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#99: Totality & Infinity in der Raketenstadt (Patreon)

Published:
2018-10-09 05:29:39
Edited:
2018-10-09 06:16:44
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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  • 99_totality_infinity.mp3

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Content

Ghosts of totality in the CIA, the Cold War global capitalist order, and the Modernist literature from which Pynchon drew most heavily.  If you listen to this episode, you get a PhD in English, redeemable at any state school (Alaska and Hawai'i may not apply).

Files

Comments

John Waaben

On totality vs. infinity in moby dick: the titular whale representing the infinite mystery of life and the quest of Ahab to turn him into the refined, industrial good of train oil. Make the world something he can hold in his hands. To conquer the universe that took so much away from him…. And that quest killing everyone on the ship (except our quirky narrator). Also the stuff in the book touching on cetacean intelligence remarks on this too, I think, especially with the implication in the “Spirit Spout” chapter of Moby Dick straight up using tactical thinking and Ahab knowing that, letting him lead them to the final battleground in the Pacific, the most infinite ocean on our planet. So badass………

chris

is it just me or is this a repost?

deathcorner

No, I just recorded this an hour ago – it begins with a reprise of some familiar material, though

Jax

I'm hearing #98 here too

Faroose

I mean it’s been another shitty week, so the intro still felt topical.

deathcorner

Sorry to everyone for the confusion; I've been either blinded with pain, smacked on pills, or both for days now

Biels Nohr

Really enjoyed this one, MJ. Definitely gonna have to listen again. In regards to your thoughts on "broken totality" being built and glorified by post-war fascist thinkers, I see what you mean but I would propose that a broken totality is really just an artificial totality, i.e., any form of government/cartel/both which forces its members to work for a set of goals which are defined by a small group of people, and therefore probably not morally justified. This is in contrast to the kind of naturalistic totality that Spinoza or Von Humboldt would support and Nietzsche would vomit at the thought of. Personally, I would argue that naturalistic totality, regardless of whether it's "correct" in any theological sense, has done a lot of wonderful things and makes for some fundamentally straight moral fibers. I'm not a student of modernism and so I'm definitely wondering if Pound, Eliot, Barnes & Co. would support one over the other.

stephen tucker

I really appreciate how specific you care about being with some of this stuff on here, especially when you talk about hating words like "symbol" and "postmodern" (at least in the way they're used in the vernacular). It gets at ideas that I have sort of thought about myself before but never really was able to articulate.

john schietinger

Michael, thank you for taking such a deep dive into just these two paragraphs of GR, giving them the time and thoughtfulness they deserve. Reading Pynchon's novels for the first time over the last few years completely expanded and altered the lens through which I understand, most significantly, American history, and your podcast is having a similar effect on me now. I'd be fine with a multi-episode epic on any number of single sentences from the Walter Rathenau seance scene.

Jax

The musicogeological mixed metaphor was great, the part about subliminal threads surfacing but suggesting their continuity through the whole novel really resonated with my reading of Mason and Dixon, with things like the occasional kabbalah references suggesting a deeply coded meaning connecting all the disconnected events. I think you mentioned not being interested in that one, but to me it seems like one of Pynchon's most murkily multilayered and complex books; I still don't know what to think of it after the 2nd reading, although I thought I detected a vortical structure to it the 2nd time. With your theory about totalization I think you're on to something; I think I read a similar theory somewhere about GR being resistant to totalizing interpretations, although could you not say the same about Joyce? And doesn't GR's preterite vs. elect form a kind of totalizing system in GR?

Louise

At the risk of coming off as a woowoo snake oil salesman from beyond the moon, I use skullcap whenever the pressure in my head gets too obnoxious. Tincture sub lingua or nasya oil.

Bruce Malm

I just joined your Patreon and am working my way through the archive, so all my comments will be late to the party as I was listening to this I was thinking I would love to hear your take on Dylan’s desolation row. I bet you could do an hour on these two lines And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers

Nic Bodiford

Your venture into academia brings to mind Ray McGovern’s “Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank” complex aka MICIMATT

Lukas McCutcheon

Ugh the opening couple minutes about the political landscape of the US is *not* fun