Technics, baby

So, part of the image I've been developing uses a famous screenshot from David Cronenberg's 1984 classic Videodrome. In the shot, Max Renn (haha) played by James Woods sticks his head into a fleshy television screen and also into the mouth of Debbie Harry. I keep coming back to the film, not only because of its narrative concerning a TV programmers subsumption into television but also because it dares to take what seems like a Baudrillard-ian approach to media theory. Cronenberg says in the commentary that one of the premises is to assume that all critics of media are right. That the cathode ray will indeed give you cancer and extreme content will make you act as if you were sociopathic. In other words, he's taking a discourse and taking it to something like an ecstatic level.

That brings us to a question I've been grappling with for some time. If I'm going to figure the technics of my disaster (the comparative and intermingling ontologies of the technologies effecting the disaster and also of the subject who interacts with that technology), I need to first figure out what E-Waste is an accident of.

Like I said before, there are a lot of possibilities. One could read it as an outgrowth of the development of globalized networks of exchange in which developing countries constantly get the short end of the stick. You could look at it as an accident of technology rapidly replacing itself, but I'm leaning more and more toward calling it an accident of our modern condition. Our interfacing with technology relies so much on the virtual experience of them that, unless somethign goes wrong, we largely treat the machines as if they don't exist (maybe for fashion purposes if you're rocking a peculiarly nice cell phone or laptop?).

So, what we're looking at here is an accident of technics.

The ontology of the computer as a technology seems oriented toward making one forget it exists. We may hear a soft hum from the CPU (as I do right now, working at an old Dell at my in-law's house (I'm housesitting)). We may need to install a fan if heat's affecting performance, but the machine as a whole and the ways in which we use it encourage a forgetfulness about the machine's ontology to itself as a machine.

For example, my relationship to this computer is abstracted in many ways even as I type. As I type, I'm punching keys with 8 fingers and a thumb. This is my contact.

Those buttons trigger a signal which travels down an insultated wire (stylish, black, and neatly arranged on the desk). That signal moves to where the device connects ot eh main CPU.

The CPU, running hardware to run a software that runs an operating software, my web browser, and this page, takes that information and reproduces it as text simultaneous with my production.

I was complaining to my wife about new versions of Word yesterday and remarked that I like my word process to be more or less like a typewriter.

This desire runs contrary to the particular abilities or automatisms of the machine itself. But I forget that I'm working with tangible parts with their own logics and want the technology to move to a tangible level in which manipulation follows not the logic of symbolic computation but my orders.

So, as a subject, I desire the virtual, the pure symbolic of computation, to adhere to the precepts of my phenomenal existence. And as machine, its telos attempts to solve any gaps holding up the user's desire.

I think, anyway.