Practicing Philosophy and Revolution/Dunayevskaya

[Nonson]

Practicing Philosophy and Revolution

By Raya Dunayevskaya/Founder of Marxist-Humanism

Editor's Note (Edited by the Resident Editorial board of News and Letters Committees): When Raya Dunayevskaya wrote the following letter to her colleagues on the National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees, she had just completed a draft of her second book, Philosophy and Revolution (published 1973). In it, she takes up the just completed class series on philosophy that the organization had undertaken and the need to go beyond merely "understanding" dialectics to practicing" dialectics. The full text of the letter can be found in The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Microfilm no. 14036-14038.
May 28, 1968

Dear Colleagues:

This is as good a time as any to throw out some ideas relating the book to the organization....Although on different levels, isolation from ideas--the daily practice of dialectics--is every bit as stifling as isolation from the masses. Nevertheless, just as we try hard to surmount the latter, so we must the former. So, here goes:

A decade has passed since the publication of Marxism and Freedom. Though not only the solid but the unique theoretic foundations it laid for the formation of News and Letters Committees remain with us and will continue to serve us, the dual impulses--from the objective situation and from the theoretical void in the Marxist movement—that have emanated these past 10 years make imperative not a mere " updating" but new development that could rightly be called new discoveries. There may be some who are so bereft of a sense of history, or so involved in what Hegel called " a giddy whirl of self-perpetuating disorder" (that is to say, a world that revolves around Ego rather than around Subjectivity as mass and as theory), that they fail to see that Philosophy and Revolution is the most concrete of all the tasks facing the Chairman, not as " author," but as leader of a revolutionary organization. ["Chairman" is a reference to herself by Dunayevskaya --Ed.]

Let me explain one of the theoretical differences between Lenin and Bukharin that has the greatest applicability for our own development now. It is neither the state-capitalist debate, nor that on Subject--both of which I believe the organization has in the very marrow of its bones. No, it is self-determination of nations as a dialectic of revolution vs. Bukharin' s conception that it was a veritable reactionary step away from the " world revolution."

You must understand that Bukharin was not only not a betrayer of the proletariat, but also not a Trotskyist, which tendency Lenin considered a lot of bombast. Bukharin was a Bolshevik and a co-leader with Lenin. Moreover, he was considered "the greater theoretician." (Which all goes to show how much of bourgeois ideology creeps into the Marxist movement when theory can be equated to " pure theoretical questions" as against one, like Lenin, who always has a specific political or organizational question in mind when he deals with philosophic questions.) They had just finished collaborating on a book on economics, Imperalism and World Economy. Neither the economic analysis nor the common solidarity of the specific Bolshevik tendency as THE organization for revolutionary Marxists could, however, unite their view on self-determination of nations.

Again, this wasn' t just a " general question," for the Bolsheviks were all " for" the right of the self-determination of nations. Rather, the question was: are you for it as a "right" or because you consider it integral to the very dialectic of proletarian revolution. Lenin said, Yes. Bukharin said, No, the "new" situation of imperialist war, the "new" situation that the proletariat, along with the bureaucratic leaders of the Second International, were participating in this imperialist war, the "new" situation that nationalism, more than ever before, was backward as against internationalism, all mean we must be "uncompromising," must take nothing short of proletarian revolution as THE revolution. Lenin retorted that the imperialist war must have "suppressed" your reasoning for you to fail to see the development through contradiction, the dialectics of the many varied forces that participate in a mass outburst, etc.

Now, I'm not interested in the debate as such, not only because most of us know it, but also because the point that concerns us at this period in our development is not the theory, but the attitude to the theoretician. You must understand that Lenin and Bukharin were both theoreticians, and, though Lenin was known as the founder of the Bolshevik organization, he was not known [as]--that is to say, history had not yet proven him to be--the founder of a unique theoretical tendency, which, in fact, would become the Marxism of the age of monopoly-capitalistic imperialism. They had just authored a book on that very new stage of capitalist development and there seemed to be no differences between them. There were therefore those who were even feeling that, since Bukharin was the "pure theoretician," Lenin was revealing "opportunism" (sic!) by being for a national " development" when even capitalism was thoroughly " international" but, of course, from the wrong class point of view.

