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.