'Pataphysics, Determining the Approach, and Which Science to Use

if poetry cannot oppose science by becoming its antonymic extreme, perhaps poetry can oppose science by becoming its hyperbolic extreme, using reason against itself ‘pataphysically in order to subvert not only pedantic theories of noetic truth but also romantic theories of poetic genius

This strategy of vertigo seems to be becoming more clear. We must look into the science of the topic and exacerbate it in a way that its truth becomes questionable and indiscernible.

The Oulipians derive a logic and strategy from calculus and then derive a way to treat letters and words. Yet the question remains of how one might convert this into a visible syntax, a language made of image.

Do we simply take the words and convert them to image correlates? How do we establish the chain of inference? Something like the figure in the unconscious (something that needs to be traced back to an initial system through processes like displacement and condensation (or, as Lacan says, through metaphor and metonymy?)?

And then the question also comes up of which science to use? If we're to start with a scientific process and then derive an exaggerated poetics out of it, where to look for that science in the accident? For example, with my accident, a primary process is the displacement of lead by way of conflagration of plastics. Do I look into the specific science of that chemical breakdown, convert it to a linguistic trope, and then build that trope into images? Or do I parody the specific science straight off?

Finally, a side note: can we create vertigo just through simply manipulating the user's vision via the Prezi. I've been messing around with the program, and one can easily spin the screen with such convulsions that the viewer might become physically ill. I guess then we can pursue vertigo through both the figurative recognition of ourselves in a mise-en-abyme and also through the visual spinning of an image.

From Orality to Digitality

Orality - Religion - Church

Literacy - Science - Academy

Electracy - Entertainment - Internet

or

Orality - attempts to understand the chaos of the present, does so through religion via church.

Literacy - attempts to control the present and past, does so through classifying the world via written language and preserving the past to dedicate civilization toward progressing past the past

Electracy - attempts to create new worlds (digital worlds, drug worlds, synthetic organic life) by way of technology.

Perhaps this is a means toward understanding how drugs might function in the present. Rather than adopting Caillois' edicts against them, can we see the growing use of designer drugs as a way for the average joe to create or spin a new reality out of the existing one?

Is it that much different for someone to walk around Downtown stoned than for someone to zip around on a skateboard listening to The Sound on an ipod? Both activities attempt to take our phenomenal reality and to manufacture a new world or reality within it. Both seem somewhat dangerous.

Vertigo and Drugs

Thinking through the ramifications of vertigo (ilynx) as a strategy, I'm struck by my continual return to drugs (esp. hallucinogenic drugs like LSD) as a contemporary means.

Caillois, of course, covers this, referring to drugs when he speaks to the corruption of ilynx outside of the separate zone of play. He reminds, "If the principles of play correspond to powerful instincts in the human, they gratify these only under the idealized situation correspondent to play. Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these impulses can hardly but lead to disastrous consequences" (55). Searching for unconsciousness and a distortion of perception, many are led down the harried road of pure pleasure, which, of course, interrupts daily life, making existing in the "straight" world nearly impossible.

Maybe it'd be different if one could ride a rollercoaster to work.

Then again, I wonder if there might be more to Caillois' position. He considers the use of intoxicants as a derivation from the positive impulses associated with ilynx at play. He talks about a group of ants who preserve another species' larvae in order to get stoned on its secretions. They evidently give this so much attention that they neglect their young. For Caillois, such a favoring of the paralyzing substance neutralizes "the most powerful instincts, even that of self-preservation." Because of physical addiction, the "alcoholic [is] led down a road where he is destroyed. IN the end, deprived of the freedom to desire anything but his poison, he's left a prey to chronic organic disorder, far more dangerous than the physical vertigo that momentarily compromises his capacity to resist the fascination of oblivion."

Drug culture has changed a lot since Caillois wrote the book, and it seems like they might offer a means to experience the world in a strange new way. It's no secret that many of the avant-gardes used drugs in their speed toward new forms (cabaret scene and absinthe; 60's avant-gardes and LSD, etc. etc.).

So, to what extent should we consider these things in our conceptualization of ilynx? The purest example of vertigo I've seen in contemporary art might be Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, a film that simulates the experience of someone who's killed while taking a new hallucinogen called DMZ. The blend of live-action and digital imaging in this film is quite incredible, and as a result of the effort put forth in the production, it's the closest one can come to tripping without taking a tab or eating a mushroom.

