Prezi Project (with additional shot)

Binary Metalepsis on Prezi

Prezi Project

Binary Metalepsis on Prezi

Trope Diagram

The review last week in class was very helpful in that it led me to diagram the operative slots of my Prezi in relation to Kovitz's project. 

Kovitz 

Tenor: utopian social planning 

Vehicle: pig farming 

Trope: evokes the horror concentration camps 

Contaminates the Tenor: The conceit-link between utopian social planning and pig farming renders the former grotesque, especially in the instances where the material signifiers of pig farming (eg., barbed wire) correspond with the stuff of concentration camps.

My Case 

Tenor: standardized testing based curriculum 

Vehicle: the Jacquard Loom (first machine reader) 

Trope: evoke a sense of Derrida's theories of writing and his critique of metaphysical hierarchies 

Contaminates the Tenor: The metalepsis of the tenor and vehicle should emphasizes the ontological import of technics (ie., machinic reading) on the conception of knowledge in contemporary K-12 education policy. 

In pataphysical terms, I'd like my Prezi to--if nothing else--"exhaust the imaginary potential" of standardized testing as a practice for learning via machinic reading. The trope then should at least open a space for considering modes of learning/writing with machinic reading other than the literate metaphysics of standardized testing.

Creating Creations

One of the more relevant and provocative ideas presented in Bok's book on Pataphysics comes in the later pages in his chapter about the Oulipo group.  The oulipo writers, says Bok, were trying to make "creating creations" rather than "created creations" -- texts that act as "a catalyst rather than an artifact" (79).  In other words, such a text "is not a message produced by a person" but rather a "program produced by, and for, a device...designed to make its reader become a writer" (77).

Though I'm making no formal attempt to do so in my Prezi, perhaps this notion of the creating creation bears some application on the potential uses of Prezi.  Since Prezi does allow (if you keep your project public) anyone to copy and then manipulate any published Prezi, one could approach a Prezi project less in terms of classical rhetoric and more in terms of procedural rhetoric -- with the aim of creating a Prezi to act as a platform for other people write in network with one another (networked by the fact that they share your initial Prezi as a creating creation with which to generate writing).

Playing with Utility

In his examination of the four types of games, Caillois indicates the importance of acknowledging non-productive and non-useful forces at work in any event.  Of the four attitudes/games, we saw that game theory based its theory of human behavior exclusively on the competitive, win-at-all-cost drive assumed in games of agon.  In the objections to game theory, we can see that part of its failure to recommend sound strategy in every situation lies in the fact that not all situations/games are based in agon.  Driven by alea, mimicry, or illinx, players will willingly resign themselves to fate, non-rationality, and vertigo.

Relevance to my project: Education reform based in the measure of standardized testing sees the problem-solution entirely in terms of agon.  They point to a lack of motivation -- they say a competitive, performance-based salary will push teachers to "win" the extra money by going the extra mile for their students.  Standardized tests act as the figure of the official/referee and --true to the spirit of agon -- it is regarded with the utmost authority and respect.  The test is also the stadium where students are judged against each other, ranked based on their individual, indisputable (lack of) achievement.

Thinking with Prezi: Reformulating the Big Picture

(continuing from the previous post)

Standardized testing, then, establishes a restricted economy of writing, which--in keeping with literate metaphysics--neglects the "accidental" iterability of (arche-)writing and the excess of the signifier. As a utilitarian response the problem/disaster of contemporary American public education, standardized testing adopts the efficiency of machine readers as perceived from the calculating standpoint of instrumental reason. This of course contrasts with genres of electrate writing, which embrace machinic technologies precisely as means to write with the excess of the signifier rather than downplay it.

And so, though I've been saying this whole time that my accident/disaster was the proliferation of standardized testing, I now think it's more accurate and productive to see it as my contrast. That is, standardized testing constitutes the restricted economy's way of dealing with the underlying disaster, which is the somewhat recent failings of the American public education system (as documented in films like Waiting for Superman).

In addition to being utilitarian, standardized testing could also be seen as a profoundly literate response to the emergence of digital/binary technologies, rooted in the same fatal drives evident in the invention of the jacquard loom. As such, and this is perhaps the starting point for a future project, standardized testing as a writing system marks an important point of contrast from electrate writing practices, which in turn speaks to the value of electracy as a theoretical/pedagogical project that is distinguished from the conventional calls for so-called digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, etc.

Thinking with Prezi: Receiving the Trope

Some thoughts accruing alongside my work/play in the Prezi (but not explicitly referencing what I'm doing in Prezi):

The Jacquard loom initiated machine reading processes into technics at the beginning of the 19th century. The loom was designed to "read" specific patterns programmed into punched cards by textile designs. The loom would produce textile designs based on its interpretation of the presence/absence (binary code) sequence of each punched card.

Humans have a desire to know. Since Plato's academy, schools (along with libraries and museums) have been the institution that societies entrust with the responsibility to generate, disseminate, and archive knowledge. Schools appeal to the desire to know--to learn--via literate metaphysics.

“According to Derrida then, metaphysics involves installing hierarchies and orders of subordination in the various dualisms that it encounters (M 195). Moreover, metaphysical thought prioritises presence and purity at the expense of the contingent and the complicated, which are considered to be merely aberrations that are not important for philosophical analysis. Basically then, metaphysical thought always privileges one side of an opposition, and ignores or marginalises the alternative term of that opposition.” (IEP)

Machines can read/register binary code (presence/absence markers) much faster than human readers. If students write in binary code, then their writing can be read at the most quick and accurate manner possible. When binary writing meets machine reading, learning becomes hyperlearning (the hyperlearning of hyperknowledge?).

When machines read binary writing, the only measure is that of presence/absence. Standardized testing practices map over this measure with their own (i.e., the axis of true-false) and erect a set of referents made to stand in as signifieds for the binary writing. To write in the space of "A" is to mean/signify a pre-established answer, the true-false value of which has already been predetermined by the test-maker-as-foundation/referent. Machine reading processes – at least in the case of standardized testing – reinforce the writing of literate metaphysics.

“Derrida’s more generalised notion of writing, arche-writing, refers to the way in which the written is possible only on account of this ‘originary’ deferral of meaning that ensures that meaning can never be definitively present…He suggests that “writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true” (OG 43), and this process of infinite referral, of never arriving at meaning itself, is the notion of ‘writing’ that he wants to emphasise…The widespread conviction that the sign literally represents something, which even if not actually present, could be potentially present, is rendered impossible by arche-writing, which insists that signs always refer to yet more signs ad infinitum, and that there is no ultimate referent or foundation.” (IEP)

Visual Quotation and Collage-Montage

On Kovitz's Style: Quotes and Anecdotes

Ultimately, my reading of Pig City Model Farm focused on the style of the book -- looking intently for elements of Kovitz's style that we could learn from and make use of as we begin our Prezi. 

