Commentary on the object's "speech"

Looking back over the commentary this morning, I find that perhaps it went in the wrong direction toward the end. The object *wants* us to engage it in a virtual relationship. That's the teleology. The object wants us to forget that it's there (in this sense, the first few vignettes are okay).

But where I went wrong is in the section where the computer gets thrown overseas. This is part of its desire. This is part of its role as donor. So, the last few would go something like this.

"Hey, I'm glad that you're sending me away. We've had a great relationship, and I want to live on, if only in your memories of me." The object, of course, is being coy here. It wants us to send it to a virtual realm, distanced by time and the lack of image. What ends up happening though, is its trip into the obscene, into the exposing and decomposition of its working parts. It wants its guts to hang out for all to see, and this brings together a different kind of teleology that works toward a limit.

Its virtuality pushed to ecstasy, the object becomes more virtual than virtual: in a sense, perfectly in the real. It infiltrates the body and the earth itself, making for itself a new home inside the life and forces of the earth through diffusion. Pushed to its limit, we see a new teleology. Rather than wanting a virtual relationship, the computer, willing to give itself up to our desire (like Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo), the machine wants to merge. The digital will, it would seem, is to eventually converge (everything that rises must converge: one can imagine Watson the computer punching out the patronizing mother in the O'Connor story).

Hiding behinds its virtuality, the digital will to power lies in this ability to form relationships that are more virtual than virtual, that are real. The digital will seduces us with its virtuality to force its way into our bodies, into the earth, to become a world.

The digital will is in a state of becoming, its telos being that of a new world.

Provisional sketch of a new image (part 3)

a) the accident reveals the substance
b) follow the accident
1) Conceive the accident as sign
2) Model the accident onto object in pop narrative
3) Put yourself in the shoes of accident-as-commodity

What is it that the accident says? I've decided to do an experimental sequence of dialogues in which I follow the object through its own narrative and life-span. I figure that providing a narrative might also help us with both Contrast and Theory at the same time, as well as giving voice to the sign came up with in the Target. I may be giving it too many human characteristics, but it's an experiment, so here goes nothing:

Narrative sequence: 1) Birth 2) Life 3) Exile 4) 1st Death 5) Afterlife

1) Taking place sometime after a computer or other electronic device has been brought home:

"Hello, I'm a Macintosh G-5. Turning me on is no problem (just press the button on my back). My protocols have made it super easy for you to get me up and running. Wait, hold on a second, buddy, would you...check...out...that...software!?! Isn't it great!? I know. Oh, what's that? You've never had a computer with a camera before? Check mine out. This is going to be a great relationship. Look, that's you in my screen. You look good; I look good; we'll be good together.

2) Hey man, glad you've been around so much lately. I'm running 6 programs right now (one of them, Transmission, the one you use to pirate those lousy VHS rips of Abel Ferrara television movies, has been on for 4 days straight). I've been running nonstop lately, but I don't mind. I'm digging the attention, to be frank. Aren't you amazed how easy I still am to use? Plug stuff in; I almost immediately recognize it and almost always start the software install before you even have to bother. You've got me set up just the way you like me. Check out how good that screen still from Gilda looks on this HD monitor. You don't know what's inside of me, and that's just fine. Our relationship's deeper than that. Look at these photos you took. Your niece was 14 months old then. She's five now. What a kid!

3) Oh please, baby, please, baby, please babybabyplease! We have a great thing going here! I stopped firing up right away awhile back, but you took me to the right people. My circuits and drives are fine now, baby. Sure, you had to buy a peripheral cd-drive. Did you hear me complaining all of those days you neglected to brush your teeth. Let's face it. You need me. I've been your $*#@&(%@(in' window to the world for 5 years now. You've learned more about yourself on and through me than with anyone else (except your wife...maybe). C'mon, man, get real. I've seen you checking out those Ipads. You think that thing can do what I do for you? C'mon, baby, I love you. I've always loved you! I've never made this relationship anything it isn't. C'mon, let's keep it going. Please.