Let me get away from Russia for a while, come over to the U.S. as the referent. We all recognize Abolitionism as the freedom movement that had the greatest affinity to Marxism, although it was religious and limited to wanting the abolition of slavery, and not a socialist society. It would therefore be natural for us to "prefer" Wendell Phillips, who is the only one of the Abolitionists who came over to the labor movement, to William Lloyd Garrison who did not. And yet history records that Garrison, not Phillips, was the founder of Abolitionism. You might ask: why care about who first founded the movement when, obviously, the more "advanced" was Phillips?

The question, however, is not one of "advanced" or any other adjective like "best." The question is that historically (and this Historic should have been with a capital H because before ever History gets around to "proving," the historical movement would be 10 feet underground if some who had a sensitivity on the question weren' t there to become adherents with "proof" and thereby help create the movement that would become "the proof" ); to repeat, the question is that historically the importance of being the founder is that he creates the atmosphere for all others to grow in and develop to be more "advanced," or "best." Without him, there would be no room for others; it would just be one more lost moment in history--and they are a great deal more tragic than "lost weekends."

So you see that the historic and American and international demands on the Marxist-Humanist tendency to be born are not accidental, nor are they what Hegel would have called "the arbitrary caprice of prophetic utterance." It isn't "prophecy" ; it is the "labor, patience, seriousness, suffering of the negative" that are the prime requisites on leadership, on ranks, and, if they would try the patience of Job, impatience is no more capable of creating "shortcuts to revolution" than are guerrilla tactics. Moreover, none but self can create the discipline needed for the task of working out Philosophy and Revolution. (Marcuse used to tell me that I was "too close" to the proletariat and, by remaining in a " so-called" ivory tower, he had both the advantage of "objectivity" [and the] "tension" needed for development of original theory. The resulting One Dimensional Man showed, however, that, unfortunately, it resulted in a one-dimensional theory.) You cannot afford, as collaborators, not to create free time for me to complete the work.

And yet, of course, there was no way for me not to engage in those organizational problems that are directly (and not so directly) related to the work....As part of the inseparability of Philosophy and Revolution and the organization, I had decided last winter to take time out to work up the Outline of Lectures.(1) It wasn' t just a question of gaining some new members--though both Detroit and New York did so--but of internalizing a methodology both for analyzing events and participating in them as well as relating ourselves to other organizations in a new way. It is the latter I' m not sure the leadership in New York internalized.

To make sure, however, that the first reaction of self-defense or apportioning blame doesn' t beat down the second negativity before it ever has a chance to emerge; and, above all, because it will become of [the] essence to any pamphlet that may result and therefore is first to be tested later, I will give an example, not from New York or even News and Letters Committees anywhere, but from a far off place. The place is France, the subject is the relationship of methodology, not only for analyzing events but for being "actors of change," for those who would be revolutionaries. And the person involved is Jean-Paul Sartre, a petty bourgeois intellectual of such "high" stature as to have created a philosophy other than Marxism: Existentialism.

After a full decade' s existence--actually it had begun in the late 1930s in France but World War II made it invisible, so to speak, and it didn' t become a challenge to Marxism till [the] end of war--Jean-Paul Sartre felt so totally impotent to create actors and he, too, having gotten, he claims, some new impulses from the death of Stalin (not to mention that Existentialism ALMOST got a following in East Europe) that he decided to declare [himself] a Marxist after all! But still his task was not "to join" but "to search for a methodology" for revolution. It is there that he declared that Marxism will remain THE philosophy of our time, and that Existentialists merely "tended the garden" because "today' s Marxists" had stifled Marxism' s self-growth. He called Existentialists "ideologues."

