'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).

'Pataphysical Inquiries (part one, baby)

Start with the substance of the accident: lead

CRT screens employed lead in order to exercise glare reduction

Glare:

noun

1. a. Dazzling brilliance (of a light, fire, sun, etc.); a strong fierce light. Also, dazzling or oppressive sunshine, esp. when falling upon reflecting surfaces and not relieved by shadow

b. The glistening or shining of some surface

2. fig. Dazzling or showy appearance; gaudiness; tawdry brilliance

3. A fierce of piercing look

noun 2

a. Frost, icy condition (obs.)

b. A sheet of ice

adjective

1. Smooth and bright or translucent, glassy. Chiefly of ice.

verb

1. To shine with a brilliant or dazzling light. Also of light itself.

b. To display oneself ostentatiously: to be obtrusively evident or conspicuous.

2. To look fixedly and fiercely.

3. To send forth or express with a glare

4. To reflect with a glare. Also to glare back.

(all this from OED)

to be continued

but also...

Definition of Glare:

Glare comes in three forms (adapted from IESNA RP-33-99):

1. Disability Glare - Also known as veiling luminance, disability glare is caused by lights that shine directly into one's eyes. Disability glare is dangerous because it is blinding.

2. Discomfort Glare - Discomfort glare does not necessarily reduce the ability to see an object (as is the case with disability glare), but it produces a sensation of discomfort. It is caused by high contrast or uniform distribution of light in the field of view.

3. Nuisance or Annoyance Glare - Nuisance glare is defined as glare that causes complains, such as the "light shining in my window phenomenon."

Comments on Glare:

Glare is a significant and pervasive problem. Glare demands attention because the eye is naturally attracted to the bright light. This is dangerous while driving but glare can be used by retail establishment to attract attention of customers passing by. This can lead to competition between businesses to get noticed.

Older citizens are extra sensitive to glare.

Two things (let's see where they go):

Icy glare (icy look); let's see what comes up via Google:

Misfire

...

How about dazzle?

Links to programs and restaurants...

Translucent...glassy...

This came up...no joke.

Glassybaby - Goddamn it, I don't want to follow a chain of inference on baby.

Oh well, let's see where it goes...

Quickly: What is a baby? It's a person who's not yet entered the symbolic order, someone who sits outside of the dominance of literate thought patterns.

At one point in The Wild Bunch, Don Jose tells William Holden that we all seek to be children again, perhaps even more so for the worst of us.

Could it be that we have a desire to see to escape the quotidian regulations of a world based on strenuous competition and values of a scientifically motivated milieu?

Speak Like a Child:

'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?).

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?