Fetish Object Methodology (a re-pressed email)

Hi everyone,

Dr. Ulmer's lecture the other day got me trying to think about my disaster's fetish object, some of which was recently documented on the blog.

I guess I just want to be sure I understand the idea behind the search for the object. Dr. Ulmer said it was a feature in reality that, when a particular process came into contact with it (ship-building, in his case), causes the fatal accident to come into being (the making of pine tar). For this particular disaster, the issue at hand is the little red mollusk, the initiator of a fetish that, should it be satisfied, ties the objects' becoming to the eventual accident.

So, the idea would be to trace the object back from the accident to figure how that accident came to be part of the object's becoming?

So, looking into my accident, I figured that the majority of the problems associated with e-waste come as a cause of mishandling the various non ferrous metals that figure in computer (or CRT) construction. Things like lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, etc. are released when these things are mishandled and then affect the local environment and workers. So, looking into where these things figure in construction, we see that, for example, lead figures a lot in the process of construction (it's in the solder, the protective coating of CRT screens, etc.).

I'm not sure where to go here. Intuition sends me to the various problems that these metals seek to solve (making connections, reducing a screen's glare, etc.) as the fetish, but that seems a bit weak and perhaps not specific enough. From the example offered by Dr. Ulmer, it seems as though the fetish object shouldn't necessarily be figurative and metaphoric but something tangible (a shoe fetishist would never say that her/his fetish involves, y'know, protecting one's feet).

Ulmer's Response (edited for my own personal use):

The philosophers of event want to get at that dimension of the world that "indicts" (categorizes) us. There is no transcendence on the machinic side; its evolution is entirely immanent.

The fatality of the contamination at the Cabot Koppers site in Gainesville is that, for it to be otherwise, there would have had to have been no wooden ships, no colonization of the New World, etc. Where is the "decision"? The decision was not to pollute, but to "trade" (economy, circulation of goods).

to presume that my being may be discovered only outside, in the world, made to appear in the mode of image (in whatever media).

We scan the outside materiality of our disaster to locate a fetish (a thing more than itself, the condenses in an emblem the necessity of the history handed down to us (the indictment: you are this).

You choose it, but the point is to think the inevitability, the necessity, of E-Waste. For example, if Einstein couldn't get his paper on relativity published, and got promoted to head of Customs and lost interest in physics, there maybe wouldn't be cathode ray tubes (nor nuclear energy) (I'm just blathering now).

Atomic physics is just one angle. You mention the metallurgy involved (the convergence of many inventions in the equipment) and that could serve just as well. In our context, we are addressing some aspects of the question of ethics raised in Game Theory, the principle that one cooperates or defects. That is thinking from the side of the subject. What is our ethics, from the side of the object?

Strategy, the nth power, the mystery

Target: Think of the accident as a sign
Contrast: Find a popular narrative to compare with disaster -- follow the object in its narrative

Theory:???

First, some select quotes, then something like synthesis:
"Against the true of the true, against the truer than true (which immediately becomes pornographic), against the obscenity of obviousness, against this unclean promiscuity with itself that we call resemblance, we must remake illusion, rediscover illusion, this power, at once immoral and maleficent, to tear away from the same, called seduction. Seduction against terror: these are the stakes. There are no others" (75)
"The only revolution in things today is no longer in their dialectical transcendence, but in their potentialization, in their elevation to
the second power, in their elevation to the nth power, whether that of terrorism, irony, or simulation. It is no longer dialectics, but
ecstasy that is in process" (63)
"the irony of the object lies in wait for us" (98)
"If our perversion lies in this, that we never desire the real event, but its spectacle, never things but their sign, and the secret derision of their sign, it means we don’t want things to change; the change must seduce us" (102)
"To find again a kind of distinction, a hierarchy for these figures – seduction, love, passion, desire, sex – is absurd wager, but it’s the only one we have left" (132)

The difficulty of the book lies in how much is actually there. Preparing a presentation on this material has required a laser-like focus on fundamental areas related to our own projects.