You must understand it was not a compliment. It is a word used by Sartre like we use "popularizers" plus the way Marx uses the word ideology as false consciousness. (With Sartre it' s always a hybrid; that' s so easy for the brilliant writer for whom words are toys, "dialectical" toys.)

In a single sentence, this means that it is impossible to create an organization without a Marxist methodology, one that needs constantly to be "restated" to meet the challenge of new situations, and that any "pretenders to the throne," as the Existentialists were to the Communists, NOT MARXISTS, must know how to bow to the organization-builders on a different methodological basis....

Finally there is the book itself, and I want to quote just a few sentences from the Introduction that [were] not in the first draft: "It becomes necessary to return to Hegel whose philosophy has a validity all its own. That is why Marx kept returning after he broke with Hegelianism and created historical materialism. Marx' s problems, Lenin' s problems, aren' t ours. No age can speak for another. Precisely because the impulse to grapple with Hegel' s Absolutes came neither from scholastic needs, nor even [from] the founders of the new world view of Marxist-Humanism, but because our age imparted a new urgency to it, it would be at our own peril if we were to dismiss the new facets unfolded by our world in transition.

Yours, Raya

l. " Lenin on Hegel' s Science of Logic : Notes on a Series of Lectures," Dec. 14, 1967, The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection microfilm no. 3885. Reproduced in Dialectics of Liberation (News & Letters, 1974, 1982

[Sato]

Thymos -- it's a Greek word that comes from Plato, representing a certain part of the, or to put it in modern terms, part of the personality, or a part of the human psyche that precisely demands recognition. And according to Plato, there are three parts of the soul: there's the desiring part-- the part that desires food and water and so forth -- and there's reason, human capacity to calculate, and to make decisions based on fundamental logic, this sort of thing. But Plato says that there's a third part of the soul which is thymos, which essentially is, in a way, a source of self-esteem. It's the valuing part of the soul. It's the part of the soul which says, "Yes, I am a human being. I have a certain dignity of worth and I am proud of that worth." It's impossible really to reduce any understanding of human psychology simply to desire and reason alone, and there's a very important assertive side of human personality which wants recognition and demands that other people recognize one at one�fs worth, at one�fs understanding of what one is worth.

Megalothymia means the desire to be recognized as greater than other people, and this is in a way the sense of both things that are good about politics and things that are bad about it, because a tyrant is, in a way, a prototype of the person that wants to be recognized as greater.

Hegel felt that the French Revolution was an end to a great dialectical progress toward the conditions of Liberal Democracy. Since that event the world�fs nations functionally have been discovering a pragmatic endpoint in some kind of liberal democracy, in spite of sometimes an initial or temporary allegiance to a megalothymial doctrine. This process is just short of 50% completed (since 40% of all nations are now on a liberal democratic path). Russia is the present arena of the transition of a small percentage of global population. More importantly, China will be next, and this will be messy and slow.

As for the nature of capital, this is very fluid in a self-organizing world. Rather than defining class struggle in terms of simple dominant dialogues (between, say, some entity called labor and another called management), a better model might be the motion of gases in a nebular cloud. All kinds of coalescences are forming and unforming at any moment in the manner of my previous discussion in the �gwho�fs running the show�h posting. If you want moral oversight, then you will have to make only a small contribution where your talents fit in.

In any case, I think there is no �gthrone,�h as understood by some doctrinaire Marxism. Also it seems to me that postmodern intellectuals have been trying to take over a lot of the social concerns of the Marxists of the first half of the 20th century. Postmodern jargon is often silly pomposity and of little applicable value, but it was good to see the more arrogant of the Marxists getting their word games thrown back at them.

Paraphrasing Winston Churchill�fs statement: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all other forms.


S

[Ronald_Barbour]

An Oxymoron: Marxist-Humanism.

Sato: What is your opinion of Objectivist philosophy?

