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? 

A stab at it (maps, etc)

This was another stab at creating an image for the disaster. The elements roughly are: 1) Nature 2) Biology 3) E-Waste 4) Cartography

I like the first image better and was intrigued more by the vertigo of the image from the last post.

Oh well.

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.

Strategy, the nth power, the mystery

Target: Think of the accident as a sign
Contrast: Find a popular narrative to compare with disaster -- follow the object in its narrative

Theory:???

First, some select quotes, then something like synthesis:
"Against the true of the true, against the truer than true (which immediately becomes pornographic), against the obscenity of obviousness, against this unclean promiscuity with itself that we call resemblance, we must remake illusion, rediscover illusion, this power, at once immoral and maleficent, to tear away from the same, called seduction. Seduction against terror: these are the stakes. There are no others" (75)
"The only revolution in things today is no longer in their dialectical transcendence, but in their potentialization, in their elevation to
the second power, in their elevation to the nth power, whether that of terrorism, irony, or simulation. It is no longer dialectics, but
ecstasy that is in process" (63)
"the irony of the object lies in wait for us" (98)
"If our perversion lies in this, that we never desire the real event, but its spectacle, never things but their sign, and the secret derision of their sign, it means we don’t want things to change; the change must seduce us" (102)
"To find again a kind of distinction, a hierarchy for these figures – seduction, love, passion, desire, sex – is absurd wager, but it’s the only one we have left" (132)

The difficulty of the book lies in how much is actually there. Preparing a presentation on this material has required a laser-like focus on fundamental areas related to our own projects.

So, Baudrillard starts by laying out the (post?)modern condition: we're in a state of obscenity, of information, of sex (as opposed to seduction or love), etc. Illusion has been lost. If anything, the rationality and our obsession with rooting out the cause of all things has made illusion and seduction something to be distrusted, something lost on the wayside.

This situation puts us in a position where the traits of objects and concepts cannot be drawn back. They spin and spin together until in a state of ecstasy (the formula would be roughly "more ___ than ___"). Baudrillard's clear that we can't go back. It's too far gone.

So, what action to take? B. spends a great deal of time pointing out that our traditional thinking through of revolution or social change may have been misguided, filtered through what he sees as the misguided lenses of psychoanalysis, feminism, and direct social action. B. doesn't want that. If anything, he puts these things in the same boat as the other failed methods of utilitarian thinking.

He also sees terrorism as arising out of this system of rationale, based on an ecstatic sense of mutual responsibility that everyone owns but no one wants.

So, to attempt to reverse the tide, B. wants to do seemingly two things:
1) We need to restore illusion and mystery to the world
and
2) We need to find a way of dealing with the object, a process that will likely require taking it further than it's already gone.

So, the 2nd one almost seems clear. B. says that things are in an irreversible state of ecstasy but also that their revolution is in "their elevation to the nth power." So, take things and push them in their own direction.

As he spends the latter half of the book noting, we need to allow to the object is own sovereignty, a sovereignty it takes regardless of whether we want it to or not.

So, yielding to the logic of the object, and pressing it toward its own limits, perhaps we can push it into the mysterious state of reversibility, something that would then yield to the restoration of illusion.

Or, at least, maybe we'll get toward that in the presentation tomorrow.

The Museum of Accidents as Form

For an experiment, let's re-view Virilio (as though in the rearview mirror) and attempt to see how his choice of narrative form can inform an idea of how to go about structuring the kinds of narrative we will attempt through Contrast.

So, we're back to Target.

Rather than utilizing popular narrative or myth, Virilio employs the museum modality for his gallery of accidents. How does this particular strategy function? How does the choice of the museum-as-exhibition site differ from, say, the movies?

First and foremost, the museum is an institution. Rather than assembling things according to the comparatively loose space of narrative, the museum functions as a site for collecting and exhibiting those works deemed to be of importance to the target culture. So, first and foremost, Virilio institutionalizes the accident.

