'Pataphysical Inquiries (part 3, resolution&housing)

As per Ulmer's suggestion, let's think about the term resolution for a moment.

Simply put, an increase in resolution can motivate the "wasting" of monitors and screen technologies. Similarly, it's an emblematic way of thinking about the overall speed of technological reproduction, which leads to technological waste and death.

At the same time, resolution can also refer to the solving of a problem or a dispute.

But what's being resolved?

I thinking through the question of vehicle and tenor here, I've been thinking a lot about what a screen technology or what imaging in general does for us.

Cavell suggests that the silver screen screens us from ourselves, from our problems, and encourages us to lay aside our skepticism in favor of a renewed relation with the world. In short, it resolves the disjunction between our subjectivity and the world's relentless objectivity.

Yet Lacan reminds us that the world as is already exists in us as we take our cues and our innermost intimate actions from it (the term is extimacy).

So, back to resolution. With our continual increases in resolution, what are we attempting to do? Earlier, it was decided that E-Waste partially comes as a result of our desire to see. But how does that desire fulfill itself through these particular technologies?

The screen is a window, connecting us to another world. High resolution is a term for both the amount of lines capturing that world but also describing the possibility that these screens serve as a means for us to reconnect to the world.

E-Waste is then a reminder that these screens have their own cosmogony, one with a will and desire of its own, a desire that's satisfied when it's destroyed (paradoxically).

When its housing is destroyed, E-Waste becomes manifest.

Housing divides interior from exterior, ourselves from the world. It demarcates private space and allows us to carve a space out for ourselves.

Yet the world also comes in.

That's the trope!

Vehicle: E-Waste

Tenor: The relationship between our subjectivity and the objective world

The switch: House/Housing?

'Pataphysical Inquiries (part 2, confabulate)

Process:

So, in the disaster, we have a material (usually plastics and heavy metals) being burned, so a potential starting point is conflagration.

Then again, the process by which it enters the human body would be dissipation.

And also, the burning of something like a plastic, for example, results in melting and then vaporization.

Let's put "dissipation" through the OED and see what's nearby. "Dissinew?"

Dissinew:

Obs. rare.

trans. to deprive of 'sinew' or vigour

Hrm, let's leave that on the table for now. What about conflagration?

Okay, from conglagration to conflab, which is colloquial for "confab". On to confab...a colloquial shortening of confabulation, which, I guess, is a chat or familiar talk...okay...speaking like a child from the last entry...confabulation, a chat, a familiar talk, a conference, a...in psychiatry, the action of the verb confabulate...

Ooh baby, we're cookin' with fire now.

"To fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory"

Beautiful. Because part of the accident is the purposeful forgetting of those technologies not allowing us to see, we may have a decent inference end here...

So, we're at Baby (material) and confabulate (action).

Provisional sketch of new image (Parts 1 & 2)

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

1) E-Waste as sign involves processes of displacement and diffusion. Most of the imagery of E-Waste I've seen are perversely beautiful due to the sheer accumulation of wires, empty computer husks, etc. But its actual method of accident (ecological and biological damage) has primarily involved processes of chemical diffusion: the diffusion of lead, beryllium, cadmium, etc. from the computer products into the lungs of workers and into the earth over which they're burned or otherwise destroyed. The process into a sign must take these things into account. So, we may have a layering of the earth, the biological, and diffusion. Some methods have already been tried at this, some in the right direction and some in the wrong. But now, as a sign, we can develop an abstraction, something reveling in signifiance, something able to get across the obscure feeling, bringing together its obscure desire for us to experience it vicariously. Layering, dissolving, and trailing will be our strategies in this.

2) As I did a few posts ago, the accident is modeled on the object of Vertigo. In that film, Jimmy Stewart attempts to get back many things: his manhood, his balance, his occupation, etc. But all of those things become wrapped up in the love interest, his romantic obsession with the deceased Madeleine. Judy offers him the key to regaining his lost love and all of the symbolic material that comes with her, but the twist is that, as donor, Judy is also the object. Judy eventually encourages Stewart to take her as object, to allow him to wrap her up in his own obsession. At the end of that post, I concluded that E-Waste as sign and computer at object should encourage us to do the same: experience me as object, wrap yourself in my virtuality. Yet the object takes its revenge, infecting our bodies, revealing a different desire: to become one with us. To step outside of its virtuality and to merge somehow. So far, it's been through diffusion.

Analyzing the disaster below

On pg. 75, Baudrillard gives us one of our prime directives in a fairly direct manner: "Against the true of the true, against the truer than true . . . against the obscenity of obviousness, against this unclean promiscuity with itself that we call resemblance, we must remake illusion, rediscover illusion,t his power, at once immoral maleficent, to tear the same away from the same, called seduction. Seduction against terror: these are the stakes. There are not others."  Okay, fine, fighting terror with seduction. Remaking illusion, yadda yadda yadda.  I had a failed project at creating an image this morning. The essential idea would have been to layer the natural, the biological, and cartographic on the same plane and then attempt to map out E-waste. I keep on returning to the figure of the map because of the problem's geopolitical implications, something I can't help but identify as one of the primary scenes of the accident.  Anyway, my attempt was pretty abortive and resulted in a wasted, albeit fun, half-hour.  SO, looking at this page in Fatal Strategies, I find my eyes drawn to another segment that I think can help me clear this up:  "Illusion is not false, for it doesn't use false signs; it uses senseless signs, signs that point nowhere. This is why it deceives and disappoints our demand for meaning, but it does so enchantingly."  I had the right idea in the beginning, bringing together the natural, the biological, and the cartographic as a means to produce a background not quite recognizable but still resembling...something.  Where I messed up was in creating these tokens of the event. These signs point somewhere. We want signs that point to nowhere, senseless signs that can help us squeeze a new logic into the insanity of rational structure. So, I guess I just realized that I should have taken Ulmer's clue earlier and gone for more or less total abstraction sooner rather than later?