-liberal version from a more democratic one. Most of the advocates of the neo-liberal version defend an idealized view of the United States, whose politics is presented as being driven not by national interest but by the promotion of liberal values: free trade and liberal democracy. This goes hand in hand with the glorification of globalization as bringing the benefits and virtues of capitalism to the whole world…The democratic version is more interesting because it does not see globalization as a merely economic self-regulating process and it attributes a greater role to politics than its neo-liberal counterpart does (91-92).

But I come away wondering how this “democratic version” can escape the capitalist model. There may well be other enlightenments, other histories beyond the rise of capitalism, other concepts of human rights that may or may not be in the service of specific geopolitical or economic interests, but am I reductive in wanting some more specific examples here? Mouffe says, “It is not in our power to eliminate conflicts and escape our human condition, but it is in our power to create the practices, discourses and institutions that would allow those conflicts to take an agonistic form.” But what are those practices? Why is this appeal to agonistic pluralism any less a utopian dream?

Against the Day: random thoughts on chapter 1

2007-02-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

So, Pynchon has us in an airship. He has a dog reading Henry James (“Rr rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rff-rff,” replied Pugnax without looking up, which Darby, having like the others in the crew got used to Pugnax’s voice—easier, really, than some of the regional American accents the boys heard in their travels—now interpreted as, “The Princess Casamassima.”). He has references to dime novels and pop culture, and phrases that sound oddly informed by a cable tv squawking in the background of literary creation. Weird phrases that, as a product of televisual culture, give me pause and make me wonder if they only resonate due to the received noise rattling around in my own brain:

“Oh boy!” cried Darby Suckling as he the lifelines to watch the national heartland deeply swung in a whirling blur of green far below, his tow-colored locks streaming in the wind past the gondola like a banner to leeward. (Darby, as my faithful readers will remember, was the “baby” of the crew, and served as both factotum and mascotte, singing as well the difficult treble parts whenever these aadolescent aeronauts found it impossible to contain song of some kind.) “I can’t hardly wait!” he exclaimed.

(Why did I just get a brief flash of the teenie-bopper Jennifer Love Hewitt movie of the same title? No, that really can’t be right…)

But then:

“Much as we might be inclined to offer our protection,” Lindsay had informed the agitated youth, “here upon the ground we are constrained by our Charter, which directs us never to interfere with legal customs of any locality down at which we may happen to have touched.”

(A flash of another captain on a different sort of airship, reciting Star Trek’s Prime Directive during 2 a.m. reruns. Nah…)

There are also ruminations from the airship crew on the earth as a surface—a spherical logic that sets off little Riemannian associations:

“Here it is in a nutshell,” Randolph confided later. “Going up is like going north.” He stood blinking, as if expecting comment.
“But,” it occurred to Chick, “if you keep going far enough north, eventually you pass over the Pole, and then you’re heading south again.”
“Yes,” the skyship commander shrugged uncomfortably.
“So…if you went up high enough, you’d be going down again?”
“Shh!” warned Randolph St. Cosmo.
“Approaching the surface of another planet, maybe?” Chick persisted.
“Not exactly. No. Another ‘surface,’ but an earthly one. Often to our regret, all too earthy. More than that, I am reluctant—“
“These are the mysteries of the profession,” Chick supposed.
“You’ll see. In time, of course.”

In time, indeed. Is this the first of many stages that Pynchon sets up to turn the sphere inside out? Will Pynchon discover a Klein bottle that actually succeeds in going all the way? Undressing (mathematically speaking) the big non-Euclidean strip tease? I skipped ahead a few hundred pages to read about a gaggle of rebel Quaternion mathematicians enjoying a conference:

