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.
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.
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.
If the last post was a fairly lazy attempt at getting this thing started, let's view this post as an only moderately lazy start. SO, what I intend to do here is to lay down some preliminary research and ideas regarding this accident in an attempt to discern perhaps its technology's essence or its telos --
So, the accident itself is the waste.
What's the waste?
The problem aren't necessarily the materials themselves. A supercomputer or a Cathode-Ray television can be disposed of properly, the more volatile of metals can be removed and sold to procure a profit.
But I'm already getting ahead of myself.
The facts: Used electronics are being forwarded to developing countries without set standards for how to dispose of various chemically volatile materials. Workers paid very little forced to endure dangerous chemical intake because of "do it quick" procedures made to separate out the precious metals of technologies. So, rather than breaking the machinery down and separating out pieces to be properly disposed, you throw a load of old CPU's onto a fire to melt them down to the inflammable precious metals inside.
So, you end up with phosphor in the air (CRTs), or you're burning plastic to get at something inside of it, forced to huff the fumes.
Are you getting bored yet with facts presented baldly? Here are a couple stills to break it up, from director Tsai Ming-Liang's 2006 film I Don't Want to Sleep Alone:
These images are rather unremarkable, but the reason I include them is that the film, which takes place in Malaysia (the director is Taiwanese, I'm pretty sure), basically starts out as this strange slow piece about sub-poverty urban squatters who come to depend on each other. It's all fine and well-done, but the film takes on this sublime edge when a mysterious fog rolls in over the city about an hour into the movie. There's one hysterically funny and vaguely disturbing scene where two would-be lovers attempt to have sex but, upon trying to take off their masks, break into coughing fits. It probably doesn't sound funny, but, uh, see the movie.
The EPA has recommended that consumers simply recycle their goods, and the idea is largely that the solution to the problem lies in our being responsible consumers. One can see some similarities to prisoner's dilemmas. It's a pain if I have to take an old CRT to Tampa to get it recycled properly. I can just hope that others take the drive to do so, and I'll just toss my junk on the curb. Then again, I just saw two monitors and an old PC sitting on the curb outside my neighbor's place (luckily, several trucks run through my neighborhood every week looking for potentially valuable trash, so it didn't end up in a dump yet...maybe they'll properly dispose of it?). In the end, doesn't it end up being a matter of ethics?
What I'm wondering is if these methods can curb the tide. We can give all the financial incentives or legal prohibitions we want, but has that turned the tide in other extra-legal practices like the use of sweatshop labor?
It seems to me that the problem is two-fold: 1) It's part and parcel with the general exploitation of the developing world on the part of "1st world" corporate and governmental concerns. 2) It may be a catastrophe endemic to the speed of technological development.
If it's the first, well, man, good luck. We can attempt to develop methods by which to derail these trends (through rhetoric? What form would that take? Activism?).
If it's the second, well, man, good luck again. There's no reversing that tide.
And if we read the problem as being an accident of technology (in this case, let's restrict our focus to the development of computing technologies), then the problem seems even stranger. We might wish for a return to nature of sorts, a move back to the pre-industrial "pure earth." But then again, it also seems as though we're beyond that point. Short of an incredible catastrophe, these things aren't reversing and heading back into the sea. One of the assumptions of electracy is that we're dealing with communications in a post-literate situation...
So, I find that most of my ideas of solutions resemble science fiction for some reason:
Exhibit A) Ghost in the Shell The premise here is pretty simple. The main characters are government agents who volunteered to turn their bodies into hybrids between corporeality and digital products. As a result, they're hyper badasses. As to be expected, existential questions regarding identity's relation to technology ensues. Highly recommended: plays out like an action film. See it above on youtube links or by DVD from Lib West
Exhibit B: Tetsuo The Iron Man This one's for adventurous types only. At 60 minutes, this is the fastest paced feature I've ever seen. The concerns are similar to Ghost, but here, it's more involved with industrial products rather than computer-age stuff (so, the difference between hooking your body up to nanobots and hooking it up to industrial products like drills).
Note that both of these are Japanese. Tokyo definitely looks like the city of the future (it's caught up and surpassed the future LA of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), but what I'm interested in in both of these films are the integration of technology into the human body.
As per the lecture from last week, we're dealing now with a technology that's, well, smarter than us, and if we're to oversee it as operators, the question is how, I guess, that role's to be facilitated. These films (and others like them) suggest that, y'know, we'll eventually integrate these things into our bodies. Of the two, Ghost in the Shell probably has the more interesting ideas about how our bodies interact and deal with technologies (see it, c'mon, it's only like 80 minutes long...)
So, what's the telos? Where do these things all end up? At its current clip, the telos of computing technologies are to move ever and ever further into human communication, determining new automatisms for interactions and relations ("automatisms" in the Cavellian sense, only extrapolated from cinematic codes to vague "communication" tendencies). If that's the essence (maybe), then the accident would be these human-driven poisonings of our natural ecosystem.
So, with this new apparatus, what's the future with this apparatus?