Sincerely, Ronbo

[Nonson]

If readers accept that the analogy of narrative Loops complementing and competing with the main "Line" of the narrative is one useful way of following Mason and Dixon, then chapter 61 quickly looms in prominence and importance, for that is the chapter in which the two surveyors investigate an Indian Mound "quite in the projected path" of their proposed Line guided by one of their party who knows the local territory, a Welshman named Shelby.

The Mound is a huge cone-shaped hill gradually illuminated by the morning light, with a passageway cut into it by a would-be looter that allows Mason and Dixon to see a cross-section of the Mound's structure as a series of layered rings, each being warmed successively as the morning sun rises. The layers are created using "Refuse": "dirt...ashes...crush'd seashells." Dixon comments: "alternating Layers of different Substances are ever a Sign of the intention to Accumulate Force,--- [...] perhaps, Captain, these Substances Mr. Mason so disrespects may yet be suited to Forces more Tellurick in nature, more attun'd, that is, to Death and the slower Phenomena." The Mound's layered Loops indeed accumulate such force that magnetic compasses are made useless for surveying: "the Needle is swinging wildly and without pause, rocking about like a Weather-Vane in a storm," and Dixon temporarily forgets who or where he is. Shelby then adds a comment that encourages us to see the Mound precisely as a Vortex or array of an infinite number of narrative Loops tangent to the Line: "'---When at length your Visto is arriv'd here, the Mound will become active, as an important staging-house, for...whatever it may be" (599).

It would be an oversimplification to label the contrast between Line and Mound a contrast between modern and ancient ways of knowing, science and religion. A more accurate way to state the contrast would be between heaven-centered vs. earth-centered forms of knowledge, both ancient and modern. The "star-dictated" (601) absolutes of Mason's astronomy or Zarpazo's Jesuit theology, which thrive on neat geometries and stable hierarchies, are juxtaposed with what Zhang and Dixon call the ambiguities and "inner shapes" of earthly realities, including the sheer difficulty Mason and Dixon have making perfect celestial or magnetic measurements in the field and the myriad ways in which mortal human lives and understandings conflict with truths that science and theology claim are universal. Zhang associates these latter forces with "the true inner shape, or Dragon [Shan], of the Land," while for Dixon they represent Tellurick or earth-centered forces, especially magnetism. In the Indian Mound these forces find their most powerful centering, their most direct contact and conflict with the different energies embodied by the measuring of the Line. For Pynchon, the Indian Mound and the Dragon Shan represent not only ancient world views antithetical to Enlightenment science, but are prophetic of how that same science already contained within it anomalies that could only be resolved with the invention in the twentieth century of quantum physics, fractals, and the sciences of chaos and "complex systems" combining both linear and non-linear iterations. Hence we are meant to see in the Mound's Vortex not a unique or exceptional occurrence but an emblem for the infinite number of narrative Vortices or alternative universes already present in any Linear rendering of either space or time.

Pynchon's narrative also playfully raises questions about the origins of the Mound---who built it and what it signifies. Captain Shelby, supposedly a local expert, has decided opinions on the subject but their validity is questionable. To begin with, Shelby's views are self-serving and fantastical: a Welshman, he argues that the Mound was created by a visionary band of Welsh migrating from the East who left similar Mounds in Britain before (possibly) becoming the band of Indians known as the Tuscarora (600); in his opinion the Atlantic Ocean for them was not a barrier but "nearly irrelevant." Shelby also contradicts himself: he proposes Meso-European origins for Indian Mounds yet elsewhere concedes that the Indians in the area are heartily amused by whites' attempts to understand the Mound's meaning and origins: "This Mound is something they understand perfectly,--- that white people do not, and show no signs of ever doing so, is a source of deep Amusement for them" (598).

