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.
WHAT IS MY 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; this report will offer up each of our fatal strategies. 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 usingOne 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.