Quotes 

One of the most striking features of the book is of course that it is made up of about 95% quoted material. For me, this was cause for frustration that lasted for about the first 25 pages. Most of us are use to reading for the author's position/stance, and, as Jake pointed out, Kovitz complicates that very notion of positionality. Thus, after getting over my frustration, what helped me "get into" the book was paying close attention to the sudden shifts in one discourse to another (ie, from quotes of farm-handbook discourse to stuff like Donald Barthelme). These shifts, as well as the juxtapositions between images and quotes, seem to be the location of Kovitz's work. When discussing "normal" books, we tend to point the presence of words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. as the location of the author's thought. Whereas, with Kovitz, we may do better to locate thinking in terms of absence -- to prioritize the white space as the mark of his most profound gestures, which is to establish (conductive) relations among disparate discourse. Like Kovitz, our consulting reports will perform a lot of quoting (whether it's verbal or visual), so I think we can learn from ambition (as I see it) to "write with the white space" -- to really stress the generative role of combination (collage/montage) in our composition. In the band presentation, I also plan to discuss a potential difference between Kovitz's book and our Prezi: Kovitz's quoting is primarily verbal and our quoting is likely to rely more on visuals. Through some examples, I'll try to show how we can try to make some of Kovitz's tactics work visually. 

Anecdotes 

Given the dominance of quotation, the anecdotes of Kovitz's summer work in the meat packing plant (spread over two different pages) really stuck out. Though the tone differs from Blanchot, these anecdotes reminded me a lot of Blanchot's inclusion of his primal scene in his book The Writing of the Disaster. In both books, the inclusion of the anecdote adds another layer of relationality, in Kovitz's case: the intersection of architecture and agriculture in Kovitz's early life which become two of the prime discourses in his book. Though I don't think we've put this on the list of instructions yet, the subtle inclusion of a brief anecdote (especially if written in the Hemingway/Chekhov style of Kovitz's, which seems to emphasize the object) in our Prezi may give our consultant's report an added dimension, as it does for Kovitz.

Syzygi and Conceit

"Jarry does not borrow scientific concepts so much as scientific conceits..." (29)

"Jarry may posit this notion [ie, syzygia] within a medieval context...but such a principal of alliance does provide a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of syncretism...conceits which conjoin as much as they disjoin, inverting, while equating, the values of the binary that must support them" (40-1).

In his commentary on Jarry, Bok points to the role of conceit as a 'pataphysical interface between poetry and science. Conceit, as a literary device, can be added to our list of the four rhetorical tropes -- or at least be acknowledged as a specific brand of metaphor. In particular, "The metaphysical conceit involves the use of paradox, images from arcane sources not usually drawn upon by poets, and an original and usually complex comparison between two highly dissimilar things. The originality of a metaphysical conceit often derives from ordinary or esoteric materials used in a previously unthought-of way. A single metaphysical conceit may function as the controlling image for the entire poem" (Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms).

The prezi could be approached as a 'pataphysical conceit, wherein we -- like the poets -- develop a visual conceit as the controlling image or guiding figure of our consultant's report. This visual conceit could stand as the large, establishing shot/image, which contains the smaller images that get zoomed in on throughout the path. Perhaps each zoom shows an image that somehow tropes the meaning of the controlling image when we zoom back out. The controlling image could be ordinary at first glance, then inch closer and closer to a conceit as the viewer moves through each zoom in and out, ultimately coming to see that initial controlling image in the light of the syncretism generated by each of the close-ups.

Caillois's Relevance for our Project's tale

Caillois's linking of gaming and culture is predicated upon Huizinga's thesis that "culture is derived from play," which has always been an important form/force of invention (58).  Furthermore, games as such occur only within the pure space of play; the spatial and temporal boundaries of play separate it from the pressures, obligations, and stakes of "ordinary life."  These restrictions enable the players to partake in the logic of potlatch and gift economy: "Play is an occasion of pure waste [of time, energy, skill, etc.]" (5).

One way to conceive of our perspective work with Prezi is to see this phase of the project as a pure space of play, in the sense elaborated by Caillois.  Not to say that it is a waste of time, of course, but to say that the fatal strategies of our consultant's report embrace waste: our method experiments with modes of thought/expression that run contra to those deemed "useful" by conventional consulting practices, and we are also making it a point to notice the waste evident in our accident.

Moreover, in defining his game catagories, Caillois description of mimicry and ilinx seem especially applicable to our work with Prezi.  Particularly his claim that, "Mimicry is incessant invention...it consists in the actor's fascinating the spectator" and his claim about the seductive appeal of ilinx, "which consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind" (23).  In our case the role/agency of actor is replaced by the fatality of the object.  We can also think about the cinematic movements of Prezi as a kind of ilinx-generating machine (Caillois points out that the speedy machinery of the Industrial Revolution were crucial to the development of ilinx games).

If we do approach our Prezi reports as a space of pure play (invention in spite of--or by virtue of--waste), then, for framing purposes, we can appeal back to Baudrillard's comment about the relationship between fiction and reality: "Somehow, whatever happens on the level of pure appearance of the tale always impinges on the real" (169).  Play-as-consulting does not solve the accident but playing with the accident affects our perception/conception of it, enables us to see it differently, and possibly introduces something new/unthought into processes of deliberative reasoning and policy formation concerning the accident.

Planning a Fatal Strategy

We know that the second half of the project will be devoted to making a consultant's report targeted at public policy formation surrounding our disaster.  Furthermore, we know that this report will break from the conventional literate/scientific mode of consulting (e.g., a narrative forecast of possible scenarios) and will instead focus on obscene and fatal graphic details arranged by an aesthetic and pataphysical logic of conduction.  The exhibition of accident -- the fascinating seduction of its appearance -- will be of greater concern to us than any ambition to explain its empirical cause and to pitch a positivistic solution.

So, what have part one of the project prepared me to do for part two?  Looking back over my posts so far, I'm confident that three groups of post will come in handy during part two.

1. Technics.  I've gathered an inventory of technical devices and processes that have been historically crucial to the rise of standardized testing, noting these machines are basically the same one used in voting for the legislators who have come to promote bills like FL SB 6. A key question for part two: what does this popular application of copy/scan technics show us about the conditions of though in the dromosphere? (i.e., how does it explain us?)

2. Values.  Thinking rhetorically about the information I gathered from the Foundation for Florida's Future (the "think tank" behind SB 6), and using One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a relay for the fundamental values at work in my policy debates, has alerted me to some of the drives and desires currently guiding the more pronounced stances on the issue.  As I've commented in these posts, values such as civic duty, pay-for-performance, and omni-accountability -- though not "bad" values -- seemed to have become warped to the point of ate (blindness/foolishness) in this case.

