'Pataphysical Schools

For Futurists, exception from collision of machines

for Oulipians, from constraint of programs

for Jarryites, exception results from the corruption of memories (pg. 10)

What's our school? How do we define the kind of 'pataphysics we perform? More on this later.

I guess we're after the Clinamen since we're looking at a system that values not equivalence or difference but the fate of its own contrivances (the contrivance here being rational logic and progress by way of scientific law).

In the end, our exception (the accident) results from the holes left in the fabric of scientific progress. As science/literacy continually and more minutely classifies the world and attempts to control it through that classification, the more the world, from the bottom up, rejects that classification.

I guess the world may be reinstating its own mystery, starting at its base (the atom, the proton, a ray of light) and moving on up.

Perhaps a goal would be that, through our treatment of the accident, we can tap something into the collective subject, reinstating a certain enigmatic relationship to a particular object (in my case, the PC or screen technologies, for Walton architecture, for Wendy our bodies, for John our educational institutions, for Ulmer our environment, for Jake our minerals). I always say that the power of the cinema is such that if one embraces it with everything that it will literally change the way they see the world. Through our rendering of quotidian elements of every day life, perhaps we can introduce the viewer to a new way of perceiving and experiencing reality. (Lofty goal, right?).

'Pataphysics, Determining the Approach, and Which Science to Use

if poetry cannot oppose science by becoming its antonymic extreme, perhaps poetry can oppose science by becoming its hyperbolic extreme, using reason against itself ‘pataphysically in order to subvert not only pedantic theories of noetic truth but also romantic theories of poetic genius

This strategy of vertigo seems to be becoming more clear. We must look into the science of the topic and exacerbate it in a way that its truth becomes questionable and indiscernible.

The Oulipians derive a logic and strategy from calculus and then derive a way to treat letters and words. Yet the question remains of how one might convert this into a visible syntax, a language made of image.

Do we simply take the words and convert them to image correlates? How do we establish the chain of inference? Something like the figure in the unconscious (something that needs to be traced back to an initial system through processes like displacement and condensation (or, as Lacan says, through metaphor and metonymy?)?

And then the question also comes up of which science to use? If we're to start with a scientific process and then derive an exaggerated poetics out of it, where to look for that science in the accident? For example, with my accident, a primary process is the displacement of lead by way of conflagration of plastics. Do I look into the specific science of that chemical breakdown, convert it to a linguistic trope, and then build that trope into images? Or do I parody the specific science straight off?

Finally, a side note: can we create vertigo just through simply manipulating the user's vision via the Prezi. I've been messing around with the program, and one can easily spin the screen with such convulsions that the viewer might become physically ill. I guess then we can pursue vertigo through both the figurative recognition of ourselves in a mise-en-abyme and also through the visual spinning of an image.

From Orality to Digitality

Orality - Religion - Church

Literacy - Science - Academy

Electracy - Entertainment - Internet

or

Orality - attempts to understand the chaos of the present, does so through religion via church.

Literacy - attempts to control the present and past, does so through classifying the world via written language and preserving the past to dedicate civilization toward progressing past the past

Electracy - attempts to create new worlds (digital worlds, drug worlds, synthetic organic life) by way of technology.

Perhaps this is a means toward understanding how drugs might function in the present. Rather than adopting Caillois' edicts against them, can we see the growing use of designer drugs as a way for the average joe to create or spin a new reality out of the existing one?

Is it that much different for someone to walk around Downtown stoned than for someone to zip around on a skateboard listening to The Sound on an ipod? Both activities attempt to take our phenomenal reality and to manufacture a new world or reality within it. Both seem somewhat dangerous.

Vertigo and Drugs

Thinking through the ramifications of vertigo (ilynx) as a strategy, I'm struck by my continual return to drugs (esp. hallucinogenic drugs like LSD) as a contemporary means.