The Indians have their own theories about the origins of the Mounds. They attribute them not to their own civilizations but to a great earlier civilization that preceded theirs---one that perhaps arrived from the sky and was constructed by giants (662, 671). For the Indians the Mound inspires hilarity as well as humility, a playful appreciation of the limits of all human attempts to define and measure. Although sky-centered, this "visto" is akin to Zhang's discussion of the inner realities and local contingencies embodied in the Earth-Dragon Shan. The Mound is perhaps the most discernible geographical structure in the novel representing this alternative, earth-centered point of view; it is arguably as important for appreciating the novel as a whole as the Line itself, and its centripetal and anti-entropic forces are operative at every moment in Mason and Dixon. Indeed, such a Mound is an analog for the printed Book itself, "'thin layers of pattern'd Ink, alternating with other thin layers of compress'd Paper, stack'd often by the Hundreds," producing an effect not unlike that of the Mound and other "Contrivances" which "quite multiply the apparent forces, often unto disproportionate results'" (390). [3]

&



The Mound may also be read as a primary model of how to do alternative cultural history. Mason's and Dixon's training exemplifies not only the world of Enlightenment science but also emerging eighteenth-century views regarding how to understand cultural history. The Enlightenment project sought to define universal laws of the history of civilizations comparable to those governing the physical world. These human sciences reach their fullest development in Kant's and Hegel's schemes for using universal standards for measuring the degree of "civilization" any culture has attained. [4] For Hegel, this led inevitably towards classifying world cultures both past and present into several different categories, including "world-historical," "emergent," and eternally child-like or primitive. Universal history for him meant the "development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and the consequent realization of that Freedom" (70). But for Hegel only certain civilizations may participate in "universal history"; primitive cultures were by definition eternally outside of the dialectical progress of History toward the realization of freedom.

Such a vision of cultural history also inextricably links the forces of market capitalism, colonialism, and a sense of racial and national superiority. The rules governing how to measure cultural superiority and inferiority created the right of superior civilizations and races either to raise inferior civilizations to their cultural level as part of the Progress of history or (if a culture were judged inevitably primitive) to take advantage of that culture's "undeveloped" natural resources, including human labor. If Enlightenment reasoning led to the belief that the right of personal liberty was "inalienable" for some, for others it justified their being defined as aliens and slaves. The strain of this contradiction shows itself most clearly in Hegel's contradictory use of his famous dialectic in constructing his theory of comparative cultural history. Although constructed as antithetical to Europe and thus seemingly part of any dialectic, truly primitive cultures for Hegel by definition can never be subsumed into the dialectic of history, for they cannot progress and their States will never be able to realize freedom. Their exploitation, however, is indispensable for other cultures to progress.

Of course, this Enlightenment cultural project had its dissenters and other internal contradictions. The Marquis de Sade is the most notorious; I have already briefly mentioned one example of his relevance to Pynchon's novel. The Enlightenment project's most dangerous dissenter, however, is less well known. In Isaiah Berlin's opinion, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was Kant's most serious contemporary opponent in cultural philosophy and the precursor of all attempts to understand and value the differences in cultures. As Berlin reads his work, Herder provides the most sustained argument before the twentieth century for the denial of cultural hierarchies and universal absolutes for evaluating cultural progress such as Kant and Hegel were determined to construct. Herder argued that each culture was a product of its geography and history and that its cultural inventions could only be fully understood from within that history. Even more, Herder argued that cultural values were incommensurate; one culture's cultural values could not be used to understand or measure another's, except as a starting point of reference, never as an absolute. (A very controversial claim, then as now.) In Herder's words as translated by Berlin: "the civilization of man is not that of the European; it manifests itself, according to time and place, in every people" (198). To use the terms Pynchon's novel has given us, this sense of cultural relativism is the novel's Mound or Shan, its "Tellurick" or earth-bound knowledges that pose an alternative to allegedly universal (whether Newtonian, Kantian, or Hegelian) absolutes as a way of defining cosmological and cultural realities. [5]

Herder, as far as I can tell, is never mentioned in Mason and Dixon, but I would argue that his thought is deeply relevant to it, if only because without considering his thought it is impossible to re-evaluate the complex heritage of the Enlightenment--- and such an assessment is the deepest ambition of Pynchon's text. Pynchon's novels have always been concerned with the metaphysics used to create and justify power inequities, but with unprecedented power Mason and Dixon provides a cultural archeology of the links between Enlightenment science and European theories of racial and cultural superiority. In this the novel is profoundly Herderian, and never more so than when Jeremiah Dixon's point of view is central.