3. Graphic Detail.  I've been seduced by a graphic detail -- the clip-art style images of kids that typically adorn FCAT worksheets -- which clearly resonates with the politics/values of standardized testing as an educational application of copy/scan technics.  This detail also suggestive of appearance and disappearance, or the appearance of a disappearance: the disappearance not only of a person a standardized ideal of "the student," but also (and more subtly) the disappearance a certain way of experiencing the world and engaging with knowledge (the disappearance of the methods of the humanities?).  I'll be continuing this line of thinking/designing in part two, attempting to make the disaster of this disappearance appear more and more seductively.

Taking each of these areas into part two, the major task I'm prepared to pursue (which I've drawn from class lectures) is to design the appearance of my disaster such as to evoke (conduce?) an epiphany about emergent electrate thought structures.  To put more specifically, my aim in part two will be to articulate (or at least make visible and seductive) the metaphysical stakes of the appearance of the disappearance occurring at the intersection of copy/scan technics and bureaucratic education policies/practices.

What are Fatal Strategies?

From Baudrillard, I am able to glean at least four important generalizations about what constitutes/distinguishes fatal strategies: enigma, appearance, object, seduction.

1. Enigma.  Fatal strategies side with enigma instead of trying to clarify enigmas or explain them away.  The hypothesis, which underlies every fatal strategy, is that "there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of things" (230).  To combat/condemn enigmas, rather than embrace them, would be to perpetuate the "occultism of subjectivity" -- filtering the things of our experience on the basis of subjective desire.

2. Appearance.  In siding with enigma, fatal strategies deal in appearances in advance of meaning.  Everything revolves around the preservation of things at the level of their appearances because -- another hypothesis -- the fatal linkage of things occurs in the order of appearances (193).  Causal linkage is ascribed (by subjects) among things (objects) only after they have already happened, and this only appear as seductive objects when they move faster than causal development/interpretation (198). 

3. Object.  Only the object is a good conductor of the fatal; objects in their appearances elicit yet another hypothesis: "From this angel, everything burst with connection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by chance--there is a total correlation" (185). 

4. Seduction.  Think from the seduction of the object, not the desire of the subject; that is to say, follow the (conductive logic of) interconnection of appearances, which is marked by enigmatic, accidental details (the object's charming glances at you, "the excess of the signifier") and not by the strands of meaning essentialized by causal narratives.

Image: Words for Things

Psychobubble

Toward the end of Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard rails against psychoanalysis, almost as vehemently as McMurphy does in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (my Contrast movie).  Having already initiated a dialogue between this movie and my disaster, as well as between Baudrillard and my disaster, I want to try to elicit a conduction from Baudrillard through the movie to my disaster: psychoanalysis in Baudrillard, psychoanalysis in Cuckoo's Nest...psychoanalysis in standardized testing? 

Baudrillard citing Canetti on psychoanalysis: "The harm done by the interpretation of dreams is immeasurable" (177).

Baudrillard on psychoanalysis: "it transforms every sign into a symptom...every representation into a hallucination of desire" (178).

Deleuze and Guattari on psychoanalysis: "Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says" (Anti-Oedipus 23).

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard clearly seems to be drawing on D&G's use of schizophrenia as a relay when he describes, for example, the catastrophe as a pure event "where the subject himself is no longer a word but a thing, and functions at the mercy of things" (190).

In 1975, the same year One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won Best Picture, journalist Richard Dean Rosen invented the word "psychobabble" to denote the explosion of psychological treatment and terminology witnessed in the 70s:

Psychobabble is … a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candour, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.

With the proliferation of standardized testing, we can extend the critique of psychobabble to account for the these educational practices as "psychobubble."  Standardized tests, like Rosen says of psychoanalysis, kills off the very understanding it pretends to promote and reduces insight to a collection of standardized observations.

Possible "writing with the icon" image: screenshot of McMurphy post-lobotomy with bubble sheet letter-graphics layered over his face and body; caption: "words for things."

Imaging Tips from Baudrillard

Below are several passages from the forth and longest chapter of Fatal Strategies that I found especially helpful.  I've been treating them as a collaged mission statement, using the various objectives Buadrillard articulates as loose guidelines for working with the visual details of my disaster -- for thinking/designing with them.

...a work of art that bewilders in its venality, mobility, effects of missing referent, chance, vertigo -- a pure object of marvelous commutability, since, the causes having disappeared, all effects are virtually equivalent. (148)

The work of art...should work to deconstruct its own traditional aura, its authority and power of illusion, in order to shine resplendent in the pure obscenity of the commodity. It must annihilate itself as a familiar object and become monstrously foreign. (149)

The strategy of the object...is to be confused with the thing desired. (153)

...like the eruption of a pure unidentified object that renders the subject unidentifiable to himself…the object becomes powerful with all the powers of the subject. (170)

....suddenly erase all conscious and unconscious determinism. (171)

...tear beings from the psychological sphere of fantasy, repression, the primal scene, to return them to the vertiginous and superficial play of appearances. (176)

...everything is fatally, admirably connection…no at all according to rational relations, but…according to the seductive rapports of form and appearance…everything bursts with connection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by chance—there is total correlation. (185)

...provoke a deescalation of rational causes and an inverse escalation of magical linkage. (188)

It is never causes but rather appearances that, when they link themselves up, lead to catastrophe. (192) 

Detail Trope

Technics and the human intersect at the (ob)scene of the disaster, to paraphrase from Ulmer's review lecture.  The proliferation of (policies mandating) standardized testing is a critical site through which we are engineering our own becoming.

The heuretic method, coupled with the CATTt readings for this particular project, suggests that we locate a precise visual detail from the (mediated) material of our disaster, and that we treat this detail as a mise-en-abyme for an epiphany (or at least a punctum feeling) we have about the disaster.

In my case, the clip-art images of children that conventionally appear on FCAT practice tests and worksheets struck my as a promising visual detail.  

The aesthetic of these images (low-res, black & white) seems to reflect something about the political/bureaucratic institutions that commissioned them: from a technical standpoint, these clip-art images are the most efficient design for circulating unchanged from the national or state Department of Education to the copiers and scanners of each and every school in the region.  As such, the images are designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of technical capabilities--they are settled upon a design which can be read by and agreed with (exactly reproduced) by even the most rudimentary copy machine.  Moreover, on a more enigmatic level, the clip-art aesthetic elicits, from me, an eerie sense of correspondence between the design of the image, the structure of the test, the experience of taking/teaching the test, and it's ramification for education (and consequently thought).

Flattening. Stratifying. Efficiency. Black and White.        

The Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (2)

 The Foundation for Florida's Future really likes grade things.  I don't know if this tendency is an expression of their fundamental values as policy makers so much as it is an attempt to transpose their political agenda into what seems like a more objective/neutral system of espousing value judgments.

The Foundation prides itself on establishing objective measures for data-driven accountability to promote statistically-evident increases in student learning.

To this end, in consultation with the Foundation, Florida has adopted an education policy that calculates grades for each and every public school in the state based on student proficiency levels (measure by the FCAT).  The state then uses these grades as the basis for dolling out funding.  "A" schools get the most money, "B" schools a little less, and so on.  Here's the Foundation's reasoning: "Funding that recognizes and rewards progress will result in rising student achievement and more efficient and productive school systems."  Not only do "failing schools" receive less funding--the teachers at these schools are required to attend weekend workshops learning how to teach the FCAT and must devote a minimum amount of their class time FCAT practice questions.  In this way, the grade-policy appropriates the qualitative tradition of school grading systems as a euphemistic means to proscribe quantitative (money and time) rewards and punishments, whereby (administrative) data becomes more knowledgeable than (disciplinary) knowledge.  

But schools aren't the only thing the Foundation likes to grade.  There's another thing, which I just discovered on the Foundation for Florida's Future website.  And it's is almost too funny to believe.  The Foundation gives a grade to each of Florida's state legislators based on their performance related to educational policy.  So, as I click on the link to these "grades," I'm wondering just how great the disparity is going to be between Democrats and Republicans.  And sure enough, the grades for Democrat senators: 1 "C"; 2 "D"; 10 "F"...really, 10 F's out of 13.  And, of course, the Foundation scored all but a handful of Republican senators as "A" and even "A+"...this so-called report card is worth seeing for yourself.

The Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (1)

The above ad, put on by Jeb Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future, urges citizens of Florida to support Senate Bill 6.  The Foundation for Florida's Future has been the major hub for the state's education reform efforts for several years, and they are currently working with legislators to finish up a revision of SB 6 that will be voted on later this year.

Continuing my back and forth between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and SB 6, I'll spend this post looking directly at the fundamental values apparent in the Foundation for Florida's Future promo materials and website, all the while keeping in mind the insights generated from my posts on the movie.

Returning to the ad above, here's a breakdown of its three main verbal appeals (and the subtext of their rhetorical function as an enthymeme):

1) "Florida's neediest students...the poor, the disabled, those in broken homes with broken spirits... deserve an education that gives them hope for a better life."
Doxa: charity, good will, the American Dream
Omitted Premise: The current education system neglects Florida's neediest students.
Omitted Premise 2: Neglecting the needy is bad but nothing's worst than neglecting needy children.

2) "We can finally pay more to teachers who care about every child's learning"
Doxa: pay for performance (capitalism), equal opportunity (democracy)
Omitted Premise: Emphasis on "finally" -- SB 6 is progressive if not obvious, while other teacher pay systems are backwards and not reflective of the current economic system.
Omitted Premise 2: Emphasis on "care" -- Teachers who don't teach their students how to do well on the FCAT do not care about student learning.

3) "Please, don't abandon these children."
Doxa: intergenerational/civic duty
Omitted Premise: These children desperately need/want SB 6 to pass.
Omitted Conclusion: If you don't support SB 6, then you are turning your back on the(ir) future.

Target+Contrast+Theory

Here's a question that stuck with me from last class: What is it about our accident/disaster that is seducing (some of) us? Framing the question in this (Baudriallard) way adds something, I think, to the instruction from our Contrast, which is "to use popular narratives as probes to locate the fundamental values (the common scenarios) motivating decision-making in individual and collective situations." That is to say, locating these fundamental values is a matter of tracing the characters' and the policymakers' fascination; their (fanatical) adherence to certain values probably has more to do with seduction and symbolic exchange (general/gift economy) than with rationality and utility (restricted economy), even when they justify their decisions with logical appeals to the common good. 

This is a glaring point of correspondence between my Contrast movie (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and my Target disaster (standardized testing & the policies that promote/enforce them). In my movie, for instance, Nurse Ratched uses a logical appeal to the common good to justify the most crucial policy decision of the film (the decision to keep McMurphy in the ward beyond his mandatory 90 day sentence). In spite of the psychologists' willingness to give McMurphy the benefit of the doubt (yes, he's a bit wild, but he's not clinically insane), Nurse Ratched urges them to retain McMurphy in the name of the institution's professional responsibility to society. She believes that "giving up" on McMurphy would be to "pass our problem onto somebody else." 

The scene (and obscenity) of this decision in the film corresponds rather clearly with current policy debates surrounding public education in Florida. Failing schools (teachers and students) are cast into the role of McMurphy, while the FL legislators sit at the table with Nurse Ratched and the psychologist (all bathing each other in their collective sense of personal responsibility). Of course, personal responsibility is not a bad thing/value in inself; it becomes problematic, however, when one's (ecstatic) sense of personal responsibility drives her/him to take responsibility away from others. At this point, what is called personal/professional/civic responsibility becomes a game of subject/object relations: 

*by appealing to my professional responsibility to the "common good," as a state legislator, I am indirectly extending the reach/power of my subjectivity at the dispense of those teachers and students who, as the statistics show, have failed their responsibility to the common good 

*the fact/proof of their failure affords me the power as legislator to impose a plan (my plan) upon them in the name of civic duty 

*my power as legislator (i.e., my capacity to impose my will upon others, rendering them into passive objects of my subjectivity--as FCAT literally does) is directly proportionate to my ability to exhibit the statistical failings of the teachers and students (FCAT data sheets have always excelled at this)

*my fascination with my professional responsibility to the common good is at once the image of my own power seducing me 

(I can give the people of the Florida education system a lobotomy--like Nurse Ratched eventually does to McMurphy--all the while believing that it's the correct course of action.) 

Hence, the fascination with values of "professional/civic responsibility" and "doing what's (morally and/or statistically) 'right' for the 'common good'" can, as McMurphy puts it, "rig the game" of policy formation.

Polling and Testing

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard has a lot of critical things to say about "polls and other forms of directive solicitation."  These passages, of course, resonate with the directive solicitation practices at the core of SB 6: voting ballots and, especially, standardized testing (eg, FCAT).