Caillois, of course, covers this, referring to drugs when he speaks to the corruption of ilynx outside of the separate zone of play. He reminds, "If the principles of play correspond to powerful instincts in the human, they gratify these only under the idealized situation correspondent to play. Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these impulses can hardly but lead to disastrous consequences" (55). Searching for unconsciousness and a distortion of perception, many are led down the harried road of pure pleasure, which, of course, interrupts daily life, making existing in the "straight" world nearly impossible.

Maybe it'd be different if one could ride a rollercoaster to work.

Then again, I wonder if there might be more to Caillois' position. He considers the use of intoxicants as a derivation from the positive impulses associated with ilynx at play. He talks about a group of ants who preserve another species' larvae in order to get stoned on its secretions. They evidently give this so much attention that they neglect their young. For Caillois, such a favoring of the paralyzing substance neutralizes "the most powerful instincts, even that of self-preservation." Because of physical addiction, the "alcoholic [is] led down a road where he is destroyed. IN the end, deprived of the freedom to desire anything but his poison, he's left a prey to chronic organic disorder, far more dangerous than the physical vertigo that momentarily compromises his capacity to resist the fascination of oblivion."

Drug culture has changed a lot since Caillois wrote the book, and it seems like they might offer a means to experience the world in a strange new way. It's no secret that many of the avant-gardes used drugs in their speed toward new forms (cabaret scene and absinthe; 60's avant-gardes and LSD, etc. etc.).

So, to what extent should we consider these things in our conceptualization of ilynx? The purest example of vertigo I've seen in contemporary art might be Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, a film that simulates the experience of someone who's killed while taking a new hallucinogen called DMZ. The blend of live-action and digital imaging in this film is quite incredible, and as a result of the effort put forth in the production, it's the closest one can come to tripping without taking a tab or eating a mushroom.

As you can see from my earlier example, I'm exploring the effects of psychedelia in my image. It seems to me that trips might be considered a kind of living sublime. A sublimity, chemically inspired, coming from the inside out (or the out in). It seems to me that one way of promoting a feeling of vertigo in the reader might be to attempt to synthesize the feeling of the trip in a visual form, but not in a boring, tyedye way, but in another, something resembling reality but tweaked enough in a way as to inspire a feeling of intoxication, of blurriness, of dizziness and ilynx.

Caillois Questions

Like all of you, I've spent the past week attempting to mine some ideas out of the Caillois. One of the challenges I have with the text is that I'm constantly questioning how many of these elements remain relevant in accordance with the move from literacy to electracy. That is to say, we see a move in Caillois where society moves from vertigo and simulation as the guiding focus of culture to that of agon and alea (often with alea serving as a recompense to agon's denials). So, while I think I'm on the same page as all of you with the need to reintroduce ilynx to escape the limits to utilitarian thinking, I'm almost wondering if another category should be introduced? That is to say, while ilynx focuses on the pleasure/pain axis we're concerned with, is it possible to invent another category that's perhaps more commensurate with what we know about modernity?

Also, Caillois mentions that in "primitive" or oral cultures, vertigo comes by way of simulation. Vertigo is the goal, but simulation is the means. What can we say about the interplay of these categories in our concepts? It seems like the context of the catastrophe, with things left hanging constantly in suspense, that chance might be what we're looking at. Just as the flaneur of the arcades surfed the crowd, taking in sights, we now act as a flaneur to the world, moving quickly through information as major news networks wonder which geopolitical catastrophe will kill us firth (which sets it off? Military intervention in Libya? Rick Scott's assistant suicide of the educational and labor systems? An exploding oil rig?). So, could we say that the conditions of pleasure/pain in the dromosphere build to vertigo by way of chance...and accumulation?

Like Jason, the Blog returns from the dead

or maybe more like Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse.

So, this post will be a little slap-dash, but we were making so much sense before that it'd be a shame not to re-energize the blog with some good old fashioned information sprawl.