But then again, as a sign system, how does the museum function?

While exhibitions and installations certainly create and drive according to their own personalities, what the museum typically does is to collect things, to assemble them in some order, to make sense of a given range of work through the act of exhibition.

So, once again, we get back to Virilio's exhibition-as-sign.

In an earlier post, I'd said that Virilio's sign system seems to pose a fixed and fundamental signified for the "raw material" of the accident. To follow-up with Baudrillard's concern over cause and effect, what's interesting about Virilio is that he doesn't seem to be terribly concerned over cause or effect but simply in the sign, in proposing the sign of a particular accident and arranging those signs, raising them to the nth power in succession in order to build to...something (kind of like the blog form, I suppose).

Sure, the individual exhibits have facts about the place, date, size and magnitude of the accident, but if you click on the picture, as if to find out more about it or perhaps to zoom in, we go back to the page we just came from. Depth is not a concern here. Accumulation is presented as a mode of institutional awareness. We'll understand the accident through accumulation, it would seem.

I guess this is where our project might split off. We might take the fundamentals of Virilio's approach (the accident-as-sign, use of images to portray the concepts, etc.), but it seems to me that we're replacing his bare, transparent signified with...something.

Pataphysics? Whatever that is.



Digitized, the museum no longer functions as conscious sketching away of the borders of a collective culture's artifacts but simply as a resting spot for the detritus of a series of images, symbolic without depth, raised to the nth power, put into ecstasy through the mode of accumulation.

Von Neumann and the Temple of Depense

Three of the crucial concepts in Kantian metaphysics are space, time, and causality. Ulmer's lecture last week holds that the Kantian aesthetic exists somewhere between common sense and decision-making regimes of reason. Or, more appropriately, the aesthetic bridges them. If I recall previous reading on Kant's aesthetic theory, he holds that it also exists alongside and through space,time,causality.

It's causality that I think game theory most applies to. One of the most vital tenets of game theory (or one of its contingencies) is that experience changes one's behavior. For example, if you're in a game of chicken, and you know that your opponent Rosko the Shark has a tendency to drive straight, drink grain alcohol, and tear off his wheel as he speeds toward you, you'll likely swerve. Sure, you didn't prove anything to Rosko, but at least you're not dead.

Your making this decision relies on the givens of our sense of space and time but also on the causality that informs our creation of causality in our striving to understand the givens of the world.

What game theory attempts to do is to rationalize through practical reason how best to alter the state of things to instill a desired causality. So, for example, if one played chess mathematically, one could effect a causality that would dictate the moves (if she moves her knight here, I'll take it with my rook, setting up this move by her, and this move by me, ad nauseum).

The subject of game theory exists to scoop it all up, to maximize personal gain.
This is the figure of a limited economy, not a game economy.

We're trying to find the causality of the gift economy (the sacred) and, I suppose, attempting to figure out how to bring that sacred to the experience of entertainment, the defining function of electracy. We could then use that sacred to promote policy formation. How to strategize this kind of symbolic exchange?

Game theory's based on scientific rationality, a product of literacy (logically, I will do...). Electracy's based on the flesh, on feeling, on affect, pain and pleasure. What will a game theory with these tools look like?

Game theory predicts a subject's behavior or attempts to account for it, but as we noted, it's mostly used to point out what's right in front of us. It demystifies.

Part of Baudrillard's mission is to reinstate mystery, seduction, and the secret. So, I guess our game theory is to figure how digital rhetoric has seduced the subject, figuring out an already existing model, and, understanding those tenets, attempt to use its precepts to effect some kind of shift.

Game theory's inapplicability to human behavior comes from its failure to properly contextualize the subject. As we noted before, the human subject isn't the purely rational figure of game theory.

So, a subtenet of our wanderings may be to properly consider our subject. Is pain, pleasure, etc. still applicable. Do we still function according to affect?

I'm fairly certain we do, but reflection may complicate.

Perhaps.

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.