Certainly, the answer is induced by the question.  But the one who asks the question has no more autonomy: he can only ask questions which have a chance of getting a circular reply--he is caught in exactly the same vicious circle. (67)

However you perfect them, polls will never represent anything, because the rule of their game is representation. (116)

The obscenity proper to polls comes not from their betrayal of the secret of an opinion...but from statistical exhibitionism, from this continual voyeurism of the group spying on itself. At every moment it must know what it wants, what it thinks, it must see itself in numbers...Overinformed, it becomes obese with itself. (118)

...no one can live in the anticipated image of what he is, nor in the exorbitant mirror of his statistical truth. (120)

At all events the greatness of statistics is not in their objectivity but in their involuntary humor. (121)

Statistical Exhibitionism

It is tempting and humorous/ironic to think of a test as a poll.  It even seems accurate in the case of standardized, multiple-choice questions dealing with contingencies of practical reason, as is generally the case with reading comprehension/interpretation sections.  For Baudrillard, the kind of knowledge yield by the poll is only ever a degraded form of opinion.  Can the same be said of standardized tests like the FCAT--that they test (and teach) not knowledge but a degraded form of opinion?  As such, an FCAT-based education could be framed (via obsenario) as an series of exercises in learning how to think with degraded opinions.

Nurse Ratched's Policies

Nurse Ratched, the head of the ward staff, is the central decision-maker in the film; she observes all the patients on a daily basis and is responsible for leading group therapy sessions, devising treatment plans, establishing patients' schedules, and implementing ward policies.  In fact, the facility's head psychologist defers to her on the most crucial decision in the film: should they keep McMurphy in the ward or let him go? (ie., Is he crazy or not?)

decisions/values

Nurse Ratched decides the ward should keep McMurphy, beyond his mandated 90 days, for an indefinite extension.  She cites the ward's responsibility to its patients and to society--to let McMurphy go would be to "pass our problem onto somebody else."  Perhaps he would be a danger to society if let free completing therapy/treatment...perhaps he would just end up in another institution (another ward or prison), or so her thinking goes.  Ultimately, her decision is based on a sense of professional responsibility--the actor's consistent and resolute composure creates an impression that she is not acting out a personal vendetta against McMurphy (at least not in the movie, the book's a bit different).

That Nurse Ratched decides/acts out of responsibility much more than animosity is precisely what prevents the film from becoming melodramatic.  She never appears to hate any of the patients, maybe she loves them.  When she leads the group therapy sessions, probing into each man's problems (Billy's suicidal tendencies, Harding's failed marriage, etc.), she clearly hurts them.  But she genuinely believes its for their own good, and that she would be failing her responsibility by taking it easier on them.  Every single shot of her in the film could be very plausibly captioned with Hamlet's motto: "I must be cruel only to be kind."  

In deciding to keep McMurphy in the ward indefinitely, she is being cruel out of kindness to him, to society, and to all humanity.  And yet, her decision leads to disaster: McMurphy--unable to leave--brings the outside world into the ward: the patients go wild (as opposed to "insane"), Nurse Ratched's scolding drives Billy to suicide, Billy's suicide drives McMurphy to choke Nurse Ratched, and this nearly fatal choking incident drives Nurse Ratched to order McMurphy's lobotomy.

reversibility

Glass in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Object: Glass

Crucial plot moments involving glass:

• The sliding glass doors of the nurse station generally only open up when the patients come there to receive and swallow their mandatory pills
• McMurphy bangs on the glass to get Nurse Ratched's attention when she refused to recognize Chief Bromden's vote to watch the baseball game
• McMurphy breaks the glass of the nurse station to retrieve a carton of cigarettes 
• Chief Bromden ends up breaking one of the ward's big glass windows when he escapes 
• Billy breaks a glass jar and uses a piece of it to kill himself
• The guys improv watching the baseball game on the reflective glass of the television screen 

Glass is transparent, reflective, and fragile.  Glass promotes a special kind of division, enabling parties on both sides to see through it even though it is solid--glass makes for a non-threating sense of division, a naturalized division.

The second half of this clip, wherein McMurphy begs Nurse Ratched to change the patients' schedule so they can watch the World Series, shows three important functions/qualities of glass in the film.

1) The sliding glass windows of the nurse station: transparent division

(the glass allows the patients to see the nurses as they talk to them, but the glass also allows the nurses to ignore the patients--as if, by the material fact of the closed glass, the patients imposing upon them: the glass serves as a justification mechanism for the nurses' right to selective attention: one can ignore the patients' direct request behind closed class ('I'm a nurse in a nurses station--I'm busy right now' ) in almost the same instance as monitoring the patients without consent/request (I'm a nurse in a nurses station--I'm watching you for your own good')

2) The gated glass windows of the ward walls: barred vision

(the view of the outside is always barred...$...patients are barred/split between their life in the ward and the inaccessible window to the world beyond the ward...some of the "vegetable" patients spend the entire time on screen gazing at these gated windows) 

3) The reflective glass of the television screen: play and illusion

(the blank screen becomes a means for the patients to project their own image onto a shared performative space, the television, which is also associated with the world beyond the ward...their performance in the scene creates an illusion for them of the possibilities of living their lives outside of the ward)

Pop Film Narrative: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Holding in mind Bertrand Russell's use of Rebel Without a Cause as metaphor for brinksmanship in the Cold War, I have chosen the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  (adapted from Ken Kensey's novel) as a popular narrative to think about the policy formation surrounding FL S.B. 6, in particular, and the proliferation of high-stakes standardized testing, in general.

Problem/Disturbance: R. P. McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) upsets the routine of the ward immediately.  Some of the most memorable examples:

• He bring the patients into the world and the world into the ward (hijacks the ward bus and takes the patients deep sea fishing, brings girls and alcohol into the ward)
• He gets Chief Bromdem to talk (all the staff and patients believe the Chief to be deaf and dumb) and proposes a plan to escape from the ward
• He  (organizes a patient basketball team and they beat staff team, invades nurse station, almost chokes Nurse Ratched to death, etc.) 

disturbance

Solution: After individual & group therapy and electro-shock treatment have clearly failed to discipline McMurphy, the ward staff decides to give him a lobotomy, effectively turning him into one of the "vegetables."

lobotomy

Transpolitical Conditions: From Scene to Obscene

Like Virilio, Baudrillard deals consistently with the notion of speed and catastrophe, and his assessment of what he calls the transpolitical has much in common with Virilio's dromosphere.  Furthermore, Baudrillard's claim that the disaster's symbolic energy is even more powerful than its material destruction reinforces the instruction to approach our accident as a sign.

Pompei

Baudrillard's treatment of the Pompei ruins serves as a helpful relay in this regard, particularly his engagement with the materiality of the scene ("the fold of a toga on a body buried beneath the ashes," etc.) and the moment of his insight on "the mental effect of catastrophe" (i.e., "stopping things before they end, thus maintaining them indefinitely in the suspense of their apparition") (42-3).  For Baudrillard, Pompei has the feel of the "vertigo of a missing dimension" and the "hallucination of an added dimension," which he likens to--maybe this is his most pataphysical sentence--a "precise vision of submerged trees living at the bottom of an artificial lake over which you pass while swimming" (43).