So, I missed class on Wednesday, so this post will serve two purposes: 1) to report on my progress towards an image representing my disaster and 2) parsing the notes in that context in order to arrive at something like a plan for part 2.

Section 1:

So, working from my previous failures, I created a new image:

Clearly, we're not quite there yet, but we're making progress all the same.

Okay, so what we have is an image of a computer emanating multi-colored rays, those centered on an image of Sylvia Sidney, one of my favorite actresses. Why her? I guess it has something to do with...er...seduction (ahem). Outside of the computer, we see E-waste that gives texture to the colored sprawl. Finally, we have static running over the image.

The problems: Sidney's not the emblem we need here. She's evocative, to be sure, but we need something that pushes it in a different direction. I'm thinking Mabuse might be an image to consider. Something from these below perhaps...

I especially like the 2nd design.

Problem 2 is that the static isn't integrated terribly well as a formal strategy. Don't know what I was thinking there, but I layered and saved the image without creating another copy, so it's there for keeps. I'm thinking I'll start from scratch again anyway. I like a lot of it, but the colors need touching up.

Section 2:

John was nice enough to send me his well-organized notes, and I'd like to highlight some of what seem like the key points. I'll go through them and then organize a paragraph or something highlighting what I'd like to do:

"Look at your accident as a festive event of vertigo"

I guess my earlier personification of the object attempted to do something like this. I think the key here might be to think of the production of E-waste not as a complicated network of geopolitical insanity resulting in physical poison but as a good time, as a party, as a festival.

So, what would have to be highlighted then is A) The joy of seeing appropriate to E-Waste and digital imaging. I think I might have this (the multi-color spiral giving us a "shinyness" that might help. B though) There's a joy in cracking these objects open, having been seduced into believing them the receptacle of our desire to see. We want to see through them, but eventually we also want to see in them. Do the images of E-Waste get at this? How do you get across the joy of destruction without motion or sound?

"Ethics of cooperation: why do people cooperate? (game theory addresses this from the dimension of the subject ('I think he thinks') -- it recommends defection). Why do people reciprocate in the gift economy? (belief in the 'Hau'). Fatal Strategies thinks, more ecologically, from the position of the object/event. The accident/disaster is the object's reply to the subject."

So, why would people cooperate in an electrate society? Well, we're not concerned with subjects; we're concerned with the will of the object. Why does the object cooperate? Well, in the accident, it doesn't. So, I guess the exchange might go something like this (for my disaster):

Subject: I want to see.

Object: Here ya go.

Subject: I want to see better. See you later.

((at this point, the object is set into motion, moving overseas or into a landfill))

Subject B: I want to see too!

Object: Here ya go.

((smash smash))

Subject B: *cough**cough*

Object: Hey, pal, you wanted to see. Don't get mad at me.

So, I guess the desire for the object might be to sustain its seduction as long as possible, by infiltrating the subject, if necessary.

"Use one thing to say something about something else, use the 'outside' to say something about the 'inside'"

I think if I can somehow get across the logic of visual media (in its constant improvement/replacement), the seduction (with Mabuse/visual pleasure), and the consequence (the production of E-Waste and the obscenity of visibility), perhaps I can get at something having to do with an innate desire to see.

"Beauty no longer applies as the measure -- now it's closer to the absurd or the sublime"

Exactly my logic in using Mabuse over Sidney. Sidney's beautiful; Mabuse's grotesque but grabbing. The logic of the image would be to abstract the power of imagery via sublime coloration.

One more point:

Near the end of John's notes, he talks about the musical slope of language and speaks to our project's relationship to psychoanalysis. A potential question for email: how does this relate to our sense with working w/ images? That is to say, we could think of some of the ways in which written or verbal language might create chains of displacement or condensation and, in that way, trace back a symptom (that's pretty much Lacan's take, more or less). But we're working with visual images. Do we rely on iconographic resemblance? Symbolic resemblance? Affective resemblance (a little more open)?