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 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.

Vertigo in Vertigo

So, I laid this all out yesterday in class, but let's get it down for the sake of getting it down.

So the choice is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo:

In the film, Jimmy Stewart plays a detective haunted by the death of his detective buddy. They're chasing a bad guy across rooftops, and after Stewart slips, his buddy falls to his death trying to help him.

Left shaken by the incident, Stewart can't be on the force any more. In the meantime, an old friend from college, now a rich industrialist, hires Stewart to follow his wife, played by Kim Novak. Stewart follows her and gradually becomes obsessed. She returns his love but ends up dying when she falls from a belltower. Stewart was unable to save her due to his vertigo.

Shaken even more, Stewart's bumming around the city when he runs into a woman who looks just like his lost love. He sets about courting her and decides to turn her into the deceased woman. He dyes her hair, buys her the woman's gray suit, etc. He walks into her apartment, and in the film's best scene, remeets his lost love, holding and kissing her as the camera spins around them, the cinema itself lost within the pleasure of the vertigo.

As it turns out though, the woman is indeed the lost love, and it turns out that she was a pawn in the rich industrialist's plan to kill his own wife.

I feel kinda bad for spoiling the plot, but seeing the film will still reveal the pleasures. The moment when Stewart remeets Madeleine is one of the finest in the cinema with Bernard Hermann's score and a green glow suffusing your senses as you're seduced the same way Stewart is, willing to leap into the obsession.

My relay to the accident is that Stewart's experience of Madeleine is, of course, a tactile but virtual experience. The figure is a simulacrum wrapped in flesh and blood, a simulacrum that still affects us and shakes us to our core. What else is the computer?

What Stewart can't do is to get over the truth behind the simulacrum, which, of course, revenges itself upon him when Madeleine/Judy dies at the end of the film.

But what sets Vertigo up as especially fascinating is that if we can see the gift as a second meeting with a lost love, then Judy becomes the donor, the one who submits herself to Stewart's desired simulacrum of Madeleine. She's both the donor and the object. She gives herself.

If anything, the ultimate problem is that Stewart can't learn to love the simulation. He can't recognize the gift offered as the donor offers itself as pure simulacrum, as pure Madeleine.

(of course, another way of looking at it is that Stewart's obsessive remaking of Judy negates any possibility for the two's happiness anyway, but the above is looking at it in terms of these narrative actants).

If our goal is to make the commodity speak, then I guess Madeleine/Judy-as-commodity (a phrase I feel a bit uncouth writing down) would say, "Remake me, I'm so dedicated to you that I'll allow it."

Don't our machines say the same? "Use me, I'm your relay to the world. And when we're done, throw me away. Send me away to lands unknown to be smashed and tortured. I want it."

As Baudrillard notes though, the object will have its revenge, and it does so with a fatal potentiality to destroy ecosystems and human life. So, I suppose this accident, that the working parts of virtuality can kill us, is the limit that we can assign the object. To take this accident to its limit then, we can see geopolitical ramifications, health, biological, and ecological consequences.

But it's still a question, I suppose, of refining my understanding of how the object's wishes become fulfilled in how it presents itself.

I'm starting to feel as though my Mac's spying on me even as I write about it and think about its senseless insides.

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.