Pompei enables Baudrillard to move from the catastrophe to a further abstraction: the obscene.  The obscenity of catastrophe is a matter of excrescence and anomaly: superfluous proliferation, or "ascension to extremes related to the absence of rules" (55).  His examples include obesity, pornography, the masses, and information overload.  And yet, his cursory definition of pataphysics (something we know he admires) resembles his description of these ecstatic forms (things we know he detests).  He tells us that pataphysics ("this logical going beyond, this escalation") begins when a system "enters live into noncontradiction, into its own exalted contemplation, into ecstasy" (33).  Like the obscene, pataphysics (and fatal strategies) seems to thrive on fascination (cool) rather than passion (hot)--the indeterminate fate of the object rather than the determined will of the subject (94).

As we prepare to exhibit our accidents and our fatal strategies, I think an important factor in the production of our images will be to distinguish between the metaphysics of the scene and the pataphysics of the obscene--and to enact the latter in the design of our exhibits.  The problem with the naturalistic theatrical scene, as Baudrillard points out in his ramblings on the history of theatre, is that the actor's gesture has become oversignified by stereotypical "social antagonisms and psychological conflicts" (86).  A "hysteria of causality" consumes every tableaux presented by the naturalistic scene--the meaning of every action is restricted to (or traced back to) plausible origins in social circumstances or individual psychology/motives.  A pataphysical tableaux of the accident would therefore not feed into this hysteria of causality, especially if the exhibit strategy is attune to the fate of the catastrophe, which is "more eventful than the event--but an event without consequences, one that leaves the world in suspense" (36).

Gaming

What is the nature of gaming in game theory?

If we take game as a basic form of making meaning, certainly the treatment of games in game theory does not encompass all possible ways to experience games. As Gregory Bateson says (cited by Poundstone), "Von Neumann's 'players' differ profoundly from people and mammals in that those robots totally lack humor and are totally unable to 'play' (in the sense in which the word is applied to kittens and puppies)" (168). Game theory is obsessed with being at least one step ahead of the opponent, which require one to think in advance of the other on their behalf. We might say that this type of thought leads to an eclipsing of the other, but, then again, it is this same thinking that goes into giving someone a really good gift. How do game theory go about accounting for what others are thinking/desiring/scheming? According to Von Neumann, once players enter into a game (or at least the games he's interested in), they are automatically assumed to play on behalf of self-interest and a healthy distrust of the other players (who are also out for themselves)--the occurrence of anything resembling gift exchange is discarded as useless and irrational. Carrying this mentality into prisoner's dilemmas (which would not be dilemmas at all in an established gift economy), we see that a rational fear of the other can lead to just as destructive an outcome as would irrational hatred. (My so-called opponent and I can easily help each other, but fear and rationality lead to second-guessing about that option--defection--that would help one of us and hurt the other...it's uncertain whether fear drives rationality or rationality drives fear, but the connection seems evident enough). I'm also interested in thinking more about the metaphysics of gaming in game theory, which seem founded upon the assumption an unproblematic, absolute separation between my side and your side (i.e., a victory is always a victory and a loss is always a loss, and the outcome experienced by one side has no consequences for the outcome experienced at the other side).

In thinking toward a strategy for policy formation that contrasts from game theory, one of the important points of comparison will be the concept/form of the game (perhaps comparing the games of game theory with the games of Man, Play and Games). The "theory" of game theory is (in)formed by the visions of "game" that it assumes/forwards.

Copy/Scan Technics

@ The Printing Press

@ The Copy Machine

Since the invention of the printing press, the reproduction of printed documents has been getting easier and easier.  But nothing has done more to democratize the means of reproduction than the electronic copy mechanisms of the 20th century.  Institutions such as schools could suddenly perform much of their copying and scanning needs in-house.

The Official Machine of Degraded Opinion

It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the shift from scribes to the printing press, in terms of how much that shift accelerated the reproduction of writing.  With the Scantron, a prototypical machine reader (which are currently exploding onto the scene of everyday reading), we can see the early signs of an acceleration similar to the printing press.
This acceleration initiated by the Scantron-as-machine reader does for processes of reading what the printing press did for processes of reproduction.

With the printing press (and more so with the electronic copier), I can run a piece of paper through a machine and get an instant reproduction of the writing I "programed" into it.  With the Scantron (and other reading machines), I can run a piece of paper through a machine in order to get an instant, programmed reading of the document.

What forms of reading can be programmed?  If a test is to be graded by a Scantron, then the Scantron must be able to read it--and that reading must be programmable.  Machine readers, like all computers, are masters at one thing and one thing only: counting (or calculating).  Thus, all programmed reading is really just a (sophisticated) form of counting.

What forms of writing lend themselves to programmable reading?  Obviously, at the current stage of AI, a machine reader can not "read" a novel or poem (or even a memo) anymore than the printing press or electronic copier can "write" one.

In order for its reading to programmable, applications of the Scantron (eg, standardized testing) must remove the accident from writing: it, like game theory, recasts practical reason as pure reason.

Before the Scantron, There was the Jacquard Loom

The Jacquard loom*, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, was one of the first machines to use punched cards -- making the loom an often cited processor/influence in many narratives of the history of computer hardware and computer programming.  Demonstrated in the above video, the loom allowed textile designers to "program" a sequence of mechanical movements via the punched card; the designed punched card could then be feed into the Jacquard loom to be read and executed.

Punched Cards

The loom operated on the basis of the same binary (yes/no, on/off) logic that remains fundamental to computers today, and with enough binary input the loom was capable of outputting a surprisingly complex range of patterns.  If the textile designer wanted to change the output pattern, all they needed to do was feed the loom a new punched card (i.e., punched card as software and loom as hardware).

What is striking to me about the Jacquard loom as compared with the standardized testing machines of the 20th century is the differences of their outputs.

The Jacquard loom read punched cards that were designed -- with a specific visual/material output pattern in mind --  in order to produce a textile such as a rug:

And standardized testing machines (and voting machines), by the same basic technical processes, read bubble sheets that are designed -- presumably without any pattern in mind -- in order to produce data visualizations such as bar graphs:

(*Thanks to Walton for giving me this lead.)

Waiting for Superman and SB 6

Davis Guggenheim's recent documentary Waiting for Superman provides an excellent "statement of the problem" concerning the present state of public education in America.  The film will no doubt serve as a constant referent in education policy debates for years to come, and it will probably be invoked to justify various (even competing) agendas--just like 1912 newspaper accounts of the scene of the Titanic's sinking were used to justify Anglo-Saxon heroism but also to support allocations of elitism).  This is because the movie names and appeals so strongly to a common desire to improve public education, and yet, it also points out positive and negative aspects of various agents/entities involved.  In other words, teachers are the movie's heros but they are also its greatest villains (eg., teacher unions, apathetic teachers, etc.); American kids are portrayed as ambitious if not bright, but they're also shown to be cocky and/or stupid at times.  Politically, the film could be used as "evidence" in any number of cases, depending on which part of the movie was being referenced.