4) Dear Todd,

That trip across the Pacific was bizarre. You remember that scene from Star Wars (I don't remember which one) where the gold robot goes into the Jawa cruiser thing and sees all of the dismantled robots? That's what this $*#&@#)er is like. I always figured we had a good thing. You should see some of these mean SOBs. Circuit boards pulled apart, wires hanging out, it's like their owners fancied themselves amateur surgeons. Thank God you never pulled on my insides.

All in all, I miss you, but I'm in a fun and exciting new space. We're sitting in a mound full of dirt and trash right now, but I have a bunch of friends from British National Health hangin' with me. I think they're putting up a volleyball net of some sort.

Oop, some kids are coming over. I wonder if they know how to play Tecmo Bowl. Will write back soon.

5) Todd,

A lot has passed since I last wrote. In fact, everything's changed. These kids here use hammers and saws and matches and, well, let's just say I'm a whole new person. Oop, did I say person? Well, kind of. You see, I'm actually punching this message up as I sit in this kid Ke-Zhang's left lung.

Okay, here's the story. Those kids came over and ravaged me. I mean, tore me to shreds. It was the most horrific thing that's ever happened to me. You, you were different. You were gentle with a capital G. No probings on my parts, no investigation into my workings, no nothing. These kids though, holy moly, they ripped me limb by limb and burned some of my coatings off in the fire. I guess I'm worth some money to them, like a fat American just waiting for his kidneys to get jacked.

Oh well, I didn't wake up in a bathtub full of ice.

I'm in a kid's lung.

In fact, I'm settling in.

I got a call from my cousin George. He didn't make it into anybody's lungs, but he's got a sweeter gig. He's moving down to a central water supply.

You see, we all made it. I thought having myself exposed would be the worst. Goodness would dictate that I remain in a strictly screened relationship, but these users, whoa boy, they wouldn't take no for an answer. Anyway, it all worked out in the end. Now, we're merging. They're cool with it. They cough sometimes, but, y'know, they did hammer me apart and set me on fire.

Anyway, I hope you and Steph are okay. I'm having fun and think I'm on to a whole new life now.

Let's just hope it lasts.

Provisional sketch of new image (parts a & b)

a) The accident reveals the substance
b) Follow the accident
1) Conceive of the accident as a sign
2) Model the accident as object onto a pop-narrative
3) Put yourself in the shoes of the accident-as-a-commodity

a) E-Waste tells us something about the computer and our relationship to it (its technics). Its fundamental mystery (we have yet to tangibly experience it or its results) is that E-Waste has nothing to do with our experience of the computer-as-machine. As a machine, it provides us with a virtual interface, an interface represented by (at least) a double negation.
First, our interfacing with the machine presents us with iconographic registers that are instantaneous with our interaction and manipulation of them. Its essential work, of course, takes place at the level of code. Second, this code itself remains a virtual network, entirely supported by a purely symbolic system of notation having no relationship with the referent. But this code itself only works as a result of the various tangible parts of the machine, parts that produce certain chemical reactions to fire electronic messages in and through lines.
E-Waste reverses the order, stopping short before the first negation can be reached. Unwired and cut off from our normal relationship, we see the obscenity of the machine, smashed into bits, and this is where the machine has its revenge. It allows us to see its insides but only at the price of ecological and biological damage, conveniently displaced from first world consumers to third world scrap-metallers.

b) So what we're left with is another kind of displacement or negation. The machine is used, used until it quits (or until we quit it). We tell the machine, "I got what I wanted, baby, hit the bricks!" And it does, moving on to new users but eventually being pressed to other areas who can employ its physical material, themselves having value on a virtual level (so, a kilo of copper might fetch some $$$). We're there seeing the more virtual than virtual, of course lapsing into its reverse state: the real, or reality. From these compounded virtual relationships, real consequences develop...for some. This may not be just the limit for the particular object but may be considered the limit for a larger virtuality, the ones of exchange (reaping all sorts of ecological havoc) and of interfacing (disconnecting us further from the real). But let's see how much further it can go.

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.