Here, for example, are Mason and Dixon debating whether to accede to Native American requests and halt the drawing of the Line some forty miles short of its planned intersection with the Ohio river. Characteristically, Mason argues for the universal imperatives of their collective enterprise in the name of Enlightenment science, while Dixon takes the side of the Indians and imagines how they might see the enterprise of the Line differently. Dixon does this in part just to needle his partner and in part because, though trained as a scientist, he is curious about all world-views and all forms of knowledge that contradict what he has been taught. Dixon also voices his and Mason's growing unease with their project and what its unintended consequences might be.

"They want to know how to stop this great invisible Thing that comes crawling Straight on over their Lands, devouring all in its Path."

"Well! [Mason replies] of course it's a living creature, 'tis all of us, temporarily collected into an Entity, whose Labors none could do alone."

"A tree-slaughtering Animal, with no purpose but to continue creating forever a perfect Corridor over the Land. Its teeth of Steel,--- its Jaws, Axmen,--- its Life's Blood, Disbursement. And what of its intentions, beyond killing ev'rything due west of it? do you know? I don't either. ...Haven't we been saying, with an hundred Blades all the day long,--- This is how far into your land we may strike, this is what we claim to westward. As you see what we may do to Trees, and how little we care,--- imagine how little we care for Indians, and what we are prepared to do to you. ...As the Indians wish, we must go no further." (678-79; ellipses are my own)
If Mason is obsessed with categorical imperatives in science and philosophy, Dixon, though trained as Mason was, is by temperament drawn to ironies, ambiguities, and cultural contradictions. Mason and Dixon journey to South Africa or to Ireland or the American colonies primarily on scientific expeditions, but Pynchon uses their presence in these locales---and the astronomers' unease with the abuses of power that they encounter---to show us the contradictory consequences of Enlightenment cultural theories, their complicity with both the "Charter'd Companies" that marked the first stage of capitalism (252) and justified colonialism with theories of racial and cultural supremacy, not just a curiosity for different cultures or the necessities of trade. We see class and cultural warfare in rural Britain and in London; we see how British colonial violence and racism was first deployed not in the New World but against the Scots and the Irish.[6] And the novel's opening episodes in South Africa provide a key introduction to a history of slavery and cultural domination that sets the stage for the full exploration of these themes in America. Mason and Dixon's Line of course became a boundary marking not just the Pennsylvania/Maryland border but the fault-line in American democracy itself---all the contradictions between America's vision of liberty and equality and its constitutional validation of the color line marking some as citizens and others as aliens. Mason and Dixon's Line is also implicated in America's westward expansion, a violent, tree-clearing expression of cultural superiority made manifest both in slavery and in Indian wars. These doubts increasingly shadow Dixon as the Line is drawn farther and farther West.


Yet it is too simple to say that Mason embodies the Line's energies and Dixon the Mound's, though this is partly true. In reviews of the novel, much was made of Pynchon's brilliant use of opposing temperaments in his two main characters---Mason's rage for order coupled with his melancholia; Dixon's optimism, gregariousness, and delight in play, improvisation, and risk-taking. What has not yet been sufficiently emphasized is how well this pairing allows Pynchon to explore the cultural contradictions of the Enlightenment embodied in each of his primary characters and in the country most famously founded in the name of Enlightenment truths, America itself.

Mason is usually threatened by the new and the culturally different and most frequently seeks refuge in his scientific training in universal absolutes. In the wilds of Pennsylvania he is the one who is least able to adapt to the conditions of the frontier; he frequently (and sometimes unintentionally) insults both his white and Indian hosts, and Dixon has to patch things up. Yet Mason has his own "Tellurick" energies; he is a melancholic frequently assailed with visions of the uselessness of all his science, and in his dreams and visions of his wife Rebekah he journeys far into an alternative realm that can be explained neither by Newtonian physics nor by Enlightenment cultural or psychic history; like Newton, he has a visionary and mystical side that is fully developed but usually hidden behind his scientific face.