Waiting for Superman changed my mind about one issue relevant to SB 6.  While I am a vehement supporter of tenure in higher education on the basis of academic freedom, the film it very clear that tenure for K-12 teachers is very different from university tenure.  Unlike college professors, K-12 teachers are typically granted tenure very quickly without having to show a high level of accomplishment and promise.  Moreover, tenure in K-12 doesn't seem to have much to do with academic freedom: there are no research requirements and the curriculum is generally predetermined and invariable.  One of the most shocking scene's of the film comes when the D.C. superintendent proposes a plan that would do away with K-12 tenure but enable "highly effective" teachers to earn a solid six-figure income.  The teachers of D.C., however, stage a protest by refusing to even cast a vote of the proposal.  The proposal disappears.  This moment of the movie acted as a "punctum," propelling me to my memories of the status quo, mediocre, "CYA!" demeanor that overshadowed my experience of teaching in a Florida public high school.  That demeanor--which pervaded the school and rubbed off on the students--was bar none the worst aspect of the experience, therefore I think a move toward a merit-based form of teacher pay is necessary.  And since K-12 tenure isn't really predicated on merit or academic freedom, its elimination is an entirely different matter than tenure in higher education.  In fact, if the elimination of K-12 tenure creates the conditions for a true meritocracy, then K-12 without tenure would be more like the highly competitive, accomplishment-oriented system of tenure in higher education.  

Of course, the big question still remains: how do you measure quality when it comes to teaching?  With a merit-based pay scale, the answer to this question has even greater stakes and consequences.  With an major incentive to be measured as "highly effective," those who are highly motivated to become the best in the profession must use the established measurement criteria as their guide to the top.  If the measure is FCAT scores, the best teachers (who would likely be the best teachers in any given evaluation system) will generally strive, above all else, to maximize their students' test scores.  And yet, the measure (once it becomes a meritocracy) will not only guide the best teachers--it will also guide the teaching profession, such that the very idea and activity of teaching will rapidly transform.  (Indeed, we can already see if we compare the best private school teacher with the best public school teachers: their teaching philosophies/styles are extremely different and will continue to be as public schools become more and more engrossed by standardized testing as their primary measure.)    

A formal/aesthetic observation: the film is premised on the animation of education statistics.  We see this in two ways:

(1) the arch of its narrative follows five real kids who hope to be accepted (via lottery) to better public schools--and the screen is constantly flooded with national statistics of very processes being lived through by these five kids (so we see the plain statistics, but we see them at precise moments when we are very emotionally invested in the kids' chances of accessing that better education--in this way, the statistics become animated through our interested in these kids by virtue the narrative);

(2) the personal narrative arch is occasionally interrupted by computer-animated sequences that display (inter)national statistics dealing with reading/math levels, teacher unions, and the cost of schools vs. the cost of prisons.

Obviously statistics and data are at the core of FCAT and the policy debates that surround it.  In this sense, Waiting for Superman's animation aesthetic provides a useful formal/tale relay for my project. 

Technics and the "Indirect Production of Science"

Connecting last week's lecture on technics with Virilio's writing on the accident, I'm finding myself more curious about the presence of technology in my disaster, which I hadn't really grappled with directly when making my video on Senate Bill 6 last spring.  A frequent translator of Bernard Stiegler's work, Stephen Barker comments on the vital role of technics in the shaping of (human) experience:

What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of the human itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some traditional notion of “human nature”: since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” (and obviously, therefore, to any “humanism”) our need to attempt to “understand the process of technical evolution” is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative.

And so, here's a question we could be asking: What is the ontological or existential significance of the technics at work in my accident/disaster? Or, more specifically, how does the disaster reveal the "indirect production" (those qualities concealed/obscured by narratives of progress and utility) of the technics involved?

In the case of my disaster (the rampant proliferation of mandatory standardized testing as stipulated by FL's SB 6), my next blog post will look at the technologies that underlay if not engender that thought of such educational policies/practices.  Indeed, if we accept Stiegler's notion that technics precede human subjectivity, then technologies like photocopiers and scanners become reframed as immensely significant from an ontological perspective, rather than (boring) machines that sit passively in the sense of a "standing reserve."  A survey of the history of standardized testing, for example, reveals that the very concept of a standardized, multiple-choice test was, at least in the West, unheard of (and unthought) until soon after the Industrial Revolution; furthermore, the concept and cultural place of standardized testing wasn't really developed until the 1930's--the same decade in which the first automatic scanner was invented: the IBM 805.

The IBM 805

Of course, after noting this relation between the evolution of copy/scan technology and standardized testing, we have to qualify the terms of relationship.  For instance, my video (ABCDE, see in blog below) critiques the FCAT education environment as an "evaluation machine gone crazy," and I use image repetition and audio looping to suggest the experience of teaching a standard, drill-based, top-down mandated curriculum.  Throughout the video, though, I am relying upon the exact same copy/scan technologies that underlie standardized testing; my engages these technologies to create an aesthetic and visceral affect, while standardized testing uses them to establish and enforce a disembodied/universal jungle-gym of utilitarian rationality.  So we cannot claim that the technologies of copy/scan (the bedrock of computational media) inherently foster the kind of dull repetition symbolized by standardized testing and other forms of bureaucratic paperwork.

If, as Virilio (a la Ulmer) suggests, we treat contemporary standardized testing--and its surrounding policy debates--as a sign of the coming metaphysics, then we need to approach this particular practice of copy/scan technics as an entry point.  Rather than interpret, critique, and condemn the situation (and then just complain about it as it persists), a heuretic encounter with standardized testing aims to learn something from it--something about how our society tends to conceive of and relate to copy/scan technics.  If we can learn something here about copy/paste technics, then perhaps we'll be in a better position to articulate an alternative strategy for governing or occupying copy/scan technics--a strategy that contrasts from the utilitarian rationality evident in the FCAT, but a strategy that nonetheless answers to the same historical, technological, and political conditions.

A CATTt for The Museum of Accidents

Note: all quotes below reference Paul Virilio's forward to Unknown Quantity, a 2002 exhibit that prefigures his ultimate (not yet realized) project for a Museum of the Accident.

