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.

Fetish Object Methodology (a re-pressed email)

Hi everyone,

Dr. Ulmer's lecture the other day got me trying to think about my disaster's fetish object, some of which was recently documented on the blog.

I guess I just want to be sure I understand the idea behind the search for the object. Dr. Ulmer said it was a feature in reality that, when a particular process came into contact with it (ship-building, in his case), causes the fatal accident to come into being (the making of pine tar). For this particular disaster, the issue at hand is the little red mollusk, the initiator of a fetish that, should it be satisfied, ties the objects' becoming to the eventual accident.

So, the idea would be to trace the object back from the accident to figure how that accident came to be part of the object's becoming?

So, looking into my accident, I figured that the majority of the problems associated with e-waste come as a cause of mishandling the various non ferrous metals that figure in computer (or CRT) construction. Things like lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, etc. are released when these things are mishandled and then affect the local environment and workers. So, looking into where these things figure in construction, we see that, for example, lead figures a lot in the process of construction (it's in the solder, the protective coating of CRT screens, etc.).

I'm not sure where to go here. Intuition sends me to the various problems that these metals seek to solve (making connections, reducing a screen's glare, etc.) as the fetish, but that seems a bit weak and perhaps not specific enough. From the example offered by Dr. Ulmer, it seems as though the fetish object shouldn't necessarily be figurative and metaphoric but something tangible (a shoe fetishist would never say that her/his fetish involves, y'know, protecting one's feet).

Ulmer's Response (edited for my own personal use):

The philosophers of event want to get at that dimension of the world that "indicts" (categorizes) us. There is no transcendence on the machinic side; its evolution is entirely immanent.

The fatality of the contamination at the Cabot Koppers site in Gainesville is that, for it to be otherwise, there would have had to have been no wooden ships, no colonization of the New World, etc. Where is the "decision"? The decision was not to pollute, but to "trade" (economy, circulation of goods).

to presume that my being may be discovered only outside, in the world, made to appear in the mode of image (in whatever media).

We scan the outside materiality of our disaster to locate a fetish (a thing more than itself, the condenses in an emblem the necessity of the history handed down to us (the indictment: you are this).

You choose it, but the point is to think the inevitability, the necessity, of E-Waste. For example, if Einstein couldn't get his paper on relativity published, and got promoted to head of Customs and lost interest in physics, there maybe wouldn't be cathode ray tubes (nor nuclear energy) (I'm just blathering now).

Atomic physics is just one angle. You mention the metallurgy involved (the convergence of many inventions in the equipment) and that could serve just as well. In our context, we are addressing some aspects of the question of ethics raised in Game Theory, the principle that one cooperates or defects. That is thinking from the side of the subject. What is our ethics, from the side of the object?