Like Mason, Dixon is a good and steady scientist, indisputably a free-thinker, experimenter, and man of his age. But unlike Mason he is a gregarious optimist delighting in heterogeneity and chance, always willing to explore new foods, new adventures, and new cultures. Dixon is also a Quaker deeply disturbed by inequities of power and by injustice and cruelty; he too has a melancholic side and it is he, not Mason, who meditates most thoroughly on the contradictions between slavery and the Enlightenment.

"Ev'rywhere they've sent us,--- the Cape, St. Helena, America,--- what's the Element common to all?"

"Long Voyages by Sea," replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by now chronick. "Was there anything else?"

"Slaves. Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,--- more of it at St. Helena,--- and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to re-encounter thro' the World this public Secret, this shameful Core...." (692; ellipses are Pynchon's)
Dixon is really a Herderian, a proto-anthropologist who relishes rather than is threatened by cultural differences and the possibilities of cultural relativism. When Native American leaders explain with the Line must stop and not cross a Warrior Path that is a crucial boundary-line allowing contact yet separateness among Native American nations, it is Dixon who is instrumental in stopping the Line's "progress." This is the same Dixon who will confront injustice whenever he encounters it, most memorably when he publicly humiliates a slave-driver even though his actions put an important supplemental surveying project in jeopardy (696ff). [7] Dixon may be fascinated with cultural multiplicities, but he does appear to believe in some absolutes of ethical conduct.

In the end Pynchon's novel does not resolve the conflict between the Enlightenment project and its contradictions and alternatives, just as it does not side with either Mason's or Dixon's world-views but rather presents them both in all their complexity and inter-relatedness. The novel is both Line and Loop, Loops infinitely expanding within the narrative of the Line. The full richness of Pynchon's deconstruction of Enlightenment cultural studies as well as its natural sciences will only emerge in the next millennium as the novel gets readings to match the complexity of those given Gravity's Rainbow. Moreover, just as Gravity's Rainbow proved so stimulating in the late 1970s and 1980s to testing the full range of possibilities in deconstruction as a theory of reading, so will Mason and Dixon be one of the crucial texts for testing the resources and limitations of current "cultural studies" and "postcolonial" critical theories. (In saying this, I don't mean to place Mason and Dixon as the unmovable center of these new critical paradigms, only as one of many possible centers. Mason and Dixon will greatly benefit from being read in contexts provided by writers such as Rushdie and Kingston, Marquez and Parmuk, Ben Okri and Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff and the Bharati Mukherjee of A Holder of the World, not just novelists such as Burroughs and Barth and Melville with whom Pynchon is usually compared.) As well as focusing on the novel's brilliant comic set-pieces (talking dogs and walk-on parts for Washington and Franklin, etc.), we should be willing to unpack the full meanings of the laughter provoked by a knowledge of the Mound, the crises of understanding represented by Native America's "Interdiction" (678) of the Line in western Pennsylvania.

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Notes

[continued]

[3]. The novel's magnificent opening paragraph gives us another such device figuring the work as a whole as well as the reader's encounter with it: in the room in the Philadelphia house in which Cherrycoke presides is "a sinister and wonderful Card Table which exhibits the cheaper Wave-like Grain known in the Trade as Wand'ring Heart, causing an illusion of Depth into which for years children have gaz'd as into the illustated Pages of Books ... along with so many hinges, sliding Mortises, hidden catches, and secret compartments that neither the Twins nor their Sister can say to have been to the end of it" (5-6; ellipses Pynchon's).