As you can see from my earlier example, I'm exploring the effects of psychedelia in my image. It seems to me that trips might be considered a kind of living sublime. A sublimity, chemically inspired, coming from the inside out (or the out in). It seems to me that one way of promoting a feeling of vertigo in the reader might be to attempt to synthesize the feeling of the trip in a visual form, but not in a boring, tyedye way, but in another, something resembling reality but tweaked enough in a way as to inspire a feeling of intoxication, of blurriness, of dizziness and ilynx.

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?

Like Jason, the Blog returns from the dead

or maybe more like Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse.

So, this post will be a little slap-dash, but we were making so much sense before that it'd be a shame not to re-energize the blog with some good old fashioned information sprawl.

So, I missed class on Wednesday, so this post will serve two purposes: 1) to report on my progress towards an image representing my disaster and 2) parsing the notes in that context in order to arrive at something like a plan for part 2.

Section 1:

So, working from my previous failures, I created a new image:

Clearly, we're not quite there yet, but we're making progress all the same.

Okay, so what we have is an image of a computer emanating multi-colored rays, those centered on an image of Sylvia Sidney, one of my favorite actresses. Why her? I guess it has something to do with...er...seduction (ahem). Outside of the computer, we see E-waste that gives texture to the colored sprawl. Finally, we have static running over the image.

The problems: Sidney's not the emblem we need here. She's evocative, to be sure, but we need something that pushes it in a different direction. I'm thinking Mabuse might be an image to consider. Something from these below perhaps...

I especially like the 2nd design.

Problem 2 is that the static isn't integrated terribly well as a formal strategy. Don't know what I was thinking there, but I layered and saved the image without creating another copy, so it's there for keeps. I'm thinking I'll start from scratch again anyway. I like a lot of it, but the colors need touching up.

Section 2:

John was nice enough to send me his well-organized notes, and I'd like to highlight some of what seem like the key points. I'll go through them and then organize a paragraph or something highlighting what I'd like to do:

"Look at your accident as a festive event of vertigo"

I guess my earlier personification of the object attempted to do something like this. I think the key here might be to think of the production of E-waste not as a complicated network of geopolitical insanity resulting in physical poison but as a good time, as a party, as a festival.

So, what would have to be highlighted then is A) The joy of seeing appropriate to E-Waste and digital imaging. I think I might have this (the multi-color spiral giving us a "shinyness" that might help. B though) There's a joy in cracking these objects open, having been seduced into believing them the receptacle of our desire to see. We want to see through them, but eventually we also want to see in them. Do the images of E-Waste get at this? How do you get across the joy of destruction without motion or sound?

"Ethics of cooperation: why do people cooperate? (game theory addresses this from the dimension of the subject ('I think he thinks') -- it recommends defection). Why do people reciprocate in the gift economy? (belief in the 'Hau'). Fatal Strategies thinks, more ecologically, from the position of the object/event. The accident/disaster is the object's reply to the subject."

So, why would people cooperate in an electrate society? Well, we're not concerned with subjects; we're concerned with the will of the object. Why does the object cooperate? Well, in the accident, it doesn't. So, I guess the exchange might go something like this (for my disaster):

Subject: I want to see.

Object: Here ya go.

Subject: I want to see better. See you later.

((at this point, the object is set into motion, moving overseas or into a landfill))

Subject B: I want to see too!

Object: Here ya go.

((smash smash))

Subject B: *cough**cough*

Object: Hey, pal, you wanted to see. Don't get mad at me.

So, I guess the desire for the object might be to sustain its seduction as long as possible, by infiltrating the subject, if necessary.

"Use one thing to say something about something else, use the 'outside' to say something about the 'inside'"

I think if I can somehow get across the logic of visual media (in its constant improvement/replacement), the seduction (with Mabuse/visual pleasure), and the consequence (the production of E-Waste and the obscenity of visibility), perhaps I can get at something having to do with an innate desire to see.

"Beauty no longer applies as the measure -- now it's closer to the absurd or the sublime"

Exactly my logic in using Mabuse over Sidney. Sidney's beautiful; Mabuse's grotesque but grabbing. The logic of the image would be to abstract the power of imagery via sublime coloration.

One more point:

Near the end of John's notes, he talks about the musical slope of language and speaks to our project's relationship to psychoanalysis. A potential question for email: how does this relate to our sense with working w/ images? That is to say, we could think of some of the ways in which written or verbal language might create chains of displacement or condensation and, in that way, trace back a symptom (that's pretty much Lacan's take, more or less). But we're working with visual images. Do we rely on iconographic resemblance? Symbolic resemblance? Affective resemblance (a little more open)?

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?