Fatal instruction -- final instruction before application

What decision led to the fatal event? What decision, put into contact with an existing desire, launched the fatal accident into the object's becoming?

From Ulmer's last email (see last post): The decision was not to pollute but to trade.

Applied to my context: The decision was not to pollute but to ____.

Calculate? See?

I guess it depends on which element of E-Waste we're talking about.

If we start looking into the history of computing technologies, especially as they applied to Von Neumann in Poundstone, we can see a desire for an object capable of replicating Von Neumann's own, strange, mechanical ability to calculate. So, if we were to go with this thread, we might say that the decision was not to pollute but to calculate. To achieve this then, the materials used in the computer (particularly the non-ferrous metals we talked about before) simply are tools used to enable the connections necessary to manipulate the binary code into something capable of calculating.

But hold on a second. We've so far associated E-Waste with a sense of virtuality, and while the cathode ray technology doesn't define the computer as such, it may act as a successful relay between the computer's functions and our experience of it (an experience defined by the computer's ability to offer us a graphic iconic interface, to display pictures, to act as a window to the world). So, sticking with the cathode ray momentarily, we can see a need emerge.

The historical fatality we can see is the necessity for us to have a relay to the computer's functionality. Punch cards, floppy disks: they're all benign compared to an intrinsic need to see calculation, text, etc. through familiar images.

When you have this need, one can see the necessity of this determination. One had to see. The decision was not to pollute but to see. The involvement of non-ferrous metals (but lead particularly) in the production of the cathode ray tube was simply a technical intervention satisfying a deeper desire. So, therefore, the desire to see fixates on these metals as a means to deliver the object, to intertwine our destiny with its.

Additionally, one can see the problem of E-waste arising from this necessity to see as well. We can see the development of subsequent screens (LCD, LED) as resulting from a desire to see ever more clearly, resulting in the displacement of the CRT and its eventual demise as a figure in a landfill. That isn't to say that these newer technologies solve the problem. A report has indicated that LCD's still contain dangerous amounts of copper and lead. Another indicates about the same for LED screens.

What emblem can stand for this?

Part of my early posts attempted to account for the mixtures of outdated technologies with human desires to see, now expressed in different ways (fetishizing of VHS or cassette tapes in an era of DVD and digital images).

So, from an earlier project that used diffusion as a means to get across the issues of E-waste, perhaps we can add to that a dimension of a kind of seeing that has changed. I.E. IN a new image, we can put in formal elements of former ways of seeing.

My graduate thesis focuses on classical figures by which cinema has been understood (particularly the window and the mirror, the cinema is a ____). My move is to synthesize these forms and posit the cinema as a reflecting window, one that, for example, offers a window onto reality but also that reflects cultural associations, one that offers a window onto the world but also reflects the digital nonsense of pure symbolic, etc. etc.

Perhaps we can utilize this model for the image. The image will offer us a window onto E-Waste but reflect the modes of seeing that have produced the E-waste.

This doesn't change the image much, but it focuses it. From a pure depiction of E-waste, we must now integrate screens (see my "vertigo" image) but also their ability to signify simply as an apparatus.

How can this emblem be manipulated to show the universal subject its own image in the mirror?

We'll see the emblems of E-waste, manipulated to show us texture and diffusion.

But we'll see our mirror image in the scan lines and distortions (simulated, of course) associated with the CRT.

Instruction:

Tap into our fatal need to see that incorporates the poison of the earth. Use the experience of image + the images itself to get across these ideas of seeing oneself in those things that offer images.

As a formal technique, we might see these scan lines as doing something like Holbein's Ambassadors painting:

Lacan writes that this is a prime example because, looking into the image, we eventually see the death's head. This connection will need to be explored more, but I'm starting to intuit its potential.

Let's give it a try.

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.

Von Neumann and the Raiders of Rationality

While I think that we might pursue the Contrast as something directed more toward Game Theory itself than Poundstone's book, I think a short take on the book's overall logic may yield some insights as to how exactly Game Theory functions in relationship to real-life situation.