[4]. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published somewhat contemporaneously with the events of Pynchon's novel (Kant's "The Idea of a Universal History" dates from 1784, for instance), while G. F. W. Hegel (1770-1831) of course did not publish his work until after the period in which the novel is set. Pynchon is writing an ur-history of the Enlightment, however, not making a strict chronology of influences. Kant and Hegel brought to fruition in the philosophy of history many of the assumptions that governed Mason and Dixon's Enlightenment scientific training, in particular the belief in universal laws underlying and explaining the multifariousness of the perceived world. Also relevant is John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690), which contradictorily treats slavery as both a violation of natural rights and as acceptible within a social contract such as the Articles that governed the Carolina colony.

[5]. Isaiah Berlin's most succinct account of the importance of Herder is in Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking, 1976. For Kant, see The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, trans. Thomas de Quincey (rpt. Hanover, NH: Sociological Press, 1927); an excerpt is also in Patrick L. Gardiner, Theories of History: Readings from Classical and Contemporary Sources (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 22-34, translated by W. Hastie. For Hegel, see especially the "Introduction to the Philosophy of History," in Gardiner, 60-73, translated by J. Sibree. For a central J. G. Herder text, see the selections compiled as "Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Man," in Gardiner, 35-49, translated by T. Churchill. Contrast Herder's statement "one must enter the time, the place, the entire history [of a people]; one must 'feel oneself ... into everything'" (Berlin 186) with the following two statements by Kant and Hegel, respectively: "suppose we start from the history of Greece, as that by which all the older or contemporaneous history has been preserved, or at least accredited to us." [Kant's footnote on this passage: "It is only a learned public which has had an uninterrupted existence from its beginning up to our time that can authenticate ancient history. Beyond it, all is terra incognita; and the history of the peoples who lived out of its range can only be begun from the date at which they entered within it. In the case of the Jewish people this happened in the time of the Ptolemies through the Greek translation of the Bible, without which little faith would have been given to their isolated accounts of themselves"] (in Gardiner, 32). Or Hegel: "In the history of the World, only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state. For it must be understood that this latter is the realization of Freedom.... It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses---all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... for his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence---Reason---is objectively present to him [as realized in a rational State of which he is a member]" (67-68).

[6]. The Irish role in the origins of repressive colonial policies is stressed in Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown, 1993), especially pp. 9, 24-50; and David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993).

[7]. This incident may be prophesied by Mason and Dixon's Native American guide during a night-time exploration of the Warrior Path that their Line will not cross (675-76). There they find a mysterious whip-like weapon in the path, either put their as a warning from Catawba Indians to the South, or a "find" staged by the Indians to give the white surveyors pause with a weapon that for Mason and Dixon may connote not so much Indian weaponry as one of the principal instruments of coercion in the slave system, the cat-of-nine-tails whip. A similar whip (though made of leather, not swamp cane) is wielded by the slave-seller whom Dixon later attacks (696).^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Critical review of Mason and Dixon.

[oca]

Nonson my boy:

You naughty boy, you have been funny again. Don't you ever get serious?

[Reza_Rahmani]

Nonson, and anyone else who takes an interest in pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere:

Take a look at the most recent issue of National Geographic magazine.

More than 11,000 years ago, in what is now the eastern part of the USA, there were people whose DNA has been proven to be of European origin.

It is likely that the first penetration of homo sapiens into the Western Hemisphere was done in ocean-going vessels. People came from both Beringia (now covered by the Bering Sea), by way of the North Pacific Ocean, and from Europe, by way of the North Atlantic Ocean. 11,000-year-old settlements have been found on the southern Chilean coast.

Reza

[Sato]

Nonson,

The verbosity of your post aside, I appreciate that you are bringing Thomas Pynchon's books into the discussion.

I suggest that rather than dwell on Pyhchon's theme of nihilism versus conspiracy (which has its charm as a basis for entertaining novels); consider instead the work of Stuart Kauffman, a scientist who wrote a book called "At Home in the Universe." Kauffman is concerned with complexity theory.

It may be that the human brain, that little squishy thing in each of our skulls, has limited capabilities with respect to really understanding complexity. This is anxiety-provoking.

S