Objective/Purpose:
*to expose the accidents ("and the frequency of their industrial and postindustrial repetitions"), which we encounter as witnesses and/or victims, to current and future generations, thereby promoting "a critical distance from excesses" and "a homage to discernment"

Contrast:
*news media, which Virilio calls "a museum of horrors"
*according to Virilio, news media "always precedes and accompanies the upsurge of even greater disasters [than those which it has already covered]...[b]y progressive habituation to insensitivity and indifference in the face of the craziest scenes" and "a programming of extravagance at any cost which ends not any longer in meaninglessness, but in the heroicization of terror and terrorism."  (In other words, the media makes terror--and its various personifications--into heroes in the sense that they have now become vital to the appeal/buzz created by the news; the news commands a greater market share over our cultural attention to the extent that it renders horror/terror as a urgent, threatening object.  Furthermore, in many cases, the news media can amplify an otherwise insignificant event or person, making that event/person into a spectacle of horror for all the world to experience instantaneously and respond against with threats/acts of terrorism...recent example: Pastor Terry Jones.)
*Virilio also seems to attribute two related effects to news media: (1) a societal shift from citizens-as-actors to citizens-as-witnesses; (2) "the fading of ethical and aesthetic points of reference"

Theory:
*Paul Valery assessment of the novelty of the 20th century (eg., the sudden and rapid emergence of unprecedented questions/problems, the reduction of memory/temporality to the "event-instant," the automation/mechanization of function, the imperative to remain conscious of accidents)
*Aristotle's metaphysics (eg., "the accident reveals the substance")

***

The progressive qualities of scientific knowledge tend to obscure its accidental, disastrous qualities from our (collective) consciousness.  Virilio infers that all the great technical innovations/discoveries that characterize the 20th century will give rise to an equally unprecedented degree of global accidents/disasters in the 21st century.  Hence the need for a cultural institution--a museum of accidents--to ensure that this string of inevitable(?) accidents be given a profound/monumental place within the existential territories future generations will inhabit--that they not become automatic or denied via "voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions."

In order to avoid succumbing to such voluntary blindness, Virilio says we urgently need to cultivate "an 'intelligence (ie., an understanding) of the crisis of intelligence'...an understanding of which ecology is the clinical symptom."  As far as I can surmise from this passage, I gather that Virilio sees ecological/relational thinking as an early indicator (symptom, in that sense) of or first step toward achieving the critical distance and discernment he calls for at the end of his forward to the exhibit.

We already have intelligence--the thought that has built and continues to advance the "thought technologies" guiding contemporary technical innovation at an exponential rate.  The crisis of intelligence is evidently referring to the unprecedented accidents/disasters--accompanying intelligent technical innovations like a shadow--that occur ever more frequently on an increasingly global scale.  This brings us to the intelligence of the crisis of intelligence, which must, as a ecological enterprise, act as a kind of meta-intelligence and bootstrap the intelligence of technical innovation though a relentless cognitive mapping of the accident/disaster.  To inscribe the accident/disaster perpetually upon collective consciousness is "to take a stand against the fading ethical and aesthetic points of reference."

***

Virilio's tale is of course his not yet realized museum of accidents, and, drawing upon my reading above, I would posit that for this particular project his Analogy is perhaps ecology (in a general sense) and his Target is collective consciousness as archived/embodied/cultivated through public cultural institutions.

Also important, for our purposes especially, is Virilio's statement about invention.  He claims that invention is a way of seeing/grasping accidents as signs and opportunities.  The Museum of Accidents, then, would seems to promote this way of relating to the accident: as a heuretic encounter with "the indirect production of science" and "the shadow of technical innovation."

Little Flags

Featured in Paul Virilio's exhibit Unknown Quantity, Jem Cohen's short film Little Flags draws on footage he captured at a Gulf War victory parade in New York City (~1991).  

The film seems to be suggest two distinct parts. 

The first part is a loud, abrasive montage of close-ups shots: groups of people chanting and cheering, each looking on at some spectacle the film never shows us.  The camera (ie, Cohen) is on the move, sometimes spinning 180 degrees at the sound/reaction of the crowds and sometimes bumping into people as they try to weave between one another.  

Then the screen goes black and silent for a couple seconds.  

In this unofficial "second part" of the film, most of the crowd has left.  The city streets are covered with the parade's debris; new sets of pedestrians (apparently not there to see the parade) walk solemnly over the white mess, shuffling through it like snow.  Unlike the "first part," the camera relaxes into a few still, contemplative moments: papers whirl around and fall among the bases of skyscrapers, a man with a suit and briefcase walks alone down a long paper-covered street, a toddler sleeps through it all in a stroller as his mom stands motionless in the street.  The audio track too has slowed down to a drowning crawl, until the music fades on the image of a young woman sitting in the middle of another street.  And then the film ends with a man picking up little American flags  amidst the mounds of trash, while we hear the ambience of parade noise and, above it, another man chanting (almost robotically), "Let's all celebrate; 250,000 dead."

The Post-Industrial Accident

In an interview called "Surfing the Accident," Paul Virilio explains his theory that a new kind of accident has emerged--an accident that is contemporaneous with exponential speed and global scope of current technical innovation.

Just like there has been a change in the nature of the accident somewhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth century - from the natural accident towards the industrial accident - we now witness a fresh transmutation of the accident: from the industrial accident to its post-industrial successor. This transmutation is accompanied by a very substantial increase in scale. The industrial accident is still the kind of event that "takes place." The post-industrial accident, on the other hand, goes beyond a certain place, you may say that it does no longer "take place," but becomes an environment. The disaster that befell the Titanic involved only its passengers; the Millennium Bug will involve everybody on this Earth.

What bothers me most about the apparent logic of SB 6 is the belief that problems with the public education system can be treated (and solved) in the manner of an industrial accident/disaster.  That is, while the bill targets and seeks to reform instances where failure 'takes place' (in the most empirical, data-driven sense), supporters of the bill (and even many who oppose it) do not realize that the logic of the bill 'becomes an environment.'  This industrial treatment of the accident (ie, failing students/schools) is precisely what engenders disaster on a post-industrial scale.  Evaluation mechanisms have an enormous influence over day-to-day curriculum decisions, each subject/discipline requires its own form of thinking, and the learning strategies of K-12 accompany students as they enter college or the workforce.

By suiting educational practices to the evaluation mechanism (ie., standardized, multiple-choice tests), we impose restrictions over how much of the thinking unique to a subject/discipline can actually be exercised in the classroom.  How can the generative/creative thinking so crucial to the resolutely qualitative/subjective subjects (eg, art, music, English, humanities, etc) be mobilized or even approximated by the multiple-choice format?  FCAT questions dealing with literary passages, for example, generally remain anchored in sheer comprehension/regurgitation and occasionally ask students to choose among several interpretations and select the "correct" one, as if that interpretation was an inherent/eternal property of the work itself, independent of a reader's reading of the work.