Kit threaded his way out into the Grand Salon, wallpapered in aniline teal and a bright though sour orange, to appearances floral in theme, though few would insist on it, lit by hundreds of modern-looking sconces, each quarter-shade of Congo ivory scraped thin as paper to let its electric bulb shine through, roisteringly a-seethe tonight with Quaternionnaires from around the globe, all persuasions not to mention apostates therefrom, quasi-Gibbsites and pseudo-Heavsiders and full-bore Grassmanniacs, milling about, more than in the mood for a clambake, eccentrically attired, negligently when not defectively groomed, all, with perhaps no more than the usual quota of barking and drooling, gossiping breathlessly about vacant appointments, compulsive marriages, cretinous colleagues, and real estate both overpriced and otherwise, scribbling on one another’s attire, performing with cigarettes and banknotes feats of vanishing and restoration right up in one another’s faces, drinking Monopole de la Maison, dancing on tabletops, exhausting the patience of wives, vomiting into the pockets of strangers, getting into long, intensely hoarse disputes in fluent Esperanto and Idiom Neutral, the technical discussions being in large part impenetrable, the phatic or sociable chitchat tending to the only slightly less problematic.

Fun. And all in one sentence. But where will it go?

gainfully employed

2007-02-13T13:21:00.000-08:00

A good friend from my department just got word that she's been offered an assistant professorship at Rider University. It's great news for her, especially as she was reaching the end of her student visa and was very concerned she wouldn't be able to stay on in the States. It's been a week of manic-depressive news around here, but this is a very happy moment.

spelunking the panopticon

2007-02-13T00:40:00.000-08:00

I was skulking around an old Nike missile site in Nahant, MA this weekend and getting in the mood for more Pynchon. Up until the 1960s this area was a functioning military post, one of a few cutting-edge “magnetic loop” submarine detection stations in the world, and even housed some nuclear warheads—all within eyesight of the Boston skyline. A Northeastern University marine studies lab has taken over much of the grounds now, but local teenagers have also re-coded the bunkers with graffiti during their late-night make-out sessions. What better place for Pynchon-esque musings?

Urban exploring (or “UE,” for those in the know) is a quirky subculture that has come into its own online as more and more people network and post their trophy photos from spelunking expeditions. Abandoned urban spaces like old factories, forgotten subway tunnels, and defunct hospital grounds become sites of “reality hacking” for the true UE junkie. I love the ethos—the simple act of sneaking into what would otherwise be an overlooked drainage pipe is described by the dedicated as a method for recoding the assumed boundaries of daily life. The whole phenomenon calls for a good anthropological study.

I’ve been following some sites for a few years. Infiltration (“the ‘zine about going places you’re not supposed to go”) out of Toronto is a particularly nice one: http://www.infiltration.org/

Sadly, Ninjalicious, the man behind this publication, died far too young in 2005. He was rather brilliant and wrote at length about how we interact unquestioningly with our given environment. He drew up elaborate maps and diagrams detailing ways to access the hidden realities of various cities through sub-basements, pipelines, service tunnels. You can listen to an interview with him on the This American Life website in the 1999 Archive, 10/1, episode 141, “Invisible Worlds” (Act 3). (The entire episode is worth a listen—the first act is about radio hobbyists who “call-jump” coded transmissions. There are long musings on all the unseen waves and transmissions coursing through us: “I guess I feel like a radio sometimes. We’re all antennas.”) Ninjalicious speaks with delightful passion in Act 3 about his philosophy behind exploring the infrastructure we take for granted every day:

"Most people have no idea the extent to which they are being coddled and taken care of, the millions and millions of dollars and manhours that go into all the support systems that sustain them and make it possible for them to live in an urban environment.”

“I think overcoming your own mental block against going somewhere you’re not supposed to go is the biggest hurdle. Most people seem to just have this instinct to stay on-path and make sure they only go places they’ve been clearly told they’re allowed to go. They don’t need to be told NOT to go, they actually specifically need to be told that they CAN enter a place before they will.”

“Fish farmers use these special underwater tanks that blow little tiny oxygen bubbles through tubes. The fish will perceive these bubbles as a solid wall; therefore, they’ll all stay put. I think that’s the exact same reason people will stay confined to the designated public areas of street-level rather than fully exploring their environment. They perceive walls that aren’t there.”

Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-02-09T22:48:00.000-08:00

A fascinating little post by Prof. Michael Wesch at Digital Ethnography.

babies, dogs, marx

2007-02-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

So tomorrow I’m going to see a friend who has decided to leave academia after a year of no dissertation work and a long bout of silence towards his fellow grad students/friends in the fray. I’m sitting here staring at Pynchon’s three-pound latest and Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 (a good two and a half pounds, easy) and negotiating a boatload of mixed feelings about his decision. Non-academic wife, dog, car payments, a decade of apartment-dwelling and baby on the way = time for a “real” job. For him, at least. Not that I can blame him. But why is it that the decision to stay or leave academia can be so readily organized around a false all-or-nothing choice between maintaining the comforts of the domestic, or rabidly embracing the radicalization that can grip those living under the decree of publish-or-perish? Apparently, I find something noble in radicalization, no doubt because I’m not nearly as radical as I like to think I am. Along this semi-radical line, I had a meeting with my advisor this morning that went fairly well, but he suggested that I was too quick to read every text I’m working on as "a critique of the liberal humanist subject.”

Advisor: “What’s so wrong with the liberal humanist subject?”

Me: “I dunno. It seems to involve kids and dogs.”

Advisor: “You’re being reductive.”

Me: “Yeah, true. You have kids and a dog.”

Advisor: “I hate dogs.”

Me: “Well, there you go.”

Pynchon, Freud, Haeckel

2007-02-04T12:41:00.001-08:00

When Freud lays out his theory of the “retrograde” instinct for repetition in biological life and human psychological development in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he cites fellow psychoanalyst and collaborator Ferenczi in a footnote, but I can’t help but read the following passages without the beautiful watercolor studies of another of his contemporaries in mind, German biologist Ernst Haeckel. An outspoken proponent of Darwin’s evolutionary biology, Haeckel spent much of his career drawing intensely detailed studies of specimens and mapped out an elaborate genealogical tree that related all life forms. Many of his ideas, however, including his “recapitulation theory,” which posits that each successive developmental stage of a given organism repeats the broader evolutionary development of its species, as well as his insistence that “politics is applied biology” would later be used by Nazi eugenicists. I mentioned Haeckel’s work to a friend recently who is writing on the overlap between scopic and death drives in medical photography, but I imagine someone has already taken up a comparative study of contemporaneous biological science, visual culture and Freud. From Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

The fact that the cortical layer which receives stimuli is without any protective shield against the excitations from within must have as its result that these latter transmissions of stimulus have a preponderance in economic importance and often occasion economic disturbances comparable with traumatic neuroses. The most abundant sources of this internal excitation are what are described as the organism’s ‘instincts’—the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus—at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research (40).

It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life. This view of instincts strikes us as strange because we have become used to see them in a factor impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary—an expression of the conservative nature of living substance…We see how the germ of a living animal is obliged in the course of its development to recapitulate (even if only in a transient and abbreviated fashion) the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung, instead of proceeding quickly by the shortest path to its final shape (43).

Let us suppose, then, that all organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same. It would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life…Every modification of which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that know no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’… These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life (45-46).

I see Haeckel’s specimen studies so distinctly in these selections, from the “protective shield” that the cortical layer lacks, to the discussion of “conservative organic instincts” and Freud’s anxious insistence that “inanimate things existed before living ones.” Freud even uses the same terms as Haeckel, including most notably “recapitulation,” and points out, "we are quickly relieved of the necessity for seeking for further examples by the reflection that the most impressive proofs of there being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena of heredity and the facts of embryology" (44). In essence, this is the basic premise of Haeckel's theory of recapitulation, that at each stage of its development, an embryo repeats and overcomes earlier instances of the species in evolutionary history, and it was one of the major scientific arguments used to justify eugenics. Haeckel was obsessed with radiolaria and species on the cusp of organic life, and his paintings compellingly illustrate Freud’s thoughts here. (I’ve just checked—sure enough, a paper was published on Freud, Haeckel and Darwin by Andreas de Block in 2005: “Freud as an ‘Evolutionary Psychiatrist’ and the Foundations of a Freudian Psychiatry”) Anyway, Freud ends by discussing the instinctual repetition towards the stasis to which he claims all life aspires to return, but he notes a single profound exception: “Is it really the case that, apart from the sexual instincts, there are no instincts that do not seek to restore an earlier state of things?” (49). I wonder about the political ramifications of Freud’s final observation here—sexual instincts as an instinctual embrace of difference and change—in terms of historical events like the sexual and political revolution of the Sixties. Especially in contrast to the present post-AIDS moment when cinematic and televisual apocalyptic fantasies go hand in hand with 80-hour work weeks, alienated labor, and virtual sex lives negotiated through Britney Spears’ pixilated cunt. How and where does political change take place in a world mediated by screens and keyboards, where ideas rather than bodies collide?