So, Baudrillard starts by laying out the (post?)modern condition: we're in a state of obscenity, of information, of sex (as opposed to seduction or love), etc. Illusion has been lost. If anything, the rationality and our obsession with rooting out the cause of all things has made illusion and seduction something to be distrusted, something lost on the wayside.

This situation puts us in a position where the traits of objects and concepts cannot be drawn back. They spin and spin together until in a state of ecstasy (the formula would be roughly "more ___ than ___"). Baudrillard's clear that we can't go back. It's too far gone.

So, what action to take? B. spends a great deal of time pointing out that our traditional thinking through of revolution or social change may have been misguided, filtered through what he sees as the misguided lenses of psychoanalysis, feminism, and direct social action. B. doesn't want that. If anything, he puts these things in the same boat as the other failed methods of utilitarian thinking.

He also sees terrorism as arising out of this system of rationale, based on an ecstatic sense of mutual responsibility that everyone owns but no one wants.

So, to attempt to reverse the tide, B. wants to do seemingly two things:
1) We need to restore illusion and mystery to the world
and
2) We need to find a way of dealing with the object, a process that will likely require taking it further than it's already gone.

So, the 2nd one almost seems clear. B. says that things are in an irreversible state of ecstasy but also that their revolution is in "their elevation to the nth power." So, take things and push them in their own direction.

As he spends the latter half of the book noting, we need to allow to the object is own sovereignty, a sovereignty it takes regardless of whether we want it to or not.

So, yielding to the logic of the object, and pressing it toward its own limits, perhaps we can push it into the mysterious state of reversibility, something that would then yield to the restoration of illusion.

Or, at least, maybe we'll get toward that in the presentation tomorrow.

Von Neumann and the Temple of Depense

Three of the crucial concepts in Kantian metaphysics are space, time, and causality. Ulmer's lecture last week holds that the Kantian aesthetic exists somewhere between common sense and decision-making regimes of reason. Or, more appropriately, the aesthetic bridges them. If I recall previous reading on Kant's aesthetic theory, he holds that it also exists alongside and through space,time,causality.

It's causality that I think game theory most applies to. One of the most vital tenets of game theory (or one of its contingencies) is that experience changes one's behavior. For example, if you're in a game of chicken, and you know that your opponent Rosko the Shark has a tendency to drive straight, drink grain alcohol, and tear off his wheel as he speeds toward you, you'll likely swerve. Sure, you didn't prove anything to Rosko, but at least you're not dead.

Your making this decision relies on the givens of our sense of space and time but also on the causality that informs our creation of causality in our striving to understand the givens of the world.

What game theory attempts to do is to rationalize through practical reason how best to alter the state of things to instill a desired causality. So, for example, if one played chess mathematically, one could effect a causality that would dictate the moves (if she moves her knight here, I'll take it with my rook, setting up this move by her, and this move by me, ad nauseum).

The subject of game theory exists to scoop it all up, to maximize personal gain.
This is the figure of a limited economy, not a game economy.

We're trying to find the causality of the gift economy (the sacred) and, I suppose, attempting to figure out how to bring that sacred to the experience of entertainment, the defining function of electracy. We could then use that sacred to promote policy formation. How to strategize this kind of symbolic exchange?

Game theory's based on scientific rationality, a product of literacy (logically, I will do...). Electracy's based on the flesh, on feeling, on affect, pain and pleasure. What will a game theory with these tools look like?

Game theory predicts a subject's behavior or attempts to account for it, but as we noted, it's mostly used to point out what's right in front of us. It demystifies.

Part of Baudrillard's mission is to reinstate mystery, seduction, and the secret. So, I guess our game theory is to figure how digital rhetoric has seduced the subject, figuring out an already existing model, and, understanding those tenets, attempt to use its precepts to effect some kind of shift.

Game theory's inapplicability to human behavior comes from its failure to properly contextualize the subject. As we noted before, the human subject isn't the purely rational figure of game theory.

So, a subtenet of our wanderings may be to properly consider our subject. Is pain, pleasure, etc. still applicable. Do we still function according to affect?

I'm fairly certain we do, but reflection may complicate.

Perhaps.