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.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
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:
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."
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."
Sunday, February 20, 2011
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)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)