The direction this post has taken may make more sense if you know that I’m also thinking about sexual politics and technology in Pynchon right now, and I’ve been reading Stefan Mattessich’s subtle analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow via Freud and Deleuze, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Works of Thomas Pynchon. It seems like misreading Deleuze is an easy trap to fall into when writing on Pynchon, but Mattessich offers some beautiful observations on machinic and recursive narrative structures and the displacement of desire and drives in the novel. I especially love this bit on the V-2 rocket and the novel-as-object:

The rocket is the object to which obsession attaches, the fetish the novel fetishizes, but as a figure for the novel, this fetish is also the activity of fetishizing, so that in essence the novel fetishizes fetishization itself. The circularity of this operation verges on auto-affection, and in this respect the novel is like Franz, like but also unlike, a whole reduced to a part that nonetheless cannot bear the weight of any adequate similitude. In condensations such as these, you begin to glimpse the novel exploring itself as text, as metaphoricity, as object and as work—a crystal, a coral, a cyborg, a machine. Each term in this series has a different sense: the crystal is a natural object; the coral is half-animate, half-inanimate organism; the cyborg is part human, part machine (and also part animal); the machine is a mechanical tool. The novel plays within and on these metaphors, warping them into a single movement of desire that encompasses the text itself, or rather metaphoricity itself...The rocket “chooses” Franz…The rocket presents itself to him as prior to or outside any attribution, a thing in itself, standing for a rupture in language at the same time that it is made to bear the weight of pure meaning. The rocket becomes all metaphoricity by foreclosing all metaphoricity (106-07).

All these half-inanimate objects that crystallize functions of the text also make me think of Haeckel’s preoccupation with invertebrates and radiolaria. Also, Haeckel was obsessive about system-building, coined the terms “phylum” and “ecology,” and lectured widely on a variation of philosophical monism that posited all living beings were of a piece. (Again, it’s no big surprise that the Nazis found his work very useful.) Part of what makes Pynchon so fascinating to me is the tension between celebrating what is possible only after a system has been established, such as parataxis and synecdoche in language, parole to langue—in other words, play along the surface of structure—and his inherent critique of system-construction itself as a divisive, reductive and destructive process. When I described the general outline of my project to a friend the other night, she sniffed, “Oh c’mon. Why are you doing this to yourself? Only hipster white men read Pynchon.” She was only half-kidding. But counter to some feminist dismissals of his work, I’d say Pynchon is quick to represent system-building as an obsessional and rather negative masculine trait. While this is also problematic—i.e., who’s to say systems are either masculine or feminine?—the point is he’s not simply celebrating system-building as the rise of pure logic over the muck of humanity, he’s also critiquing its inherent potential to generate paranoid and utopian fantasies of interconnectedness. (Hardt and Negri might want to pay more attention to him.)

Following random thoughts on systems, I’m also curious about how the old one-to-many broadcast model of McLuhan’s “secondary-orality” televisual Sixties and Seventies plays into Pynchon’s novels from that time, and if the many-to-many broadcast model of the internet is going to work its way into his latest 1085-page monster, Against the Day. ARPANET reads beautifully as a Pynchon-esque military nightmare-system, a technology designed with full expectation of nuclear holocaust in mind, but the internet that evolved from it consists primarily of the rupture and play of civilian communications—a shift in usage that also may explain Pynchon’s wacky and huge internet fanbase. Is the new internet model enough to create a more productive and agonistic exchange of ideas around the globe? Will the written subject-as-absence of email and blogging be subsumed once again by video presence now that YouTube encourages everyone to vlog out their secrets? I wonder if Against the Day is so damned long because Pynchon fetishizes the very act of writing itself and insists—rather sadistically to a 21st century telemediated, fast-paced, and over-worked audience—that we better read, dammit! Read it all and like it!