That I'm even having to make this distinction points to Poundstone's fundamental take on Game Theory: as something that one can describe in mathematical terms but also as something that, as it relates to real-world and interpersonal situations, constantly bleeds over into personal conflicts which its requirements of pure reason cannot account for.

Poundstone makes it a point several times in the book to emphasize that criticisms of game theory as not accounting for an effect of a real world situation is problematic because game theory doesn't assume imperfect human players (see the discussion on guilt in the dilemma on 223 or the problem of measuring human investment on 171-172), but yet the entire logic of his book rests upon the indeterminacy within game theory between pure reason and human indeterminacy.

So, we frequently get two different kinds of chapters (the division more stated at the beginning of the book and merged a bit by the end): there are numerous chapters simply detailing the material premises and results of the games (chapters 1, 6, and 11 are good examples) while others detail von Neumann's personality and biography or historical accounts (see chapters 2, 7, and the rather heartbreaking 9).

This division in chapters and logic seem counterproductive. If we wanted a strict account of game theory or a straight biography of von Neumann, we might find ourselves disappointed by what seems like info that distracts from one or the other books' provisional main point.

But it seems as though the kind of logic we find here can also be seen abundantly in game theory. For example, one of the dilemmas the book opens with asks us to imagine that we are faced with a clock ticking down an hour, and at the end of the hour, both our mother and our spouse will be killed. We have the option of saving one of them by pressing a button. If we save one, the other dies. If we refuse to press a button, both die. (it just occurred to me that one could probably see a lot of these prisoners' dilemmas in the Saw series).

Poundstone says that one can only decide which of the two he/she likes better and choose accordingly, but the woman/man of reason this advice presumes simply does not exist. The decision is, in most cases I'd presume, impossible to make (a great film might be made with Norman Bates put in this situation...one would assume he'd choose Mother, I guess).

While Poundstone stone-faces it and pretends as though we should accept this precept without a second thought, it indicates what he will later call the ultimate failure of game theory or the prisoner's dilemma to dictate political or economic affairs because rationality has nothing to do with the way human beings actually live. The model is incredibly useful for providing certain explanations regarding biological evolution, but as Lacan tells us, human desire has very little to do with our unthinking biology. To use an example, our body feels hunger, but what we ultimately eat has nothing to do with nutritional value (if it did, nobody would eat McDonald's).

Additionally, the widespread appeal and draw of game theory plays on irrational motivations in order to make decisions. One might map out reasons to save Mom or spouse, but the decision, in the end, would likely not be a rational one (if one's mom or spouse was continually abusive or otherwise unpleasant, that situation might be different). In the end, game theory can't explain these things. The chess example used in chapter 1 is a good one. Von Neumann held that chess isn't really a game to be played at if it were played rationally. One could mathematically produce strategies that would dictate every move, reaction, surprise move, etc. But no one can actually play the game in such a way, so it, like poker, does inevitably depend on intuition and the kinds of things that reason and quantification can't dictate. We can say the same with economics. Von Neumann initially assumed that game theory could dictate military strategy and economic decisions, but game theory remains unable to do simply because these systems have human motivations.

So, I guess if we're dealing with game theory as a contrast, perhaps that's the way we can approach it. Game theory is great at modeling certain relationships between humans, economic forces, etc. but ultimately fails to predict or provide models for human behavior because it's logic and ontology is based on a purely rational, quantifiable regime whereas the kinds of policy formations we seek are based in human irrationality, flesh, etc.

The dichotomy ultimately takes place in the von Neumann biography as well. Poundstone regularly depicts von Neumann as able to perform incredibly complex mathematical equations without effort, like a human calculator (34, 95, 179) but at the same time his quarrels with his wife, his personal affability, and his love of humor seem to play against it. We can also characterize our relationship to computing technologies in a similar fashion. I might produce a digital animation that makes you laugh. It relies on a series of manipulations of binary code but moves beyond it to work on the human register.